Daniel Defoe didn't just write picaresque novels of adventure, he lived the life of a character from one of his own tales. He was spy, pioneering journalist, jailed political dissident, bankrupt and, arguably, the founding father of the English novel, and his 71 years were packed with the sort of incident which makes him a biographer's dream.
Defoe will always be remembered as the author of Robinson Crusoe, one of the most famous works in the English language. His other novels, such as Moll Flanders and Roxana, are accomplished enough to ensure that, unlike his rival for the title of first important English novelist, Samuel Richardson, he is still very readable.
Richard West's biography of the multifaceted Defoe is solid, workmanlike and generally entertaining, although one wonders what someone like Peter Ackroyd might have done with this inviting material. Ackroyd's pyrotechnics and flights of fancy seem somehow suited to the savage 17th-century world into which Daniel Defoe was born in 1660 in Cripplegate, London. The son of a chandler, he would remain insecure all his life about what he saw as his humble beginnings.
The world in which Defoe grew up was seething with intrigue and violence. The monarchy had just been restored, but the fate of the country remained unsure. Defoe would see the war between King James II and William of Orange, hear the speculation about conspiracies to put the Old Pretender on the throne and, most intriguingly, he may have taken part in the Battle of Sedgemoor, the Duke of Monmouth's ill-starred attempt to take on the forces of King James.
Sedgemoor is now most famous for precipitating the savage judicial backlash of the sadistic Judge Jeffreys in 1685. Defoe received a pardon for his part in the rising years later, but West cannot uncover definite evidence of his participation in the battle. If he did take part he was lucky to escape the wrath of Jeffreys, whose results were memorably described by Macaulay: "At every spot where two roads met, on every market place, on the green of every large village which had furnished Monmouth with soldiers, ironed corpses clattering in the wind, or heads and quarters stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the mind sick with horror."
The century was one of violence and of powerful people who brooked no dissent. Yet Defoe earned a name as a controversial political pamphleteer and in 1702 finally landed himself in the deepest trouble of his career. A pamphlet entitled "The Shortest Way With Dissenters" recommended that Dissenters be hanged in the interests of religious harmony. This proposal was greeted with approval by many High Church Tories until they realised that Defoe, a Dissenter himself, had in fact been satirising their own fanatical tendencies, in much the same way as Swift had done in relation to English attitudes towards Ireland when he recommended in A Modest Proposal that the young of the Irish poor be reared as food. Defoe's effrontery earned him a spell in both Newgate Prison and the pillory. The fact that he had previously lampooned all the judges at his trial did not help his case.
This ordeal would have been enough to persuade many men to step out of the public eye for a while but it merely whetted Defoe's appetite for controversy. He founded The Review, a newspaper which was the model for Richard Steele's Tatler and Joseph Addison's Spectator, two of the great publications of any time. He also found the time to go to Scotland where he worked as a spy for the government of Queen Anne and helped lay the groundwork for the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England. Defoe was first and foremost an English patriot and West's leanings in a similar direction can, I think, be detected from his hailing of the Act as a triumph of "Presbyterian prudence over Jacobite romanticism".
Defoe did not write Robinson Crusoe until he was well into his sixties, and his early books included one of the first-ever sex manuals which went under the charming title of Conjugal Lewdness or Matrimonial Whoredom, A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed. He also penned a number of supposedly moral and improving books which, judging from the extracts in this biography, were the very ne plus ultra of tedium.
Like many another self-proclaimed moralist, what really interested Defoe was vice, and Moll Flanders and Roxana fairly wallow in it. In that sense Defoe had far more in common with Fielding than with Richardson. West sagely points out that while Defoe supported the death penalty for adultery, neither of his two most famous heroines would have survived the first fifty pages had it been in force in his books.
If this fine biography has a fault, it is that it tails off in the last quarter. The author is obviously a great fan of Defoe's A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, but it does seem excessive to devote fully eighty-three pages to a recapitulation of the events described there. I also question his repeated view that it was a pity Defoe did not visit Ireland as well as Scotland as his observations would have been sympathetic in a way that his great rival Swift's were not. When Defoe does mention the Irish, he generally does so in relation to strife and violence, commenting that "The priests and the zealots, nay, the very women, boasted of the number they had killed, showed the daggers with which they cut the throats of the Protestants". On that evidence it is somewhat difficult to imagine him as a great lover of the Catholic Irish.