The guy was prolific.
One of these days I'll post some of his 1719 piece:
"The anatomy of exchange-alley, or, A system of stock-jobbing : proving that scandalous trade, as it is now carry'd on, to be knavish in its private practice and treason in its publick ... : to which is added some characters of the most eminent persons concern'd now, and for some years past, in carrying on this pernicious trade"That's just the title.
He was an insider but not a fan. For now a quick hit from a 2017 post:
Are Activist Investors Being Sabotaged by Their Brokers? (well duh, see Daniel Defoe)
*****
....In addition to writing Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year
and a ton of other stuff Defoe had in-depth experience of both business
and politics. He was a promoter of the South Sea Company.In 1719 he wrote Robinson Crusoe and The Anatomy of Exchange Alley in which he described stock-jobbing as:
...a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by trick, cheat, wheedle, forgeries, falsehoods, and all sorts of delusions; coining false news, this way good, this way bad; whispering imaginary terrors, frights hopes, expectations, and then preying upon the weakness of those whose imaginations they have wrought upon...That may be the earliest warning in English against the intersection of news and equities.
Not the European earliest however. The Dutch were all up in that at least thirty and probably a hundred years prior:....
From Lapham's Quarterly, the headline story:
What Preparations Are Due?
In a word, I would have everyone prepare themselves for death, prepare together, and prepare apart.
—Daniel Defoe, Due Preparations for the Plague, as Well for Soul as Body
Daniel Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year was published in March 1722. Through the eyewitness testimony of H.F., a saddler from the Whitechapel district of London who decides to remain in the city during the Great Plague of 1665, the book imagines one man’s attempt to avoid infection while confronting the horrors of an epidemic: the forced shutting up of houses, the plague pits barely able to contain the dead, the dissolution of social order. At age five Defoe had lived through the epidemic he would later fictionalize.
The Great Plague of 1665 had killed over 20 percent of the roughly 460,000 people living in London. The outbreak began in the small parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, just outside the city. When several unusual deaths, mostly of poor working-class people, were reported in 1664 and 1665, they were not directly connected to plague. While death counts from each part of London had been recorded and published in bills of mortality since 1603, these official records often underreported deaths, especially if they could lead to panic and civil unrest. This failure to identify a developing crisis and the delay in a municipal response led to sudden spikes in plague deaths by the summer of 1665, when nearly eight thousand people died in a single week. Like Dickens’ novels of social reform over a century later, A Journal of the Plague Year illuminated the tragic personal and collective costs of unpreparedness, which greatly exacerbated the suffering of thousands of Londoners dying from bubonic plague.
By 1722 Defoe, businessman and government spy, had retired from such work and moved on to journalism and fiction. His 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, which generated countless editions, sequels, and translations, was his first extended foray into fiction. He was prolific, writing two other novels in 1722—Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack—but only A Journal of the Plague Year was built upon the plague essays he had been publishing in periodicals like the Daily Post and Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal since 1709, covering topics such as the conditions of plague-ravaged France and the cruelty of household quarantine measures. His own memories of the epidemic, coupled with his research, made A Journal of the Plague Year so evocative that the book was believed to be a memoir authored—as the title page claimed—by an anonymous “citizen” instead of a novel penned by an already famous writer known for propaganda that had led to his numerous arrests. Commentary on the book did not even start mentioning Defoe’s authorship until the late eighteenth century, when critics began to debate whether the account could be considered history. The argument continued into 1920, when a Times Literary Supplement reviewer decreed, “Defoe is historian, not romancer.”
But only a month before the publication of A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe released a work of nonfiction on epidemics, one that traded the quotidian experience of London’s plague past with didactic advice about what to do when a plague arrives at your doorstep. The earlier work, burdened with the title Due Preparations for the Plague, as Well for Soul as Body: Being Some Seasonable Thoughts upon the Visible Approach of the Present Dreadful Contagion in France; the Properest Measures to Prevent It, and the Great Work of Submitting to It, reads, as the literary scholar Louis A. Landa suggested, like “a manual of instruction” for how to act before the time of plague. At the age of sixty-two, Defoe believed he had a moral responsibility to “encourage the great work of preparation” at the individual and national levels before the next inevitable disaster.
Recognizing the threats to the growing British Empire, Defoe admits that “we are not a nation qualified so well to resist the progress of such a distemper, or the entrance of it into our country, as others are.” The British bodily constitution, plagued by its own excesses of gluttony and consumerism, desperately required what Defoe calls “the best preventive remedies,” ranging from strict dietary regimens to daily prayer for spiritual penitence, which prepare the body and soul for epidemic crises. For governments, he calls for “national preparations” that emphasize the separation of the sick from healthy, with particular attention given to the poor, the imprisoned, and children as vulnerable groups........MUCH MORE
Also in this issue of Lapham's Quarterly:
Supply Chain
Daniel Defoe finds safe harbor on the water.
....MUCH MORE
