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Updated: May 23, 2025
The 'Spectator' was a modified continuation of the 'Tatler', and the 'Tatler' was suggested by a portion of Defoe's 'Review'. The 'Spectator' belongs to the first days of a period when the people at large extended their reading power into departments of knowledge formerly unsought by them, and their favour was found generally to be more desirable than that of the most princely patron.
You can find it in Australia, in Canada, in America; it infects Scotland, and impresses Wales. It is everywhere in our trenches to-day. It is not clannish, or even national, it is essentially the lonely temper of a man independent to the verge of melancholy. An admirable French writer of to-day has said that the best handbook and guide to the English temper is Defoe's romance of Robinson Crusoe.
The seven books just mentioned are Defoe's contribution to the English novel. Let us consider the quality of this contribution first and then the means used to attain it. It may be said, "Oh! but the Amadis romances, and the Elizabethan novels, and the 'heroics' must have interested or they would not have been read." This looks plausible, but is a mistake.
It would take too long to give a sketch of the story, even if a summary could give any real estimate of its picturesque and vivid power. It is certainly a remarkable, if an offensive book. As with "Robinson Crusoe" and Defoe's other tales, we can hardly believe that we have not a real history before us. We feel that there is no reason why the events recorded should not have happened.
This is the triumph of a great genius, and it is a triumph to which no other writer has attained to the same degree. Other allegorists have pleased the fancy or gratified the understanding, but Bunyan occupies at once the imagination, the reason and the heart of his reader. Defoe's power of giving life to fictitious scenes and personages has not been surpassed by that of any other novelist.
Through his epicality he is Defoe's inferior, though much more than his equal in the range and implication of his work. A whole world seems to stir in each of his books; and, though it is a world altogether bent for the time being upon one thing, as the actual world never is, every individual in it seems alive and true to the fact.
A proclamation offering a reward for his discovery was advertised in the Gazette. The description of the fugitive is interesting; it is the only extant record of Defoe's personal appearance, except the portrait prefixed to his collected works, in which the mole is faithfully reproduced:
At last, however, after eight years of this partnership, during which Mist had no suspicion of Defoe's connexion with the Government, the secret somehow seems to have leaked out. Such at least is Mr. Lee's highly probable explanation of a murderous attack made by Mist upon his partner.
Charles Lamb says of The Complete English Tradesman that "such is the bent of the book to narrow and to degrade the heart, that if such maxims were as catching and infectious as those of a licentious cast, which happily is not the case, had I been living at that time, I certainly should have recommended to the grand jury of Middlesex, who presented The Fable of the Bees, to have presented this book of Defoe's in preference, as of a far more vile and debasing tendency.
Alexander Selkirk was the true original of Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe." He afterwards entered the Royal Navy as a lieutenant, but obtained no higher rank. Many of the men who had been suffering from scurvy were here landed and sheltered in tents, and by means of two or three goats which Selkirk caught for them each day, and the vegetables with which they were supplied, they soon recovered.
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