Note sull'episodio
Before he wrote Robinson Crusoe at nearly 60, Daniel Defoe survived the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, and a Dutch naval attack all before age seven. Born plain Daniel Foe to a butcher and candle maker, he added the aristocratic De to his name, invented a noble ancestry, ran a civet cat perfume enterprise, married into a large dowry, and still went bankrupt in 1692 owing a staggering 17,000 pounds.
This episode follows his wild reinventions: joining the failed Monmouth Rebellion, writing a satirical pamphlet so convincing that both sides were furious and he landed in Newgate Prison and the pillory, then pitching spymaster Robert Harley on a government intelligence network from his cell. We cover his undercover work in Edinburgh pushing the Anglo-Scottish Union under fake identities, his pioneering disaster journalism after the Great Storm of 1703, and how a lifetime of writing as other people prepared him to invent the modern novel.
- Why religious dissenters were barred from Oxford, Cambridge, and public office, and how that forced Defoe to fake his way into society
- The 1702 pamphlet that backfired so badly it earned him a seditious libel conviction and a stint in the pillory
- How he traded his freedom for a job as a propagandist and political intelligence agent
- The link between his espionage character acting and Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year
- Up to 550 works, at least 198 pen names, and a death in hiding from creditors in 1731