Defoe Close

It's one of the many little streets between St Peter's Road and the Parkway to be named after an English writer and as such you could be forgiven for thinking that there was no direct link between any of those writers and the city - but Defoe Close, doubtless more by accident than design, is a notable exception - although the link is a tenuous one.

In his earlier years Defoe had been involved in a variety of businesses, he had twice been bankrupted, twice been in prison (for his nonconformist views and for libel) and it wasn't until he was a worldly wise man of about sixty that he wrote his first novel - The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe - a novel that was based to a large extent on the real life adventures of Alexander Selkirk.

Selkirk's solitary stay on Juan Fernandez Island in the South Pacific was between 1704-09, in 1720 he was in Plymouth, or at least in Oreston where he met and married Frances Candish who had an inn there. Candish was 19 years his senior but she nervertheless outlived him comfortably for he died, at sea, on his first wedding anniversary, in 1921, just two years after the publication of that first Robinson Crusoe story.

EH 16 August 1997