Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Read Free Page A

‘wonderful’ than downright terrifying to Londoners. The population of the capital was visited by the worst ever outbreak of bubonic plague; some 100,000 citizens died, it is estimated. Given the population of the metropolis, it was a holocaust – triggered by the black rat’s fleas, exploding population and pre-Victorian sanitation. The city burned to the ground in this same ‘wonderful’ year – a disaster, but one which at least cleansed the city of the plague bacillus. The Great Fire of London supplies vivid entries in Samuel Pepys’s Diary: not even the 1941 Blitz did more damage – Old London ceased, almost overnight, to exist. The Foes’ house survived, however, something for which they would have offered heartfelt thanks to their stern Presbyterian deity. God had not always been good to them. The adults around young Daniel as he grew up could remember the Civil War – actually a Revolution – of the 1640s in which the monarch was beheaded. In the year of Daniel’s birth, monarchy was restored and Oliver Cromwell’s corpse (he, alas, being beyond live decapitation) was shredded by jubilant Royalists.
    All this happens, oddly, while Robinson Crusoe is on his island. He is unaware of it and doesn’t advert to the epochal events of the 1660s on his return, some decades after the wonderful year. Defoe may – part of him – have yearned for a refuge from the dangerous historical excitements of his youth and created that refuge in his most famous fiction about an Englishman outside England. During those years he was, in fact, brought up in the St Giles quarter of central London – an area notorious for its criminality. The Foes were, however, eminently uncriminal. Daniel’s father was a tallow chandler, a trade which would have conduced to the boy’s precocious literacy. The Foe house would, unlike most in St Giles, have been decently lighted (but smelly – tallow was made of mutton fat, the upper classes had more expensive wax).
    The Foe family became Dissenters in 1662 with the passing of the Act of Uniformity. As a sect, it believed in education but, being banned from the seats of higher education and higher professions, they were thrown back on their own resources – which meant books and a premium on reading (Bunyan’s Christian, it will be remembered, hies off to the Celestial City, book in hand). A ‘persecuted minority’, the Dissenters refused sacraments and allegiance to, among other things, newly restored kings. They suffered discrimination, physical abuse and, quite often, jail – with the consoling sense that such mistreatment was proof of Christian worth. Had not the Saviour himself been reviled?
    Daniel Foe grew up something of an outsider in his own country – a righteous rebel. What little is known of his school education suggests that he might have been destined for the Presbyterian ministry – ‘sacred employ’, as he calls it. Instead, he followed his father (now widowed and an increasingly eminent figure in the City) into trade. He was apprenticed in the retail business, with a line in hosiery. Men, as well as women, wore stockings at this period and there was good business to be done (close attention, one recalls, is given to Robinson’s goatskin leggings). From his earliest years in business, Defoe was an eager speculator. He had married, prudently enough, in 1684, and his wife, a carpenter’s daughter, brought a tidy fortune. We know little else about the marriage.
    There were apparently six surviving children – who were lucky to grow up with a father. Restless and rebellious by nature, Defoe rashly threw in his lot with the Monmouth rebellion in 1685, whose aim was to forestall a Catholic takeover. He was taken prisoner at Sedgemoor, a battle in which the rebels were routed, but was fortunate to be spared hanging in the punitive carnage of the Bloody Assizes and Judge Jeffreys. Hereafter Defoe would mount his resistance by the pen, not the sword. He returned to his