Writing About Defoe: What is a Critical Biography?

There is no life that can be recaptured wholly as it was. Which is to say that all biography is
ultimately fiction.

Bernard Malamud, Dubin’s Lives (1979)

. . . a great, a truly great liar, perhaps the greatest that ever lived.

William Minto. Daniel Defoe (1887)

Years ago, I agreed to write a critical biography of Defoe.1 As I made clear in the

prospectus I wrote for the publisher, the emphasis in my book was to be on the critical rather

than the biographical, since I was no biographer. I had not done specifically biographical

research on Defoe (except for reading his letters). I had, of course, read a number of Defoe

biographies, and I depended on them for the facts about his life.2 As I actually began in earnest to

work on the book, I wrote a review of the latest contribution to the catalogue of Defoe

biographies, Maximillian Novak’s (2001) massive Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life

and Ideas (and I quote Novak’s full title for reasons that will become apparent). I began my

review by quoting a wonderfully malicious review Martin Amis wrote thirty years ago of John

Cornwell’s biography, Coleridge: Poet and Revolutionary: 1772-1804, in which he declared that

critical biography of literary figures was a “dead genre” whose main aim seemed to be “to amuse

the over sixties.”3 Amis’ serious point was that biography and criticism are in fact distinct or

even mutually exclusive activities, since biography inevitably imposes narrative relationships in

which literary work tends to become largely the mirror of life events, or in which life and writing

are united by clear and necessarily causal links.4

1
 Amis certainly wasn’t thinking of a writer like Defoe when he offered this analysis, since

Defoe’s writing is inseparable from his eventful life. But for the most part, his writing seems

decisively linked to public and political rather than private events in his own life, about which in

his case relatively little is known. Students of Defoe have had to immerse themselves in the

social, political, and historical events of his lifetime, which are Defoe’s subject matter in all of

his writing, even to some extent the narratives from Robinson Crusoe (1719) onwards that he

wrote in the early 1720s. Defoe criticism is to that extent profoundly biographical but not,

strictly speaking, at all personal in its essence. So Novak’s subtitle from this perspective is

revealing: Defoe’s “life and ideas,” with the emphasis in practice falling not on the life but on the

ideas as they are articulated in his voluminous writings, with the “life” inferred most of the time

from the “ideas.” That is to say, so very little is actually known about Defoe’s intimate life. For

example, we know only the name of his wife; there is not a shred of other information about their

marriage except that they had eight children and that Defoe spent a good deal of time away from

home. Obviously, it is difficult to imagine that clear linkage of literary creation and private

experience where biography usually exists. Critical biography of the popular sort Amis was

thinking of, with its hunger for the unique motivations and the psychological origins of literary

production, what amuses the over-sixties crowd, may in Defoe’s case be almost impossible, or

may at the least require a recalculation or shall we say a recalibration of both terms – criticism

and biography.

As a prelude to my own solution to writing about Defoe, I want to move from the specific

problem of writing a critical biography of him to the larger issues that surround writing literary

biography in general. Writing the lives of authors, in English at least, has a long and honorable

tradition, stretching back to John Aubrey (1626-1697), the eccentric antiquarian whose jottings

2
(collected in the twentieth century as Brief Lives) about famous people, some of whom he knew,

some of them authors, are a rich mine of gossip and anecdotes but not fully biographical. More

substantial were Izaac Walton’s lives of his friends, the poets John Donne (1640) and George

Herbert (1670). Samuel Johnson’s life of his fellow writer, Richard Savage (1744) and the

biographical parts in his Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets,

now referred to as Lives of the Poets (1779 –1781) mark him as the most important of early

English literary biographers. Indeed, Johnson told his own most famous biographer, James

Boswell, that “the biographical part of literature” was what he loved most. 5 Biography in the

widest sense was for Johnson a resonantly instructive, a deeply moral literary genre. He offered

the opinion in one of his Rambler essays that “there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious

and faithful narrative would not be useful.” But Johnson also warned in this same essay that

biography once its subject is dead is a very difficult task: “the incidents which give excellence to

biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely

transmitted by tradition.”6 Considered in strictly biographical terms, the biographies of Johnson

that followed hard upon his death in 1784, notably James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson

(1791), are revealingly memorable because they were written by his friends, his intimates, from

recollections of him that were still fresh and vivid. Johnson’s own Lives of the Poets are

biographical in part, but they are remembered and read for their astute critical comments on the

poets’ works rather than for their biographical narratives, most of which tell us much more about

Johnson himself than about his subjects.

In most cases, the lives of writers – apart from their writings – tend to be unremarkable,

even dull, or if their lives are remarkable those interesting events they may have lived through

may not have a clear or definite relationship to their writing, as Amis warns us. We read

3
biographies of authors, after all, because we have read the writing produced by their subjects (or

perhaps because we have heard of their works and we are innocently curious about the lives of

famous people, and some writers nowadays are granted by popular media the aura of celebrity).

But without their works, literary figures are usually of no particular interest to readers, unless

they happen to have lived notable lives in addition to their writing lives. Benjamin Disraeli, for

instance, was a prominent politician and prime minister of Britain who also happened to be a

popular novelist (as well as a Jew). The most colorful or scandalous features of certain writers’s

lives – Hemingway’s depression, Balzac’s gourmandizing, Dickens’s love life, Dostoyevsky’s

gambling addiction, James’s ambiguous sexuality, Faulkner’s alcoholism, Swift’s tortured

relationships with women, Pope’s physical handicaps – acquire their fascination for readers

through their association with their literary accomplishments, although in some cases one might

argue that their works can be better understood by contemplating the pathologies out of which

(or in spite of which) they seem to have grown. Otherwise, if they had simply been gluttons or

alcoholics or invalids or mentally unstable, these individuals would be of no interest to anyone

except their friends and families. But it seems obvious that readers of literary biography are

drawn to the scandalous features of some writers’s lives by virtue of the contrast they offer

between such personal deformations and their literary achievements. Essentially gossip, accounts

of such weaknesses tend at best to humanize great writers, or at worst to diminish these titans

and bring them down to our level.

Or it may be that we live in the shadow of the Romantic myth of the artist, the poète

maudit, whose tortured and turbulent life is the source of his or her art so that the link between

life and art is of the essence. Thus a classic biography like Leslie Marchand’s Byron (1957) fills

three large volumes to narrate his subject’s short life, thirty-six years filled with notoriety and

4
scandal, a glamorous life that is intimately related to his art. Byron’s poetry and his celebrity and

notoriety were inseparable; one fed off the other. In any case, the popularity of literary

biographies that emphasize such matters in any writer, not just a poète maudit like Byron, seems

to be perennial and in some cases valid and informative. For example, William Butler Yeats’

esoteric spiritualism is crucial for reading much of his later verse and understanding his

symbolism, and Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality is now recognized as the key to his work. One

thinks of Coleridge’s drug addiction as an important part of his imaginative originality, and her

nearly autistic existence in Amherst, Massachusetts is the essential ground of Emily Dickinson’s

strange lyricism. Examples of this sort could be multiplied. But at its worst and most vulgar,

sensational literary biography feeds readers’s hunger for scandal, for the dirty little secrets and

essential dysfunctionality of the literary life as we like to imagine it is lived. In his meditation on

the biographical art of which he was a master in his lives of Joyce and Wilde, Richard Ellmann

put the best possible spin on this and made it a historical judgment. More than readers of the

past, he observed, we “want to see our great men at their worst as well as their best; we ask of

biographers the same candour that our novelists have taught us to accept from them.”7 A number

of years ago Joyce Carol Oates grew impatient with such an emphasis and labeled such literary

biography in its predictable excesses “pathography,” borrowing a term invented by Freud that

describes a study of the possible influence of disease on the life and work of an individual.

Of course, such biographical sensationalism depends heavily on extensive

documentation, on personal papers and first-hand evidence of pathology as recorded by family

and friends (or enemies), and Oates was thinking primarily of the biographies of writers within

living memory for whom plenty of such dirt exists. Such documentation varies and in general

diminishes as one goes back in time, naturally, and the textual remains of writers from the late

5
seventeenth through the early nineteenth century in Britain, for example, stretch from ample to

virtually non-existent. Consider, for example, the British eighteenth century’s greatest critical

biographer, Johnson, and think of the many biographies from Boswell’s on, especially Walter

Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson (1977), that have told his story in fascinating detail preserved in

Johnson’ voluminous correspondence and in the written accounts of his life by many of his

contemporaries. (To be sure, Johnson burned his diaries before he died, and was clearly fearful

of what biographers with such intimate knowledge would do.) Think, too, of the massive

biographies of Johnson’s great literary predecessors from the earlier eighteenth century, Maynard

Mack’s Alexander Pope: a Life (1985) and Irvin Ehrenpreis’s three-volume Swift: The Man, His

Works and the Age (1962-1983), both founded on the treasure trove of letters and documents

they and their contemporaries left behind. Critical biographies of well-documented figures like

these can truly overcome Martin Amis’ carping; one can see very clear relationships between the

life and the writing, especially in an age when writing was often “occasional,” written for

particular political or polemical purposes. But in the case of Johnson, the personality dramatized

by Boswell was so vivid that Johnson the writer was gradually obscured in ways that Pope’s and

Swift’s writing never was. What made Johnson famous in the first place and drew Boswell and

many others to him, his writing, was subordinated for posterity to the colorful personage who

stalks through The Life of Johnson.

Two revealing critical biographies of Johnson have attempted to rescue him for

biography that is properly critical. In Lawrence Lipking’s Samuel Johnson: The Life of an

Author (1998) and Robert DeMaria, Jr.’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1993), Johnson’s life and

work are presented as intertwined and interanimating areas of his experience. Indeed, both

Lipking and DeMaria go out of their way to subordinate Boswell’s Johnson, the semi-retired and

6
famous conversationalist he actually knew, to Johnson the writer who struggled to make a bare

living in a marginal trade, whose writing bears the marks of that struggle and of Johnson’s high

moral and intellectual ambitions. Here, for one example, is Lipking’s narrative about the young

Johnson’s ambitions as a scholar and writer; this story is a synthesis of what Johnson told

Boswell and others about his early life. Johnson may never have put it to himself in just this way

or of course in these words, but the slight fictionality is pardonable, since it is essential for

understanding Johnson’s development as a certain kind of writer. Lipking’s narrative is a

fictional construct that has a full measure of critical-biographical truth. “Even his years of

vegetating at home, a long stretch of vast and desultory reading in every field of knowledge,

assumed a retrospective purpose in this light: he had been becoming an author all along. . . . To

reach the goal would demand a long course of study and much self-sacrifice. But at least the

young writer knew what he had to do. He would become that ideal of a learned author.”8

De Maria, for his part, also keeps his eye steadily on Johnson the writer. Thus, he notes

the “extreme sparsity of evidence” about what some have speculated was Johnson’s hidden

private life, and his way out of this potentially scandalous and nebulous part of the life is

judicious in a specifically literary fashion: “Naturally Johnson’s private life affected his writing,

but the connections are rarely direct. Johnson’s awareness of genre, his mastery of

commonplaces, and everything that today might be called his ‘professionalism’ complicates the

relation between his private life and his life of writing.” Speculative pathographers, in Joyce

Carol Oates’s phrase, might draw a lesson from De Maria’s conclusion. “There is a personal

presence in Johnson’s writing, but he always concentrates on what it is proper, useful, and

truthful to say to a given audience in a certain genre of literature.”9 To be sure, this is a historical

7
as well as critical judgment, and not all authors can be said to possess Johnson’s literary integrity

or for that matter to inhabit his world of professionalism and generic precedents.

Both of these fine studies are indebted, and this is acknowledged by his former student,

DeMaria, to Paul Fussell’s Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (1971), whose title points to

the crucial issue that for him was even more urgent than for De Maria and Lipking: however

otherwise interesting or colorful it may be in its personal dimension, a writer’s essential, defining

life takes place in his or her writing. Fussell set out to reverse the direction of interest in Johnson

that still prevailed in the late 1960s, away from the tremendously colorful character Boswell had

propagated and toward the actualities of Johnson the author in his life as a writer: “for all his

attractiveness as a moral and religious hero, Johnson’s identity remains stubbornly that of a

writer.”10 For an author, writing is a way of life, and for a struggling professional author like

Johnson nothing less than a means of sustaining life in the most basic sense. To trace an author’s

life of writing is in the strictest sense to follow a special rhetorical, stylistic, or thematic

trajectory through that body of work, to mark continuities and divergences and developments

within the work itself over the span of a life. The writer’s life is his or her writing, and as often

as not the life strictly speaking (think of Joseph Conrad, struggling against writer’s block and

writing, striving not just to emulate the French and Russian masters he admired but to support his

family) is an obstacle to the writing. Contemporary philanthropy realizes this, and hence the

fellowships provided by foundations to support creative work, free from the distractions of life,

as it were. So biography and criticism in this kind of narrative work together; criticism is in fact

a form of biography, even if the writer’s oeuvre is not biographical in the usual sense of

responding to events in his personal or intimate life. In some cases, and Johnson’s is an extreme

8
example, the critical biographer’s task may be to rescue the work from the secondary place that

other biographers have given it as they highlight the scandalous or disgracefully exciting life.

To be sure, there are many exceptions to this rule. Byron is certainly one, and I’ve

mentioned a few other writers whose lives in the public and private world intersected

revealingly, for whom biography encompassed not the life as manifested in the history of the

writing but life and writing intertwined, the one feeding the other. Sometimes, the life almost

overwhelms the writing or is at least as important as the writing. I’ve just read Lyndall Gordon’s

Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2005), and in her extraordinary subject Gordon

finds a writer for whom life experiences combine dramatically with the production of literature.

As a proto-feminist narrative, one may say, Wollstonecraft’s private and public life is

inseparable from her work, and her writing in Gordon’s telling of her compelling story was

impelled by her experiences as a woman in a world dominated by male privilege and indeed by

outright oppression of women against which she rebelled and from which she endured much

suffering. Wollstonecraft’s struggles as a woman – the daughter of a feckless father, then a

schoolmistress, then a governess in Ireland, then a controversial author, then the lover of the

faithless American, Gilbert Imlay, who abandoned her, and then the wife of the philosopher,

William Godwin -- has a novelistic shape and documented fullness, an anticipation of heroines

like Jane Eyre with a tragic twist, since Wollstonecraft died in the agonizing aftermath of

childbirth. Wollstonecraft’s life is so affecting, so tragically moving, and she is such a splendid

heroine that Gordon’s narrative of her writing, eloquent and influential as it surely is, becomes

subordinate to her life as a woman and a radical feminist. Her life almost outdoes in its tragic

intensities the power of her writing, and that writing derives much of its force from her life.

9
 Defoe, in his very different way, also led an exciting life during extremely eventful times

for Great Britain, years full of personal trials and difficulties. As Paula Backscheider observes in

her definitive biography of Defoe, “few men seem to be better subjects for a biography than

Daniel Defoe.”11 And since the early nineteenth century, he has attracted a steady stream of eager

biographers. The broad outline of his extraordinary life is clear enough. As a young, newly-

married dissenting merchant, he seems to have taken part in the abortive rebellion in 1685 led by

Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, barely escaping with his life from the

bloody reprisals that followed. Some biographers think he may have fled like other rebels to

Holland, but no one knows for sure. In subsequent years, we know he was active as a wholesale

merchant and investor. He seems to have speculated unwisely, going bankrupt in 1692 for the

enormous sum of seventeen thousand pounds (approximately a million and three-quarter dollars

in current purchasing power) and landing briefly in debtors prison. Arrested and imprisoned in

1703 for writing the satiric pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), which the

government saw as incendiary, Defoe went bankrupt again, his prosperous brick and tile factory

failing while he languished in Newgate Prison. Released through the influence of the powerful

Tory politician, Robert Harley, who would become his employer for the next decade, Defoe

spent the next twenty years or so earning his living as a secret agent for the government and

propagandist for various politicians, a journalist and political writer, producing a veritable torrent

of writing in many genres that has no real quantitative equal in the history of English letters. In

1713, he landed in Newgate a second time for publishing more incendiary pamphlets whose

ironies the government did not find amusing. These facts are all clear and verifiable. In his

apologia pro vita sua, An Appeal to Honour and Justice, tho’ it be of his Worst Enemies (1714-

10
15), as well as in his letters to Harley and a few others, we have Defoe’s own account of some of

these tribulations and adventures.

But what survives of Defoe’s exciting life in the archive is essentially an external record,

a vivid and highlighted outline rather than a life seen steadily from within; often enough, the

record is Defoe’s self-interested, self-dramatizing, distorted, even at times mendacious, and

public version of his affairs. W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, his most recent editors and

bibliographers, sum things up nicely when they say that “much of the trouble in understanding

Defoe and consequently in fixing the canon of his writings, stems from the fact that the

personality he presents to us in his writings is completely a construction, allowing us to guess

only dimly at the ‘real’ Defoe.” Even though they have studied all of his work for years, for

them Defoe “courts exposure and yet hides his personality, so that we get no such feeling of him

as a person as we do with Swift or Pope.” 12

But that hasn’t stopped Defoe’s biographers from trying to evoke him, and perhaps it

shouldn’t, since even in his evasions Defoe is always in some elusive sense present in his works.

Biography, as its practitioners always emphasize, is a game worth the candle. But it is in

Defoe’s case very much a game. The two most extensive biographies of Defoe, Backscheider’s

and Novak’s, which taken together provide the definitive account of Defoe’s life, sometimes

resort to a form of imaginative reconstruction that very occasionally leads to a kind of padding.

For example, at the very beginning of her book Backscheider vividly evokes the London of the

plague year and the Great Fire of 1665 when Defoe was five years old: “Even before the Great

Fire, Daniel’s childhood was not placid. Only one year earlier the last great plague in London

had killed more than 97,000 people. Perhaps Daniel, like so many others, had been evacuated

then as well as during the Great Fire. Even a child of five might remember a time when shops

11
were shut, few people on the street, and open coffins and even bodies occasionally in plain

view.”13 This evocation is fair enough, and pretty plausible, although the object here is to fill in

the background for a reader who needs reminding of the events of those years. Novak

occasionally also goes in for this sort of colorful evocation, early on in his book noting that the

day Defoe married Mary Tuffley, January 1, 1684, was recorded by various contemporary

observers as part of an unusually cold winter when the Thames froze over and shopkeepers set

up booths on the river. Defoe was, Novak remarks, “fascinated by extraordinary natural

phenomena,” and “certainly he could hardly have resisted taking his young bride for a stroll

through the booths, however vain he may have considered many of the attractions of the fair.”14

This is a charming idea and probable enough but, obviously, an imaginative fiction, which

despite Novak’s “certainly” has no basis in the documentary record.

Biographies of even minor literary figures are popular in Britain, as James Atlas noticed

recently in a essay in The New York Times, where literary biography is a thriving genre for men

and women of letters the way it isn’t in the United States.15 But where ever it is written and

marketed (and there is a thriving trade all over the English-speaking world in biographies of all

sorts, not just literary biography16), popular biography – trade books rather than scholarly

volumes for specialists – aspires to speak to the general reader who really does need to be

reminded of those events that surround Defoe’s childhood and early manhood. But we really

have no way of linking Defoe to those events, except to say that he was alive when they

occurred. London disasters like the fire and the plague may well have affected the infant Daniel,

as Backscheider muses. The Thames was indeed frozen over during the winter he married his

wife, as Novak usefully reminds us, but that Defoe took a stroll among the booths with Mary is

simply a pleasant fancy for readers of what for the moment becomes a popular biography.

12
 In fact and in all fairness, such popularizing moments are rare in both Backscheider’s and

Novak’s scholarly and decidedly unpopular biographies. Consider in this regard a complex

psychological speculation from Novak’s biography when he comments upon a poem that Defoe

wrote while in prison after his arrest for writing The Shortest Way with the Dissenters – “More

Reformation: A Satyr upon Himself” (1703). Novak says that Defoe in this poem “transformed

himself into an icon: the author as transgressor who through that transgression would be better

equipped to hold up a mirror to society and reveal its sins” [p. 221] In his discussion of the poem

and its contexts – the misapprehension even by his supporters of the irony of The Shortest Way

with the Dissenters that landed him in Newgate prison – Novak extracts what he calls the poem’s

not entirely successful attempt to hide the anger and outrage that lay behind “Defoe’s attempt to

eat humble pie” [p. 202]. Perhaps necessarily because he is a biographer, Novak makes this

poem a rich site of emotional complexity, as Defoe tries to be humble but expresses conflicting

emotions. And indeed throughout his book, Novak performs similar feats of imaginative re-

construction. For example, his guiding justification for examining Defoe’s voluminous

journalism is that it prepared him for the phase of his career that posterity has treasured as a

writer of those extended pseudo-autobiographical narratives we now call novels. “Being a

spokesman for the Tory viewpoint may have forced him to see two sides to every argument, and

he may have discovered more of himself in the Tory and Whig opposition position than he might

have supposed possible. Certainly the need to present multiple views helped to shape him into a

masterful writer of fiction” [p.506]. Although it is a speculative moment, I see this as it as a

properly critical-biographical analysis, since Novak is making a purely literary-historical and

rhetorical rather than simply biographical point. He is tracing for the moment a history of

13
Defoe’s life of writing, how his textual production of one kind is linked to production of another

sort.

But look at the speculative tenses [“may” – twice] that dominate the sentences I’ve just

quoted. Novak is scrupulously tentative much of the time. As a biographer, he is necessarily

guessing, constructing (even inventing) an inner narrative of Defoe’s psycho-literary

development. In this case at least it’s a useful guess, a hint for future students of Defoe’s fiction

to consider carefully the journalism as part of the puzzle of how he came to construct his

narratives and imagine their narrators so convincingly. Novak is asking us to compare texts, and

the biographical/historical contexts he supplies in this chapter help us to approach literary-

historical and critical issues that they raise. For the most part, however, the biographical

speculative mode in Novak’s book slides away from this heuristic and specifically literary

engagement with Defoe’s texts and into what I would call an elided interrogative mode: “what

must Defoe have thought,” implicitly suppresses the question mark in such a formulation, and

thereby invites readers of biography, who have paid their money for just this sort of information,

to imagine precisely what Defoe must have been thinking or (better) feeling. For one key

example, in his second chapter on the young Defoe, Novak describes a manuscript he sent to his

future wife, Mary Tuffley, in 1683: “Historical Collections or Memoires of Passages & Stories

Collected from Severall Authors,” a selection of what Defoe called his “juvenal reading.” Most

of these are stories of heroic military triumphs, anecdotes about Alexander, Julius and Augustus

Caesar, and Scanderberg, an Albanian patriot. This emphasis on violent feats of strength and

military valor makes it clear, says Novak, that Defoe was backing away from his youthful plan to

enter the ministry: “that his talents needed to find an outlet in the world of action rather than in a

clergyman’s study” [p.38]. Now this may well have been so, but there is a desperate quality in

14
such speculations, an improvised and suspiciously dramatic narrative line that strikes me as less

than self-evident. Despite the paucity of hard information about Defoe and the recurring tentative

mode in the biographer’s narrative assertions, Novak insists that we imagine a pattern of

development that encompasses the whole life story; he finds in the matured Robinson Crusoe of

The Farther Adventures a mirror of Defoe who “could still strike a rigid and self-righteous

position when the occasion arose” but “had moved far from the prim and puritanical young man

who had recorded his favourite stories for his future wife” [p. 561].

“What Defoe’s childhood was like,” Novak remarks at the outset, “has to be left to the

imagination” [p.25]. So, too, large stretches of his early life as a merchant are simply blank, and

although you would never guess it from reading Novak (or Backscheider, for that matter), who

speculates freely and often about Defoe’s domestic affections, we know almost nothing about his

personal life. Defoe has been immensely attractive to biographers because his voluminous

writings allow them to speculate about the personality that must have been behind the various

and distinct voices that he projects in that astonishing river of writing, especially the fiction.17

Novak has succumbed (and who can blame him?) to this temptation to summon this particular

ghost. Novak’s exhaustive book is often enough a species of biographical fiction in which a

mysterious and elusive authorial presence is transformed into a familiar human subject. Too

much of it, I think, offers readers the thrill of an inside view of a body of work that is in a way all

surfaces and contradictions, a view that is persuasively if misleadingly based on Novak’s

unrivaled knowledge of Defoe’s works. For one extreme example, Novak finds that Captain

Singleton and Quaker William are almost “an imaginative projection” of Defoe’s “own divided

ego” [p. 583], and that in Singleton Defoe “found something of himself ,” his “tendency to

action, adventure, and even violence.” And he continues, “Defoe must have wondered [my

15
emphasis] what he would have been like if he had been spirited away from his parents and raised

without any care at all” [p. 584]. We are back to Amis’ remark that literary biography is meant

to amuse the over-sixties crowd, since this statement and others like it (“Surely Defoe’s wife,

Mary, was not far from his thoughts as he wrote about the ideal woman [in An Essay on

Projects]” [p. 118]) tell us more about Novak’s generous inventiveness and imaginative

involvement with his subject in the face of a blank personal record than about a Defoe we know

existed or had these particular thoughts. In spite of Novak’s nearly eight hundred pages of

perceptive and illuminating commentary on Defoe’s writings, the essential mystery surrounding

the man deepens.

So where did this leave the aspiring critical biographer like me? How, I asked myself

when I began writing my own book, can I sketch out a method and approach for writing such a

book about Defoe, a book that concentrates on the works themselves but strives to give them the

deep context without which most of them don’t make much sense. In part, it is a matter of

intellectual, political, and social history, a tracing of ideas and issues in Defoe’s time, and Novak

and other biographers, in so far as they are intellectual, social, and political historians (and

Novak is at his best I think as an intellectual historian), provide essential help here. But the

critical biographer needs in my view to try to resist the siren song of speculative biography, to

ground the narrative in the production of texts, and of course if the book is to be a literary-critical

biography rather than a historian’s view of Defoe it needs somehow to attend to literary

production, to writing as an activity with its own shape and history, to what Fussell called the life

of writing.

To gesture toward such a difficult act of critical attention, I want to return to works such

as “More Reformation” and to consider the volume in which Defoe reprinted it, A True

16
Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born English-man (2 vols, 1703-1705). As

these volumes make clear, Defoe’s self-conscious presentation or construction of himself as an

author is at the heart of his publishing history in the first tumultuous decade of the eighteenth

century. One text leads to another, as it were, and Defoe in the self-advertising title of these

collected volumes (an audacious and self-centered publishing project, by the way) is defined as

the author of a popular poem. His identity, his marketability as it were, lies in that authorship,

and his connection to that body of writing as he presents it is fragile, easily distorted not just by

misunderstanding but by piracy and mis-attribution, as well of course by rival writers and

polemical opponents. There is a narrative in Defoe’s life but its clearest and most intimately

observable tale is the story of his writing, of publication dates and collections like this, of self-

presentation, defense, and promotion in his 1714 An Appeal to Honour and Justice, and at length

in all these ways over the course of a number of years in the incredible Review (1704- 173),

which is a week-by-week record of Defoe’s opinions and is in the end as much about him and his

opinions, about what he has just or recently written, as it is about the various wars and

controversies that are its ostensible subject matter. Doubtless, like other men and women, Defoe

had affections and passions, and much of what his biographers present as his interior life clearly

took place in something like the story they tell. But the critical biographer (Lipking, Fussell, and

DeMaria are my models here) has a clear and steady narrative which is not half an invention nor

a good guess but follows rather the particular facts of his life as a writer in print and of course as

a purveyor of certain ideas in that writing. In the preface to A True Collection, he claims that he

has been forced to publish this collection to counter and to correct a pirated version of his works:

“a certain printer, who had forg’d a surruptitious [sic] collection of several tracts; in which he

had the face to put several things which I had no hand in, and vilely to dismember and mangle

17
those I had.” The collection is also designed, Defoe adds, to correct misunderstandings about

him and his work. I am not, he declares, an “incendiary.” “Of all the writers of this age, I have, I

am satisfied, the most industriously avoided writing with want of temper, and I appeal to what is

now publish’d, whether there is not rather a spirit of healing than of sedition runs through the

whole collection, one misunderstood article excepted.”

That misunderstood article is The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, the prime instance in

Defoe’s life of writing that highlights what a critical biography must in his peculiar case focus

on. One might say that from the appearance of that pamphlet Defoe is in nearly constant dialogue

with his enemies – to use a polite word for fierce polemics, attacks and counter attacks, sheer

verbal assaults. For nearly the rest of his writing life as an author, Defoe would return

obsessively to the misunderstandings that landed him not once but twice in jail and once in the

pillory, and his polemical journalism, notably the Review, would be to an important extent based

on a continuing complaint, a life-long grievance, that he was misunderstood and misrepresented

by both friends and enemies. Defoe’s unsatisfactory and fractious life is his great subject, his

advertisements for himself. In the early years of the Review, Defoe uses the term “the shortest

way” frequently enough to remind his audience of the malevolent stupidity of his foes and to

reinstate his own lingering grievance with inattentive readers. One wonders how many readers,

after a while, would have recognized the allusion. Defoe’s career as a writer, at least until the

Review ceases publication in 1713 is a matter of constant self-authentication (often enough self-

congratulation) through a constant process of correction, explication, elaboration, and insistent

self-attribution in which Defoe dramatizes himself as a certain kind of writer, as essentially a

writer.

18
 Here’s the opening paragraph of the preface to the opening volume of the Review, as

Defoe looks back at the origins of the paper, which “had its birth in tenebris,” which may mean

that he thought it up while in Newgate, and of its results: “I have pass’d through clouds of

clamour, cavil, raillery and objection, and have this satisfaction, that truth being the design; finis

coronat: I am never forward to value my own performances, let another man’s mouth praise thee,

said the wise man; but I cannot but own my self infinitely pleas’d, and more than satisfied; that

wise men read this paper with pleasure, own the just observations in it, and have voted it useful.”

The persona Defoe adopts in this retrospective preface to the first year’s Review is rather like that

of the New York Times in the face of tabloid scurrility: “a diligent enquiry after truth, and laying

before the world the naked prospect of fact, as it really is; for this paper is not design’d for so

trivial an occasion, as only bantering the nonsence of a few news-writers, tho’ that may come in

often enough by the way: But the matter of our account will be real history, and just

observation.” Over the years that the Review appears, Defoe is honest enough (or simply

fractious by temperament) to record a constant struggle with uncomprehending enemies and

nonsensical, contemptible “news-writers,” and he dramatizes himself with unflagging energy

over a very long haul as a lonely voice of accuracy, reason, and moderation (in about as

immoderate a manner as you can imagine). The ferocity of Defoe’s attacks creates and sustains a

polemical persona, Mr. Review, that we can say is the rhetorical emanation of Daniel Defoe.

And of course in many other works that accompany and follow that periodical Defoe

projects distinct personae and in the novels fully-realized characters who define themselves

rhetorically in similar fashion, by marking themselves as authors, by separating themselves

specifically as writers from the inferior competition by honesty and integrity, by an original kind

of accuracy, by a self-proclaimed fullness and singularity. We can think of that, especially in the

19
fiction, as a thematic achievement, the imagining of particular and distinct individuals or subjects

who are related inevitably to the biographical subject we call Daniel Defoe. But we can also in

the search for a properly critical-biographical method think of that process as essentially a

strategy whereby writing strictly speaking evokes a subject on the printed page, where the

insistence on singularity is a means of self-authorization or even of self-creation for that subject

in a proliferating publishing and printing scene where rival voices and opinions clamor for

attention. Defoe’s fictional characters are by these lights for the critical biographer usefully

thought of as textual allegories of Daniel Defoe the writer, although we can follow Novak to

some extent by conceding that a novelist inevitably inserts something of himself into fictional

characters.

In the end, I realize, some will say that my method, such as it is, simply ignores the

uncertain personal and emotional sources of Defoe’s writing to concentrate on its textual facts. I

would say, rather, in conclusion that the method I hope I have developed more fully in my new

book finds that for an author like Defoe the personal is nothing less than what is expressed or

performed in the textual, that we know Defoe through his writing, through the immense and

nearly life-long articulation of words upon words. And given what we do know about Defoe,

thanks to his many biographers, especially Backscheider and Novak, we are in position to see the

divergencies between the biographical subject, Daniel Defoe, and the textual entity that he

projected. Of Defoe one might say with Vladimir Nabokov that “the best part of a writer’s

biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”18 To borrow some

language from Michel Foucault in his essay, “What Is an Author?”, Defoe might well be the

original “author function,” for to know him through his purely textual manifestations is a matter

of grasping “the subject’s points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies.

20
. . . How, under what conditions, and in what forms, can something like a subject appear in the

order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it

assume, and by obeying what rules?”19 Without endorsing Foucault’s post-modern erasure of the

author, we can say that such positioning is what defines the Daniel Defoe we can know most

fully. The Defoe on offer in a properly critical biography is a writer, and to that extent a

somewhat diminished but still vital entity: “something like a subject.”

21
1
The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
2
James Sutherland, Defoe (London: Methuen, 1937); Frank Bastian, Defoe’s Early Life (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes

& Noble, 1981); Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,

1989); and Maximillian Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001)

are the major accounts of Defoe’s life, with Backscheider’s and Novak’s sharing the prize as his definitive biographers.
3
Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (New York: Talk Miramax Books, 2001), p.

175.
4
Biography and its problems are a frequent topic for biographers as they reflect, somewhat nervously and often enough

defensively, on their craft, which hovers as they tend to admit uneasily between fiction and documentary. For one

collection of such reflections from prominent American literary biographers, see The Literary Biography: Problems and

Solutions, ed. Dale Salwak (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1996). Most recently, Paula R. Backscheider has surveyed

these problems and offered her own experience as Defoe’s biographer in Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford

Univ. Press, 1999). Backscheider’s book can serve as an exemplary discussion of the larger issue of biography in

general, and the book features a comprehensive bibliography of the subject. She herself takes a somewhat self-

congratulatory view of what biography can do when she remarks that for her literary “work is part of a larger canvas,

that rich, nuanced portraits reveal quite varied degrees to which the work was the life” (p. xviii). My own approach,

even when there are ample documents and testimony, is more skeptical; the life of an author may be of great and indeed

inevitable interest, but for the critical biographer the writing is what we can hope to understand more or less fully and

usefully.
5
James Boswell, Life of Johnson (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 301.
6
The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume III, The Rambler, ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss

(New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), # 60, pp. 320, 323.
7
Richard Ellmann, Literary Biography: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 4 May

1971 (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 5.

8
Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), p. 61.
9
The Life of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 166.
10
Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. xii.
11
Daniel Defoe: His Life, p. xi.
12
The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven & London: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), p. 137. Pat Rogers notes that

“we have grown so accustomed to the testimonies of authors that [Defoe’s] anonymity comes to seem almost sinister.”

Rogers observes here as well that since he never mentions his novels in his correspondence, our ignorance of Defoe

extends from the externals of his biography to his methods as a writer. See The Text of Great Britain: Theme and
Design in Defoe’s Tour (Newark and London: Univ. of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1998), p. 61.
13
Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, p. 7.
14
Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions, p. 75. All further references to Novak’s book are in parentheses in the text.
15
“My Subject, Myself,” The New York Times, October 9, 2005. Atlas’s essay takes off from his finding in a

bookshop in London a new series called “Classic Biographies” edited by the noted English biographer, Richard

Holmes. Atlas observes that in Britain literary biography is “a vital form in its own right” the way it isn’t in America. In

Britain, poets, novelists, journalists, and professors (amateurs in the best sense) as well as biographical specialists like

Holmes or Claire Tomalin or Michael Holyrod write literary biographies, and these last three write substantial lives of

their subjects. In America, specialization tends to prevail, and the big literary biographies of Joyce by Richard Ellmann,

James by Leon Edel, Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate, or Melville by Hershel Parker are by scholars and

academic specialists. Atlas tends to give too much credit, I think, to the amateur and journalistic nature of the literary-

biographical tradition in England. There’s a biography of Defoe by an English journalist (Richard West, Daniel Defoe:

The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures [New York: Carroll and Graf, 1998]) that is trivial and superficial when

put next to Novak’s and Backscheider’s thoroughly academic and definitive biographies.
16
Backscheider begins her Reflections on Biography, p. xiii, with an amusing survey of biography’s tremendous

popularity.
17
Biographical attention to Defoe began with George Chalmers (1742-1825), an antiquarian who published a Life of

Defoe in 1785. Chalmers called Defoe “one of the ablest and most useful writers of our island.” He concentrated on

Defoe’s achievements as a “commercial writer . . . fairly entitled to stand in the foremost ranks among his

contemporaries” and as a “historian who . . . had few equals in the English language.” Chalmers’ “Life of Defoe,”

afterword to The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, London, 1804 [first published in 1785], p. 446, p. 454.)
18
Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 155. Nabokov makes the remark to an interviewer.
19
The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 118.

Bibliography

Amis, Martin. The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000. New York: Talk Miramax Books, 2001.

Atlas, James. “My Subject, Myself,” The New York Times, October 9, 2005.

Backscheider, Paula. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989.

Backscheider, Paula. Reflections on Biography. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999.

Bastian, Frank. Defoe’s Early Life. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1981.

Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965.

Chalmers, George. “Life of Defoe,” afterword to The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, London, 1804 [first

published in 1785].

De Maria, Robert, Jr. The Life of Samuel Johnson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

Ellmann, Richard. Literary Biography: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 4 May

1971. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1971.

Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

Furbank, P.N. and W.R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe. New Haven & London: Yale Univ. Press, 1988.

Fussell, Paul. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

Johnson, Samuel. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume III, The Rambler, ed. W.J. Bate and

Albrecht B. Strauss. New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1969.

Lipking, Lawrence, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard Univ.

Press, 1998.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973.

Novak, Maximillian. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001.

Richetti, John. The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

Rogers, Pat. The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour. Newark and London: Univ. of Delaware

Press and Associated University Presses, 1998.

Salwak, Dale, ed. The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1996.

Sutherland, James R. Defoe. London: Methuen, 1937.

West, Richard. Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures .New York: Carroll and Graf, 1998.