Other writers of this era; Pope, Addison & Steele, Prior, Swift, with their approved education, their notions of literary finish, French in origin, were essentially aristocrats of literature. Their services in refining and edifying the thrifty new middle class, as they well knew, were in truth condescending, even though they covered the fact with consummate art. But that middle class produced its own genius, who pf course could never hope to become one of the literary elite, but who, like Bunyan of the age before, brought forth what after all has survived as the most popular book of his century.

In 1725-7, near the end of the first George's reign, appeared in two volumes The Complete English Tradesman. It is full of hard-headed advice and exhortation to honest and prudent dealing, worthy of Benjamin Franklin. London, through trade, it says, has become the heart of the world. Charles II's jest that the tradesmen were the only gentry in England bade fair to be a fact; at any rate, "trade in England," says the author, "makes Gentlemen, and has peopled this nation with Gentlemen." Four years later the same hand penned The Complete Gentleman, who is described as "a Person of Merit and Worth; a Man of Honour, Virtue, Sense, Integrity, Honesty, and Religion, without which he is Nothing at all." Both books are from the plebeian hand of Daniel Defoe.

Defoe's span (the name had been Foe, until Daniel, in prosperity, set it up on its "De") extended over the seventy years from about 1661 to 1731, from Charles II to George II. He was a cockney Presbyterian butcher's son, a man of the masses, with powers and instincts of the modern journalist in a measure that amounted to extraordinary genius. He was enormously prolific--some 250 works have been latterly accepted as his, out of a welter of anonymous material. His brain fermented with schemes, reforms, and politics; his curiosity was irrepressible, his interest in public affairs intense, and his energy over and above providing for his family was tireless. Wiry he was in mind and body--spare, dark, with "a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his mouth."

He had obscure but good education for the ministry, and his absorbent mind picked up foreign languages and literatures as such a mind will. Swift did not know his man when he sneered at Defoe as a stupid, illiterate scribbler. Defoe chose business instead of the ministry, and variously succeeded in hosiery and roof-tiles. But journalism was his calling. His life is a series of obscure movements and passages, now Whig in its hue, now Tory, and again Whig; now in royal favor, now out, now in; in short with the same journalistic shift of protective coloring that we have observed in Dryden and Swift. After all he had a wife and six children.

Now and then the focus clears, and the light falls strong on this elusive figure. In 1701 he wrote some vigorous tortured verses called The True-born Englishman, and rebuked the English anti-foreign prejudice by showing that the English are in reality only thoroughbred mongrels. It had enormous success, and he was presented to King William. Again in 1702, when the question of toleration was vexed, he sprang a trap, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which was in brief to exterminate them, French fashion. Certain of the Tories, off their guard, broke into wild applause only to find that they had given their whole case away. Defoe, for his saucy cleverness, was condemned to prison after exposure on the pillory. Aloft in that place of shame for three July days in 1703 stood this gristly man of forty, overwhelmed with flowers and the pledges and plaudits of an adoring multitude. Once again he appears in his sixties, living in comfortable leisure with his "three lovely daughters," at a house with a garden and four acres in the suburbs. His body lies in Bunhill Fields, amid the roar of his London, near the graves of Bunyan, Isaac Watts the writer of hymns, William Blake, and, not far off, George Fox, the first Quaker.

While tossing off a swarm of pamphlets with his left hand, his right was engaged twice and thrice a week from 1704 to 1713 writing the Review. It was doubtless the precedent for the Tatler. Yet Defoe is usually cited as a writer of fiction rather than a journalist. Fiction and fact in such a life cannot be distinguished, and such is the man's art that his "fiction" is fact-like enough to deceive anybody. He was almost sixty when his Robinson Crusoe appeared. Alexander Selkirk, an able and roving Scot, had been left a castaway for some five years on the island of Juan Fernandez off Chile, and his adventures had been published. Defoe, taking them as a point of departure, transformed and developed them with his magic and his invention, so that they not merely stirred the romantic imagination of everyone in his time, but to this day the wonderful tale has never lost its power of doing so against thousands of derivative competitors. Even Gulliver's Travels stands in its unacknowledged debt.

In four months came another instalment of Robinson Crusoe, and, with incredible yield, book followed after book, and tale after tale, from this youth in his sixties, to the number of some twenty in the next six years. Among these were The King of the Pirates, Adventures of Duncan Campbell, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders (of which the scene is partly in Virginia), ]ournal of the Plague Year, The Highland Rogue [Rob Roy], Roxana, and tales of the crooks, Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. The list sounds like a boy's library of dreadfuls. But all of them, especially Captain Singleton, live with the baffling daylight reality that makes them true whether they ever happened or not. The literary resort to Iow life for material has been intermittent ever since Chaucer; but Defoe, with his Moll, his Roxana, and his highwaymen, made a specialty of it, as far as he ever had a specialty.

Yet his darting mind flies at any opening. He will edify with his Family Instructor, and his Religious Courtship! He will exploit superstition with his Apparition of Mrs. Veal, 1706, and his Political History of the Devil, 1726.

This prolific man of the people found the very style to suit his needs, so seemingly artless that it appears to be no style at all. He says in his English Tradesman that the perfect style is easy, plain, and familiar, "that in which a man speaking to five hundred people, of all common and various capacities, Ideots and Lunaticks excepted, should be understood by them all." It is the ideal of him who would be heard on all hands today, and Defoe was the first to attain it.

- Charles Grosvenor Osgood, The Voice of England, 2nd Ed., 1935, 1952 Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York.