Transcribed from the 1887 Cassell & Company by DavidPrice,
CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY.
AN
Essay upon Projects.
BY
DANIEL DEFOE.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
LONDON, PARIS,NEW YORK &MELBOURNE.
1887
INTRODUCTION.
Defoe’s “Essay onProjects” was the first volume he published, and no greatwriter ever published a first book more characteristic inexpression of his tone of thought. It is practical in thehighest degree, while running over with fresh speculation thatseeks everywhere the well-being of society by growth of materialand moral power. There is a wonderful fertility of mind,and almost whimsical precision of detail, with good sense andgood humour to form the groundwork of a happy Englishstyle. Defoe in this book ran again and again into soundsuggestions that first came to be realised long after he wasdead. Upon one subject, indeed, the education of women, wehave only just now caught him up. Defoe wrote the book in1692 or 1693, when his age was a year or two over thirty, and hepublished it in 1697.
Defoe was the son of James Foe, of St. Giles’s,Cripplegate, whose family had owned grazing land in the country,and who himself throve as a meat salesman in London. JamesFoe went to Cripplegate Church, where the minister was Dr.Annesley. But in 1662, a year after the birth of DanielFoe, Dr. Annesley was one of the three thousand clergymen whowere driven out of their benefices by the Act ofUniformity. James Foe was then one of the congregation thatfollowed him into exile, and looked up to him as spiritual guidewhen he was able to open a meeting-house in Little St.Helen’s. Thus Daniel Foe, not yet De Foe, was trainedunder the influence of Dr. Annesley, and by his advice sent tothe Academy at Newington Green, where Charles Morton, a goodOxford scholar, trained young men for the pulpits of theNonconformists. In later days, when driven to America bythe persecution of opinion, Morton became Vice-President ofHarvard College. Charles Morton sought to include in histeaching at Newington Green a training in such knowledge ofcurrent history as would show his boys the origin and meaning ofthe controversies of the day in which, as men, they mighthereafter take their part. He took pains, also, to trainthem in the use of English. “We were not,”Defoe said afterwards, “destitute of language, but we weremade masters of English; and more of us excelled in thatparticular than of any school at that time.”
Daniel Foe did not pass on into the ministry for which he hadbeen trained. He said afterwards, in his“Review,” “It was my disaster first to be setapart for, and then to be set apart from, the honour of thatsacred employ.”