Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/294

 ing Post,’ a tri-weekly journal, in September 1718, and wrote for it till June 1720. In October 1719 he started the ‘Daily Post,’ for which he wrote till April 1725; and, on dropping his connection with the ‘Whitehall Evening Post,’ he began to contribute weekly articles to ‘Applebee's Journal,’ in which he wrote regularly till 12 March 1726. From the date of his second period of employment under Harley, Defoe became anonymous. The reason clearly was that he was from that time regarded as a renegade. His connection with Mist forced him to pass himself off as one of the Jacobites, ‘a generation who, I profess,’ as he says in his letter in the State Paper Office of 26 April 1718, ‘my very soul abhors.’ He had, therefore, to abandon his claims to integrity, and submit to pass for a traitor. No man has a right to make such a sacrifice; and if not precisely a spy, Mist and Mist's friends would hardly draw the distinction.

The political questions were now less absorbing than in the earlier period, and Defoe's writings were in great part of a non-political character. He was an adept in all the arts of journalism, and with amazing fertility wrote upon every topic likely to attract public curiosity. His power had already been shown in comparative trifles, such as the ‘History of the Great Storm,’ ‘Mrs. Veal's Ghost,’ and a curious imaginary history of an earthquake in St. Vincent, contributed to ‘Mist's Journal’ in 1718. On 25 April 1719 he published the first volume of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ founded on the four years' residence of Alexander Selkirk in the island of Juan Fernandez. Captain Rogers, who released Selkirk, had told the story, which was also told by Steele in the ‘Englishman,’ from Selkirk's own account. Defoe sold his book to William Taylor, a publisher, who made a large sum by it. A fourth edition appeared on 8 Aug. 1719, and was immediately succeeded by a second volume. In 1720 appeared a sequel called ‘Serious Reflections during the life … of Robinson Crusoe.’ The extraordinary success of the book was proved by piracies, by numerous imitations (a tenth, according to Mr. Lee, i. 300, appeared in 1727), and by translations into many languages. Gildon, who attacked it in the ‘Life and strange surprizing Adventures of Mr. D—— De F——, of London, Hosier’ (1719), says that every old woman bought it and left it as a legacy with the ‘Pilgrim's Progress,’ the ‘Practice of Piety,’ and ‘God's Revenge against Murther.’ Swift had it in his mind when writing ‘Gulliver's Travels.’ An absurd story, preserved by T. Warton, is given in Sir Henry Ellis's ‘Letters of Eminent Literary Men’ (Camden Soc. 1843), to the effect that ‘Robinson Crusoe’ was written by Lord Oxford in the Tower. It needs no confutation. Defoe has also been accused of appropriating Selkirk's (non-existent) papers (see WILSON, iii. 456–8). Defoe published the ‘Anatomy of Exchange Alley,’ an attack upon stockjobbers, in the interval between the first and second volumes of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and the ‘Chimera,’ an attack upon Law's system, in January 1720. He was much occupied in the following year with the various developments of the South Sea mania. But he tried to work the vein opened by ‘Robinson Crusoe.’ His unrivalled skill in mystification has made it difficult to distinguish the purely fictitious from the authentic part of his admitted narratives, and in some cases to separate genuine histories from stories composed by him. In October 1719 he published ‘The Dumb Philosopher,’ an account of one Dickory Cronke, who acquired the power of speech just before his death, and prophesied as to the state of Europe; and in December 1719 ‘The King of the Pirates,’ an ostensible autobiography of Captain Avery, a well-known pirate of the time. In 1720 he published two pamphlets about another deaf and dumb soothsayer, Duncan Campbell [q. v.] The first included a story of a ghost which appeared at Launceston in Cornwall. A manuscript transcript of this came into the hands of C. S. Gilbert, who published it in his ‘History of Cornwall’ as an original document; and it has been used in Mrs. Bray's ‘Trelawney of Trelawney’ and Hawker's ‘Footprints of Former Men.’ Between 1722 and 1725 Defoe wrote various accounts of the criminals, Cartouche, the ‘Highland Rogue’ (Rob Roy), Jack Sheppard, and Jonathan Wild. He ingeniously induced Sheppard, when actually under the gallows, to give a paper to a friend, apparently Defoe himself, with which the published pamphlet professed to be identical (, i. 387). In other books he dispensed with an historical basis. The adventures of ‘Captain Singleton,’ in which Avery again appears, was published in 1720. ‘Moll Flanders’ and ‘Colonel Jacque’ both appeared in 1722, and ‘Roxana’ in 1724. Mr. Lee attributes a moral purpose to Defoe in these accounts of rogues and harlots, and it must be admitted that Defoe tacks some kind of moral to stories which show no great delicacy of moral feeling, and the publication of which is easily explicable by lower motives. One of his most remarkable performances, the ‘Journal of the Plague Year,’ appeared in 1722. It was suggested by the dread of the plague which had recently broken out in