He contrived to observe in his writing a scrupulous and realistic fidelity and appropriateness to the conditions in which the story was to be told.

We learn about Crusoe's island, for instance, gradually just as Crusoe learns of it himself, though the author is careful by taking his narrator up to a high point of vantage the day after his arrival, that we shall learn the essentials of it, as long as verisimilitude is not sacrificed, as soon as possible.

It is the paradox of the English novel that these our earliest efforts in fiction were meant, unlike the romances which preceded them, to pass for truth.

Defoe's _Journal of the Plague Year_ was widely taken as literal fact, and it is still quoted as such occasionally by rash though reputable historians.

So that in England the novel began with realism as it has culminated, and across two centuries Defoe and the "naturalists" join hands.