by Daniel Defoe
Crusoe’s transformation from terrified and confused survivor to colonial master and avenging overlord of his island marks Robinson Crusoe as one of the key modern myths of English and even of European culture. Having experienced the compulsions and mysterious drivings of fate, Crusoe now acquires and indeed embodies freedom and domination of nature and of others in his powerful and confident actions. From victim to hero, Crusoe is now a man of action and commanding energy. Descending like an avenging angel on the terrified cannibals or amazing the bewildered mutineers a bit later on like a latter-day Prospero (or an anticipation of the Wizard of Oz) as the all-powerful governor of his island, Crusoe can be said to resemble the inscrutable deity he has imagined earlier: to the cannibals and the mutineers he is a mysterious and irresistible force. Crusoe controls the fates of others; he presides suddenly over a new political order on his island, even though he treats his new authority as something of a joke: ‘My island was now peopled, and I thought my self very rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made, how like a king I look’d. First of all, the whole country was my own meer property; so that I had an undoubted right of dominion. Secondly, my people were perfectly subjected: I was absolute lord and law-giver; they all ow’d their lives to me, and were ready to lay down their lives, if there had been occasion of it, for me’ (p. 190).
Defoe, it turns out, was one of James Joyce’s favourite writers. In a lecture (‘Verismo ed idealismo nella letterature inglese’) he gave on Defoe in Trieste in 1911, Joyce called Crusoe the embodiment of British imperialism. Defoe’s hero is ‘the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty savage who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races’. Joyce found in Crusoe the ‘whole Anglo-Saxon spirit…the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity’.5 What we need to add to his evocation and what should be clear to anyone who actually reads Robinson Crusoe is the caution that Defoe’s book does not simply offer that prototype as a given but rather records the development of that imperial personality in Crusoe. The book’s importance as one of the earliest English novels lies in its tracing of the hero’s painful and slow acquisition of that identity. Balancing critique and celebration of its hero, Robinson Crusoe is not simply propaganda for British imperial expansion but, also, a dramatization of the psychological origins and moral problems of the triumphant but troubling historical phenomena of western individualism and imperialism that he comes to embody.
NOTES
1 The Englishman: being the sequel of the Guardian (London: S. Buckley, 1714), Number 26, p. 172.
2 Ibid., p. 173.
3 The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in ‘Robinson Crusoe’ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966).
4 ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, revised from Essays in Criticism (1951), reprinted in Norton Critical Edition of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: Norton, 1994), p. 289.
5 ‘Daniel Defoe’, edited from Italian manuscripts and translated by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1 (December 1964), pp. 24–5.
FURTHER READING
Paul Alkon, Defoe and Fictional Time (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979). Critically sophisticated reading of Defoe’s manipulations of time in his fiction.
Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Standard, definitive biography.
Ian Bell, Defoe’s Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1985). Valuable treatment of the novels in the context of popular narrative in the early eighteenth century.
John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Original and penetrating study of the relationship between the development of the novel and the emergence of the modern penitentiary.
David Blewett, Defoe’s Art of Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). Explores very thoroughly the artistic and moral dimensions of the novels.
—, The Illustration of Robinson Crusoe 1719–1920 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995). A fascinating analysis of shifting visual interpretations of the novel.
Harold Bloom (ed.), Robinson Crusoe: Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House, 1988). Collection of the most important interpretations of Defoe’s novel.
Michael M. Boardman, Defoe and the Uses of Narrative (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983). Perceptive discussion of the novels’ formal innovations.
Homer O. Brown, ‘The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe’, English Literary History 38 (1971), pp. 562–90. Sees Defoe’s fictions as confessions in which characters expose their lives and conceal their identities.
Leopold Damrosch, God’s Plot and Man’s Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Insightful discussion of Robinson Crusoe as part of Puritan tradition exemplified in the works of Bunyan and Milton.
Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Original exploration of the somatic qualities of Defoe’s explorations of physical experience.
P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). Important history of how many of Defoe’s works came to be attributed to him.
—, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998). Revised list of Defoe’s writings based on title above.
Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979). Stimulating discussion of Robinson Crusoe and European imperialism.
—, The Robinson Crusoe Story (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990). Survey of the lingering significance and importance of Defoe’s book.
J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in ‘Robinson Crusoe’ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). Important study of the Christian foundations of Defoe’s novel.
James Joyce, ‘Daniel Defoe’, edited from Italian manuscripts and translated by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1 (December 1964), pp. 3–27.
Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Monumental and crucial study of the emergence of the novel, with a valuable chapter devoted to Robinson Crusoe.
A. D. McKillop, The Early Masters of English Fiction (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1968). Informative history of the novel in the eighteenth century that features a discussion of Defoe’s role.
Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe – Master of Fictions: His Life and Works (London: Oxford University Press, 2001). A masterful and authoritative account of Defoe’s life and writings.
—, Defoe and the Nature of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). Traces the intellectual currents of Defoe’s time and his treatment of those ideas in his fiction.
—, Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). Explores the underestimated complexities of Defoe’s novels.
John Richetti, Daniel Defoe (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987). A survey of all of Defoe’s writings, fictional and non-fictional.
—, Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Reads the novels as explorations of cultural contradictions and expressions of individual will to power.
Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972). Study of Defoe’s milieu as a writer.
—, Robinson Crusoe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979). Sensible and thorough guide to Defoe’s novel.
Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Persuasive political reading of Defoe’s novel.
Michael Seidel, Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel (Boston: Twayne Publis
hers, 1991). Shrewdly original treatment of the structure and cultural resonances of the novel.
Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). Defoe’s social aspirations as a key theme in his novels and some of his non-fiction.
Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (eds.), Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996). Essays discussing the cultural influences of the Crusoe story on later writers and thinkers.
G. A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). Traces insightfully the influence of the analytic case history method of moral judgement on the structure of Defoe’s novels.
—, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). Finds the origins and organizing principles of Defoe’s fiction in Puritan diaries.
James Sutherland, Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). A study of the non-fiction and its relation to the fiction.
—, Defoe (London: Methuen, 1937). Sensible and readable older biography.
Elsa Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Traces the influence of Baconian science on Defoe’s writing, including Robinson Crusoe.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957). Chapters on Defoe are crucial for understanding his importance as a realistic innovator in fiction.
—, ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, revised from Essays in Criticism (1951), reprinted in Norton Critical Edition of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: Norton, 1994). Influential and provocative essay about the cultural meaning of the novel.
Richard West, Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures (London: Harper Collins, 1998). A journalist’s appreciative and lively narrative of Defoe’s life and writings.
Everett Zimmerman, Defoe and the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975). Cogent and powerful examination of the changes in Defoe’s moral and literary values expressed in his fictions.
NOTE ON THE TEXT
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner first appeared on 25 April 1719 and was instantly popular, the initial printing of 1000 quickly selling out. To meet the great demand for the book, the London printer William Taylor issued five more separate printings that year, four of these marked as new ‘editions’, with the third and fourth editions issued twice. Each printing corrected many errors in the first edition, but each also introduced new errors. The text for this Penguin edition is based on a photocopy of one of the first edition copies in the British Library, but I have consulted all of the 1719 printings and made some minor modifications and editorial choices to aid readability. I have retained all features of the original text except for the capitalization of common nouns, which is for modern readers an insignificant convention of eighteenth-century typography. I have also occasionally chosen for the sake of clarity one variant among eighteenth-century spellings; for example, in place of ‘cloaths’ in the first edition I have substituted ‘clothes’ from a later printing as less distracting; in place of ‘ruine’ from the first edition I have substituted ‘ruin’. For ease of readability, I have also introduced some consistency in the spelling; for example, turning what appears at first as ‘shoar’ into the later spelling of ‘shore’, converting what is occasionally spelled ‘patroon’ into its normal spelling of ‘patron’, spelling ‘surprise’ and ‘surprising’ with the ‘s’ rather than the ‘z’ that the first edition sometimes employs, preferring ‘human’ to the alternative spelling of ‘humane’, ‘comrade’ to ‘comerade’, ‘cabin’ to ‘cabbin’, and ‘till’ to what sometimes appears as ‘’til’, as well as ‘cannibals’ to ‘canibals’, ‘rice’ to ‘ryce’ and ‘cargo’ to ‘cargoe’. Except in some places where the plain sense of the text required slight alterations, I have retained the punctuation used in the first edition, and I have made no effort to remove the many inconsistencies. There is no surviving manuscript of the novel, and scholars have supposed that most of the punctuation was supplied by the printers for what must have been the lightly punctuated manuscript Defoe gave them. Otherwise, I have corrected like editors before me some obvious errors or misprints.
THE
L I F E
AND
STRANGE SURPRIZING
ADVENTURES
OF
ROBINSON CRUSOE,
Of YORK, MARINER:
Who lived Eight and Twenty Years,
all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the
Coast of AMERICA, near the Mouth of
the Great River of OROONOQUE;
Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself.
WITH
An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by PYRATES.
Written by Himself.
LONDON:
Printed for W. TAYLOR at the Ship in Pater-Noster-Row. MDCCXIX.
THE
PREFACE
If ever the story of any private man’s adventures in the world were worth making publick, and were acceptable when publish’d, the editor of this account thinks this will be so.
The wonders of this man’s life exceed all that (he thinks) is to be found extant; the life of one man being scarce capable of a greater variety.
The story is told with modesty, with seriousness, and with a religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always apply them (viz.) to the instruction of others by this example, and to justify and honour the wisdom of Providence in all the variety of our circumstances, let them happen how they will.
The editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it: And whoever thinks, because all such things are dispatch’d,1 that the improvement of it, as well to the diversion, as to the instruction of the reader, will be the same; and as such, he thinks, without farther compliment to the world, he does them a great service in the publication.
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF
ROBINSON CRUSOE,2 &c.
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, tho’ not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen,3 who settled first at Hull: He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was call’d Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now call’d, nay we call our selves, and write our name Crusoe, and so my companions always call’d me.
I had two elder brothers, one of which was Lieutenant Collonel to an English regiment of foot in Flanders, formerly commanded by the famous Coll. Lockhart, and was killed at the battle near Dunkirk against the Spaniards.4 What became of my second brother I never knew any more than my father or mother did know what was become of me.
Being the third son of the family, and not bred to any trade, my head began to be fill’d very early with rambling thoughts: My father, who was very ancient, had given me a competent share of learning, as far as house-education, and a country free-school generally goes, and design’d me for the law; but I would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea, and my inclination to this led me so strongly against the will, nay the commands of my father, and against all the entreaties and perswasions of my mother and other friends, that there seem’d to be something fatal in that propension of Nature tending directly to the life of misery which was to befal me.
My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel against what he foresaw was my design. He called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by the gout, and expostulated very warmly with me upon this subject: He ask’d me what reasons more than a meer wandring inclination I had for leaving my father’s house and my native country, where I might be well i
ntroduced, and had a prospect of raising my fortunes by application and industry, with a life of ease and pleasure. He told me it was for men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprize, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me, or too far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanick part of mankind, and not embarrass’d with the pride, luxury, ambition and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me, I might judge of the happiness of this state, by this one thing, viz. That this was the state of life which all other people envied, that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequences of being born to great things, and wish’d they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this as the just standard of true felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty or riches.5
