Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe, 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.

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.