Englishman, a satirical response to sentiment against Dutch-born King William III, is published ; in the poem Defoe humorously reminds the English of their varied ancestry.
1702 Defoe falls out of political favor when King William dies and Queen Anne and her Tory government, intolerant of Dissenters, assume power. Defoe publishes his ironic pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.
1703 Defoe is arrested for publishing The Shortest Way with the Dissenters and appears in the pillory for three days in London. He also serves five months in Newgate Prison; he will draw on his experience in Newgate in Moll Flanders. While Defoe is incarcerated, his businesses collapse.
1704 Defoe begins to write and edit The Review, a highly influential political journal that he will publish until 1713.
1705 As a government agent working for Robert Harley, a moderate Tory minister, Defoe begins making trips north through England to Scotland to assess public opinion for the Act of Union uniting the two countries.
1707 The Act of Union is passed.
1713 Defoe’s political enemies have him imprisoned again briefly for a satiric tract mocking the impending Hanoverian Succession to the English throne.
1714 George I ascends the throne, and the Whigs, favorable to Defoe and other Dissenters, regain power.
1715 The first volume of The Family Instructor, the most popular of Defoe’s many books of moral instruction, is published.
1719 The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is published and immediately becomes widely popular.
1722 Defoe publishes three fictional works: Moll Flanders, 14 Journal of the Plague Year, and Colonel Jack.
1724 Defoe publishes his final novel, The Unfortunate Mistress: Roxana, and returns to nonfiction with the publication of the first volume of his three-volume A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain.
1726 Defoe’s Political History of the Devil is published, as is Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift.
1731 Defoe dies in a London boardinghouse in April.
INTRODUCTION
Defoe’s Novel Experiments
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722) is the fourth in a series of remarkable full-length narratives Daniel Defoe wrote hard upon each other when he approached and passed his sixtieth year. The first was The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), followed by Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), and The Unfortunate Mistress: Roxana (1724). Defoe, born in 1660, wrote no more extended narratives of this kind for the rest of his writing career until his death, in 1731.
So how does one begin to explain this burst of fictional energy beginning with Robinson Crusoe and continuing through to Roxana? This is not only a fair question, it is one of the most intriguing in the history of the British novel. If we define the novel in the way we are used to thinking about fiction—as a prose narrative of substantial length that makes a pretense of representing life in a form human beings might well have been imagined to have lived it-Defoe surely stakes a forceful claim as the first English novelist. But the question of Defoe’s primacy is less interesting than the question of his originality. What did he think he was doing in those remarkable narratives from 1719 to 1724? And how did he go about doing it?
Daniel Defoe was a man of wide and varied experience. He knew the world from the bottom up, from the dank holding cells of Newgate Prison1 to the backroom offices of Britain’s most prestigious ministers of state. He began his adult life as a wholesaler of haberdashery, but soon enough emerged as major speculator in projects ranging from recovering buried treasure to cornering the civet-cat market in London for the production of perfume. Over the course of his life he owned trading vessels, imported wine, sold herring, mined for tin, manufactured bricks and tile, ran taverns, and even owned a few shares of a slave-trading venture. Defoe’s first financial empire, extensive but flimsy, collapsed in 1692, and he spent some uncomfortable days appearing before bankruptcy commissioners and on the lam from creditors in undisclosed locations in England. In 1703, he took up residence for five months in Newgate Prison on a trumped-up charge of sedition. Beginning in 1704, he went into surreptitious service as an undercover agent in Scotland and at the same time launched a new career as a publishing entrepreneur. He ran, wrote, and edited a newspaper, The Review of the State of the British Nation, for nine years, and, in addition, penned hundreds of essays, poems, conduct