3. The history of writing the work of “Robinson Crusoe”

The history of writing the work of Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe, in full The Life 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., novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in London in 1719. Defoe’s first long work of fiction, it introduced two of the most-enduring characters in English literature: Robinson Crusoe and Friday.Crusoe is the novel’s narrator. He describes how, as a headstrong young man, he ignored his family’s advice and left his comfortable middle-class home in England to go to sea. His first experience on a ship nearly kills him, but he perseveres, and a voyage to Guinea “made me both a Sailor and a Merchant,” Crusoe explains. Now several hundred pounds richer, he sails again for Africa but is captured by pirates and sold into slavery. He escapes and ends up in Brazil, where he acquires a plantation and prospers. Ambitious for more wealth, Crusoe makes a deal with merchants and other plantation owners to sail to Guinea, buy slaves, and return with them to Brazil. But he encounters a storm in the Caribbean, and his ship is nearly destroyed. Crusoe is the only survivor, washed up onto a desolate shore. He salvages what he can from the wreck and establishes a life on the island that consists of spiritual reflection and practical measures to survive. He carefully documents in a journal everything he does and experiences.Encyclopaedia Britannica thistle graphic to be used with a Mendel/Consumer quiz in place of a photograph.49 Questions from Britannica’s Most Popular Literature Quizzes After many years, Crusoe discovers a human footprint, and he eventually encounters a group of native peoples—the “Savages,” as he calls them—who bring captives to the island so as to kill and eat them. One of the group’s captives escapes, and Crusoe shoots those who pursue him, effectively freeing the captive. As Crusoe describes one of his earliest interactions with the man, just hours after his escape:At last he lays his Head flat upon the Ground, close to my Foot, and sets my other Foot upon his Head, as he had done before; and after this, made all the Signs to me of Subjection, Servitude, and Submission imaginable, to let me know, how he would serve me as long as he liv’d; I understood him in many Things, and let him know, I was very well pleas’d with him; in a little Time I began to speak to him, and teach him to speak to me; and first, I made him know his Name should be Friday, which was the Day I sav’d his Life; I call’d him so for the Memory of the Time; I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be my Name. (Robinson Crusoe, ed. by J. Donald Crowley [Oxford University Press, 1998]).Crusoe gradually turns “my Man Friday” into an English-speaking Christian. “Never Man had a more faithful, loving, sincere Servant, than Friday was to me,” Crusoe explains. Various encounters with local peoples and Europeans ensue. After almost three decades on the island, Crusoe departs (with Friday and a group of pirates) for England. Crusoe settles there for a time after selling his plantation in Brazil, but, as he explains, “I could not resist the strong Inclination I had to see my Island.” He eventually returns and learns what happened after the Spanish took control of it.Defoe probably based part of Robinson Crusoe on the real-life experiences of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who at his own request was put ashore on an uninhabited island in 1704 after a quarrel with his captain and stayed there until 1709. But Defoe took his novel far beyond Selkirk’s story by blending the traditions of Puritan spiritual autobiography with an insistent scrutiny of the nature of human beings as social creatures. He also deployed components of travel literature and adventure stories, both of which boosted the novel’s popularity. From this mixture emerged Defoe’s major accomplishment in Robinson Crusoe: the invention of a modern myth. The novel is both a gripping tale and a sober wide-ranging reflection on ambition, self-reliance, civilization, and power.
Robinson Crusoe was a popular success in Britain, and it went through multiple editions in the months after its first publication. Translations were quickly published on the European continent, and Defoe wrote a sequel (The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) that was also published in 1719. Defoe’s book immediately spurred imitations, called Robinsonades, and he himself used it as a springboard for more fiction. (For a discussion of Robinson Crusoe in the context of Defoe’s writing career, see Daniel Defoe: Later life and works.) Robinson Crusoe would crop up in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762) and in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867). The novel The Swiss Family Robinson (translated into English in 1814) and the films His Girl Friday (1940), Swiss Family Robinson (1960), and Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) are just a few of the works that riff—some directly, some obliquely—on Defoe’s novel and its main characters.Some critics have debated Robinson Crusoe’s status as a novel per se: its structure is highly episodic, and Defoe’s uneven narrative pacing and niggling errors—a goat that is male, for example, later becomes female as circumstances demand—suggest that he may not have planned or executed the work as a single unified whole. In many ways, however, its heterogeneity—the fact that it draws together features of the genres of romance, memoir, fable, allegory, and others—argues that novel is the only label large enough to describe it. Robinson Crusoe is best understood as standing alongside novels such as Tristram Shandy and Infinite Jest, all of which expand the novel’s possibilities by blurring its boundaries.Steingrímur Thorsteinsson, (born May 19, 1831, Snaefellsnes, Iceland—died August 21, 1913, Reykjavík), Icelandic patriotic poet and lyricist, best remembered as a translator of many important works into Icelandic.Born: May 19, 1831 Iceland Died: August 21, 1913 (aged 82) Reykjavík Iceland Thorsteinsson studied classical philology at the University of Copenhagen but, more important, read widely in the continental literature of his day. After 20 years in Copenhagen, he went back to Iceland in 1872 to become a teacher and later headmaster at the Latin School in Reykjavík.Stack of books, pile of books, literature, reading. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, history and society.In Copenhagen Thorsteinsson had joined the group of young Icelandic nationalists who were campaigning for Iceland’s independence from Denmark. Much of his poetry at that time was patriotic, and as an expatriate he wrote nostalgic lyrics in praise of Iceland’s natural beauty. He also began to translate with the deliberate aim of widening the cultural horizons of his compatriots.Thorsteinsson’s poetry was of a uniformly high standard, and some of his lyrics were gems of delicacy that seemed to demand musical settings, but he showed his highest level of craftsmanship in his translations. As well as a vast number of lyrics from a variety of languages, he translated The Arabian Nights, William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales.
Daniel Defoe was born in 1660, in London, and was originally christened Daniel Foe, changing his name around the age of thirty-five to sound more aristocratic. Like his character Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was a third child. His mother and father, James and Mary Foe, were Presbyterian dissenters. James Foe was a middle-class wax and candle merchant. As a boy, Daniel witnessed two of the greatest disasters of the 17th century: a recurrence of the plague and the Great Fire of London in 1666. These events may have shaped his fascination with catastrophes and survival in his writing. Defoe attended a respected school in Dorking, where he was an excellent student, but as a Presbyterian, he was forbidden to attend Oxford or Cambridge. He entered a dissenting institution called Morton’s Academy and considered becoming a Presbyterian minister. Though he abandoned this plan, his Protestant values endured throughout his life despite discrimination and persecution, and these values are expressed in Robinson Crusoe. In 1683, Defoe became a traveling hosiery salesman. Visiting Holland, France, and Spain on business, Defoe developed a taste for travel that lasted throughout his life. His fiction reflects this interest; his characters Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe both change their lives by voyaging far from their native England.Defoe became successful as a merchant, establishing his headquarters in a high-class neighborhood of London. A year after starting up his business, he married an heiress named Mary Tuffley, who brought him the sizeable fortune of 3,700 pounds as dowry. A fervent critic of King James II, Defoe became affiliated with the supporters of the duke of Monmouth, who led a rebellion against the king in 1685. When the rebellion failed, Defoe was essentially forced out of England, and he spent three years in Europe writing tracts against James II. When the king was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and replaced by William of Orange, Defoe was able to return to England and to his business. Unfortunately, Defoe did not have the same financial success as previously, and by 1692 he was bankrupt, having accumulated the huge sum of 17,000 pounds in debts. Though he eventually paid off most of the total, he was never again entirely free from debt, and the theme of financial vicissitudes—the wild ups and downs in one’s pocketbook—became a prominent theme in his later novels. Robinson Crusoe contains many reflections about the value of money.Around this time, Defoe began to write, partly as a moneymaking venture. One of his first creations was a poem written in 1701, entitled “The True-Born Englishman,” which became popular and earned Defoe some celebrity. He also wrote political pamphlets. One of these, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, was a satire on persecutors of dissenters and sold well among the ruling Anglican elite until they realized that it was mocking their own practices. As a result, Defoe was publicly pilloried—his hands and wrists locked in a wooden device—in 1703, and jailed in Newgate Prison. During this time his business failed. Released through the intervention of Robert Harley, a Tory minister and Speaker of Parliament, Defoe worked as a publicist, political journalist, and pamphleteer for Harley and other politicians. He also worked as a spy, reveling in aliases and disguises, reflecting his own variable identity as merchant, poet, journalist, and prisoner. This theme of changeable identity would later be expressed in the life of Robinson Crusoe, who becomes merchant, slave, plantation owner, and even unofficial king. In his writing, Defoe often used a pseudonym simply because he enjoyed the effect. He was incredibly wide-ranging and productive as a writer, turning out over 500 books and pamphlets during his life.Defoe began writing fiction late in life, around the age of sixty. He published his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, in 1719, attracting a large middle-class readership. He followed in 1722 with Moll Flanders, the story of a tough, streetwise heroine whose fortunes rise and fall dramatically. Both works straddle the border between journalism and fiction. Robinson Crusoe was based on the true story of a shipwrecked seaman named Alexander Selkirk and was passed off as history, while Moll Flanders included dark prison scenes drawn from Defoe’s own experiences in Newgate and interviews with prisoners. His focus on the actual conditions of everyday life and avoidance of the courtly and the heroic made Defoe a revolutionary in English literature and helped define the new genre of the novel. Stylistically, Defoe was a great innovator. Dispensing with the ornate style associated with the upper classes, Defoe used the simple, direct, fact-based style of the middle classes, which became the new standard for the English novel. With Robinson Crusoe’s theme of solitary human existence, Defoe paved the way for the central modern theme of alienation and isolation. Defoe died in London on April 24, 1731, of a fatal “lethargy”—an unclear diagnosis that may refer to a stroke.
Daniel Defoe was born in 1660, in London, and was originally christened Daniel Foe, changing his name around the age of thirty-five to sound more aristocratic. Like his character Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was a third child. His mother and father, James and Mary Foe, were Presbyterian dissenters. James Foe was a middle-class wax and candle merchant. As a boy, Daniel witnessed two of the greatest disasters of the 17th century: a recurrence of the plague and the Great Fire of London in 1666. These events may have shaped his fascination with catastrophes and survival in his writing. Defoe attended a respected school in Dorking, where he was an excellent student, but as a Presbyterian, he was forbidden to attend Oxford or Cambridge. He entered a dissenting institution called Morton’s Academy and considered becoming a Presbyterian minister. Though he abandoned this plan, his Protestant values endured throughout his life despite discrimination and persecution, and these values are expressed in Robinson Crusoe. In 1683, Defoe became a traveling hosiery salesman. Visiting Holland, France, and Spain on business, Defoe developed a taste for travel that lasted throughout his life. His fiction reflects this interest; his characters Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe both change their lives by voyaging far from their native England.Defoe became successful as a merchant, establishing his headquarters in a high-class neighborhood of London. A year after starting up his business, he married an heiress named Mary Tuffley, who brought him the sizeable fortune of 3,700 pounds as dowry. A fervent critic of King James II, Defoe became affiliated with the supporters of the duke of Monmouth, who led a rebellion against the king in 1685. When the rebellion failed, Defoe was essentially forced out of England, and he spent three years in Europe writing tracts against James II. When the king was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and replaced by William of Orange, Defoe was able to return to England and to his business. Unfortunately, Defoe did not have the same financial success as previously, and by 1692 he was bankrupt, having accumulated the huge sum of 17,000 pounds in debts. Though he eventually paid off most of the total, he was never again entirely free from debt, and the theme of financial vicissitudes—the wild ups and downs in one’s pocketbook—became a prominent theme in his later novels. Robinson Crusoe contains many reflections about the value of money.Around this time, Defoe began to write, partly as a moneymaking venture. One of his first creations was a poem written in 1701, entitled “The True-Born Englishman,” which became popular and earned Defoe some celebrity. He also wrote political pamphlets. One of these, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, was a satire on persecutors of dissenters and sold well among the ruling Anglican elite until they realized that it was mocking their own practices. As a result, Defoe was publicly pilloried—his hands and wrists locked in a wooden device—in 1703, and jailed in Newgate Prison. During this time his business failed. Released through the intervention of Robert Harley, a Tory minister and Speaker of Parliament, Defoe worked as a publicist, political journalist, and pamphleteer for Harley and other politicians. He also worked as a spy, reveling in aliases and disguises, reflecting his own variable identity as merchant, poet, journalist, and prisoner. This theme of changeable identity would later be expressed in the life of Robinson Crusoe, who becomes merchant, slave, plantation owner, and even unofficial king. In his writing, Defoe often used a pseudonym simply because he enjoyed the effect. He was incredibly wide-ranging and productive as a writer, turning out over 500 books and pamphlets during his life.Defoe began writing fiction late in life, around the age of sixty. He published his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, in 1719, attracting a large middle-class readership. He followed in 1722 with Moll Flanders, the story of a tough, streetwise heroine whose fortunes rise and fall dramatically. Both works straddle the border between journalism and fiction. Robinson Crusoe was based on the true story of a shipwrecked seaman named Alexander Selkirk and was passed off as history, while Moll Flanders included dark prison scenes drawn from Defoe’s own experiences in Newgate and interviews with prisoners. His focus on the actual conditions of everyday life and avoidance of the courtly and the heroic made Defoe a revolutionary in English literature and helped define the new genre of the novel. Stylistically, Defoe was a great innovator. Dispensing with the ornate style associated with the upper classes, Defoe used the simple, direct, fact-based style of the middle classes, which became the new standard for the English novel. With Robinson Crusoe’s theme of solitary human existence, Defoe paved the way for the central modern theme of alienation and isolation. Defoe died in London on April 24, 1731, of a fatal “lethargy”—an unclear diagnosis that may refer to a stroke.
In Defoe's early childhood, he experienced some of the most unusual occurrences in English history: in 1665, seventy thousand were killed by the Great Plague of London, and the next year, the Great Fire of London left only Defoe's and two other houses standing in his neighbourhood.[16] In 1667, when he was probably about seven, a Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway via the River Thames and attacked the town of Chatham in the raid on the Medway. His mother, Alice, had died by the time he was about ten.Defoe was educated at the Rev. James Fisher's boarding school in Pixham Lane in Dorking, Surrey.[19] His parents were Presbyterian dissenters, and around the age of 14, he was sent to Charles Morton's dissenting academy at Newington Green, then a village just north of London, where he is believed to have attended the Dissenting church there. He lived on Church Street, Stoke Newington, at what is now nos. 95–103. During this period, the English government persecuted those who chose to worship outside the Church of England.
The novel Robinson Crusoe is written by Daniel Defoe and was first published in the year 1719. It is about a man named Robinson Crusoe, from England who has a dream to explore the sea. Robinson’s father does not agree with his dreams and wants him to live a normal middle-class lifestyle. Robinson’s disagreement with his father caused him to run away and start adventuring into the sea. During his adventures with sailing he makes money in trade, but then was captured and turned into a slave off the coast of Africa. He then escapes from captivity.
Where he was picked up by a sailing crew. Crusoe makes it to Brazil where he then buys a sugar plantation. Crusoe eventually becomes involved in the slave trade from Africa. On his way to Africa, he gets shipwrecked and is the only survivor on what seemed to be a deserted island. Crusoe builds a shelter to survive. He spends his time planting corn and other crops and trying to stay alive. During Crusoe’s time on the island, he grows stronger in his religious faith and creates a relationship with God. Near the end of the book, Crusoe rescues a native man named Friday from cannibals. Crusoe teaches Friday English and converts him to Christianity. Friday and Crusoe also rescue a Spaniard and Friday’s father from a different group of cannibals. Eventually, an English sailing crew that has many problems amongst themselves comes to the island. Crusoe helps gain peace between the captain and sailors and is rescued by them. At the end of the novel, Crusoe returns to Europe, where he comes home to a lot of money that his sugar plantation had earned for him. Crusoe then promises to continue adventures in the last lines of the novel. The four main themes of the book are progress, self-reliance, civilization, and most importantly Christianity.Progress is one of the main themes in the novel Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe makes progress in more than just physical ways but also mentally. During Crusoe’s time on the island, Cruso becomes independent. He learned to live and survive on his own. It’s easy to see the progression from when Crusoe first got stranded on the island to when he was rescued. He goes from pure survival mode to living comfortably by hunting and farming. He had also created tools and furniture which helped him progress in his style of living. The most notable progression is mental. Before coming on the island Crusoe was a goal-driven man that wanted to make money and to travel the sea. He also had quarrels with God in his younger days. Throughout the novel, he had learned to be happy with where he was and what he had. He had started to focus on not what he wanted but being thankful for the good things that happen to him. “I learned to look upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed rather than what I wanted.” (Defoe, p.129) He had also progressed in his relationship with God and gave in to the fact that this is God’s world and he is just living in it. “I survive by the Word of God, and by the assistance of His grace.”(Defoe, p.128). The whole unit that we have learned this semester can relate to the progress of Great Britain. Great Britain became one of the strongest empires of all time consisting of two separate empires. Britain’s empire consisted of colonies in America and the West Indies.
Which came to an end after the American Revolution. However, in the 19th century, the British built a second empire, due to their strong navy. Their second empire was made up of India and conquest in Africa. Great Britain made progress in their empire and had improved their circumstances through time just like Crusoe had done on the island.Self-Reliance is another one of the major themes in the novel Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe had to rely on his cleverness, physical ability, and spirituality to survive. Throughout the novel, one can see this theme in his actions. He demonstrates self-reliance in building his plantation in Brazil and escaping from slavery. The best example of self-reliance can be seen on the island. Crusoe is the only one on his crew who survived on the ship. He was responsible for providing for himself and he could not depend on anyone to help. Crusoe had to go through the goods on the wrecked ship to determine what would best aid him to survive. He also was responsible for building his shelter and he wasn’t able to split the labor with anyone. He had built two shelters one for comfort and the other for defense. Crusoe had few materials available to him, but he was able to use them effectively. He also had to do the labor of hunting for food and planning plans on his own. Crusoe had used his spirituality to keep him going and to aid himself in his tasks. Later in the novel, he rescues a slave named Friday from cannibals who becomes his companion. Crusoe had spent 28 years on the island where he had to depend on self-reliance to stay alive. Crusoe said in the novel ‘ I would look upon my condition with the utmost Regret. I had nobody to converse with but now and then this neighbor; no work to be done but by the Labour of my own Hands and I live just like a man cast away upon some desolate island, that had nobody there but himself.’ This is similar to the colonies’ self-reliance from England. The colonies were self-governing and thought of themselves as independent from the control of the British government. The colonies were on their own in a sense because they were an ocean away from England and only able to depend on themselves. Parliament began to pass laws in an attempt to regulate their colonies by setting taxes and restrictions on trade. This evidently resulted in the colonist’s resentment of British control. This caused the colonists to become totally independent and self-reliant starting the American Revolutionary War on April 19th, 1775 to gain freedom from British rule. This is similar to Robinson Crusoe because he was stuck on an island with no government to protect him or govern him. He became self-reliant and governed himself, he set his own rules and survived on his own without the help of others like the colonists had to survive without the help of Great Britain.