Captain Singleton
Daniel Defoe, Segismundo Andrade
Paperback
(Independently published, Aug. 19, 2019)
DANIEL DEFOE (1660-1731), born in London, he attended Morton´s academy for Dissenters at Newington Green, but by the time he married Mary Tuffley and was established as a hosiery merchant in Cornhill. He was absorbed by travel throughout his life, having travelled in France, Spain and Low Countries, and possibly Italy and Germany. He took part in Monmouth´s rebellion, and in 1688 joined the advancing forces of William III. His first important work was “An Essay upon Projects” (1697) followed by “The True-Born Englishman” (1701), an immensely popular satirical poem attacking the prejudice against a king of foreign birth. In 1702 appeared “The Shortest Way with Dissenters”, a pamphlet in which Defoe, himself a Dissenter, ironically demanded the total and savage suppression of dissent; for this he was fined, imprisoned and pilloried. While in prison, he wrote his “Hymn to the Pillory”, a mock-Pindaric ode which was sold in the streets to sympathetic crowds. Defoe was an extremely prolific writer, and produced some 560 books, pamphlets and journals, many anonymously or pseudonymously, but the work for which he is best known, “Robinson Crusoe” (1719), belong to his later years.