A Journal of the Plague Year. Daniel Defoe

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      DANIEL DEFOE

      Daniel Defoe has the distinction of writing one of the earliest novels in English literature and also of creating one of the most contradictory heroes, Robinson Crusoe. From the beginning of the novel, Crusoe betrays an alarming tendency to vacillate between extremes of religious conviction and godlessness, humanity and callousness, dedicated industry and restlessness. One moment, he is sincerely affected by his father's representations to him to stay home rather than go to sea and the next moment, he is plotting to run away from his family. When he is shipwrecked and scrounging for provisions on the ship, he finds money and at first bemoans its uselessness, saying "O drug!..what art thou good for?" (Robinson Crusoe) but in the same breath, he decides to take it with him. He accidentally kills a she-goat with a dependent kid and says that his event "grieved me heartily" (Robinson Crusoe). In the same paragraph, we find that he has killed, eaten and forgotten the kid and is instead congratulating himself on making the meat last so long.

      Like his fictional hero, Defoe himself has been accused, in life, of taking the most convenient path as opposed to the morally right one. Being involved in politics, he would pledge his allegiance to whichever party was in power, causing his fellow author, Joseph Addison, to call him a "false, shuffling, prevaricating rascal" (qtd. in Pancoast). In addition to an ambiguous political stance, however, Defoe's life carried a whiff of disrespectability, because of his various investments which led him into debts amounting to £17,000, which adds up to more than a million in present-day currency. It's impossible to know whether Defoe was merely unfortunate in financial matters or whether he was actually unscrupulous. It is evident that his contemporaries believed the latter for they leveled many charges against him, the truth of which can no longer be discerned. Thomas Keymer refers to these when he writes, "Defoe's notoriety as a seditious libeler and literary mercenary was not alleviated by sporadic allegations of other crimes and misdemeanors, from smuggling, fraud and horse-stealing to the cuckoldry of a personal friend" (xiii-xiv). We may puzzle over his ethical stance but the one thing that cannot be disputed is that Defoe was a colorful personality.

      Defoe was born around the year 1660 (sourcebooks tend to vary the date between 1659 and 1661) in St. Giles, Cripplegate, a neighborhood of London that was destroyed completely in the second World War. His original name was Daniel Foe which he changed to Defoe in his thirties, largely because it sounded more upper crust, although he might have been returning to a version of his family's original name. His father was James Foe, a tallow chandler (a term which might seem baffling to modern readers but essentially refers to a seller of candles, an important office in a time before electric lights) and later, possibly, a butcher. Defoe had an exciting childhood, for he survived the Great Plague of London which hit when he was around five and the Great Fire of London which occurred when he was about six. Later in life, he wrote a book called A Journal of the Plague Year which describes this horrific pestilence in great detail. Although this work has some fictional elements, it is thought to be historically accurate and based on the diaries left behind by Defoe's uncle Henry Foe.

      Defoe's parents were Nonconformists or Dissenters, a religious group that had broken away from the Church of England and that opposed state interference in religious matters. As the name suggests, Nonconformists or Dissenters formed a minority; they were barely tolerated and often oppressed. As a result, Defoe's father couldn't send him to Oxford or Cambridge; instead, Defoe was educated at a special academy for Dissenters at Newington Green, run by Charles Morton who later became the first vice-president of Harvard College. Defoe's father wanted him to become a Dissenting minister but Defoe decided that he would prefer to be a tradesman. Over time, he dealt in hosiery, woolen goods and wine in addition to running a brick and tile manufactory and trying to make perfume. He wasn't always successful in his ventures and is often quoted as saying,

      No man has tasted differing fortunes more,

      And thirteen times I have been rich and poor; (qtd. in Pancoast).

      Despite his failure as a merchant and the heavy debts he incurred, Defoe's economic views have been commented on by many critics including Karl Marx who analyzed Robinson Crusoe in his seminal work Capital. According to Marx, Crusoe's experiences on the deserted island go to show that labor is more important than capital, for Crusoe has only meager supplies to work with and manages to satisfy all this needs by dint of hard work.

      After setting himself up in trade, Defoe married Mary Tuffley in 1684; she was the daughter of another Dissenting merchant, with a dowry of £3,700, a sum that might have saved a more prudent man from bankruptcy. Not that much is known about her, except that she and Defoe had eight children of whom six survived. A year after the marriage, Defoe started to get into political hot water, for he joined the Monmouth rebellion, an attempt to overthrow the Catholic king, James II, by the Duke of Monmouth who was a Protestant. Monmouth was defeated and executed but Defoe managed to get a pardon. However, his political ardor was far from quenched and when William of Orange, also a Protestant, came to the throne in 1688, Defoe became an ardent supporter and pamphleteer for the king. There were those who opposed the king on account of his foreign birth in the Netherlands, but Defoe refuted them by writing a poem called The True-Born Englishman which made him very popular. In this poem, he argued that all Englishmen are of mixed ancestry, making hypocrites out of those who opposed William of Orange on the basis of his lineage.

      In 1702, however, with the death of William of Orange, Defoe's luck ran out as the throne went to Queen Anne, who favored the Anglican church and detested Catholics as well as Dissenters. The animosity against Dissenters being rekindled, Defoe decided to write one of his most notorious pieces called "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters." This was a satirical piece in which he wrote from the point of view of the Churchmen who opposed Dissenters and spelled out, without equivocation, a bigoted and vicious way of dealing with Dissenters. As this piece was published anonymously, it was not immediately perceived that the author was himself a Dissenter and both, High Churchmen and Dissenters, thought that this was a seriously written argument. When it was revealed that the pamphlet was a parody, Churchmen were naturally incensed but Dissenters felt like they had also been deceived and both groups condemned Defoe. He was arrested and sentenced to the pillory (a form of punishment similar to the stocks in which a wooden frame encircles the prisoner's head and hands, holding him still in a bent position such that people could witness his humiliation and throw rotten foodstuffs at him). However, before the sentence could be carried out, Defoe wrote and published his "Hymn to the Pillory" and it is said that the popularity of this poem caused people to throw flowers at him rather than pelting him with spoiled food. After the pillory, Defoe spent two years in Newgate prison, causing his brick and tile business to go down the drain.

      From prison, Defoe appealed to Robert Harley, a politician, to help set him free and agreed to become a pamphleteer and intelligence agent

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