He told us, that he had given Mrs [Elizabeth] Montagu a catalogue of all Daniel Defoe’s works of imagination; most, if not all of which, as well as of his other works, he now enumerated, allowing a considerable share of merit to a man, who, bred a tradesman, had written so variously and so well. Indeed, his Robinson Crusoe is enough of itself to establish his reputation.
—Samuel Johnson, 10 April 1778
A UNIFYING THEME IN THE LIFE OF DANIEL Defoe (1660-1731) was the pursuit of the future — a future of individual redemption and social improvement. This pursuit was partly inspired by Defoe’s position as an outsider to the present. A Protestant Dissenter from the Church of England whose joining the unsuccessful 1685 Monmouth rebellion against King James II was an act of treason, Defoe was by his background and fortunes a man who had only an episodic and precarious stance in the Establishment. He was well aware of his outsider status and dependence on the vagaries of political fortune, polemical and literary success and business and legal chance. It gave his career its edge.
Defoe was a traveller, both literally so, and in his interests and imagination.) is shipwrecked.
