1703 To a high Tory like Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe was just one of those innumerable hacks of Grub Street, part of that ‘involuntary throng’ buzzing around the throne of Dulness. In Book II of The Dunciad (1743) the goddess presents a tapestry picturing her most illustrious acolytes, among whom, ‘Earless on high, stood unabash’d De Foe’ (line 147) – that is, Defoe punished as though a 17th-century Puritan under Archbishop Laud.
Defoe irked Pope for three reasons: he was a radical dissenter, he was a political pamphleteer, and he wrote for money, rather than being supported by patrons. These very qualities might prompt a later age – imbued with Adam Smith’s respect for the market and (Defoe’s own) Robinson Crusoe’s genius for practical solutions – to admire him the more.
As it happens, there’s some substance to Pope’s portrait of Defoe standing ‘unabash’d’ on the podium of punishment. In 1702 he published The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, an ironic proposal that religious dissenters should be done away with – banished from the realm if not something worse. The Church of England had been too lenient up to now, the pamphlet argued. In the reign of King James I, ‘the worst they suffered was, at their own request, to let them go to New England, and erect a new colony’. Even now, the worst they suffer is to be fined ‘Five Shillings a month for not coming to the Sacrament, and One Shilling per week, for not coming to Church: this is such a way of converting people as was never known! This is selling them a liberty to transgress, for so much money!’
If any think the remedy cruel, consider that ‘It is cruelty to kill a snake or a toad in cold blood, but the poison of their nature makes it a charity to our neighbours, to destroy those creatures! … Serpents, toads, vipers, &c., are noxious to the body, and poison the sensitive life: these poison the soul! corrupt our posterity! ensnare our children! destroy the vitals of our happiness, our future felicity! and contaminate the whole mass!’
It was a satirical trick that Jonathan Swift would repeat 29 years later with A Modest Proposal, in which he urged that children of starving Irish beggars be cooked and eaten. The trouble with The Shortest Way was that many in authority took it seriously and even began to borrow its imagery. When they discovered who had written the pamphlet, the high-church establishment, tricked into making fools of themselves and thereby proving his satirical point, took their revenge. Defoe was punished on this day for seditious libel – not by having his ears cut off but by being put in the stocks for three days, fined heavily and thrown into Newgate prison.
Legend has it that instead of throwing rotten vegetables and dead rats at him, the populace bestrewed his scaffold with flowers.