| Daniel
Defoe |
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| Nationality - English |
Profession - Author |
| Date of birth - 1660
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Date of death - 1731 |
| Place of birth
- London : |
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Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660, probably in September, third child and first son of James and Mary Defoe1. Daniel received a very good education, as his father hoped he would become a minister2, but Daniel wasn't interested. His family were Dissenters, Presbyterians to be precise, and those sects were being persecuted a bit at this time, so maybe Daniel had the right idea. He was always very tolerant of others' religious ideas himself.
By 1683, Daniel was a successful young merchant, with a storefront in an upscale part of London and no real ideas of becoming a writer at all. On New Year's Day, 1684, he married Mary Tuffley, an heiress whose dowry amounted to ?3,7004. Later that year, he joined the army of the rebel Duke of Monmouth, who was attempting to take the throne from James II.
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When the rebellion failed, Daniel and many other troops were forced into semi-exile. He traveled around the continent for three years, off and on, as both tourist and merchant, and wrote very dangerous, very anti-James II pamphlets. Daniel was very pleased when William and Mary took charge, and wrote in favor of William in particular, but he was in the minority there.
Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe in 1719. Only a third of the book is about his survival on a remote island. But that part is now a metaphor for the way we save ourselves with technology.
Fourteen years earlier, a real person, Alexander Selkirk, was left by his shipmates on a real island -- off the coast of Chile. Selkirk had fled his contentious Scottish family in 1702 and gone to sea in a British privateer. Its business? Harassing Spanish outposts in the Pacific. Conditions on the ship were terrible, and Selkirk carried trouble with him.
One day, in a rage, he told his shipmates to put him ashore. So they did -- on a deserted island. As the longboat pulled away, he screamed for them to take him back. They would not. And there he stayed 'til a British ship found him four years later.
A London magazine published the story in 1713, and Defoe read it. Meanwhile, Selkirk went back to his erratic life -- marrying women here and there -- going to sea now and then. He died in 1721, two years after Defoe published Robinson Crusoe.
Of course, Defoe changed his hero. He modeled Crusoe on himself -- made him part of the conservative middle class. He used Crusoe to explore his own ideas about imperialism. Crusoe becomes the benevolent colonizer -- teaching the savage, Friday, to be what he himself is. There was no Friday in Selkirk's story.
Selkirk was pretty savage before he was deserted, and he brought little technology to his imprisonment. The sailors who found him said he was almost naked -- that he had to relearn human speech. Oddly enough, Defoe undercut his own survival thesis in another book. He wrote, "Necessity makes an honest man a knave."
In 1750, the Spanish built a small fort on Selkirk's island. Later, they made the island into a prison. Neither lasted long. In 1966, the Chilean government changed the name of the island to Robinson Crusoe. They hoped to pick up tourist trade. Today the population is around 600 -- mostly fisherfolk who live in near isolation. There are three small hotels -- not heavily used.
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Daniel Defoe
bibliography - 4
listed |
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Defoe books below
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