Robinson Crusoe (Routledge Revivals)

Pat Rogers

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317687634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

First published in 1979, this title presents the basic facts and the background information needed by a modern reader of Robinson Crusoe, as well as a careful exploration of the structure and style of the work itself. Pat Rogers pays particular attention to the book's composition and publishing history, the critical history surrounding it from 1719 onwards, and the contemporary context of geographical discovery, colonialism and piracy, as well as more controversial areas of interpretation. A wide-ranging and practical reissue, this study will be of value to literature students with a particular interest in the critical interpretation of Robinson Crusoe, as well as the novel's place in the context of Defoe's career.

CHAPTER 1
Preliminary

DEFOE’S LIFE

Robinson Crusoe is generally regarded as the first English novel, but its author was by no conceivable stretch of imagination a beginner.¹ Defoe had been writing for thirty of his sixty-nine years when the first part of Crusoe appeared in 1719. The three parts form items 412, 417 and 436 in Moore’s Checklist of Defoe’s writings; a few earlier items in the list may not have been written by Defoe, but we can be certain that he did write other works not identified to fill the blanks.² (Moore’s final tally amounts to some 560 books, pamphlets and journals.) No one writing his 412th work can begin with a totally blank literary sheet, and even though Crusoe was a deeply innovative production it necessarily drew on a long apprenticeship in the author’s craft. We might estimate, very roughly, that of the previous 411 books something like half were, in the broadest sense, political. They included tracts on controversial topics such as the Sacheverell dispute of 1709–10; pamphlets on the politics of religion, and especially the condition of dissenters; and clusters of items concerned with a specialised interest, such as Scottish affairs. In addition Defoe had been widely active as a poet, with The True-Born Englishman (1701) his most popular single work. From the time of his verse meditations in 1681, he had aspired to success as a poet, and in 1703 almost a hundred pages of Poems on State Affairs (the most widely read verse of the day) were occupied by his compositions.³ But after 1710 he restricted himself more and more to prose, and by 1720 he allowed himself only a very occasional return to poetry.

Experienced as he was, Defoe had not yet found his entire range as an author. It is often supposed that his background as a writer of criminal biography was a major help to his fictional technique; and yet, as A. W. Secord pointed out, ‘the biographies known to have been written by Defoe previously to 1719 … are neither very numerous nor very significant’.⁴ His lives of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild come after, not before, Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack. What might be called Defoe’s ‘social’ concerns grew much more prominent in the 1720s; it was in his last decade that he produced most of his important works on crime, economics, the family and class. We might almost say that it was his novels which led him to an interest in social affairs, rather than the other way round. In other words, although Defoe was quite an elderly man when he came to Crusoe, he was still only on the verge of discovering some of his most characteristic styles as a writer.

The reason for Defoe’s late efflorescence may be at bottom no more than this: he finally had time to write undistractedly. His had been an eventful progress through life up to that time. He was born in 1660, most likely in the autumn; the event probably took place in Cripplegate, just outside the historic walls of the City of London, near legendary Grub Street. He was actually Daniel Foe; his father was James Foe, later a City liveryman, a merchant whose Flemish ancestors had originally settled in the English midlands. Arriving in the world contemporaneously with the restoration of Charles II, and facing as a result some hard-line legislation, little Daniel became in his innocence a dissenter (in fact a Presbyterian) at the age of 2, when his entire family was forced to decide whether they could subscribe to the new tests of allegiance to the Church of England. When he was 5 the Great Plague hit London, and he was evacuated to the country; the superb descriptions in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) owe more to research and imagination than to direct recollection. In his teens the young Foe attended a prominent dissenting academy just outside London, seemingly in the expectation of becoming a minister. But he did not do this: instead, he established himself as a merchant just off Cornhill, in the business heart of London. By 1684 he was in a position to marry, and marry well; his bride, Mary Tuffley, brought him a dowry of £3,700, worth perhaps £60,000 or $120,000 at present-day values.

It looked as if he was heading for a life of prosperity and respectability. True, he did incautiously go off to fight for the Duke of Monmouth, the Protestant pretender to the throne of Catholic James II, in 1685. He even got himself captured, but was lucky to escape with a royal pardon, when hundreds went to the gallows. Having weathered this, he should have done doubly well when William III dispatched James in 1688 – he actually rode to meet the ‘invader’ on his way to London, and joined the entourage at Henley. By this time he was a member of a City livery company, that is, one of the bodies which controlled business life: Daniel Foe was admitted to the Butchers’ Company, by reason of his father’s membership. He was beginning to write and to be published; he had good contacts on the fringe of the Court; and all seemed set fair. But he over-reached himself. After one doomed effort to raise civet-cats in Stoke Newington (he owned seventy cats for manufacturing perfume), in the course of which he managed to cheat his own mother-in-law, he found himself in severe financial difficulties.⁵He had been engaged in a wide variety of ventures, including a project to construct a diving engine to help salvage some lucrative wrecks which lay round the coast of Britain. But it was a more respectable occupation, marine insurance partly designed against these very wrecks, which brought him down. Along with eighteen other merchants he failed because the French were too successful in seizing English vessels during the war now enveloping Europe. A petition to Parliament looked as if it might succeed, and allow the merchants to compose with his creditors; but in the end the House of Lords rejected the measure.⁶ In fact Daniel Foe, as he still was, found himself in the Fleet gaol: there could scarcely be a more symbolic eighteenth-century landscape than the debtor’s prison, and yet the novelist made no use of it as he did of Newgate.

Slowly, in the middle 1690s, he began to climb once more. He became Defoe, so much more aristocratic in tone, and he acquired substantial public offices. In 1697 his first important literary work, significantly entitled An Essay upon Projects, came before the public. With his capital renewed – perhaps owing to a royal gift – he put money into a brick-making concern at Tilbury. The year 1701 saw the publication of The True-Born Englishman, satirising hostility towards those of foreign ancestry (like himself). It sold, according to report, 80,000 copies: there were twelve separate pirated editions. But again things went awry. Defoe’s patron William III died, to be succeeded by the High Church Queen Anne. His satire on the extreme Tory position, called The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (namely, embark on a pogrom), earned official displeasure. He went into hiding but was found concealed at a house in Spitalfields. He was sent to Newgate and ultimately, in July 1703, stood in the pillory on three successive days. Meanwhile his brick works had failed and he was bankrupt for a second time. The autumn of 1703 marks the nadir of what had been an exceedingly chequered career.

He owed his rescue to Robert Harley, a moderate Tory politician who was to be his most enduring patron. Harley arranged for a royal pardon, as well as giving Defoe employment intermittently for the next ten years. It was somewhere between a public and a private post. Defoe served as a one-man intelligence agency, travelling around the country to test the political temperature, and writing extensively on behalf of Harley. From 1704 to 1713 he had single-handed responsibility for The Review, a journal of opinion rather than fact. Defoe also wrote a long series of pamphlets in support of Harley; many of these concern the Union with Scotland, for which Defoe acted as promoter and publicist. When Harley fell in 1708, Defoe was taken on by his successor, Godolphin. Again he went all over England and Scotland to report, spy and ferret out disaffection. In 1710 the situation was reversed. Godolphin was ousted, and a strong new Tory administration headed by Robert Harley took over. During the next four years Defoe wrote many of his most influential political pamphlets, in spite of many Whig attempts to gag him. With the death of Queen Anne and the collapse of the Tory Party in 1714, Defoe found himself a suspected person. For the next few years he had to tread most carefully; his health was bad, and he never became persona grata with the Hanoverian court. But he did not stop writing, and the first two parts of Robinson Crusoe were among sixteen items listed under the year 1719. No doubt many people had written him off; no one could have guessed that his great creative period was still to come.

The early 1720s witnessed the appearance of the books by which he lives today. After Crusoe in quick succession came Memoirs of a Cavalier, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, Colonel Jack and Roxana, all within five years. His non-fictional output is just as remarkable in its way. It included a life of Sir Walter Ralegh, his favourite historical subject; the invaluable Tour through Britain; a History of the Pyrates; biographies of major and minor criminals; The Complete English Tradesman, a deeply characteristic production; and works on demonology and magic. He was in harness to the end, and when he died – fleeing from creditors yet again – in April 1731 the flow had not quite ceased. A few unpublished works have come to light, most notably The Compleat English Gentleman, as though the organism had gone on, posthumously secreting its natural juice – words on the page. It is an astonishing record of diligence, will and courage, and would be remarkable even if the books had not been very good. Most of them were, but Crusoe stands above all.

EARLY EDITIONS

The first part of Robinson Crusoe (henceforward RC1) was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 23 April 1719.⁷ This was on the way to being an obsolete mode by which a publisher claimed the property in a book; the Stationers’ Company retained comprehensive powers in theory, but the need for a new Copyright Act in 1709 had shown its practical impotence in the face of pirates. The ‘whole share’ in Defoe’s work was claimed by William Taylor: we do not know how much he had paid for the copyright, but at a very rough guess one might expect a figure of £50 or so. Newspaper advertisements are not precise to within a day, but RC1 must have appeared to the public on or around 25 April. The title-page opens with the words ‘The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner’ (typography normalised), followed by fifty-three words of sub-title. Then comes, within rules, the statement ‘Written by Himself’, and the imprint, describing the book as ‘printed for’ W. Taylor. The whole is enclosed within double rules. Taylor (d.1724) had been associated with Jacob Tonson and Bernard Lintot in publishing the official votes of the House of Commons since 1715. He was a less prominent figure in the book trade than either of his associates; suitably to the ethos of Crusoe, he might be termed a publisher of the middle rank. His name is linked to few other works of any historical importance.⁸

There was only one issue of the first edition of RC1. A few trifling changes were made while the book was in the press, including the substitution of a semi-colon for a colon in the imprint; but these represent variant states of the same printing. The work is in octavo and consists of 186 leaves; the text ends on page 364 and it is followed by four pages of advertisements by the publisher. A list of errata on page 365 is found in all states of this edition. The famous frontispiece of Crusoe in his sheepskin outfit, a gun slung over each shoulder, was designed by Clark and Pine. As A. Edward Newton wrote, ‘This illustration has outlasted several centuries of criticism. We always look for it and are disappointed when we do not find it. … It has come to be the accepted portrait; no legend is required: one knows that he is looking at Robinson Crusoe.’⁹ The book was priced at 5 shillings, a reasonably modest price even by the standards of the day; an octavo of this length might easily have cost 6 shillings or more.

Defoe’s name did not appear on this or any other of the early editions. There is nothing surprising or sinister in that. He had been brought up in the world of controversial pamphleteering, where anonymity was more or less ubiquitous. Of the more than 500 items in the Checklist, only a handful carry an unambiguous statement of authorship. Some of these are among his shortest productions, like Daniel Defoe’s Hymn for the Thanksgiving (1706) (item 119), or De Foe’s Answer to Dyer’s Scandalous News Letter (1707) (153). Occasionally initials are used, as with the ‘D. F. Gent’ found in The Complete Art of Painting (1720) (430). Defoe sometimes signed a preface, as in The History of the Union (1709) (161); or a dedication, as in Caledonia (1706) (129). Letters included in the body of a work may provide evidence of authorship. More often Defoe appears under a sobriquet such as ‘the Author of the True Born Englishman’, common between 1702 and 1707; or ‘the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on the Texts
• A Note on the Texts
• Map Illustrating Crusoe's Travels
• 1 Preliminary
• 2 Travel, Trade and Empire
• 3 Religion and Allegory
• 4 Social and Philosophic Themes
• 5 Literary Background
• 6 Structure and Style
• 7 Critical History
• Appendix A Woodes Rogers's Narrative of Selkirk
• Appendix B Richard Steele's Narrative of Selkirk
• Appendix C The Illustrators of Robinson Crusoe
• Appendix D Table of Dates
• Appendix E Gazetteer
• Appendix F Biographical Index
• Bibliography