Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (4 page)

His own projects were inventive but unlucky. A scheme to harvest musk (from the anuses of cats) was unproductive and he was arrested for debts in 1692, of the huge sum of £17,000. He may also at this period have been speculating in wine and spirits from the Iberian peninsula. There was a brick and tile factory at Tilbury he was connected with, and a printing works in London. Defoe was, one may confidently assert, an energetic and resourceful entrepreneur or, as he would have put it, ‘the complete English tradesman’. But he was either unlucky or too reckless.

There was also an element of recklessness in his publications. His first major success as an author was with the long 1703 poem, a satirical polemic, ‘The Trueborn Englishman’. Written in sinewy couplets it contains such provocative lines as:

WHEREVER God erects a house of prayer,

The Devil always builds a chapel there:

And ’twill be found, upon examination,

The latter has the largest congregation,

The poem ends with the Dissenters’ proud motto: ‘’Tis pers’nal virtue only makes us great’. It was not a good period to be of that disliked party and raise your voice: in 1702 persecution rose to the level of mob violence. Defoe, ever pugnacious, hit back with the mock ironic ‘The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters’. It is another pamphlet, delivered in the spoof voice of a man of (Anglican) reason (that is to say, arrant prejudice), driven to such final solutions as:

Alas, the Church of England! What with Popery on one hand, and Schismatics on the other, how has She been crucified between two thieves. NOW, LET US CRUCIFY THE THIEVES!

It is very funny – but the authorities did not find it so. Defoe was prosecuted for his ‘diabolical and seditious libel’, which led to his being fined, jailed and pilloried in 1703. As legend has it, he was pelted not with rotten fruit or stones but flowers by a sympathetic crowd and was released early from the six-month sentence in Newgate (an incarceration which supplied, years later, the opening chapters to
Moll Flanders
).

It was at this time that Defoe formed a relationship with the politician Robert Harley, for whom he became, effectively, a secret agent, or cat’s paw. Harley, an arch-Machiavellian, used Defoe’s pamphleteering skills in the interests of the government. Secret commissions were passed on in coffee houses and Defoe, often anonymously, would fire off the necessary articles the next day. Both men – the politician and the journalist – took a delight in ‘secrecy’. Defoe’s hectic stream of publication over the next fifteen years is difficult to follow – scholars are still in dispute about what he wrote and did not write. One thing is certain: he was the most influential journalist in the country, and was routinely accused of being the most mercenary. He lent the power of his pen to both Whigs (with whom his heart was) and Tories, as served his interest best at that particular juncture.

How then did Daniel Defoe graduate into writing fiction, in his sixtieth year? After the publication of his first effort in the field,
Robinson Crusoe
, the reason for continuing in this new line is simple enough. He had – as unexpectedly to him as to his publisher – hit a vein of literary gold. Nothing wonderful was expected of the first edition, for which he received a modest £10. But
Crusoe
went through edition after edition in its first year, 1719. As a contemporary, Charles Gideon, grumbled, ‘Not an old Woman that can go the Price of it, but buys the Life and Adventures.’ One of Defoe’s favourite slogans was that God gave him brains that he might have bread – and that he might fall back on those brains in any emergency. A principal event turning Defoe the pamphleteer into Defoe the novelist was, one may surmise, the downfall of Robert Harley, in 1714. Once England’s Cardinal Richelieu he found himself committed to the Tower on charges of high crimes and misdemeanours – politically he was finished.

Defoe had, at this point in his life, turned his coat and written so many lies that fiction (‘lies like truth’, as Leslie Stephen described
Crusoe
) was second nature to him. Many of his squibs, such as the immensely popular ‘A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal’ (1706), read like short stories. Mrs V., we are told (Defoe, we are to understand has researched the matter thoroughly), ‘was a maiden gentlewoman of about thirty years of age, and for some years past had been troubled with fits’. On the eighth of September, one thousand seven hundred and five (Defoe is owlishly pedantic about the details): ‘she was sitting alone in the forenoon, thinking over her unfortunate life, and arguing herself into a due resignation to Providence,’ when she was visited by an old friend who wasn’t there. It presents itself as a believe-it-or-not piece of journalism and works as a still very readable spine-chiller.

In embarking on the new field of fiction, Defoe was able to draw on a rich trove of precursors: romances, tales of roguery, picaresque tales, spiritual autobiography, whore’s memoirs, and travel writing. Spurred on by the success of
Crusoe
, he rush-wrote a mass of fiction in his last decade of life:
Captain Singleton
(1720),
Colonel Jack
(1722),
Moll Flanders
(1722),
Roxana
(1724). Each is related to one of the above precursor categories, but takes narrative well beyond it. There has been much academic dispute about Defoe and the ‘Rise of the Novel’. One thing seems indisputable – that there is a link between the fiction he wrote and the Rise of Capitalism – specifically the commercial activity Defoe was engaged in during the first twenty years of his adult life – ‘the business of the shop’, he called it. What is most striking as an innovation in Defoe’s fiction is, however, something much less grand – what the critic John Richetti calls his ‘peculiar realism’.

Another term for it is supplied by Henry James, in 1884, referring to his own work: ‘One can speak best from one’s own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel – the merit on which all its other merits … helplessly and submissively depend.’ Consider, as an example of this Jamesian solidity, the following very incidental episode from
Robinson Crusoe
. The hero has been miraculously (or, as he later comes to believe, for some inscrutable divine purpose) shipwrecked on an island off the coast of South America. Of his former shipmates, presumed drowned, he says: ‘I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.’ It is an incidental detail of no significance – but every reader recalls those irritatingly mismatched shoes. But why does Defoe have Robinson mention them? They never come up again in the story.

The most solid, and most specific, of Defoe’s fictions masquerading as fact is
A Journal of the Plague Year
(1722). The narrative pivots on the conventional prefatory lie purporting to be ‘observations or memorials, of the most remarkable occurrences,
as well publick as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London. Never made public before.’ The narrator (an actual relative, but in this instance Defoe’s glove puppet) is ‘HF’ – his uncle, Henry Foe. HF, we understand, is no writer but a saddler who deals in leather with America. He is unmarried and has remained in London to witness the 1665–6 cataclysm, because, he believes, it is the ‘will of heaven’ that he should do so. He has written down his observations because, during the time of plague, newspapers ceased to exist. HF chronicles the gradual rise of the epidemic from sporadic cases, to larger outbreaks, to epidemic, the quarantining of whole quarters of the city and, finally, mass evacuation and flight. The playhouses and bear-baiting pits and places of public eating, ‘tippling houses and coffee shops’, suffer first curfew, then closure. The dumping of refuse (nightsoil) is prohibited, along with the slaughter of dogs and cats. HF’s musing on this ordinance is typical of his laconic, keen-eyed style:

Wherefore were we ordered to kill all the dogs and cats, but because as they were domestic animals, and are apt to run from house to house, and from street to street, so they are capable of carrying the effluvia or infectious streams of bodies infected even in their furs and hair? And therefore it was that, in the beginning of the infection, an order was published by the Lord Mayor, and by the magistrates, according to the advice of the physicians, that all the dogs and cats should be immediately killed, and an officer was appointed for the execution.

It is incredible, if their account is to be depended upon, what a prodigious number of those creatures were destroyed. I think they talked of forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house.

Ironically, since rats were principal vectors of the disease (as the carriers of the fleas which spread it), this was fuel on the epidemic fire. It is the detail (down, even, to statistical precision, of the great caninocide and felinocide) which leaves a more powerful effect than the generally restrained description of the corpse carts and charnel pits.

In his last years, he had one more great non-fiction work in him. This was his
Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain
(1724–7). Never let it be thought Daniel Defoe did not think big. He died, it is assumed, in hiding from his creditors, in the aptly named Ropemakers’ Alley, in London (Judge Jeffreys would have approved). The wholly inapt cause of death recorded is ‘lethargy’.

His mind is so very vile a mind, so oozy, so hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s verdict on Samuel Richardson

Even in an age when lives are usually invisible to posterity, the little we know about Samuel Richardson is scant – and what is unknown to us is almost certainly unexciting. ‘Few writers have led less interesting lives’ his biographers glumly conclude, having expended 800 pages and the best part of two academic careers cataloguing Richardson’s uninterestingness. Dull as the life may have been, one great question will tantalise those who contemplate it. How did a dropsical, late-middle-aged tradesman, of no previous literary distinction come to write a first novel as momentous as
Pamela
? What little we know of Richardson’s first half-century of existence comes from bleak inscriptions in registers, scraps of gossip and a handful of letters which, late in life, he wrote to a Dutch clergyman, Johannes Stinstra.

The Richardsons (among whom Samuel was a recurrent primal name) had been farmers in a small way in Surrey for a hundred years or more. Samuel, however, was born in Derbyshire. His father, Samuel Richardson Sr, had broken with family tradition to work as a skilled ‘joiner’ or carpenter. He was based principally in London – still in a process of reconstruction after the great fire, and expanding every year with waves of urban migration, among which were the Richardsons. The family got by reasonably well. Samuel Senior inherited some property on his father’s death, in the same year as Samuel Junior’s birth. But his connection with a rich customer who participated in the Monmouth rebellion entailed losses and temporary rustication. There was some thought that Samuel Jr might go into the church but ‘Fortune was not propitious’. There was no money and nine children.

Little is known of Samuel’s schooldays and nothing of interest other than the recollection that ‘my Schoolfellows used to call me
Serious
and
Gravity
’. As the twig was bent, so the tree was shaped. He may have attended Christ’s Hospital Grammar School in London but, if so, received only a basic education; he lamented in later life his inability to read French. This was compounded by a remarkably static life, in which he rarely ventured beyond the sound of Bow Bells. ‘Few men were less travelled,’ his biographers drily note. From the first, Samuel was a precocious penman. As a youth he acted as a scribe to girls of his acquaintance, wanting to write the right kind of love letter. He enjoyed ‘secretaryship’ and it led in 1706 to his being apprenticed for seven years as a printer. He was proud of his ‘assiduity’ in this chosen trade, although the shop he was apprenticed to produced a very minor sort of book and Samuel was aiming higher. He set up his first shop, with his own
apprentices, in 1720. Over the following decades his operations would flourish in ever-larger establishments around Salisbury Square, near Fleet Street – the heart of the London book trade.

Following the moral script laid down by Hogarth for industrious apprentices, he married his former master’s daughter, Martha. The match was, as he put it, ‘prudential’ – although he claimed, on her death ten years later, that the marriage had been ‘a happy one’. It cannot, unless the young Richardson had a heart of stone, have been entirely happy: the couple had six children (no less than three named ‘Samuel’), none of whom survived beyond the ‘pratler’ stage of life. Martha Richardson’s death was doubtless accelerated by grief and physical exhaustion.

Politically Richardson had, by the early 1730s, begun to construct a public character for himself. He was a Tory, with a leaning towards Jacobitism. He printed nothing that could be construed as immoral. His ‘list’ was mixed, ranging from journals to works of such distinction as Defoe’s
Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain
, and there was a literary flavour to his imprint. ‘James Thomson,’ his biographers recall, ‘is the most eminent author for whom he printed’ and whom he befriended. The link between author and printer was, typically, intimate at the period. One picks up a silhouette of the man from his catalogues – it is practically all one has.