Introduction

Summary

In 1706 Daniel Defoe was spying in Scotland. A year before the Union of England and Scotland, he wrote to his employer, Robert Harley, Queen Anne's Secretary of State, from Edinburgh: “I have faithfull Emissaries in Every Company And I Talk to Everybody in Their Own way . . . With the Glasgow Mutineers I am to be a fish Merchant, with the Aberdeen Men a woollen and with the Perth and western men a Linen Manufacturer, and still at the End of all Discourse the Union is the Essentiall and I am all to Every one that I may Gain some.” / Let us hope that Harley was amused as well as informed. 'I Talk to Everybody in Their Own way' - and everybody talks to me. This is good training for a writer of some sort, a dramatist perhaps and a journalist certainly. Not that Defoe was a novice: born in 1660, he was in his mid-forties, author of satirical poems and pamphlets including The True-Born Englishman and The Shortest Way with Dissenters (the latter landed him in jail). But a new - and safer - kind of writer was about to emerge. While the word 'novel' had been available throughout the seventeenth century to describe certain kinds of stories in print, especially in its later decades, the idea of 'the novelist' was about to leap into existence. The first date recorded by the OED of the word for an author of novels is 1728. The phenomenal success of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) had something to do with this.