2 - Daniel Defoe (1660–1731): Journalism, myth and verisimilitude

Summary

I discover’d a Locker with Drawers in it, in one of which I found two or three Razors, and one Pair of large Sizzers, with some ten or a Dozen of good Knives and Forks; in another I found about Thirty six Pounds value in Money, some European Coin, some Brasil, some Pieces of Eight, Some Gold, some Silver.

I smil’d to my self at the Sight of this Money, O Drug! Said I aloud, what art thou good for . . . However, upon Second Thoughts, I took it away, . . . wrapping all this in a Piece of Canvas.

Daniel Defoe was responsible for one of the world's greatest myths: Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on a desert island for twenty-eight years. Published in 1719, The Life, and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe had gone through 196 English editions by the end of the nineteenth century, along with multiple translations into French, German, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, Hebrew, Armenian, Danish, Turkish, Hungarian, Bengali, Polish, Arabic, Estonian, Maltese, Coptic, Welsh, Persian and even Ancient Greek. Then there were the imitations, abridgements and adaptations – what in Germany and France was called the Robinsonade. August Kippenberg has referred to ‘Defoes allbekanntes Werk’, which has exerted ‘as extraordinary an influence on world literature as any book’. Yet this larger-than-life, transcontinental myth (in European coin) was created from the smallest, most ordinary bits of life, from the details pebbling about our shoes – scissors, knives and forks, a piece of canvas. Before he began his novelistic career, Defoe had been a journalist, merchant, economist and spy, and from these ongoing and intersecting careers he developed both a sweeping and a local sense of history, an attention to ‘human-interest’ stories, an impressive knowledge of geography and a taste for the realistic tiny detail.