Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731) was an English novelist, journalist, merchant and political pamphleteer, often regarded as one of the formative figures in the development of the English novel. Born in London into a Protestant Dissenter family, he wrote extensively about commerce, religion, crime and national politics, sometimes undertaking intelligence work for the government. His satirical pamphlet The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters led to imprisonment and public exposure in the pillory. Defoe turned to extended prose fiction comparatively late in life, publishing Robinson Crusoe in 1719, followed by works including Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, A Journal of the Plague Year and Roxana. His documentary style, practical detail and use of supposedly authentic first-person testimony gave his stories an unusual sense of realism.

Although Defoe’s novels now provide valuable portrayals of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century life, most were contemporary or near-contemporary fiction when written and are therefore not historical novels in the strict modern sense. The clearest historical work is A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722 but set during London’s Great Plague of 1665, blending archival research, remembered testimony, fiction and reportage. Memoirs of a Cavalier similarly reconstructs the Thirty Years’ War and English Civil War through the supposed recollections of a soldier. Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack and Roxana explore crime, poverty, transportation, marriage and social mobility, while Robinson Crusoe reflects the maritime trade, colonial expansion and religious assumptions of Defoe’s age.