Daniel Defoe Biography Quotes 16 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Daniel Defoe was born Daniel Foe around 1660 in London, in the unsettled afterlight of civil war and restoration. His father, James Foe, was a tallow chandler and a Dissenter, and that double inheritance - trade and Nonconformity - stamped the son with both worldly practicality and a permanent sense of being politically exposed. He grew up in a city of plague memory and fire-scarred streets, where the rebuilt commercial metropolis was also a surveillance state for religious outsiders.

The England that shaped him was a nation learning to argue in print: coffeehouses, pamphlet stalls, and post roads stitched together opinion faster than parliaments could control it. Defoe moved early in the borderland between conscience and expedience, where dissenters navigated oaths, markets, and sudden legal penalties. He added "De" to his name as he rose and fell, a small act of self-invention that suited a man who repeatedly rebuilt his public identity after financial and political disaster.

Education and Formative Influences

Defoe was educated for the Dissenting ministry at Charles Morton's academy (often placed at Newington Green), where he absorbed an unusually modern curriculum - languages, history, and practical reasoning - and where the habits of sermon argument bled into later journalism. Instead of the Anglican university path closed to him, he learned to write as a persuader aimed at the public, not the court: to marshal examples, anticipate objections, and treat politics as a moral question lived by ordinary people.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

He tried commerce first - hosiery, importing, and other ventures - and learned in the hardest way how credit can become a trap; bankruptcies and lawsuits stalked him for decades. Politics drew him in: he supported William III and became a prolific pamphleteer, culminating in The True-Born Englishman (1701), a satirical defense of a foreign-born king in a xenophobic moment. His most famous punishment came after The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), an ironic tract so convincing that authorities treated it as sedition; he was tried, pilloried, and imprisoned in 1703. The experience did not silence him - it professionalized him. Robert Harley used him as a political writer and intelligence-gatherer, and Defoe built The Review (1704-1713) into a landmark of early periodical journalism, mixing commentary, economics, foreign news, and moral instruction. In later life he turned that reporter's eye into fiction and pseudo-document: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), and Roxana (1724), alongside travel writing and social-economic treatises. He died in London on 1731-04-24, reportedly while avoiding creditors - an ending that matched a life spent racing the consequences of risk.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Defoe's inner life reads as an ongoing trial between providence and appetite. His work insists that people rationalize themselves into wrongdoing, then call it necessity or prudence: "Necessity makes an honest man a knave". That sentence is not only plot logic for thieves, prostitutes, and adventurers; it is Defoe's diagnosis of a commercial society where hunger, debt, and status pressure the conscience until it re-labels sin as survival. He wrote as someone who had lived on both sides of solvency, and who understood how quickly moral vocabulary becomes a ledger.

His style - plain, documentary, intimate - is built to make inward motive feel like recorded fact. He rarely flatters the reader with heroic certainty; instead, he shows power as a temptation available to anyone, because he believed "All men would be tyrants if they could". That dark egalitarianism gives his criminals their eerie recognizability: they do not break rules because they are monsters, but because they are human. Yet the world of Defoe is not nihilistic. He returns again and again to punishment, repentance, and the violence of judgment, alert to the way every accused person narrates innocence: "Justice is always violent to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes". The line captures his journalist's skepticism toward official righteousness and his novelist's sympathy for self-deception.

Legacy and Influence

Defoe helped invent the modern public writer: part reporter, part moralist, part political operator, fluent in the new economy of news and the old language of providence. Robinson Crusoe became a foundational myth of self-making and empire, while A Journal of the Plague Year set an enduring template for disaster narrative that blends data, rumor, and lived fear. His criminal and mercantile novels widened the novel's social range, proving that a life of work, vice, calculation, and belated remorse could carry epic weight. In journalism, The Review stands as an early model of sustained editorial voice, and in literature his method - fact-like detail used to probe conscience - continues to shape realism, historical fiction, and the ethical ambitions of reportage.