I’ll Probably Delete This

How does a monarch deal with an unruly press?
One way is to sentence the most prolific writer of the 1700s
to public humiliation and jail time.

Hello listeners, this is episode 11
of I'll Probably Delete This, where we explore
compelling stories behind some of the world's best stories
and storytellers.

Today's episode takes us further back than we've gone in any of the first
ten episodes. We are visiting London at the beginning
of the 1700s. If you are a writer,
an anonymous poster online, or a journalist, I bet
after hearing this, you will say to yourself, boy am I glad
I don't have it as hard as Daniel Defoe did.
For Americans, I hope you'll also develop an even greater appreciation
for the First Amendment. Join me now
as we learn about some of the struggles of Daniel Defoe. These struggles were long
before he became the famous writer of Robinson Crusoe.

In late July of 1703, a 43-year-old Daniel Defoe
stood facing Cornhill, one of the busiest streets in the city.
Behind him was the Royal Exchange.
An earlier generation of merchants had erected its wooden clock tower
after London's Great Fire. That wooden clock tower now
looked down on Defoe, even though Defoe couldn't see it.
He knew this place well. His house was a few minutes' walk away.
Despite the rain, he was surrounded by a crowd.
Authorities stood Defoe facing away from the clock tower
and toward the street, so that passersby could get a good look at him.
Defoe hunched. His neck ached and his hands were
going numb. He hunched because he was shackled. His neck
and wrists were held in place by a board. This was his
first day in the pillory. The government had sentenced him here
to humiliate him. What was his crime? In a word,
journalism.

Long before Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe was a prolific writer
of news, propaganda, and opinion. Beginning in its
twenties, Defoe's political pamphlets filled the coffee houses
of London. He could take the issue of the moment and, in a matter
of days, write and publish a persuasive argument covering
multiple pages. At the start of his career, printers paid
him the going rate of two guineas a pamphlet, roughly
$600 in today's dollars. Later his rate was much higher
than the average writer, even though he published those pamphlets anonymously.
For example, John Baker paid Defoe
two guineas for every 500 copies of a pamphlet that Baker shop
printed. Most of Defoe's pamphlets would have a print run of
2,000 copies, which meant that Defoe made $2,500
or so. Baker also gave Defoe
courtesy copies that Defoe could then sell for additional profit.
This arrangement gave Defoe around 17% of the prospective
revenue, a rate higher than many publishing contracts
give authors even today. Unusual for his day,
this arrangement gave Defoe a share of the pamphlet's upside.
More copies printed meant more income for Defoe.
In addition to writing, he pursued various merchant schemes
as a way to support his family of eight kids. In his
20s and 30s, he traded cloth and started a brick foundry to rebuild
London after the Great Fire of 1666.
For his business schemes, he was better at ideas than at
execution. But in writing, he had no equal.
No one was more prolific. In his late 30s,
Defoe published his first book, unhelpfully titled An Essay
on Projects. And in 1701,
at age 41, his best-selling poem, The True Born Englishman,
gave him nationwide fame.

In 1703, Defoe wrote a political
pamphlet, The Shortest Way. He wrote it because
he feared the high church Tories. The Tories were
England's conservative political party who favored strong
traditionalism in the Church of England. The Tories were
promoting a bill to place additional burdens on Christians who
dissented from the Church of England. Defoe was a Presbyterian
and a dissenter. He feared that Tories would undermine
the hard-won religious toleration that he and his friends
relied on. His pamphlet, The Shortest Way, argued
for the most extreme version of the high church Tory
position. It argued that the government should suppress religious
centers and revoke existing legal protections.
But he wrote the pamphlet as satire. Defoe didn't
believe the arguments and thought that articulating the extreme case
would show how ridiculous and dangerous it was.
Defoe wrote and published The Shortest Way
anonymously, as was typical of the day.
This was much like writing under a pseudonym in the American
colonies during the Revolutionary War 70 years
later, or being an anonymous poster online today.
The public didn't know what to do with the pamphlet.
Many believed that the arguments were sincere. Among members
of the Tories, no one thought it came from a dissenter.
Instead, they asked which member of their party wrote it.
Did you write it? No, did you? And this is kind of a testament
to Defoe's success, or in the skill in his writing style.
While hardline Tories liked the pamphlet,
public sentiment, though, thought the author had gone too far.
Even worse than the public's
reaction, the government and the Queen were not
pleased. They took the pamphlet as engaging in
criticism of the Toleration Act and of the Queen's policies
and of her government. Under existing law, such
criticism was a form of treason. The government opened
an investigation and issued warrants to those suspected of writing
the pamphlet. The investigation eventually led them to Defoe.
The link to Defoe came when investigators questioned
the man who delivered Defoe's manuscript, The Shortest Way,
to the printers. He readily gave Defoe up.
At this point, Defoe's anonymity was gone.
In the 1700s, English
law, or the English law of seditious libel, made the
publication of a writing that scandalized the government a
crime. Sedition is treason, and libel
is insulting or defamatory language in print.
The idea that publishing criticism was an act of
sedition was because, quote, it diminished the
affection of the people for the king or his ministers, and
thereby encouraged rebellion. If
charged, a person was entitled to trial by jury,
but the jury considered only very narrow questions.
In a seditious libel case, a jury decided three
things. First, did the accused author the document.
Second, was the document published?
And third, did the relevant passages refer to the monarch?
That was it. So, did the accused author the document?
Defoe's identity as author was clear because the courier
had delivered The Shortest Way to the printer and gave Defoe
up. Second, was it published? This means essentially
that a private letter should be immune from this type of prosecution.
Here it was clearly published. And then three,
that the passage referred to the monarch.
This also extended not just to the monarch, so to Queen Anne
at the time, but also to her government ministers.
Remember that seditious libel criminalized writing
that, quote, scandalized the government. But in
such prosecutions, the jury didn't weigh in on and
wasn't allowed to consider whether the writing was scandalous or whether
it was in fact insulting or seditious. That decision was
made by the prosecutor and by the judge when the suit
was brought. The theory was that all criticism of the government
was disrespectful and threatening to the Queen's authority
and therefore was menacing to the peace of the nation.
Even more, you could not offer as a defense that the criticism
was true. In libel suits, it was irrelevant whether
an argument or an allegation was true or false.
The government's indictment of Defoe charged him with acting falsely,
seditiously, maliciously, and factiously,
which is kind of hard to say. Defoe being
a man after my own heart, complained of all the adverbs
in his indictment. All of this together meant that
the argument that Defoe most wanted to make in his defense
wasn't open to him. He wanted to argue I wasn't
being critical of the Queen, that this was satire, I
support the acts of religious toleration, and I was instead
making fun of the opinions of the Tories. Maybe I
didn't pull it off as well as I wanted, but no one should read what I wrote
as criticism of the Queen. But he couldn't argue
any of that because the law and the court didn't care.
All of that was irrelevant.
The deck was stacked against him. Even so,
Defoe tried to explain his intentions to the government and to
the court and to Queen Anne. Defoe thought that the
fact that he was a dissenter and not a high church Tory
should make it clear that this was satire. None of them,
not the cabinet, not the Queen, and not any member of the government, cared.
And none of them offered mercy. Six men,
the Lord Mayor of London, the Chief Magistrate, and
four assessors, sentenced Defoe to three days
in the pillory and fined him 200 marks,
and further sentenced him to an additional term in Newgate
Prison. The men who sentenced him were not his friends.
Defoe had criticized many of them in print,
some by name, and some through their association
with the East India Company. Defoe and his friends
had tried to avoid this punishment, particularly the public shame of the pillory.
But his pleas for mercy hadn't moved anyone.
To modern American ears,
this legal regime sounds pretty dystopian.
Imagine if during the 2024 election, any public writing
that criticized President Biden or Vice President Harris
could put you in jail. Or in 2025,
that any criticism of President Trump would do the same.
That all seems pretty nuts. And it would include
and cover public writing almost in any form, so newspaper
articles, as well as Facebook posts, and anything
in between. There are a number of people online
that fear authoritarianism of the right or the left in the U.S.
But at least we aren't under the regime that Defoe was
under. A very strange thought.
The early 1700s was an
interesting time for the city of London and for the press.
The Great Fire had destroyed much of the city in
1666. And England had been through a civil war
culminating in William of Orange taking the throne in
1688. England's population was growing
but only gradually. But even though England's population
growth was gradual, London was booming.
Between 1600 and 1700, London grew
from 200,000 people to more than 500,000.
By 1700, London was the largest city
in Europe, though likely smaller than Beijing, Tokyo,
and Istanbul. By 1715, London's
estimated population exceeded 600,000 people.
As London grew, it was also becoming
more literate. The middle class was growing and wanted newspapers
and books for both entertainment and self-improvement.
In 1700, there were around 65 different
print shops in London. To give you a sense of the vibrancy
of the press, in 1710, there were 20 different political
newspapers with a combined circulation of more than
40,000 copies in a week. Just two years later,
combined weekly circulation had hit 70,000 copies.
And just think about in comparison in American City today
with 500,000 people, we'd be lucky to have more than
one newspaper. The number of copies in circulation in the
1700s, though, undercounts the reach of those newspapers.
That is largely because of coffee houses.
Coffee houses were an important institution. They were a
gathering place, a place where people gossiped, conducted business,
and learned and discussed the news of the day. So for the
cost of admission, you would get a cup of coffee
and then access to newspapers and pamphlets. And a common
thing in coffee houses, a common activity, was listening to someone
read aloud the latest newspaper or political pamphlet.
This meant that each issue, each newspaper issue, would
reach between four and five people or as many as 10 people
for every issue.
How does this jibe with the political prosecution of Defoe?
Well, in some sense, it doesn't. I'm no expert on
British history, this period or any other. But in this time
you have Parliament with kind of a growing say after the
Glorious Revolution. They've got a growing say in how the government
will run. And there's a lessening or gradual lessening
of the power of the monarch. Parliament would end up choosing
Anne successor because Anne had no surviving heirs.
There is also the rise of political parties.
Each party supported its own writers and newspapers. Jonathan
Swift was a contemporary of Defoe, wrote for a time
for a Tory newspaper in the same way that Defoe generally
wrote for newspapers that supported Whig positions.
The Whig party was the opposing party to the Tories and tended to be
more progressive. So in 1703 London,
when government convicted Defoe of
seditious libel, London was large and growing. The population
was becoming more literate and demanded more papers
and books to read. And the press was surprisingly vibrant.
At the time you have the government sentencing one of the
most popular and productive writers to public shame, to
fines and imprisonment. This seditious libel
prosecution and others like it were an attempt by the government
to contain the growing press. They were an attempt
to control the message and to scare other writers away from direct
criticism of parliament, government ministers and the monarch.
And the chilling effect was probably quite real.
On that rainy day in late
July, on the platform outside of the Royal Exchange,
Defoe stood hunched over the pillory with his head and hands
held in place by a board that bit into his neck and his wrists.
Defoe was nearly finished with his first day in
the pillory. He only had to stand there for an hour.
But his friends had worked hard to lessen the humiliation
that the authorities intended. Someone in the
pillory often got rotten food, human waste
or rocks thrown at them. That didn't happen to Defoe.
The crowd was filled with dissenting merchants from the city,
friends and business associates and some supporters
likely paid by the Whig party. These efforts
and the rain kept away any unruly people.
Street vendors sold Defoe's pamphlets and books to the
dissembled crowd. Instead of rotten food or worse,
the crowd showered Defoe with roses.

Like Defoe, all
writers of his time faced arrest, pillory,
fines and jail. It was a profession with
real risks. Beginning in 1710,
Queen Anne's government arrested almost every journalist
in London. A similar thing happened in 1714
when King George succeeded Anne. The government
of the new monarch pursued political opponents and the attorney general
arrested and prosecuted a number of journalists
but not just the journalists. He also pursued the street hawkers
and the delivery men or delivery boys probably.
These types of arrests and prosecutions were the government's
primary tool to control the press. After his
1703 conviction, Defoe, like his colleagues,
had a number of run-ins with prosecutions for seditious libel
but never had to serve in the pillory again or serve
additional jail time.
Defoe's time in the pillory marked and changed him.
It, together with his earlier bankruptcy, eliminated
any chance of political office. His direct influence with his
fellow dissenters suffered. Also, from then on,
he more directly sought political patronage and political protection.

One of the things the criminal sentencing didn't
do is it didn't slow down his writing.
In 1704, one year after his time in the pillory, Defoe
started a newspaper, The Review. Defoe would publish
The Review without interruption for nine years. He wrote
and edited the paper and published it first weekly and then quickly
expanded it to twice a week, given the public and
advertiser interest. He later expanded it to three times a week.
He continued to do pamphlets and the occasional book.
Even when he closed The Review, he did that because he decided
to start a wholly new newspaper.
Defoe's time writing The Review helped him move toward
the themes he later covers in Robinson Crusoe.
It included a regular section called The Scandal Club
that, over time, started to include town gossip
and advice. His focus on personal motivations,
human conduct and character, and interpersonal relationships
would all be helpful when he turned his attention to writing
novels, and none of his novels was better or more
popular than Robinson Crusoe.

I have two notes for the postscript.
First, covering the pillory, and then second, connecting
a few dots with the present-day media environment from Defoe's
life. I'll take just a minute to explain the pillory, because
if you're anything like me, you might have mistakenly called it by a different
name. I always thought that the apparatus was called
the stocks, or even the stockade. Not so.
A stockade is a fortification. Stocks are similar to the pillory,
but they only fasten to someone's feet or legs.
So, you might have seen these things in sort of
colonial town squares where someone's head and arms are put through
holes in a board and locked in place. That thing is called the
pillory. You can see examples of them at a renaissance
fair or a place like Colonial Williamsburg in the
U.S. Queen Anne's government sentenced Defoe
to the pillory for three days. One day in the pillory
required you to stand for only an hour or two,
and then be released. People in the pillory would be sore
and could have their hands or arms go numb while there,
but if you avoided getting hit with a rock, there would likely be no
lasting damage or harm for the person sentenced, with one exception.
The harm instead was to the person's reputation.

The second part of the postscript is just to touch on a few things
in Defoe's life as they relate to today's media
environment. In some ways, the press and
the environment of newspapers and pamphlets is pretty
reminiscent of the environment that we're in now.
So you think about kind of the 1950s maybe
through the 1990s. There were really only a handful of
TV news channels and a handful of radio channels,
radio stations, and they dominated public attention
and consciousness so that everybody was getting the same news at the same
time, or very similar news at the same time, and was getting basically
the same types of information. That's very different now
where everyone's news source is defined by
what they watch, what they read, or what their algorithm
feeds them, whether it's on TikTok or Facebook or
Instagram or somewhere else. And it seems much
more like what you might get in London in the 1700s
where there were a couple dozen different printers,
dozens and dozens of writers, and all trying to make different points
and get people's attention. There wasn't a consolidating
force like the broadcast media was. The other
thing I'll say is, in a sense, Defoe's life sort of touches on many of the
roles in the media that you see now. He was absolutely
trying to be an influencer. Later in his life, he ends up being a spy
and working hard as an agent for the government to persuade Scotland
to vote for union with England. And he's pretty successful
in that role. But in the parts that we've talked about and covered
today, you've got his life and his writing,
you've got his role in writing pamphlets, and in a
lot of ways, he's essentially a political blogger. He takes
sort of the issue of the day, the issue of the moment, and writes a hot take.
Then you've got, after that, he ends up starting a newspaper
and running a newspaper, writing a newspaper, and
trying to be more factual. But that newspaper
also has the scandal club. And the scandal club is
kind of an advice column, it's a gossip column, it's
a public interest story, and that, in a lot of ways,
is the most popular part of the paper. And then after the
newspaper, he moves into being a novelist, an early novelist,
and in some ways, maybe was the father of English novelists.
So you can see many of the roles
of media and publishing that Defoe pioneered
in his day.

Today's bibliography is the source material for most of the episode.
The book is Daniel Defoe, His Life.
It's by Paula R. Backshider. It was published
in 1989 by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Defoe was prolific, and the book spends a great deal of time
on his writing and many of the political controversies of his day.
What it spends much less time on, and is harder
to discern, is his early life. I listed Defoe's
age, but Backshider says we can't really be sure
about what year Defoe was born. If you want to learn
about how Defoe got his start in life, what his relationship was like
with his wife and with his kids, why he chose to begin
writing, you'll only really get hints at the
answers to those things in the biography, mostly because the
source material isn't there, isn't as plentiful as
the vast amount of writing he did later in his life.
Defoe though is a fascinating figure, and if anybody has
another biography to suggest on him, please send it my way. I'd love
to learn more about him.

Join us next time for another episode of I'll Probably
Delete This, where we'll explore more stories of authors,
seditious libel, jail time, and great books.

Happy reading.
Thanks everybody.