50 Facts About Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe was an English writer, trader, journalist, pamphleteer and spy.

Daniel Defoe is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which is claimed to be second only to the Bible in its number of translations.

Daniel Defoe has been seen as one of the earliest proponents of the English novel, and helped to popularise the form in Britain with others such as Aphra Behn and Samuel Richardson.

Daniel Defoe was a pioneer of business journalism and economic journalism.

Daniel Defoe Foe was probably born in Fore Street in the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, London.

Daniel Defoe later added the aristocratic-sounding "De" to his name, and on occasion made the false claim of descent from a family named De Beau Faux.

Daniel Defoe's father, James Foe, was a prosperous tallow chandler of probable Flemish descent, and a member of the Worshipful Company of Butchers.

Daniel Defoe was educated at the Rev James Fisher's boarding school in Pixham Lane in Dorking, Surrey.

Daniel Defoe's parents were Presbyterian dissenters, and around the age of 14, he was sent to Charles Morton's dissenting academy at Newington Green, then a village just north of London, where he is believed to have attended the Dissenting church there.

Daniel Defoe lived on Church Street, Stoke Newington, at what is nos.

Daniel Defoe entered the world of business as a general merchant, dealing at different times in hosiery, general woollen goods, and wine.

Daniel Defoe's ambitions were great and he was able to buy a country estate and a ship, though he was rarely out of debt.

In 1685, Daniel Defoe joined the ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion but gained a pardon, by which he escaped the Bloody Assizes of Judge George Jeffreys.

Queen Mary and her husband William III were jointly crowned in 1689, and Daniel Defoe became one of William's close allies and a secret agent.

Daniel Defoe died with little wealth and evidently embroiled in lawsuits with the royal treasury.

Daniel Defoe's first notable publication was An Essay Upon Projects, a series of proposals for social and economic improvement, published in 1697.

Daniel Defoe's most successful poem, The True-Born Englishman, defended William against xenophobic attacks from his political enemies in England, and English anti-immigration sentiments more generally.

Daniel Defoe was charged with seditious libel and found guilty in a trial at the Old Bailey in front of the notoriously sadistic judge Salathiel Lovell.

The truth of this story is questioned by most scholars, although John Robert Moore later said that "no man in England but Daniel Defoe ever stood in the pillory and later rose to eminence among his fellow men".

Daniel Defoe was amazed that a man as gifted as Harley left vital state papers lying in the open, and warned that he was almost inviting an unscrupulous clerk to commit treason; his warnings were fully justified by the William Gregg affair.

The Tories fell from power with the death of Queen Anne, but Daniel Defoe continued doing intelligence work for the Whig government, writing "Tory" pamphlets that undermined the Tory point of view.

In despair during his imprisonment for the seditious libel case, Daniel Defoe wrote to William Paterson, the London Scot and founder of the Bank of England and part instigator of the Darien scheme, who was in the confidence of Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, leading minister and spymaster in the English government.

Daniel Defoe immediately published The Review, which appeared weekly, then three times a week, written mostly by himself.

Daniel Defoe began his campaign in The Review and other pamphlets aimed at English opinion, claiming that it would end the threat from the north, gaining for the Treasury an "inexhaustible treasury of men", a valuable new market increasing the power of England.

Years later John Clerk of Penicuik, a leading Unionist, wrote in his memoirs that it was not known at the time that Daniel Defoe had been sent by Godolphin:.

Daniel Defoe was therefor a spy among us, but not known to be such, otherways the Mob of Edin.

Daniel Defoe was a Presbyterian who had suffered in England for his convictions, and as such he was accepted as an adviser to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and committees of the Parliament of Scotland.

Daniel Defoe told Harley that he was "privy to all their folly" but "Perfectly unsuspected as with corresponding with anybody in England".

Daniel Defoe was then able to influence the proposals that were put to Parliament and reported,.

Daniel Defoe took pains to give his history an air of objectivity by giving some space to arguments against the Union but always having the last word for himself.

Daniel Defoe disposed of the main Union opponent, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, by ignoring him.

In 1709, Daniel Defoe authored a rather lengthy book entitled The History of the Union of Great Britain, an Edinburgh publication printed by the Heirs of Anderson.

Daniel Defoe made no attempt to explain why the same Parliament of Scotland which was so vehement for its independence from 1703 to 1705 became so supine in 1706.

Daniel Defoe received very little reward from his paymasters and of course no recognition for his services by the government.

Daniel Defoe made use of his Scottish experience to write his Tour thro' the whole Island of Great Britain, published in 1726, where he admitted that the increase of trade and population in Scotland which he had predicted as a consequence of the Union was "not the case, but rather the contrary".

When Daniel Defoe visited in the mid-1720s, he claimed that the hostility towards his party was "because they were English and because of the Union, which they were almost universally exclaimed against".

The extent and particulars are widely contested concerning Daniel Defoe's writing in the period from the Tory fall in 1714 to the publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719.

From 1719 to 1724, Daniel Defoe published the novels for which he is famous.

Daniel Defoe published a number of books decrying the breakdown of the social order, such as The Great Law of Subordination Considered and Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business and works on the supernatural, like The Political History of the Devil, A System of Magick and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions.

Daniel Defoe argued that most of the British gentry was at one time or another inextricably linked with the institution of trade, either through personal experience, marriage or genealogy.

Not only did Daniel Defoe elevate individual British tradesmen to the level of gentleman, but he praised the entirety of British trade as a superior system to other systems of trade.

Trade, Daniel Defoe argues, is a much better catalyst for social and economic change than war.

Daniel Defoe argued that through the expansion of the British Empire and British mercantile influence, Britain would be able to "increase commerce at home" through job creations and increased consumption.

Daniel Defoe wrote in the work that increased consumption, by laws of supply and demand, increases production and in turn raises wages for the poor therefore lifting part of British society further out of poverty.

Daniel Defoe is finally content with his lot in life, separated from society, following a more genuine conversion experience.

Daniel Defoe went to school Newington Green with a friend named Caruso.

Also in 1722, Daniel Defoe wrote Moll Flanders, another first-person picaresque novel of the fall and eventual redemption, both material and spiritual, of a lone woman in 17th-century England.

Daniel Defoe was well known for his didacticism, with most of his works aiming to convey a message of some kind to the readers.

Daniel Defoe is known to have used at least 198 pen names.

Daniel Defoe was interred in Bunhill Fields, just outside the medieval boundaries of the City of London, in what is the Borough of Islington, where a monument was erected to his memory in 1870.