Daniel Defoe in London – debt, the pillory, and a final lodging in Rope Makers’ Alley
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead. Story time.
History time.
Daniel Defoe.
Dead on April the 24th, 1731.
Buried, almost certainly, two days later.
Which makes today,
April the 26th, a pretty good day to go looking for him.
And where do we find him?
Not on a desert island.
Not with a parrot on his shoulder.
Not building a stockade and counting goats and drying raisins.
No.
We find him in London.
Of course we do.
We find him in Rope Makers’ Alley, sometimes given as Rope Makers’ Street, in the old City of London.
Hiding.
Hiding from his creditors.
Which is a very Daniel Defoe way to die.
The official cause of death was given as “lethargy.”
That’s a wonderful eighteenth-century word. Sounds almost gentle. As if the poor man had overdone lunch and nodded off in a chair.
But “lethargy” probably means what we’d call a stroke.
So there he is.
Daniel Defoe.
The great survivor.
The man who gave us Robinson Crusoe.
The man who wrote plague, pirates, prostitutes, thieves, tradesmen, spies… pamphlets, newspapers, conduct books,
travel books… economic schemes, religious argument,
political mischief… and God knows what else.
And he dies in a City lodging, under pressure, under a cloud,
in debt, pursued to the end.
You couldn’t make him up.
Though he could have made himself up.
And frequently did.
That’s the first thing to get clear about Defoe.
He is not just the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe.
He is one of the great London machines.
A one-man printing press.
A pamphlet cannon.
A political operator.
A spy.
A bankrupt.
A businessman.
A dissenter.
A contrarian.
A journalist before journalism quite knew what it was.
A novelist before the novel quite knew what it was.
He was born, probably, in 1660, in or near London, into a dissenting family.
His father was James Foe,
a tallow chandler in Cripplegate.
A tallow chandler.
That means candles.
Fat, smoke, grease, trade, the City.
Not aristocratic.
Not polished marble.
London work.
London smell.
London money.
Young Daniel was educated at a dissenting academy at Newington Green and might have gone into the ministry.
But he didn’t.
As he put it,
the pulpit was none of his office.
His office was the world.
Trade.
Politics.
Ink.
Risk.
And risk nearly swallowed him.
He became a merchant.
Hosiery, exports, imports, tobacco, wine, cloth, bricks, tiles.
He invested in ships.
He speculated. He overreached.
He had schemes, projects, ideas.
If Defoe had lived now,
he’d have had three start-ups,
a podcast, a Substack,
a consultancy, a tax investigation, and a very complicated relationship with his bank manager.
In 1692 he went bankrupt for £17,000.
Seventeen thousand pounds.
In the 1690s that is not a hole in the pocket.
That is the Grand Canyon.
He was sent to prison for debt.
More than once.
And yet he kept going.
That’s the Defoe pulse.
Fall down. Get up.
Shipwrecked financially.
Build a raft.
Lose everything.
Start again.
Sound familiar?
Of course it does.
Robinson Crusoe is not just a story about a man on an island.
It’s Defoe’s whole life translated into myth.
Disaster.
Improvisation.
Inventory.
Prayer.
Labour.
Hope.
Start again.
But before Crusoe came the pillory.
And what a London scene that was.
In 1702 Defoe published one of the most dangerous things a writer can publish:
satire that some readers took literally.
The piece was called The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.
It pretended to speak in the voice of their enemies.
It took the language of religious persecution and pushed it until it became monstrous.
The authorities were not amused.
They arrested him.
Newgate Prison.
Fine.
Imprisonment.
And the pillory.
Three days of it.
July 1703.
The pillory was meant to shame him.
Head and hands locked in wood. Public humiliation. Abuse.
Rotten eggs if you were unlucky. Stones if the crowd was ugly.
But Defoe turned it into theatre.
His supporters gathered round.
His poem, Hymn to the Pillory, was sold in the streets.
And there he was,
as later described,
unabashed on high.
Imagine that.
London crowd.
Street noise.
Paper sellers bawling.
A man in the pillory becoming more famous by the minute.
It is one of the great reversals.
The state tries to make an example of him.
He makes an event of it.
Then comes journalism.
Defoe founded The Review in 1704 and wrote almost all of it himself.
Think about that.
Issue after issue.
Politics, foreign affairs, manners, morals, economics, argument, gossip, opinion.
Before newspapers had quite become newspapers,
Defoe was showing what they could do.
Not just raw news.
Explanation.
Interpretation.
Point of view.
Voice.
He was there at the birth of modern journalism,
sleeves rolled up,
ink on his fingers,
creditors at the door.
And then, late, astonishingly late, comes the fiction.
Robinson Crusoe appears in 1719.
Defoe is about fifty-nine.
Most writers would be thinking about the home straight.
Defoe invents a new road.
A man alone on an island.
A footprint in the sand.
A life rebuilt from wreckage.
And the world never let it go.
Then Moll Flanders.
The great London survivor.
Thief, wife, prisoner,
transported convict,
woman on the make,
woman under pressure,
woman asking the terrible question:
what would you do?
Then A Journal of the Plague Year.
London in 1665.
The streets sickening.
Doors marked.
Carts rumbling.
Bills of mortality.
Fear in the air.
A city trying to understand death while death is walking up the lane.
Defoe had the great gift.
He could make you believe.
He wrote as if he had been there.
As if he had seen it.
As if he had taken notes while the world was burning.
And that brings us back to London.
Because Defoe is one of London’s great explainers.
He understood trade.
He understood credit.
He understood panic.
He understood mobs.
He understood poverty.
He understood the City.
He understood that London was not just streets and steeples.
It was movement.
Goods coming in.
Ships going out.
Money promised.
Money owed.
Reputations made and ruined.
Printers, prisons, pamphlets,
coffee houses, warehouses, meeting houses, courts, creditors.
The great machine.
And Defoe was inside the machine.
Sometimes driving it.
Sometimes being chewed up by it.
His last years were hard.
The old debts came back.
Lawsuits.
Family troubles.
Property troubles.
He moved between lodgings.
He wrote of himself sinking under insupportable sorrows.
That phrase stops you.
Insupportable sorrows.
And then, April the 24th, 1731, Rope Makers’ Alley.
The survivor’s last wreck.
Two days later, we think,
April the 26th, he was buried at Bunhill Fields.
Bunhill Fields. Sounds almost cosy, doesn’t it. It isn’t.
The name goes back to Bone Hill – piles of human bones dumped outside the City walls.
London tidying itself up… by pushing its dead just over there.
And there’s more.
Bunhill Fields was
the great resting place of dissenters.
Not Westminster Abbey.
Not Poet’s Corner.
The nonconformist ground.
The outsiders’ acre.
The place for those who did not fit neatly into the official story.
Perfect.
Absolutely perfect.
Because Defoe never did fit neatly.
He was too many things.
Too restless.
Too useful.
Too troublesome.
Too modern.
And today, all these years later,
we still go back to him.
To Crusoe on the island.
To Moll in the city.
To London in the plague.
To the man in the pillory who would not be shamed.
And to that final London room, where the creditors were still circling and the old fighter finally went quiet.
Daniel Defoe.
Born Foe.
Added the “De” later, perhaps because it looked a little grander.
A Londoner to his bones.
Shipwrecked again and again.
And always, until the last,
writing himself ashore.
And there you go, there you have it. That’s today’s London fix.
Couldn’t be more London.
See you tomorrow.