Robinson Crusoe 300 Years On

A major new series on 100 Novels that Shaped Our World has been launched in the UK by the BBC. The wide-ranging journey through English literary history takes as its starting point the publication of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), which has been hailed as the first English novel.

Despite an error-ridden plot and numerous structural quirks, Robinson Crusoe – which tells the story of a shipwrecked mariner – has had a profound impact on global literature (and the modern world at large) for the past 300 years. Despite the wealth of prose narrative that existed beforehand, some scholars believe that Daniel Defoe’s book was the first to combine all the elements that have become the hallmarks of the novel.

Fiction masquerading as fact, it is so much more than a novelisation of the true-life misfortunes of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish mariner who spent four years and four months as a castaway at sea after being marooned on an island by his captain. Daniel Defoe’s novel is a gritty survival story with genuine threat. But it’s also a thought-provoking parable of Christian sin, a critique of capitalist individualism, an expose of imperialist paranoia, and even a tale of the triumph of the human spirit.

From the point of view of the natives, it’s a myth of invasion – Crusoe is a sunburned demon who imposes European belief systems on them. There’s no getting beyond the fact that Friday, a man the narrator “saves” from the hands of the cannibals and takes under his wing, is cloyingly subservient to the unkempt foreigner, which upholds a racist ideology of white supremacy (whether it’s Crusoe’s or the author’s own). But we might think of Friday as the true hero. His humility and grace under pressure can serve as a compelling model for anyone in any culture. And his apparent feebleness is the only logical response to seeing for the first time the explosive effect of a fully loaded gun.

Then there’s Xury, a cheerful and charming lad whom Crusoe casually sells to a Portuguese captain (on the apparently agreeable grounds that after ten years of service, and a conversion to Christianity, the boy will be freed). Prior to that, Xury had faced his own terrible choice: subject himself to Crusoe’s will or be tossed overboard. This all happens shortly before Crusoe is shipwrecked. Instant karma, perhaps?

Daniel Defoe (1659-1731). Engraved by J.Thomson and published in The Gallery of Portraits encyclopedia, United Kingdom, 1834. Georgios Kollidas via Shutterstock

Defoe is certainly the master of visual motifs – and Crusoe’s gun is an especially potent one: it at once demonstrates the technological superiority of the Europeans, while signalling their moral deficiencies. After all, warfare does not a true civilisation make.

Seven years later Jonathan Swift spoofed the motif in Gulliver’s Travels, where the miniature protagonist ludicrously boasts of Britain’s prowess in modern weaponry to an astonished audience of gentle giants. Like Gulliver, Crusoe embodies the failings of his home society, even when stranded in strange lands.

The most terrifying moment in Defoe’s story, however, occurs when no one is around. Crusoe stumbles across a footprint in the sand on his seemingly deserted island. The footprint causes a profound crisis of consciousness. Who left it: a friend or foe? Man or monster? Will he be saved or brutally attacked? He’s never more alone than when the threat of uncertain human interaction looms. It’s a scene that has been retold throughout world culture for centuries.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1980 short story collection, China Men, a densely woven tale of the lives of Chinese immigrants in America, features a story about a sailor named Lo Bun Sun, who is seized by a debilitating fear when he stumbles across a human footprint on a beach. Even after the wind and rain had worn away the footprint, he continues to be haunted by it – it’s a poignant parable about the ceaseless emotional turmoil of an immigrant’s experience, perhaps, or even an ironic take on colonial exclusionism.

The scene is replayed for laughs in Willis Hall’s children’s book Vampire Island. Count Alucard, Skopka the wolf, and Peppina the parrot lazily loll on a marooned island – until they discover an unfeasibly large bootprint in the sand, which, we eventually learn, belongs to Frankenstein’s monster.

Defoe’s story of the 17th-century shipwrecked sailor is so famous it has led to the creation of a large and loose genre known as the “Robinsonade” – to which authors as diverse as James Gould Cozzens and John Maxwell Coetzee have contributed. A quick definition might call it a narrative in which a sole protagonist (the notional “Robinson” after whom the genre is named) is suddenly isolated from the comforts of civilisation, usually on an inhospitable island or planet.

But a Robinsonade does not have to be a novel: the principal characters, themes and settings of Robinson Crusoe have always been reworked into non-fictional genres, poems, plays, pantomimes, films, advertisements, and material culture at large.

Outside of literature, the most famous modern example is Cast Away, the 2000 movie starring Tom Hanks as Chuck, a hands-on FedEx executive. Stranded on a deserted tropical island for four years, Chuck desperately seeks to return home to the arms of his girlfriend Kelly (played by Helen Hunt) who, heart-wrenchingly, has mourned and moved on.

Chuck could not be more different from the workshy Crusoe who – despite claiming to be a keen advocate of the Protestant work ethic that shaped England’s economic progress – had rejected the cautions of his wise and grave father in the pursuit of adventure. Paranoid, guilty, hypocritical, and much more besides, Crusoe is not a hero. But he established the model of the flawed protagonist that remains so central to English culture.

Robinson Crusoe 300 Years On: Defoe’s Unreliable Narrative Set Up Enduring Colonial Myths. By Daniel Cook. The Conversation , November 12, 2019.

Some years ago the New Yorker banned desert-island cartoons from the magazine. The ragged, bearded fellow making satirical observations from his little patch of sand with its lone palm tree had become a tired formula. But he’s still with us, Wifi and social media now offering new punchlines: he forgets the password (was it “coconut” or “fish”?) or gets spammed by messages in bottles. We can all identify with that castaway now, clinging to our petty, futile obsessions, routines, platitudes and delusions in the face of isolation and hopelessness. We “go on”, our Beckettian resolve both noble and pathetic.

The source of these existential tableaux celebrates its tricentenary this year. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was not the first story of shipwreck and marooning on a desert island, but it turned earlier real-life accounts into a cultural emblem. Out of the hazards of maritime adventure it forged an enduring metaphor and myth that spoke to the dilemmas of modernity.

Being stranded alone on some distant shore was a constant risk of sea travel. That there was a story to be told about the predicament would not, however, have been a meaningful proposition before the 18th century. No ancient stories had a lone protagonist – for without relationship, what was there to say?

The Enlightenment made Crusoe possible by introducing the idea of the individual as autonomous moral agent: the self-made man. Your role and fate were no longer pre-ordained by birth and the stars – you could strive to improve your lot. Coming from a family made prosperous and respectable by trade, Crusoe was representative of the book’s target audience, and he enacted for them a fable of capitalist self-sufficiency.

Robinson Crusoe took its cue from several contemporaneous memoirs of sea adventures. William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World (1697) told of his exploits on the ships of buccaneers and privateers around the coast of the New World. In the archipelago of the Juan Fernández Islands off Chile, Dampier’s crew found a “Moskito Indian” who had been stranded for three years, surviving by hunting goats. Dampier got marooned himself with two others on an island in the Indian Ocean, but found his way back to England, where he published his stories to great acclaim.

In 1703 Dampier was sent on a gunship to defend English interests against Spain and France during the War of Spanish Succession. He returned to the Juan Fernández Islands in 1704, where one of his officers, a troublesome Scot named Alexander Selkirk, was put ashore at his own request. Selkirk survived alone on his island for four years before being rescued by the privateer Woodes Rogers, who gave an account of Selkirk’s survival in A Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712).

The castaway has all the hallmarks of Crusoe. He first appeared to them, Rogers wrote, as “a Man cloth’d in Goat-Skins, who look’d wilder than the first Owners of them”. He had built “two Hutts with Piemento Trees, cover’d then with long Grass, and lin’d them with the Skins of Goats, which he kill’d with his Gun as he wanted, so long as his Powder lasted”. He had survived on crawfish and goat, “Cabbage-Trees”, small black plums and by cultivating turnips. The moral, said Rogers, is that “Necessity is the Mother of Invention, since he found means to supply his Wants in a very natural manner, so as to maintain his Life”.

Enter Daniel Defoe (he had grandly added the “De” to the family name): hack writer, chancer and social agitator. Having acquired a tidy sum by marriage, he squandered it on speculative business projects such as breeding civet cats for their perfume. In 1692 he was sent to the debtors’ prison in Newgate, bankrupt to the tune of an eye-watering £17,000. A Dissenter who advocated revolutionary Puritanism, Defoe was sentenced in 1703 to public pillory in the stocks for writing a leaflet criticising the repressive regime of Queen Anne. The court condemned him as “a Seditious man and of a disordered mind, and a person of bad name, reputation and Conversation”.

He would write on just about anything for anyone, if they paid. After his conviction he petitioned the Tory politician Robert Harley, speaker of the House of Commons, who got him released and pardoned. In return, Defoe became Harley’s man, writing apologia where previously he had called the Tories “plunderers” and “betrayers of liberty”.

Harley rewarded him well, and by the 1720s Defoe was living in a large house in Stoke Newington with a retinue and carriage. He turned to writing lurid tales of disreputable characters such as Moll Flanders (“Twelve Years a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her brother), Twelve Years a Thief, Eight Years a Transported Felon in Virginia”) and Colonel Jack. Unsurprisingly they sold well, and the wide readership attracted by accounts of shipwreck presented Defoe with another opportunity to tap into popular literary taste.

In Robinson Crusoe his limitations as a writer are plain. Defoe is making it up as he goes along; he neglects to tell us until well after the event, for example, that Crusoe has saved a dog and two cats from the wreckage. But this is, after all, the modern novel in infancy: messy, undisciplined, sometimes baffling. Character psychology is crude and the narrative little more than a string of episodes.

Having gone to sea as a young man against his father’s wishes, Crusoe buys a sugar plantation and becomes a prosperous colonist. The shipwreck occurs when Crusoe joins a slave-hunting mission, is blown off course up the South American coast by storms, and is washed up alone on a beach.

Crusoe makes the island his home, building a palisade to fend off attack by wild animals or visiting cannibals. Even as he painstakingly constructs his “estate”, he hankers to escape. When he saves the “Savage” Friday from being slaughtered by cannibals, he enlists the man’s help to construct a sailing boat. But before they are ready to set out, Crusoe spots the sails of an English ship and Crusoe and Friday discover that the crew has mutinied. They help restore the commander and his loyal followers, and the castaway and his companions make for England, where Crusoe finds that his plantations have flourished and that he is comfortably endowed.

Robinson Crusoe was a bestseller, but Defoe scarcely benefited. Writers tended to be paid a lump sum, and Defoe’s fee was likely to have been a modest £50 or so. It’s small wonder, then, that he was eager to capitalise on the success by publishing sequels. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) described Crusoe’s return to his island and travels elsewhere, while Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720) was a collection of essays musing on what the author had learnt from his experiences.

Crusoe is one of the least attractive heroes in adventure literature. He discharges obligations dutifully but forges no strong relationships that are not ultimately pragmatic. He mouths pious formulas without evincing any deep engagement with his faith. He is a callow dullard incapable of self-reflection, a bookkeeper lacking all trace of artistry, imagination or poetry. For James Joyce he is the true prototype of the British colonist: “The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.” Virginia Woolf saw in him a personification of the humdrum bourgeoisie: “cautious, apprehensive, conventional and solidly matter-of-fact”.

That utilitarian plainness pervades the book. In the early 19th century Charles Lamb remarked dismissively that it was “an especial favourite with sea-faring men, poor boys, servant-maids”, and was written “in a phraseology peculiarly adapted to the lower condition of readers”. It was deemed appropriate reading for children, who would scarcely be troubled by Crusoe’s psychological blankness or his absence of a sexual life.

It’s no coincidence that Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), almost a parody of Crusoe, was also assigned to the realm of juvenile literature. In Mythologies (1957) Roland Barthes describes the appeal of the island myth:

To enclose oneself and to settle, such is the dream of childhood… the man-child reinvents the world, fills it, closes it, shuts himself up in it, and crowns this encyclopaedic effort with the bourgeois posture of appropriation: slippers, pipe and fireside, while outside the storm, that is, the infinite, rages in vain.

Children were considered apt to benefit from what Enlightenment and Romantic educators deemed its moral message: how self-reliance and hard work pay dividends. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said of Crusoe that: “Nothing upon Earth can be so well calculated to inspire one with ardour in the execution of a plan approved by so great a genius.”

Defoe was aiming higher. When the hero ironically proclaims that “I allow’d Liberty of Conscience throughout my Dominion”, Defoe’s readers would have understood this to be political allegory on the controversial topic of religious tolerance. There is religious allegory too in the themes of punishment and repentance, sin and grace. But these topics are handled ambiguously, and that’s what makes Robinson Crusoe so modern: it pays lip service to Christian obligations while seeming to feel not especially bound by them. In the end, Crusoe is author of his own fate, and God can’t do much about it. Harold Bloom identifies this as the defining feature of “all quest-romances of the post-Enlightenment”: they are “quests to re-beget one’s own self, to become one’s own Great Original” – like Milton’s Satan.

In retrospect the book’s most obvious and dominant metaphor is British imperialism. With the cold, methodological pragmatism of the colonist, Crusoe gets on with whatever practical tasks are needed to subdue and domesticate his environment, turning it into a home from home. What hope do the indigenous dwellers have against his stolid resolution?

An assumption of privilege and cultural superiority pervades the encounters with “savages”. When Crusoe meets Friday, the relationship is automatically one of master and servant. In his rewriting of the Crusoe myth Foe (1986), JM Coetzee has “Cruso” blithely commend God for not extending his providence too far:

If Providence were to watch over all of us, who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugar-cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must sometimes wake and sometimes sleep.

Crusoe remains as thoroughly European when he leaves the island as when he arrived; his labours are, in fact, largely devoted to recreating the circumstances of an English country gentleman. Civilised behaviour is supposedly in his blood: he can no more revert to the “savage” than he can to an ape-like ancestry. No wonder a copy was to be found in every Victorian school. Crusoe, according to the Cornhill Magazine in 1868, represents “the shrewd vigorous character of the Englishman thrown upon his own resources”. He is “the broad-shouldered, beef-eating John Bull, who has been shouldering his way through the world ever since… He does not accommodate himself to his surroundings; they have got to accommodate themselves to him.” (This vision of the redoubtable Englishman building his little island empire is familiar in Brexit Britain.)

The novel has become a part of that small and contentious canon, including Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) – with Kurtz its Crusoe manqué – over which arguments about European attitudes to race and empire have raged. At face value Crusoe legitimises colonialism; it would surely have been read as such in its day, and continued to resonate that way long after. The book, said the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, was “part of the mythology of every West Indian child”.

Crusoe’s obsession with accountancy is simultaneously dull and oddly satisfying. As Crusoe’s stores expand and his assets become more secure, you feel heartened: all that effort paid off! Robinson Crusoe is a novel about capitalism itself, its hero the economic agent stripped to essentials: a minimal model for the theory of labour. Everything Crusoe wants, he makes himself. Karl Marx acknowledged this economic lesson in Das Kapital (1867): “All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion… And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the determination of value.” Crusoe stockpiles: he is the sensible investor hedging against risk, and he asset-strips the shipwreck of anything that might conceivably be valuable (including money).

The Crusoe myth was so often retold that it spawned a genre: the Robinsonade. Jules Verne was a leading proponent, in particular with The Mysterious Island (1874) (initially titled Shipwrecked Family: Marooned with Uncle Robinson) and The School for Robinsons (1882), which closely shadows Defoe’s plot. By marooning a “family” of sorts (an engineer, an ex-slave, a sailor and his adopted son, a journalist and a dog), The Mysterious Island was also indebted to The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) by the Swiss pastor and educator Johann David Wyss, who saw the Crusoe template as a means of promoting Protestant values of patience and hard work in an “improving” tale for children.

The image of the self-sufficient, happy desert-island family persisted into modern times. The 1940 movie based on Wyss’s book was a straightforward melodramatic yarn, but Disney’s 1960 version is a cloying hymn to the nuclear family. Animal races and pirate attacks keep the kids occupied, and the implication is that family is the bastion of moral virtue against the decadence and savagery of the world outside.

Parental authority is essential, for otherwise Swiss Family Robinson becomes Lord of the Flies. Like HG Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Golding’s book turned the island myth dystopian, making it a place where normal rules are suspended, the parent figure has gone bad, mad or missing, and dark experiments ensue: cue Alex Garland’s 1996 novel The Beach and Michael Bay’s 2005 movie The Island.

Yet the desert island was a cliché even by the 1960s. Exotic beaches were no longer fantastical: the middle classes could now fly there by Pan-Am. If you were going to be real castaways, you had to go much further afield. Forbidden Planet (1956) recapitulated in outer space that other antecedent of Crusoe: the shipwreck of Antonio, Alonso and their entourage on Prospero’s island in The Tempest. Space Family Robinson began as a comic-book series published in 1962, a year after Yuri Gagarin made the first manned spaceflight around the Earth, before becoming the popular TV series Lost in Space.

But in its hostile desolation and unimaginable remoteness, today space is considered an environment where survival depends on physical and psychic endurance. Watching Sam Rockwell’s mental disintegration as the lone protagonist of Duncan Jones’s Moon (2009), you suspect that isolation is a lot easier to manage if you are as dull as Crusoe.

The real Crusoe for our times is surely JG Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), which explores the isolation possible amid, and indeed created by, the relentless bustle of the urban jungle. “The Pacific atoll may not be available, but there are other islands far nearer to home, some of them only a few steps from the pavements we tread every day”, wrote Ballard in the novel’s introduction. “They are surrounded, not by sea, but by concrete, ringed by chain-mail fences and walled off by bomb-proof glass.”

In Concrete Island, Robert Maitland, a wealthy architect who echoes Defoe’s bourgeois seafarer, is marooned on the traffic island of a motorway intersection in London, surviving on the meagre provisions salvaged from his crashed Jaguar. He resigns himself to his predicament almost with relief: “Already he felt no real need to leave the island, and this alone confirmed that he had established dominion over it.” Maitland is an anti-Crusoe, revelling in his accidental freedom. “Perhaps, secretly, we hoped to be marooned, to escape our families, lovers and responsibilities,” said Ballard. Set against the stifling pressures of modernity, the desert island doesn’t look so bad after all.

The many afterlives of Robinson Crusoe. By Philip Ball.  New Statesman , May 1, 2019

In February 1719, two months before the publication of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe proposed in the Weekly Journal that the South Sea Company – founded just eight years earlier to manage the national debt and awarded a contract to supply the Spanish colonies in Latin America with several thousand African slaves per year – should oversee the founding of a British colony at the mouth of the River Orinoco on the coast of present day Venezuela. The government would be required “to furnish six Men of War, and 4000 regular Troops, with some Engineers and 100 pieces of Cannon, and military Stores in Proportion for the maintaining and supporting the Design”, but “the Revenue it shall bring to the Kingdom will be a full amends”. Defoe chose to locate the fictional island on which Crusoe is stranded around 40 miles from the mouth of the Orinoco, and furnish it with a kindlier climate than that of the actual island on which Alexander Selkirk, the presumed model for Crusoe, was marooned. His book (no one was calling it a “novel” at the time) was a prospectus for potential investors, lacking only glossy photos of beaches and palm trees.

Bribery and insider dealing combined with public credulity to drive the share price of the South Sea Company unsustainably high, and in 1720 the bubble burst, causing widespread financial ruin. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – which recounts, in addition to Crusoe’s diligent labours on the island, his skirmishes with cannibals and a crew of English mutineers, his rescue and a perilous overland journey from Lisbon to bring home the fortune that has been accumulating during his absence – would have been a better investment. By late summer 1719 the book had been reprinted three times and Defoe had published a sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. A third volume, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, followed in 1720. By the end of the 19th century, the original Crusoe had been reissued in several hundred editions and the book had come to resemble, as Virginia Woolf wrote, “one of the anonymous productions of the race rather than the effort of a single mind”. During the 20th century, Defoe’s original template was turned upside down and inside out – by, among many others, HG Wells, Jean Giraudoux, William Golding, JG Ballard and Julio Cortázar – in ways that reflected changing attitudes to race, gender, imperialism, rationality and the environment.

In Michel Tournier’s Friday, or, The Other Island (1967), Robinson comes to perceive the island not as “a territory to be exploited but a being, unquestionably feminine”; mandrakes grow on the slope where Robinson has sex with the earth and “a new man seemed to be coming to life within him, wholly alien to the practical administrator”. In Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending (1975), Moses takes over a run-down house in Shepherd’s Bush and has his practical affairs attended to “by my man Friday, a white immigrant from somewhere in the Midlands … He was a willing worker, eager to learn the ways of the Black man.” In JM Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Susan Barton tells Mr Foe, a writer she has engaged to bring her adventures to book, that “The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a way of giving voice to Friday” – whose tongue has been cut out, either by the slavers who transported him from Africa or by Crusoe himself.

There have also been adaptations for the stage, film, TV and online gaming, but the particular status of Robinson Crusoe in English culture derives chiefly from the early abridgements and retellings published for children. In Émile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau described Crusoe as “the most felicitous treatise on natural education” ever written. However, the text that will provide “both Émile’s instruction and entertainment” is to be “disencumbered of all its rigmarole”. Crusoe’s career as a slave trader and owner of a plantation in Brazil is omitted. Many other educationists agreed that the island narrative of Crusoe was an ideal text for teaching the virtues of self-reliance, careful management of resources and trust in the overall – if a little mysterious, but that’s a part of the appeal – wonderfulness of the Christian God. That the novel could be harnessed to the business of empire was a further recommendation. The introduction to a 1900 Cambridge University Press edition encouraged readers to admire “those qualities of resourcefulness, activity and practical common sense that have made Great Britain the greatest colonising power in the world”. In 1903, Thomas Godolphin Rooper – educated at Harrow and Oxford, a schools inspector for 25 years – declared “Nothing, not even football, will do more to maintain and extend the dominion of the Anglo-Saxon than the spirit of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which may be summed up in this piece of advice: ‘Never look to others to do for you what you can do for yourself.’”

Did Rooper, I wonder, wash his own clothes, bake his own bread, mend his own roof? His summary of Crusoe-ism is a mockery of the way Defoe’s novel was actually incorporated into the ethos of British public schools, where the earnest Victorian schoolmen who considered Crusoe’s labours on his island to be an exemplary form of self-reliance taught their charges to read Latin and be dependent on the work of servants and women. For all its nod to Crusoe the manufacturer, able to knock up his own furniture and fences (walls are a speciality), the education system’s interest in him had nothing to do with manual labour, skilled or not. It had to do with maintaining the class hierarchy and extending “the dominion of the Anglo-Saxon”.

On his tight little island, Crusoe became a monarch: “My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made, how like a king I look’d.” The moral of the story appeared to be: work hard and trust in God and you shall have dominion over others. But the promotion of Robinson Crusoe in schools was a con trick: there cannot be kings without subjects, and for most of those doing the work and the trusting in God – even those lucky enough to be born white and male and in the rich west – the promise of dominion is not fulfillable, and never was. At the end of Defoe’s novel Crusoe is rich, but his wealth has accrued not from his own labour but from that of his slaves on his plantation in Brazil.

A chauvinistic take on Robinson Crusoe, a very selective obsession with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, and complete isolation from the opposite sex: at the posh end of the education system, an end that for generations was reserved exclusively for boys, this was a toxic mix. Long after the British empire had crumbled, it was a recipe designed to perpetuate the racism, sexism and unearned entitlement on which the empire had subsisted. Robinson Crusoe’s place in this mix was abetted by its status as (arguably) the first English novel and by the status accorded to literature within the culture. Simple in design, with strong contrasting colours overriding any psychological shading, Crusoe became a flag for empire and travelled in the luggage of merchants, missionaries and generals.

The early history of the English novel coincided with the expansion of the British empire and literature became a subject for academic study, with all the apparatus of professorships and certificates, when the empire was at its height. The aptly named Walter Raleigh, who was appointed in 1904 to the newly established chair of English literature at Oxford University, wrote with pride about these links: “We have spread ourselves over the surface of the habitable globe, and have established our methods of government in new countries. But the poets are still ahead of us, pointing the way. It was they, and no others, who first conceived the greatness of England’s destinies, and delivered the doctrine that was to inspire her.” Within the academy, this triumphalist habit of thinking was challenged in the 1970s and 80s by critical theory, which argued that literary works cannot be independent of the social and political conditions of their making, and that they propagate the assumptions of dominant status groups. But outside the academy there is still a vague belief that literature is, in some moral if not medicinal way, good for you, and English literature is the best on the market: beware of imitations.

Crusoe: “I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure (tho’ mixt with my other afflicting thoughts) to think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of this country indefeasibly, and had a right of possession.” The poster boy: white man, muscular and ageless, lord of his sunlit island by a sort of divine right (and in “delicious vale” and “secret kind of pleasure” there is surely sexual as well as territorial “right of possession” being claimed).

Crusoe had a great PR team. Billed as an emblematic Englishman, he is barely English (“my father being a foreigner of Bremen”) and is as much an immigrant on his island as the black man he makes his servant. Billed as a homemaker, Crusoe could hardly wait to quit the homes of, first, his parents and then (in The Farther Adventures) his own family. On his island he was hard-working and God-fearing, but he wasn’t an especially good man. Before the island, he was a slave trader; and when he and a Moorish boy, escaping from their Turkish captors, are rescued by a Portuguese ship, Crusoe sells the boy to the ship’s captain. After the island, in The Farther Adventures, his attitude to non-white people remained the same: “I look’d upon these savages as slaves, and people who, had we any work for them to do, we would ha’ used as such, or would ha’ been glad to have transported them to any other part of the world; for our business was to get rid of them, and we would all have been satisfy’d, if they had been sent to any country, so that they had never seen their own.” An English seaman who “had taken a little liberty with a wench” in Madagascar (he raped her) is killed by the local people. In revenge, the English “kill’d or destroy’d about 150 people, men, women, and children, and left not a house standing in the town”; Crusoe thinks they have gone too far, but the boatswain assures him “that they did nothing but what was just, and what the laws of God allow’d to be done to murtherers”.

In 1719, Robinson Crusoe brought on to the page certain assumptions of its time – that slavery is OK and can be squared with Christianity; that the function of women in society is to serve men; that people whose skin colour is not white are savages – and did not challenge them. The book’s lasting popularity, not least among those in a position to decide what should be popular, which books to offer to children (Crusoe) and which not (Moll Flanders), largely derives from this failure to challenge, and the elevation of Robinson Crusoe into the canon of English literature has perpetuated its own assumptions about what is “normal”, which is then argued as the “natural” way of things.

The argument here is not with Defoe, who was a clever and contrary man. His acceptance of slavery as necessary for profitable business is one thing; his belief that Britain is a nation of immigrants and his championing of education for women are others. Nor is the argument with the novel itself, which is just dull: there’s not much of a story and the writing is pedestrian. Walter de la Mare admired Defoe but struggled to defend his style: “The best perhaps that can be said of Defoe’s prose is that it served his multifarious purposes; but as he seldom seems to have attempted feats much beyond his workaday scope, it is apt to sink below a certain level rather than to rise above it.” Robert Louis Stevenson, comparing Robinson Crusoe to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, found in Defoe “not a tenth part of the style nor a thousandth part of the wisdom”. EM Forster, rereading Crusoe as an adult, found “No gaiety wit or invention … Boy scout manual.” My quarrel is with the way the novel has been used, and continues to be used to underpin the white male entitlement that is still evident in so many daily transactions in the UK: in who cleans the streets and the sheets and the toilets; who is served, who serves; in the gender pay gap; in the policies of the Conservative party relating not just to immigration but to every aspect of social welfare. Those are obvious examples. There are others buried so deep in the mindset of the past 300 years that most of the time they are invisible.

Crusoe himself is two-dimensional, a cardboard figure on to whom every reader can project their identity. By denying him a sexual dimension and also self-doubt, Defoe infantilised him. Crusoe in turn can infantilise his readers. He saved himself but he couldn’t save others. A man who was stuck on an uninhabited island for 28 years and who traded in slaves and reckoned women should be “proper for service” was never going to be much help as a role model for how to live with others, in society. Let him go.

Robinson Crusoe at 300: why it’s time to let go of this colonial fairytale. By Charles Boyle , The Guardian , April 19, 2019.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is 300 years old on April 25th. It is often regarded as the first novel in English, although this has been disputed, and is generally accepted as initiating the genre of realistic fiction. Its enormous popularity is not in doubt, and probably continues to some extent, but what might not be so widely realised is just how extensive and enduring its literary legacy has been.

While it has also inspired stage plays, operas and many films, it is its literary legacy that is the subject of this discussion.

The English writer and journalist Robert McCrum has argued that, like Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Defoe’s novel “follows an almost biblical pattern of transgression (youthful rebellion), retribution (successive shipwrecks), repentance (the painful lessons of isolation) and finally redemption (Crusoe’s return home). In storytelling terms, this is pure gold,” according to McCrum, who pointed out that by the end of the 19th century, “no book in English literary history had enjoyed more editions, spin-offs and translations … with more than 700 alternative versions, including illustrated children’s versions”.

Robinson Crusoe marked the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre, and it is understandable that its success should have led to many imitators. (The German writer Johann Gottfried Schnabel coined the term “Robinsonade” in 1731 to describe these imitations.) It could be maintained that 18th- and 19th-century spin-offs were mainly imitative but that the 20th century produced more counter-narratives than duplications.

A very early rejection of Defoe’s optimism about the individual’s capacity to exploit nature and thrive no matter what the circumstances was Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, published just seven years after Crusoe. Warren Montag, who wrote The Unthinkable Swift, believed that Swift was anxious to refute Defoe’s belief that the individual was antecedent to, and therefore more important than, society.

But Swift was the exception, and writers such as Ambrose Evans, John Barnard, Penelope Aubin and many others produced imitative castaway novels that proved popular in the 18th and early 19th century. Most of these have been forgotten but one that has endured is The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), originally written in German by a Swiss pastor, Johann David Wyss, which borrowed the first name of Defoe’s hero for its title.

Three other 19th-century novels influenced by Crusoe, which could be said to have stood the test of time, are The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne (1858), The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868) and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883). Strictly speaking, The Swiss Family Robinson and The Coral Island are not true Robinsonades in that nature on the islands featured in those novels is bountiful and benign whereas in Crusoe it is barren and harsh but the influence is obvious.

The influence on The Moonstone would be less obvious, as it is generally regarded as initiating and establishing the writing formula for the detective genre. However, Gabriel Betteredge, one of the novel’s main characters and narrators, displays great faith in Defoe’s work and seeks to use it as a means of seeing into the future and working things out. He regards it as the finest book ever written, is happy to re-read it frequently and considers anyone who has not read it to be poorly read.

Treasure Island was partly inspired by The Coral Island (and therefore indirectly by Robinson Crusoe), Stevenson saying he admired the “better qualities” of Ballantyne’s book. But he could be said to parody Crusoe’s character in Ben Gunn, who is a friendly castaway who was marooned for many years; his appearance is wild, his entire dress is goat’s skin and he chatters constantly about providence. Stevenson’s island is also different from Ballantyne’s or Defoe’s: it is not a place to live but merely one on which to dig for treasure.

The 20th century saw a change in attitude towards Robinson Crusoe and its progeny. To James Joyce, the eponymous character was “the true prototype of the British colonist” and he regarded the “whole Anglo-Saxon spirit” as being in Crusoe: “the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity”. Joyce pinpointed a common 20th-century reaction to the novel, which was that it reflected and embodied the mentality that led to the British empire.

Of the novel’s descendants, The Coral Island probably exemplifies most clearly this imperialist perspective in the way the boys recreate a society on the island that exactly mimics the one they have left behind. The most stinging novelistic counterblast to Ballantyne’s novel (and therefore Robinson Crusoe as well) is William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), which has been referred to as “The Coral Island in reverse”.

Commenting on the relationship between the two books, Golding said that Ballantyne’s novel “rotted to compost” in his mind and in that compost “a new myth put down roots”. There are a number of very deliberate and overt references in Lord of the Flies that indicate Golding’s undermining of Ballantyne’s fantasy. The Coral Island presents an optimistic (some would say smugly imperialistic) vision of three boys who, although lacking the structures, controls and supports of society, are still able to co-operate for the common good and against the savage forces threatening them.

Golding’s vision is much more pessimistic. One of his most salient and obvious themes is that society holds everyone together, and without these conditions, our ideals, values and basic morality are lost. Without society’s rigid rules, anarchy and savagery can take over. Another major difference is Golding’s belief that evil comes from within and is not something extrinsic that can be easily confronted and overcome.

A very interesting later 20th-century take on Robinson Crusoe is JM Coetzee’s Foe (1986), about a woman looking for her kidnapped daughter who is set adrift during a ship’s mutiny and lands on an island where she finds Cruso (spelt thus) living contentedly with Friday, who cannot speak. The three depart for England but Cruso dies en route. In England she tries to get a writer, Daniel Foe, to help her tell her and Friday’s stories. Critic Denis Donoghue saw one of the novel’s central themes as the need to give a voice to the oppressed, whether Friday or the woman.

An indication of how pervasive Robinson Crusoe’s literary influence has been is to consider how it has extended into languages other than English as well. Two significant examples of very fine novels from other languages, translated into English, would be Friday, or the Other Island (published in French in 1967 as Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique) by Michel Tournier; and Kruso (German, 2014) by Lutz Seiler.

Tournier’s novel explores such themes as civilisation versus nature, the psychology of solitude, and death and sexuality. Rather than Crusoe converting and controlling Friday, it’s the other way round, and Crusoe chooses to remain on the island, rejecting a chance return to “civilisation” when offered it after 28 years.

Seiler’s Kruso and his Friday, Ed, are on a busy, not deserted island (Hiddensee in the Baltic Sea, a sanctuary for dropouts and dreamers and the place from which many East Germans tried to swim to freedom in Denmark during the communist era) but both are castaways from society. With the collapse of communism, the need for their idyllic island retreat evaporates, leaving them to face a new reality.

In non-fiction, the novel inspired Tim Severin, who is well known for retracing the journeys of historical explorers, to probe the world of sea navigation familiar to Defoe. He retells amazing survival stories of sailors, pirates and castaways of the time, retracing their journeys to experience for himself the adventures that inspired Robinson Crusoe. As well as camping on islands where famous castaways once survived and undertaking dangerous sea voyages, Severin searched Nicaragua and Honduras for the Miskito, the indigenous tribe that Friday was modelled on. The book, In Search of Robinson Crusoe, is an intriguing fusion of history, literature and travel adventure.

Desert island risks: Robinson Crusoe at 300. By Brian Maye . The Irish Times , April 20 2019.

Robinson Crusoe: the man and his island.  Bridget Kendall discusses Daniel Defoe’s classic island adventure story ‘Robinson Crusoe’ with Andreas Mueller, Olivette Otele, and Karen O’Brien. The Forum,  BBC World Service , February 21, 2019.