A Year: Day to Day Men: 25th of April
Rivulets of Water
The first edition of “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe was published on April 25, 1719.
Around 1692 at the age of thirty-two, Daniel Defoe began to write, partly as a moneymaking venture. One of his first creations was a poem written in 1701, entitled “The True-Born Englishman,” which became popular and earned Defoe some celebrity. He also wrote political pamphlets. One of these, “The Shortest Way with Dissenters”, was a satire on persecutors of dissenters and sold well among the ruling Anglican elite until they realized that it was mocking their own practices. As a result, Defoe was publicly pilloried—his hands and wrists locked in a wooden device—in 1703, and jailed in Newgate Prison.
He also worked as a spy, reveling in aliases and disguises, reflecting his own variable identity as merchant, poet, journalist, and prisoner. This theme of changeable identity would later be expressed in the life of Robinson Crusoe, who becomes merchant, slave, plantation owner, and even unofficial king. In his writing, Defoe often used a pseudonym simply because he enjoyed the effect. He was incredibly wide-ranging and productive as a writer, turning out over 500 books and pamphlets during his life.
Defoe began writing fiction late in life, around the age of sixty. He published his first novel “Robinson Crusoe”, in 1719, attracting a large middle-class readership. He followed in 1722 with “Moll Flanders”, the story of a tough, streetwise heroine whose fortunes rise and fall dramatically. Both works straddle the border between journalism and fiction. “Robinson Crusoe” is thought to be based on the true story of a shipwrecked seaman named Alexander Selkirk and was passed off as history, while “Moll Flanders” included dark prison scenes drawn from Defoe’s own experiences in Newgate and interviews with prisoners.
His focus on the actual conditions of everyday life and avoidance of the courtly and the heroic made Defoe a revolutionary in English literature and helped define the new genre of the novel. Stylistically, Defoe was a great innovator. Dispensing with the ornate style associated with the upper classes, Defoe used the simple, direct, fact-based style of the middle classes, which became the new standard for the English novel. With the theme of solitary human existence in “Robinson Crusoe”, Defoe paved the way for the central modern theme of alienation and isolation. Defoe died in London on April 24, 1731, of a fatal “lethargy”—an unclear diagnosis that may refer to a stroke.