British Literary Journalism

Defoe and the Blurred Boundaries between Fact and Fiction

Intriguingly, Daniel Defoe, an eminent early British journalist, presented all his writings—whether fact or his now famous fiction such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722)—as fact, almost all of it anonymously. While the boundaries between fact and fiction can often blur, journalism from its outset generally succeeded on the basis of its claims to accuracy and authenticity. Thus Defoe was at pains to stress in The Storm (1704), his celebrated account of a tempest that struck the British Isles in November 1703, the accuracy of his observations and the authenticity of the documents he drew on. There may well have been ironies here. Yet within the diversified literary culture of early eighteenth century England, Defoe's rhetoric of factuality became all the more necessary, if only to win the trust of readers—and the support of advertisers.

A fascination with “human interest” also lies at the core of the journalistic imagination. Defoe's The Storm was a pioneering example of the “human interest” story making it particularly compelling for modern readers. Moreover, Defoe's journalism was very much a product of his times. While the first specialist women's magazine, the Ladies' Mercury, was launched as a monthly in 1693, the lapsing of the restrictive Licensing Act in 1696 unleashed a torrent of new literary forms. Not only did Britain's first recognizable newspaper, the Daily Courant, appear on March 11, 1702, but the journalistic imagination also expanded about this time to incorporate war stories, parliamentary proceedings, travel accounts, political editorials, book adverts, bills of mortality, cargoes of ships, biographies, bibliographies, Hebrew anagrams, lottery numbers, assize reports, literary criticism, and social comment.

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