#11: Publishing and Pillory (Daniel Defoe)

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.