Defoe and Sterne

Defoe was not released from Newgate for a further three months. What happened next is a matter of considerable dispute among his biographers. He was released through the intervention of Robert Harley and Sidney Godolphin, his prosecutors, and thereafter worked for Harley, who was a Tory, as a spy and polemicist. Novak handles the charges of hypocrisy with exemplary tact and balance. Defoe received about 200 a year in secret service funds, a considerable sum of money for those times, and found himself writing more or less what his employers wanted, often in direct opposition to his own convictions. Novak points out that Defoe at least remained free to publish numerous independent works of his own, and that in those days it was by no means unusual for a writer to earn his keep by producing arguments to order. Without this capitulation he would have rotted in prison. Yet eventually Defoe was forced to write pamphlets supporting policies he detested and even attacked Marlborough, whom he hero-worshipped. He loses all claims to integrity, and ends up as a mercenary hack. Novak calls him a trickster-clever, scheming, always shifting his positions to survive, a far more fascinating figure for us than the Whiggist saint of some earlier biographies.

Such conflicts between morality and the need to survive occur repeatedly in Defoe's prose fiction. Roxana faces a choice between starvation or sleeping with her landlord. Defoe adopts no simple dogmatic stance, but acknowledges the ambiguities that both justify Roxana's capitulation and yet plunge her into further misfortunes and difficulties. His vivid narrations encourage us to participate vicariously in the adventures of thieves, pirates and courtesans, but their greatness lies in more than cheap sensationalism. His heroes and heroines exist in a kind of moral limbo where survival is their first criterion; but their misdeeds often lead to solitude and despair, as they try to create for themselves a true identity, as they try to work out for themselves a system of moral parameters in a society dominated by self-interest.

Defoe himself died in hiding once more from a creditor. He was over seventy years old, and his beloved wife, Mary, survived him only by a year and eight months. Defoe learnt from his parents the value of a true marriage based on companionship. Novak sums up the vicissitudes of his life-his various imprisonments (at least five), his bankrupties, his long journeys through the British countryside on horseback through storm and cold-all proving his extraordinary resilience. He died in hiding at a time of dispute with his children and with one son, Benjamin, in prison. Novak says it's amazing he survived so long. He would have been delighted if he could have known that even today, as in postcolonial studies, his works provoke controversy, and that Robinson Crusoe is still one of the most popular of world classics.

Maximillian Novak's biography is a truly heavyweight performance, bringing together a mass of information about every detail of Defoe's life. Ian Campbell Ross's Lawrence Sterne: A Life is more selective, written with a grace of style which makes it continually entertaining to read.