"A Pirate of Exquisite Mind" by Diana and Michael Preston

This is a biography of William Dampier, the first person to circumnavigate the world three times, who landed on the coast of Australia 80 years before Captain James Cook and who became the best selling author who inspired the new genre of travel writing as well as Robinson Crusoe (being on both the expeditions which marooned Alexander Selkirk and which rescued him) by Daniel Defoe (whose biography is reviewed here) and Gulliver's Travels. He is also responsible for a host of words including avocado, barbeque, chopsticks and sub-species.

But he started off as a buccaneer. Sailing to the West Indies he began working on a sugar plantation but his wanderlust soon got the better of him. He spent time as a logger before signing on as a pirate. His career in piracy was pretty lacklustre; in his first voyage he sacked a couple of towns but kept missing the rich prizes and he returned to England (having rounded Cape Horn and crossed the Pacific) after twelve years at sea with little to show for his trouble. His second voyage, as a captain of a scientific vessel for the Royal Navy was equally unsuccessful. Only on his third voyage, demoted to navigator under the command of Woodes Rogers, did he help in capturing a Spanish Galleon which earned him some thousands of pounds, enough to pay his debts after he had died. In all, he did better as an author.

The Prestons tell his tale in great detail which sometimes slows the narrative. A great deal of time is spent on the first voyage (to be fair, it was the longest, it took twelve years). But Dampier did so much and discovered so much that it is difficult to see how any less detail would be possible. Certainly the book is action packed to the extent that I got a little lost a times. I would have liked to see some (modern) maps to show exactly where he was at which time.

This is is an interesting biography of a fascinating man and well worth reading.

August 2015; 461 pages

"The life and strange surprising adventures of Daniel Defoe" by Richard West

The man born Daniel Foe was an extraordinary man who lived in extraordinary times. Born in the year of the Restoration of Charles II, he lived through the Plague and Fire of London, the Glorious Revolution, the Union with Scotland, the first Jacobite risings, and the South Sea Bubble. He was a rebel, fighting with the Duke of Monmouth at the Battle of Sedgemoor, a hosier, a maker of bricks and pantiles, a bankrupt, a pilloried pamphleteer, a prisoner, a journalist, a secret agent and finally a writer responsible for Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and  A Journal of the Plague Year as well as many other titles. With such a cv he is an obvious subject for biography.

Richard West faces some difficulties. Defoe loved to mix fact and fiction and his own accounts of his own life are inconsistent, contradictory and partial. There is no record of his birth. So West has relied a great deal on Defoe's own writings, whilst warning us about them. This means extensive quotes. West also quotes from historians about the period but concentrates almost exclusively on Macauley and Trevelyan. There is a feeling that West has done insufficient independent research and has relied too heavily on a limited number of sources.

But the book rattles on until the middle when the journalist becomes the author. You might think that this is where the story would become compelling. For 236 pages, Defoe has led an exciting life but now he is going to become the author of the famous books. Suddenly, West goes weird. Robinson Crusoe is described, with two other books, in twenty pages. Twenty three pages are devoted to A Journal of the Plague Year with two other works of historical fiction. Moll Flanders and Roxana merit twenty five pages. Then 84(!) pages are given to his three volume travelogue, A Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain. This one work is thus given more space than all his fiction put together!

Moreover, West attempts little in the way of literary criticism. Most of the descriptions of the books are taken up with an exhaustive summary of their plots. I would have been far more interested to know how Defoe came by the ideas for these books, what they shed upon his life (West does note the repeated obsession with money that was a probable legacy of Defoe's bankruptcy), how they were received by his contemporaries (both Crusoe and Flanders were best-sellers), and how they influenced future writers. But West only mentions in passing the fact the Moll Flanders was published the year before The Beggar's Opera was first performed and he is virtually silent on the presumable obsession with crime that Georgian society must have had at the time. As for the 84 pages on the Tour, most of this is devoted to discussing each place Defoe went to (or claims he went to).

In short, I felt the first half of the book was a triumph but I was extremely disappointed in the second half.

April 2014; 408 pages

In A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, Diana and Michael Preston make the point that Robinson Crusoe was in poart based on the best-selling travel books of William Dampier who was on the expedition that marooned Alexander Selkirk, the model for Crusoe, and on the expedition that rescued him!

"Moll Flanders" by Daniel Defoe

A best-seller in 1722 by the man who had also written Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders is a sort of Rake's progress about a lady who descends (quite slowly) into iniquity. Born in Newgate and raised first by gypsies (a common theme in 18th Century fiction and a strange paranoia of the times) and then by the parish, the lady who later becomes known as Moll Flanders (although she makes it clear that this is a pseudonym, the trade name she used when she later became a famous thief) dreams of becoming a gentlewoman. As a companion to the daughters of a family she is first seduced by the elder son and then marries the younger. Following his death she marries a spendthrift linen-draper; when he runs off she marries (bigamously, though this doesn't seem to be important) a man who takes her to Virginia where she discovers that he is her brother And this is important; she is horrified by incest); she then oscillates for a while between widowhood, being a mistress and marrying again. As in Jane Austen, the purpose of marriage is to improve one's fortune and therefore much effort is made to conceal her relative poverty: finally everything goes wrong when both herself and her new husband discover that they have both tricked one another into marrying for money and they are virtually destitute. However, Moll never really sees the need to work for her living, so poverty is a relative matter, and she never worries too much about supporting her children, most of whom she discards with little care. Finally, staring poverty in the face, she resorts to theft and begins a long and successful career as pickpocket, shoplifter and opportunistic sneak thief.

This is a fascinating insight into the morals and morality of early eighteenth century London. Without an effective police force, criminals could only really be caught 'in the act' by a hue and cry and then turned over to the authorities. One notorious criminal .mastermind', Jonathan Wild, ran a criminal gang and acted as crime boss, fence, 'recoverer' of stolen property for reward, and thief-taker. Moll's exploits, written when Jonathan Wild was at his height, seem based on the story of one of his female associates. He became iconic as a base for literary stories including 'The life of Jonathan Wild' by Henry Fielding and 'The Beggar's Opera' by John Gay (first performed in 1728).

Although there are some rather slow passages where Moll painstakingly analyses the moral dilemmas facing her (albeit from a very materialistic moral viewpoint), there is a lot of action. Little of it would seriously shock the modern reader: Moll is never a whore in the modern sense of the word although she often refers to herself as this because she has sex with men whilst she is unmarried, or married to someone else, or married illegally (eg incestuously). Her thieving is essentially opportunistic (it reminded me very much of 'Harry the Valet', the jewel thief). What seems appalling to her are abortion (which she goes to some lengths not to commit) and incest (which she commits accidentally).

Seen from a modern perspective, Moll is a deeply flawed woman. She casts her children away, marriage is a financial transaction, she has no compunction about her victims (a fact she admits herself) and even after her repentance in the face of death and redemption she is still more than happy to build the foundations of her new life as a businesswoman on the ill-gotten gains she has amassed from her life of crime.

I enjoyed Moll Flanders. Although there were moments when I struggled, there were also moments when the narrative had me hooked. Nowadays its principal delight is probably as a social commentary of the criminal underworld of London in the early 1700s but it is still well worth reading as a story.

April 2014; 317 pages

I have just finished reading a biography of Daniel Defoe. He was an extraordinarily interesting man who lived from the Restoration of Charles II, through the Glorious Revolution, till the Jacobite Rebellions of the early Georges.