Sample

Introduction

It is something strange, that a man’s life should be made a kind of Romance…that the World should be so fond of a formal Chimney-corner Tale, that they had rather a Story should be made merry than true.
     The Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild
     Daniel Defoe, 1725

DANIEL DEFOE IS THE biographer’s nightmare. The author of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana and many other works, his fictions have sold in vast numbers around the world for nearly three hundred years and have earned him the reputation of the ‘father of the English novel’; but notwithstanding their success, very little is known about Defoe and much that has been written about him is mistaken. This is not to denigrate the many fine biographies that have been written but to state the obvious. In the words of a recent biographer, ‘the man and his mind have not yet become clear to us’. Defoe remains to this day a biographical puzzle and an obscure and mysterious fellow.1
     Peter Earle, who knew a great deal about Defoe’s life and times, wrote that an adequate biography of Defoe would never be possible because of the obscurity and subterfuge with which he enclosed his life and the lack of documentary evidence. By evidence, he meant the stuff of biography: reminiscences, correspondence, the trace of him in the records and memories of others, the very particulars of a life lived.2
     William Minto suggested that Defoe sought obscurity in his personal life for very good reasons and that he, ‘was a very great storyteller in more ways than one. We can hardly believe a word he says about himself without independent confirmation’ and that, ‘he [Defoe] was a great liar, perhaps the greatest’.3
     It cannot be said that Defoe as an author occupies a place in the imagination and loyalties of his readers. Arguably, Defoe’s greatest work is Robinson Crusoe written nearly three hundred years ago. Both Alexander Pope and Virginia Woolf, writing in different times, have reasoned that it was difficult to think of anyone as having written Robinson Crusoe and that it was just there and always had been. In saying this they tell us something profound about the book: that it occupies our mind as a fable and an archetype of what is involved in facing up to life’s dangers and difficulties.
     In giving us Robinson Crusoe’s story, Defoe offers the hope that the fears and dangers individuals experience can be overcome even when they are alone, isolated and cast away. Biographers have revealed that Defoe, like Crusoe, was often an isolated and suffering figure and when in the Preface to Robinson Crusoe he writes, ‘Here is invincible patience recommended under the worst of misery, and indefatigable application and undaunted resolution under the greatest and most discouraging circumstances,’ it is hard not to conclude that he is writing about himself and that the book is autobiographical in some respects. Defoe suggests as much in replying to critics by saying that he was portraying his own life allegorically.
     Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe in 1719 when it is generally believed he was fifty-nine years of age and it established his reputation as a writer. Robinson Crusoe was Defoe’s first and most popular book. It was immediately acclaimed, although it has had its critics, and reprinted many times in Defoe’s lifetime. The story has universal appeal and its readership has spread across the world. It endures in the popular imagination of its readers but particularly among children.4 In days when most people owned few books, Robinson Crusoe was to be found on the shelf alongside the Bible, some Shakespeare, and John Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress and, much later, with Hardy and something by Dickens. Today it is under siege by Harry Potter and computer games but it resists their advance – it persists.
     Why does Robinson Crusoe have such universal appeal? Manuel Schonhorn offers a partial answer. He wrote that anyone familiar with the typology of Robinson Crusoe could predict its ending from its beginning. It told the story of the younger son setting out in life to prove himself.5 Crusoe could only find himself by disobeying his parents. Young readers sense this as a revolutionary message for they know that they too will to have to rebel and wonder at the consequences of doing so.
     Robinson Crusoe has been singled out for acclaim by literary critics, with the assertion that it is arguably ‘the most significant landmark in the history of the early English novel’. It seems obvious that the book must have a greater significance than Schonhorn has suggested. Other explanations, although fascinating, have failed to satisfy. It is easy to agree with literary critics that the book must have been concerned with the religious, economic and political issues of the times in which it was created but the ordinary reader knows that it ‘transcends the particular issues which inform it’.
     All the ideological and cultural issues identified as influencing the book have a significance of a kind. For some critics the book has been seen as a fictional manifesto of a new mercantilist culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Others understand it best as a form of spiritual autobiography, ‘a kind of secular version of Bunyan’s Grace Abounding’. For certain Marxist critics, it is an archetype of homo economicus and an early form of colonialism.
     The children in and among us perceive the story as both escapism and a hazardous adventure. Dangerous journeys into foreign places (which Defoe always envisaged as a seaway to glory and riches) are common in children’s books. In my childhood, Robinson Crusoe was coupled in the imagination with the enjoyment of reading such adventure stories as Swallows and Amazons, Treasure Island, King Solomon’s Mines, Lord Jim and, later, Heart of Darkness.
     Great adventure stories offer more than pleasure. Even when I hid my copy of Robinson Crusoe beneath the pillow and read it after lights-out in the fear of cannibals and the creak of footsteps on the stairs, I knew what I could not conceptualise: that I was reading a real person’s story in the form of a moral fable. I was being offered not only an opportunity to get near to Crusoe’s self-communing exile, his delusions, dreams and nightmares in the comparative safety of his stockade and his cave but also to his author, Daniel Defoe. It was a wonder to me then, and it still is, that Defoe could make his quest for the meaning of his life, for him a spiritual and temporal journey, in such a peculiar and singular manner.
     To find Defoe and to answer for myself the question of what were the sources of his fears and the resilience with which he confronted them, I set out to discover all I could about him. I found that he had led a dangerous and exciting life with many severe crises. All these crises were accompanied by terrible fears, impetuosity of action, a certain knowledge that he was in the right and a strong desire to have the last word.
     The number of questions increased. Why the repetition of these awful moments? What was Defoe seeking to achieve? And why, at the many testing moments of his life, was he so alone, isolated without friends and besieged by so many enemies?
     The Introduction to my copy of Robinson Crusoe told me that Defoe had written the book in 1719 and that, in a late burst of literary activity, he published in 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, Captain Singleton, Due Preparations for the Plague and, later, other literary works. When I read these works, I experienced much of the excitement and fear that I encountered with Robinson Crusoe.
     It seemed that the unifying theme in these various works was Defoe himself and that all these writings must be, in some sense, ‘autobiographical’. For the most part they are written in the first person and in the past tense. This form of narrative is the modern way and, compared to what had gone before, Defoe had increased the possibilities of resolving his conflicts although he remained hard pressed to do so.
     Are these books really fictions? Defoe never called his works novels and insisted that they were not works of fiction.6 He writes in the Preface to Robinson Crusoe, in the guise of the Editor, that ‘The Editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction.’ I accepted that Defoe was never shipwrecked on a desert island but I knew him to be there and that, beyond the truism that an author is always present in his books, he had given his readers ‘autobiography’ skilfully presented as fact. Defoe gives the readers of Robinson Crusoe a wealth of circumstantial objects and events to convince them of the reality of Robinson’s experience on the island, but it becomes apparent to the reader that the recounting of this island experience contains recollections and emotions of overwhelming importance to the author as he looked back.
     I was bound to accept that there would be acute difficulties in finding Defoe in his fiction, for there are considerable problems in making decisions on what to include and what to ignore. It was apparent from the outset that it could not be assumed that what Defoe seemed to be telling his readers was literally true. I decided to apply the simple test that when it was possible to confirm a fictional statement by a provable particular of his life it could be taken into account.
     I concluded from an exhaustive reading of Defoe’s writing that there was a sense in which he wished his readers to discover him. Perhaps he was driven by egotism or natural self-pride. I needed to crack what I dubbed The Defoe Code. The application of the Code to his fiction is explained in this text. It led me to the most stunning, exciting – and ultimately disturbing – revelations about Defoe’s life which, in my opinion, change fundamentally all published understanding of him as a writer and a man, and for ever.
     I discovered also an extensive and powerful use of signifiers in Defoe’s writing: that is the use of words and phrases that have a hidden meaning for some or all of his readers, other than a literal understanding, which is obscure to the modern reader. Interpreting the signifiers has had an electrifying effect on the meaning of the text.
     The use of language in Defoe’s fictions as they reveal his own life is fraught with difficulties. Defoe uses the language common to his time and social position and its meaning to a modern reader is often obscure and puzzling. For example, a family may consist of all those people living within an establishment whether or not they are biologically related or legally married and will include servants. A father is the senior male who pays the rent or owns the property and his wife may not be legally married to him Brothers and sisters may not share the same parents. In general usage a master may be a father, the captain or owner of a ship, a person to whom one is apprenticed or a dominant partner in a sexual relationship. Defoe plays with the ambiguities of these terms A same-sex union is sometimes termed a ‘marriage’ in certain contexts as may be a sexual relationship between  an adult and a child When Defoe refers to a death this may often mean the end of a relationship, temporary or permanent.

There is a further difficulty, and one not considered by Peter Earle. Over two hundred and fifty years a huge volume of works was attributed to Defoe, most of which were not signed or admitted to be his in his lifetime. These included an abundance of works of fiction, pamphlets, articles and poems. There has been a reaction to these so-called ascriptions. It is generally accepted that over half of them are not credible. Ascription confusions, when taken together with the paucity of provable information about Defoe, have led to very different biographical accounts. During Defoe’s life, and since then, there has been controversy about his character. Most biographers are divided between hagiographers, who deny the significance of duplicity and dishonesty and who have invented romances as a substitute for reality, and debunkers who can see no virtue in him.
     It would be a foolish biographer who denied that Defoe often lied or dissembled. But the task of revising romantic, iconic and child-like accounts of a subject presents the biographer with problems. A common reaction to the revelation of lies is that readers think less well of the ‘hero’, the subject of the biography itself. The question is asked as to why the biographer has chosen to write about such an unreliable character. Weakly, it might be responded, we do not always choose our ‘heroes’, they select us, and despite our better judgement. However, such a response will not do. A biographer is expected to persuade his reader of the worthiness of his subject while proceeding with circumspection, and a good biographer is expected to grapple with contradictions of character and event and to do his best to reveal the ‘truth’, so far as it can be ascertained. After all, the reader might say, ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ and more interesting. What is more, I believe that ‘truth’ is something owed to the subject as well as to one’s self.

There is a very simple reason why biographers of Defoe persist with what appears to many to be a hopeless quest: Defoe is one of the first writers widely accepted as being a progenitor of the modern novel and is, therefore, grappling in his writing with a nascent sense of his individuality in a world we recognise as our own. He was among the first authors to break away from stories based on legend or myth of Greek and Roman origin and to give his readers characters, plot, and something which amounts to ‘realism’. Admittedly his characters are often shadowy, unconvincing and unlikeable, but they represent distinguishable individuality and they engage the reader. They are characters that can be recognised and identified with and their human endeavours represent something of us.
     The issue of ‘realism’ in the novel, a genre that is fictional, is a subject of enduring literary controversy. The sense of the worth of an individual life and the importance of human society is dependent on a belief in reason. Among the elements of realism must be a concern with the lives of ordinary people facing dilemmas which are recognisable to the reader and with a relationship to what has gone before and to the events which unfold. Historically, this sense of individuality and individual destiny was only possible from the beginning of the eighteenth century. Philosophically, it is associated with a departure from the classical belief that there were universal truths to be apprehended from the physical world and their replacement by truths based on human perceptions and the evidence of our senses. This departure places human personality and imagination at the heart of the pursuit of knowledge.
     By the eighteenth century, the drift of people from the countryside and the development of trade and commerce with its specialisation of function had undermined the cohesion of community and cast men adrift to their own devices. Crusoe’s world, although strange, is the contemporary world. It is our world in its earliest form, with the places in which we live, love, struggle and, ultimately, fail.
     Defoe’s sense of identity is troubled, and troubling, because his imagination is focused on two very different ‘realities’. On one hand, the foundation of his ideas is to be found in the seventeenth century, where life and beliefs are accountable to God in an endless queue for a place in heaven, while, on the other, in his writing can be seen the effects of the cynical marketplace of an embryonic eighteenth-century capitalism with its materialistic struggle for riches and survival.
     Yet still I hesitated. In attempting to reveal the ‘truth’ I risked creating a portrait of Defoe which would repel. Victoria Glendinning writes that the question biographical writers are most frequently asked about a particular subject is, ‘Do you like him?’ She suggests that what the questioner usually means is: ‘If I read your book will I meet someone whom I like?’ 7 Biographers often start out with enthusiasm for their subjects and finish liking them less. Yet those researchers whose affinity with their subject remains unshaken after long acquaintance may have lost all objectivity and usefulness to their readers. A subject becomes the biographer’s friend but also his enemy; without friendship a difficult task cannot be attempted but without distrust there would be no ‘truth’.
     There is no general answer to Victoria Glendinning’s question. In relation to Defoe, it can be said that those who like a ‘who dunnit’ should not hesitate to read on. The serious-minded can be sure that in Defoe they are in the presence of a man of singular intelligence writing in the revisionist tradition. Some readers will always think of Defoe as a great and compelling man whatever others might say of him although, as they get to know him better, their liking may turn to a grudging respect and their judgement to sympathy. In the end, all judgements are personal.
     Then, as in any worthwhile biographical task, in unravelling Defoe and his times the reader can learn something more of himself and the age in which he lives which, surely, is justification enough for the time spent reading about him. For those who can abstract themselves from tumultuous times and dreadful choices, concern with the meaning of Defoe’s life can be justified in Defoe’s own words ‘Tis evident … that the history of men’s lives may be many ways made useful and instructive to those who read them.’

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