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Hello, in 1719 a man aged, in 1719 a man aged nearly 60 publishes first novel. It's neatly summarized in its title.

The life and strange surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York Mariner, who lived eight and twenty years all alone in an uninhabited island on the coast of America near the mouth of the great river of Udo-Nokwe.

Having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself, with an account of how he was at last and strangely delivered by pirates.

The author's name, Daniel Defer, did not appear anywhere on the title page.

Many readers believed they were reading a true account of a castaway desert island existence, and his relationship with the man he calls Friday.

It was enormously popular, so much so that by the end of the year Defer had already written and published a sequel.

The book has been heralded by some as the first English novel. Each themes of capitalism, colonialism and man's place in nature have made it a focus of perennial interest, not just to readers and literacritics, but also to philosophers, economists and historians.

With me to discuss Robinson Crusoe, a Karen O'Brien, provised Chancellor for Education at the University of Birmingham, Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway University of London, and Bob Owen's Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the Open University.

Karen O'Brien, can you tell us a bit about Daniel Defer himself?

Yes, Daniel Defer's life was in some respects as eventful as Robinson Crusos. He was born around 1660 in London, and his original name was Daniel Foe, and he added the D later on for effect.

His father was a wealthy businessman, and also a non-conformist. Daniel grew up in London, and when he was very young he witnessed the Great Plague in London, and this is later reflected in one of his novels,

Bodys being taken out in carts as he wandered the streets of London, and he saw the fire of London. When he was a very young man, he took the extraordinarily risky step of joining a rebellion against King James II who had recently come to the throne,

and he was very lucky to escape with his life, and he was subsequently pardoned. He then became in the 1680s a successful businessman, eventually going bankrupt in the 1690s.

In 1688, when King William III came to the throne, things really changed for Defer, because in many ways he shared the new government's philosophy of religious toleration and its belief in a limited kind of constitutional monarchy, and at that point he becomes something of a political writer and a successful poet, but he continues with his business ventures.

When Queen Anne comes to the throne, however, the climate really changes, and it really hardens against the kind of dissenting religious beliefs that Defoe has, and he writes a pamphlet called the shortest way with dissenters, which satirizes the hard line attitude that the then government was taking towards people of his kinds of religious beliefs, and this lands him in a show trial, and he's fined, and he's condemned to spend some time three times in the pillory, which was quite a terrifying ordeal,

and he kind of turned it around by writing a hymn to the pillory at the time, and he spent some time in Newgate prison.

He managed to get out of Newgate prison, partly through the good offices of the Tory government and of Robert Harley, the then speaker of the House of Commons, who then got Defoe to act as a kind of paid writer and paid spy for the government for much of the 1717s.

So Defoe leaves a kind of double life in this period as a writer, as a pamphlet here, as an opinion former and agent for the government.

Once King George I comes to the throne, he's once again out of favour, and it's then that he takes to becoming a writer of fictions,

conduct books, but in 1719 Robinson Crusoe, then as you mentioned the sequel, and then many, many novels after that.

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