‘had not time to lose’ as he told his story full of things: a saw, planks, a knife, ropes,
a raft, a cabin, how to grow crops. We experience these things; we see a footprint in
the sand; and with the arrival of Man Friday, we realize with Crusoe that Man does
not live by ship’s biscuit alone, and that it is Providence which has saved him.
I had alas! no divine knowledge; what I had received by the good instruction of my
father was then worn out by an uninterrupted series, for 8 years, of seafaring wickedness,
and a constant conversation with nothing but such as were like my self, wicked and
profane to the last degree: I do not remember that I had in all that time one thought that
so much as tended either to looking upwards toward God, or inwards towards a
reflection upon my own ways: but a certain stupidity of soul, without desire of good, or
co nscience of evil, had entirely overwhelmed me ....
This is not Augustine’s Confessions nor Pilgrim’s Progress, but the passage ends: ‘I
cried out,Lord be my help, for I am in great distress. This was the first prayer, if I may
call it so, that I had made for many years ...’. Although Crusoe stresses his wicked-
ness,his story is only fleetingly spiritual. Rather, he survives by his own effort, which
he sees as God’s guidance. He is a modern type: godfearing within reason, enterpris-
ing, self-reliant.Compared with Gulliver,his romance of adventure is naïve. Its
mythic quality has allowed it to be seen as a modern fable of various kinds, as by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. On its Protestant side, it compares with the
life story of John Newton, who went to sea as a boy, worked in the slave trade, and
had an evangelical conversion and became a minister. Newton, the author of
‘A mazing Grace’, had a great effect on the poet William Cowper (1731–1800).
Earlier, in The Shortest Way with Dissenters, Defoe had advocated the contrary of
his own views. This was misunderstood, and the Dissenting author put in prison
and the pillory. Thereafter he put his views and his irony in his back pocket. A
Whig, he worked underground for the Tory Lord Oxford, then wrote for the Whigs.
Having discovered the effect of autobiographical perspective on gullible readers, he
used the journalist’s commonplace detail to make believable the reactions of ordi-
nary people to extraordinary situations. His later romances of adventure intro-
duced the picaresqueinto English fiction. In his roguish fiction, opportunists
survive the bruises on their consciences. They are not studies in religious self-
deception: Providence helps those who help themselves. After profitable sexual
adventures in England and Virginia, a hard-up Moll Flanders helps herself to chris-
tening-presents and a child’s gold necklace, feels guilt, becomes a professional thief,
THE NOVEL 199picaresque Full of the
adventures of rogues,
episodic. A picaroor rogue is
the hero of the Spanish
novels Lazarillo de Tormes
(1553) and Aleman’s Guzman
de Alfarache(1599–1604).Daniel Defoe (1660–1731)Chief publications:
1700 The True-Born Englishman
1702 The Shortest Way with Dissenters
1706 The Apparition of Mrs Veal
1709 The History of the Union of Great Britain
1719 Robinson Crusoe
1720 Captain Singleton
1722 Moll Flanders; A Journal of the Plague Year; Colonel Jack
1725 Roxana
1726 Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain