The Shorter Fiction

Abstract

Defoe turned to the writing of fiction after a long apprenticeship in journalism Before the publication of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe in 1719 he had written pamphlets, verse, political satire and religious polemic in addition to writing and editing regular issues of The Review. The latter occasionally included short stories and sketches in which he would insert dialogues between imaginary correspondents or comment on the political and religious controversies of the day. This journalism, together with such satirical pieces as The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702) and And What if the Pretender Should Come? (1713) proved to be a most valuable training in literary expression. For through the medium of these articles, pamphlets and stories he was gaining experience in the adoption of a persona other than himself and acquiring the narrative skills that were later to flower so impressively in Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year. In 1705 he published The Consolidator; Or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon, an account of an imaginary voyage to a lunar kingdom. This is a laboured allegory on contemporary English institutions and politicians, an allegory which may well have been the inspiration behind Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).