In 1879, in the process of attacking Daniel Defoe as a writer of immoral works of fiction, the novelist Anthony Trollope set aside Robinson Crusoe as a work that everyone agreed was an “accident.” He did not elaborate on this comment, but it may be argued, to the contrary, that so far from being an “accident,” Defoe seemed destined to write the work that brought him a degree of fame in his lifetime and continued fame over the centuries following his death in 1731.¹ Although he achieved some notoriety in the first decade of the eighteenth century as the writer of controversial political poetry, pamphlets, and journals, he sprinkled these works liberally with short fictions; so much so that one critic complained that this was his only real talent. It was not. From the very beginning, those critics who were not biased against him because of his Whiggish politics, his status as a religious Dissenter, and his pugnacious defense of his ideas recognized the vividness of his style and his ability to write powerful narratives, whether of battles, scenes of riots, or accounts of infamous Jacobite gatherings, forceful in a manner to be discovered in few of his contemporaries.

The publication date of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, April 25, 1719, was significant as well. It reflected a time when publishers had begun to recognize a growing audience demand for book-length fiction. It would be a mistake to speak of an imaginary audience eagerly awaiting the publication of Defoe’s work, as Richard Altick absurdly imagined the audience for the novels of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding,² but, aside from an amazing ability to involve readers in a work in which, once Crusoe lands on his island, almost “nothing” adventurous happens for almost fifteen years, until the discovery of the cannibal’s footprint, there was much in Defoe’s masterpiece that played to developing attitudes and interests of the time – ideas of isolation, concepts of the importance of the private life, a sense of exploring a new world, notions of the nobility of labor, and a fascination with the primitive. Along with these, the concept of what may be called anachronistically the Robinsonade, though hardly original with Defoe, seemed to strike a chord with Defoe’s and with future audiences. Island fictions became popular in Britain and the rage in Germany, where that term was invented.

Before entering into an account of Defoe’s writings before Robinson Crusoe, I want to address the notion argued by Defoe in his Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the third and last of the Crusoe series, to the effect that the first two volumes were an allegorical account of his (Crusoe’s and/or Defoe’s) life and hence an allegory of his career as a writer. Having been exposed as the author of what purported to be an autobiography of a Robinson Crusoe,³ Defoe, still writing as Crusoe, argued in his preface that his work was to be regarded as “Allegorick History.”⁴ He maintained that all of his reflections were a “just History of a State of forc’d Confinement, which in my real History is represented by a confin’d Retreat in an Island; and it is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent any Thing that really exists by that which exists not.”⁵ He then proceeded to enumerate all the incidents of his story: there really was a parrot, the footprint in the sand, and a Friday. For all his swearing to the truth of his statements, as if he were signing a legal document, all that we can actually rely upon from this seeming statement of fact, aside from its being a brilliant general defense of fiction, is that Defoe’s writings on contemporary politics, both secular and religious, were so often controversial that he was indeed put into prison on a number of occasions. In so far, then, as Crusoe’s island experience, which Crusoe at one point describes as being “a prisoner lock’d up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean,”⁶ might bear some relationship to Defoe’s imprisonment for using his talents to express his viewpoints in print, there is a degree of truth to Defoe’s claim. And it may be allowed that Defoe felt deeply enough the anguish of these times in prison to have felt some imaginative empathy with Crusoe’s island experience.

Defoe’s earliest manuscripts, dating from around 1682 to 1684, have certain fictional interests and hence some relationship with Robinson Crusoe. The first involved a series of poetic meditations recounting his personal religious struggles. These certainly have importance in relation to Crusoe’s discovery of his need for the comforts of religious belief, but while these were far more than exercises, the meditation, as a poetic form, was well established during the seventeenth century. More interesting are the “Historical Collections,” a series of brief prose narratives with particular, pointed morals. These fell under the genre known as the apothegm, or brief fictions, which were popular at the end of the seventeenth century. Defoe’s collection was dedicated to his future wife, Mary Tuffley (given the romance name Clarinda), and was almost certainly intended to give her an idea of his personality. They were fictions with a purpose, but it is surprising how many concerned events involving the emerging of powerful character to meet some difficult challenge. One, of particular interest to students of Defoe as the future creator of realist fiction, involved the ancient Greek painter, Zeuxis, who destroyed a painting for its failure to be real enough.⁷

What contemporary fiction did he read? He occasionally spoke of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. He certainly knew popular picaresque fictions, mentioning The Spanish Rogue and The English Rogue and seemingly drawing on The French Rogue for Crusoe’s interview with his father. The English Rogue, from which he drew material for his novel, Roxana, was essentially a piece of libertine fiction, but as with his admiration for the libertine poet, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, this did not seem a barrier to his enjoyment.⁸ It is hard to tell how many “novels,” the successors to the long historical French romances, he might have read. The magnificent Princess de Cleves, by Madame de Lafayette, might have seemed to be too much about love to interest him. But he certainly knew the popular first-person fictional memoirs, which were the specialty of Courtilz de Sandras (1644–1712).⁹ Of course he knew John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but although he often used brief allegories to illustrate economic or political arguments in his journal, the Review, begun in 1704, he never attempted a lengthy allegory of the kind written by Bunyan. His attraction to picaresque fiction, with its realist depiction of the lowest ends of society, was certainly a more important influence upon his writing.

After working as an effective propagandist for William III, especially in his role as a writer and political activist in moving the country toward war with France and publishing his first book, An Essay upon Projects (1697), dealing with the social and economic possibilities of contemporary England,¹⁰ Defoe emerged from relative anonymity in 1700 as the author of a poetic satire, The True-Born Englishman, a clever attack upon English xenophobia through a rehearsal of the numerous peoples who had populated England over the centuries and an ironic assault upon ideas of racial purity. For many years afterwards, he identified his writings as being “By the Author of the True-Born Englishman.” In 1702, Defoe got into severe trouble by impersonating the voice of a High Church bigot advocating the persecution of the Dissenters in England in a pamphlet with the title The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Ian Watt suggested that Defoe was too much a writer of fiction to allow a break in the narrative that would have permitted the audience to recognize the irony of the text – to reveal the viciousness of the Anglican priest, whose genocidal attitude toward a religious minority should have shocked, and indeed did shock, its readers.¹¹ Certainly Defoe, the satiric writer of 1702, might have considered as too obvious the “concession” section of Jonathan Swift’s ironic Modest Proposal (1729) in which Swift provided positive solutions for Ireland’s problems. As contemporary readers would have had no trouble recognizing, there was enough in the extreme positions of Defoe’s Churchman to reveal the irony, but it is also possible, as he maintained, that he wanted incompetent readers, those who felt a deep prejudice against the Dissenters, to take his High Churchman as a genuine figure.¹² Defoe created him with all his uncontrolled anger bursting out of him, wittily triumphing over his enemies, and violating all the rules that held society together. It showed a precocious ability to create character, but it also brought with it imprisonment, a large fine, and the pillory. It should have taught Defoe a lesson, but in 1713, he published three pamphlets with provocative titles written through the viewpoints of somewhat dim-witted narrators, who argued against (but just barely) bringing in the family of James II to rule England after Queen Anne’s demise: “Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover,” and “What if the Pretender Should Come? Or, some Considerations of the Advantages and real Consequences of the Pretender’s Possessing the Crown of Great Britain,” and “An Answer to a Question that No Body thinks of, viz. But what if the Queen should die?” At that time, he was rescued by his patron, Robert Harley, the Lord Treasurer, and by the Queen. But his enemies never let him forget it. The judge hearing the case said that a writer might hang for using such irony.

In 1704, Defoe put together a work called The Storm, a series of narratives about the storm of the previous year – a mixture of science, religion, and human interest – with a slight fictional interest, and in that year, he also started his journal, the Review, which will be discussed later in this chapter. But in 1705, he produced his first full-length work of fiction in the form of a voyage to the moon – what we would think of as science fiction. Defoe clearly read the early moon voyages with their mixture of satire and fantasy – the works of Bishop Francis Godwin (The Man in the Moone [1638]), Bishop John Wilkins (Discovery of a World in the Moone [1638]), and Cyrano de Bergerac (Histoire comique [1656]) – but his real influence was Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub, first published in 1704. Defoe read the narrative by Swift’s half-insane advocate for modern thought as a rationale for frequently obscure allusions to contemporary politics. On the other hand, his account of the moon inventions is often clever enough, and his use of the relatively new Savery steam engine¹³ as a space vehicle was in line with the way science fiction would use scientific inventions as a central device. That this “rocket ship” is also made an allegory for the British Parliament, however, only adds to the confusion. But Defoe never gave up on fantasy as a possible genre. He has Crusoe walking among the planets in Serious Reflections, the third volume of Robinson Crusoe.

After The Consolidator, Defoe concentrated on his political and economic journalism. But voyages, islands, and global geography were never far from his mind. In various works, he might lapse into speaking of how people who would be thrown on a desert island would establish government as their first act. Or, as in his General History of Trade (1713), he might contemplate the circulation of wealth, distribution of goods around the world, and the division of labor – economic themes that were to impact his thinking in writing The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures. As mentioned earlier, he would occasionally employ allegory in describing economic, political, and social situations. And in several issues of his Review of June 21 and 23, 1711, he would engage in lengthy economic and political allegories to describe how society was constructed:

This account ends with the birth of the daughter, “CREDIT,” valuable economic force, while all the children of Witt bring misery to the world.

The account of government is similar:

I quote these passages not as examples of Defoe’s ideology (though it is certainly interesting to see how much it suggests that ideological concepts were never far from the surface of Defoe’s writing), but rather to demonstrate how bouncy and inventive he could be in his allegories – how he could make these abstract figures seem alive. The reason for this is that, in a sense, for Defoe, they were alive – were vitally connected to the economic and political world in which he lived. In his Essay upon Projects (1697), he had described how, in the real world, men driven to desperation by poverty would use their ingenuity to come up with projects that might rescue them from their condition and, in the process, not only benefit themselves but also enrich society. And as for his allegory of the true origin of government and the “Projects of Tyrants” in distorting its true end of government, Defoe had engaged in an attack upon tyranny and the very real monarchs who claimed divine sanction for their holding on to power in his long political poem, Jure Divino (1706).

Large parts of Jure Divino are historical – about individual tyrants and their roles in history. In considering Defoe’s path toward The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, his involvement with historical narrative should not be forgotten. Indeed, “History,” however fictional, was a term often used to describe contemporary novels, and as we have seen above, it was one of the terms he used in the preface to Serious Reflections in an effort to describe his particular kind of writing.¹⁶ His journal, the Review, began with an historical consideration of the rise of French power in the world, and in that publication, he appeared to enjoy continually rehearsing historical cause and effect. In 1709, he brought out a large volume called The History of the Union of Great Britain, recounting the events involved in the union of England and Scotland. Defoe presents his account as someone who was deeply involved in the committee work that contributed to the ultimate success of the union. And this involved some fascinating passages in which Defoe described how in Glasgow and Edinburgh he was pursued by anti-Union mobs. At a time when the genuine truth value of history was viewed with skepticism, an account from a participant in an event such as the Union might be viewed as making a real contribution, even though it was sometimes thought that the narrator tended to exaggerate his role in the events. Defoe quite accurately presented himself as being in the middle of an important historical event. Detractors tended to attack it as first-person fiction.

This was hardly the only historical work Defoe engaged in before writing The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures. His General History of Trade (1713) was an attempt at economic history; his Secret History of the White Staff (1715) belonged to the genre of “secret history,” an account of political events by an insider; and his Memoirs of the Church of Scotland (1717) gave an historical account of the sufferings of the Covenanters in Scotland. This last work was particularly important because it described this persecuted religious group as “wandering about in Sheep-skins and Goat skins, in Dens, and Holes, and Caves of the Earth,” after the defeat of their army in the battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679.¹⁷ Defoe also depicted sublime aspects of the Scottish landscape in this work, and these descriptive passages may have prepared him for situating Crusoe on his island. Crusoe is far from being persecuted for his religious beliefs, but the sufferings of the Covenanters and the landscape through which they moved may have stuck in Defoe’s imagination.

In addition to his involvement in history, Defoe was also deeply involved in geography, particularly economic geography. In the Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, Crusoe sails down the east coast of England, then goes to Africa, and in the second voyage ends up as a slave in Sallee, in North Africa, present-day Morocco. In escaping, he sails down the west coast of Africa, is rescued, and taken to Brazil. After several years spent working as a sugar and tobacco planter and manufacturer, he is shipwrecked on an island in the Caribbean off South America. Crusoe lives on the island for twenty-eight years, but after arriving in England, he travels to Portugal to visit the Portuguese Captain who befriended him. Then he travels over the Pyrenees to France and back to England. Crusoe’s island experience is so central to Defoe’s fiction that we may forget how much movement through other locales is involved. In The Farther Adventures, Crusoe’s travels are indeed epic. He returns to his island, then voyages to Madagascar and to the Far East. He is abandoned at an outpost in the Bay of Bengal (present-day Bangladesh), engages as a merchant in the East Indies, travels through China and then crosses Asia through Siberia until his final return to England.

Travel became central to much of Defoe’s work after the Crusoe volumes and is particularly noteworthy as an element within his fiction.¹⁸ His Captain Singleton travels to Madagascar and then on land across Africa. In his career as a pirate, Singleton operates throughout the Caribbean and later in the Indian Ocean. The Cavalier of Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) travels to France and Germany and ends up fighting throughout England during the wars of the Rebellion. Colonel Jack travels north from London to Scotland, to the North American Colonies, to France and Italy, and back to England and North America. Even the female protagonists engage in some adventurous travels. Moll does considerable traveling in England and becomes a plantation owner in America. Roxana travels to France and Italy, picks up a knowledge of Turkish manners and language from a maid, returns to England, and then goes to Holland with her husband. The narrator of A New Voyage Round the World (1724) visits what was thought to be Australia, lands in southern Chile and tells of a voyage across the Andes from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. Even a work such as A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) has its narrator H. F. explore various parts of London, and the three workmen who escape from London to Epping Forest cross the city in a manner not very different from Captain Singleton’s trip across an Africa haunted by ferocious, strange beasts.

Defoe seems to have been extremely knowledgeable about geography, particularly wherever economic matters were concerned. A scholar treating the sugar industry in Brazil during the seventeenth century maintained that the way in which Crusoe eventually becomes the owner of an ingenio or factory was precisely the process that most manufacturers pursued.¹⁹ He read widely in travel accounts for the Crusoe volumes. And some of his knowledge may have been first-hand, at least from the standpoint of buying and selling goods, if not from that of actual travel. In his role as a young merchant, he had traded to North America and probably to Africa. In addition to extensive travel within Britain, he seems to have done some travel on the European Continent. Some of his willingness to invest so much time in researching this material may have been connected with a volume which William Taylor had contracted, Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis, for which Defoe wrote the section on economic geography. Although it was not published until 1728, Taylor had advertised a similar volume in the back of The Farther Adventures in 1719. At any rate, much of Defoe’s output after 1719 had a geographical element, including his three-volume Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) and A Plan of the English Commerce (1728; 1730).

Another form that Defoe practiced in the years prior to the publication of the Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures was the memoir. In 1715, fearing a backlash from his enemies after the George I’s ascension to the throne and a shift from a Tory to a Whig administration, Defoe published An Appeal to Honour and Justice, Tho’ It Be of His Worst Enemies, an account of his career as a writer, what amounted to a justification of his public life. Although he provided some interesting biographical details, the intent of this work was to place his actions in defense of the Tory ministry that dominated British politics from 1710 to 1714, the last four years of Queen Anne’s reign, in the best light possible. He had not changed his political views, he argued, it was the times that had changed. He was always sincere in his beliefs.

If his enemies might have considered this work a form of fiction, it merely amounted to a degree of concealment and some bending of the truth. On the other hand, he produced a fictional political memoir in 1717, which showed how capable he could be in handling this form. Minutes of the Negotiations of Mons. Mesnager was the purported account of a diplomat sent over to Britain by Louis XIV in an effort to obtain a peace agreement. Mesnager was dead by 1717 and therefore in no position to refute the account of Defoe’s fictional diplomat. In so far as one can see, the purpose of the entire fictitious account was a passage which showed that the former Lord Treasurer, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, who had been imprisoned in the Tower since 1715, was innocent of any complicity in restoring the exiled Stuart dynasty to the throne of Great Britain. In Mesnager’s version of events, although Harley was interested in making peace with France, he was entirely committed to the House of Hanover. Mesnager finds that Harley was extremely elusive – difficult to pin down about anything. Of Mesnager’s character we learn little. He is a loyal servant to Louis XIV. He is Catholic. He views the English common people as “furious and brutal,” lacking in “due subordination.”²⁰ He tries to bribe a journalist (Defoe), who turns down his overtures. For the most part, Defoe makes Mesnager into a fairly typical Frenchman, given just enough elements of character to make him convincing. But after all, the memoir was supposed to be about external events. One of Defoe’s less friendly fellow journalists quickly discovered this was by Defoe and complained about his “Forge of Politicks and Scandal.”²¹ This accusation that he was a forger of fictions might have pushed him into the possibilities of longer and more elaborate narrative fiction.

In 1715 and again in 1718, Defoe produced two volumes of religious dialogues, both entitled The Family Instructor. The first volume presents a fairly unified vision of a family, including a father who decides to turn toward firm Christian beliefs and his son who remains defiant and perishes miserably. Defoe showed an adept use of dialogue and developed his characters with considerable skill. Although these volumes purported to be based upon the lives of genuine families, they were generalized sufficiently to allow for the broad moral that Defoe wanted to convey. And they depicted the lives of his characters with seriousness and sympathy. Most eighteenth-century novels portrayed devout Dissenters as objects of comedy or satire. For example, in most of these works, it is impossible to imagine a serious scene such as that in which the daughter is sassy toward the mother, causing the mother to box her ears. Even in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, scenes of this kind border on the comic, and in Henry Fielding’s novels, they tumble into farce. In the second volume, there is less unity, but the central figure – a man who finds himself unable to control his passions – brings up a theme that will become important in almost all of Defoe’s fiction. These volumes, both of which continued to be reprinted during the nineteenth century, marked in their sharply rendered scenes and fully realized characters a flair for the dramatic in Defoe’s writing. Nevertheless the scenes are set in a novelistic fashion, with considerable detail about the emotions of the characters. They are essentially dramatic fictions exploiting religious themes.²²

As one critic suggested, at least the first volume in this series was probably suggested by the dangers posed by the Schism Act of 1714. That Act was essentially intended to end the existence of Dissenting schools or even Dissenting tutors in private homes throughout England. Only the Church of England would be permitted to engage in religious education. A work such as the first volume of The Family Instructor was probably intended, in part, as a means of religious instruction for Dissenting families. Although the dangers inherent in the Act ended with the death of Queen Anne at the very time at which it was supposed to go into effect, it still provided the possibility of practicing home religious schooling.²³ Defoe’s turn toward the evils of passion dominating domestic life in the second volume is probably an indication that the original target of his interests had shifted. But we should be aware that some of the subject matter in these volumes carried over to The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures. From the first volume comes Crusoe’s discovery of his Christian beliefs, not through the preachings of the Anglican Church, or any other church, but rather away from organized religion; from the second volume comes Crusoe’s finding himself carried away by his passionate “Wandering Fancy” to throw himself upon the dangers of the sea. It should also be noted that the opening domestic scene of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures has some of the same ambience as the second volume of The Family Instructor – life among the middle orders with its typical conflict between parents and children.

In composing these volumes, Defoe grew as a writer. In the second volume of The Family Instructor, the bitter dialogue between the husband and the wife, with its witty allusion to the eclipse of 1715, is done brilliantly.

And so the quarrel continues, with husband and wife becoming more enraged with each bitter, witty exchange. In such passages, Defoe showed an ability to render his characters with considerable psychological depth. Ian Watt credited Defoe with the importation of “formal” or “circumstantial” realism into the novel, singling out scenes such as that in which, going through the pockets of a drowned boy from a wreck, Crusoe could tell us: “He had on no clothes, but a seaman’s wast-coat, a pair of open knee’d linnen drawers, and a blew linnen shirt, but nothing to direct me so much as to guess what nation he was of: He had nothing in his pocket, but two Pieces of Eight, and a tobacco pipe” (149). In order to make his paradigm fit, Watt had to deny Defoe what he called “psychological” realism, arguing that this particular aesthetic concept was an innovation of Samuel Richardson.²⁵ But Defoe was deeply involved in the psychology of his characters.²⁶ The realistic details of the boy’s clothing and the contents of his pocket are intended to disguise the “affliction” (149) Crusoe feels at the sight of the boy’s body. He has just had a kind of fit of uncontrollable emotion at contemplating the failed possibility that one person might have been saved out of the ship in distress he had heard during the night.

In making a claim to “novelty” in the second volume of The Family Instructor, Defoe instanced The Turkish Spy as being among those books that “have pleased and diverted the world, even to the seventh or eighth volumes.” He was probably already at work on his A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy, which was published on August 29, 1718, by William Taylor, the same publisher who was to bring out The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe eight months later. There is indeed a strong possibility that Taylor was seeking to turn Defoe toward works of fiction. In writing his Continuation of the popular work by Giovanni Paolo Marana (1642–93), Defoe did more than bring Marana’s device of having a Turkish spy in Paris comment on seventeenth-century political life in Europe. He transformed the character of the spy, Mahmut, into a more complex personality. Mahmut has grown old in the service of the Turkish government, and he longs to return to his native Arabia. The work begins in the year 1687; Mahmut has been in Europe for almost fifty years, passing as Titus the Moldavian. But he has grown tired of a life of disguise and of exile from his native land. He longs to “flie from this Exile.”²⁷ When he learns of a plan to replace him and bring him back to a land where he feels he can practice his religious beliefs openly, he has a truly ecstatic moment in which he envisions himself back in his native land.

Robinson Crusoe, who is indeed exiled from the human race on his island, until his encounter with the cannibals and then with Friday, experiences a somewhat different kind of exile from that of Mahmut, but making the connection between the two had to be easy enough. And indeed Defoe, who at this time was working for the Whig government as a spy on the Tory and Jacobite press, probably felt a strong identification with Mahmut. Thanks to his former ties with Harley and the Tories, he now posed as a skilled journalist, only too willing to join in the political struggle against the Whig government. He wrote to the Under-secretary of State, Charles De la Faye, about his situation. Often, he noted, it was impossible for him to prevent anti-government material from appearing. Under such conditions, De la Faye would have to forgive him and indeed sympathize with him:

Defoe may have indeed experienced discomfort and alienation in having to converse with people he regarded as traitors, but there is a rhetorical element in this passage. It is only too reminiscent of a somewhat jaunty letter to Harley in which he saw himself as a spy among conflicting groups as he entered Scotland during the debate over the Union:

And it is hardly surprising that he had mentioned Marana’s Turkish spy to Harley just a few years earlier.³⁰

Still functioning as a kind of spy, then, Defoe must have felt some kinship and sympathy for Mahmut. In the preface to the Continuation, Defoe expressed his intention to “make the Language plain, artless, and honest, suitable to the Story, and in a Stile easie and free, with as few exotick Phrases and obsolete words as possible,” stating his intention to appeal to “the meanest Reader.” Such an intention may well have spilled into The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures. But the passage in the introduction that is most interesting has to do with the creation of character in a work of fiction:

Posing as the translator, Defoe states that wherever Mahmut wrote anything that might be offensive to Christian ears, he removed it. But dismissing “the nice Palates of a censorious Age,” he insists that Mahmut must be “a Turk or no Turk,” that he has to remain in character. With these statements on style and character, Defoe was offering a kind of manifesto for a new kind of fiction.

To a certain extent Mahmut fashions his character to suit the person to whom he is addressing his letters, but he shows a solid core of personality, along with his skepticism about Catholicism and his strong faith in own mystical religious beliefs. Nineteenth-century critics, such as Leslie Stephen, maintained that all of Defoe’s characters were simple projections of the author; whether creating pirate or pickpocket, whore or soldier, Defoe simply wrote his own personal identity into these characters, asking himself, were I Roxana or Robinson Crusoe, what would I do next? Stephen’s formulation was intended to suggest that Defoe had a limited imagination, an imagination Stephen may have associated with Defoe’s status as a shopkeeper. In fact, when Defoe wanted to emphasize characterization (and sometimes, admittedly, he did not) he made them highly individualized. Pace Stephen, there is no confusing Robinson Crusoe with Daniel Defoe or Moll Flanders as Defoe in drag. In addition to a degree of snobbery toward Defoe as a person once engaged in trade, Stephen’s and his period’s conception of women probably made him consider both Moll Flanders and Roxana as too masculine to have been conceivable as fulfilling the character expected of women. Hence Stephen saw them as merely versions of Defoe himself.³² Defoe had a more complicated mind and emotional range than Stephen imagined. Indeed there is a degree of truth in W. H. Davies’ argument that Defoe wrote his fictions as if his characters had no author but themselves.³³

In addition to all of these lines that lead directly to The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, there were economic and religious events in the year 1719 that have some relationship to Defoe’s work. The economic bubble that became the South Sea Scandal was already creating considerable financial turmoil. There was talk about the possibility of the South Sea Company becoming involved in establishing a colony in South America not far from where Crusoe’s island was located. Defoe, who was an enthusiastic supporter of new colonies in undeveloped areas and who wrote of such an adventurous exploration in his A New Voyage Round the World (1724), would have found such a prospect very exciting. But he looked on the financial speculation that would become the disastrous South Sea Bubble as just what it was. He watched John Law’s experiment with paper money in France with considerable dismay, and feared the kind of speculation that would force up the price of stocks that had no intrinsic value. Shortly after the publication of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe published an economic tract with the title The Anatomy of Exchange Alley (1719), warning of what might happen: “Stock-Jobbing is Play; a Box and Dice may be less dangerous, the Nature of them are alike a Hazard.”³⁴ And he blamed the Stock-Jobbers who were driving up prices – men who “will do anything for Money”:

One of the important lessons learned by Crusoe on his island has to do with the uselessness of gold on a desert island, and his address to the gold that he discovers on his wrecked ship is one of the best known passages in Defoe’s work.

Crusoe’s self-conscious oration on the artificiality of money, though sound enough in theory, is ironically undercut by Crusoe’s very civilized inability to resist the temptation of the gold before him. He is not the founder of a utopia (though there are moments such as this when he is aware enough of what that might mean) but a castaway from wealth-obsessed contemporary Europe. Nevertheless it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Defoe’s skepticism about this new world of rapacious finance had an influence on a work in which his hero finds himself in an economy without money, in which he has to become a farmer, a herdsman, and a maker of clay pots.

If economic matters were to loom large in 1719, almost equal in importance were the religious squabbles within the Church of England and among the Dissenters. As a writer of pamphlets, Defoe was to participate in both of these controversies. Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor, preached a sermon in 1716, which essentially argued against the excessive interference of the Church of England in politics. The debate that ensued led to an end to Convocation – the gathering of the Church members that some members of the High Church party had hoped would become equal to the gathering of Parliament. In the debates, there was a great deal of criticism aimed at Hoadly’s arguments about the sincerity of belief. If the High Church mocked “Bangorian Sincerity” as equivalent to no sincerity at all, sincerity emerged from the debates as a crucial concept for the period. As a Dissenter, Defoe would have always considered sincerity a crucial element in judging the validity of religious belief, but he tended to mock Hoadly, a staunch enemy of the Dissenters, more than he mocked Hoadly’s enemies. The dispute among the Dissenters involved a debate over the Trinity. Meeting at Salters Hall³⁶ on February 19, 1719, a majority of those present would not vote to affirm a belief in the traditional concept of the Trinity, more from a dislike of being forced to take a position than from a doctrinal standpoint, but the meeting broke up in disarray. A staunch supporter of unity among the Dissenters as well as an equally staunch upholder of the Trinity, Defoe could not but be distressed at this development. That Crusoe comes to avow an orthodox position on Christianity on an island away from such controversies, suggests again how, for Defoe, life on an island away from civilization and its discontents might simplify religious belief.

I began my discussion with the suggestion that so far from being an “accident,” The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe might be viewed as the inevitable result of his interests as a writer. I have tried to trace some of the themes that would have stirred his imagination and some of the challenges in the writing of fiction that he had attempted to work through over many years as a writer. Questions involving exile, isolation, religious disputes, economic experiments, politics, considerations about European history, thoughts about the nature of reality and how humans experience it – it had to be all still fresh in his mind. And in experimenting with the creation of strong, independent character through dialogue and epistolary form, he had honed narrative techniques that he had been perfecting over the years. By 1719, Defoe already had an amazing ability to tell a story in a way that made everything seem real – an ability to combine a sense of a seemingly convincing environment with a character’s response to that environment. Now he succeeded in creating fictions that seemed to open up worlds equivalent to those we might experience on a daily basis, even if one of those worlds might be an uninhabited island in the Caribbean. In The Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and to a certain extent in The Farther Adventures, he achieved something remarkable, even if critical opinion has sometimes been uncertain whether he could have been conscious of what he was doing – conscious as a writer, conscious as a thinker. Such uncertainties fail to pay serious attention to his achievements – both intellectual and writerly – during the period preceding the publication of his masterpiece.