THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

their social class and education, proved particularly receptive to an easily assimilated, but morally serious, ‘realist’
literature. If heroic prejudices were gradually rejected in the theatre by self assured metropolitan audiences permeated
by commercial, professional, and ethical codes of value, so the English novel appears to have developed in response to
a demand for a new kind of literature which emphasized the significance of private experience. It cannot be argued
that the central characters in the novels of the first half of the century are drawn exclusively from the middle classes,
but few are aristocrats and none are monarchs. Tyranny and murder are domesticated; usurpation is replaced by
disputes over title-deeds, entails, and codicils; courtship and marriage become affairs of the heart not of the state, and
the death-bed enters the English novel as death on the battlefield exits. Even the panoply of the funeral, a major
concern of Richardson’s dying Clarissa, is democratized.
Defoe’s long experience of the vagaries of official censorship and the book-trade clearly stood him in good stead
when he began a vigorous new phase in his career with The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson
Crusoe in 1719. The earlier stages of his career are marked by abrupt twists and entanglements which took him from
his respectable origins as a Presbyterian tradesman in London, through an active espousal of the doomed rebellion of
the Duke of Monmouth and the more propitious cause of William of Orange, to employment as a government spy. His
first literary success, The True-Born Englishman (1701), an anti-xenophobic plea for the acceptance of a foreign king
and his Dutch friends, was overshadowed by the reaction to the transparently ironic pamphlet The Shortest Way with
the Dissenters (1702). Having attempted to win sympathy for his Dissenting co-religionists, in a particularly volatile
political atmosphere, with the hyperbolical argument that Dissenters should simply be exterminated, Defoe found
himself the immediate object of state persecution. His pamphlet was publicly burned and its author imprisoned and
exposed in the pillory. After a period as founder of, and chief contributor to, the thrice-weekly newspaper The Review
(from 1704), he became an undercover agent for the Government, monitoring Scottish responses to the proposed
Union. This Scottish episode provided material both for his Tour and for his History of the Union of 1709. Robinson
Crusoe differs from most of Defoe’s earlier works in that it represents private moral zeal rather than a public plea for
reform; propaganda it may be, but its emphasis is on spiritual rather than on political justice. Robinson Crusoe ‘of
York, Mariner’ gives over only some two-thirds of his narrative to his life on his desert island, but the account of
those twenty-eight years forms the most compelling section of his memoirs. He is an ideal choice of narrator given the
extraordinary nature of his experiences. Crusoe is ‘of good family’ and because of his sound education ‘not bred to
any trade’. His decision to go to sea is an act of rebellion, determined on in defiance to both his mother
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and his father, and from it he traces his withdrawal from grace and his embarkation on the slow, painful redemptive
journey back to a state of grace. Although Crusoe’s self exploratory time on his island, his cultivation of the land and
of his soul, and his later imposition of his codes of belief and action on Friday, have frequently been interpreted as a
fictional enactment of the processes of European colonization, his story has both a particular and a more universal
application. When his island is ‘peopled’ by Friday and by Friday’s father and a Spanish sailor (both of them rescued
from the cannibals) Crusoe thinks of himself as a king with ‘an undoubted right of dominion’, an ‘absolute Lord and
Law-giver’. As such, however, he establishes a principle which many contemporary Europeans would have regarded
as offensively radical: a ‘Liberty of Conscience’ which tolerates pagan, Protestant, and Catholic alike. It was not a
principle that was fully established in contemporary Britain. More significantly, Crusoe’s earlier heroism is that of the
ordinary human will pitted against an alien environment; as far as he can, he brings his surroundings under his
rational and practical control not as a proto-colonist but as a lonely exile. He records his experiences and his
achievements meticulously, even repetitively, because he is logging the nature of his moral survival. He is the
methodical diarist delighted both by his own resourcefulness and by his awareness that a benign God helps those who
help themselves.
Crusoe’s Further Adventures, published later in the same year, do not live up to the promise of the earlier volume.
Defoe’s cultivated ease in exploiting the first-person narrative form, as an imitation either of a journal or of
confessional memoirs, is, however, evident in the flood of fiction he published between 1720 and 1724. Both The
Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722) and The Fortunate Mistress (generally known as
Roxana) (1724) have much-abused, belatedly penitent, entrepreneurial women as narrators. Moll, born in prison,
zestfully and practically recounts her dubious liaisons with husbands, lovers, and seducers, and her progress through
thievery to transportation to Virginia and final financial and emotional happiness. Hers is a difficult, but none the less
upward, social and moral progress which contrasts sharply with that of the demi-mondaine heroine of the Abbé
Prevost’s Manon Lescaut (1731). If Moll’s memoirs somewhat awkwardly suggest a rather too meticulous retrospect
on a period of personal disorder, those of Roxana reveal a duller process of self description. Roxana declines from
respectability, partly through the disgraceful treatment meted out to her by the men on whom she relies, partly
through her own, highly selfish, sense of self-preservation. When she announces in her Preface that ‘all imaginable
Care has been taken to keep clear of Indecencies and immodest Expressions’ we sense not only the impact of her