Publick Good and Private Advantage

Abstract

Defoe, an early advocate of self-help, was never a man to wait passively for something to turn up. More enterprising than his fellow bankrupt, John Barksdale, who found a lowly niche in the customs services as a tide-waiter, he had several strings to his bow.¹ Perhaps it was about this time that he was offered an ‘Annuall Summe’ to translate the Paris Gazette into English, a project unfortunately ‘Supprest by the Government’.² He declared, ‘I could have set up for a Country Almanack Maker, as to my skill in Astronomy’;³ but he was never reduced to such an extremity. Although he now had no capital, his assets included a liberal education and an unusually varied commercial experience. He claimed that ‘Matters of Accounts are my perticular Element, what I have Allways been Master of’;⁴ and he probably had himself in mind when he described how such expertise ‘has recommended a tradesman so much to his creditors, that after the ruin of his business, some or other of them have taken him into business, as into partnership, or into employment, only because they knew him qualified for business, and for keeping books in particular’.⁵