Daniel Defoe

William Minto's study of Daniel Defoe cuts through the confusion of disputed authorship to recover the shape of a life lived at full speed. Defoe emerges not as a quiet man of letters, but as rebel, merchant, bankrupt, political agent, satirist, pamphleteer, and newspaper editor—an extraordinary career that made him both hard to know and impossible to ignore. Minto reads his authentic works against the politics and upheavals of his age to show how experience, rather than formal scholarship, forged his mind. From his London birth and Dissenting education at Newington Green to his turn from the ministry to trade, Defoe appears as a practical, wide-ranging intellect fiercely sensitive to charges of ignorance. His business life, especially in hosiery, brought both failure and hard-won authority, while his political awakening under James II and the Revolution of 1688 drew him into Protestant causes, anonymous pamphleteering, and satirical verse. The biography follows his recovery, his service to government, his bold schemes for public improvement, and his powerful journalism in the Review, where he argued for union, peace, and principled public judgment with unmatched force and clarity. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.