Daniel Defoe
From Philosopedia
Defoe, Daniel (c. 1659 - 1661 - 24 April 1731)
Author of the first true novel in English, Robinson Crusoe (1719—1722), Defoe was educated in a Dissenters’ academy, a school for Protestants who were not Anglicans, and almost became a Presbyterian minister, choosing instead to go into business, where he went bankrupt by 1692. Crusoe not only rescues his man Friday from the cannibals but also learns how to overcome life’s difficulties, all the while preserving his human integrity.
Moll Flanders (1722) is a realistic story of a London prostitute and thief. Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is equally realistic and, in many ways, timely. The Vatican prohibited the reading of his History (Political) of the Devil.
Defoe was nearly sixty years old before he started to write novels, and he is noted for being a freethinking individual who was self-reliant, industrious, and filled with a feeling of moral responsibility. Some, however, called him a Presbyterian. “Whores and priests will never want excuse,” he declared in The True-Born Englishman (1701), in which he also included, “Of all the plagues with which mankind are cursed/Ecclesiastic tyranny’s the worst.”
In his 1722 account of a plague, Defoe stated by way of anticipation: “N.B.—The Author of this Journal lies buried in that very Ground [Bunhill Fields], being at his own desire, his sister having been buried there three or four years before.”
However, Defoe did not die until 1731. His choice of Bunhill Fields points up the fact that burials outside churches had come into practice, because Londoners during the time of Pepys and Wren began complaining about “body-stuffed sanctuaries.” Bunhill, named for the Bone Hill where in the sixteenth century more than a thousand cartloads of bones from charnel houses had been dumped, was known as the Dissenters’ burial ground, a place according to Tom Weil “where free thinkers could escape the fee-grabbing clergy and their costly consecrated terrain in favor of less expensive, secular real estate.”
A 1998 biography by Richard West, Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures, tells of his becoming a political commentator and satirist, a merchant - he traded in woolen goods and wines - and a speculator in marine insurance. By 1692 he had gone bankrupt because of £17,000 in debts. Defoe described his plight in a couplet:
- No Man has tasted differing Fortunes more,
- And Thirteen Times I have been Rich and Poor.
