Читать книгу Defoe on Sheppard and Wild: The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild by Daniel Defoe - Даниэль Дефо, Данієль Дефо, Даниэль Дефо - Страница 6

How then did Daniel Defoe come to be involved with the Sheppard and Wild story? After the huge success of Robinson Crusoe, which ran to five editions by the end of 1719, Defoe was said to have ‘cleared over a thousand guineas’, which made him a prosperous man for the first time in his career. Defoe’s life began to change. He was now sixty, had two adult sons working in the City (Daniel and Benjamin), and three attractive but unmarried daughters (Maria, Hannah, and the youngest Sophia). Prosperity bought a different pace and direction to his work, and a desire to consolidate his position as a successful professional author, no longer a Grub Street hack.

He bought a large Queen Anne house with four acres of gardens in Stoke Newington, four miles north of London, where he began to entertain friends. He set up a small retail business, merchandising luxury foods (cheese, anchovies, oysters, honey) near Tower Dock. In August 1722 he invested £1,000 in a 99 year lease of farmland and timber near Colchester, partly to secure his own family income, and partly to guarantee the future independence of his three daughters. His second daughter, Hannah Defoe, probably his favourite and an able business woman, co-signed the lease. He also established a coat of arms in the name of De Foe, and had it fixed in a seal.

These financial securities did not indicate retirement from writing, but a steady change in direction from journalism to books. Defoe became less interested in party politics and topical journalism, and began to concentrate on more enduring themes: trade and travel, crime and corruption, human misfortune and ingenuity, the tangled lives of men and women. From 1720 he gradually ceased writing for the highly politicized Mist’s journal (which he had partly owned), and began to concentrate on further carefully researched books, both fiction and non-fiction. For the first time he was able to undertake these with publishers’ ‘subscriptions’ (advances). He also contributed occasional unsigned articles to a new ‘serious entertainment’ paper, John Applebee’s Weekly Journal, which specialized in crime reporting.

We catch a rare glimpse of the sixty-four year old Defoe at this period, as seen through the eyes of a young poet called Henry Baker. Baker was cautiously paying court to Sophia Defoe, and his prospective father-in-law evidently appeared as a grand, wealthy and faintly alarming old literary lion. Ensconced at Newington Green Baker found ‘Mr D[efoe], a Gentleman wellknown by his Writings, who had built there a very handsome House, as a Retirement from London, and amused his Time either in the Cultivation of a large and pleasant Garden, or in the Pursuit of his Studies, which he found means of making very Profitable. He was now at least sixty Years of Age, afflicted with the Gout and Stone, but retained all his mental faculties entire.’

This retired, sedentary, not to say valetudinarian figure, was something of an illusion. Defoe’s energy was still remarkable, and far from ‘amusing his Time’, he was writing with fantastic speed. In 1722 he published his Newgate novel, Moll Flanders, another huge commercial success, which ran to three editions. He also wrote A Journal of the Plague Year, and the pirate novel Colonel Jack. All of these, incidentally, were anonymous.

He then signed a four year contract with a consortium of publishers and began collecting material for his famous three-volume Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, which would be published in 1724–6. Meanwhile, in 1724 he also wrote Roxana, and the following spring his life of Jonathan Wild (1725). He could hardly have had time to put down his pen, let alone cultivate his rose garden.

Defoe’s interest in Newgate, and the whole question of criminal lives, was longstanding. He had himself been imprisoned there, in the Newgate Press Yard, for libel in 1703. More recently, in 1718, while researching and writing Robinson Crusoe, he had become involved with the case of James Shepheard (no relation), an eighteen-year-old Newgate prisoner who, for political reasons, had been denied the right to publish his ‘True Confession’ before execution. Defoe took this up in two pamphlets (notably a Vindication of the Press), as raising the issue of free speech.

In 1721 both Defoe’s editor Nathaniel Mist, and his own son Benjamin, were briefly imprisoned in Newgate for seditious libel. While visiting them there, Defoe heard the stories of two famous Newgate women prisoners, Moll King and ‘Callicoe’ Sarah, and probably interviewed one of them. These biographical materials became the factual basis for the Defoe’s vivid novel, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders. This was also significant because Defoe chose to tell it in a woman’s voice, using the convention of the ‘True Confession’ of Newgate.