Restless Daniel

John Mullan

• The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography by John Richetti
  Blackwell, 406 pp, £50.00, December 2005, ISBN 0 631 19529 7
• A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens
  Pickering & Chatto, 277 pp, £60.00, January 2006, ISBN 1 85196 810 5

Writers do not always know what their best writings are. Daniel Defoe believed his magnum opus to be his huge, passionately political, intermittently philosophical poem in heroic couplets, Jure Divino (1706). Begun while he was imprisoned in Newgate, its 12 books assailed the doctrine of the divine right of monarchs from every angle he could imagine. The argument mattered very much to him, as it did to many of his fellow countrymen. They had recently rid themselves of a monarch, James II, who had shown unmistakeable absolutist tendencies. For Defoe, the Revolution had been Glorious indeed. His opposition to the doctrine of divine right shaped all his political views. Jure Divino was designed to be a work to do justice to a lofty subject. It runs to some eight thousand lines of verse, plus a lengthy preface and substantial buttonholing footnotes, where Defoe explicates historical references or emphasises ideological points. It was published in a sumptuous folio edition, with an engraved portrait of the proud author for a frontispiece. It is also a work that only Defoe scholars – and perhaps not all of them – could ever bear to read.