John Martin, a best-selling Defoe biographer, has radically revised all earlier accounts of Defoe's life and work in this scholarly, peer reviewed and enjoyable work. Using a mass of archived material, Martin advances the claim that Defoe was baptised in 1644 as the son of Daniel Foe and his wife Ellene in Etton, Northamptonshire and brought up in parish care in Colchester, Essex. Simply put, he asserts that all previous accounts of Defoe's early life are untrue in their entirety. In so doing he refutes earlier claims that Defoe was brought up as the son of a London merchant at a later date in a series of masterful Attachments. The author raises important epistemological issues. He asserts that literary critical assessments of Defoe's written work fail to understand that Defoe mixes autobiography and fiction with a fine lack of distinction and that as these are inter-textual a flawed biography has distorted all previous literary assessments of his work. He suggests that identifying the autobiographical in Defoe's work enables interesting changes to be made in Defoe's bibliography and the ascription of new works.
Martin's work is fundamental to an understanding of all Defoe's writing to both academics and general readers alike. It is a 'must read' book.