Life and work of Daniel Defoe

Aftermath
In 1709, Defoe authored a rather lengthy book entitled The History of the Union of Great Britain, an Edinburgh publication printed by the Heirs of Anderson. The book cites Defoe twice as being its author and gives details leading up to the Acts of Union 1707 by means of presenting information that dates all the way back to 6 December 1604 when King James I was presented with a proposal for unification. And so, such so-called "first draft" for unification took place just a little over 100 years before the signing of the 1707 accord, which, respectively, preceded the commencement of Robinson Crusoe by another ten years.
Defoe made no attempt to explain why the same Parliament of Scotland which was so vehement for its independence from 1703 to 1705 became so supine in 1706. He received very little reward from his paymasters and of course no recognition for his services by the government. He made use of his Scottish experience to write his Tour thro' the whole Island of Great Britain, published in 1726, where he admitted that the increase of trade and population in Scotland which he had predicted as a consequence of the Union was "not the case, but rather the contrary".
Defoe's description of Glasgow (Glaschu) as a "Dear Green Place" has often been misquoted as a Gaelic translation for the town's name. The Gaelic Glas could mean grey or green, while chu means dog or hollow. Glaschu probably means "Green Hollow". The "Dear Green Place", like much of Scotland, was a hotbed of unrest against the Union. The local Tron minister urged his congregation "to up and anent for the City of God".
The "Dear Green Place" and "City of God" required government troops to put down the rioters tearing up copies of the Treaty at almost every mercat cross in Scotland. When Defoe visited in the mid-1720s, he claimed that the hostility towards his party was "because they were English and because of the Union, which they were almost universally exclaimed against".
Late writing
The extent and particulars are widely contested concerning Defoe's writing in the period from the Tory fall in 1714 to the publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719. Defoe comments on the tendency to attribute tracts of uncertain authorship to him in his apologia Appeal to Honour and Justice, a defence of his part in Harley's Tory ministry. Other works that anticipate his novelistic career include The Family Instructor, a conduct manual on religious duty; Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager, in which he impersonates Nicolas Mesnager, the French plenipotentiary who negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht; and A Continuation of the Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, a satire of European politics and religion, ostensibly written by a Muslim in Paris.
From 1719 to 1724, Defoe published the novels for which he is famous (see below). In the final decade of his life, he also wrote conduct manuals, including Religious Courtship, The Complete English Tradesma and The New Family Instructor. He published a number of books decrying the breakdown of the social order, such as The Great Law of Subordination Considered and Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business and works on the supernatural, like The Political History of the Devil, A System of Magick and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions. His works on foreign travel and trade include A General History of Discoveries and Improvements and Atlas Maritimus and Commercialis. Perhaps his most significant work, apart from the novels, is A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, which provided a panoramic survey of British trade on the eve of the Industrial Revolution[8;36].
Novels
Published when Defoe was in his late fifties, Robinson Crusoe relates the story of a man's shipwreck on a desert island for twenty-eight years and his subsequent adventures. Throughout its episodic narrative, Crusoe's struggles with faith are apparent as he bargains with God in times of life-threatening crises, but time and again he turns his back after his deliverances. He is finally content with his lot in life, separated from society, following a more genuine conversion experience.
In the opening pages of The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the author describes how Crusoe settled in Bedfordshire, married and produced a family, and that when his wife died, he went off on these further adventures. Bedford is also the place where the brother of "H. F." in A Journal of the Plague Year retired to avoid the danger of the plague, so that by implication, if these works were not fiction, Defoe's family met Crusoe in Bedford, from whence the information in these books was gathered. Defoe went to school Newington Green with a friend named Caruso.
The novel has been assumed to be based in part on the story of the Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years stranded in the Juan Fernández Islands, but his experience is inconsistent with the details of the narrative. The island Selkirk lived on, Más a Tierra (Closer to Land) was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. It has been supposed that Defoe may have also been inspired by a translation of a book by the Andalusian-Arab Muslim polymath Ibn Tufail, who was known as "Abubacer" in Europe. The Latin edition was entitled Philosophus Autodidactus; Simon Ockley published an English translation in 1708, entitled The improvement of human reason, exhibited in the life of Hai ebn Yokdhan[9;21].