Daniel Defoe
c. 1660–1731 · England
“It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Daniel Defoe
Drew From(1)
who shaped Daniel Defoe
- Crusoe's conversion is the Psalms breaking into the story
- At his lowest, Defoe has him open the Bible to Psalm 50:15 — "Call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver" — the "powerful words" that turn a survival tale into a spiritual one (Psalm 27:14 follows)
- That single verse earned the nickname "Robinson Crusoe's Psalm"
Inspired(3)
who Daniel Defoe shaped
- The castaway-survival tale Swift set out to skewer — Gulliver's Travels reads as a deliberate parody of Crusoe and the whole earnest traveler's-tale genre
- Crusoe's loving inventories of food and provisions are exactly what Gulliver mocks: "other travellers fill their books, as if the readers were personally concerned whether we fared well or ill"
- Defoe played the shipwreck straight; seven years later Swift weaponized the same form into satire
- The book on the lonely boy's shelf — Robinson Crusoe is one of the novels young David inherits in Chapter 4, the reading that keeps him alive
- It was Dickens's own childhood reading too, and David Copperfield is his first novel told in the first person — the autobiographical I that Defoe pioneered
- Read the original solitary survivor's account, then watch a Victorian boy survive on it
via Confessions
- Defoe's solitary survivor became a self-image other men reached for — in his Confessions Rousseau calls himself "another Robinson Crusoe," arranging his 21-day quarantine in the lazaretto
- Rousseau had already crowned Robinson Crusoe the one book his Emile may read — "the most felicitous treatise on natural education"
- The castaway alone with his ingenuity became the template for the self-sufficient modern self
Portraits
The single most-reproduced likeness of Defoe — the frontispiece engraving to his poem Jure Divino (1706), after Jeremiah Taverner; NPG 3960; the periwigged bust everyone reprints.
Michael Van der Gucht, 1706
The principal painted likeness — a half-length oil in the style of Godfrey Kneller showing Defoe in a blue-and-orange gown and full-bottomed wig; held by Royal Museums Greenwich (BHC2648).
Godfrey Kneller (style of)
Famous Quotes
“It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore.”
“I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen.”
“I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country.”
“Thus fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.”
About Daniel Defoe
English writer, journalist, and merchant, often credited with helping to pioneer the English novel. Robinson Crusoe (1719), his most famous work, is one of the most widely published books in history. A prolific writer on politics, economics, and social commentary, he also served as a spy for the English government.