The Observator 3
during this period, he began, probably with his version of the
Visions of Quevedo, in 1667, the long series of his translations,
and he published, in 1674, a sensible Discourse of the Fishery,
thus anticipating Defoe in the character of promoter.
during this period, he began, probably with his version of the
Visions of Quevedo, in 1667, the long series of his translations,
and he published, in 1674, a sensible Discourse of the Fishery,
thus anticipating Defoe in the character of promoter.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v09
Essais de littérature anglaise.
Cambridge, 1915.
pp. 443 ff. chapter III. Pope :
Pope, Alexander (ed. ). Poems of Thomas Parnell. 1721.
Pope, Alexander (ed. ). Works of John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, etc. 1723.
pp. 452 ff. chapter iv. Jonathan Swift:
Suddard, Mary. Swift's Poetry. Essays in English Literature. Cambridge, 1912.
pp. 479 ff. chapter vi. Lesser Verse Writers :
Under Matthew Prior :
Aitken, G. A. Notes on the Bibliography of Matthew Prior. A paper read before the
Bibliographical Society, January 17, 1916. 1919.
Bickley, F. The Life of Matthew Prior. 1914.
Dennis, J. In Studies in English Literature. 1876.
Under David Mallet :
Ballads and Songs. Ed. Di lale, F. , with a memoir. 57.
Under Richard Savage (biography):
The Plain Dealer. Nos. 28 and 73. 1724.
Johnson, Samuel. Life of Savage. 1744.
pp. 488 ff. chapters vir and viii. Historical and Political Writers :
Under William Dampier :
Voyages. Ed. Masefield, J. 2 vols. 1906.
Thomas Pitt (1653-1726).
Dalton, Sir C. N. The Life of Thomas Pitt. Cambridge, 1915.
pp. 502 ff. chapter 21. Berkeley and Contemporary Philosophy :
Under George Berkeley :
Berkeley and Percival. The Correspondence between George Berkeley. . . and Sir John
Percival. . . . Ed. Rand, Benjamin. Cambridge, 1914.
Under Anthony Astley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury:
Second Characters or The Language of Forms. Ed. Rand, Benjamin. Cambridge,
1914.
pp. 542 ff. chapter xiv. Scottish Literature from 1603 to 1786 :
Under (1) General :
Millar, J. H. Scottish Prose of the 17th and 18th centuries. Glasgow, 1912.
Under D. Miscellaneous. I. (1603-1660):
James VI. Lusus Regius : being poems and other pieces by King James ye First. Ed.
Rait, R. S. 1901.
Under Scottish Popular Poetry. II. Critical and Historical Writings:
Ganttich Ta - Pantry
:
1912
## p. xvi (#22) #############################################
## p. xvii (#23) ############################################
ADDENDUM
VOL. VII
P. 412
Daniel, George, of Beswick (1616—57). Poems, from the original MSS. Ed. Grosart,
A. B. 4 vols. 1878.
Fisher, Payne (1616—93). Marston Moor, Eboracense carmen. 1650. [Payne Fisher
wrote much verse (chiefly Latin) in praise of Oliver Cromwell, after whose death
be epent several years in the Fleet, and wrote as a royalist. ]
CORRIGENDA
1
VOL. VIII
p. 6, footnote 2, line 2 from bottom, for Royal Exchange read New Exchange, Strand
p. 28, footnote 2 at end, read : to the researches, conducted independently in each
case, of W. J. Lawrence and Sir Ernest Clarke
p. 30, 1. 23 and elsewhere, for St Évremond read Saint-Évremond
p. 215. The verses, "Why dost thou shade thy lovely face,' here ascribed to
Rochester, are the work of Quarles, and were first published in his Emblems. They
have been printed in many editions of Rochester's poems, but whether they were
claimed by him in jest, or falsely attributed to him by his editors, we have no means
of knowing.
p. 370, 1. 21, for 1655 read 1665
p. 371, 1. 38. Read as follows in lieu of the next two sentences of the text :
English imitations also appeared ; Lord Broghill (Orrery)'s Parthenissa (first part) in
1654, with which, in spite of its handsome language, Dorothy Osborne was not
very much taken, and Sir George Mackenzie'ɛ Aretina of the Serious Romance in
1661. A complete edition of Parthenissa in three volumes was published in 1665 and
1667.
p. 376, l. 5, insert the before chevalier
p. 422, l. 15, Howard, James should be inserted before All Mistaken. (This and
the subsequent play were by him, not by Edward Howard. )
1. 2 from bottom, the entry Cibber should read:
Cibber, Theophilus. An Account of the Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and
Ireland, 5 vols. 1753.
p. 445, 1. 2 from bottom, for Grammont. Des read Grammont; des
p. 478, l1. 12, 13 from bottom, transfer entries Gray, G. J. and Elton, 0. to
heading Sir Isaac Newton
VOL. IX
p. 139, for Doctor's read Doctors'
p. 204, note, for second earl read third earl
p. 254, note, for Lord Walpole read Lord Holland
p. 276, 1. 15 and p. 499, 1. 40, for Gerard read Girard
1
## p. xviii (#24) ###########################################
## p. 1 (#25) ###############################################
CHAPTER 1
I
DEFOE-THE NEWSPAPER AND THE NOVEL
DEFOE is known to our day chiefly as the author of Robinson
Crusoe, a pioneer novelist of adventure and low life. Students,
indeed, remember that he was also a prolific pamphleteer of unenvi-
able character and many vicissitudes. To his early biographers, he
was not merely a great novelist and journalist, but a martyr to liberal
principles and a man of exalted probity. His contemporaries, on the
contrary, inclined to regard him as an ignorant scribbler, a political
and social outcast, a journalist whose effrontery was equalled
I only by his astonishing energy. There is, probably, a measure of
truth in all these views; it is certainly true that the novelist we
remember was evolved out of the journalist we have forgotten.
When Defoe established his most important periodical, The
Review, in February 1704, the English newspaper, in a technical
sense, was not quite fifty years old. There had been weekly
Corantos
, or pamphlets of foreign news, from 1622 to 1641, and,
throughout the period of the civil war and the commonwealth,
there had been weekly 'newsbooks' designed to spread domestic
news, official or unofficial, parliamentary or royalist; but there
existed no real newspaper, no news periodical, not a pamphlet or
a newsletter, until the appearance of The Oxford Gazette in
November 1665'. The intrigues that led to the founding of this
paper, which soon became The London Gazette and, for many
years
, meagre and jejune though it was, possessed a monopoly of
the printed news, are of abundant interest, but have already been
noticed in this work? . It must suffice to say that such predecessors
in journalism as Defoe had before he was of an age to be influenced
by what he read were, in the main, purveyors of news through
pamphlets and written newsletters-interesting and able men,
many of them; generally staunch partisans ; sometimes, as in the
case of Marchamont Nedham, whom one regrets to encounter in
Milton's company, shameless turncoats. From their rather sorry
See Williams, J. B. , History of English Journalism, etc. p. 7.
* See ante, vol. vn, chap. xv, pp. 363—5.
1
!
E. L. IX.
CH. I.
1
8
## p. 2 (#26) ###############################################
2
Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
ranks, two figures of special importance stand out: Henry Muddiman,
the best news disseminator of his day, who has been mentioned
previously), and Roger L'Estrange, who was worsted by Muddiman
as an editor of newsbooks, but in whom, as political journalist,
indefatigable pamphleteer and competent man of letters, we
discover Defoe's most significant prototype.
L'Estrange was born, of good Norfolk stock, on 17 December
1616. He received an education befitting his station and, on
reaching his majority, became a zealous supporter of the king.
Betrayed in a plot for the recapture of Lynn, he was seized,
unfairly condemned to death, reprieved, left languishing for a few
years in Newgate and, finally, suffered to escape. During his
imprisonment, he made a small beginning as a pamphleteer, and
it is to the exasperating treatment accorded him that we may
partly attribute the dogmatic partisanship which is the most
striking characteristic of his political and ecclesiastical writings.
His adventures on the continent and his experiences in England
from his return in 1653 to the death of Cromwell may be passed
over. Late in 1659, he came forward as a writer of pamphlets and
broadsides designed to promote the restoration of Charles II.
Many of them may be read in the tract entitled L'Estrange his
Apology, but his only production of the period that possesses
any general interest is his scurrilous attack on Milton bearing
the inhuman title No Blinde Guides. After the restoration,
L'Estrange felt that his services were not duly recognised; but he
did not, on that account, neglect his assumed duties as castigator
of all persons whom he deemed factious—particularly presbyterians.
His tracts of this period often contain important information about
their author and throw light on the times; but, save for occasional
passages of quaint homeliness, they make dismal reading.
In the summer of 1663, he published his stringent Considera-
tions and Proposals in order to the Regulation of the Press, and
he soon had his reward in his appointment as one of the licensers,
and as surveyor of printing presses. He was also granted a
monopoly of the news; but his two weekly newsbooks caused dis-
satisfaction, and The Gazette finally drove him from the field. He
was more successful as a suppressor of seditious publications,
witness the notorious case of John Twyn—but such sinister success
as he had has cast upon his name, whether fully merited or not,
a reproach from which it will never be freed. For about fifteen
years, his official duties seem to have checked his fluent pen; but,
1 See ante, vol. VII, pp. 349, 362 ff.
## p. 3 (#27) ###############################################
L’Estrange and Popish Plot.
The Observator 3
during this period, he began, probably with his version of the
Visions of Quevedo, in 1667, the long series of his translations,
and he published, in 1674, a sensible Discourse of the Fishery,
thus anticipating Defoe in the character of promoter.
In 1679, he assailed Shaftesbury and the exclusionists in
pamphlets which won him the royal regard. During the next
year, he was in the thick of the controversy about the popish plot,
labouring to allay the popular fury against Roman Catholics. His
denunciations of Oates and other informers led to machinations
against himself. He was falsely accused of endeavouring by bribery
to secure the defamation of Oates, and he was charged with being
a papist. He was acquitted by the council; but public opinion
ran so high against him that he fled, for a short time, to Holland.
To employ a phrase in the title of one of his tracts, “a whole Litter
of Libellers' assailed him at this season; but 'the Dog Towzer'
was not to be thus daunted. He returned in February 1681, and
kept the press busy, not only with apologetic pamphlets, but with
bitter assaults upon the dissenters and with one of the most
important of his works, his political newspaper The Observator:
In Question and Answer.
This journal, of two double-columned folio pages, began its
career on 13 April 1681 and ran to 9 March 1686/7. After no. 5,
readers could not be sure how many issues they would receive
a week; but, as a rule, the tireless editor supplied them with three
or four numbers devoted to abuse of dissenters, whigs, trimmers
and Titus Oates. Throughout, he employed a device, which he had
not originated, but which his example made popular for a genera-
tion—the trick of casting each number in the form of a dialogue.
It is needless to attempt to chronicle the changes in the form of title
and in the persons of his interlocutors, since, in order to avoid
the mistakes already made by bibliographers, one would need to
examine every page of the periodical-an appalling task. It is
enough to say that L'Estrange had a large share in the final
discrediting of Oates; that, until it suited the king's purpose to
issue the declaration of indulgence, clerical and royal favour
crowned his ecclesiastical and political zeal; and that his many
critics had abundant excuse for the diatribes they continued to
issue against him. Defoe, who was probably in London during
the larger part of The Observator's life, may thus early have
determined that, if ever he should edit a paper of his own, he
would avoid the awkward dialogue form and an extravagance
that defeated its own ends.
1-2
## p. 4 (#28) ###############################################
4 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
The date of his knighting by James II, April 1685, may be held
to mark the zenith of L'Estrange's career. In 1686, he was sent
on a mission to Scotland; in 1687, in his answer to Halifax's
famous Letter to a Dissenter, he supported the king's claim to the
dispensing power; in 1688, he received from James a reward in
money that may have made him feel less keenly the suppression of
The Observator. At the revolution, he was dismissed from his post
of licenser and imprisoned. For several years after his release, he
led a troubled life. He was more than once rearrested; his health
declined ; his wife died ruined by gambling; he was disappointed in
his children; and, long before his death, on 11 December 1704, he
had lost all his influence and become a bookseller's hack. Yet it is
to this period that we owe his most important literary work, The
Fables of Æsop and other Eminent Mythologists : with Moral
Reflections, which appeared as a folio in 1692, and was followed, in
1699, by a second part, Fables and Storyes Moralized. His long
series of translations, many of them from the French and the
Spanish”, is noted elsewhere. Defoe did not follow far in his
steps as a translator; but it is not improbable that, when, in his old
age, he found himself cut off from journalism, he remembered the
example set him by L'Estrange and displayed an even more remark-
able general literary fecundity. It is almost needless to add that,
whether as journalist, pamphleteer, or miscellaneous writer, Defoe, in
comparison with his predecessor, profited from the general advance
made by the late seventeenth century toward a less cumbrous prose.
There was another journalist contemporary with L'Estrange to
whom Defoe was indebted. This was Henry Care, whose opposition
to the church party made him a special object of The Observator's
vituperations. He edited, in 1678—9, a quarto Pacquet of Advice
from Rome, which soon added to its title the word Weekly and
continued its existence, through five volumes, to 13 July 1683.
Later, he supported James and the Roman Catholics. If we may
trust Defoe, there is no doubt that Care's early death was brought
on by bad habits. He is chiefly important to us because it was from
him that Defoe borrowed the general idea of the department in
The Review known as the proceedings of the Scandalous Club. '
Space is wanting for a full discussion of the evolution of
journalism between the fall of The Observator and the founding
of The Review. A few meagre newspapers sprang up to rival The
Gazette so soon as James had fled the kingdom, and, between 1690
and 1696, John Dunton, the eccentric bookseller, later famous for
1 Cf. as to these, post, chap. x.
## p. 5 (#29) ###############################################
Rival Newspapers. The Review 5
his Life and Errors and for his absurd political pamphlets,
published his Athenian Gazette, afterwards The Athenian Mercury,
as an organ for those curious in philosophical and recondite
matters. From Dunton, Defoe borrowed some of the topics dis-
cussed in the miscellaneous portion of his paper. In 1695, the
Licensing Act, which had for some years been administered with
moderation, was allowed to lapse, and several new journals were at
once begun, some of which were destined to have important careers.
Chief among these were The Flying Post, a triweekly whig organ,
edited by the Scot George Ridpath, for many years a bitter
opponent of Defoe, and the tory Post Boy, which was published
by Abel Roper, a special object of whig detestation, and, for some
time, edited by Abel Boyer, who, later, changed his politics. These
and The Post Man, as well as the printed newsletter of Ichabod
Dawks and the written newsletter of John Dyer, notorious for his
partisan mendacity, were primarily disseminators of news. They
were supplemented, in March 1702, by the first of the dailies, The
Daily Courant, which, like the weekly Corantos of eighty years
before, consisted of translations from foreign papers. It soon fell
into the hands of Samuel Buckley, a versatile man with whom Defoe
was often at odds. On 1 April 1702, the most important strictly
political organ of the whigs was begun by John Tutchin, a small
poet and pamphleteer, who had suffered under Jeffreys and was
still to endure persecution for his advanced liberal opinions. He
took L'Estrange's old title, The Observator, and continued the
dialogue form. Two years later, Tutchin's form and his extreme
partisanship were imitated by the famous non-juror and opponent
of the deists, Charles Leslie, whose short-lived Rehearsal became
the chief organ of the high churchmen. Meanwhile, a few months
before Leslie's paper appeared, Defoe, not without Harley's
,
connivance, had begun his Review as an organ of moderation,
ecclesiastical and political, and of broad commercial interests.
Although his satirical discussions of current topics may have given
useful hints to Steele and Addison, it seems clear that Defoe's
chief contribution to journalism at this period is to be found in
his abandonment of the dialogue form and of the partisan tone of
his predecessors and immediate contemporaries. He adopted a
straightforward style, cultivated moderation and aimed at accuracy,
because, more completely than any other contemporary journalist,
be made it his purpose to secure acquiescence rather than to
strengthen prejudice. But, in what follows, we must confine
ourselves to his own varied career.
## p. 6 (#30) ###############################################
6 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
Defoe is usually said to have been born in London in 1661, the
date being derived from a reference to his age made in the preface
to one of his tracts. That this is an error seems clear from his
marriage licence allegation. He must have been born in London,
the son of James Foe, a butcher of the parish of St Giles, Cripple-
gate, at the end of 1659 or early in 1660. His father came of
Northamptonshire stock; but the name of his mother's family has
not been ascertained. Beyond the fact that his parents were
presbyterians, who early set him apart for the ministry, we know
little concerning his childhood. When he was about fourteen, he
entered a dissenters’ school kept at Stoke Newington by Charles
Morton, a somewhat distinguished scholar and minister, and
he probably remained there three or four years, by which
time he had given up the idea of becoming a preacher. He has
left some account of his education, which appears to have been
practical and well adapted to the needs of his journalistic career,
since emphasis was laid on history, geography and politics, the
modern languages and proficiency in the vernacular.
Scarcely anything is known of his life between 1677 or 1678,
when he may be presumed to have left school, and January 1683/4,
the date of his marriage, when he was a merchant in Cornhill,
probably a wholesale dealer in hosiery. There is evidence from
his writings that, at one time, he held some commercial position in
Spain, and it is clear that his biographers have not collected all
the passages that tend to show his acquaintance with Italy,
southern Germany and France. As it is difficult to place any long
continued absence from England after his marriage, it seems
plausible to hold that he may have been sent to Spain as an
apprentice in the commission business and have taken the oppor-
tunity, when returning, to see more of Europe. His 'wander-years,'
if he had them, must be placed between 1678, the year of the
popish plot and the murder of Godfrey, and 1683, the year of the
repulse of the Turks from Vienna, since it is practically certain
that he was in London at each of these periods.
Not much more is known of his early life as a married man.
His wife, Mary Tuffley, who survived him, was of a well-to-do family,
bore him seven children and, from all we can gather, proved
a good helpmeet. That he soon left her to take some share in
Monmouth's rebellion seems highly probable; but that, between
1684 and 1688, he became an embryo sociologist and was engaged
in the systematic travelling about England that has been attributed
to him is very doubtful. How he escaped Jeffreys, whether he
a
## p. 7 (#31) ###############################################
Defoe in Business. Essay upon Projects 7
ever was a presbyterian minister at Tooting, what precisely he wrote
and published against James II—these and other similar matters
are still mysteries. It seems plain that he joined William's army
late in 1688; that he took great interest in the establishment of
the new government; that his standing in the city among his
fellow dissenters was outwardly high; and that he cherished literary
aspirations. His first definitely ascertained publication is a satire
in verse of 1691. In the following year he became a bankrupt,
with a deficit of about £17,000.
It is usual to attribute his failure to unbusinesslike habits, and
to pay little attention to the charges of fraud brought against him
later. As a matter of fact, this period of his life is so dark that
positive conclusions of any kind are rash. It would seem, however,
that he suffered unavoidable losses through the war with France,
that he was involved in too many kinds of enterprises, some of
them speculative, and that his partial success in paying off his
creditors warrants leniency toward him. Some friends appear to
have stood by him to the extent of offering him a situation in
Spain, which he could afford to reject because of better oppor-
tunities at home. Within four years, he was doing well as secretary
and manager of a tile factory near Tilbury. He also served as
accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty, and there is
no good reason to dispute his claim that he remained in fairly
prosperous circumstances until he was ruined, in 1703, by his
imprisonment for writing The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.
Shortly after his bankruptcy, Defoe, full of the speculative
spirit of the age, was engaged in composing his Essay upon
Projects, which did not appear until 1697. Of all his early
productions, this is much the most interesting to the general
reader, who is left wondering at the man's versatility and modernity,
particularly in matters relating to education, insurance and the
treatment of seamen. At the end of 1697, he plunged, on the
king's side, into the controversy with regard to the maintenance of
a standing army, and he continued to publish on the subject, though
some of his tracts have escaped his biographers. In 1698, he began
writing against occasional conformity in a manner which lost him
much favour with his fellow dissenters, and he also made an effective
contribution to the propaganda of the societies for the reformation
of manners. His duties as head of a tile factory and as govern-
ment accountant clearly did not occupy all his time, save for the
single year 1699, to which not one work by him is plausibly assigned.
It was not until the end of 1700, however, that out of the small
## p. 8 (#32) ###############################################
8
Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
poet and occasional pamphleteer was evolved a prolific professional
writer. The occasion was the will of Charles II of Spain and the
upsetting of William's plans for the partition of the Spanish
monarchy. Defoe supported his sovereign in several tracts, and
he pleaded for the return of a parliament uncontrolled by
moneyed interests. But it was a sprawling satire in favour of
the king, not homely tracts addressed to plain freeholders,
that gave the middle-aged journalist his first taste of literary
popularity.
This satire was The True-Born Englishman, which appeared
in January 1701, and, both in authorised and in pirated editions, had
an enormous sale. It was a reply to a poem by Tutchin, in which
that journalist had voiced the popular prejudice against the
foreign-born king. Defoe's vigorous verses turned the tables on
his own hybrid people, and were good journalism, whatever one
may think of them as poetry. They seem to have been the
occasion of his introduction to the king, an honour which, much to
the disgust of less favoured editors and pamphleteers, was not left
unchronicled in his writings. We know little of his relations with
William ; but, at the time of his arrest for The Shortest Way, it
was suspected that these had been close, and he himself dropped
hints which cause one to believe that occasionally he served
the king as an
an election agent much as, later, he served
Harley.
“The Author of The True-Born Englishman,' as Defoe for
many years delighted to style himself, did not rest on his laurels
as a writer during the short period before the death of his hero
William. He published numerous tracts in which he dealt with
occasional conformity, foreign affairs, particularly the inevitable
war with France, the misdeeds of stock-jobbers and the rights of
the people as opposed to the high-banded independence claimed
by tories in parliament. The most weighty of these pamphlets
is The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of
England, which is worthy of Somers; but we get a better idea of
the character of Defoe himself through his attitude in the affair of
the Kentish petitioners. There is something of the demagogue in
the famous Legion's Address, which he wrote on this occasion;
but, in his bold delivery of the document to Harley, the speaker,
there is something of the uncalculating love of liberty that marks
the true tribune of the people. Although he was probably still
under a cloud on account of his bankruptcy, and although
fellow dissenters detected treason in his utterances on occasional
## p. 9 (#33) ###############################################
The Shortest Way. Hymn to the Pillory 9
conformity, he was, doubtless, at the zenith of his reputation among
his contemporaries when he sat by the side of the Kentish worthies
at the banquet given them on their release from prison.
The two most important pamphlets of 1702 were both concerned
with ecclesiastical affairs—the acute New Test of the Church of
England's Loyalty and the notorious Shortest Way with the
Dissenters. The latter may have been designed both to serve the
whigs and to reassure those dissenters who had not liked or
understood Defoe's attitude on the now burning question of
occasional conformity. Whatever his purpose, he overshot the
mark by assuming the character of an intolerant 'high-flyer' and
by arguing for the suppression of dissent at all costs, no matter
how cruel the means. It was no time for irony, especially for irony
that demanded more power to read between the lines than either
dissenters or extreme churchmen possessed. The former were
alarmed; the latter were enraged when they discovered that they
had been hoaxed into accepting as the pure gospel of conformity
a tract written by a nonconformist for the purpose of reducing
ecclesiastical intolerance to an absurdity. In January 1703, the
tory Nottingham issued a warrant for Defoe's arrest, but he was
not apprehended until the latter part of May. Where he hid
himself is uncertain; but there is evidence in his own hand that
the prospect of a prison had completely unnerved him. After he
was lodged in Newgate, he managed to resist all attempts to worm
out of him whatever secrets of state he might possess. At
his trial in July, he was misled into pleading guilty, and he
received a sentence out of all proportion to his offence. The fine
and the imprisonment during the queen's pleasure were less terrible
in his eyes than the three public exposures in the pillory, and
he used all the means in his power, including a promise through
William Penn to make important revelations, in order to escape
the more degrading part of his punishment. His efforts proving
of no avail, he plucked up his courage and wrote against his
persecutors his spirited Hymn to the Pillory. When he was
pilloried at the end of July, the temper of the fickle populace had
changed, and, instead of being hooted and pelted, he was hailed as
a hero. Neither he nor the mob knew that the experience marked
a turning point in the career of one of the most variously, though
not nobly, gifted men England has ever produced. Before his
persecution, Defoe may have been somewhat shifty as a man of
affairs and, perhaps, as a writer; but, on the whole, he had been
courageous in facing disaster, and he had been more or less
## p. 10 (#34) ##############################################
10 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
consistent and high-minded in his attitude toward public matters.
After he was pilloried, the sense that he had been unjustly punished
rankled in him, and he soon became dependent upon the bounty of
Harley; to insure the continuance of that bounty, he sacrificed
some, at least, of his convictions; in revenge, he began to
betray his employer; and, in the end, he stood before the public
as the most discredited and mercenary journalist of the day.
Such was not the view of his early biographers, who found in him,
as we have seen, only a maligned patriot and man of genius;
but it seems impossible for the close student of Defoe's political
writings, despite the sympathy he must feel for a kindly, brilliant
and hardly used man, not to agree, in the main, with the contem-
poraries who denounced him.
It was held until recently that Defoe remained in Newgate
until August 1704, although more careful examination of The
Review would have led to a different conclusion Research in
other newspapers and the publication of his correspondence with
Harley have now made it clear that he was released, through
Harley's good offices, about 1 November 1703. This disposes of
the story that The Review was founded while its editor was in
prison, and it also absolves us from the necessity of supposing
that, when, in his volume on the great storm, Defoe described
devastations of which he had been an eye-witness, he was drawing
on his imagination. The fact that, in this matter and in not a few
others, research has tended to strengthen belief in his ability to
tell the truth about himself ought to make it less possible for
critics to treat him as totally untrustworthy. Such criticism has never
been based upon adequate psychological study of the man, and it
is not warranted by a minute examination even of his most
discreditable writings. Instead of becoming a shameless and
wholesale liar, Defoe, in all probability, developed into a consummate
casuist who was often his own chief dupe. His experience of
the pillory was ever before his eyes, and it seemed to him necessary
and even meritorious to avoid the pitfalls that lay in those days
before all journalists. For more than twenty years, he practised
every sort of subterfuge to preserve his anonymity, and he soon
grew sufficiently callous to write, presumably for pay, on all sides
of any given subject. Within the arena of journalism, he was a
treacherous mercenary who fought all comers with any weapon
and stratagem he could command Outside that arena, he was
a pious, philanthropical, fairly accurate and trustworthy man and
citizen.
## p. 11 (#35) ##############################################
The Review
II
Space fails us for a discussion of the pampblets and poems
of this period, the stream of which not even imprisonment or his
employment as a busy agent for Harley could check. Mention should
be made, however, of the two volumes of his collected writings-
the only collection made by himself—which appeared in 1703
and 1705, as well as of controversial pamphlets against the
eccentric John Asgill, the publicist Dr Davenant, the tory poli-
tician and promoter Sir Humphrey Mackworth and the fanatic
Charles Leslie. Only one tract of them all possesses permanent
interest, the famous Giving Alms no Charity, of November 1704,
and even that is probably less of an economic elassic than some
have thought it. Defoe's real achievement of the time was his
establishment of The Review, the importance of which as an
organ of political moderation has been already pointed out. It
was equally important as a model of straightforward journalistic
prose, and, in its department of miscellanea, its editorial corre-
spondence when Defoe was away from London and other features,
it probably exerted an influence out of proportion to its circulation,
which was never large. In its small four-paged numbers, in the
main triweekly, the student of contemporary France, of English
ecclesiastical history, of the union with Scotland, of the war of the
Spanish succession, of the movements of the Jacobites, of the trial of
Sacheverell, of British commerce and of manners and customs in
general finds abundant materials to his hand. Why its eight large
volumes and incomplete ninth supplementary volume (17 February
1704 to 11 June 1713) have never been reprinted from the unique
set in the British Museum it is hard to say. Even as the record of
one man's enterprise and pertinacity (Defoe wrote it practically
upaided and kept it going with extraordinary regularity during
the years he was serving as a government agent in Scotland), it
would be worthy of a place on our shelves-much more so when that
man is the author of Robinson Crusoe. Such republication would
not be equivalent to the erection of a monument of shame, since,
on the whole, the Defoe of The Review is liberal and consistent in
his politics and far-sighted in commercial and economic matters.
In a sense, too, a reissue of these rare volumes would be a
monument to the prescience of that enigmatical, underestimated
politician Robert Harley, who clearly perceived the political
importance of the press.
Not even the briefest description can be given of Defoe's horse-
back rides through England in 1704 and 1705 as an election agent for
Harley. Highhanded tories and creditors set on by his enemies tried
## p. 12 (#36) ##############################################
12 I
Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
to stop him; but he eluded them and continued both to send Harley
reports which prove him to have been a journalist of the first order,
and to make observations which stood him in good stead in his later
sociological and economic writings. He also found time to compose
and publish his dull political allegory The Consolidator and to
labour on his still more ponderous satire in verse Jure Divino,
which appeared the next year, 1706, in folio, adorned with a full-
wigged portrait of the self-complacent author. These, as well as his
impudent satire The Dyet of Poland, his excellent pamphlets
against religious intolerance in south Carolina, his indiscreet
support, in a tract called The Experiment, of the clerical impostor
Abraham Gill, his spirited answers to Lord Haversham, who had
taunted him with poverty and writing for hire, are all, more or less,
forgotten ; but, so long as the literature of the supernatural
finds favour, there will be interested readers of the one classic
production of this stage of his career, A True Relation of the
Apparition of one Mrs Veal, the next Day after her Death, to
one Mrs Bargrave at Canterbury, the 8th of September, 1705.
Even this convincingly realistic narrative is, thanks to the
researches of George A. Aitken, no longer to be credited, as Sir
Walter Scott and many others have thought, to Defoe the master
of verisimilitude in fiction. It is now seen to be the circumstantial
account of a ghost story current at the time, a product of Defoe's
genius for reporting, not a clever hoax designed to sell Drelincourt's
pious manual.
From the autumn of 1706 to the spring of 1710, Scotland is
the main scene of Defoe's activity, and Scottish affairs are the
main subject of his pen. His movements and whereabouts are not
always certain; but it is evident that none of his biographers has
realised how large a portion of his time he spent out of London
as the agent, first of Harley, then of Godolphin. He was in
Scotland from October 1706 to December 1707, forwarding the
union in every way in his power and, after that was secured,
labouring to allay popular discontent. He kept the press busy
with pamphlets, the full tale of which will doubtless never be
known. He wrote Harley long and interesting letters; he attended
parliamentary committees; he furnished statistics on matters of
trade; he wormed himself into the confidence of men in all positions
-in short, to use his own phrase, he played the part of a perfect
spy, developing his powers of duplicity at every turn. Few agents
have ever more thoroughly earned their hire, or have served more
niggardly masters than was Harley. When, at last, Defoe, almost
## p. 13 (#37) ##############################################
13
a
Defoe and Harley
reduced to penury, was allowed to return without the place in the
customs for which he hoped, he found his patron tottering to his fall.
He was graciously permitted to transfer his services to Godolphin
and, early in 1708, was sent back to Scotland. Of his labours for
his new chief, we have no full account; but there was probably no
decline in his faithfulness and efficiency. There was some decline
in his literary activity, for the main work of 1708—9 is his huge,
dull, but apparently accurate History of the Union, a volume
which shows that Defoe had not a little of the methodical patience
characteristic of latter-day historians, but, as yet, little of the skill
in book-making which he was afterwards conspicuously to display.
In the early months of 1710, Defoe, although he saw clearly
the folly of impeaching Sacheverell, made that noisy clergyman
the subject of several tracts. Later, he transferred his services to
Harley, not, however, without allowing himself free criticism of
the extreme tories. In the autumn, he was sent to Scotland to
watch the Jacobites, and it is a letter written to Harley at this time
which first causes us to suspect that he was betraying his employer.
Some years ago, William Lee attributed to Defoe, on strong
internal evidence, a satirical pamphlet of 1711, entitled Atalantis
Major; but no one would suspect, from the way in which Defoe refers
to his efforts to suppress this tract, that he was its unblushing author.
There is no absolute proof that he was; but, when, a little later, we
find him charged with writing against Harley in The Protestant
Post Boy, and, later still, encounter attacks upon that minister in
pamphlets full of the characteristics of Defoe's style, our faith in
the journalist's fidelity is greatly shaken.
Whether the inscrutable Harley, now earl of Oxford, had
entire faith in his agent does not appear.
Certain it is,
however, that, for the next two or three years, Defoe was con-
tinually making surreptitious visits to the prime minister and
sending him letters, which not infrequently contained requests
for money. That he was as well paid by Oxford as enemies
asserted may be doubted; but there is no doubt that his advice
was sought on many matters and that he was employed by out-
siders to secure the minister's countenance for various schemes.
Meanwhile, the stream of pamphlets flowed unabated, and the
tone of The Review was adroitly changed in favour of peace with
France. As a result, Defoe was despised and distrusted by whigs
and tories alike. The modern student, making allowance for the
factiousness of the times, for the undeveloped state of party
government, for Defoe's pecuniary embarrassments and his social
## p. 14 (#38) ##############################################
14 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
ostracism after the pillorying, finds it possible to extenuate his
conduct and is impelled to admire his dexterity and his resource-
fulness. There is ground, too, for maintaining that, in some
important respects, he was consistent, and a better counsellor
than Oxford deserved. He opposed the passage of the obnoxious
schism bill, and he seems never to have wavered in his support of
the Hanoverian succession.
As luck would have it, his second imprisonment was the direct
result of his activity against the Jacobites. During a visit to
Scotland in the autumn of 1712, he was much alarmed at the
progress Jacobitism seemed to be making, and he wrote several
tracts on the subject, in some of which he made an unfortunate
use of his favourite weapon, irony. Such a title as Reasons against
the Succession of the House of Hanover should have deceived no
one; but this tract and others furnished certain whigs with an
occasion for bringing an action against him for treason. Their
object was twofold—to crush Defoe and to besmirch Oxford, if the
latter took any overt measures to protect his unacknowledged
agent. The scheme was clever, but Defoe's measures to counteract
it-too intricate to be described here were cleverer. He would
doubtless have come off scotfree, had he not made the tactical
mistake of reflecting in The Review upon chief justice Parker.
This contempt of court led to his being confined, for a few days, in
the queen’s bench prison in May 1713. Immediately upon his
release, he began to edit a new trade journal Mercator, in the
interest of Bolingbroke's treaty of commerce, suffering The
Review to expire quietly. There is some, though, perhaps, not
sufficient, evidence to show that, at this time, bis services were
controlled by Bolingbroke rather than by Oxford; but, towards the
end of 1713, he was again in frequent communication with the
latter, through whose favour he secured a pardon under the great
seal for all past offences, thus effectually stopping, for the time, the
schemes of his whig enemies,
The year 1714 was a turning point for him, as well as for his
tory employers. He continued Mercator almost to the time of
>
1 Perhaps it may not be amiss to give a concrete illustration of Defoe's casuistry.
This is furnished by a comparison of the evasive language he used in his Appeal
(1715) with regard to his editorship of Mercator, and the frank language about his
share in that journal which he permitted himself to use in a short-lived trade paper of
1719, The Manufacturer, which has escaped his bibliographers but was attributed to
him by his contemporaries and is certainly his. Moreover, in the Appeal, he stated
categorically that he had never had any payment or reward for writing any part of
Mercator ; but in his letter to Oxford of 21 May 1714, he wrote that Arthur Moore,
6
## p. 15 (#39) ##############################################
Date of An Appeal to Honour and Justice 15
the queen's death. The paper, together with numerous pamphlets
of the period, including the four which form A General History
of Trade, gives abundant proof of the liberality of his com-
mercial views, although it scarcely justifies his modern admirers in
styling him the father of free trade. He also wrote voluminously
in opposition to the schism bill; and he entered into obscure
intrigues against his old enemy George Ridpath, which resulted in
his forming a connection with a rival Flying Post. In this, he
published a glowing eulogy of the new king and an indiscreet
attack upon one of the lords regent, which led to his indictment
for libel and, in the following year, to his trial and conviction. How
he escaped punishment will soon appear. Meanwhile, apparently
with Oxford's connivance, he published the first of the three parts
of his notorious apology for the administration of that statesman,
The Secret History of the White Staff. This was the signal for a
swarm of acrimonious whig tracts, which made much capital out
of Defoe's careless admissions with regard to his patron's intrigues
with the Scottish Jacobites. A second part, in which Bolingbroke
was treated more leniently, speedily followed, and then, at the end
of the year 1714, Defoe's health broke down-or else he deemed it
expedient to pose as an apoplectic who had not long to live.
A full discussion of this tangled matter would be tedious.
Lee, who did not know the date of publication of Defoe's Appeal
to Honour and Justice, tho' it be of his worst enemies, the
masterly account of the journalist's career which closed with
a pathetic note to the effect that he had been ill for six weeks
and was still in grave peril, seems, by assigning the tract to
January 1715, to have fixed the date of his hero's illness in
November and December 1714, thus managing to make the
bibliography of Defoe square not only with these dates but
with high conceptions of his probity. Unfortunately, it has been
discovered that the Appeal was published on 24 February 1715.
This brings the period of the illness into the early weeks of 1715,
that is, into a time when, according to Lee, Crossley and a con-
temporary of Defoe, the pamphleteer William Pittis, our journalist
was actively plying his trade. It does not follow that Defoe may
.
not have been out of health about this time—his situation, with
an expensive family, no fixed source of income, a worse than
6
who undertook to support the paper, had declined any consideration for it ever since
Lady Day last. ' There is little reason to doubt that Defoe was a poorly paid editor;
bat it is very certain that his relations with Mercator were much closer than he wished
readers of that periodical to believe.
## p. 16 (#40) ##############################################
16 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
doubtful reputation and an indictment for libel hanging over him,
might well have undermined an even stronger constitution than
his; but it does seem to be clear that, on Oxford's repudiating
the White Staff tracts, Defoe published several others designed to
throw dust round the whole controversy and to minimise his own
part in it, and that, these attempts failing, he wrote his Appeal,
upon which he expended all the resources of his genius for
casuistry, without succeeding in changing the opinions of his con-
temporaries one iota. It is a proof of his literary skill, however,
that this adroit and moving pamphlet has misled many a confiding
biographer and uninformed modern reader.
Belief in a serious breakdown of Defoe's health is rendered
almost ridiculous by an examination of his bibliography, certain
and plausible, for the year 1715. It contains at least thirty
pamphlets and two thick volumes, the first instalments of The
Family Instructor and of a History of the Wars of Charles XII
of Sweden.
pp. 443 ff. chapter III. Pope :
Pope, Alexander (ed. ). Poems of Thomas Parnell. 1721.
Pope, Alexander (ed. ). Works of John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, etc. 1723.
pp. 452 ff. chapter iv. Jonathan Swift:
Suddard, Mary. Swift's Poetry. Essays in English Literature. Cambridge, 1912.
pp. 479 ff. chapter vi. Lesser Verse Writers :
Under Matthew Prior :
Aitken, G. A. Notes on the Bibliography of Matthew Prior. A paper read before the
Bibliographical Society, January 17, 1916. 1919.
Bickley, F. The Life of Matthew Prior. 1914.
Dennis, J. In Studies in English Literature. 1876.
Under David Mallet :
Ballads and Songs. Ed. Di lale, F. , with a memoir. 57.
Under Richard Savage (biography):
The Plain Dealer. Nos. 28 and 73. 1724.
Johnson, Samuel. Life of Savage. 1744.
pp. 488 ff. chapters vir and viii. Historical and Political Writers :
Under William Dampier :
Voyages. Ed. Masefield, J. 2 vols. 1906.
Thomas Pitt (1653-1726).
Dalton, Sir C. N. The Life of Thomas Pitt. Cambridge, 1915.
pp. 502 ff. chapter 21. Berkeley and Contemporary Philosophy :
Under George Berkeley :
Berkeley and Percival. The Correspondence between George Berkeley. . . and Sir John
Percival. . . . Ed. Rand, Benjamin. Cambridge, 1914.
Under Anthony Astley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury:
Second Characters or The Language of Forms. Ed. Rand, Benjamin. Cambridge,
1914.
pp. 542 ff. chapter xiv. Scottish Literature from 1603 to 1786 :
Under (1) General :
Millar, J. H. Scottish Prose of the 17th and 18th centuries. Glasgow, 1912.
Under D. Miscellaneous. I. (1603-1660):
James VI. Lusus Regius : being poems and other pieces by King James ye First. Ed.
Rait, R. S. 1901.
Under Scottish Popular Poetry. II. Critical and Historical Writings:
Ganttich Ta - Pantry
:
1912
## p. xvi (#22) #############################################
## p. xvii (#23) ############################################
ADDENDUM
VOL. VII
P. 412
Daniel, George, of Beswick (1616—57). Poems, from the original MSS. Ed. Grosart,
A. B. 4 vols. 1878.
Fisher, Payne (1616—93). Marston Moor, Eboracense carmen. 1650. [Payne Fisher
wrote much verse (chiefly Latin) in praise of Oliver Cromwell, after whose death
be epent several years in the Fleet, and wrote as a royalist. ]
CORRIGENDA
1
VOL. VIII
p. 6, footnote 2, line 2 from bottom, for Royal Exchange read New Exchange, Strand
p. 28, footnote 2 at end, read : to the researches, conducted independently in each
case, of W. J. Lawrence and Sir Ernest Clarke
p. 30, 1. 23 and elsewhere, for St Évremond read Saint-Évremond
p. 215. The verses, "Why dost thou shade thy lovely face,' here ascribed to
Rochester, are the work of Quarles, and were first published in his Emblems. They
have been printed in many editions of Rochester's poems, but whether they were
claimed by him in jest, or falsely attributed to him by his editors, we have no means
of knowing.
p. 370, 1. 21, for 1655 read 1665
p. 371, 1. 38. Read as follows in lieu of the next two sentences of the text :
English imitations also appeared ; Lord Broghill (Orrery)'s Parthenissa (first part) in
1654, with which, in spite of its handsome language, Dorothy Osborne was not
very much taken, and Sir George Mackenzie'ɛ Aretina of the Serious Romance in
1661. A complete edition of Parthenissa in three volumes was published in 1665 and
1667.
p. 376, l. 5, insert the before chevalier
p. 422, l. 15, Howard, James should be inserted before All Mistaken. (This and
the subsequent play were by him, not by Edward Howard. )
1. 2 from bottom, the entry Cibber should read:
Cibber, Theophilus. An Account of the Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and
Ireland, 5 vols. 1753.
p. 445, 1. 2 from bottom, for Grammont. Des read Grammont; des
p. 478, l1. 12, 13 from bottom, transfer entries Gray, G. J. and Elton, 0. to
heading Sir Isaac Newton
VOL. IX
p. 139, for Doctor's read Doctors'
p. 204, note, for second earl read third earl
p. 254, note, for Lord Walpole read Lord Holland
p. 276, 1. 15 and p. 499, 1. 40, for Gerard read Girard
1
## p. xviii (#24) ###########################################
## p. 1 (#25) ###############################################
CHAPTER 1
I
DEFOE-THE NEWSPAPER AND THE NOVEL
DEFOE is known to our day chiefly as the author of Robinson
Crusoe, a pioneer novelist of adventure and low life. Students,
indeed, remember that he was also a prolific pamphleteer of unenvi-
able character and many vicissitudes. To his early biographers, he
was not merely a great novelist and journalist, but a martyr to liberal
principles and a man of exalted probity. His contemporaries, on the
contrary, inclined to regard him as an ignorant scribbler, a political
and social outcast, a journalist whose effrontery was equalled
I only by his astonishing energy. There is, probably, a measure of
truth in all these views; it is certainly true that the novelist we
remember was evolved out of the journalist we have forgotten.
When Defoe established his most important periodical, The
Review, in February 1704, the English newspaper, in a technical
sense, was not quite fifty years old. There had been weekly
Corantos
, or pamphlets of foreign news, from 1622 to 1641, and,
throughout the period of the civil war and the commonwealth,
there had been weekly 'newsbooks' designed to spread domestic
news, official or unofficial, parliamentary or royalist; but there
existed no real newspaper, no news periodical, not a pamphlet or
a newsletter, until the appearance of The Oxford Gazette in
November 1665'. The intrigues that led to the founding of this
paper, which soon became The London Gazette and, for many
years
, meagre and jejune though it was, possessed a monopoly of
the printed news, are of abundant interest, but have already been
noticed in this work? . It must suffice to say that such predecessors
in journalism as Defoe had before he was of an age to be influenced
by what he read were, in the main, purveyors of news through
pamphlets and written newsletters-interesting and able men,
many of them; generally staunch partisans ; sometimes, as in the
case of Marchamont Nedham, whom one regrets to encounter in
Milton's company, shameless turncoats. From their rather sorry
See Williams, J. B. , History of English Journalism, etc. p. 7.
* See ante, vol. vn, chap. xv, pp. 363—5.
1
!
E. L. IX.
CH. I.
1
8
## p. 2 (#26) ###############################################
2
Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
ranks, two figures of special importance stand out: Henry Muddiman,
the best news disseminator of his day, who has been mentioned
previously), and Roger L'Estrange, who was worsted by Muddiman
as an editor of newsbooks, but in whom, as political journalist,
indefatigable pamphleteer and competent man of letters, we
discover Defoe's most significant prototype.
L'Estrange was born, of good Norfolk stock, on 17 December
1616. He received an education befitting his station and, on
reaching his majority, became a zealous supporter of the king.
Betrayed in a plot for the recapture of Lynn, he was seized,
unfairly condemned to death, reprieved, left languishing for a few
years in Newgate and, finally, suffered to escape. During his
imprisonment, he made a small beginning as a pamphleteer, and
it is to the exasperating treatment accorded him that we may
partly attribute the dogmatic partisanship which is the most
striking characteristic of his political and ecclesiastical writings.
His adventures on the continent and his experiences in England
from his return in 1653 to the death of Cromwell may be passed
over. Late in 1659, he came forward as a writer of pamphlets and
broadsides designed to promote the restoration of Charles II.
Many of them may be read in the tract entitled L'Estrange his
Apology, but his only production of the period that possesses
any general interest is his scurrilous attack on Milton bearing
the inhuman title No Blinde Guides. After the restoration,
L'Estrange felt that his services were not duly recognised; but he
did not, on that account, neglect his assumed duties as castigator
of all persons whom he deemed factious—particularly presbyterians.
His tracts of this period often contain important information about
their author and throw light on the times; but, save for occasional
passages of quaint homeliness, they make dismal reading.
In the summer of 1663, he published his stringent Considera-
tions and Proposals in order to the Regulation of the Press, and
he soon had his reward in his appointment as one of the licensers,
and as surveyor of printing presses. He was also granted a
monopoly of the news; but his two weekly newsbooks caused dis-
satisfaction, and The Gazette finally drove him from the field. He
was more successful as a suppressor of seditious publications,
witness the notorious case of John Twyn—but such sinister success
as he had has cast upon his name, whether fully merited or not,
a reproach from which it will never be freed. For about fifteen
years, his official duties seem to have checked his fluent pen; but,
1 See ante, vol. VII, pp. 349, 362 ff.
## p. 3 (#27) ###############################################
L’Estrange and Popish Plot.
The Observator 3
during this period, he began, probably with his version of the
Visions of Quevedo, in 1667, the long series of his translations,
and he published, in 1674, a sensible Discourse of the Fishery,
thus anticipating Defoe in the character of promoter.
In 1679, he assailed Shaftesbury and the exclusionists in
pamphlets which won him the royal regard. During the next
year, he was in the thick of the controversy about the popish plot,
labouring to allay the popular fury against Roman Catholics. His
denunciations of Oates and other informers led to machinations
against himself. He was falsely accused of endeavouring by bribery
to secure the defamation of Oates, and he was charged with being
a papist. He was acquitted by the council; but public opinion
ran so high against him that he fled, for a short time, to Holland.
To employ a phrase in the title of one of his tracts, “a whole Litter
of Libellers' assailed him at this season; but 'the Dog Towzer'
was not to be thus daunted. He returned in February 1681, and
kept the press busy, not only with apologetic pamphlets, but with
bitter assaults upon the dissenters and with one of the most
important of his works, his political newspaper The Observator:
In Question and Answer.
This journal, of two double-columned folio pages, began its
career on 13 April 1681 and ran to 9 March 1686/7. After no. 5,
readers could not be sure how many issues they would receive
a week; but, as a rule, the tireless editor supplied them with three
or four numbers devoted to abuse of dissenters, whigs, trimmers
and Titus Oates. Throughout, he employed a device, which he had
not originated, but which his example made popular for a genera-
tion—the trick of casting each number in the form of a dialogue.
It is needless to attempt to chronicle the changes in the form of title
and in the persons of his interlocutors, since, in order to avoid
the mistakes already made by bibliographers, one would need to
examine every page of the periodical-an appalling task. It is
enough to say that L'Estrange had a large share in the final
discrediting of Oates; that, until it suited the king's purpose to
issue the declaration of indulgence, clerical and royal favour
crowned his ecclesiastical and political zeal; and that his many
critics had abundant excuse for the diatribes they continued to
issue against him. Defoe, who was probably in London during
the larger part of The Observator's life, may thus early have
determined that, if ever he should edit a paper of his own, he
would avoid the awkward dialogue form and an extravagance
that defeated its own ends.
1-2
## p. 4 (#28) ###############################################
4 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
The date of his knighting by James II, April 1685, may be held
to mark the zenith of L'Estrange's career. In 1686, he was sent
on a mission to Scotland; in 1687, in his answer to Halifax's
famous Letter to a Dissenter, he supported the king's claim to the
dispensing power; in 1688, he received from James a reward in
money that may have made him feel less keenly the suppression of
The Observator. At the revolution, he was dismissed from his post
of licenser and imprisoned. For several years after his release, he
led a troubled life. He was more than once rearrested; his health
declined ; his wife died ruined by gambling; he was disappointed in
his children; and, long before his death, on 11 December 1704, he
had lost all his influence and become a bookseller's hack. Yet it is
to this period that we owe his most important literary work, The
Fables of Æsop and other Eminent Mythologists : with Moral
Reflections, which appeared as a folio in 1692, and was followed, in
1699, by a second part, Fables and Storyes Moralized. His long
series of translations, many of them from the French and the
Spanish”, is noted elsewhere. Defoe did not follow far in his
steps as a translator; but it is not improbable that, when, in his old
age, he found himself cut off from journalism, he remembered the
example set him by L'Estrange and displayed an even more remark-
able general literary fecundity. It is almost needless to add that,
whether as journalist, pamphleteer, or miscellaneous writer, Defoe, in
comparison with his predecessor, profited from the general advance
made by the late seventeenth century toward a less cumbrous prose.
There was another journalist contemporary with L'Estrange to
whom Defoe was indebted. This was Henry Care, whose opposition
to the church party made him a special object of The Observator's
vituperations. He edited, in 1678—9, a quarto Pacquet of Advice
from Rome, which soon added to its title the word Weekly and
continued its existence, through five volumes, to 13 July 1683.
Later, he supported James and the Roman Catholics. If we may
trust Defoe, there is no doubt that Care's early death was brought
on by bad habits. He is chiefly important to us because it was from
him that Defoe borrowed the general idea of the department in
The Review known as the proceedings of the Scandalous Club. '
Space is wanting for a full discussion of the evolution of
journalism between the fall of The Observator and the founding
of The Review. A few meagre newspapers sprang up to rival The
Gazette so soon as James had fled the kingdom, and, between 1690
and 1696, John Dunton, the eccentric bookseller, later famous for
1 Cf. as to these, post, chap. x.
## p. 5 (#29) ###############################################
Rival Newspapers. The Review 5
his Life and Errors and for his absurd political pamphlets,
published his Athenian Gazette, afterwards The Athenian Mercury,
as an organ for those curious in philosophical and recondite
matters. From Dunton, Defoe borrowed some of the topics dis-
cussed in the miscellaneous portion of his paper. In 1695, the
Licensing Act, which had for some years been administered with
moderation, was allowed to lapse, and several new journals were at
once begun, some of which were destined to have important careers.
Chief among these were The Flying Post, a triweekly whig organ,
edited by the Scot George Ridpath, for many years a bitter
opponent of Defoe, and the tory Post Boy, which was published
by Abel Roper, a special object of whig detestation, and, for some
time, edited by Abel Boyer, who, later, changed his politics. These
and The Post Man, as well as the printed newsletter of Ichabod
Dawks and the written newsletter of John Dyer, notorious for his
partisan mendacity, were primarily disseminators of news. They
were supplemented, in March 1702, by the first of the dailies, The
Daily Courant, which, like the weekly Corantos of eighty years
before, consisted of translations from foreign papers. It soon fell
into the hands of Samuel Buckley, a versatile man with whom Defoe
was often at odds. On 1 April 1702, the most important strictly
political organ of the whigs was begun by John Tutchin, a small
poet and pamphleteer, who had suffered under Jeffreys and was
still to endure persecution for his advanced liberal opinions. He
took L'Estrange's old title, The Observator, and continued the
dialogue form. Two years later, Tutchin's form and his extreme
partisanship were imitated by the famous non-juror and opponent
of the deists, Charles Leslie, whose short-lived Rehearsal became
the chief organ of the high churchmen. Meanwhile, a few months
before Leslie's paper appeared, Defoe, not without Harley's
,
connivance, had begun his Review as an organ of moderation,
ecclesiastical and political, and of broad commercial interests.
Although his satirical discussions of current topics may have given
useful hints to Steele and Addison, it seems clear that Defoe's
chief contribution to journalism at this period is to be found in
his abandonment of the dialogue form and of the partisan tone of
his predecessors and immediate contemporaries. He adopted a
straightforward style, cultivated moderation and aimed at accuracy,
because, more completely than any other contemporary journalist,
be made it his purpose to secure acquiescence rather than to
strengthen prejudice. But, in what follows, we must confine
ourselves to his own varied career.
## p. 6 (#30) ###############################################
6 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
Defoe is usually said to have been born in London in 1661, the
date being derived from a reference to his age made in the preface
to one of his tracts. That this is an error seems clear from his
marriage licence allegation. He must have been born in London,
the son of James Foe, a butcher of the parish of St Giles, Cripple-
gate, at the end of 1659 or early in 1660. His father came of
Northamptonshire stock; but the name of his mother's family has
not been ascertained. Beyond the fact that his parents were
presbyterians, who early set him apart for the ministry, we know
little concerning his childhood. When he was about fourteen, he
entered a dissenters’ school kept at Stoke Newington by Charles
Morton, a somewhat distinguished scholar and minister, and
he probably remained there three or four years, by which
time he had given up the idea of becoming a preacher. He has
left some account of his education, which appears to have been
practical and well adapted to the needs of his journalistic career,
since emphasis was laid on history, geography and politics, the
modern languages and proficiency in the vernacular.
Scarcely anything is known of his life between 1677 or 1678,
when he may be presumed to have left school, and January 1683/4,
the date of his marriage, when he was a merchant in Cornhill,
probably a wholesale dealer in hosiery. There is evidence from
his writings that, at one time, he held some commercial position in
Spain, and it is clear that his biographers have not collected all
the passages that tend to show his acquaintance with Italy,
southern Germany and France. As it is difficult to place any long
continued absence from England after his marriage, it seems
plausible to hold that he may have been sent to Spain as an
apprentice in the commission business and have taken the oppor-
tunity, when returning, to see more of Europe. His 'wander-years,'
if he had them, must be placed between 1678, the year of the
popish plot and the murder of Godfrey, and 1683, the year of the
repulse of the Turks from Vienna, since it is practically certain
that he was in London at each of these periods.
Not much more is known of his early life as a married man.
His wife, Mary Tuffley, who survived him, was of a well-to-do family,
bore him seven children and, from all we can gather, proved
a good helpmeet. That he soon left her to take some share in
Monmouth's rebellion seems highly probable; but that, between
1684 and 1688, he became an embryo sociologist and was engaged
in the systematic travelling about England that has been attributed
to him is very doubtful. How he escaped Jeffreys, whether he
a
## p. 7 (#31) ###############################################
Defoe in Business. Essay upon Projects 7
ever was a presbyterian minister at Tooting, what precisely he wrote
and published against James II—these and other similar matters
are still mysteries. It seems plain that he joined William's army
late in 1688; that he took great interest in the establishment of
the new government; that his standing in the city among his
fellow dissenters was outwardly high; and that he cherished literary
aspirations. His first definitely ascertained publication is a satire
in verse of 1691. In the following year he became a bankrupt,
with a deficit of about £17,000.
It is usual to attribute his failure to unbusinesslike habits, and
to pay little attention to the charges of fraud brought against him
later. As a matter of fact, this period of his life is so dark that
positive conclusions of any kind are rash. It would seem, however,
that he suffered unavoidable losses through the war with France,
that he was involved in too many kinds of enterprises, some of
them speculative, and that his partial success in paying off his
creditors warrants leniency toward him. Some friends appear to
have stood by him to the extent of offering him a situation in
Spain, which he could afford to reject because of better oppor-
tunities at home. Within four years, he was doing well as secretary
and manager of a tile factory near Tilbury. He also served as
accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty, and there is
no good reason to dispute his claim that he remained in fairly
prosperous circumstances until he was ruined, in 1703, by his
imprisonment for writing The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.
Shortly after his bankruptcy, Defoe, full of the speculative
spirit of the age, was engaged in composing his Essay upon
Projects, which did not appear until 1697. Of all his early
productions, this is much the most interesting to the general
reader, who is left wondering at the man's versatility and modernity,
particularly in matters relating to education, insurance and the
treatment of seamen. At the end of 1697, he plunged, on the
king's side, into the controversy with regard to the maintenance of
a standing army, and he continued to publish on the subject, though
some of his tracts have escaped his biographers. In 1698, he began
writing against occasional conformity in a manner which lost him
much favour with his fellow dissenters, and he also made an effective
contribution to the propaganda of the societies for the reformation
of manners. His duties as head of a tile factory and as govern-
ment accountant clearly did not occupy all his time, save for the
single year 1699, to which not one work by him is plausibly assigned.
It was not until the end of 1700, however, that out of the small
## p. 8 (#32) ###############################################
8
Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
poet and occasional pamphleteer was evolved a prolific professional
writer. The occasion was the will of Charles II of Spain and the
upsetting of William's plans for the partition of the Spanish
monarchy. Defoe supported his sovereign in several tracts, and
he pleaded for the return of a parliament uncontrolled by
moneyed interests. But it was a sprawling satire in favour of
the king, not homely tracts addressed to plain freeholders,
that gave the middle-aged journalist his first taste of literary
popularity.
This satire was The True-Born Englishman, which appeared
in January 1701, and, both in authorised and in pirated editions, had
an enormous sale. It was a reply to a poem by Tutchin, in which
that journalist had voiced the popular prejudice against the
foreign-born king. Defoe's vigorous verses turned the tables on
his own hybrid people, and were good journalism, whatever one
may think of them as poetry. They seem to have been the
occasion of his introduction to the king, an honour which, much to
the disgust of less favoured editors and pamphleteers, was not left
unchronicled in his writings. We know little of his relations with
William ; but, at the time of his arrest for The Shortest Way, it
was suspected that these had been close, and he himself dropped
hints which cause one to believe that occasionally he served
the king as an
an election agent much as, later, he served
Harley.
“The Author of The True-Born Englishman,' as Defoe for
many years delighted to style himself, did not rest on his laurels
as a writer during the short period before the death of his hero
William. He published numerous tracts in which he dealt with
occasional conformity, foreign affairs, particularly the inevitable
war with France, the misdeeds of stock-jobbers and the rights of
the people as opposed to the high-banded independence claimed
by tories in parliament. The most weighty of these pamphlets
is The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of
England, which is worthy of Somers; but we get a better idea of
the character of Defoe himself through his attitude in the affair of
the Kentish petitioners. There is something of the demagogue in
the famous Legion's Address, which he wrote on this occasion;
but, in his bold delivery of the document to Harley, the speaker,
there is something of the uncalculating love of liberty that marks
the true tribune of the people. Although he was probably still
under a cloud on account of his bankruptcy, and although
fellow dissenters detected treason in his utterances on occasional
## p. 9 (#33) ###############################################
The Shortest Way. Hymn to the Pillory 9
conformity, he was, doubtless, at the zenith of his reputation among
his contemporaries when he sat by the side of the Kentish worthies
at the banquet given them on their release from prison.
The two most important pamphlets of 1702 were both concerned
with ecclesiastical affairs—the acute New Test of the Church of
England's Loyalty and the notorious Shortest Way with the
Dissenters. The latter may have been designed both to serve the
whigs and to reassure those dissenters who had not liked or
understood Defoe's attitude on the now burning question of
occasional conformity. Whatever his purpose, he overshot the
mark by assuming the character of an intolerant 'high-flyer' and
by arguing for the suppression of dissent at all costs, no matter
how cruel the means. It was no time for irony, especially for irony
that demanded more power to read between the lines than either
dissenters or extreme churchmen possessed. The former were
alarmed; the latter were enraged when they discovered that they
had been hoaxed into accepting as the pure gospel of conformity
a tract written by a nonconformist for the purpose of reducing
ecclesiastical intolerance to an absurdity. In January 1703, the
tory Nottingham issued a warrant for Defoe's arrest, but he was
not apprehended until the latter part of May. Where he hid
himself is uncertain; but there is evidence in his own hand that
the prospect of a prison had completely unnerved him. After he
was lodged in Newgate, he managed to resist all attempts to worm
out of him whatever secrets of state he might possess. At
his trial in July, he was misled into pleading guilty, and he
received a sentence out of all proportion to his offence. The fine
and the imprisonment during the queen's pleasure were less terrible
in his eyes than the three public exposures in the pillory, and
he used all the means in his power, including a promise through
William Penn to make important revelations, in order to escape
the more degrading part of his punishment. His efforts proving
of no avail, he plucked up his courage and wrote against his
persecutors his spirited Hymn to the Pillory. When he was
pilloried at the end of July, the temper of the fickle populace had
changed, and, instead of being hooted and pelted, he was hailed as
a hero. Neither he nor the mob knew that the experience marked
a turning point in the career of one of the most variously, though
not nobly, gifted men England has ever produced. Before his
persecution, Defoe may have been somewhat shifty as a man of
affairs and, perhaps, as a writer; but, on the whole, he had been
courageous in facing disaster, and he had been more or less
## p. 10 (#34) ##############################################
10 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
consistent and high-minded in his attitude toward public matters.
After he was pilloried, the sense that he had been unjustly punished
rankled in him, and he soon became dependent upon the bounty of
Harley; to insure the continuance of that bounty, he sacrificed
some, at least, of his convictions; in revenge, he began to
betray his employer; and, in the end, he stood before the public
as the most discredited and mercenary journalist of the day.
Such was not the view of his early biographers, who found in him,
as we have seen, only a maligned patriot and man of genius;
but it seems impossible for the close student of Defoe's political
writings, despite the sympathy he must feel for a kindly, brilliant
and hardly used man, not to agree, in the main, with the contem-
poraries who denounced him.
It was held until recently that Defoe remained in Newgate
until August 1704, although more careful examination of The
Review would have led to a different conclusion Research in
other newspapers and the publication of his correspondence with
Harley have now made it clear that he was released, through
Harley's good offices, about 1 November 1703. This disposes of
the story that The Review was founded while its editor was in
prison, and it also absolves us from the necessity of supposing
that, when, in his volume on the great storm, Defoe described
devastations of which he had been an eye-witness, he was drawing
on his imagination. The fact that, in this matter and in not a few
others, research has tended to strengthen belief in his ability to
tell the truth about himself ought to make it less possible for
critics to treat him as totally untrustworthy. Such criticism has never
been based upon adequate psychological study of the man, and it
is not warranted by a minute examination even of his most
discreditable writings. Instead of becoming a shameless and
wholesale liar, Defoe, in all probability, developed into a consummate
casuist who was often his own chief dupe. His experience of
the pillory was ever before his eyes, and it seemed to him necessary
and even meritorious to avoid the pitfalls that lay in those days
before all journalists. For more than twenty years, he practised
every sort of subterfuge to preserve his anonymity, and he soon
grew sufficiently callous to write, presumably for pay, on all sides
of any given subject. Within the arena of journalism, he was a
treacherous mercenary who fought all comers with any weapon
and stratagem he could command Outside that arena, he was
a pious, philanthropical, fairly accurate and trustworthy man and
citizen.
## p. 11 (#35) ##############################################
The Review
II
Space fails us for a discussion of the pampblets and poems
of this period, the stream of which not even imprisonment or his
employment as a busy agent for Harley could check. Mention should
be made, however, of the two volumes of his collected writings-
the only collection made by himself—which appeared in 1703
and 1705, as well as of controversial pamphlets against the
eccentric John Asgill, the publicist Dr Davenant, the tory poli-
tician and promoter Sir Humphrey Mackworth and the fanatic
Charles Leslie. Only one tract of them all possesses permanent
interest, the famous Giving Alms no Charity, of November 1704,
and even that is probably less of an economic elassic than some
have thought it. Defoe's real achievement of the time was his
establishment of The Review, the importance of which as an
organ of political moderation has been already pointed out. It
was equally important as a model of straightforward journalistic
prose, and, in its department of miscellanea, its editorial corre-
spondence when Defoe was away from London and other features,
it probably exerted an influence out of proportion to its circulation,
which was never large. In its small four-paged numbers, in the
main triweekly, the student of contemporary France, of English
ecclesiastical history, of the union with Scotland, of the war of the
Spanish succession, of the movements of the Jacobites, of the trial of
Sacheverell, of British commerce and of manners and customs in
general finds abundant materials to his hand. Why its eight large
volumes and incomplete ninth supplementary volume (17 February
1704 to 11 June 1713) have never been reprinted from the unique
set in the British Museum it is hard to say. Even as the record of
one man's enterprise and pertinacity (Defoe wrote it practically
upaided and kept it going with extraordinary regularity during
the years he was serving as a government agent in Scotland), it
would be worthy of a place on our shelves-much more so when that
man is the author of Robinson Crusoe. Such republication would
not be equivalent to the erection of a monument of shame, since,
on the whole, the Defoe of The Review is liberal and consistent in
his politics and far-sighted in commercial and economic matters.
In a sense, too, a reissue of these rare volumes would be a
monument to the prescience of that enigmatical, underestimated
politician Robert Harley, who clearly perceived the political
importance of the press.
Not even the briefest description can be given of Defoe's horse-
back rides through England in 1704 and 1705 as an election agent for
Harley. Highhanded tories and creditors set on by his enemies tried
## p. 12 (#36) ##############################################
12 I
Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
to stop him; but he eluded them and continued both to send Harley
reports which prove him to have been a journalist of the first order,
and to make observations which stood him in good stead in his later
sociological and economic writings. He also found time to compose
and publish his dull political allegory The Consolidator and to
labour on his still more ponderous satire in verse Jure Divino,
which appeared the next year, 1706, in folio, adorned with a full-
wigged portrait of the self-complacent author. These, as well as his
impudent satire The Dyet of Poland, his excellent pamphlets
against religious intolerance in south Carolina, his indiscreet
support, in a tract called The Experiment, of the clerical impostor
Abraham Gill, his spirited answers to Lord Haversham, who had
taunted him with poverty and writing for hire, are all, more or less,
forgotten ; but, so long as the literature of the supernatural
finds favour, there will be interested readers of the one classic
production of this stage of his career, A True Relation of the
Apparition of one Mrs Veal, the next Day after her Death, to
one Mrs Bargrave at Canterbury, the 8th of September, 1705.
Even this convincingly realistic narrative is, thanks to the
researches of George A. Aitken, no longer to be credited, as Sir
Walter Scott and many others have thought, to Defoe the master
of verisimilitude in fiction. It is now seen to be the circumstantial
account of a ghost story current at the time, a product of Defoe's
genius for reporting, not a clever hoax designed to sell Drelincourt's
pious manual.
From the autumn of 1706 to the spring of 1710, Scotland is
the main scene of Defoe's activity, and Scottish affairs are the
main subject of his pen. His movements and whereabouts are not
always certain; but it is evident that none of his biographers has
realised how large a portion of his time he spent out of London
as the agent, first of Harley, then of Godolphin. He was in
Scotland from October 1706 to December 1707, forwarding the
union in every way in his power and, after that was secured,
labouring to allay popular discontent. He kept the press busy
with pamphlets, the full tale of which will doubtless never be
known. He wrote Harley long and interesting letters; he attended
parliamentary committees; he furnished statistics on matters of
trade; he wormed himself into the confidence of men in all positions
-in short, to use his own phrase, he played the part of a perfect
spy, developing his powers of duplicity at every turn. Few agents
have ever more thoroughly earned their hire, or have served more
niggardly masters than was Harley. When, at last, Defoe, almost
## p. 13 (#37) ##############################################
13
a
Defoe and Harley
reduced to penury, was allowed to return without the place in the
customs for which he hoped, he found his patron tottering to his fall.
He was graciously permitted to transfer his services to Godolphin
and, early in 1708, was sent back to Scotland. Of his labours for
his new chief, we have no full account; but there was probably no
decline in his faithfulness and efficiency. There was some decline
in his literary activity, for the main work of 1708—9 is his huge,
dull, but apparently accurate History of the Union, a volume
which shows that Defoe had not a little of the methodical patience
characteristic of latter-day historians, but, as yet, little of the skill
in book-making which he was afterwards conspicuously to display.
In the early months of 1710, Defoe, although he saw clearly
the folly of impeaching Sacheverell, made that noisy clergyman
the subject of several tracts. Later, he transferred his services to
Harley, not, however, without allowing himself free criticism of
the extreme tories. In the autumn, he was sent to Scotland to
watch the Jacobites, and it is a letter written to Harley at this time
which first causes us to suspect that he was betraying his employer.
Some years ago, William Lee attributed to Defoe, on strong
internal evidence, a satirical pamphlet of 1711, entitled Atalantis
Major; but no one would suspect, from the way in which Defoe refers
to his efforts to suppress this tract, that he was its unblushing author.
There is no absolute proof that he was; but, when, a little later, we
find him charged with writing against Harley in The Protestant
Post Boy, and, later still, encounter attacks upon that minister in
pamphlets full of the characteristics of Defoe's style, our faith in
the journalist's fidelity is greatly shaken.
Whether the inscrutable Harley, now earl of Oxford, had
entire faith in his agent does not appear.
Certain it is,
however, that, for the next two or three years, Defoe was con-
tinually making surreptitious visits to the prime minister and
sending him letters, which not infrequently contained requests
for money. That he was as well paid by Oxford as enemies
asserted may be doubted; but there is no doubt that his advice
was sought on many matters and that he was employed by out-
siders to secure the minister's countenance for various schemes.
Meanwhile, the stream of pamphlets flowed unabated, and the
tone of The Review was adroitly changed in favour of peace with
France. As a result, Defoe was despised and distrusted by whigs
and tories alike. The modern student, making allowance for the
factiousness of the times, for the undeveloped state of party
government, for Defoe's pecuniary embarrassments and his social
## p. 14 (#38) ##############################################
14 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
ostracism after the pillorying, finds it possible to extenuate his
conduct and is impelled to admire his dexterity and his resource-
fulness. There is ground, too, for maintaining that, in some
important respects, he was consistent, and a better counsellor
than Oxford deserved. He opposed the passage of the obnoxious
schism bill, and he seems never to have wavered in his support of
the Hanoverian succession.
As luck would have it, his second imprisonment was the direct
result of his activity against the Jacobites. During a visit to
Scotland in the autumn of 1712, he was much alarmed at the
progress Jacobitism seemed to be making, and he wrote several
tracts on the subject, in some of which he made an unfortunate
use of his favourite weapon, irony. Such a title as Reasons against
the Succession of the House of Hanover should have deceived no
one; but this tract and others furnished certain whigs with an
occasion for bringing an action against him for treason. Their
object was twofold—to crush Defoe and to besmirch Oxford, if the
latter took any overt measures to protect his unacknowledged
agent. The scheme was clever, but Defoe's measures to counteract
it-too intricate to be described here were cleverer. He would
doubtless have come off scotfree, had he not made the tactical
mistake of reflecting in The Review upon chief justice Parker.
This contempt of court led to his being confined, for a few days, in
the queen’s bench prison in May 1713. Immediately upon his
release, he began to edit a new trade journal Mercator, in the
interest of Bolingbroke's treaty of commerce, suffering The
Review to expire quietly. There is some, though, perhaps, not
sufficient, evidence to show that, at this time, bis services were
controlled by Bolingbroke rather than by Oxford; but, towards the
end of 1713, he was again in frequent communication with the
latter, through whose favour he secured a pardon under the great
seal for all past offences, thus effectually stopping, for the time, the
schemes of his whig enemies,
The year 1714 was a turning point for him, as well as for his
tory employers. He continued Mercator almost to the time of
>
1 Perhaps it may not be amiss to give a concrete illustration of Defoe's casuistry.
This is furnished by a comparison of the evasive language he used in his Appeal
(1715) with regard to his editorship of Mercator, and the frank language about his
share in that journal which he permitted himself to use in a short-lived trade paper of
1719, The Manufacturer, which has escaped his bibliographers but was attributed to
him by his contemporaries and is certainly his. Moreover, in the Appeal, he stated
categorically that he had never had any payment or reward for writing any part of
Mercator ; but in his letter to Oxford of 21 May 1714, he wrote that Arthur Moore,
6
## p. 15 (#39) ##############################################
Date of An Appeal to Honour and Justice 15
the queen's death. The paper, together with numerous pamphlets
of the period, including the four which form A General History
of Trade, gives abundant proof of the liberality of his com-
mercial views, although it scarcely justifies his modern admirers in
styling him the father of free trade. He also wrote voluminously
in opposition to the schism bill; and he entered into obscure
intrigues against his old enemy George Ridpath, which resulted in
his forming a connection with a rival Flying Post. In this, he
published a glowing eulogy of the new king and an indiscreet
attack upon one of the lords regent, which led to his indictment
for libel and, in the following year, to his trial and conviction. How
he escaped punishment will soon appear. Meanwhile, apparently
with Oxford's connivance, he published the first of the three parts
of his notorious apology for the administration of that statesman,
The Secret History of the White Staff. This was the signal for a
swarm of acrimonious whig tracts, which made much capital out
of Defoe's careless admissions with regard to his patron's intrigues
with the Scottish Jacobites. A second part, in which Bolingbroke
was treated more leniently, speedily followed, and then, at the end
of the year 1714, Defoe's health broke down-or else he deemed it
expedient to pose as an apoplectic who had not long to live.
A full discussion of this tangled matter would be tedious.
Lee, who did not know the date of publication of Defoe's Appeal
to Honour and Justice, tho' it be of his worst enemies, the
masterly account of the journalist's career which closed with
a pathetic note to the effect that he had been ill for six weeks
and was still in grave peril, seems, by assigning the tract to
January 1715, to have fixed the date of his hero's illness in
November and December 1714, thus managing to make the
bibliography of Defoe square not only with these dates but
with high conceptions of his probity. Unfortunately, it has been
discovered that the Appeal was published on 24 February 1715.
This brings the period of the illness into the early weeks of 1715,
that is, into a time when, according to Lee, Crossley and a con-
temporary of Defoe, the pamphleteer William Pittis, our journalist
was actively plying his trade. It does not follow that Defoe may
.
not have been out of health about this time—his situation, with
an expensive family, no fixed source of income, a worse than
6
who undertook to support the paper, had declined any consideration for it ever since
Lady Day last. ' There is little reason to doubt that Defoe was a poorly paid editor;
bat it is very certain that his relations with Mercator were much closer than he wished
readers of that periodical to believe.
## p. 16 (#40) ##############################################
16 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
doubtful reputation and an indictment for libel hanging over him,
might well have undermined an even stronger constitution than
his; but it does seem to be clear that, on Oxford's repudiating
the White Staff tracts, Defoe published several others designed to
throw dust round the whole controversy and to minimise his own
part in it, and that, these attempts failing, he wrote his Appeal,
upon which he expended all the resources of his genius for
casuistry, without succeeding in changing the opinions of his con-
temporaries one iota. It is a proof of his literary skill, however,
that this adroit and moving pamphlet has misled many a confiding
biographer and uninformed modern reader.
Belief in a serious breakdown of Defoe's health is rendered
almost ridiculous by an examination of his bibliography, certain
and plausible, for the year 1715. It contains at least thirty
pamphlets and two thick volumes, the first instalments of The
Family Instructor and of a History of the Wars of Charles XII
of Sweden.
