old pecuniary claims against Defoe.

It would have been open to suppose that the fears which made the old man
a homeless wanderer and fugitive for the last two years of his life,
were wholly imaginary, but for the circumstances of his death. He died
of a lethargy on the 26th of April, 1731, at a lodging in Ropemaker's
Alley, Moorfields. In September, 1733, as the books in Doctors' Commons
show, letters of administration on his goods and chattels were granted
to Mary Brooks, widow, a creditrix, after summoning in official form the
next of kin to appear. Now, if Defoe had been driven from his home by
imaginary fears, and had baffled with the cunning of insane suspicion
the efforts of his family to bring him back, there is no apparent reason
why they should not have claimed his effects after his death. He could
not have died unknown to them, for place and time were recorded in the
newspapers. His letter to his son-in-law, expressing the warmest
affection for all his family except his son, is sufficient to prevent
the horrible notion that he might have been driven forth like Lear by
his undutiful children after he had parted his goods among them. If they
had been capable of such unnatural conduct, they would not have failed
to secure his remaining property. Why, then, were his goods and chattels
left to a creditrix? Mr. Lee ingeniously suggests that Mary Brooks was
the keeper of the lodging where he died, and that she kept his personal
property to pay rent and perhaps funeral expenses. A much simpler
explanation, which covers most of the known facts without casting any
unwarranted reflections upon Defoe's children, is that when his last
illness overtook him he was still keeping out of the way of his
creditors, and that everything belonging to him in his own name was
legally seized. But there are doubts and difficulties attending any
explanation.