In the middle of the Yard lay a small Leather Purse, with two keys hanging at it, and money in it, but no Body would meddle with it. I ask?d how long it had lain there; the Man at the Window said it had lain almost on Hour? I had no such need for Money, nor was the some so big, that I had any Inclination meddle with it, or to get the Money to the hazard it might be intended with? (59).
Defoe show the reader the trouble that could come along with the purse. The boy thinks if he really wants the money. He knows he is not it desperation for money, and he knows that the amount of the money inside is not that much. ?Like so much in Defoe, this is a
description of something happening, and he makes an immediate bid for our attention and our credulity by his careful setting of the event? (Watt, 16).
Defoe?s last great work of fiction, Roxana, appeared in 1724. ??the strange, belated flowering of Defoe?s imagination withered; and in A New Voyage Round the World, published in the following spring (1725), it may be said to have died? (Freeman, 262). Also in 1725, The Four Years Voyages of Captain George Roberts was published. The Memoirs of Captain Carleton, in 1728, and Robert Drury?s Journal, in 1729, are memoirs of actual persons with slight fictional embellishment, However, Defoe never abandoned the use of the short tale to make a social or moral point. His History of the Pyrates adds to its factual accounts the story of an archetypal fictional pirate, Captain Mission. Defoe?s volumes on the occult and his treatises on trade and economics are also replete with fictional narrative.
Defoe had been haunted by creditors almost all of his life, and finally, at the age of 70, he was forced to flee and hide from a creditor claiming payment on a bill Defoe had thought he had settled in 1704. On April 24, 1731, separated from his family, he died ??? of a Lethargy,? says the parish register,? in a lodging house in London. ?Eighteen-century diagnoses were crude and casual? (Freeman, 293).
Consequently, Daniel Defoe uses his use of extreme detail to overwhelm the reader, thus enabling him to create elaborate fantasies. Defoe crated a style unheard of at the time. He could show people how things really happen even though he was never there himself.
?When Defoe began to write fiction he took little notice of the dominant critical theory of the day, which still inclined towards the use of traditional plots; instead, he merely allowed his narrative order to flow spontaneously from his own sense of what his protagonists might plausible do next. In so doing Defoe initiated an important new tendency in fiction: his total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir is s defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel?? (Watt, 15).
Defoe created excellence through his works. He created his own unique which captured the minds of million. ?His [Defoe] Dissenting background engaged his sympathies with those who? were struggling to assert their rights, rather than with those whose struggle was to maintain an inherited position and traditional privileges? (Boulton, 7).
Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe-His Life. Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Boulton, James T., ed. Daniel Defoe. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1965
Defoe, Daniel. Journal of the Plague year. London: Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge, 1871.
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. New York: The Modern Library, 1994.
Defoe, Daniel. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London: Grant Richards, 1902.
Freeman, William. The Incredible Defoe. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1950.
Moore, John R. Daniel Defoe Citizen of the Modern World. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1958.