The father of the English novel died as he had lived—running from the consequences of his own inventions.

The Deaf Composer's Final Bow: Daniel Defoe Dies in Hiding

The Father of the English Novel Spent His Last Days Fleeing Creditors

The author who invented the English novel died alone and in hiding, fleeing creditors in a London boarding house.

The summer heat of 1731 hung heavy over Ropemaker's Alley in London's Cripplegate parish. Inside a cramped lodging house, far from the literary salons that once celebrated him, Daniel Defoe drew his final breaths on July 31st. He was seventy years old, alone, and hiding from men who wanted him imprisoned for debt.

It was an ending that would have made perfect material for one of his own novels.

The man who had given English literature Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year—works that invented what we now call the realistic novel—spent his last months in what his son-in-law described as 'a state of perfect solitude.' He had fled his comfortable home in Stoke Newington sometime in 1730, leaving behind his wife of fifty years, to evade creditors whose claims he could no longer outrun.

Defoe's life had been a carnival of reinvention. Born Daniel Foe around 1660, he added the aristocratic 'De' himself, a small fiction among many. He had been a hosiery merchant, a tile manufacturer, a pamphleteer, a government spy, and a bankrupt—twice. He had stood in the pillory for seditious libel, his ears nearly nailed to the wood, only to be pelted with flowers by a sym…

💡 When Defoe stood in the pillory in 1703 for writing a satirical pamphlet, the London crowd threw flowers instead of rotten vegetables, and vendors sold copies of his poem 'Hymn to the Pillory' beneath him.