Daniel Defoe's upbringing was, it might be suggested, an almost sure recipe for the forming of a Whig; and as a Whig is certainly how, throughout his tangled political career, he would always regard himself, though it was not invariably the picture his enemies would form of him. He was born into a Dissenting family, of strict religious principles, living in the London parish of St Stephen Coleman Street. The Defoe family worshipped in the congregation of a distinguished Presbyterian preacher, the Rev. Samuel Annesley, whom Defoe would later regard as a personal friend and whose death in 1697 he commemorated in a poem. Initially the idea was that he should become a Dissenting minister, and at the age of sixteen or thereabouts he entered a Dissenting academy at Newington Green, run by the Rev. Charles Morton. It was an untraditional establishment in which the teaching was done in English and students were given grounding in physical science and political theory.

Precisely why, or when, he gave up the idea of the ministry is not known. At all events, in 1684 he married Mary Tuffley, daughter of a well-to-do citizen and cooper of London, and with the aid of her very substantial dowry (£3,700) he set up as a wholesale merchant, with a house and warehouse in Freeman's Yard, Cornhill.