Daniel Defoe’s (1660-1731) links with Kent are not substantial, but they are interesting. The most important, the claim that `The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner’ was written in the west Kent village of Hartley, is almost certainly false. Even so, as an example of how these local myths and tales arise and then gain a life of their own, this is a good example to examine in a little more detail.
Defoe himself was a Londoner. He was born there, undertook most of his business there, and was to eventually die there. According to the most authoritative modern biography of the writer by American academic Paula Backscheider, Defoe’s life revolved around writing, working as a polemicist and propagandist for government patrons, involving himself in often abortive and unsuccessful business endeavours (as a result of which, on a number of times he was sued, bankrupted, and jailed) and undertaking clandestine activities. Robert Harley, First Lord of Oxford and a prime advisor to Queen Anne, for whom he served as Lord High Treasurer, was his most significant patron, and someone for whom Defoe compiled reports during his travels through the Great Britain, and particularly at the time of the Act of Union uniting Scotland and England to form the United Kingdom in 1707. It was, however, as a writer that Defoe today remains celebrated and remembered, with his political and religious interests only relevant when they figure in this. Of his writing, there is a vast corpus. Through fiction, letters, journal articles and pamphlets, he produced millions of words. He was a man of formidable drive and energy, and the monument to this is the vast amount of work he left.
The peripatetic lifestyle Defoe led, at the service of Harley, and for his own business interests (he ran, at the start of the 18th century, a successful brick words in Tilbury producing material for the new wave of non-conformist places of worship then being constructed) meant he was familiar with most parts of Britain. In the second of his Letters constituting `A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain’ published in three volumes between 1724-1726, Kent at least gets early and enthusiastic handling. It’s portal, Greenwich (at that time part of Kent) was, he wrote;
`A place which is the most delightful spot in Great Britain; pleasant by situation, those pleasures increased by art, and all made completely agreeable by the accident of fine buildings, the continual passing of fleets of ships up and down the most beautiful river in Europe; the best air, best prospect and the best conversation in England.’ (Defoe, ` A Tour’, 1971 Penguin Edition, 113)
Covering the industry, agriculture, and topography of Kent, Defoe described places like Sheerness, Maidstone, Tunbridge Wells, and, of course Canterbury. The latter was a town which for which `its antiquity seems to be its greatest beauty. The houses are truly ancient, and the many ruins of churches, chapels, oratories, and smaller cells of religious people, making the place look like a general ruin a little recovered.’ (`A Tour’, 134). His enthusiasm for Greenwich was not sustained as he reached other places. Dover is dispatched in a coruscating passage. `Neither [it] nor its castle have any thing of note to be said of them.’ The castle in particular was `old, useless, decayed, and serves for little.’ (138) Folkestone is `eminent chiefly for its multitude of fishing-boats’ (139). For Tunbridge Wells, he simply notes that it is a place where `those people who have nothing to do any where else seem to be the only people who have anything to do [here].’ (142). The town, he went on, `is a place where a lady however virtuous yet for want of good conduct may as soon shipwreck her character as in any part of England.’ (143)
It is strange therefore that the tale of his authoring `Robinson Crusoe’ in Kent, one of the most celebrated works of world literature, should have taken root, and hard to find where this particular part of local lore came from. The redoubtable Arthur Mee is the principle source. `It is a tradition’, he declares in his entry for Hartley in the Kent volume of `The King’s England’, `that will not perish among Hartley folk that the greatest story in the world had its beginnings here.’ This is that Defoe’s novel was written in a back room over the wash-house of a cottage in the village. Mee’s evidence for this is an undated letter he refers to from a William Titford who remembered his father in 1740, nearly two decades after Defoe’s death, and three decades after actually writing the book, pointing at an old house they were passing and saying that the writer hid there during a period when he was out of favour with the government. (Arthur Mee, `The King’s England: Kent’, edited and revised A F Kersting, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1969).
The story of Defoe’s links to Hartley has been reinforced over the years. An article in the Gravesend `Reporter’ on September 11th 1981, headed `Mystery Man Who Wrote A Best Seller’ states that a local resident, Jonathan Bye, was campaigning to have a commemorative plaque placed on the site near the cottage, long since demolished, where Defoe was meant to have stayed. The `Black Lion’ pub now stands there. `Defoe’, the report goes on, `knew Gravesend well and made daily use of the ferry to get to his tile factory at Tilbury.’
Defoe certainly had issues with the government, not just in 1718 around the time he was penning `Crusoe’, but before that. He had squabbled with the government of Queen Anne and been irritable enough to come to her notice – though he was ultimately to secure a pardon from her. Nor, according to Backscheider’s biography, was he greatly enamoured of the newly appointed monarch, George the First, who had come from being Elector of Hanover in 1714 to take up the throne due to Anne’s leaving no successor (all of her children had died before her own death ). But there is no record of any particular issue in 1718. Nor any account in her biography of him being out of London while writing the book. In fact, the only reference to Kent was for a decade later, in 1730, during the last year of his life, when she stated he `moved between various London lodgings and a village in Kent.’ (Paula Backschneider, `Daniel Defoe’, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1989, 526). This unnamed village may be Hartley. But if that was the case, it was certainly not where Crusoe was produced.
Maybe this story originated from the various sequels that Defoe produced after his most famous work, derived from it. `The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’ appeared soon after the first, in the same year. But there was another work from 1729, `Madagascar, or Robert Drury’s Journal During Fifteen Years Captivity on that Island’, which was linked to a work from 1706, the `Strange Apparition of Mrs Veal’. In a confusing and elliptical article from `Archaeologica Cantiana’ in 1915 by William Minet entitled `Daniel Defoe and Kent: A Chapter in Capel-le-Ferne History’, the author links the works, and then shows how the first refers to figures from Dover and the village close by of Capel-le-Ferne for whom records can be found around the time Defoe was alive. (The full article is at: https://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/sites/default/files/archcant/1915%2031%20Daniel%20Defoe%20and%20Kent%20A%20Chapter%20in%20Capel-le-Ferne%20History%20Minet_2.pdf)
Defoe’s connections with Kent were not particularly strong, but they were suitable mercurial and suggestive for a writer who produced so much, and yet managed to convey a sense of hiddenness and mystery about his own character and himself. However unlikely to ever have happened, it is a haunting image to have a fugitive Defoe hidden in a sparse room above a now demolished wash-house in a small village in west Kent, writing a work which has appealed to widely, and been so celebrated.