Milton and Dryden were really journalists; Milton when he wrote his political pamphlets, and Dryden when he wrote Absalom and Achitophel and other poems of that kind.  But they were poets first, journalists by accident.  Defoe was a journalist first, though by nature ever a story-teller.

Daniel Defoe, born in 1661, was the son of a London butcher names James Foe.  Why Daniel, who prided himself on being a true-born Englishman, Frenchified his name by adding a “De” to it we do not know, and he was over forty before he changed plain Foe into Defoe.

Daniel’s father and mother were Puritans, and he was sent to school with the idea that he should become a Nonconformist minister.  But Defoe did not become a minister; perhaps he felt he was unsuited for such solemn duty.  “The pulpit,” he says later, “is none of my office.  It was my disaster first to be set apart for, and then to be set apart from the honor of that sacred employ.”

Defoe never went to college, and because of this many a time in later days his enemies taunted him with being ignorant and unlearned.  He felt these taunts bitterly, and again and again answered them in his writings.  “I have been in my time pretty well master of five languages,” he says in one place.  “I have also, illiterate though I am, made a little progress in science.  I have read Euclid’s Elements. . . .  I have read logic. . . .  I went some length in physics. . . .  I thought myself master of geography and to possess sufficient skill in astronomy.”  Yet he says I am “no scholar.”

When Defoe left school he went into the office of a merchant hosier.  It was while he was in this office that King Charles II died and King James II came to the throne.  Almost at once there followed the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion.  The Duke was a Protestant and James was a Catholic.  There were many in the land who feared a Catholic King, and who believed too that the Duke had more right to the throne than James, so they joined the rebellion.  Among them was Daniel.  But the Rebellion came to nothing.  In a few weeks the Duke’s army was scattered in flight, and he himself a wretched prisoner in the Tower.

Happier than many of his comrades, Defoe succeeded in escaping death or even punishment.  Secretly and safely he returned to London and there quietly again took up his trade of merchant hosier.  But he did not lose his interest in the affairs of his country.  And when the glorious Revolution came he was one of those who rode out to meet and welcome William the Deliverer.

But perhaps he allowed politics to take up too much of his time and thought, for although he was a good business man he failed and had to hide from those to whom he owed money.  But soon we find him setting to work again to mend his fortunes.  He became first secretary to and then part owner of a tile and brick factory, and in a few years made enough money to pay off all his old debts.