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... more violent protagonists (Sutherland, 86). An order for his arrest was issued on January 3, 1703. Captured soon after, he was sentenced on July 9, 1703, to stand three times in the pillory. Had a mob been in an angry mood, the pillory might have meant Defoe's death. He won the mob to his side by distributing a poem from A Hymn to the Pillory, in which he proclaimed his innocence and attacked the judges.
Robert Harley, one of the secretaries of state, rescued Defoe from jail. Defoe was grateful and remained a supporter of Harley for the next 15 years. In 1704, at the age of 44, Defoe began to write the Review. It started out being published once a week, then later three times a week. The contents of the Review held all sorts of personal and peculiar views on all kinds of subjects (Sutherland, 106).
When Harley returned to power with the Tories in 1710, Defoe turned the viewpoint of the Review to support the new government. However, his lack of sympathy with some of the governments policies frequently put him in a dilemma. Such conflicts made the Review useless as a vehicle for propaganda, and Defoe, in 1713, founded a new trade journal, Mercator. Queen Anne died in 1714. With the death of the Queen Defoe's tottering world suddenly fell to pieces (Sutherland, 204).
Defoe next threw his energies into writing pamphlets defending Harley from charges of treason. At the same time, Defoe attempted to protect himself from his former Whig friends. In the first months of 1715, he published a defense of his own life, An Appeal to Honor and Justice, saying that, he had owed his freedom to the intervention of Harley (Sutherland, 148). However, on July 12, 1715, the day on which Harley was sent to the tower, Defoe was tried on a false charge of libel and found guilty. Fortunately, he managed to convince the presiding judge that he was sympathetic to the aims of the Whig ministry and that he could be useful to them. The Whigs agreed, and Defoe was hired to act as a double agent.
After 1715, Defoe turned to a variety of fictional forms, including moral dialogues, such as the Family Instructor, and the fictitious memoirs, such as The History of the Wars of Charles XII. His masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe, was published in April 1719. Robinson Crusoe originated from Alexander Selkirk's adventures. Selkirk was a Scottish sailor who had a dispute with the captain of the ship. In 1703, Selkirk was put ashore on an island upon his own request in the Juan Fernandez Island, off the coast of Chile. He lived isolated until 1709 when the commander of an English privateer rescued him (Selkirk, Alexander).
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is about a man who struggle time after time only to knocked down every time. Crusoe gets stranded on a desert island after the ship he was on sinks in a horrendous storm. The next day he realizes that the ship did not sink at all, and that everyone would have survived if they had just stayed on board. Crusoe collects the things he needs from the ship and creates a hospitable place to live. Defoe uses his use of detail to flood you with facts that you cannot tell if it really happened. Defoe's favorite method of authenticating his narrative is to overwhelm us with details so trivial, and so apparently irrelevant, that we feel the only possible reason for being given them at all must be that they are true (Sutherland, 15).
Crusoe is given in such vivid detail that it makes it hard to believe it never really happened. An example of this is the journal that Crusoe is making to keep track of the days. The day to day descriptions makes it hard to believe anything else. Defoe writes: Dec. 10 I began now to think my cave or vault finished, when on a sudden (it seems I had made it too large) a great quantity of earth fell down from the top and one side, so much, that, in short, it frightened me, and not without reason too; for if I had been under it, I had never wanted a Grave-digger. Upon this disaster I had a great deal of work to do over again; for I had the loose earth to carry out; and, which as of more importance, I had the ceiling to prop up, so that I might be sure no more would come down (73).
Defoe uses vivid detail to give you the chance to see the problems he encounters with every step he takes. Defoe gave Crusoe limited resources to make his character actually survive. He showed that it really is not easy to live on an island with little material to work with. All of Crusoes tools had to be made by hand.
The reader was drawn in to follow. Defoe could therefore expect his readers to be interested in the very detailed descriptions of the economic life which comprise such an important and memorable part of his narrative (Kalm, 72). During his remaining 12 years, Defoe concentrated on books rather than on pamphlets. In 1720 came Memoirs of a Cavalier and Captain Singleton, and a collection of essays, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe.
At age 62, he published three of his greatest works: Moll Flanders, A Journal of a Plague Year, and Colonel Jack. Moll Flanders, like Robinson Crusoe, creates the vivid detail, which makes you believe the story is true. Moll is a woman motivated by greed. Her main objective in life is to marry a man with money. She marries a few with money and a few without, (one of whom she finds out to be her brother) but still she is unable to fulfill her need for money. She resorts to stealing anything she can.
She will do anything to keep from becoming poor. Defoe uses explicit detail to tell Molls story. Defoe writes: The next thing of moment was an attempt at a gentlewoman's gold watch. It happened in a crowd, at a meetinghouse, where I was in very great danger of being taken.
I had full hold of her watch, but giving a great jostle as if someone had thrust me against her, and in the juncture giving the watch a fair pull, I found it would not come, so I let it go for that moment, and cried as if I had been killed, that somebody had trod upon my foot (222). Defoe shows the reader how Moll actually goes about stealing a watch. Whether it be Moll or an actual thief, the point he shows is that she could be a real figure or just another face in the crowd. All this happens in real, particular place Defoe makes no attempt to describe it in detail, but the little glimpses that emerge win us over completely to its reality (Watt, 97). His next great production was the Journal of the Plague Year. Defoe may have been elaborating upon a diary kept by his uncle (Henry Foe) in the year 1665, or perhaps recollecting some of the stories of the Plague that his uncle had told him in boyhood (Sutherland, 9).
Defoe's own credibility fades due to that fact that he was five when it happened and obviously, he could not remember that much. But Defoe was a great journalist; he could give a vivid picture of anything, whether he had seen it or not (Sutherland, 6). There is a part in the book that shows Defoe's incredible use of detail. People were so afraid to touch something that might have been in contact with someone else. Defoe writes: In the middle of the Yard lay a small Leather Purse, with two keys hanging at it, and money in it, but no Body would meddle with it. I and how long it had lain there; the Man at the Window said it had lain almost on Hour I had no such need for Money, nor was the some so big, that I had any Inclination meddle with it, or to get the Money to the hazard it might be intended with (59).
Defoe show the reader the trouble that could come along with the purse. The boy thinks if he really wants the money. He knows he is not it desperation for money, and he knows that the amount of the money inside is not that much. Like so much in Defoe, this is a description of something happening, and he makes an immediate bid for our attention and our credulity by his careful setting of the event (Watt, 16). Defoe's last great work of fiction, Roxana, appeared in 1724. the strange, belated flowering of Defoe's imagination withered; and in A New Voyage Round the World, published in the following spring (1725), it may be said to have died (Freeman, 262).
Also in 1725, The Four Years Voyages of Captain George Roberts was published. The Memoirs of Captain Carleton, in 1728, and Robert Drury's Journal, in 1729, are memoirs of actual persons with slight fictional embellishment, However, Defoe never abandoned the use of the short tale to make a social or moral point. His History of the Pirates adds to its factual accounts the story of an archetypal fictional pirate, Captain Mission. Defoe's volumes on the occult and his treatises on trade and economics are also replete with fictional narrative. Defoe had been haunted by creditors almost all of his life, and finally, at the age of 70, he was forced to flee and hide from a creditor claiming payment on a bill Defoe had thought he had settled in 1704. On April 24, 1731, separated from his family, he died of a Lethargy, says the parish register, in a lodging house in London.
Eighteen-century diagnoses were crude and casual (Freeman, 293). Consequently, Daniel Defoe uses his use of extreme detail to overwhelm the reader, thus enabling him to create elaborate fantasies. Defoe crated a style unheard of at the time. He could show people how things really happen even though he was never there himself. When Defoe began to write fiction he took little notice of the dominant critical theory of the day, which still inclined towards the use of traditional plots; instead, he merely allowed his narrative order to flow spontaneously from his own sense of what his protagonists might plausible do next.
In so doing Defoe initiated an important new tendency in fiction: his total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir is s defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel (Watt, 15). Defoe created excellence through his works. He created his own unique which captured the minds of million. His [Defoe] Dissenting background engaged his sympathies with those who were struggling to assert their rights, rather than with those whose struggle was to maintain an inherited position and traditional privileges (Boulton, 7). Bibliography: Bibliography Backscheider, Paula R.
Daniel Defoe-His Life. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Boulton, James T. , ed. Daniel Defoe. London: B. T.
Batsford Ltd. , 1965 Defoe, Daniel. Journal of the Plague year. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1871. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders.
New York: The Modern Library, 1994. Defoe, Daniel. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London: Grant Richards, 1902. Freeman, William. The Incredible Defoe.
London: Herbert Jenkins, 1950. Moore, John R. Daniel Defoe Citizen of the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
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