Introducing Daniel Defoe
The Father of Modern Journalism
Daniel Defoe, (Daniel Debow, Daniel Foe, Daniel De-Foe, his name was spelt many different ways), belongs to that very select club of authors whose lives are as intriguing as their fiction. The novelist, pamphleteer, journalist, businessman and spy was a key player in the Act of Union between England and Scotland and often acted on the direct instructions of his King William III. Defoe made many enemies through his satire and swagger. In his life-time, he had spells in prison for sedition, in the pillory for his satire and on the Queen’s Bench for bankruptcy. He was the most widely read writer of his generation and his poem, ‘The True-born Englishman’, sold over 80,000 copies in his lifetime.
Early life
Daniel Foe was born around 1660 in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate: the son of James Foe, a prosperous tallow-chandler. He may well have been evacuated from London during the Great Plague of 1665. He may have seen the Great Fire of London in 1660. He was educated at Newington Green in a ‘dissenting academy' run by the Reverend Charles Morton, and toyed with the idea of becoming a minister in the Puritan church. Rather than enter the church he became a businessman, initially dealing in horses. By the time he was thirty-two, he had written his first political pamphlet, married, fought on the losing side at the Battle of Sedgemoor with the Duke of Monmouth, been declared bankrupt, through losses in marines insurance, and travelled with the king, William III, on a business trip to Liverpool.
By his forties, he had been a manager of the Royal Lottery and an importer of wine and tobacco, and had changed his surname to ‘Defoe’ - as it sounded more gentlemanly. During this decade he visited Scotland and other places in the kingdom on behalf of the King, and was employed as a government agent by Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister, and with Robert Harley, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Later years
In his fifties he served sentences in gaol, declared bankrupt for a second time and wrote Robinson Crusoe. A handful of novels followed soon later, including Moll Flanders and his Journal of the Plague Year. In his sixties his restless mind turned to subjects which included the breakdown of social order in England and whoredom - ‘A treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed’, and of course, the Tour. He died as a fugitive from an old creditor on 24th April 1731 and he is buried in the Non-Conformist cemetery of Bunhill Fields in London.
The Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
Defoe undertook seventeen ‘circuits’ or major journeys on horseback between 1722 and 1724, each one taking in a different part of the country, and his accounts were written up in the form of ‘letters’. Each letter described a circuit or journey, ‘giving a particular and diverting account of whatever is curious and worthy of observation.’ He added that the letters are ‘particularly fitted for the reading of such as a desire to travel over the island.’ The 700-page tome is both a guidebook and a commentary of thoughts and impressions.
The Tour is not a reliable guide in every detail. Defoe gets names wrong, his ‘facts’ are often based on informed guesses (for instance he claims Manchester had a population of 50,000 whereas it is more likely to have had only 10,000 citizens). Defoe applauded merchants and self-made men. He wrote sharply about the decline of market towns, the rise of tourist spas - for instance Tunbridge Wells - and of the increase of the Turnpike Roads.
The Tour was written by a man in his sixties. Defoe already had a quarter of a century of writing behind him, including the master works of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. It could be said that the Tour is the apogee of all his creative and reportage talents. His account is eminently readable, entertaining and surprising. He claimed to be a ‘neutral observer’ although he could not resist offering the weight of his opinions on a wide variety of subjects. The modern traveller and chronicler of the geographies of the British Isles, Nicholas Crane, has written of the Tour, ‘The journeys themselves were less the record of actual itineraries, than a convenient narrative spine on which to hang his encyclopaedic observations.’
Extraordinary Times
Daniel Defoe lived in extraordinary times. In the year of his probable birth, (he never wrote directly about himself and many precise details of his life are unrecorded), the monarchy was restored after an eleven-year interregnum. When he was five years old, in 1665, the Great Plague raged, killing at least a hundred thousand people, and the following year, the Great Fire destroyed much of London. Defoe fought on behalf of the Duke of Monmouth in a civil war against the king, James II. In 1707, the Act of Union formally sealed the unification of Scotland and England and the nation of Great Britain was about to emerge as a world power. His Britain was still very much an agricultural country, but one on the cusp of change. The society of which he wrote with affection, was on the brink of greatness, mercantilism, the new force of the land, and the navy about to become a world dominating force. In short he lived through vivid and exciting times of great social and economic transition.
Daniel Defoe and me
Three hundred years later, Great Britain is again living through ‘vivid and exciting times’. When I set out on this journey, in the late summer of 2020 between the spring and autumn lockdowns brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, I was entering what at times appeared to be a foreign land. Great change was afoot, with new ways of working and living. Large sections of the population were becoming marginalised, other sections becoming unimaginably rich. Some parts of society were fearful, others angry, others delighted with the progress their nation was making. Technical, financial and medical innovation were generally thought of with pride, and the nation’s past, with its Empire and a protagonist in the Atlantic slave trade, were being re-examined. Immigrants who for 60 years or so had swept the streets, driven the trains and picked the fruit, were being made to feel unwelcome and unloved. New right-wing politics, which blended populism with a lack of truth, dominated the day. Brexit might become ‘the greatest national suicide note in History’ (Gerald Kauffman MP), or the triumph of a small state of declining influence. All told, Britain was in another state of flux.
Defoe and I share little other than our age when we set out on our respective Tours. I did not have a horse on which to travel I had, instead, a bicycle. As with Defoe, I was to find many roads in a pitiful state. We both found far too many pot-holes and poor surfaces for our modes of travelling. Whereas Defoe championed the new turnpike roads, I set out to champion the National Cycle Network (NCN).
To read the Introduction to my tour, click here
To read the journal of Day 1, click here