DANIEL DEFOE
Defoe was born in London of a family of
Baptists in the year of the Restoration. He was educated at one of the best
Dissenting Academies (Newton Green) where he grounded in practical subjects
like geography, economics, chemistry and modern languages. Defoe was a man of
many trades, was a part-time write 111i88b r, a part-time businessman, with a full-time
obsession for money. All his jobs and projects, he thought, would make him a
rich and respected gentleman but his wrong speculations caused him to go
bankrupt. His political inclinations, Tory or Whig, changed rapidly according
to hopes of enrichment, too. All these adventures and experiences eventually
went into his fiction. Defoe was a prolific writer: he wrote essays, pamphlets
and travel books besides many articles for newspapers and magazines ( Defoe's
role in laying the foundations of modern journalism was very important). In
1719 Defoe, all at once, hit success with Robinson
Crusoe, the story of a shipwrecked sailor who for 28 years was forced to
live alone on a desert island. Books and novels about the sea and the dangers
of navigation were highly popular at the beginning of his century and so Defoe,
writing his Robinson Crusoe, was
ispired by "Captain Woodes Rogers' A
Cruising Voyage Round the World" where a Scotch sailor, Alexander
Selkirk, had managed to survive alone on the island of Juan Fernandez, 350
miles off the coast of Chile. However Defoe's is not a re-telling of Selkirk's
story and the fact that the novel had such a realistic background is important
because was this kind of descriptive realism that distinguished it from other
types of fiction. The story is told by a first-person narrator (the same
Robinson Crusoe) and is thus a fake autobiography and, to enhance its realism,
Defoe gives us a Robinson's life-profile. Moreover the places Crusoe visits in
England and abroad are not generic but carefully described and set in their
geographical context while time is accounted for in the most precise manner
and, at one point in the story, Robinson even starts writing a diary: thanks to
our possibility to follow Robinson's actions day by day, we are made to believe
an otherwise out-of-the-ordinary story. Robinson's psychology is rather simple,
at least from our point of view: after his shipwreck he does not despair but
sets about doing practical things to make his life as comfortable as possible,
and his comments when he is rescued by a British ship and goes back to England
are equally unemotional. Robinson was only a sensible, practical man and he
behaved accordingly. The only development in his personality stressed by Defoe
is that of his religious conversion: Robinson's adventures convince him that
life is not meaningless and that God has not deserted him. He returns to live
in society only when he has acquired a new and heightened sense of man's social
role. It is just as possible to read Robinson
Crusoe as the celebration of the English mercantile spirit. Today Robinson
appears to us as the representative of the Englishman who in those years was
beginning to colonise the world: Robinson is the archetype pioneer, armed only
with his own strength and intelligence, and with a Puritan's firm convinction
that he has God on his side.
Daniel Defoe wrote other important
novels as Moll Flanders (1722) and Lady Roxana (1724).
