A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe

Description

Academic - Scholarly - Defoe Studies - Political History - Eighteenth-Century History; In this new book, Furbank and Owens attempt to disentangle the story of Daniel Defoe's political career, as journalist, polemicist, political theorist and secret agent. They argue that this remarkable career calls for a good deal of rethinking, not least because biography and bibliography are here inextricably intertwined. The book challenges the current account of Defoe's political career - rather drastically in some cases. It argues, for example, that Defoe's cherished story of his intimacy with King William - a staple of all previous Defoe biographies - was most probably an (immensely bold) fiction, a view which, if correct, entails considerable revision of his personality and career. Likewise, it offers a new interpretation of the famous series of letters Defoe wrote in 1718 to his Government paymaster, the Whig Undersecretary of State Charles de la Faye, in which he describes how he insinuated himself into the management of a number of opposition Tory journals to restrain and 'enervate' them. Modern biographers have taken these extraordinary letters at face value, constructing their accounts of Defoe's later political career around them. By contrast, Furbank and Owens argue that they represent, instead, a dazzling piece of mendacity. If Defoe was deceiving anybody it was his Whig paymasters.

P N Furbank is Emeritus Professor of Literature at The Open University. He is the author of studies of Samuel Butler and Italo Svevo, and is the biographer of E M Forster and Diderot. His other books include Reflections on the Word 'Image' (1970), Unholy Pleasure: The Idea of Social Class (1985), and Behalf (1999) W R Owens is Professor of English Literature at The Open University. His publications include editions of John Bunyan's Grace Abounding (1987). The Pilgrim's Progress (2003) and two volumes in the Clarendon Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan (1994). A founder editor of the journal Bunyan Studies, he is also co-editor of John Bunyan and his England 1628-88 (1990), Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon (1996), and A Handbook to Literary Research (1998) Together P N Furbank and W R Owens have written over twenty articles on Defoe, and have compiled computer-generated concordances to Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. Their joint books include The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (1988), Defoe De-Attributions (1994), and A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (1998). They have also edited Defoe's Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1991), and The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings (1997).

'Furbank and Owens are well qualified to write a political biography of Defoe. [His] secretive nature and penchant for exaggeration and untruth, and the extensiveness and uncertainties of his canon, make him a notoriously difficult subject for biographers and critics. The authors acknowledge these difficulties, but they do an excellent job of assembling primary materials and historical evidence in support of the biography...Summing up: Highly Recommended'- CHOICE