The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: The Stoke Newington Edition

By Daniel Defoe, Maximillian E. Novak, Manuel Schonhorn and 2 more

Robinson Crusoe, an adventure tale that fascinated such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, and J. M. Coetzee, has been an international best-seller for three hundred years. An adventure tale involving cannibals, pirates, and shipwrecks, it embodies economic, social, political, and philosophical themes that continue to be relevant today. Moreover, the notion of isolation on a deserted island and a fascination with survival continue to be central to countless popular cinema and television programs. This edition of the novel with its introduction, line notes, and full bibliographical notes provides a uniquely scholarly presentation of the novel. There has been no other edition like it.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781684480838

Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), son of a London butcher, James Foe, took the pen name Defoe in 1703, the year he was pilloried and jailed for publishing a notorious attack on the religious hypocrisy and intolerance of the English political class. His imprisonment ruined his lucrative trade as a merchant but made him a popular figure with the public. Freed by the intervention of rising statesman Robert Harley, Defoe became a renowned journalist, but also a government spy. Robinson Crusoe, his first work of fiction, was published in his sixtieth year, but was soon followed by other lasting novels, including The Life and Adventures of Mr Duncan Campbell, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year and Roxana.

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The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Figure 1.   Portrait of Daniel Defoe. Van der Gucht, frontispiece to Defoe’s Jure Divino (1706).

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

The Stoke Newington Edition

BY

DANIEL DEFOE

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY

MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK

IRVING N. ROTHMAN

MANUEL SCHONHORN

LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731, author. | Novak, Maximillian E., editor. | Rothman, Irving N., 1935– editor. | Schonhorn, Manuel, editor.

Title: The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe / by Daniel Defoe; with an introduction and notes by Maximillian E. Novak, Irving N. Rothman, Manuel Schonhorn.

Other titles: Robinson Crusoe

Description: Stoke Newington Edition. | Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, 2020 | Contributors for the edition: Kit Kincade, Maximillian E. Novak, John G. Peters, Irving N. Rothman, Manuel Schonhorn. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019050815 | ISBN 9781684480968 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684480821 (hardback) | ISBN 9781684480838 (epub) | ISBN 9781684480845 (mobi) | ISBN 9781684480852 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Crusoe, Robinson (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | Shipwreck survival—Fiction. | Castaways—Fiction. | GSAFD: Adventure fiction.

Classification: LCC PR3403 .A1 2020 | DDC 823/.5—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050815

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner was first published in 1719 by William Taylor.

Introduction to this edition and scholarly apparatus copyright © 2020 by Bucknell University Press

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837–2005. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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Contents

Contributors

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Note on the Text

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

The Preface

The Journal

Notifications of Books Printed and Sold

Bibliographic Descriptions

Variants

Works Consulted

Selected Bibliography

About the Editors

Index

Contributors

KIT KINCADE, Indiana State University

MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK, University of California, Los Angeles

JOHN G. PETERS, University of North Texas

IRVING N. ROTHMAN, University of Houston

MANUEL SCHONHORN, Southern Illinois University

Illustrations

1. Portrait of Daniel Defoe. Van der Gucht, frontispiece to Defoe’s Jure Divino (1706).

2. Crusoe with Rifles (1719). John Pine and John Clark.

3. Crusoe with Saw (1721). French ed., Bernard Picart.

4. Crusoe Shipwreckt at Yarmouth. 7th ed. (1726 [original 1722]).

5. Crusoe Shooting a Lion Off the Coast of Guinney (Africa) (1726 [original 1722]).

6. Crusoe Shipwrecked on a Deserted Island. Early German illustration.

7. Crusoe Saving His Goods Out of the Wreck of the Ship (1726 [original 1722]).

8. Crusoe’s Family. T. H. Nicholson and Charles William Sheeres (1862).

9. Viewing the Footprint. Thomas Stothard (1820 [original 1790]).

10. Viewing the Footprint. George Cruikshank (1838 [original 1831]).

11. Viewing the Footprint. Grandville [Jean-Ignace-Isadore Gérard] (1840).

12. Viewing the Footprint. Frederick Wentworth (1863).

13. Crusoe Rescues His Man Friday and Kills His Pursuers (1726 [original 1722]).

14. Crusoe and Friday Hunting. William Thomas (1863).

15. An English Ship Comes to Robinson Crusoe’s Island (1726 [original 1722]).

16. Crusoe Recovers the Ship for the Captain and Conquers the Pyrates (1726 [original 1722]).

The illustrations in this volume are provided through the courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Special Collections of the Young Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the collection of Maximillian E. Novak.

Acknowledgments

The three volumes of Robinson Crusoe were the product of much research in a variety of libraries. The line notes and introductions owe a great deal to the resources of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. But over the years the editors made use of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Columbia University Library, the Special Collections of the Young Research Library of the University of California, the Boston Public Library, the Beinecke Library and the Sterling Library of Yale University, the Henry E. Huntington Library, and the University of Houston Library.

We wish to thank these institutions and their librarians for their generosity in giving of their time to help us. We also wish to thank the institutions that provided us with grants to do the research involved in this project. These include the Research Council of the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California Committee that awards President’s Fellowships, the Henry E. Huntington Library that awarded us a Mellon Fellowship, and the William Andrews Clark Library that gave us a yearlong Clark Professorship. Funding for the collational portion of this edition also came from the publisher, Gabe Hornstein, AMS Press Inc., and from resources at the University of Houston for which we are grateful: the University of Houston Limited-Grant-in-Aid Program, Small Grant Program, Provost’s Undergraduate Research Scholarship (PURS), Donald L. Birx, Office of the University of Houston’s Vice-Chancellor/Vice-President of Research, and the Martha Gano Houstoun Endowment of the University of Houston Department of English.

We wish to thank those who provided special research help for the introduction and line notes at UCLA. These include Irene Beesemyer, Jacob Klein, Zoe Goldstein, and Catherine Nguyen.

The most extensive use of assistants came with the collation of various editions of Robinson Crusoe. For this work, we have many helpers to thank. The effort to produce a definitive edition required the examination of the first edition and all subsequent editions. To that extent the Stoke Newington Edition finds itself free to correct or alter text, depending upon data that Defoe, himself, might have chosen to alter. The definitive edition is also embellished with engravings obtained in later editions, from the third and the seventh. The project gained support from the Department of English and the administration at the University of Houston. It also became an instructional project in the classroom. Students in the studies of bibliography and methods of research found themselves actively engaged in primary research in the examination of the variant texts. We are grateful to all those who became involved in the structuring of this definitive edition by working on unique and distinctive editions.

Computer input of unemended first edition text: Polly Heil-Mealy.

Computer input of second edition text: Polly Heil-Mealy.

Compilers of variants: Irving N. Rothman, with 2nd ed.: James Hall, Polly Heil-Mealey, 3rd ed. (L): Christine Aguirre; 3rd ed. (OP): Sadaf Alam, Meredith Allison, Kritren Bagnall, Kellie Buhunko, Lindsay Crate, Maria Van Furstenberg, Mercedes Garcia, Roy Granados, Allison Laubach, Tasneem Mandiwala, Matthew McKinney, Glynis Mitchell, Grinelda Morales, Jane Nguyen, Crystal Smith, Brittany Stuhlmiller, Elise Wahm; 4th ed. (F): Ashley Andrews, Andrew Pickup; 4th ed. (G): Pam Sutherland; 5th ed.: Beth Ebersbaker; 6th ed. (O6): Julie Caplan, Patricia Clay, Kelly Fritsch, Pat Green, April Hill, Tyler Jans, Megan Lowry, Melissa Luna, Jason Nedbalek, Shari Ottman, Peggy Mims, Aaron Pavlock, Scott Peckler, Jennifer Saul, Carmen Seitan, Michale Webster, Ashley Wilson, Teneka Woods; 6th ed. (D6): Bruce Martin;7th ed.: Jennifer Loftin; Dublin ed.: Aaron Crippen, Chad Wilson, Pamela Maddox Stelly (Provost Undergraduate Research Fellow, 2003), Aaron Pavlock (Provost Undergraduate Research Fellow, 2004).

Collators: James Hall, Polly Heil-Mealey, Samantha Lay, Bruce Martin, Jason Poland

Consultants: Dvorah Arbisser (German), Houston, Texas; Sean Casey, Rare Books & Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library; Kate Hutchens, Special Collections, University of Michigan; Maximillian E. Novak, UCLA, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library; Adrienne Sharpe, Beinecke Library, Yale University; Austin Thomason, Photo Services, University of Michigan; Karla Vandersypen (Dutch), Special Collections, University of Michigan; Pat Bozeman, Doan Chinh, and Julie Grob, Special Collections, University of Houston.

Proofreaders: University of Houston student personnel.

Bibliographic assistance: Elliot Paul Rothman, Boston.

Introduction

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner was published around 25 April 1719 by William Taylor.¹ It went into six printings within four months and was a huge success. John Nichols, who had access to the papers of William Bowyer, one of the printers used by Taylor, remarked, So rapid was the demand for this ingenious production, that several printers were employed to print the successively successful editions.² It was serialized in the Original London Post, beginning 7 October 1719, and an unauthorized abridgment was published by T. Cox in the same year.³ Despite this exposure Defoe brought out a sequel, The Farther Adventures, published on 20 August 1719, and a series of essays on subjects raised by the two volumes. Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe appeared on 6 August 1720, and new editions of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures appeared almost annually over the next seven years. The fourth edition appeared with a map of the world showing Crusoe’s travels, and the edition of 1726 was elaborately illustrated.

Daniel Defoe lived to see himself the author of a world-famous book; translations appeared almost immediately in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish. Yet his name never appears on the title page or in the prefaces to the two works of fiction, or indeed in Serious Reflections as anyone but Robinson Crusoe. Like so many works of the time, these were written under a mask or disguise. Defoe was anything but an obscure author when he published his masterpiece, but he was more notorious than famous. Until 1710 he had been a radical Court Whig, but between 1710 and 1714 he had lent his services as a journalist to the Tory government of Robert Harley. His reputation as a turncoat was never repaired during his lifetime.

In replying to the accusation of plagiarism made against him, Cox, who had published an unauthorized abridgement of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, referred to a letter he received from either Taylor or Defoe suggesting that Honesty is the best Policy. In responding, Cox suggested that adherence to such an ethical principle might convert one of the most prostituted pens in the whole world more steadily to the service of religion and the best of governments.⁴ This rejoinder, published in the Flying Post of 29 October 1719, was accompanied by a threat that Cox could reveal some secrets about the author. At this time, Defoe not merely was considered as someone who had betrayed his principles but also had the reputation of being a Jacobite—a defender of the rights of the Stuarts to the throne and therefore a traitor to George I, Britain’s legitimate monarch. Since Defoe was an important writer for Nathaniel Mist, who was indeed a Jacobite and the publisher of an opposition newspaper, The Weekly Journal; or Saturday’s Evening Post, Defoe also gained the reputation of being a Jacobite. That he was working for the government as a censor of that newspaper for Walpole’s Whig government was a closely guarded secret. Defoe clearly felt that he was in no position to make himself conspicuous by announcing his authorship of any of the Robinson Crusoe volumes.

CRITICAL REPUTATION

Despite his attempt at anonymity, Defoe’s authorship was almost immediately revealed by Charles Gildon in an attack upon the work with a lengthy title in imitation of the title of Defoe’s novel: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D .… . De F …, of Lond, Hosier. The title went on to promise exposure of Defoe’s various disguises, a dialogue between Defoe, Crusoe, and Friday, and critical remarks on the Life of Crusoe. Because it represents the only extended criticism of Defoe’s novel, this work may have been given too much prominence by later critics. It is mainly a demonstration of Gildon’s pique against Defoe for creating a brilliant new form of fiction and, perhaps, for Defoe’s earlier attack upon him in More Reformation (1703) as one who

Sets up for a Reformer of the Town,

Himself a first Rate Rake below Lampoon.⁵

Gildon complains about the popularity of the work by having Crusoe exclaim, Your Hero! Your Mob Hero! your Pyecorner Hero! on a foot with Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Southampton, and the London Prentice!⁶ In addition to placing it in the realm of chap-book literature, he compares it to such popular religious works as Pilgrim’s Progress and God’s Revenge against Murther. As Paul Dottin points out, as a staunch defender of the classics and as someone who came from a family of gentlemen, Gildon was affronted by the success of Robinson Crusoe and its author. Since Defoe had worked as an importer of goods, in Gildon’s mind he lacked the gentility required of an author. Defoe was hardly the only author Gildon viewed as lacking such credentials; he used a similar type of hauteur toward Alexander Pope, whose father had been a grocer.⁷ To Gildon, the first two volumes of Robinson Crusoe were wrongly conceived, debased forms of narrative—realist versions of life and attitudes told by someone who comes from the Middle Station in a style that attempts to imitate ordinary speech.

Gildon attempted to point to what he considered to be inconsistencies in Defoe’s work, often with some justification. He criticized Friday’s speech for failing to show very much improvement and for Crusoe’s moral observations that were not necessarily connected with events. He was the first to note such now famous oversights as having Crusoe swim out naked to the wreck and then put salvaged objects in his pockets. On the other hand, his notion that the work is somehow an insult to the British navy is absurd, and some of his criticisms are picky. For example, he finds it odd that Crusoe attempts to make beer rather than wine, which he might have made with little or no trouble, and he criticizes Defoe for giving Crusoe a blind superstitious Fear, which ought not to be minded by any Man of common Sense or Religion.⁸ But aside from such criticisms based on what amounted to a personal distaste, Gildon also mockingly suggested an autobiographical element in the two volumes of Robinson Crusoe, a hint that Defoe was to take up in an interesting way in Serious Reflections.

In addition to the obvious success that The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures achieved among the reading public in Great Britain and abroad, it received considerable attention from critics on the Continent, and since Defoe was a translator of the foreign news for Mist’s Weekly Journal, it is unlikely that he would have been unaware of such notices. The reviewer in Le Journal des Scavans of 1720 clearly recognized it as a work of fiction despite its realism and praised the section in which Crusoe addresses the gold he finds on the ship as well as his spiritual bookkeeping, balancing the evils against the advantages of his condition.⁹ In the same year, the preface to the French-language edition, published in Amsterdam, argued that it had to be a history rather than a romance because it seemed so real and lacked the politesse expected of a work of fiction. And again in the same year, the introduction to the sixth edition of the German translation, published in Leipzig in 1720, remarked on its fame throughout Europe and proclaimed the work a masterpiece that would live forever.¹⁰ In 1721, Jean Le Clerc’s Bibliothèque Ancienne et Moderne reviewed the third volume and gave a summary of the two earlier volumes. Le Clerc or one of his assistants described the volumes approvingly as une sort de Roman Moral, pointing out that its tremendous success did not depend upon the notion that it was an authentic account by a real Robinson Crusoe. The reviewer argued that Defoe’s volumes had replaced the novels of gallantry that had been so popular for the past thirty years, and that unlike those works of fictions Defoe’s work tended to cure rather than inflame the passions. No author is named aside from the remark that he was well known in England (assez connu en Angleterre).¹¹

The reputation of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures among readers continued after Defoe’s death.¹² Even Alexander Pope, who along with the others of the Scriblerian group had nothing good to say about Defoe and satirized Defoe in his Dunciad, grudgingly noted to Joseph Spence that the first volume of Robinson Crusoe trilogy was good if not truly excellent,¹³ and Henry Baker, Defoe’s son-in-law and editor of The Universal Spectator, remarked upon it as having been read over the Whole Kingdom, and pass’d as many Editions as perhaps any Book now extant.¹⁴ And as the controversies over Defoe’s political career in Great Britain began to fade in the decades following his death, some genuine criticism of the work became possible. By 1753, when Robert Shiels contributed a life of Defoe to The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain collection, under the general editorship of Theophilus Cibber, the controversies that marked his life appear to have been forgotten.¹⁵ Defoe was praised as a great defender of liberty as well as a person of an invincible integrity in his political sphere, and Robinson Crusoe as the product of a fertile, strong, and lively imagination. This was a Defoe who created a model [of fiction] entirely new.¹⁶ Since the materials in Shiels’s life were frequently used as introductions to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century editions of Robinson Crusoe, his view of Defoe had wide influence.

Considering the low esteem with which prose fiction was regarded in Britain through much of the eighteenth century, it is hardly surprising that the first serious treatment of Robinson Crusoe came from the Continent and from one of the most important of the philosophes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his Émile: ou de l’Éducation (1762), Rousseau used Robinson Crusoe as the first book to be given to his ideal pupil.¹⁷ It would teach him about nature and things rather than words. It would help him to grow up free from the opinions of others, governed by no authority beyond that of his own reason.¹⁸ And it would teach the potential benefits of solitude and independence. The notion that Robinson Crusoe might be used as a serious philosophic or educational text must have come as a revelation to the many admirers of Rousseau throughout the world. Before this, The Strange Surprizing Adventures and The Farther Adventures were mainly considered as volumes of adventures, as Tobias Smollett described them in Roderick Random.¹⁹ Rousseau’s appreciation led to a series of adaptations of Defoe’s novel as a text for instructing children in morality and geography that lasted well into the nineteenth century, the most famous of which was by Joachim Heinrich Campe (1779–1780). And it probably led to the possibility of approaching the two volumes as literary texts.

During the 1780s, the reputation of Defoe and Robinson Crusoe became fully established. The Novelist’s Magazine, a multivolume collection of the rich and varied fiction of the century, published the first two volumes under Defoe’s name. He also garnered considerable interest from two important Scottish critics, James Beattie and Hugh Blair. Blair praised Defoe for his imagination and ability to create the reality of live experience, while Beattie admired Defoe’s ability to create an exciting and imaginative narrative. But Beattie repeated the accusation made in the Universal Magazine of August 1778 that Defoe had merely stolen and transcribed the manuscript of Alexander Selkirk in putting together Robinson Crusoe, thus committing a cruel fraud,²⁰ a charge that was also repeated in Love and Madness (1780), a widely read novel by Sir Herbert Croft. Croft’s protagonist, James Hackman, first praised the brilliant feeling of authenticity created by Defoe and then accused him of plagiarism. Although Defoe was exculpated of such charges by a number of important critics, the possibility of his indebtedness to some kind of manuscript by Selkirk concerned critics well into the nineteenth century.

With George Chalmers’s The Life of Daniel Defoe (1785; rev. ed. 1790), serious discussion of Defoe as a writer may be said to have begun. Chalmers was unstinting in his praise of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures. For him it was already a classic work of English fiction: "If it be inquired by what charm it is that these surprising Adventures should have instantly pleased, and always pleased, it will be found, that few books have so naturally mingled amusement with instruction. The attention is fixed, either by the simplicity of the narration, or by the variety of the incidents; the heart is amended by a vindication of the ways of God to man; and the understanding is informed, by various examples, how much utility ought to be preferred to ornament: the young are instructed, while the old are amused."²¹ By now this was the general view of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures,²² but at a time when there was much discussion of the nature of original genius, Chalmers provided a biographical background for treating Defoe as a writer.

In 1810 there appeared The Novels of Daniel Defoe in twelve volumes, including Sir Walter Scott’s continuation of John Ballantyne’s memoir and Anna Lettitia Barbauld’s fifty-volume collection The British Novelists, with its inclusion of Robinson Crusoe. Barbauld was mainly intrigued by Defoe’s ability to interest and entertain the reader, but Scott saw in Defoe an essential creation of the real—an essential quality in a novelist. Such acceptance signaled the general appreciation of Defoe among the romantics, with Coleridge’s feeling that Robinson Crusoe was better than Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels because of its faithfulness to experience. When John Dunlop published his History of Fiction in 1814, he too compared the two works with much the same conclusion as Coleridge’s, arguing that, as readers of Robinson Crusoe, we rise exulting in our nature, whereas the experience of Gulliver’s Travels entailed a disgust with human nature. Dunlop also recognized the influence of Defoe and Richardson in the development of realistic technique in the novel. In short, Defoe was becoming part of literary history, and since Dunlop was a comparativist, Defoe became a player in both British literary history and world literary history. Since editions of Dunlop’s study continued to be published throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Dunlop’s work helped to sustain Defoe’s growing reputation.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Robinson Crusoe was becoming not only a standard text for everyone’s reading, but an almost magical text. As early as 1801 Maria Edgeworth had written of a character who tended to lose himself in Robinson Crusoe to an extent that he modeled his life upon Defoe’s character,²³ and in Wilkie Collins’s novel, The Moonstone (1868), Gabriel Betteredge famously consults Defoe’s novel on all occasions involving an important decision. He simply opens the novel at random to a given page and is able to arrive at the answer to his problems, a secular version of bibliomancy. The image of Robinson Crusoe as a near magical text may have been aided by biographies of Defoe, by Walter Wilson (1830), William Chadwick (1859), and William Lee (1869), that presented him as a saintly figure—directly opposite to the demonic image to be found in works published during his lifetime.

But inevitably the critical pendulum had to swing in the opposite direction. For in the same year that Henry Kingsley called Robinson Crusoe almost the tenderest, gentlest, purest book in the language,²⁴ Leslie Stephen was dismissing Defoe’s method of creating a sense of the real as merely the most amazing talent on record for telling lies. Stephen was attempting to hold up Defoe to the new realism practiced in France and championed by a journal with that name. For Stephen, unlike that new French realism with its dedication to aspects of the real that were genuine, Defoe’s methodology was merely a bundle of tricks.²⁵ Stephen’s deprecatory essay was republished in his Hours in a Library, which went through a number of editions in the late nineteenth century and even into the twentieth century. And it had a lasting effect. In dismissing Defoe’s fiction as possessing any value at all, the extremely influential critic F. R. Leavis, in the Great Tradition (1948), merely referred his readers to Stephen’s essay as saying all that anyone might need to say about Defoe as a novelist.²⁶ A companion to Stephen’s criticism on a biographical level appeared in 1879 with William Minto’s Daniel Defoe, which viewed Defoe as a master liar and all of his fiction as a projection of his duplicitous personality.

Despite such negative judgments, Defoe and Robinson Crusoe continued to be the subject of more or less admiring criticism. Among the novelists, Thomas Hardy was an admirer of Defoe’s colloquial language,²⁷ and if Henry James and his followers had little good to say about Defoe, in 1919 Virginia Woolf put Bloomsbury’s seal of approval with an essay published in TLS and frequently reprinted in her Second Common Reader. Woolf stressed Defoe’s genius for fact and his masterful creation of Crusoe’s character—that naturally cautious, apprehensive, conventional and solidly matter-of-fact intelligence.²⁸ And although James Joyce’s 1912 lecture on Defoe was not available to English readers until decades after he delivered it in Italy, like Woolf he was a great admirer of Defoe’s novels, thinking that in Robinson Crusoe Defoe had set forth all that was to come in Britain’s future of colonial repression. Only by understanding Crusoe’s character could one comprehend how a small island off Europe could, at one point, become the master of three-quarters of the globe.

If Defoe was being praised by the modern novelists, he was also becoming the continued subject of twentieth-century scholarship. In America, William Petersfield Trent expanded the canon of Defoe’s writings, and in his Daniel Defoe and How to Know Him, published in 1916, he treated The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures as a book that belonged to the literature of the entire world. Focusing on the island portion, Trent argued that the permanent appeal of Defoe’s novel lay in the absorbing story of how a weak and solitary man struggles successfully with the pitiless and seemingly unconquerable forces of nature.²⁹ In 1924, Arthur Wellesley Secord devoted an entire volume to the sources of Robinson Crusoe, building on earlier studies by German scholars Friedrich Wackwitz (1909) and Max Günther (1909). In 1925, Henry Hutchinson published his careful bibliographical study, The Printing of Robinson Crusoe. And James Sutherland’s biography of 1937 provided a useful background for treating the combination of isolation and Englishness that keeps a hold upon the imagination. Sutherland reads Crusoe’s looting of the wreck not merely as a form of ingenious self-preservation but also as satisfying the desire to achieve a successful theft, an element always lurking behind any enterprising business man.³⁰ John Robert Moore began his work of many decades in the 1940s with a number of essays on Robinson Crusoe, and he was eventually to publish his lengthy biographical study of Defoe in 1958.

If Moore’s biography contained some new pieces of information, it did little to change anyone’s mind about Robinson Crusoe or about Defoe’s status as a novelist. On the other hand, in 1957 Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel succeeded in transforming the way critics in Britain and America looked at Defoe’s fiction. The New Criticism, an excellent system for reading poetry, had gained acceptance as the primary critical tool for reading fiction, and Defoe’s novels were considered as too formless to be considered as works of conscious artistry. By using a combination of approaches—historical, sociological, and mythic—Watt shifted the grounds for discussing fiction. He approached Defoe’s fiction in terms of a growing sense of individualism exemplified by the isolation of figures such as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders and attempted to analyze the interests of the audiences that were attracted to the early novel. He continued to treat Defoe as a somewhat primitive writer in comparison to his two other exemplars, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, but he recognized Defoe’s contribution to the novel as the master of what he called formal or circumstantial realism. And since he made the various forms of realism—formal, psychological, and the realism of assessment—the central aspect of fiction from Defoe onward, Defoe was given a central position in the history of the novel. Much in the manner of the man who came to dinner—the famous guest who would not leave, to whom Michael Seidel compared Watt in an excellent article³¹—Watt’s book has remained the standard account of the development of fiction, despite his omission of the many women novelists and the many changes in critical fashion since 1957. His attention to the content of fiction as well as its form gave particular advantage to Defoe. Few of the many studies of Defoe that followed did not, in some way, continue to deal with issues that Watt had raised.

Defoe’s star may have been on the rise even before Watt’s study. In the year before Watt’s Rise of the Novel was published yet another work appeared that was influential in raising the critical fortunes of Defoe. Alan McKillop’s survey, The Early Masters of English Fiction, gave considerable space to Robinson Crusoe, noting, There had been other stories of shipwrecked solitaires; Defoe’s art makes the difference. McKillop’s suggestion that Defoe was indeed an artist in creating his fiction was an attempt to reformulate the way Defoe and Richardson had been viewed. But after The Rise of the Novel, most critics attempted to build upon Watt’s view of Defoe. In 1962, Maximillian Novak’s Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe attempted to read Defoe’s fiction in terms of Defoe’s own economic writings. Watt had projected a socioeconomic idea of the Puritan view of economic activities on Defoe’s fiction. Novak suggested that the ideas behind Defoe’s fictions were best illuminated by his own economic ideas. In 1963, once again drawing upon Defoe’s own writings, Novak published Defoe and the Nature of Man in an attempt to deal with Defoe’s fiction in terms of his attitudes toward human nature, particularly in connection with contemporary concepts of natural law. And a few years later he began writing a series of articles that attempted to argue for Defoe’s deliberate artistry that were collected in his 1983 book, Realism, History, and Myth in the Fiction of Daniel Defoe. If all of these writings were, in various ways, arguments against some of Watt’s ideas, they also took their inspiration from Watt’s discussions.

The aforementioned studies showed the potential complexity of Defoe as both a writer and a thinker and opened up a variety of critical stances. In 1965, George A. Starr’s Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography suggested that there was a formal structure to be found in Robinson Crusoe as well as in many of his other novels and that was the pattern of sin, repentance, and new-won faith that might be found in any number of works association with Puritan and later Dissenting lives. What had previously seemed like a lack of artistic form in Robinson Crusoe might now be understood as an elaboration on a well-established pattern. A year later, in The Reluctant Pilgrim, J. Paul Hunter presented Robinson Crusoe against an array of forms, of spiritual autobiography as in Starr’s book, but also of its relation to seventeenth-century guidebooks and works attempting to illustrate the works of Providence. In addition to tying Defoe to the formal structures of an established body of literary works, both Starr and Hunter saw Defoe as the heir to traditional Protestant religious thought. Through these works, both authors have influenced later writers on Defoe.

By now Defoe was revealed as a rich source of contemporary ideas and as a writer of fiction whose artistry might be explored in ways that the New Criticism had hardly permitted. In 1968, Michael Shinagel examined Crusoe’s social situation in Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility, and in the 1970s there were a rash of critical books on Defoe that touched on Robinson Crusoe with considerable subtlety. John Richetti’s Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (1975) showed that Defoe’s fictions might withstand an extraordinarily complicated reading. Published in the same year was Everett Zimmermann’s Defoe and the Novel. And during the following years, there appeared a number of books that subjected Robinson Crusoe and Defoe’s other novels to a variety of critical approaches. Among these were Paul Alkon’s Defoe and Fictional Time (1979) and David Blewett’s Defoe and the Art of Fiction (1979). In this same year also appeared a general book on Robinson Crusoe by Pat Rogers that contained a great deal of information and some perceptive criticism. Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel, published in 1987, attempted a reconsideration of the territory that Ian Watt had covered and revealed how complex criticism had grown since 1957. He brought a new theoretical sophistication to the discussion of Robinson Crusoe as seen against the development of fiction in the Restoration and the early eighteenth century.

After such intense critical scrutiny during the 1970s and 1980s, interest tended to shift away from Robinson Crusoe to Defoe’s other writings, but in 1989 J. M. Coetzee published his novel, Foe. Although some major fictional variations on Robinson Crusoe had appeared earlier, most notably Michel Tournier’s Vendredi (1967), Foe represented a vision of Defoe’s work from an imaginative, postcolonial standpoint. It tended to make Defoe’s novel into a central text for the postcolonial approach to literature. In the same year Paula Backscheider brought out her biography, Defoe, with an extended discussion of Robinson Crusoe; and in 1991 Manuel Schonhorn produced his Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and Robinson Crusoe, in which he examined Crusoe’s claim to kingship over his island against the very complex ideas on that subject raised by the Glorious Revolution and the reigns of William and Mary and then William III. And in 1997 appeared Homer Brown’s Institutions of the English Novel from Defoe to Scott, with a version of his brilliant phenomenological exploration of Robinson Crusoe, The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe, written originally in 1971 and containing some remarkable insights into Defoe’s fiction. The authorship of Robinson Crusoe was left unscathed by the questions about the Defoe canon raised by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens during the 1990s. In 2001 Geoffrey Sill published his The Cure of the Passions, viewing Robinson Crusoe and Defoe’s other novels in terms of the age’s concern with ways to lessen the control of the passions over human life, and in that year appeared Maximillian Novak’s substantial literary biography, Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions, with its reading of the novel in terms of Defoe’s life and ideas.

This brief survey has omitted a number of important books and has mentioned few articles. But it does attempt to demonstrate the continued interest in Defoe’s novel and its resilience as a literary text. In some ways, as a novel, it is a tour de force. Crusoe is stuck on his island, but despite storms, earthquakes, and the arrival of cannibals, Virginia Woolf was right to insist that the story was dominated by a very real and solid earthenware pot. Modern students, accustomed to fast-paced action adventures, may complain about various difficulties with the novel, but in most cases they are objecting to the interiority of most of the novel, to the slowing of time that distinguishes most serious literature from popular novels. Of course Defoe intended it to be popular, but he also put much of his thought and experience into this one text. If it has lost some of the magic that Betteredge in Collins’s The Moonstone thought he saw there, it has not yet lost its power to interest the reader.

SOURCES IN DEFOE’S WRITING AND THE WORK OF OTHER AUTHORS

It is well to begin with some of Defoe’s writings during the years preceding the publication of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures. He was certainly no stranger to narrative fiction, having written his imaginary voyage to the moon, The Consolidator, in 1705, and having filled his journal, the Review, with a variety of allegories and stories. He had practiced historical narrative in his History of the Union (1709), autobiographical narrative in his An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), and mixed dialogues and narrative in his Family Instructor (1715, 1718) and in his Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager (1717), a fictional memoir purportedly written by one of the French negotiators of affairs between Britain and France during the reign of Queen Anne.

But of all the works that seem like a prelude to Defoe’s account of isolation, none is quite so important as another work that he wrote for William Taylor, his A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris (1718). Defoe added a ninth volume to an eight-volume work generally ascribed to Giovanni Paolo Marana dealing with European politics in the second half of the seventeenth century. The main purpose of the work was to treat the 1690s in a way that discredited French intentions toward James II and thereby discourage his followers, the Jacobites. The Turkish Spy, Mahomet, delivers his opinions on a variety of religious and political subjects. Marana’s work had been enormously popular, and the hint, in the preface, of the possibility of additional volumes to come suggests that Defoe was searching after a large fictional project.³²

The Continuation contains a number of subjects that appear in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, including discussions of the terrible earthquakes at Port Royal and Messina. Through the eyes of this devout follower of Islam, Defoe is able to comment wryly upon the religious strife among Christians. In his own religious beliefs, Mahomet is far more of a religious enthusiast than Crusoe. But it is in rendering Mahomet’s despair at his exile, his loneliness, that the germ of Crusoe’s isolation takes its seed. It is the sum of human Misery to have no Body to communicate our Joys and Griefs with, he writes to the person who is supposed to relieve him of his post. The Heart is not able to contain its own Excesses, but they will break out, and if we have not a Friend to unburthen the Soul to, it will discover its Burthen in every Line of the Countenance.³³ Longing for his home and his fellow Muslims, he begs his friend, Hassan El Abmenzai, to remember him and his suffering, and he describes his violent Agitations of despair, relieved only by the thought that he will eventually return home after his replacement has arrived.³⁴ Although the distance between Mahomet, the Turkish Spy, and Crusoe, the Englishman, may seem great, Defoe was apparently able to make an imaginative leap from the spy’s alienating experience in Paris to Crusoe’s literal isolation on his Caribbean island.

A second source of influence for Defoe came from his contemporary journalism. There he reported on terrible tempests, of lightning striking supplies of gun powder, and of volcanoes erupting. The Weekly Journal of 8 March 1718 reported a story of a floating island filled with beasts making hideous Noises … a most horrible and frightful Roaring and Howling, and of a terrifying invasion of wild beasts into the villages of the Pyrenees whose frightening confus’d Noise of Roarings and Howling were so horrific that several villagers died simply of fright. Such reports provide a background of scarcely muted terror that runs through much of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures.³⁵

In 1924, Arthur Wellesley Secord published his Studies in the Narrative Method of Daniel Defoe, and, with a few minor adjustments, he presented the basic problem of determining what works seemed to be genuine sources and which seemed to be merely analogs to Crusoe’s story. He even provided a chart (page 107) that we here reproduce.

Since the view of Defoe in Secord’s time was that of a man rooted in a realist view of life and art, he did not attempt to speak of the way in which Defoe’s imagination tended to merge his readings into a work that, in the words of Michel de Certeau, functions as one of the rare myths that modern Occidental society has been able to create.³⁶ The myth has been so powerful that it has tended to absorb many of the works about wrecked ships and stranded voyagers, both real and fictional, that preceded it. If the story of Alexander Selkirk received such notoriety when it was featured in Woodes Rogers’s Voyage Round the World (1712) and was given larger ramifications in Sir Richard Steele’s The Englishman (1–3 December 1713), it was because interest in such a subject had prepared the audience for it.

Stories of shipwrecks on strange lands were, of course, a staple of romance literature from the time of the Greek romance.³⁷ In drama, it is famously used by Shakespeare at the beginning of Twelfth Night and given full development in The Tempest. In seventeenth-century fiction, it was a typical lead-in for the presentation of utopias and dystopias as well as being a frequent story sequel in picaresque fiction. Examples in both forms are common enough. Secord mentioned The English Rogue by Francis Kirkman and Richard Head as well as the episode in Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus in which the protagonist is driven ashore on an island and lives in a cave as a hermit, but even the second part of Lazarillo de Tormes has a sea adventure, and Vincent Espinel’s The History of the Life of the Squire Marcos de Obregon (1618), in addition to an island adventure, contains a number of episodes that might have influenced Defoe.³⁸

But the island shipwreck was also the standard introduction to the discovery of a land that might be used in a variety of ways for ideological statement. Secord mentions the two parts of Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668), but there were also Denis Vairasse’s The History of the Sevarites (1675), Gabriel de Foigny’s Discovery of Terra Incognita, translated by John Dunton in 1693, and Hendrik Smeeks’s The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes (1708). Secord dismissed the influence of Smeeks’s book upon Defoe on the grounds that Defoe would have been unlikely to have known of such an obscure work, but David Fausett has revived the claim.³⁹ The opening section, which precedes the description of the utopia, involves a cabin boy who is accidentally abandoned on a part of what is now Australia. Like Crusoe he manages to find tools and weapons from a wreck and encounters hostile natives. Although he is extremely resourceful, he is eventually captured by the natives. Finally, he is rescued by the troops from Krinke Kesmes and brought to that kingdom, where he lives out his adult life. Although Fausett’s arguments are stronger than those of Lucius Hubbard, to whom Secord was replying, the real source must be ascribed to contemporary interest in the subject itself.⁴⁰

One of the better known accounts of a seaman surviving on an island was that of Pedro Serrano, whose three-year stay on an island was told in Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Yncas. Serrano’s hairy appearance was used to argue the notion of man’s degeneration to the animal state in nature, and while he survived, he was almost ready to end his misery by death when he was discovered.⁴¹ Despite similar accounts of the misery caused by loneliness and the struggle to survive, it seemed as if everyone was waiting for the opposite story—that of happiness found in a return to nature.⁴²

The traveler J. Albert de Mandelslo, in his Voyage and Travels … into the East Indies, showed a general interest in the subject. He not only recorded the story of a Frenchman who was stranded on the island of Maurice for twenty months—the man was found entirely naked and in a state of delirium, though Mandelslo described the island as a kind of paradise—but also reported a conversation with the Lord Mayor of London on this subject when he came to England in 1639–1640. The Lord Mayor told the story of a Dutchman who was so terrified at being abandoned on Saint Helena that he rowed out to his ship in a coffin and begged to be taken aboard. The Lord Mayor felt that he was motivated by fear and despair and that he should have stayed. The optimism of the Lord Mayor, shown by the story of a successful flight of Christian slaves from North Africa, is countered by a tale of misery involving an Englishman who lived in despair on a rock in the ocean for eleven months.⁴³

Such stories were common enough. William Dampier, with whose writings Defoe was well acquainted, told of finding Will, a Moskito Indian who had been left on Juan Fernandez in 1680. After three years, Dampier and his ship returned for him, and Dampier describes the elaborate Ceremonies of Civility between Robin, another Moskito on board, and Will as they greeted one another.⁴⁴ Secord included as a possible influence A Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman (1689) because Pitman was shipwrecked on a Caribbean island and because of such parallels involving the difficulty of cooking without pots and the inclusion of a diary. Recently, Tim Severin has discovered that Pitman actually lived above the printing shop of the elder William Taylor, the father of Defoe’s printer, but beyond this interesting fact he has not added very much to Secord’s analysis.⁴⁵

Other likely sources include Robert Knox’s Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon (1686). Knox was never solitary, but he did have to find a way of surviving after he was captured and held hostage by the natives. Defoe had read and was acquainted with Knox and may even have had access to materials not published until the twentieth century. In addition, Knox’s ordeal lasted for a very long time (twenty years), and like Crusoe, he suffered a terrible ague and found comfort in the Bible. Defoe may also have been familiar with The Voyage of François Leguat (1708), who tried to establish a colony with eight men on the island of Roderiguez. Although they regarded the island as a paradise, the adventure failed because the men complained that there was no equivalent to Eve on the island. The different choices of Knox as opposed to Leguat and his men would have interested Defoe. Knox insisted on remaining celibate during his long years in what is now Sri Lanka, while those with Leguat found the like situation intolerable.⁴⁶

But whatever hints Defoe may have taken from the aforementioned works, there can be little doubt that his chief inspiration came from the narrative of Alexander Selkirk’s four-year and four-month stay on the island of Juan Fernandez. Selkirk’s decision to have himself put on the island was a voluntary one—a flight from a ship that he considered to be unseaworthy and doomed to sink. Captain Woodes Rogers, who rescued Selkirk on 2 February 1709, went into considerable detail about Selkirk’s way of relieving his melancholy by reading, singing Psalms, and Praying, so that he said he was a better Christian while in this Solitude than ever he was before, or than, he was afraid, he should ever be again. In contact with nature, he became healthier than ever and a remarkably good runner. Defoe unquestionably knew Selkirk’s story, but it served more as a general inspiration than as a specific source. For example, the plague of vermin and the goat skin clothing Crusoe manufactured and wore might seem to be obvious borrowings, yet they might have come from any number of accounts. Unlike Selkirk, Crusoe does not dance and sing with his goats, and Crusoe makes no mention of his having forgot his Language for want of Use. But both Crusoe and Selkirk conquer many of the miseries of solitude and, just as Crusoe thinks of himself (ironically) as the king of his island, so Selkirk is referred to (ironically) as the Governour and absolute Monarch of his island.⁴⁷ Rogers was not reluctant to draw the moral that Solitude and Retirement from the World is not such an unsufferable State of Life as most Men imagine and he added a further Maxim:

That Necessity is the Mother of Invention, since he found means to supply his Wants in a very natural manner, so as to maintain his Life, tho not so conveniently, yet as effectually as we are able to do with the help of all our Arts and Society. It may likewise instruct us, how much a plain and temperate way of living conduces to the Health of the Body and the Vigour of the Mind, both which we are apt to destroy by Excess and Plenty, especially our Meat and Drink: for this Man, when he came to our ordinary Method of Diet and Life, tho he was sober enough, lost much of his Strength and Agility.⁴⁸

Admitting that this set of ideas was more apt for a Philosopher and Divine than a Mariner, Woodes Rogers dropped this discussion. Richard Steele, in The Englishman of 3 December 1713, took up that challenge, for his Selkirk reflects on how happy he was when poorer and in his former tranquil condition.

Not everyone was that impressed with Selkirk. For example, Captain Edward Cooke, who published his account in the same year as Woodes Rogers, did not think that Selkirk’s story offered much in the way of a religious moral. He urged his readers to read the "Lives of ancient Anchorites, who spent many years in the Deserts of Thebaida in Egypt if they wanted to learn about the moral benefits of isolation instead of wasting their time upon a downright Sailor" who merely struggled to survive and to keep off his loneliness by conversing with goats.⁴⁹ Cooke was protesting against all the attention that had been showered on what he called the most barren Subject that Nature can afford. It would be different, he argued, if he had been engaged in using his isolation for the purpose of making scientific discoveries, but the mere attempt of an ordinary person at keeping alive could be of no real interest.⁵⁰ Fortunately, Defoe saw great possibilities in just that subject, and despite efforts to resurrect the story of Alexander Selkirk as the real Robinson Crusoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures simply swallowed up all the forms that came before it.

CONTEMPORARY INFLUENCES ON THE NOVEL

Defoe is careful to give The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures a historical setting, and that setting deserves a separate section. In 1719 Defoe was very much an editor of a variety of journals—Mist’s Weekly Journal, Mercurius Politicus, Dormer’s News Letter, Mercurius Britanicus, and The White-Hall Evening Post.⁵¹ He confronted contemporary life on a daily basis through reporting and through reading a variety of newsletters and printed sources. As Stuart Sherman has suggested, such an encounter is likely to shape a writer’s vision in such a way as to make him highly conscious of the interaction of present time and human experience.⁵² It would seem odd, then, if Defoe did not make his work reflective of what was happening in the world around him.

One of the most significant events of the time was the interest in the South Sea Company and the investments in it that eventually brought about the famous Bubble. It was a time of frenzied financial activity. In France, John Law was attempting to stir up investment in the Mississippi Company and beginning his experiment with paper money. The Assiento—the agreement that was part of the Treaty of Utrecht—was supposed to allow Britain to send one ship annually to trade with the Spanish colonies in the New World and to supply these colonies with African slaves. For some people this seemed to hold out a prospect of endless riches. And this, in turn, raised interest in the area itself. An early manuscript in the Bodleian Library, usually thought to be in Defoe’s hand, contains a scheme to colonize the area of present-day Chile and Argentina. Though the scheme itself was that of another projector, William Paterson, it shows that Defoe’s interest in the area dates back to several decades before the publication of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures.

In the Weekly Journal of 7 February 1719, there was an announcement in the daily papers of a plan by a British company to colonize the northern area of South America around the Orinoco River.

We expect, in two or three Days, a most flaming Proposal from the South Sea Company, or from a Body of Merchants who claim kindred of them, for erecting a British Colony on the Foundation of the South-Sea Company’s Charter, upon the Terra Firma, or the Northermost Side of the Mouth of the great River Oroonoko. They propose, as we hear, the establishing a Factory and Settlement there, which shall cost the Company £500000. Sterling, and they demand the Government to furnish six Men of War, and 4000 regular Troups, with some Engineers and 100 Pieces of Canon, and military Stores in Proportion for the maintaining and supporting the Design; for which they suggest, that the Revenue it shall bring to the Kingdom will be a full amends. It is said they will send over Workmen to build 12 Sloops with 12 Guns each, and able to carry 300 Men, which are to maintain a Commerce up the Great River to the Province or Empire of Guiana, in which they resolve to establish a new Colony also, above 400 Leagues fro the first Settlement, to be always supplied with Forces as well as Merchandizes from the first Settlement; and they doubt not to carry on a Trade there equal to that of the Portuguese in the Brazils, and to bring home an equal quantity of Gold, as well as to cause a prodigious Consumption of our British Manufactures. This it seems, is the same Country and River discovered by Sir Walter Rawleigh, in former Days, and that which he miscarried in by several Mistakes, which may now easily be prevented.

Defoe may not have composed this report for The Weekly Journal, but, as one of its editors, he certainly would have read it. And the comments on the prodigious Consumption or our British Manufactures along with the evocation of Sir Walter Raleigh certainly sound like Defoe. If the emergence of a full colonial theme was to await the publication of The Farther Adventures, we do get the origins of a colony in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures.⁵³

Economic themes make up an integral part in all of Defoe’s work. In addition to the interest in paper money provoked by John Law in France, there were considerable discussions about the possibility of a new coinage in Britain, and, along with it, considerable speculation about the nature of money. One of the most famous sections in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures is Crusoe’s address to the gold that he discovers aboard the wreck. He finds it completely worthless on the island, yet upon Second Thoughts (66), he decides to take it with him. It is a speech admired by contemporary commentators and by Coleridge in the nineteenth century, both for its awareness of the artificiality of money in what Crusoe calls a State of Nature and for Crusoe’s inability to resist what his gold might mean if ever he were to return to civilization. On the island, everything is measured by its usefulness to his life there, and it is hardly surprising that Robinson Crusoe’s judgment about the value of money was picked up by those trying to illustrate a theory of marginal utility, in which the question of value is measured by what is absolutely necessary for his existence and what might be considered a luxury to be dispensed with when the threat of the cannibals causes him to change his way of living.⁵⁴

Defoe’s fictional expression of what Locke preached in his Two Treatises of Civil Government receives its best treatment elsewhere in Defoe’s text:

In a Word, The Nature and Experience of Things dictated to me upon just Reflection, That all the good Things of this World are no farther good to us, than they are for our Use; and that whatever we may heap up indeed to give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use, and no more. The most covetous griping Miser in the World would have been cur’d of the Vice of Covetousness, if he had been in my Case; for I possess’d infinitely more than I knew what to do with. I had no room for Desire, except it was of Things which I had not, and they were but Trifles, though indeed of great Use to me. I had, as I hinted before, a Parcel of Money, a well Gold as Silver, about thirty six Pounds Sterling; Alas! There the nasty sorry useless Stuff lay; I had no manner of Business for it; and I often thought with my self, That I would have given a Handful of it for a Gross of Tobacco-Pipes, or for a Hand-Mill to grind my Corn; nay, I would have give it all for Six pennyworth of Turnip and Carrot Seed out of England, or for a handful of Pease and Beans, and a Bottle of Ink. As it was, I had not the least Advantage by it, or Benefit from it; but there it lay in a Drawer, and grew mouldy with the Damp of the Cave, in the wet Season, and if I had had the Draw full of Diamonds, it had been the same Case; and they had been of no manner of Value to me, because of no Use.

In addition to emphasizing use value, Crusoe feels a genuine disgust for the value that society places upon money. Implicit in this condemnation is a judgment upon Western society for its mistaken emphasis—its fetishization of gold, silver, and diamonds, mediums of exchange that have only an illusory value.

Accompanying this rejection of an absolute value inherent in money is the emphasis on useful tasks. It was Ian Watt who first suggested that society had just reached the stage of urbanization in which ordinary products—bread, clothing, meats—were purchasable at shops rather than part of home industry. Watt posited a kind of nostalgia built into The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures for a simpler past.⁵⁵ Crusoe’s manufacture of pots, his reflection on all the tasks that are necessary for making a loaf of bread, and his sewing together the goat skins to make himself an outfit were conceived in terms of the pleasure that a contemporary audience, removed from such tasks, would feel in seeing Crusoe master these difficulties. But if this is true enough, it is also true that Defoe was attempting to illustrate a point he makes over and over again—that any human being could do what he is doing, that the economic history of mankind is latent within every human being. In other words, even if most human beings in the West were now removed from the necessity to engage in these activities, they were always recoverable. From this standpoint, Defoe points forward

Reviews for The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

[comfypants · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A man with wanderlust encounters a series of escalating misfortunes.1/4 (Bad).I gave up after 40 pages. I haven't even gotten to the really racist stuff yet (I suspect), but already the attitude towards slavery is too much. The style is readable but uniformly void of personality, and it's pretty clear how the story is going to unfold, so I'm confident that I'm not missing anything.(Aug. 2022)

[clurb · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Adventure n'that. With parrots and goats. A really good read.

[woollymammoth_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A brilliant book that set the standard for the Desert Island Genre. It's a classic, and a great read for both adults and children, much better than endless Enid Blyton I read at that age.

[clueless_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book blew me away! I was amazed how relevant it was to present time. It was not dusty/stuffy at all. I guess I was expecting Swiss Family Robinson or something. Instead I got this wonderful story of a man wrestling with his faith. Way.Cool.

[philipjhunt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's a classic; how could I not give it 5 stars. I was delighted to discover how very readable the book is despite the language of early 1700s. Also surprised that the two main themes of the book are mechanical and spiritual. Mechanical, in the sense that there is a lot of practical detail about how Crusoe creates a living from the bits and pieces he rescues from the wrecked ship. And spiritual, in his struggles to come to terms with life alone (until near the end) on an island (not desert, btw) and how considers his relationship with God under the circumstances. Doubtless one of today's editors would have asked for a rewrite to reduce the book in half, but the rambling detail is part of its classic charm. Read slowly and it's easy to be with Crusoe for a LONG time.

[tanasi1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love this classic tale. I pick it up occasionally and read it again; it always feels like I am meeting an old friend once more.

[jms001 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this book in eighth grade cause it was worth more 'reading points' than some of the other books on the list. But when I first picked it up, it was a non-stop adventure and tale of survival that I absolutely adored. If you like survival classics like Lord of the Flies or Castaway, then this is a great read as well.

[zhyatt-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Its account of a man's industry and occasionally outright boredom in the face of trying circumstances is inspiring and classic.Honestly, if you dig too deep, there are a lot of uncomfortable themes about race, gender, and religion that might tarnish any fond childhood memories you have (I recommend the excellent essay "Robinson Crusoe and the Ethnic Sidekick").To summarize, it's about a man who uses and possesses everything and everyone he sees. You can draw a lot of conclusions about sexism, white supremacy, and capitalism and you really wouldn't be too far off base.While it's good to keep this in mind, you should also keep in mind that it's over three hundred years old. Not that this makes any of the enclosed sentiments any less awful, but the prevailing ideas of the time should at least be taken into account.

[nialle-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Started rereading this as a refresher before I pick up Foe - and wow, is it a different book now. When I was a kid, I read this at the crux between my nautical fiction craze and my self-sufficiency craze, so naturally the seagoing and the invention with which Crusoe builds his encampment interested me most. This time around, though, I'm fascinated by his descriptions of living with and without fear of different varieties, and by what is middle-class and middle-aged about those fears. Very different. Hm.

[crewman_number_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I just reread this book, and it is amazing to me that it is as relevant today as it was when it was written in the late 1600's! I think sometimes people are expecting this to be an adventure story, but truly it is the theme "man vs. himself." Robinson Crusoe has to come to grips with the fact that his choices got him to the point he was in life, good or bad. Loved it.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Robinson Crusoe starts off whiney. And moany. And oh-woe-is-me, and why did I do that?

This is spoiler-ish.

Then he spends 20-odd years alone on a not-desert island. He learns to be alone--except for pets, and a parrot who he teaches to talk, and God. Because of course he finds God and starts studying the bible. It was all downhill from here.

From whiney guy he becomes the King. Because of course a native man will be his servant! And of course his servan'ts father and the random Spanish guy will serve him too! And then he becomes the Governor, because of course those who survive a mutiny on their ship will want Robinson to be their boss! And hey, he'll just eave the Spanish behind!

I was going to recommend this for a friend's 5th grade daughter--she reads like crazy, and would love the way he builds his life on the island. But then the servant bossy governor bits come in. Meh.

[flydodofly · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My absolute favourite as a child

[merrymary_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've loved this story since my teens. The illustrations by Fritz Kredel are nice full-color plates.

[crashmyparty · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

For what was supposed to be the classic shipwreck story I couldn't help but be disappointed by Robinson Crusoe. It may have been the language of the time, but I found the story to be slow and frankly a little boring. It seemed to be a lot of lists of things that Crusoe was doing or accumulating or learning. And for someone who spent so long alone on an island, I would have thought that he would have gone at least a little bit crazy! 

[vandev11 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked on an island after his slave ship runs aground. The rest of his crew soon die and Robinson is left to fend for himself. Robinson soon encounters a group of savages, one of which he befriends and names Friday, and the two work in tandem to get themselves off the island.Defoe’s work provides opportunity for various topics of discussion, ranging from the power of religion to the reconciliation of cultural differences. It is also an excellent book for examining the development of the English language, as the writing style is quite a bit different than most of the texts your students may have encountered.

[pickwick817 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book to me was both an epic adventure and a deeper look into the soul of an individual. It had both the survivalist type adventure, as well as the introspection of someone who finds themselves in an unimaginable situation. At first he refuses to believe in what is happening, then he moves into the realization that it is inevitable, then he adjusts again and can't concieve of the possibility of the change he has been dreaming of.

[jwarbler-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The storyline of this novel is intriguing enough, but since the medium was so new, Defoe's writing leaves much to be desires. Crusoe's constant listing and mood swings are hard to get through after a while.

[weakley_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The majority of this book is enjoyable if you keep it in perspective. Being written as long ago as it was it still maintains a quality of easily read prose that I do not find in any other book of the time period. It leans a little heavily into religious thought but I suppose if you are stranded on an island for 28 years you have a lot of time to think!The end doesn't live up to the rest of the book. The last 20 odd pages are just a mess, and take the reader through some idiotic exercise in the mountains between Spain and France. There is a series of attacks by 300 wolves and bears and our man Friday teases a bear before killing him. Very bad.

[fuzzi_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a classic that I'd missed reading for over five decades but determined to attempt this year. It was an enjoyable read, believable, and kept my interest throughout the tale.

[rebeccaann_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Intellectually, I can see why this is a good book and why it remains a proud member of the Western canon. Unfortunately, I couldn't bring myself to finish this. The prose is dry, Crusoe himself makes me want to bang my head repeatedly against a wall, and religious conversions always make it on to my top ten list of LEAST favorite things I like to see in my fiction. All in all, I get it. It's a classic. It's the first novel. It's important to our literary heritage. But that doesn't mean I want to read it.

[phaga_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had a really hard time getting into this book. The pacing was very inconsistent. Some sections were fast paced and exciting, others were dull and seemed pointless. The writing itself made reading this incredibly dry. Constantly repeating himself and reminding you of things you had just read as if his story was that easily forgotten. I understand this was written in the early 18th century and that styles were different back then, i just can't get past how hard it was to stay focused on the story, esp. when sentences would take up entire pages.

[dilettanti-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wilkie Collins put in the pen of Gabriel Betteredge the following words: "I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad — ROBINSON CRUSOE. When I want advice — ROBINSON CRUSOE. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much — ROBINSON CRUSOE." At once both caricature and encomium, and each a fitting response.

[madspihl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Read this, expecting to know the story, since it is a tale told all over the world. Was happily surprised to feel the pace of Crusoe's routines, and all the details of everyday life only made the story more believable. Wonderful read. Read Robert P. Marzec's "Enclosure, Colonization, and the Robinson Crusoe syndrome" parallel with Defoe's book - very interesting analysis. Text published in "boundary", 2:29:2, 2002 (Duke Uni. Press).

[pamici_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Started out quite interesting - then made the mistake of reading the historical basis for the story before finishing (Selkirk's Island). With the illusion shattered, I couldn't get back to the adventure with any gusto. :(

[scaryguy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Timeless classic!

[audacity88_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Sure, the novel has some deeper themes - the theodicy question being the most obvious. But the real story is in the clever and well-thought-out ways in which Crusoe manages to stay alive on the island. A modern analogue is good strategy-based computer games (SimCity, Age of Empires II) or board games (Monopoly, Settlers of Catan), much of the fun of which is in the society that one watches develop.I found the novel stimulating, though not enthralling. Recommended for intelligent kids - boys, especially - who will do better than most adults at both picking up the language and appreciating the narrator's ability to fend for himself.

[nortonius_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel is so good and such a bulwark of the proverbial canon that this series' editor's choice to modernize the language and syntax falls a bit flat. A good version for the un-initiated, though it pales in comparison to the experience of the original novel.

[jess_reads_books · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I heard a lot of negative things about the story of Robinson Crusoe, so when I decided to pick up the book I had my doubts. I have to say, I found the book engaging and the story thoroughly interesting. I loved everything about the book right up until the ending. I felt as though Defoe rushed the end and took away everything we enjoyed from the Robinson's island adventure.

[trasfavoritepastime · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

To say I hated this book is probably the understatement of the century. In fact, I'm only halfway through the book after six years! I just can't seem to bring myself to buckle down and finish it mainly because the main character is a whiny pompous ass who is just plain dislikeable. I should probably donate this book, but there is still this little part of me that insists on finishing it, although that will most likely never happen.

[jguidry-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

When I started this book, I was expecting a story about survival. I expected to hear about wild adventures and man vs. nature. I got a little of that. But, mostly I got a whiny narrator who complained bitterly about how lonely he was and how he wanted a companion. Turns out, he really just wanted a servant. I couldn't get into the story at all, I didn't like the main character (not even enough to feel a little sorry for him) and I really wasn't impressed by the ending. This was a slight disappointment for me.