Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) lived a very rich life. He is typical of his time because he excelled, as many others, in his intelligence, energy, and spirit of enterprise and tried to fight for a good place in society. He represents the moderate wing of the English enlightenment. He was the son of a London butcher, Foe, a Presbyterian, and was also a tradesman. On his business trips he visited Spain, Germany, France, and Italy. When he was twenty-four years old, he married. In 1688 he joined the army of William of Orange.

The new king was a foreigner and when the aristocracy began to speak against him, Defoe wrote a satirical poem combating the popular prejudice against a king of foreign birth. In 1702 he wrote The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, in which he, himself a dissenter, ironically demand the total suppression of dissent. He suggested in it that all who were against the Anglican Church should be executed. At first it was considered to be the work of an Anglican, but when it was discovered, that Defoe was the author, he was pilloried and imprisoned. But several days before that he had written his Hymn to the Pillory, in which he said that the suppressers of freedom always acted similarly against those who defended the interests of the people. It was read everywhere while he was in prison. Defoe began to issue there his weekly, The Review of the Affairs of France, which was the first organ of political views independent of the government. He wrote about English matters instead of French, of course. But then Defoe made a compromise with the government and served as a secret agent, and that also at the preparations for the union of Scotland and England.
Thus he was well prepared for writing his best novels. He was about sixty when he wrote his greatest fictional work, The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York. The story is based on the actual experiences of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor, who was marooned on a desolate island in the Atlantic in 1704 and lived alone there for four years. Defoe captures the interest of the reader by simple, matter-of-fact, yet detailed narration, which maintains an illusion of truth, though the story is full of adventures. Defoe describes the life of the hero before he starts living his solitary years. Robinson becomes a sailor against the wishes of his parents. After a terrible storm on the sea he thinks of returning home. But an old captain persuades him to board a ship bound for Guinea. On the way he is captured by a Turkish pirate and sold into slavery, from which he escapes to Brazil. There he stays for some time as a sugar planter. But he soon joins another ship. Unfortunately the ship is wrecked off the coast of an uninhabited island. Robinson alone escapes to the shore and his new life begins. The author narrates in a minute detail how Robinson with the aid of some foodstuffs and utensils, which he saved from the wreck, builds himself a house, grows corn, keeps goats and makes himself a boat. He also describes the perturbation of Robinson’s mind caused by the visit of cannibals to his island, and how Robinson rescues from death one poor native, whom he names Friday. Finally an English ship approaches. But the crew are in state of mutiny. After some fighting the mutineers are subdued and Robinson is rescued. Defoe himself said that he had written the book for the instruction of mankind, to recommend patience and energy under the worst misery.

A similar moral and educational purpose may be found in The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in which Robinson with Friday revisits his island, is attacked by savages in canoes on his departure and loses Friday in the encounter. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders is a realistic picture of low life. Defoe the wrote several stories similar to this.

Later in his Essay upon Projects he propagates reforms in different walks of life, such as finance, trade, and education. His intellectual outlook was wholly modern. In the discussion of moral and social matters. Defoe for the first time let the actual voice of the average middle class be heard.

The Complete English Tradesman destroyed the literary privilege, which the Restoration had accorded to the circles of the aristocracy. The Complete English Gentleman gave definite utterance to the essential claim of the tradesman: “to attain to culture, and through it to integrate himself with the ruling classes, to sweep away the barrier of refinement, the only thing that still barred his progress. The sons of merchants, when duly educated, will no longer be distinguishable from the descendants of ancient families”. He showed the moral corruption of the nobility, the decline of the brutal country gentleman and said that “the future belongs to the class that toils, grows rich and will give itself the prestige of knowledge”. This class is in contact with reality. Intellectually it is brought up to respect the concrete and practical.Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin on 30th November 1667 and died there on 19th October 1745. Swift’s father , who was also called Jonathan, died before his son’s birth. His mother, Abigail, came from Leicester and he was the grandson of Thomas Swift, the Royalist vicar of Goodrich. He was a cousin of Dryden. He was educated at Kilkenny Grammar School, contemporaneously with Congreve, and thereafter attended Trinity College. Dublin where he was in trouble for disciplinary matters and obtained his degree only by special grace. Subsequently he became secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park in England, but he became unhappy with his position and returned to Ireland where he was ordained in 1694 and took the prebend of Kilroot. However, he returned to Sir William Temple two years later and stayed there till Temple’s death in 1699. Swift wrote there his famous satires The Battle of the Books and his satire on corruption in religion and learning A Tale of A Tub, both were published in 1704.

A Tale of Tub is an allegory criticising various forms of religion and religious fanaticism. Swift was an uncompromising supporter of the Established Church. He wrote this book to support Protestantism against Catholicism on one side and against the Dissenters on the other side.

Before his death a father gives each of his three sons a coat to look after and expresses the wish that the coats should not be altered. But the sons disobey the injunction and add shoulder-knots or gold braid on them according to the fashion. Finally Martin (Luther, the Anglican Church) and Jack (Calvin) quarrel with Peter (the Roman Catholic Church) and then with each other. Peter decorates hid coat and wears three hats at once, but the younger brothers remember their father’s wish and decide to return their coats to their original state. Martin takes off only the trimmings without tearing the coat, but Jack in his radicalism tears the trimmings off so violently that he even tears the coat itself.

The Battle of the Books is a contribution to a literary controversy which was known as “the quarrel of the ancients and moderns”, that is ancient classics and modern writers.

In 1708 he published his Prediction for the Ensuing Year, 1708, against the predictions of the astrologer John Partridge, whom he wanted to ridicule. In 1712 Swift published a pamphlet, The Conduct of the Allies, against the war waged by England on the continent. In the war he saw an enormous burden for the people. The pamphlet was successful and Swift’s popularity grew quickly.

In 1712 Swift left for Ireland and withdrew from active party life. Once Swift was in Ireland, the fate of that country became his main interest. The condition of Ireland was miserable. Restrictions on trade, imposed for the benefit of the English, ruined Irish industry. He then published A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture. When Ireland was to be provided with new copper coinage, which gave profit to the English again, Swift wrote Drapier’s Letters, in which he asked the tradesmen , shopkeepers, farmers, and other not to accept the money as it would ruin the country.

It is uncertain as to whether Swift ever married in a formal sense, but he was closely involved with Esther Stella Johnson, who he had met through Temple at Moor Park and, from 1708, with Esther Vanhomrigh who is reputed to have died as a consequence of his final break with her in 1723. Stella died in 1728. Swift gave one third of his income to charities and used his own money to found St. Patrick’s Hospital for Imbeciles. He was himself considered by many to be insane in his final years due to the impairment of his faculties by what was probably Méniéres disease. He is buried beside Stella in St. Patrick’s, Dublin.

In Ireland he wrote the most famous of his works, the satire Gulliver’s Travels, with the full title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships, which was published anonymously in 1726. The idea of a satire in the form of a travel narrative probably originated from meetings of the Scribblers Club and Swift would likely have been encouraged by the contemporary interest in voyages.

On the first voyage Gulliver is shipwrecked and swims to the shore of an island inhabited by Lilliputians, the tallest of whom is only six inches tall. The emperor believes himself to be the delight and terror of the universe. This is absurd when watched by Gulliver, who is twelve times as tall. Gulliver gives an account of the two parties in the country. They are distinguished by the use of high or low heels, which is a satire on the political parties in England. Another account is given by him of a religious problem which divides the nation: Should eggs be broken at the big or the little end? In the end Gulliver is charged with high treason, but escapes.

On the second voyage a storm drives his ship to the land of Brobdingnag. Here Gulliver is a dwarf among men sixty feet in height. The king in his calmness and commonsense looks at Europe as if it were an anthill. Soon Gulliver feels the same contempt for the narrow-minded English lords and ladies, which he expresses in his conversation with the king of Brobdingnag. At one point the travelling box, in which Gulliver is taken to the sea-shore, is snatched by a big bird and dropped into the sea. Gulliver is rescued by an English ship.

On his third voyage he is set adrift in a little boat, after his ship has been captured by pirates, and he reaches the shores of an uninhabited of the flying island take him with them. He visits the Academy of Lagado, where he meets philosophers, projectors and inventors, men who also dwell in the air like the inhabitants of the flying island. This part of the book is a satire on all learned fools whose minds hover over the earth and who are unable to see real life and real problems. After many experiences Gulliver decides to return to England.

In the fourth part Swift’s satire is the bitterest. A few months after his return home, Gulliver sets out on another voyage. The crew mutinies, seizes the ship and Gulliver is set ashore in a strange land inhabited by the Houyhnhnms, horses endowed with human intelligence and superior in virtue to men. They are the governing class, whereas the Yahoos, though is the shape of men, are beasts, without reason and conscience. The Houyhnhnms are governed only by reason, undisturbed by love and courtship. But even if Gulliver holds the government of this country in great respect, he decides to leave the country. His intention is to live alone on some desolate island, but at last he is forced by the captain of a Portuguese ship to return home.

Swift in this novel satirised the politics of his day, the religious quarrels, the wars of ambition, the lucubrations of science, and also the very nature of man and the whole human species. In spite of all the pessimism, which burdens it, the book, especially in the first half, is written with a rich and ingenious invention and unflagging spirit. The perfectly simple style has an incomparable exactness and precision. Moreover, every detail is vivified by a humour which consists in presenting the most improbable extravagances with an imperturbable gravity that procures belief for them. Like Defoe´s Robinson Crusoe it enjoys the privilege of amusing children while making adults think. For its qualities it has become popular not only in England, but also in many other countries.

Swift’s physical condition deteriorated. He died on 7th October 1745. He wished his fortune to be used for founding a hospital for idiots and lunatics.