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Daniel DEFOE, Sr.

Male Abt 1661 - 1731  (~ 70 years)


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  • Name Daniel DEFOE 
    Suffix Sr. 
    Birth Abt 1661  London, England Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Christening No Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Gender Male 
    AFN FWM6-XW 
    Name Daniel FOE Sr. 
    Occupation Journalist, Novelist, Author, Merchant 
    Death 24 Apr 1731  London, England Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Burial Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, London, England Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Notes 
    • (1) "Daniel Defoe," Encyclopædia Brittanica, 2010, © 2010 Encyclopædia Brittanica, Inc.:

      Daniel Defoe, (b. 1660, London, Eng. - d. April 24, 1731, London), English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist, author of Robinson Crusoe (1719-22) and Moll Flanders (1722).

      Early life.

      Defoe's father, James Foe, was a hard-working and fairly prosperous tallow chandler (perhaps also, later, a butcher), of Flemish descent. By his middle 30s, Daniel was calling himself "Defoe," probably reviving a variant of what may have been the original family name. As a Nonconformist, or Dissenter, Foe could not send his son to the University of Oxford or to Cambridge; he sent him instead to the excellent academy at Newington Green kept by the Reverend Charles Morton. There Defoe received an education in many ways better, and certainly broader, than any he would have had at an English university. Morton was an admirable teacher, later becoming first vice president of Harvard College; and the clarity, simplicity, and ease of his style of writing - together with the Bible, the works of John Bunyan, and the pulpit oratory of the day - may have helped to form Defoe's own literary style.

      Although intended for the Presbyterian ministry, Defoe decided against this and by 1683 had set up as a merchant. He called trade his "beloved subject," and it was one of the abiding interests of his life. He dealt in many commodities, traveled widely at home and abroad, and became an acute and intelligent economic theorist, in many respects ahead of his time; but misfortune, in one form or another, dogged him continually. He wrote of himself:

      No man has tasted differing fortunes more,
      And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.

      It was true enough. In 1692, after prospering for a while, Defoe went bankrupt for £17,000. Opinions differ as to the cause of his collapse: on his own admission, Defoe was apt to indulge in rash speculations and projects; he may not always have been completely scrupulous, and he later characterized himself as one of those tradesmen who had "done things which their own principles condemned, which they are not ashamed to blush for." But undoubtedly the main reason for his bankruptcy was the loss that he sustained in insuring ships during the war with France - he was one of 19 "merchants insurers" ruined in 1692. In this matter Defoe may have been incautious, but he was not dishonourable, and he dealt fairly with his creditors (some of whom pursued him savagely), paying off all but £5,000 within 10 years. He suffered further severe losses in 1703, when his prosperous brick-and-tile works near Tilbury failed during his imprisonment for political offenses, and he did not actively engage in trade after this time.

      Soon after setting up in business, in 1684, Defoe married Mary Tuffley, the daughter of a well-to-do Dissenting merchant. Not much is known about her, and he mentions her little in his writings, but she seems to have been a loyal, capable, and devoted wife. She bore eight children, of whom six lived to maturity, and when Defoe died the couple had been married for 47 years.

      Mature life and works.

      With Defoe's interest in trade went an interest in politics. The first of many political pamphlets by him appeared in 1683. When the Roman Catholic James II ascended the throne in 1685, Defoe - as a staunch Dissenter and with characteristic impetuosity - joined the ill-fated rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth, managing to escape after the disastrous Battle of Sedgemoor. Three years later James had fled to France, and Defoe rode to welcome the army of William of Orange - "William, the Glorious, Great, and Good, and Kind," as Defoe was to call him. Throughout William III's reign, Defoe supported him loyally, becoming his leading pamphleteer. In 1701, in reply to attacks on the "foreign" king, Defoe published his vigorous and witty poem The True-Born Englishman, an enormously popular work that is still very readable and relevant in its exposure of the fallacies of racial prejudice. Defoe was clearly proud of this work, because he sometimes designated himself "Author of 'The True-Born Englishman'" in later works.

      Foreign politics also engaged Defoe's attention. Since the Treaty of Rijswijk (1697), it had become increasingly probable that what would, in effect, be a European war would break out as soon as the childless king of Spain died. In 1701 five gentlemen of Kent presented a petition, demanding greater defense preparations, to the House of Commons (then Tory-controlled) and were illegally imprisoned. Next morning Defoe, "guarded with about 16 gentlemen of quality," presented the speaker, Robert Harley, with his famous document "Legion's Memorial," which reminded the Commons in outspoken terms that "Englishmen are no more to be slaves to Parliaments than to a King." It was effective: the Kentishmen were released, and Defoe was feted by the citizens of London. It had been a courageous gesture and one of which Defoe was ever afterward proud, but it undoubtedly branded him in Tory eyes as a dangerous man who must be brought down.

      What did bring him down, only a year or so later, and consequently led to a new phase in his career, was a religious question - though it is difficult to separate religion from politics in this period. Both Dissenters and "Low Churchmen" were mainly Whigs, and the "highfliers" - the High-Church Tories - were determined to undermine this working alliance by stopping the practice of "occasional conformity" (by which Dissenters of flexible conscience could qualify for public office by occasionally taking the sacraments according to the established church). Pressure on the Dissenters increased when the Tories came to power, and violent attacks were made on them by such rabble-rousing extremists as Dr. Henry Sacheverell. In reply, Defoe wrote perhaps the most famous and skillful of all his pamphlets, "The Shortest-Way With The Dissenters" (1702), published anonymously. His method was ironic: to discredit the highfliers by writing as if from their viewpoint but reducing their arguments to absurdity. The pamphlet had a huge sale, but the irony blew up in Defoe's face: Dissenters and High Churchmen alike took it seriously, and - though for different reasons - were furious when the hoax was exposed. Defoe was prosecuted for seditious libel and was arrested in May 1703. The advertisement offering a reward for his capture gives the only extant personal description of Defoe - an unflattering one, which annoyed him considerably: "a middle-size spare man, about 40 years old, of a brown complexion, and dark-brown coloured hair, but wears a wig, a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth." Defoe was advised to plead guilty and rely on the court's mercy, but he received harsh treatment, and, in addition to being fined, was sentenced to stand three times in the pillory. It is likely that the prosecution was primarily political, an attempt to force him into betraying certain Whig leaders; but the attempt was evidently unsuccessful. Although miserably apprehensive of his punishment, Defoe had spirit enough, while awaiting his ordeal, to write the audacious "Hymn To The Pillory" (1703); and this helped to turn the occasion into something of a triumph, with the pillory garlanded, the mob drinking his health, and the poem on sale in the streets. In An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), he gave his own, self-justifying account of these events and of other controversies in his life as a writer.

      Triumph or not, Defoe was led back to Newgate, and there he remained while his Tilbury business collapsed and he became ever more desperately concerned for the welfare of his already numerous family. He appealed to Robert Harley, who, after many delays, finally secured his release - Harley's part of the bargain being to obtain Defoe's services as a pamphleteer and intelligence agent.

      Defoe certainly served his masters with zeal and energy, traveling extensively, writing reports, minutes of advice, and pamphlets. He paid several visits to Scotland, especially at the time of the Act of Union in 1707, keeping Harley closely in touch with public opinion. Some of Defoe's letters to Harley from this period have survived. These trips bore fruit in a different way two decades later: in 1724-26 the three volumes of Defoe's animated and informative Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain were published, in preparing which he drew on many of his earlier observations.

      Perhaps Defoe's most remarkable achievement during Queen Anne's reign, however, was his periodical, the Review. He wrote this serious, forceful, and long-lived paper practically single-handedly from 1704 to 1713. At first a weekly, it became a thrice-weekly publication in 1705, and Defoe continued to produce it even when, for short periods in 1713, his political enemies managed to have him imprisoned again on various pretexts. It was, effectively, the main government organ, its political line corresponding with that of the moderate Tories (though Defoe sometimes took an independent stand); but, in addition to politics as such, Defoe discussed current affairs in general, religion, trade, manners, morals, and so on, and his work undoubtedly had a considerable influence on the development of later essay periodicals (such as Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's The Tatler and The Spectator) and of the newspaper press.

      Later life and works.

      With George I's accession (1714), the Tories fell. The Whigs in their turn recognized Defoe's value, and he continued to write for the government of the day and to carry out intelligence work. At about this time, too (perhaps prompted by a severe illness), he wrote the best known and most popular of his many didactic works, The Family Instructor (1715). The writings so far mentioned, however, would not necessarily have procured literary immortality for Defoe; this he achieved when in 1719 he turned his talents to an extended work of prose fiction and (drawing partly on the memoirs of voyagers and castaways such as Alexander Selkirk) produced Robinson Crusoe. A German critic has called it a "world-book," a label justified not only by the enormous number of translations, imitations, and adaptations that have appeared but by the almost mythic power with which Defoe creates a hero and a situation with which every reader can in some sense identify.

      Here (as in his works of the remarkable year 1722, which saw the publication of Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, and Colonel Jack) Defoe displays his finest gift as a novelist - his insight into human nature. The men and women he writes about are all, it is true, placed in unusual circumstances; they are all, in one sense or another, solitaries; they all struggle, in their different ways, through a life that is a constant scene of jungle warfare; they all become, to some extent, obsessive. They are also ordinary human beings, however, and Defoe, writing always in the first person, enters into their minds and analyzes their motives. His novels are given verisimilitude by their matter-of-fact style and their vivid concreteness of detail; the latter may seem unselective, but it effectively helps to evoke a particular, circumscribed world. Their main defects are shapelessness, an overinsistent moralizing, occasional gaucheness, and naiveté. Defoe's range is narrow, but within that range he is a novelist of considerable power, and his plain, direct style, as in almost all of his writing, holds the reader's interest.

      In 1724 he published his last major work of fiction, Roxana, though in the closing years of his life, despite failing health, he remained active and enterprising as a writer.

      Assessment.

      A man of many talents and author of an extraordinary range and number of works, Defoe remains in many ways an enigmatic figure. A man who made many enemies, he has been accused of double-dealing, of dishonest or equivocal conduct, of venality. Certainly in politics he served in turn both Tory and Whig; he acted as a secret agent for the Tories and later served the Whigs by "infiltrating" extremist Tory journals and toning them down. But Defoe always claimed that the end justified the means, and a more sympathetic view may see him as what he always professed to be, an unswerving champion of moderation. At the age of 59 Defoe embarked on what was virtually a new career, producing in Robinson Crusoe the first of a remarkable series of novels and other fictional writings that resulted in his being called the father of the English novel.

      Defoe's last years were clouded by legal controversies over allegedly unpaid bonds dating back a generation, and it is thought that he died in hiding from his creditors. His character Moll Flanders, born in Newgate Prison, speaks of poverty as "a frightful spectre," and it is a theme of many of his books.

      Reginald P.C. Mutter
      Ed.

      (2) The inscription on the monument at Daniel DEFOE's grave at Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, London, England, reads as follows:

      DANIEL DE-FOE.
      BORN 1661.
      DIED 1731.
      AUTHOR OF
      ROBINSON CRUSOE.

      See the photograph of the monument at http://www.flickr.com/photos/fabiovenni/40402373/.

      (3) Novak, Maximillian E., Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions, New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc., 2001, pp. 20-21, 73, 92:

      Like so much in Defoe's life, the exact place and date of his birth are uncertain. The place was probably the London parish of St Giles Cripplegate and the date some time in 1660. The parish registers of St Giles Cripplegate list the birth of his two sisters in a distinct manner. In the list for 1657 there appears:

      Mary daught' of James Foe Tallowchandler & of Ailce Not christened but borne November 13.

      And for 1659:

      Elizab' daugt' of James Foe tallowchand' & of Ailce not Christe: borne June 19.

      By the time Defoe was born, the recorders had renamed to the custom of including only baptisms rather than births, and like his sisters, Defoe was not baptized. . . . At any rate, the birth of Elizabeth in June of 1659 makes some date in 1660, anywhere from late spring to the end of the year, a likely time for the birth of Daniel.

      Why were he and his sisters unbaptized? Since the family's religious sympathies were with the Presbyterians, what would cause them to take such a decision? Samuel Annesley, whom Defoe was to eulogize in a poem after his death, was the minister at St Giles Cripplegate church, and it has sometimes been thought that the Foe family attended his sermons after he was ejected from his place following the Restoration settlement. But Annesley allowed his children to be baptized. Defoe's biographer, Frank Bastian, has made the ingenious suggestion that Alice Foe may have been a Quaker. He rightly suggests how rare the entry 'not christened' was in the parish registers, and connects Defoe's interest in the Quakers with their attitudes toward baptism to arrive at what might seem like a plausible explanation.

      Bastian may be correct, but he provides no real evidence for his conjecture. . . .

      On the first day of January 1684 Daniel Foe married Mary Tuffley, the only daughter of John Tuffley and his wife, Joan, formerly Joan Rawlins. Tuflley was a cooper, and Defoe may have become acquainted with him and his family in connection with one of his major business activities - buying, selling, and importing wines. The event took place at St Botolph Aldgate, a parish church located just outside the 'bars' marking the limits of the old city of London and not very far from where Defoe's uncle, Henry Foe, had lived in his spacious house with six chimneys. They were married more than a year after Defoe had presented Mary with his gift of 'Historical Collections'. The manuscript at the Clark Library is bound in a white vellum embossed with green and gold. Whether this was in any way connected with the original binding is impossible to determine. Pages seem to have been added in the nineteenth century, but it would certainly have been the kind of decorative volume that an 'Adorer', such as Defoe professed himself to be, might have presented to the woman he wished to marry.

      In that work, Defoe quoted one wise man on the folly of marrying young, but Mary was just 20 and Daniel about 24, young for someone just beginning his career as a merchant. The equivalent of the modern marriage licence had been obtained on 28 December 1683 and appears in the Allegations for Marriage Licences issued by the Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Canterbury as follows:

      Daniel Foe, of St. Michaell, Cornehill, Lond., Merchant, Bachelor, about 24, & Mrs. Mary Tuffley, of St. Bottolph's, Aldgate, Lond., Spinster, about 20, with consent of her Father; alleged by Charles Lodwick, of St. Michaell's aforesaid; at St. Bottolph's aforesaid, St. Lawrence, Jewry, or St. Giles, Cripplegate, London. . . .
      Although the next few years were to bring some genuine pleasures, they were certainly mixed with the anxieties of family life and the uncertainties of business. But on that day in October, Defoe must have seen before him the prospect of a brilliant future. He was 29. His wife, Mary, had either just given birth to their second daughter, Maria, or was pregnant with her. On the other hand, Defoe's excitement over the successful invasion by William of Orange, now William III, ruling jointly with his wife, Queen Mary, would certainly have been tempered by his grief over the death of his first child. On 7 September 1688, he had buried Mary in the parish church of St Michael Cornhill. . . .

      So little is known of Defoe's children that his biographers tend to avoid the subject. James Sutherland, wonderful scholar that he was, limited himself to a discussion of the supposed illegitimacy of Benjamin Norton Defoe, who was probably Defoe's third child, concluding that Defoe's sins were probably 'not those of the flesh' and that the charge, coming from the unreliable Richard Savage, was doubtful. The little that we know is that Defoe had eight children in all: Mary, Maria, Hannah, Benjamin, Henrietta, Daniel, Margaret, and, finally, Sophia, in December 1701.

      (4) Johnston, George, History of Cecil County, Maryland [reprint], Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc., 1972, pp. 526-529:

      THE DEFOE FAMILY.

      Written expressly for the History of Cecil County by Mrs. Mary E. Ireland.

      [Note by compiler: The compiler has not verified the following information.]

      WHILE many perhaps can boast of celebrated ancestors, few can trace back to a more distinguished source than the Trimble's; they being lineal descendants of Elizabeth, niece of Daniel Defoe.

      From Elizabeth, who came from England in 1718, down to her relatives of the present day, all the family with a few exceptions have lived within two miles of Brick Meetinghouse, Cecil County, Maryland; all worshiped in the meetinghouse which gave the village its original name, and all, when called upon to pay the debt of nature, have been brought for interment to the burial-ground attached to this meetinghouse.

      In order to explain how it it was that Elizabeth, neice of Daniel Defoe, and ancestor of the Trimble family, happened to settle in this part of the New World, it will be necessary, to go back to the year 1705, when Daniel Defoe, on account of his persistent writing upon the exciting subjects of the times, was compelled to seek an asylum under the roof of his widowed sister, Elizabeth Maxwell, in the city of London.

      Three years before, he had sent forth his, "Shortest Way with Dissenters," for which he had suffered the pillory, fine, and imprisonment. It was on account of this article that the government offered £50 for the discovery of his hiding place. The proclamation as tradition informs us, was worded very nearly thus:

      "Whereas Daniel Defoe, alias De Fooe, is charged with writing a scandalous and seditious pamphlet, entitled the 'Shortest Way with Dissenters.' (He is a middled-sized, spare man, about forty years old, of brown complexion and dark brown colored hair, but wears a wig; a hook nose, sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his mouth; was born in London, and for many years was a hose-factor in Frogman's yard, Cornhill, and now is owner of the brick and pantile works near Tilbury Fort in Essex;) whoever shall discover the said Daniel Defoe to one of Her Majesty's Secretaries of State, or any of Her Majesty's justices' of the peace, so he may be apprehended, shall have a reward of ??50, which Her Majesty has ordered immediately to be paid upon such discovery."

      On his release he was again imprisoned for his political pamphlets, and through the influence of Lord Oxford, was again liberated; but in his sister's house, secure from his political and pecuniary assailants, he continued to send forth his barbed arrows with impunity. A small room in the rear of the building was fitted up for his private study, and it was there that his sister's only daughter (named for herself, Elizabeth), who was five years of age when her uncle came to live with them, received her education under his teaching; and it was there that " Robinson Crusoe" was written, one year after his niece had left her home and him. Perhaps the comparative isolation he endured suggested the wonderful narrative to his mind.

      The Defoe's were all members of the Society of Friends, and attended a meeting designated by the odd name of "Bull and Mouth," which was often mentioned in the early annals of the society.

      At eighteen, Elizabeth contracted a matrimonial engagement, which was peremptorily broken off by her mother. This caused an alienation from all her friends, and she privately left her home and embarked for America. Being without funds, she bargained with the captain to be sold on her arrival, to reimburse him for her passage. Accordingly, in the autumn of that year she, with a number of others, was offered for sale in Philadelphia, and Andrew Job, a resident of Nottingham, now in Cecil County, Maryland, happening to be in the city at the time, bought her for a term of years, and brought her to his home.

      In 1725 Elizabeth Maxwell became the wife of Thomas Job, son of Andrew, and now being happily settled, she wrote to her mother and uncle, giving them the first information of her whereabouts. As soon as possible a letter came from her uncle, stating that her mother was dead, and that, a large property, in addition to her mother's furniture, had been left to her by will, in case she should ever be found alive. An inventory of the goods sent accompanied the letter, and especial attention was solicited for the preservation of such articles as he had used in his private study, "as they had descended to the family from their Flemish ancestors, who sought refuge under the banner of Queen Elizabeth from the tyranny of Phillipe." He also apologized for the condition of two chairs, the wicker-seats of which he had worn out and replaced by wooden ones. One of these chairs is in the possession of James Trimble, and the other, which belonged to his brother Joseph, was after his death, presented by James to the Historical Society of Delaware, in Wilmington, because it was in that city that the last thirty years of the business part of Joseph Trimble's life was spent.

      All the letters received from her uncle were carefully preserved by Elizabeth until her death which occurred on the 7th of September, 1782, at the age of eighty-two. One of her grandsons, Daniel Defoe Job, living near her, was almost constantly in her society. She took delight in relating recollections of her early days; of how she used to bother her uncle, meddling with his papers, until he would expel her from his study.

      Daniel spoke of his grandmother as a little, old, yellow looking woman, passionately fond of flowers, and retaining her activity of mind and body until the close of her life.
    Person ID I18993  Frost, Gilchrist and Related Families
    Last Modified 26 Mar 2024 

    Father James FOE,   b. 1630, Etton, Northamptonshire, England Find all individuals with events at this locationd. Bef 25 Feb 1708, London, England Find all individuals with events at this location (Age < 78 years) 
    Mother Alice (FOE) 
    Family ID F8487  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

    Family Mary TUFFLEY,   b. Abt 1663, England Find all individuals with events at this locationd. 1732 (Age ~ 69 years) 
    License 28 Dec 1683  London, England Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Marriage 1 Jan 1684  St. Botolph Aldgate, London, England Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Children 
     1. Sophia FOE,   b. Dec 1701
     2. Daniel FOE, Jr.
     3. Henrietta FOE
     4. Margaret FOE
     5. Maria FOE
     6. Mary FOE   bur. 7 Sep 1688, St. Michael Cornhill, London, England Find all individuals with events at this location
     7. Benjamin FOE
     8. Hannah FOE
    Family ID F8489  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
    Last Modified 26 Mar 2024 

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