Defoe’s American Families

Abstract

As described in Scribner’s Monthly, family legend has it that in 1725, Elisabeth Maxwell of Calvert, East Nottingham, a small village in Cecil County, Maryland and a migrant from England, married a fellow member of her Quaker Meeting House, a Thomas Jobe, and in the hope that her mother was still alive wrote home to London to tell her about it. After many months, she had a reply from her uncle Daniel. He told her that her mother had died some years previously, and that in her will, she had made some provision for Elisabeth in case she was alive. Uncle Daniel told her that she ‘was to have a good property1 and her mother’s furniture’. A schedule of effects had been included with the will and passed on to Elisabeth. In particular, she was to have an antique desk taken from uncle Daniel’s study on which he had written Robinson Crusoe and some ancient chairs that had ‘descended to the family from the Flemish who sought refuge under the banner of Queen Elisabeth from the tyranny of Philipe’.2 They were sent to her and became treasured possessions. Elisabeth Maxwell maintained that her uncle Daniel was Daniel Defoe. She described her ‘Defoe family’ as active Quakers, and that every Sunday, they attended the local Quaker Meeting House in Smithfield with the memorable name of ‘Bull and Mouth’. Their local parish church was St Giles, Cripplegate. So certain were the family of the Defoe connection—and so proud of it—they kept the desk and the chairs for some time. One of the chairs, it is said, was passed on by a Mr Trimble to the Historical Society of Delaware in 1874.