DANIEL DE FOE.
Daniel De Foe was descended from a respectable family
in the county of Northampton, and born in London,
about the year 1663. His father, James Foe, was
a butcher, in the parish of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate,
and a protestant dissenter. Why the subject of
this memoir prefixed the De to his family name
cannot now be ascertained, nor did he at any period
of his life think it necessary to give his reasons
to the public. The political scribblers of the
day, however, thought proper to remedy this lack of
information, and accused him of possessing so little
of the amor patriae, as to make the addition
in order that he might not be taken for an Englishman;
though this idea could have had no other foundation
than the circumstance of his having, in consequence
of his zeal for King William, attacked the prejudices
of his countrymen in his “Trueborn Englishman.”
After receiving a good education at an academy at
Newington, young De Foe, before he had attained his
twenty-first year, commenced his career as an author,
by writing a pamphlet against a very prevailing sentiment
in favour of the Turks, who were at that time laying
siege to Vienna. This production, being very
inferior to those of his maturer years, was very little
read, and the indignant author, despairing of success
with his pen, had recourse to the sword; or, as he
termed it, when boasting of the exploit in his latter
years, “displayed his attachment to liberty
and protestanism,” by joining the ill-advised
insurrection under the Duke of Monmouth, in the west.
On the failure of that unfortunate enterprise, he
returned again to the metropolis; and it is not improbable,
but that the circumstance of his being a native of
London, and his person not much known in that part
of the kingdom where the rebellion took place, might
facilitate his escape, and be the means of preventing
his being brought to trial for his share in the transaction.
With the professions of a writer and a soldier, Mr.
De Foe, in the year 1685, joined that of a trader;
he was first engaged as a hosier, in Cornhill, and
afterwards as a maker of bricks and pantiles, near
Tilbury Fort, in Essex; but in consequence of spending
those hours in the hilarity of the tavern which he
ought to have employed in the calculations of the
counting-house, his commercial schemes proved unsuccessful;
and in 1694 he was obliged to abscond from his creditors,
not failing to attribute those misfortunes to the war
and the severity of the times, which were doubtless
owing to his own misconduct. It is much to his
credit, however, that after having been freed from
his debts by composition, and being in prosperous
circumstances from King William’s favour, he
voluntarily paid most of his creditors both the principal
and interest of their claims. This is such an
example of honesty as it would be unjust to De Foe
and to the world to conceal. The amount of the
sums thus paid must have been very considerable, as
he afterwards feelingly mentions to Lord Haversham,
who had reproached him with covetousness; “With
a numerous family, and no helps but my own industry,
I have forced my way through a sea of misfortunes,
and reduced my debts, exclusive of composition, from
seventeen thousand to less than five thousand pounds.”
