Daniel Foe

Daniel Foe - it was not till he was 35 that he assumed the more high-sounding name Defoe - was born in 1660, in a family of nonconformist. His fa-ther, James Foe, a London butcher, was wealthy enough to give his son a good education. As a boy Daniel was sent for four or five years to a non-conformist school at Newington Green to prepare for the Presbyterian ministry. Though he never became a minister, he is in all his books an indefatigable preacher. When his training was completed, he decided to engage in business as a hosier. It was his cherished desire to become wealthy, but his wish was never fulfilled. Defoe went bankrupt several times. He was always deep in debt. "Thirty times I was rich and poor," he used to say. The only branch of business in which he proved successful was journalism and literature. Throughout his life he had the knack of picking up information on a wide variety of subjects - history, economics, geog-raphy, demonology.

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