Mayorov K. V.

Daniel Defoe: from a Grub Street scribbler to leadership in the English Enlightenment. Pp. 62–72.

UDC 94(410).06

DOI 10.37724/RSU.2024.83.2.006

 

Abstract. The article examines the history of studying the life and work of the English writer Daniel Defoe over three centuries. It is shown that during his lifetime the writer acquired a reputation as a “venal scribbler” and, despite the great success of the novel about Robinson, he was considered by his contemporaries as an ordinary writer. The author of the article believes that the first full-fledged work recreating the biography of Defoe can be considered the work of the Scottish antiquarian J. Chalmers The Life of Daniel Defoe, published in 1786. It was the first to account for the political “volatility” of the writer through his devotion to the cause of the state and patriotism. Another significant study was the three-volume work of W. Wilson Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe (1830), in which the author tried to combine two sides of his hero’s activities: artistic work and political activity. However, in the second half of the 19th century, the image of Defoe as a mediocre writer but a significant political commentator continued to dominate scholarly discourse. A decisive role in this interpretive model belongs to the authoritative historian of English literature of the last third of the 19th century, S. Leslie. Only in the middle of the twentieth century did a “revision” of the assessments of classical historiography begin. This was marked by a comprehensive study of Defoe’s creative heritage. In 1955, H. Healy prepared an edition of all the writer’s surviving letters. Meticulous work on the attribution of anonymous works attributed to Defoe was carried out by P. N. Farbank and W. R. Owens. In this new historiographical paradigm, Defoe the writer and Defoe the journalist were no longer opposed to each other, but were considered as a single whole. The works of M. Novak and P. Backscheider were written in the genre of intellectual biography. However, the newest page in current studies of Defoe can be considered the work of E. Marshall, who made a critical assessment of the artificial “construction” of the image of Defoe in the currently dominant historiography of the writer’s life and work.

 

Keywords: Daniel Defoe, 18th-century England, Great Britain.

 

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