He Used Nearly 200 Pseudonyms During His Life

It is known that Defoe utilized at least 198 aliases. What a fact about Daniel Defoe! The route that had brought us to this point had involved, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, a profession as a merchant. However, Wikipedia claims that as a businessman, he was naturally interested in politics. Defoe's family belonged to the Dissenters movement, which was opposed to the Anglican church and had its own political views. In order to dodge the authorities, he published political pamphlets endorsing his ideas while using some of them as pseudonyms.

Initially publishing works under a pen name was a highly typical technique in eighteenth-century novel publishing, with the majority of other authors at the period publishing their works anonymously. It has been difficult for historians over the years to properly credit Defoe for all of the works that he created during his lifetime because the majority of them were published anonymously. There would be roughly 75 works that may be assigned to Defoe if only including those that he published under his own name or his well-known pen name, "the author of the True-Born Englishman."

Scholars have employed a variety of techniques to identify which additional works should be assigned to Defoe in addition to these 75. The process of assigning Defoe authorship to works that were published anonymously was initially started by author George Chalmers. He compiled a longer list in History of the Union that included over a hundred works that he claimed to be written by Defoe as well as twenty other books that he referred to as "Books which are said to be De Foe's." Chalmers eventually assigned 174 works to Defoe and included works that were particularly consistent with his style and philosophy in his canon.