Fiction · 1719
Dickory Cronke
The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain’s Wonder
Dickory Cronke, a Cornish tinner's son, is born dumb and stays so for fifty-eight years — watching, thinking, and understood by nobody — and then, a few days before his death, speaks. What he says makes up most of the book: a series of observations on providence, on the follies of the age, on death, and a set of predictions about the affairs of Europe. The narrator frames it as a plain account of a real man, sets down his character and his habits, and leaves the reader to decide what to make of the prophecies.
Daniel Defoe published The Dumb Philosopher, or Great Britain's Wonder in 1719, the year of Robinson Crusoe. It belongs with the pamphlets in which he presents invented marvels in the exact tone of factual reporting.
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About the author
1661–1731 · Enlightenment
Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731) was born in London, the son of a tallow chandler, and was in turn a merchant, a bankrupt, a pamphleteer pilloried for satire, a government agent, and one of the first journalists. He was nearly sixty when he published Robinson Crusoe (1719); Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Roxana followed in quick succession.
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