If the modern reader finds it hard to pin down the man identified by his contemporary Alexander Pope as ‘restless Daniel’, it must be largely because Defoe was professionally as well as personally committed to maintaining a very low profile. His perennial employment as a government hireling required mobility, evasiveness and changes in identity, as did his inability to meet the demands of a host of angry creditors. 

Another barrier to apprehending our man is that so much of Defoe’s life was unrecorded. Born in or around 1660, Daniel Foe or De Foe, as he was also known, had published very little by the start of the 18th century; his first novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), did not emerge until he was nearing sixty. In the meantime, he had been frenetically occupied with many other people and causes: by his own account, he joined the Duke of Monmouth’s failed rebellion against James II in 1685, avoiding capture soon after defeat. He also married, fathered eight children and travelled widely; he pursued various entrepreneurial schemes involving tobacco, wine, wood, cloth, bricks, civet cats and a diving bell, resulting in bankruptcy and imprisonment. If he could not invest in or implement a new business venture himself, he wrote about it instead, as in his Essay on Projects (1697), a work that addressed such permanently applicable social and economic questions as how to improve transportation and trade, regulate the banks, employ the poor and care for the needy.

The period of Defoe’s life with which Marc Mierowsky is chiefly concerned begins with the anonymous satirical pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, published in 1702, at the start of Queen Anne’s reign. In this work, Defoe set out to parody the High Church opponents of toleration for Dissenters