Forgotten Bestseller: Daniel Defoe

Most people know Daniel Defoe as the author of Robinson Crusoe.

This is rather like knowing Shakespeare as the author of Hamlet.

Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, certainly. He also wrote about plagues, pirates, marriage, travel, economics, religion, politics, ghosts, the Devil, English national identity, and the weather. He wrote novels, poems, pamphlets, histories, essays, journalism, practical guides, and books that are rather difficult to classify at all.

He is often called the father of the modern novel, though he apparently didn't feel any particular obligation to behave like one.

But there is something running through all of this variety: Defoe was fascinated by people.

And he was very good at watching them.

He Knew People

Defoe had plenty of experience.

He was a merchant and businessman who experienced financial disaster. He was imprisoned for debt. His political writing eventually brought him into serious trouble, and in 1703 his satirical Shortest Way with the Dissenters landed him in the pillory after readers took it seriously.

He was also a husband and father with a large family of his own, giving him a front-row seat to the domestic dramas of life.

He knew what happened when principles met money, embarrassment, fear, ambition, or wounded pride.

He knew, in other words, what happened when people had to live with their principles.

His characters feel real because they are allowed to be inconsistent, vain, frightened, stubborn, ridiculous, and occasionally very funny.

One of my favorite examples comes from Religious Courtship.

A young woman has announced that she will not see a certain man who had courted her in the past. Then her sister tells her:

Eldest. Don't be so hasty, he did not desire to see you: He's gone.

Youngest. Is he gone?

Following this exchange, Defoe immediately stops to tell us about her change of expression. She doesn't necessarily want to see him. She just expected him to want to see her.

And now she is offended.

It is such a wonderfully recognizable piece of human behavior that it hardly needs explaining:

I didn't want to see you. I just wanted you to want to see me.

Defoe simply watches her face.

Defoe Had a Flair for Drama

This is especially entertaining in The Family Instructor and Religious Courtship, where Defoe turns ordinary domestic problems into miniature dramas.

These are books about marriage, parents, children, religion, temptation, and household duties—but they are not exactly dry manuals of moral instruction.

People argue.

People storm out.

People lose their tempers.

People say things they immediately regret.

Children behave outrageously.

Parents respond badly.

Someone is always in danger of making a perfectly manageable situation considerably worse.

Defoe clearly understood that if you want people to pay attention to a moral lesson, it helps to give them a little drama.

A Writer Who Would Write About Anything

Once you realize how closely Defoe watched people, his extraordinary range becomes far less surprising.

The Storm records the Great Storm of 1703 through eyewitness accounts gathered from across England. Defoe wasn't content simply to say that there had been a terrible storm. He wanted to know what people saw, what they lost, and what happened to them.

A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain turns the same curiosity toward the country itself—its towns, roads, industries, commerce, landscapes, and inhabitants.

A Journal of the Plague Year imagines London during the plague, filling catastrophe with rumors, fears, decisions, and ordinary human behavior.

The Apparition of Mrs. Veal is a ghost story presented with such an air of factual testimony that the reader is encouraged to wonder whether it actually happened.

The Political History of the Devil is exactly what it sounds like.

The Consolidator sends its narrator on a voyage to the Moon and uses the journey to satirize earthly politics. It is now often regarded as an early work associated with science fiction.

The True-Born Englishman humorously takes aim at the idea of pure English ancestry by pointing out that the English themselves are a mixture of peoples.

And The Shortest Way with the Dissenters demonstrates what happens when a satire is so successful that people forget it is a satire.

Defoe apparently regarded almost everything as potential material.

More Than Crusoe

By the time Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719, Defoe was already in his late fifties. The famous castaway was not the beginning of his career, but the product of decades spent observing commerce, politics, religion, travel, disaster, domestic life, and human nature.

Crusoe is in an extraordinary situation, but his reactions are recognizably human. He worries, plans, calculates, panics, regrets, adapts, and tries to make sense of what has happened to him.

The island is unusual. Crusoe isn't.

And perhaps that is the real key to Defoe's work.

The famous island is only one doorway into a much larger world: a world of merchants and sailors, husbands and wives, parents and children, politicians and criminals, travelers and preachers, fools and schemers, frightened citizens and very determined young women.

Defoe kept watching them.

And he kept writing them down.

That is the Defoe I am interested in recovering.