“I thought myself very rich
in Subjects”: Re-Reading Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Robinson Crusoe is a
book everyone sort of knows, perhaps more for the man than for his book. The central myth of the shipwrecked
Englishman, forced to reconstruct society from the debris of a dashed vessel,
appeals to a deep, secret well of childhood within us all. For this reason, the 18th century
virtually adopted it as a children’s book, with writers such as Rousseau
suggesting it should be the first and perhaps only book in a child’s
library. Partly this was to inspire the
imagination with bold, noble deeds of self-sufficiency, but also because the
book spoke so clearly and directly to all men.
Writing in 1822, Charles Lamb noted that Defoe’s manner of writing “is
in imitation of the common people’s way of speaking, or rather of the way in
which they are addressed by a master of mistress, who wishes to impress
something upon their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact
readers.” For generations, this ability
to speak to common people of a common man who did uncommon deeds assured its
literary immortality. Only later, toward
the 20th century, did readers begin to draw back from its
unrelenting “matter-of-fact” tone, and its inability (to paraphrase Dickens) to
make readers either laugh or cry. In a
book that promised exotic landscapes, strange peoples, and the occasional
scrape with pirates, Defoe merely gives us lists of seeds planted, gold
discovered, and natives slain. Pirates
of the Caribbean it most decidedly is not.
