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Baker would not take his bond, and the marriage was not arranged till two years afterwards, when Defoe gave a bond for £500 payable at his death, engaging his house at Newington as security.
The multitudinous particulars of Crusoe's island are therefore exhibited concretely to the reader one by one, as Crusoe makes use of them successively in what he does. Setting as an Aid to Characterization.= But though in Defoe the element of setting is merged with the element of action, it is not brought into intimate relation with the element of character.
The civil wars are described by a young officer who took part in them, who gives a detailed account of his own opinions, his wardrobe, his horse, his lodgings. Lord Chatham quoted these memoirs as the true account of an eye-witness. From writing the life of a well known individual, Defoe had advanced to writing the life of a fictitious person placed amidst historical scenes.
The Queen also, he afterwards said, "was pleased particularly to inquire into his circumstances and family, and by Lord Treasurer Godolphin to send a considerable supply to his wife and family, and to send him to the prison money to pay his fine and the expenses of his discharge." On what condition was Defoe released?
Now here, in a single sentence, Defoe catches for us the whole soul and character of the situation.
p. 1. The second edition appeared between 1740 and 1750, after the death of Defoe. p. 2, l. 35. "Nicely" is here used in the stricter and more uncommon sense of "minutely." This use of words in a slightly different sense from their common modern significance will be noticed frequently; cf. p. 8, l. 17 "passionately," p. 18, l. 40 "refined," p. 31, l. 18 "particular." p. 3, l. 3.
Pattison say to Burke's "Reflections on the French Revolution," to Paine's "Common Sense," to the tracts written by Halifax and Defoe at the time of the Revolution? Neither thought nor action is his epigrammatic condemnation of Milton's political writings, but an appeal which stirs men to action is surely both.
With Defoe fiction gained verisimilitude, it ceased to deal with the incredible; it aimed at exhibiting, though in strange and memorable circumstances, the workings of the ordinary mind.
'Lord! to see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks strange. Defoe says that the English are 'the most churlish people alive' to foreigners, with the result that 'all men think an Englishman the devil. In the 17th and 18th centuries Scotland seems to have ranked as a foreign country, and the presence of Scots in London was much resented.
In fact, there are numerous legends of this kind; and it may be remembered how Defoe, in his "Tour through Great Britain," speaks of a certain camp called Barrow Hill, adding, "they say this was a Danish camp, and everything hereabout is attributed to the Danes, because of the neighbouring Daventry, which they suppose to be built by them.
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