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DEFOE AND THE SOCIETY OF HIS TIME

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DEFOE AND THE SOCIETY OF HIS TIME


I'm going to deal with Defoe's life in short and about the main aspects of the society of the time as these are represented in his novels, in particular in "Robinson Crusoe" and "Moll Flanders".



DANIEL DEFOE'S LIFE

Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660 in a rigid Presbyterian family. He was brought up in the values of a Prot 222g69c estant ethic ‑ practical knowledge of the Bible, hard work and self‑help ‑ which had a great influence on him. He was educated at a private Presbyterian Academy, a kind of school for boys debarred from ordinary schools and universities because they belonged to dissenting families. His school omitted the traditional classical instruction in Greek and Latin but stressed modern languages, mathematics and even science, which at that time was completely ignored at both Oxford and Cambridge, the two major universities in Great Britain. Defoe's education here made him the first really modern writer, his mind was disposed to independence and scientific inquiry, his interests were immediate and practical, not erudite, although as an adult he wrote literary as well as historical and economic works.



Both his family and his education contribuited to an extremely radical attitude which characterizes his intellectual activity in the first forty years of his life. Defoe published hundreds of pamphets on religion, commerce, history and politics. Defoe was extremly frank in denouncing repressive attitudes promoted by his own society, for istance towards women. He thought that though Britain considered itself as a civilized and christian country, it was one of the most barbarous customs in the world that it denied the advantages of learning to women.

The violence of his pamphlets - violent attacks against parliament in favour of the people - got him into serious trouble and the result was that Defoe was sentenced to the pillory. After that bad experience, he decided that there was no hope for a radical solution for England in the future, and that the political situation was very likely to remain as it was. So he followed the ways of his world and Defoe, probably the first Journalist in the modern sense of the word, began writing and publishing a weekly Review (1704‑1714).

He was also constantly tried for being in debt as a result of unlucky speculations in trade, since he thought that capitalist opportunities could change one's life. He worked for years as a journalist and part-time secret agent.

In 1719 he wrote Robinson Crusoe. The next five years saw an intense flow of books.

Like his most famous character, Robinson Crusoe, Defoe lived both as an isolated survivor (in his radicalism) and a man of a new world of trade quite able to understand capitalist England's age. He died alone in a London flat in April 1730.













"ROBINSON CRUSOE": MERCANTILE ETHICS

Robinson Crusoe, apparently a book about life on an uncivilized island, is in fact a glorification of western European technology, the myth of Western development. Robinson Cnisoe can be read as a tract in favour of western Earopean imperialism in its early eighteenth‑century phase. Crusoe takes possession of the island as his property. He brings to it capital and technical skills, but until the <<savage>> Friday appears he lacks labour power to develop these to the best advantage. Crusoe believes in his civilizing mission.


THE SLAVE‑TRADE

In 1600 the slave‑trade was relatively unimportant to England; by 1700 it was widely accepted to be economically crucial. England had developed her New World Empire. The plantation colonies generated enormous wealth and economic progress for the mother country. African slaves became very important when it was realized that they could answer the labour problems of the New World. In 1640 there were no slaves in the English colonies by 1700 there were about 118,000 mainly in the Caribbean colonies of Jamaica, Barbadoes and the islands of the Antilles.

The few voices who protested against the trade in Africans remained isolated and ignored until late in the eighteenth century. Often people admitted that the slave‑trade was morally wrong, but felt it was necessary as labour for the colonies. Thus the slave‑trade was tolerated for so long because it was thought to be economically irreplaceable. The slave‑trade was finally abolished in 1807; slavery in 1833.

Robinson Crusoe can be considered a spokesman for the eighteenth century attitude towards slavery. Apparently he has no scruples about participating in a voyage to bring slaves from West Africa to Brazil. He takes for granted the cultural inferiority of American Indians and their child‑like relationship to the superior Europeans whom they must call Master (this is the first word he teaches Friday). So clearly Crusoe does not disapprove of slavery as an institution.


CAPITALISM

Most economic historians agree that the rise of modern capitalism happened in late‑seventeenth century England. It depended, first, on a form of capital accumulation that involved the dispossession of many small owners from the land and their means of subsistence, and, secondly, on the emergence of a new kind of capitalist that encouraged rapid technological advances of the industrial kind during the early decades of the eighteenth century.

The concentration of wealth which led to modern British capitalism was also made possible by mercantilism, a term applied, historically, to the trading practices of European countries during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. British mercantilism aimed at the enlargement of national power at the expense of other nations and depended on royal monopolies: it was a system for ensuring a constant import of precious metals from Britain's Colonial Empire.

Mercantile and industrial capitalism were able to meet the export demand created by the colonisation and exploitation of foreign colonies and stimulated the introduction of the factory system of production starting from the middle of the eighteenth century. With the factory system two main classes appeared: the capitalist, who owns the factories and other means of production, and the class of the workers who have only their labour power, that is their capacity to work.











"MOLL FLANDERS": PICARO, OR HEROINE OF FREE ENTERPRISE?

Also Moll Flanders can be seen as a representative character of her age. This novel was often defined a picaresque novel.

Picaresque and Picaro are referred to a literary genre of Spanish origin. The Picaresque novel began in the sixteenth century. It is characterized by realism and is often told in autobiographical form. It tells the adventures of popular or underworld heroes, outlaws struggling against organized society. These heroes are called picaros or picarons. But it is in the Augustan period that this genre became very popular. Many Augustan novelists wrote picaresque novels, from Defoe to Fielding.

But Moll Flanders, the heroine, a criminal, is also a characteristic product of modern individualism - she tries to reach the highest economic and social status using every available method. While the picaro has a real historical basis ‑ the breakdown of the feudal social order. Defoe, on the other hand, presents his whores, pirates, highwaymen, shoplifters, and adventurers as ordinary people in their environment, as products of the society of the time.

Moll Flanders is also the result of a social change in modern urban civilization: the rise of a well‑defined criminal class, and a complex system for fighting it, with law‑courts, informers and even crime reporters like Defoe.

As theft increased, punishments for offences against property became much more severe: Moll Flanders risks to be hung and is actually transported for stealing <<two pieces of brocaded silk>>, and her mother suffered the same fate. About ten thousand metropolitan criminals were transported from the Old Bailey, the main prison in London, to the North American Plantations between 1717 and 1775; many of them, like Moll Flanders, were able to find a way to reach a high economic and social condition.


THE CITY

The setting of Moll Flanders as a criminal is London.

London was seen by Defoe as a new kind of social landscape. Eighteenth‑century London was the leading city in the world; already a city of half a million inhabitants in 1660, between 1700 and the early decades of 1800 it rose to more than a million and a quarter.

Many social interests were in conflict in eighteenth‑century London. Augustan London is a territory in which the contrasts of wealth and poverty are more evidently observable, in their concentration in an expanding urbanism.













Siro Martini






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