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Updated: May 23, 2025
But if Richardson had wisht to make our ancestors weep at the woes of Romeo and the sad trials of Juliet, he would have abandoned the autobiographic form characteristic of Defoe's method of approach, for the epistolary, in which the author of 'Pamela' felt himself more at ease; and he would have spared us none of the letters of Romeo to Juliet, and of Juliet to Romeo, and of Romeo to Mercutio, and of Juliet to her nurse.
Defoe's career was so full that both his chief biographers have found three large volumes to be necessary to do it justice. And yet it was not until near the end of that busy life, when the author was fifty-eight years old, feeling the approach of age and infirmity, and looking about for means to provide for a large family, that he added the writing of novels to his multifarious occupations.
Haywood deserves to be remembered if only because she supplied the one element missing in Defoe's masterpieces. Each writer in his day was considered paramount in his or her particular field. Not included in Boileau's Works until 1713.
He never opened a book, save a manual of husbandry or a ready reckoner; he could conceive of no reason for walking, unless it were the business of the farm. Nothing irritated him more than to see Desmond stretched at length with his nose in Mr. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, or a volume of Hakluyt's Voyages, or perhaps Mr. Oldys's Life of Sir Walter Raleigh.
Instances are Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" and Stevenson's "Kidnapped." But whether in the first or third person, the story holds us by the magic of adventure. The day before Christmas, in the year of our Lord 722.
If a popular tempest could have been allayed by brilliant argument, Defoe's papers ought to have done it. He was a manly antagonist, and did not imitate coarser pamphleteers in raking up scandals about the Doctor's private life at least not under his own name.
But Defoe's scenes and characters were of a nature familiar to his readers, and therefore easily realized. In the "Pilgrim's Progress," strange and unreal regions become well-known places, and moral qualities distinct human beings. Evangelist, who puts Christian on the way to the Wicked Gate; Pliable, who deserts him at the first difficulty; Help, who pulls him out of the Slough of Despond; Mr.
There was "Plutarch's Lives," in which he was deeply interested; also Defoe's "Essay on Projects." But to no one book was he more indebted than to Dr. Mather's "Essay to do Good." From this he derived hints and sentiments which had a beneficial influence upon his after life.
He had led, in fact, as adventurous a life as any of his own heroes, and had met quickly succeeding difficulties with equally ready and fertile ingenuity. For many of the incidents in Defoe's life we are indebted to himself. He had all the vaingloriousness of exuberant vitality, and was animated in the recital of his own adventures.
William Lee's remarkable discovery, fourteen years ago, of certain letters in Defoe's handwriting in the State Paper Office, it was generally believed that on the death of Queen Anne, the fall of the Tory Administration, and the complete discomfiture of Harley's trimming policy, the veteran pamphleteer and journalist, now fifty-three years of age, withdrew from political warfare, and spent the evening of his life in the composition of those works of fiction which have made his name immortal.
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