Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660. The son of a tallow-chandler, his childhood years saw great change in London, witnessing both the Plague and the Great Fire of 1666. Defoe was educated first at Dorking from 1671 and then at Morton's Academy for Dissenters in Newington Green; attending the latter with a view to becoming a Presbyterian Minister.
In 1684 Defoe married Mary Tuffley, and received a substantial dowry but this proved insufficient to keep him from bankruptcy and he was later jailed for debt. Defoe's life was extremely varied, fighting briefly in the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion of 1685 he was also a strong supporter of William of Orange in the 'Glorious' Revolution three years later.
One of Defoe's most notorious and ironic pamphlets, The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1702) led to him being fined, put in the pillory and then jailed at Newgate Prison. Intervention by a Tory minister, Robert Harley, secured Defoe's release and for the next eleven years he served as a secret agent and political journalist for Harley and other ministers.
A prolific and versatile writer, Defoe wrote over 500 books, pamphlets and journals on a wide range of topics including politics, crime, religion, geography, marriage, psychology and the supernatural. It was not until his sixties did he write fiction or what he called romantic books. Defoe's first novel, Robinson Crusoe, was not published until 1719. His other main works, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year and Roxana followed shortly after. He said they were autobiographies of people who led unusual lives (pirates, whores, treasure hunters), but they were really fiction and amongst the first of the English novels.
Defoe died in 1731 and was buried in Burnhill Fields but his tombstone can be seen at Stoke Newington District Library.
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