Chapter 3 - Family Life and Inner Life

Summary

Defoe’s public life – his bankruptcies; his jailing for political attacks; his notorious, seemingly unprincipled service to various political parties – is so absorbing that an attempt at viewing his inner life and his life in a domestic setting might seem both irrelevant and unnecessary. Nevertheless, we have to give some credence to the reality of the sincere, loving father who presented himself in the letters to his daughter Sophia. Such a vision of Defoe has to be woven into the many other Defoes: the somewhat unscrupulous businessman, the adventurer, the spy, the writer whose lively imagination found its fulfilment in the fictions he wrote from 1718 to 1725. When he appealed to his ’Sincerity’ in his autobiography, few seemed to believe him, but it is possible that amid all the lies and deceptions that he practised there was a core of belief in his own integrity. This essay tries to trace that part of his self throughout his career.