Authors: Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders (45 page)
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DANIEL DEFOE
was born Daniel Foe in London in 1660. (He assumed the more genteel “de” when he was thirty-five years old.) His father, a tallow chandler, sent him to Reverend Charles Morton’s academy to study for the ministry. But Defoe turned to trading and, later, to the brick-and-tile business. Both bankrupted him, and from then on he was plagued by debt.
It was perhaps inevitable that Defoe, an outspoken man, would become a political journalist. As a Puritan, he believed God had given him a mission to print the truth; that is, to proselytize on religion and politics, and in fact, he became a prolific pamphleteer satirizing the hypocricies of both church and state. Defoe admired William III, and his poem
The True-Born Englishman
(1701) won him the king’s friendship. But an ill-timed satire on High Church extremists, “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” published during Queen Anne’s reign, resulted in his being pilloried and imprisoned for seditious libel in 1703. Rescued by the Tory minister Robert Harley, whom he later served as writer and spy, Defoe went on to publish the
Review
(1704–13), one of London’s earliest and best miscellaneous journals.
At fifty-nine Defoe turned to fiction, completing
The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(1719), partly based on the saga of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor;
Moll Flanders
(1722);
Colonel Jack
(1722);
A Journal of the Plague Years
(1722); and
Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress
(1724).
Defoe is the father of the English novel, preceding both Fielding and Richardson. As James Joyce observed, Defoe is “the first English author to write without imitating or adapting foreign works, to create without literary models and to infuse into the creatures of his pen a truly national spirit, to devise for himself an artistic form which is perhaps without precedent….”
Defoe’s important novel
Robinson Crusoe
has been acknowledged by Samuel Johnson as one of the few books “written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers,” and it has been praised by Virginia Woolf as “a simplicity.” Daniel Defoe died “of a lethargy” on April 24, 1731, in Ropemaker’s Alley, London, and was buried along with such worthy Puritans as John Bunyan in Bunhill Fields.
FOOTNOTES
* The bell of St. Sepulchre’s, which tolls upon execution-day.
Return to text.
MOLL FLANDERS
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Moll Flanders
was first published in 1722
Bantam Classic edition published February 1989
Bantam Classic reissue / December 2006
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90313-3
v3.0