DEFOE, DANIEL (c. English author, was born in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, London, in the latter part of 1659 or early in 166o, of a Nonconformist family. His father James Foe, was a butcher and a citizen of London. Until late in life Daniel signed Defoe or Foe indifferently.
Daniel was educated at a famous dissenting academy, Mr. Charles Morton's of Stoke Newington, where many of the best known Noncomformists of the time were his schoolfellows. He joined Monmouth's rebellion in 1685, and is supposed to have owed his lucky escape from the law to his being a Londoner, and therefore a stranger in the west country. Before his western escapade he had taken up the business of hosiery factor, and had married Mary Tuffley, by whom he had seven children. At the entry of William and Mary into London he is said to have served as a volunteer trooper "gallantly mounted and richly accoutred." At this period he seems to have been a sort of commission mer chant, especially in Spanish and Portuguese goods, and at some time to have visited Spain on business. In 1692 he failed for f 17,000. Although his creditors accepted a composition, he after wards honourably paid them almost in full, a fact attested by not very friendly witnesses. He then became secretary and after wards manager and chief owner of some tile works at Tilbury, but here also he was unfortunate, and his imprisonment in 1703 brought the works to a standstill, and he lost £3,000. About the middle of the reign of William III. he was introduced to the King, and in 1695 he was appointed accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty, an office which he held for four years. At this time he produced his Essay on Projects (1698), containing re markable suggestions, much in advance of his time, on banks, road-management, friendly and insurance societies of various kinds, idiot asylums, bankruptcy, academies, military colleges, high schools for women, etc. In the same year he wrote the first of a long series of ingenious pamphlets on the then burning ques tion of occasional conformity. He argued that the conscience of the Dissenters should not permit them to conform ; yet he de nounced the impropriety of requiring tests at all. In support of the government he published, in 1698, An Argument for a Stand ing Army, followed in I 7 0o by a defence of William's war policy called The Two Great Questions considered, and a set of pamph lets on the partition treaty. The True-Born Englishman (I 70I) is a satire in rough but extremely vigorous verse on the national objection to William as a foreigner, and on the claim of purity of blood for a nation of mixed origin. He also took part in the pro ceedings which followed the Kentish petition, and was the author, some say the presenter, of the Legion Memorial, which asserted the supremacy of the electors over the elected. The theory of the indefeasible supremacy of the freeholders of England was one of Defoe's favourite political tenets, and he returned to it in a power fully written tract entitled The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England examined and asserted (1701).
In an evil hour for himself Defoe wrote the anonymous Short est Way with the Dissenters (r 702), a statement in the most forcible terms of the extreme "high-flying" position, which some high churchmen were unwary enough to endorse, without any suspicion of the writer's ironical intention. The author was soon discovered ; and the advertisement offering a reward for his apprehension gives the only personal description we possess of him, as "a middle-sized spare man about forty years old, of a brown complexion and dark brown-coloured hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth." In this conjuncture Defoe had really no friends, for the Dissenters had already been annoyed by his rather casuistical tracts on the question of occasional conformity, and were as much alarmed at his book as the high-flyers were irritated. He was fined (Feb. 24, r 703) 200 marks, and condemned to be pilloried three times, to be imprisoned indefinitely, and to find sureties for his good behaviour during seven years. It was in reference to this incident that Pope, whose Catholic rearing made him detest the abettor of the Revolution and the champion of William of Orange, wrote in the Dunciad Earless on high stands unabash'd Defoe —though he knew that the sentence to the pillory had long ceased to entail the loss of ears. Defoe's exposure in the pillory (July 29, 30, 3 was, however, rather a triumph than a punishment, for the populace took his side; and his Hymn to the Pillory is one of of the best of his writings in verse. Unluckily for him his con demnation had the indirect effect of destroying his business at Tilbury.
He remained in prison until Nov. i, 1704, and then owed his release to the intercession of Robert Harley, who represented his case to the queen, and obtained for him not only liberty but pecuniary relief and employment, which, of one kind or another, lasted until the termination of Anne's reign. There is no doubt that Harley, who understood the influence wielded by Defoe, made some conditions. Defoe says he received no pension, but his services were certainly rewarded, and he was a secret agent of the government in r 706 and r 707 in Scotland, working in favour of the Union. In this case he was employed by Godolphin, to whom Harley had recommended him. He wrote in prison many short pamphlets, chiefly controversial, published a curious work on the famous storm of the 26th November, i 703, and started in Febru ary 1704 The Review. This was a paper which was issued during the greater part of its life three times a week. It was entirely writ ten by Defoe, and extends to eight complete volumes and some few score numbers of a second issue. He did not confine himself to news, but wrote something very like finished essays on questions of policy, trade and domestic concerns; he also introduced a "Scandal Club," in which minor questions of manners and morals were treated in a way which undoubtedly suggested the Milers and Spectators which followed. Only one complete copy of the work is known to exist, and that is in the British Museum. After his release Defoe went to Bury St. Edmunds, though he did not interrupt either his Review or his occasional pamphlets. One of these, Giving Alms no Charity, and Employing the Poor a Griev ance to the Nation (r7o4), is extraordinarily far-sighted. It denounces both indiscriminate alms-giving and the national work shops proposed by Sir Humphrey Mackworth.
In r 705 appeared The Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in Moon, a political satire which is supposed to have given some hints for Swift's Gulliver's Travels; and at the end of the year Defoe performed a secret mission, the first of several of the kind, for Harley. In r 706 appeared the True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal, an excellent example of Defoe's skill as a special reporter. In the course of his service in Scotland he wrote his History of the Union, which appeared in 1709. In this year Henry Sacheverell delivered his famous sermons, and Defoe wrote several tracts about them and attacked the preacher in his Review.
In r 7 r o Harley returned to power, and Defoe was placed in a somewhat awkward position. He seems, in fact, to have agreed with the foreign policy of the Tories and with the home policy of the Whigs, and naturally incurred the reproach of time-serving and the hearty abuse of both parties. At the end of i 7 r o he again visited Scotland. In the negotiations concerning the Peace of Utrecht, Defoe strongly supported the ministerial side, to the intense wrath of the Whigs, displayed in an attempted prosecu tion against some pamphlets of his on the all-important question of the succession. Again the influence of Harley saved him. He continued, however, to take the side of the Dissenters in the ques tion affecting religious liberty. He naturally shared Harley's downfall; and, though the loss of his salary might seem a poor reward for his constant support of the Hanoverian claim, it was little more than his ambiguous, not to say trimming, position must have led him to expect.
Defoe declared that Lord Annesley was preparing the army in Ireland to join a Jacobite rebellion, and was indicted for libel; and prior to his trial (r 7 r 5) he published an apologia entitled An Appeal to Honour and Justice which is one of the chief sources for the facts of his life. He was convicted, but was liberated later in the year under circumstances that only became clear in 1864, when six letters were discovered in the Record Office from Defoe to a government official, Charles Delafaye, which, according to William Lee, established the fact that in 1718 at least Defoe was doing political work of an equivocal kind—that he was sub editing the Jacobite Mist's Journal under a secret agreement with the government that he should tone down the sentiments and omit objectionable items. He had, in fact, been released on con dition of becoming a government agent. He seems to have ful filled similar functions in Dormer's Letter and the Mercurius Politicus.
The first volume of Defoe's most famous work, the immortal story—partly adventure, partly moralizing—of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, was published on April 25, r 7 r 9. It ran through four editions in as many months, and then in August appeared the second volume. Twelve months afterwards the sequel Serious Reflections, now hardly ever reprinted, appeared. The first two parts were reprinted as a feuilleton in Heathcote's Intelligencer, perhaps the earliest in stance of the appearance of such a work in such a form. The story was founded on Dampier's Voyage round the World 0697), and still more on Alexander Selkirk's adventures, as communicated by Selkirk himself at a meeting with Defoe at the house of Mrs. Damaris Daniel at Bristol. Selkirk afterwards told Mrs. Daniel that he had handed over his papers to Defoe. Robinson Crusoe is one of the world's classics in fiction. Crusoe's shipwreck and adventures, his finding the footprint in the sand, his man "Fri day," are all inimitably told, but it is the conception of civilized man alone face to face with nature which has made Defoe's great work an imperishable part of world literature. In the same year appeared The Dumb Philosopher, or Dickory Cronke, who gains the power of speech at the end of his life and uses it to predict the course of European affairs.
In r 7 20 came The Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Camp bell. This was not entirely a work of imagination, its hero, the fortune-teller, being a real person. There are amusing passages in the story, but it is too desultory to rank with Defoe's best. In the same year appeared two wholly or partially fictitious his tories, each of which might have made a reputation for any man. The first was the Memoirs of a Cavalier, which Lord Chatham believed to be true history. Captain Singleton, the last work of the year, has been unjustly depreciated by most of the com mentators. The record of the journey across Africa, with its surprising anticipations of subsequent discoveries, yields in in terest to no work of the kind.
In 1721 nothing of importance was produced, but in the next year three works of capital importance appeared. These were The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, The Journal of the Plague Year, and The History of Colonel Jack. Moll Flanders still ranks among the great English novels, and deserves far more notice than it has usually received.
The Journal of the Plague Year, more usually called, from the title of the second edition, .4 History of the Plague, reads like a contemporary record. No one had the imaginative power neces sary to create circumstantial detail in a greater measure than Defoe, and there is no more reason to presuppose a documentary basis than in the case of Moll Flanders. Defoe was able to make all his narratives appear true stories, and he was gifted in a high degree with historical imagination. The History of Colonel Jack is an unequal book, and the end of the story is less good than the beginning.
To this period belong his stories of famous criminals, of Jack Sheppard (1724), of Jonathan Wild (1725), of the Highland Rogue, i.e., Rob Roy (1723). The pamphlet on the first of these Defoe maintained to be a transcript of a paper which he per suaded Sheppard to give tb a friend at his execution.
In 1724 appeared also the first volume of that admirable guide, A Tour through the whole Island of Great Britain, which was completed in the two following years. In 1725 appeared A New Voyage round the World, apparently entirely due to the author's own fertile imagination and extensive reading. It has all the in terest of Anson's or Dampier's voyages.
Towards the end of 1726 appeared The Complete English Tradesman, which called forth the scorn of Charles Lamb. To 1726 also belongs The Political History of the Devil. This be longs to a series of demonological works, of which the chief others are A System of Magic (1726), and An Essay on the His tory of Apparitions (1728), issued the year before under another title. A Plan of English Commerce, containing very enlightened views on export trade, appeared in 1728.
During the years 1715-28 Defoe had issued a formidable array of pamphlets and minor works which cannot be enumerated here. No man can ever have written more continuously. He must in some way or other have obtained a considerable income. In '724 he had built himself a large house at Stoke Newington, and he had obtained on lease in 1722 a considerable estate from the corporation of Colchester, which was settled on his unmarried daughter at his death. He died in Ropemaker's Alley, Moorfields, on April 26, 1731, and was buried in Bunhill Fields. He left no will, all his property having been previously assigned, and letters of administration were taken out by a creditor. How his affairs fell into this condition, why he did not die in his own house, and why in the previous summer he had been in hiding, as we know he was from a letter still extant, are points not clearly explained. In 1724 he was, however, attacked by Mist, who was disarmed and wounded and (May 18) imprisoned. It is more likely that Mist had found out that Defoe was a government agent and quite prob able that he thus informed other editors, for Defoe's journalistic employment almost ceased about this time, and he began to write anonymously, or as "Andrew Moreton." Mist had escaped to France, and may have designed revenge on Defoe. It is possible that he had to go into hiding to avoid the danger of being accused as a real Jacobite, when those with whom he had contracted to assume the character were dead.
The earliest regular life and estimate of Defoe is that of Dr. Towers in the Biographia Britannica. George Chalmers's Life, however (1786), added very considerable information. In 183o Walter Wilson wrote the standard Life (3 vols.). In 1864 the discovery of the six letters stirred up William Lee to a new investigation, and the results of this were published (1869), in three large volumes. The first of these (well illustrated) contains a new life and particulars of the author's discoveries. The second and third contain fugitive writings assigned by Lee to Defoe for the first time. There is also a Life by Thomas Wright (1894). The best modern version is the Novels and Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe (Oxford, 14 vols. 1927-28). Charles Lamb's criticisms were made in three short pieces, two of which were written for Wilson's book, and the third for The Reflector. The volume on Defoe (18791 in the "English Men of Letters" series is by W. Minto.
There is considerable uncertainty about many of Defoe's writings; and even if all contested works be excluded, the number is still enor mous. Besides the list in Bohn's Lowndes, which is somewhat of an omnium gatherum, three lists drawn with more or less care were compiled in the i9th century. Wilson's contains 210 distinct works, three or four only of which are marked as doubtful; Hazlitt's enumerates 183 "genuine" and 52 "attributed" pieces, with notes on most of them ; Lee's extends to 254, of which 64 claim to be new additions. There have been various editions of Defoe, none of them complete. In 187o Nimmo of Edinburgh published in one volume an admirable selection from Defoe. It contains Chalmers's Life, annotated and completed from Wilson and Lee, Robinson Crusoe, pts. i. and ii., Colonel Jack, The Cavalier, Duncan Campbell, The Plague, Every body's Business, Mrs. Veal, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, Giving Alms no Charity, The True-Born Englishman, Hymn to the Pillory, and very copious extracts from The Complete English Tradesman. An edition of Defoe's Romances and Narratives in sixteen volumes by G. A. Aitken came out in 1895. The Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe (14 vols.), were published by Blackwell, 1927.
The reprints and editions of Crusoe have been innumerable; it has been often translated; and the eulogy pronounced on it by Rousseau gave it special currency in France, where imitations (or rather adapta tions) have also been common.
DE FOREST, LEE (1873— ), American inventor, was born at Council Bluffs, Ia., Aug. 26, 1873. He was educated at the Sheffield Scientific School, Yale, receiving his B.S. in 1896 and Ph. D. in 1899, and continued his studies at the Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago. His earliest employment was with the Westerd Electric Co., Chicago, in their experimental telephone laboratory.
He was the first to use the alternating cur rent generator and transmitter, which were later universally employed in wireless transmitting sets. He designed and in stalled the first five high-power radio sta tions for the U.S. Navy. The most impor tant of his inventions was the audion amplifier, Which made possible long-dis tance telephony. His other inventions include the oscillating audion, or three electrode tube, and the four-electrode tube.
After 1921 he devoted himself to the devel opment of the so-called phonofilm, a talk ing motion picture, involving the synchron izing of sound and motion by the photo graphic representation of sound waves.
He was the recipient of the Elliott Cres son medal of the Franklin Institute for his discovery of the audion in 192i. He also received the medal of the Institute of Radio Engineers and a prize from the Institute of France in 1923. He was awarded a gold medal for his work in wireless telegraphy at the St. Louis exposition in i9o4 and a gold medal from the Panama Pacific exposition in San Francisco in 1915.