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Updated: May 23, 2025
In March, Defoe published his Family Instructor, a book of 450 pages; in July, his History, by a Scots Gentleman in the Swedish Service, of the Wars of Charles XII. Formidable as the list of these works seems, it does not represent more than Defoe's average rate of production for thirty years of his life.
The tragedy of that fruit-gathering is described with extraordinary grimness and force in the abrupt language of verse 3. It is like Defoe's picture of the dead-cart in the plague of London. Such is ever the end of departing from God songs palsied into silence or turned into wailing when the judgment bursts; death stalking supreme, and silence brooding over all.
Though, doubtless, the idea of its inception was derived from journals like Defoe's Review and Leslie's Rehearsal, which had won success, its intimate connection with the party leadership was a novel element; and it may therein claim a special relation to the official periodicals of a later generation.
"War does bring out heroism. So does pestilence and famine. Read Defoe's account of the Plague of London. How men and women left their safe homes, to serve in the pest-houses, knowing that sooner or later they were doomed.
Bear this remonstrance of Defoe's in mind, and though it is the fashion of the day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and to contemn, the noble band of Covenanters, though the bitter laugh at their old-world religious views, the curl of the lip at their merits, and the chilling silence on their bravery and their determination, are but too rife through all society, be charitable to what was evil and honest to what was good about the Pentland insurgents, who fought for life and liberty, for country and religion, on the 28th of November 1666, now just two hundred years ago.
Once assured that Defoe did not withdraw from newspaper-writing in 1715, he ransacked the journals of the period for traces of his hand and contemporary allusions to his labours. A rich harvest rewarded Mr. Lee's zeal. Defoe's individuality is so marked that it thrusts itself through every disguise.
The agitation for the higher education of women on equal terms with men, particularly in the liberal arts, went back to the days of Defoe's "Essay on Projects" in which he included a section on "an Academy for Women." It had echoed from his time down through the eighteenth century until 1791 when Mary Wollstonecraft published her systematic treatise, "A Vindication of the Rights of Women."
The notion that the shops of the past age were plain, while those of the present are gaudy, and that the tradesmen of a past age carried on all their business in a quiet way and with little expense, is as strongly impressed on the minds of the present generation, as it is here seen to have been on those of Defoe's contemporaries, a hundred and twenty years ago, although it is quite impossible that the notion can be just in both cases.
Partition the Spanish dominions in Europe between France and Germany, and the West Indies between England and Holland such was Defoe's idea of a proper basis of peace. But while Defoe expounded in various forms the conditions of a good peace, he devoted his main energy to proving that peace under some conditions was a necessity.
The world has decided to consider it Defoe's masterpiece, and to neglect all else that he wrote for it. Nor can the world be blamed. The deliberate and dangerous lewdness of Defoe is one of the most deplorable things in letters.
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