In 1719 he published the immortal romance of Robinson Crusoe. Everything which had been written earlier than this in the form of an English novel faded at once into insignificance before the admirable sincerity and reality of this relation. It is difficult to conjecture what it was that

THE

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ADVENTURES

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suggested to the veteran drudge this extraordinary departure, so perfectly fresh, spirited, and novel. The idea of the European sailor marooned on an oceanic island had been used in 1713 by Marivaux in his novel of Les Effets Surprenants, but there is no further similarity of treatment. In his later picaresque romances Defoe is manifestly influenced by Le Sage, but Robinson Crusoe can scarcely be traced to French or Spanish models. It was an invention, a great, unexpected stroke of British genius, and it was immediately hailed as such by the rest of Europe. It was one of the first English books which was widely imitated on the Continent, and it gave direction and impetus to the new romantico-realistic conception of fiction all over the world. The French, indeed, followed Defoe more directly than the English themselves, and his most obvious disciples are Prévost, Rousseau, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. It was in his Émile, where he prefers Defoe as an educator to Aristotle, Pliny, or Buffon, that Rousseau finally drew the full admiration of Europe upon Robinson Crusoe. In England, however, the bourgeois romances of Defoe long remained without influence and without prestige, widely read indeed, but almost furtively, as vulgar literature fit for the kitchen and the shop.

ROBINSON CRUSOE, Of YORK, MARINER: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years,

all alone in an un-inhabited Inland on the Coaft of AMERICA, near the Mouth of the Great River of ORO ONOQUE;

Having been caft on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perifhed but himself.

WITH

An Account how he was at laft as strangely deliver'd by PYRATES.

Written by Himfelf.

LOND 0 N:

Printed for W. TAYLOR at the Ship in Pater-Neftc
Row. MDCCXIX.

Title-page of "Robinson Crusoe." First Edition, 1719

Daniel Foe, who called himself in later life Defoe (1661-1731), was the son of a Northamptonshire butcher, of the name of Foe, settled at the time of the writer's

Daniel Defoe (1661-1731)

birth, in St. Giles', Cripplegate. The butcher was a dissenter, and intended his son for the ministry; he seems to have been at a Nonconformist training college on Newington Green from 1675 to 1680. He gave up the idea of becoming a minister, but his career is vague to us until 1685, when we find him engaged in the wholesale hosiery business in a court leading out of Cornhill. He went abroad occasionally, sometimes certainly to Spain; but his trade failed, and in 1692, being bankrupt, he had to fly his creditors. About this time he seems to have published the earliest of his innumerable pamphlets. We hear of him at Bristol, where he was called "The Sunday Gentleman," because he dared not face the bailiffs on week-days; and the next thing is that, for no apparent reason, he is appointed, in 1694, Accountant to the Glass Commissioners. This enabled him, perhaps, to pay his debts, and he started a factory for bricks and pantiles at Tilbury, which for a while was highly successful. Defoe now kept a coach and a private yacht. His post under Government was probably a mere decoy for the work of a mercenary jour

nalist, and we find Defoe beginning to use his active. pen in the King's service. It was probably under direction from the court that he now separated from the Nonconformists in his Occasional Conformity of 1698. In the year 1701 he first adopted the surname Defoe, and engaged with fervour in a national, royal, and Protestant propaganda. His first great popular success was with the rough and daring satire in verse, The True-Born Englishman, in which he hammered into his

countrymen some hard facts. This "poem " sold to the amount of 80,000 copies, and Defoe was presented to the King. He was now, at the age of forty, a famous man, or at least a very popular one, but the death of William III. in 1702 was unfortunate for him. He wrote recklessly and vaguely, in prose and verse, and at last he scandalised all parties by his grotesque and ironical Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1703). Defoe fled, but presently determined to surrender; he was found guilty of seditious libel, and had his famous experience of the pillory. Pope, however, was not warranted in saying that Defoe stood "earless" or "unabashed," and the populace flung posies of flowers about him and drank enthusiastically in his honour at the foot of the pillory. He was taken to Newgate Prison, where he lay until the following summer, when he was released to be used for secret service by the Government. While he was imprisoned, he wrote as usual incessantly, and published a very remarkable newspaper, the Review, of which he wrote the whole himself; under several forms, this influential periodical continued to appear until 1715, all the time supporting whatever Ministry "Her Majesty was pleased to employ." All

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the central portion of Defoe's life has little relation to literature, and is so excessively obscure that there was no thread to guide the investigator through it, until Mr. William Lee published the result of his exhaustive researches in 1869. It is now known that Defoe did not withdraw from journalism in 1715, as was long supposed, but continued to edit and contribute to newspapers until 1726.

As

In many

ways Defoe may justly be considered as the founder of modern journalism, in its good as well as in its bad features. In the course of catering for his newspapers, Defoe inter viewed with impartiality a surprising variety of persons, and became familiar with their modes of life and language; he thus prepared himself for his later and far more important work as an author. early as 1706, in The Apparition of Mrs. Veal, he wove reality into a kind of naturalistic fiction. But his boldest and more original work in this line was not begun until he was approaching his sixtieth year. In 1719 Defoe published his celebrated romance of Robinson Crusoe, the first of its class in English literature. This was founded on a report of the adventures of a certain Alexander Selkirk (or Selcraig), who had been marooned on Juan Fernandez. The instant success of this wonderful book revealed to Defoe the fact that he had struck, as by accident, on a rich lode of gold. Perhaps he had already composed other stories of this kind, for the almost simultaneous appearance of three such long novels as Mr. Duncan Campbell, Captain Singleton, and (perhaps) Memoirs of a Cavalier, all printed in 1720, is hardly to be accounted for except on the theory that the MSS. of them were already partly in existence when Kobinson Crusoe became famous. These novels of Defoe's old age continued to appear with startling rapidity; before the end of 1722, Moll Flanders, The Plague Year, and Colonel Jack were added to the list. Roxana, the latest of his important romances, belongs to 1724. An innate vulgarity curiously characteristic, for all its genius, of the mind of Defoe, appears unabashed in his doubtless ironical Complete English Tradesman of 1725-7,