No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Defoe's name is indissolubly linked with Stoke Newington. There he lived when he wrote Robinson Crusoe and other important works. There on a Saturday morning in 1713 the agents of Lord Chief Justice Parker ostentatiously seized him and carried him off to a London prison.1 The Stoke Newington Library now displays his statue, and a plaque at No. 95 Church Street, by Defoe Road, marks where his house stood. One may even see the wall along the east side of Oldfield Road which tradition says was his. But all accounts are inaccurate and fragmentary. Among them only two are aware that Defoe lived in two Stoke Newington houses, and none at all that he did not own the “Defoe” house or that, a decade after his death, his poet-naturalist son-in-law, Henry Baker, F.R.S., purchased and held it for twenty-three years. The Official Guide to Stoke Newington (seventh edition, p. 23) tells us that descendants of Defoe lie in Abney Park Cemetery, which (p. 27) dates from 1840.2 The Cemetery officials say they know nothing of such descendants.
1 James R. Sutherland, Defoe (London, 1937), p. 196.
2 Besides Defoe's biographers, of whom William Lee (1869) and Thomas Wright (1931) are best for Defoe in Stoke Newington, see William Robinson, History of Stoke Newington (London, 1820), re-issued in 1842 with the 1820 sheets and new illustrations inferior in number and quality; E. Forbes Robinson, Defoe in Stoke Newington (London, 1889), a slight booklet; “Giltspur” (J. R. Spratling), The Story of Church Street (Stoke Newington, 1893); “F.R.C.S.” (Dr. Benjamin Clarke), Glimpses of Ancient Hackney and Stoke Newington (London, 1893); and London County Council: Indications of Houses of Historical Interest in London, vi (London, [1938]), 62–66. James Browne's “Sketches of … Stoke Newington” in Bibliotheca Topograpkica Britannica, ii (London, 1790), Nos. ix and xiv, does not mention Defoe.
5 See William Robinson, History of Hackney (London, 1842), i, 266, and Wright, p. 47. An unsigned and undated letter of 1704 or later says that Defoe was then living on Newington Green with his father-in-law, an elder in a conventicle (B.M. Add. MS. 28094, f. 165). Paul Dottin—De Foe et ses romans (Paris, 1924), pp. 172, 181—seems to have thought this statement in agreement with Defoe's letter dated Kingsland, 5 Jan. 1707. He says that while Defoe was in Scotland Mrs. Defoe and the children lived with her father in Kings-land. But Kingsland, though near, is not on Newington Green.
4 Three months later (17 June 1710) Defoe wrote J. Dyer from “Newington” (B.M. Harl. MS. 7001). P.C.C. (Prerogative Court of Canterbury) records are filed in Somerset House, London.
5 The six years in Boyer's statement of June 1717 (quoted above) must be computed from the time when Defoe settled down to write after his activity in Scotland, rather than from the date of his move to Stoke Newington.
6 The three MSS. brought 115 from Mr. Maggs, who has since sold them to Dr. Henry Clinton Hutchins of New Haven, Conn.
7 N'Q, CLX, 39. Upon the death of Mr. Humphreys the Bowrey collection was broken up. Sir William Foster, distinguished authority upon early Anglo-Indian Affairs, gives the following account of its dispersal. The unpublished papers, consisting chiefly of household accounts and two or three letters from Bowrey's wife, were presented by Colonel Howard to the Guildhall Library. Two documents were given to the Metropolitan Water Board, two to the present representatives of Bowrey's fire insurance company, and a few others to the India Office Record Department.
8 John Robert Moore in Defoe in the Pillory (Bloomington, Ind., 1939), pp. 192–211, reprints a 1705 account of the Worcester affair which may have been written by Defoe.
9 The Navigantium comes first in the list of his books which Bowrey compiled in 1711. See N&Q, CLX (1931), 188.
10 See also Moore's Defoe in the Pillory, pp. 137–138.
11 Dottin, p. 179; Wright, p. 151; Sutherland, p. 168.
12 The Harley correspondence, formerly kept at Welbeck Abbey, has lately been placed by the Duke of Portland in the MS room of the British Museum. The letters of 1707/8 were printed in the 15th Report of the Historical MSS Commission, Portland Papers, iv (1897), 473, 477.
13 Wright, p. 153, printed the letter without seeing its implications.
14 See Poe's short story, William Wilson.
15 Mrs. De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (London, 1882), p. 20, is in error in thinking Watts lived for a while in Defoe's house.
16 P.C.C. (Fagg), 84.
17 Abstract of Court Rolls, pp. 83, 84x, 91x, 118x; Boyer's Political Stale, xiii, 632. I assume that Boyer's reference is to the Sutton house. There is no evidence that Defoe altered the Clarke house. When the latter was purchased by White, 14 February 1716/17, it was described as “late … in the possession of Daniel D'ffoe”, The implication is that it was no longer in Defoe's possession; otherwise the phrase would have been “now or late.”
18 Pages 155, 216–218.
19 Abstract of Court Rolls, p. 89x; Lee, i, 440; “Giltspur”, pp. 44–46; London County Council: Indications of Houses, vi, 62–66.
20 Digest of Court Rolls, Pt. 2, pp. 43–46.
21 Sutherland, pp. 258 ff.
22 Digest of Court Rolls, Pt. 2, pp. 43–46; Land Registry, 1729, ii: 29. The Land Registry records are in the Middlesex Guildhall, Westminster. The keeper showed me the mortgage with Defoe's signature. From Defoe's letter to Baker of 21 Jan. 1728, it is evident that Baker had questioned the validity of the lease and that Defoe unwillingly had attempted some alteration or other in it. The attempt served only to give Sutton inconvenient ideas.
23 Defoe's letter to Baker of 12 Aug. 1730. Defoe, who was then in hiding near Greenwich, concludes his letter thus: “I have not the policy of assurance; I suppose my wife, or Hannah, may have it” (Wilson, iii, 605–608). The date on Baker's will (1727?) is partly torn away and the final digit restored in pencil.
24 Page 246.
25 The present Abney Congregational Church, erected in 1838 on the south side of Church Street across from the site of Abney house, is being rebuilt after serious bomb damage in the late war. It has a valuable painting of Isaac Watts.
26 See Vestry Minutes, pp. 332, 346, 348, 358. In 1730, Defoe's deficiency was 13s. and 4d. in the church rate and 15s. in the poor rate. In the next year, that of his death, his deficiency was 5s. in the church rate. The lists of defaulters are dated for the year following that in which the deficiency occurred.
27 Walter Wilson, ii, 36; J. R. Moore, Defoe in the Pillory, pp. 12–32; “Giltspur”, pp. 42–46.
28 This church, still standing at the northwest corner of the Green, was built in 1708, near the time when Defoe moved to Stoke Newington. It gradually became Unitarian during the 18th century. Richard Price, Thomas Amory, and, in the next century, Roche-mont Barbauld were ministers there. See John Nelson, History … of the Parish of St. Mary Islington (London, 1811), p. 186 n.; S. Lewis, Jun., History … of the Parish of St. Mary Islington (Islington, 1843), pp. 315–322.
29 Page 246. Dottin is following the booklet of E. Forbes Robinson mentioned above in n. 2.
30 The usual practice was to reelect the junior warden of the previous year, who thereupon became senior warden, and to elect a new junior warden. Cap. Whitty, at his first election in 1720, was informed that to be excused he must pay the full fine of 10 even though he had previously served in the office of surveyor of the highways. His predicament was the same as Defoe's in 1721.
31 Page 206 (26 Dec. 1717). Defoe is the first of four listed as elected; but probably only the first two, beside whose names are dashes, were really chosen. The practice was to elect two from a list of four or six.
32 Sophia Standerwick, wife of James Standerwick, a London haberdasher, is said by Wilson (in, 650) to have been a daughter of Daniel Defoe the younger.
33 Biographers differ about the date of Defoe's death. Wilson (1830) and Wright (1931) are for the 24th, and Lee (1869) and Dottin (1924) for the 26th of April. Sutherland (1937), apparently aware of the uncertainty, does not venture a date. Lee (i, 468) thought he had settled it after consulting all the available 1731 periodicals. Of those which specified the day, eight gave the 26th and one (the only quarterly), the 24th. He reasoned that the quarterly probably copied its information and misprinted 24 for 26. But how came he to ignore the clear implication of the burial registers? The register of St. Giles Cripplegate, the parish in which Defoe died, and that of Bunhill Fields Cemetery in which he was buried, both enter his burial on 26 April. It seems incontrovertible that he was buried on Monday, the 26th, and probable that, as the quarterly Historical Register says, he died on the preceding Saturday, the 24th.
34 Baker (Wilson, in, 646) gave 4 Jan. 1762 as the date of Sophia's death; but her burial is recorded 1 Jan. 1762 in the register of St. Mary-le-Strand. Wright gives 1772.
35 Digest of Court Rolls, Pt. 2, pp. 43–46; Lee, i, 454.
36 Wright, opposite p. 336.
37 “Giltspur”, pp. 44–46. See also Mrs. De Morgan's Memoir of Augustas De Morgan, p. 20; Digest of Court Rolls, Pt. 2, pp. 43–46.
38 NèrQ, Ser. iii, viii (1865), 436. Lee, i, 454, says the house was demolished “about two years ago”, but he doubtless was writing two years before publication in 1869.
39 William Lee, i, 448–449.
40 See Gentleman's Mag., xxxiv (1769), 171–172; and John Robert Moore, Defoe's Sources for Robert Drury's Journal (Bloomington, Ind., 1943), pp. 8, 11, 21 &., 79 ff.
41 Abstract of Court Rolls, p. 107x, and Land Registry, 1717, ii: 67, and 1718, v: 148. In 1745 Beardsley's widow, who had given the great Bible used on the reading desk of the parish church, purchased the Beardsley house (see Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica, Vol. ii, Nos. ix and xiv, p. 37; Abstract of Court Rolls, pp. 85,96). John Drury's will named James Freeman as co-tenant with Beardsley. But Freeman seems to have lived in a house (which may have been Drury's) between the Beardsley house and the Newen houses, which Drury owned also.
42 A month later, the younger son, John, described as a London baker, sold his right to 5 annually from the Beardsley house, to John Holden, a London vintner. See Land Registry, 1717, ii: 67; 1719, v: 231; 1721, i: 82–83.
43 Curryer witnessed Defoe's purchase of his lease from Jarvis Willcocks on 22 Nov. 1727. See Land Registry, 1727, iii: 312.
44 St. Katherine Crée burial register, 21 Sept. 1703.
45 Abstract of Court Rolls, pp. 60–77.
46 George Virgoe, the London merchant to whom Defoe assigned the lease on his house in Stoke Newington 23 Nov. 1727 and from whom he repurchased it 3 April 1729, seems to have been the George Virgoe who was parish vestryman with John Drury (1693–1705) and churchwarden with him (1700–01). See Vestry Minutes of St. Olave Jewry in the Guildhall Library. Virgoe signed the minutes from 1693 to 25 Sept. 1729.