Daniel Defoe Biography Quotes 16 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Daniel Defoe was born Daniel Foe around 1660 in London to James Foe, a tallow chandler and committed English Dissenter, and his wife, Annis. Raised in a Protestant nonconformist household that stood apart from the Church of England, he grew up amid the turbulence of Restoration politics and the upheavals that marked London in his youth. As a boy he lived through the aftershocks of the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, experiences that shaped his sense of civic vulnerability and resilience. In adulthood he adopted the more genteel-sounding surname Defoe, a gesture toward social aspiration that aligned with the ambitions of a tradesman-intellectual.

Education and Early Trade
Denied access to Oxford and Cambridge because of religious tests, Defoe studied at the dissenting academy of the Reverend Charles Morton at Newington Green. Mortons rigorous curriculum in languages, history, logic, and practical sciences equipped Defoe with the habits of inquiry and clear exposition that would mark his later writing. Although intended for the ministry, he chose commerce, entering the world of wholesale and retail trade. He dealt in hosiery and other goods, ventured into brick and tile manufacture, and navigated both domestic and overseas markets. The risks of early modern enterprise were severe; a catastrophic downturn led to his bankruptcy in 1692, a blow that he never fully escaped and that repeatedly returned in the form of debts and lawsuits.

Marriage and Family
In 1684 Defoe married Mary Tuffley, the daughter of a London merchant. The marriage brought a dowry that helped him expand his ventures, and together they raised a large family. Defoe remained deeply connected to kin and dissenting networks throughout his life. His household intersected with the world of learning through his son-in-law Henry Baker, a naturalist and educational reformer, whose career reflected the intellectual ambitions and social mobility that also animated Defoes own path.

Pamphleteer and Satirist
By the late 1690s Defoe had turned with increasing energy to public argument. An Essay upon Projects (1697) surveyed schemes for national improvement, promoting ideas such as academies for women, better roads, and more rational bankruptcy laws. He quickly became one of the most vivid political voices in print. The True-Born Englishman (1701), a bestselling satirical poem, defended King William III against xenophobic attacks and mocked racial purity, arguing that English identity was historically mixed. Defoes sharp irony crested in The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), a pamphlet written in the voice of a hardline churchman calling for extreme penalties against nonconformists. Some readers took the parody at face value; the state treated it as seditious.

Imprisonment and Patronage
Prosecuted for The Shortest Way, Defoe was jailed in Newgate in 1703 and sentenced to stand in the pillory. He responded with Hymn to the Pillory, turning punishment into publicity and demonstrating his mastery of the public sphere. His release was engineered by Robert Harley, a rising minister who recognized Defoes value as a writer and intelligence gatherer. Harley became his most important political patron, employing him to report on opinion, shape public debate, and write in support of government aims.

Journalism and the Review
Under Harleys wing, Defoe founded and almost single-handedly wrote the thrice-weekly Review (1704, 1713), a remarkable blend of news analysis, economic commentary, moral essays, and foreign reports. The paper anticipated many features of modern journalism: a consistent editorial voice, attention to public credit and trade, and a steady effort to mediate between parties. Defoe addressed the War of the Spanish Succession, shifts in Queen Annes ministries, and the dynamics of finance with a practical intelligence drawn from his years in business. He wrote tirelessly, often under pseudonyms, and moved with agility across the political spectrum while trying to keep faith with his core commitments to tolerance, commerce, and national strength.

Union with Scotland
In the critical years leading to the Act of Union (1707), Defoe undertook missions in Scotland as a confidential agent. He cultivated contacts among merchants and politicians, gathered intelligence for Harley, and argued in print for economic and political union. His reports from Scottish towns and parliament illuminated local resistance and opportunities, and his writings helped frame union as a project of mutual prosperity. He later chronicled these events in accounts that combined reportage with analysis, contributing to the public memory of the making of Great Britain.

Shifts after 1714 and Work for the Press
After the Hanoverian succession in 1714, Defoe adapted to the altered political landscape. He continued to serve government aims under the new Whig leadership, including figures such as Robert Walpole, by writing pieces that moderated opposition voices and emphasized stability. At times he contributed to newspapers run by political adversaries, notably those associated with Nathaniel Mist, while quietly advancing government positions. This double role as journalist and covert propagandist reveals the fluid, often perilous nature of early eighteenth-century print culture.

Fiction, Travel, and the Late Masterpieces
Defoes late career brought works that became cornerstones of English prose. Robinson Crusoe (1719), published by William Taylor, offered the compelling self-reliance of a castaway rebuilding life from the wreckage of circumstance. He followed with The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Serious Reflections, extending the narrative into moral and spiritual territory. A burst of novels then appeared: Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Colonel Jack (1722), culminating in Roxana (1724). He also produced A Tour thro the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724, 1727), a panoramic survey of roads, manufactures, harbors, and towns that fused travel writing with economic geography. While many titles were published anonymously or under shifting bylines, contemporaries recognized the distinctive cadence of Defoes plain style and his fascination with how individuals navigate markets, hazards, and conscience.

Themes, Methods, and Beliefs
Defoes writing married dissenting moral seriousness to a traders eye for detail. He prized empirical observation, close accounts of prices, ships, and tools, and the inner calculations of characters handling risk. His narratives repeatedly stage providence and prudence side by side, suggesting that divine oversight works through human industry. He favored reform through practical institutions: insurance schemes, improved credit, better prisons and poor relief, and education that included women. These preoccupations run from An Essay upon Projects through the fictional case histories of Moll Flanders and the quasi-documentary realism of A Journal of the Plague Year.

Financial Troubles and Personal Resilience
Despite fame, Defoe rarely escaped creditors. Old failures shadowed new ventures, lawsuits multiplied, and he sometimes lived under assumed names or in obscure lodgings to keep working. The discipline of serial journalism and hack writing, however, allowed him to keep supporting his family and to continue publishing at a prodigious rate. His connections to publishers and booksellers, including William Taylor and others in the Paternoster Row trade, anchored a professional life that was always precarious yet astonishingly productive.

Final Years and Death
In his last years Defoe wrote conduct books, histories, and further political pieces while managing declining health and legal pressures. He died in London in 1731, having spent much of his later life in relative obscurity compared with the sensation that Robinson Crusoe had once made. He was buried at Bunhill Fields, the great resting place of nonconformists, among the community that had shaped his convictions from the start.

Legacy
Defoe helped define the possibilities of modern prose. As a journalist, he modeled analysis that connected finance, diplomacy, and daily life for a broad audience. As a political writer attached to figures such as Robert Harley and later Robert Walpole, he showed how print could operate inside the machinery of the state. As a novelist and travel writer, he endowed English literature with narratives that treat survival, trade, and conscience as universal dramas. The people around him his dissenting teachers like Charles Morton, patrons in government, publishers in the London book trade, and family members such as Mary Tuffley and Henry Baker formed the social infrastructure that enabled his work. Out of these connections, and under the pressure of debt and controversy, he produced a body of writing whose clarity and resourcefulness continue to resonate.

Our collection contains 16 quotes who is written by Daniel, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Justice - Leadership - Learning.

Other people realated to Daniel: Robert Louis Stevenson (Writer), Andrew Fletcher (Writer), William Minto (Writer), Bernard de Mandeville (Philosopher)