Defoe's Hoax Called for Hanging Dissenters. The Tories Embraced It Until They Realized It Was Satire.

On July 31, 1703, Daniel Defoe stood in the pillory for a satirical pamphlet so deadpan that High Church Tories mistook it for their own manifesto. Both sides turned on him, the Commons burned his work, and the crowd that came to shame him drank his health instead. The hoax that ruined him also made him the most famous writer in England, and 16 years later he wrote Robinson Crusoe.

In December 1702, an anonymous pamphlet appeared in London called The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. It opened with a fable about a cock resting on the ground among horses, begging them to stand still for fear of treading on one another. Then the voice sharpened. Writing as a High Church Anglican, the author argued that Dissenters had been coddled for too long. Fines were useless. Banishment was too soft. The remedy was simple: "If one severe Law were made, and punctually executed, that Whoever was found at a Conventicle should be banished the nation, and the Preacher be hanged; we should soon see an end of the tale."

High Church Tories read it and cheered. Here, at last, was one of their own saying out loud what they really thought. Dissenters read it and recoiled. The pamphlet sold briskly.

The author was Daniel Defoe, a Presbyterian Dissenter. He was in his early forties, a London brickworks owner with eight children, and an occasional propagandist for the government. He had written the pamphlet as satire, adopting the rhetoric of extremist churchmen so faithfully that the parody was invisible. There was no wink, no signal. The voice was indistinguishable from a genuine fanatic's.

That was the problem. When the truth leaked, both sides turned on him. The Tories felt betrayed by a man who had made them applaud their own absurdity. The Dissenters were offended that anyone, however ironically, had called for their preachers to be hanged. In February 1703, the House of Commons ordered the pamphlet burned by the common hangman. The Earl of Nottingham, the High Tory Secretary of State, issued a warrant for the author's arrest on a charge of seditious libel.

Defoe went into hiding, published a flimsy "Brief Explanation" saying he had been misunderstood, and was betrayed for the reward. He was seized in May 1703 and locked in Newgate Prison. His trial in July was brief. He pleaded guilty and asked for mercy on the grounds that he had not meant to be taken seriously. The court was unmoved. He was sentenced to stand in the pillory three times, pay a fine, and remain in prison until he could post sureties for good behavior for seven years.

While in Newgate, he wrote A Hymn to the Pillory, a poem whose title page declared it was composed "upon his standing in the pillory, the thirty first of July, 1703." It was printed and sold in the streets while he stood in the stocks.

The pillory was designed to humiliate. Offenders were locked by head and hands in a wooden frame in a public square, where crowds pelted them with rotten eggs, dead cats, mud, and stones. Some were maimed for life. Defoe stood on three successive days: July 29 outside the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, July 30 at Cheapside, and July 31 at Temple Bar in Fleet Street.

The crowds that came to shame him did the opposite. They drank his health and hawked copies of the very pamphlet he was being punished for, along with the Hymn he had written for the occasion. By tradition they strewed the boards with flowers. The pillory, meant to break him, made him a folk hero.

Defoe emerged from prison bankrupt. But the Tory Speaker of the House, Robert Harley, saw his usefulness and secured his release. Harley put him on the payroll as a propagandist and intelligence agent, sending him across England and into Scotland to gauge public opinion. It was in this second life as a writer that Defoe produced the works that endure: Robinson Crusoe in 1719, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year.

The pamphlet that put him in the pillory is now read as the original case of a problem the internet age knows intimately. Defoe's impersonation was so flawless that the satire was invisible without a tell, and the target audience embraced it as sincere. Scholars still debate whether it was failed satire or a deliberate hoax. It is routinely contrasted with Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729), which argued with a straight face that the Irish should eat their babies, and which succeeded precisely because everyone understood the joke. Defoe's mistake was being too good at sounding like the thing he hated.

Also on this day

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• 1790: The first U.S. patent was signed by President George Washington, granting Samuel Hopkins of Philadelphia a 14-year monopoly on a process for making potash and pearl ash.
• 1917: The Third Battle of Ypres began at 3:50 a.m. near the Belgian village of Passchendaele, as General Sir Douglas Haig sent nine British divisions against German lines after a two-week barrage of 3,000 guns. The offensive lasted over 100 days and cost more than 250,000 Allied casualties for roughly five miles of mud.
• 1964: Ranger 7 transmitted the first close-up photographs of the Moon, sending more than 4,300 images to Earth over 17 minutes before crashing into the lunar surface, a turning point after 13 consecutive failures in America's lunar probe program.