Richard West (1) (1930–2015)

Having at one stage lived for a short time in Stoke Newington Church Street, it follows that I might read the biography of its most famous resident.
The summary of john257hopper below is a perfectly good summary of the biography. The chapters about his written work tend to be plot summaries of Defoe's books themselves, and so spoilers if they remain unread.
None the less, a good biography about a pioneer in novel writing and a foremost among pamphleteers. Poor Defoe did suffer for much of his life through poor investment and subsequent debt.… (mais)

This is a very well researched account of the life and works of the late 17th/early 18th century writer most famous today as the author of Robinson Crusoe, often described as the very first novel. Defoe was in fact very much more, a true literary polymath, being a political commentator and journalist, author of books on morals and ethics, as well as historical biography, economics, travel and satire. His activity even extended to being, in modern parlance, a political activist and spy. His period as a novelist is really confined to a five year period of his life between the ages of 59 and 64 (1719-1724). That said, the dividing line between fiction and non-fiction was much less clear-cut than it generally is now. His novels such as Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and Journal of a Plague Year are written almost as though they are accounts of their lives and other events by real people who lived through them; while a non-fiction work, his magisterial A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, contains many colourful fictional embellishments and indeed rests on literary conceits, as he did not conduct such an organised tour and almost certainly never visited the places in Europe and elsewhere with which he frequently makes comparisons (e.g. between Snowdonia and the Alps). Defoe lived through a period of huge change. Born (probably) in 1660, the year of the Restoration of Charles II, he was a keen supporter of the Protestant William III and Mary and their "Glorious Revolution". A convinced Puritan and non-Conformist who penned many diatribes against Papists and Jacobites, he was in practice comparatively tolerant in religion by the standards of the day. A writer on good commercial practices, he was notoriously unsuccessful in his own business ventures, spending much of his life in debt, including spells in prison, and even in his late 60s being pursued by the heirs of creditors to whom he had owed money well over three decades earlier. He was a man hard to classify in many ways; politically, while definitely not a Tory, he was not really a Whig either; religiously, while a non-Conformist, his fictional narrators are often Anglicans relatively sympathetically observing non-Conformism from the outside. Richard West compares him to George Orwell in some respects. His life and works were colourful and multifaceted and this literary and personal biography covers them very well.… (mais)

The subtitle says it all: "The Life and Times of the First English Poet."

Dear Mr. West: Ever hear of Beowulf? It's in (Old) English, and was written at least four hundred years before Chaucer was born. How about Caedmon, as in Caedmon's Hymn? He lived in the seventh century, and is the oldest English poet whose name is known. Or how about Caedmon's approximate contemporary Cynewulf?

If you don't allow "English" to include Old English, there are still poems in Middle English from before Chaucer -- "King Horn," for instance. And Layamon's "Brut," an important link in the development of the Arthurian legend, was written c. 1200.

Of course, book titles can be the fault of editors, not writers. The true test of a book is its content. In the case of this book, the content is easy to sum up: "Gossip." There are, for instance, no footnotes -- which is understandable, since if there were footnotes, author West would either have to admit how much he's taking from worthless "sources" or how much he's just making up. For instance, on page 3, he refers to "Sir John Froissart, the leading chronicler of the Hundred Years War." It is widely agreed that Froissart made up a large amount of what he wrote. Indeed, it strikes me that West's technique -- a little fact combined with a lot of shavings from the axe he's grinding -- very much resembles Froissart.

Froissart's one virtue was dramatic readability. We find that here, too. If you want to read about a fourteenth century that never happened and a Geoffrey Chaucer who never actually existed, this book is for you. But read the book being aware of what it is: Mostly fiction.… (mais)