Defoe’s Critical Reception, 1731–1945

Abstract Since his death in 1731, Daniel Defoe has attracted a vast range of responses, both for his literary achievements, wider social ideas, and his personality and actions. This chapter traces Defoe’s reception down to the middle of the twentieth century, by which time he had been canonized as a major author, particularly as a pioneering novelist. The chapter shows that this status has been hard-won. In the generation after his death, Defoe was to a large extent ignored, especially as most of his novels remained anonymous. Certain Romantic-era critics reclaimed Defoe, focusing on Robinson Crusoe. This acclaim continued in the Victorian period but was at that time combined with moralistic disapproval of some of his writings, as well as distaste for Defoe’s political duplicity. Modernist critics recuperated Defoe more ardently, and Defoe has attracted a wave of professional academic scholarship after World War II.