ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the extent to which can discern Daniel Defoe’s progressive foregrounding of a hybridised form of non-specific English Protestantism in the early works which in turn anticipates the non-specific Protestant authorial personae who voice the later extended works of fiction. Defoe scholarship has long recognised his assumption of fictional authorial personae across the canon. A more modest cohort of Defoe’s early works specifically indicates authorial personae identified as dissenters. In comparison with his mimicry of the socially disadvantaged and ill-educated eyewitnesses in The Storm, Defoe’s earlier effort to likewise ‘offer equal weight’ to the Poor Man’s perspective offers an incongruously elegant and learned overview of vice and efforts towards moral reformation over two centuries of English history. The reformation of ‘professional’ jargon and pedantry needs to be distinguished from the Projects narrator’s and Poor Man’s united campaign against swearing, which in turn is indicative of the much wider project of moral reformation implicit across Defoe’s whole canon.
