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

London trade, prospered and became within a few years a well-regarded man in the City. Details of what he was doing in this period are, as everywhere, scarce. But from his writings it is clear he was fascinated by ‘projects’ – the subject of one of his early substantial publications in 1697. Man was, as Defoe saw the species, a mechanic animal,
homo faber
. His survey began with Noah’s Ark (‘the first project I read of’) and came down to the latest French fire-fighting equipment; it covered other such instances of human resourcefulness as diving bells.
    His own projects were inventive but unlucky. A scheme to harvest musk (from the anuses of cats) was unproductive and he was arrested for debts in 1692, of the huge sum of £17,000. He may also at this period have been speculating in wine and spirits from the Iberian peninsula. There was a brick and tile factory at Tilbury he was connected with, and a printing works in London. Defoe was, one may confidently assert, an energetic and resourceful entrepreneur or, as he would have put it, ‘the complete English tradesman’. But he was either unlucky or too reckless.
    There was also an element of recklessness in his publications. His first major success as an author was with the long 1703 poem, a satirical polemic, ‘The Trueborn Englishman’. Written in sinewy couplets it contains such provocative lines as:
WHEREVER God erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there:
And ’twill be found, upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation,
     
    The poem ends with the Dissenters’ proud motto: ‘’Tis pers’nal virtue only makes us great’. It was not a good period to be of that disliked party and raise your voice: in 1702 persecution rose to the level of mob violence. Defoe, ever pugnacious, hit back with the mock ironic ‘The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters’. It is another pamphlet, delivered in the spoof voice of a man of (Anglican) reason (that is to say, arrant prejudice), driven to such final solutions as:
Alas, the Church of England! What with Popery on one hand, and Schismatics on the other, how has She been crucified between two thieves. NOW, LET US CRUCIFY THE THIEVES!
     
    It is very funny – but the authorities did not find it so. Defoe was prosecuted for his ‘diabolical and seditious libel’, which led to his being fined, jailed and pilloried in 1703. As legend has it, he was pelted not with rotten fruit or stones but flowers by a sympathetic crowd and was released early from the six-month sentence in Newgate (an incarceration which supplied, years later, the opening chapters to
Moll Flanders
).
    It was at this time that Defoe formed a relationship with the politician Robert Harley, for whom he became, effectively, a secret agent, or cat’s paw. Harley, an arch-Machiavellian, used Defoe’s pamphleteering skills in the interests of the government. Secret commissions were passed on in coffee houses and Defoe, often anonymously, would fire off the necessary articles the next day. Both men – the politician and the journalist – took a delight in ‘secrecy’. Defoe’s hectic stream of publication over the next fifteen years is difficult to follow – scholars are still in dispute about what he wrote and did not write. One thing is certain: he was the most influential journalist in the country, and was routinely accused of being the most mercenary. He lent the power of his pen to both Whigs (with whom his heart was) and Tories, as served his interest best at that particular juncture.
    How then did Daniel Defoe graduate into writing fiction, in his sixtieth year? After the publication of his first effort in the field,
Robinson Crusoe
, the reason for continuing in this new line is simple enough. He had – as unexpectedly to him as to his publisher – hit a vein of literary gold. Nothing wonderful was expected of the first edition, for which he received a modest £10. But
Crusoe
went through edition after edition