1719 There are a number of candidates for the title of ‘first novel in English’. Most convincing is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published on this day.
Defoe’s life was extraordinarily full of event and of literary achievement. He was a great pamphleteer, a government spy, and the father of English journalism. Born around 1660 (the year of the Restoration), he lived in turbulent and dangerous times. More so as he was a dissenter and had a foreign-sounding name (never a good thing in England: Crusoe’s father prudently changed his name from ‘Kreutzer’). As chronicled below (see 31 July), Defoe on one occasion found himself in the stocks for things he had written that were, alas, too clever for the dolts who misread them.
He lived a long life, dying in his early seventies in 1731. He was never well off, and downright impoverished by creditors in his last years. And it was in these last years, aged nearly 60 (a fact that the authors of this volume find very cheering), that he can be said to have invented the English novel – or, at the very least, to have helped establish it as the dominant literary form it would become.
The word ‘novel’ literally means ‘new thing’, and it is the one dominant literary form whose genesis, and progenitor, we can plausibly claim to know and date. Literary evolution is as fascinating as the evolution of any other species. Why, then, did the novel come into existence at this particular point in historical time, and why in this particular place – England (London, specifically) at the beginning of the 18th century?
A number of answers have been suggested, in addition to Defoe’s pre-eminent genius and originality of mind. The rise of the novel coincides, it has been noted, with the rise of capitalism in its modern form. Robinson Crusoe, colonising his island, is Homo economicus – the epitome of mercantilism (he even sells Man Friday). The novel – the ‘bourgeois epic’ as it has been called – coincides with a related event, the rise of the middle class (along with parliamentary democracy).
These are very much after-the-historical-event explanations. It is clear that although Defoe knew what he was doing, neither he nor the booksellers who produced Robinson Crusoe could put a name to their fascinating ‘novelty’. So extra copies of the title page would be run off, and pinned, or pegged, up on rope-lines as advertisements – hence the intrusion of what we would call a ‘blurb’:
Any prospective purchaser idly casting an eye over this in the yard outside St Paul’s Cathedral (i.e. the ‘Row’, where booksellers congregated) would assume he was being offered something on the lines of Alexander Selkirk’s authentic memoir of being shipwrecked on a desert island (Selkirk’s experiences were later published as the ‘Life and Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe’).
There is nothing on the Defoe–Taylor title page to indicate that this is fiction – and the ascription ‘Written by Himself’ is downright misleading. There was, happily for literature, no Trades Description Act to prosecute the vendor in 1719.
For all its misleadingness, the title page goes to the essence of what Defoe is doing, and what the novel is: ‘Lies like truth’ – as Leslie Stephen called Robinson Crusoe. Many contemporaries were taken in, and assumed Robinson Crusoe to be ‘genuine’. That, one might fancify, is the ultimate sales test for a novel. So good a fiction that the unknowing will take it as fact.