Defoe and the Whig novel

"This critical study challenges some widely accepted views of Defoe's fiction. Based on a close reading of the major fiction and a broad assessment of history, the author rejects individualism as an ideal espoused in Defoe's fiction and argues that Marxist interpretations have distorted the influences on Defoe and depicted him unfairly as a proponent of capitalism and exploiter of native peoples.^

Although all of Defoe's protagonists are forced into a temporary individualism in order to obey the natural law of survival, they eventually recognize their need for social interaction and seek the leisure afforded by society to repent for the crimes they have committed." "Defoe's fictional settings all begin in the reign of the Stuarts, but the lack of specificity invariably reflects on the Hanoverian political and social situation, which witnessed a crisis in Whig leadership from 1717 to Walpole's resumption of power after the disaster of the South Sea Bubble and the sudden deaths of Stanhope and Sunderland. This serious split in Whig leadership probably played a role in Defoe's turning toward fiction. But Defoe never abandoned his social and political views.^

This study explores how his social viewpoint actuates his major fiction." "By creating talented characters, many of whom were denied the opportunity to function within a rational social and economic setting, Defoe takes up the social concerns expressed in his Essay on Projects (1697) and other early works. He concluded that the establishment of the opportunity for equality was essential for the broad prosperity of the British nation and that such prosperity could only be realized by the development of trade on a large scale. By creating a fiction that allowed him to envision the possiblities and outcomes of some of his social ideas, e.g., the transformative values of criminal transportation, he could assess the value of recovering the services of a talented portion of the populace lost to crime.^

Though his settings are in the era of the Stuarts, the social and moral lessons are always applicable to the Hanoverian present." "When Defoe abandoned fiction after the publication of Roxana in 1724, he returned to the social concerns which he had never lost sight of in such late works as "The Protestant Monastery, or a Complaint Against the Brutality of the Present Age" (1727), "Augusta Triumphans" (1728), and "Some Objections...Relating to the Present Intended Relief of Prisoners" (1729). Defoe recognized that economic success was essential to prosperity, and only prosperity could insure a steady improvement in social well-being. This social imperative forms the basis of Defoe's major fiction."--BOOK JACKET.