Selkirk's Island, Diana Souhami [the best books to read TXT] 📗

1719 The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

SO SELKIRK became a naval officer, on a wage, with a pension and familial obligations. His story of abandonment faded, like the news of a day. He had survived alone on an unaccommodating island when all human support was withdrawn. He had made this island his home. But rescue meant return to society. And now he was with HMS Enterprise, plying the unremarkable ports of Sheerness and Woolwich, Plymouth and Portsmouth.

While he was employed on this ordinary voyage, Daniel Defoe picked up the tale again. Selkirk’s ‘Fame of having lived four Years and four Months alone in the island of Juan Fernandez’ inspired Defoe to write a novel. He called it ‘The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oronoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. An account of how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates’.*

It was the first English novel and became known as Robinson Crusoe. Defoe was nearing sixty when he wrote it. He lived in a ‘very genteel’ manner, in a house in Stoke Newington. He had a fine library, stables, a large garden and seven children.

Like Steele he was in debt and keen for money. He needed cash to pay for his daughter Maria’s wedding.* Robinson Crusoe took him a few months to write and was his four hundred and twelfth publication.* He did not wrestle with his prose. He was the author of daily broadsheets, political and religious essays, satires in verse, odes and hymns. He propounded tolerance, reason and practical work, advocated free trade, union between Scotland and England, the establishment of savings banks, and a review of bankruptcy laws. He denounced corruption at elections, and the persecution of dissenters.*

Fiction, though, was new ground. He intended Robinson Crusoe as a money-making yarn. It was published anonymously on 25 April 1719, reprinted on 9 May, 4 June and 7 August and from then on. There was no definitive manuscript. The first edition was changed even while at the printers.†

The book was a winner. Here was the quintessential survival story: a man cut off from the world, who trusted in God and did what he could for himself. Though Defoe was chided for ‘Solecisms, Looseness and Incorrectness of Stile, Improbabilities, and sometimes Impossibilities’, his readers were undeterred.* They identified, projected and asked the question, what would I do, if that were to happen to me.

Robinson Crusoe was serialised, abridged, pirated, adapted, dramatised and bowdlerised. It was translated into French in 1720 and into Dutch, German and Russian in the 1760s. It was banned in Spain in 1756. An abridged French version of 1769, gave Richard Steele as the author. In the 1770s it was printed as a Chapbook, a penny book printed on a single sheet of paper, folded twelve times, and distributed by walking stationers called chapmen, hired by printers, who sold it in towns on market days.

It became a world classic. By 1863 it was in the Shilling Entertaining Library, by 1869 there was ‘Robinson Crusoe in words of one syllable’ by Mary Godolphin, with coloured illustrations, and by 1900 it was being given away in promotions by grocers. Crusoe inspired literary criticism, picture books, pop-up books, cartoons, puppets and pantomimes. His image was universal. He was portrayed standing alone on a circle of sand, with a palm tree and the surrounding sea; barefoot in goat skins with a musket at his shoulder and a sinking ship behind him; leaning on a rock with a spy glass and umbrella; shooting goats, discovering Man Friday’s footprint in the sand.*

Down the years, Selkirk transmuted into Crusoe’s mythical world. His own reality blurred. His time on The Island, claimed first by journalists, was reinvented in the bright world of fiction. What had really happened and who he was were incidental. It was the story that mattered, not The Island or the man.

Defoe capitalised on Crusoe’s success. Within a year he produced two sequels: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of His Life and of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe, and then, in 1720, a work of awful piety, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelic World. In a preface to this he teased:

there is a man alive, and well known too, the actions of whose life are the just subject of these volumes, and to whom all or most part of the story most directly alludes.

Part Two was widely published if not widely read. Part Three was instantly forgotten. And of the thousands of references and allusions to Robinson Crusoe that were to follow, none were to Crusoe in China, Russia, France, Persia, India, Russia, or Heaven. They were all to the core theme: the Man alone on the island.

1719 A Large Earthenware Pot

CRUSOE’S ISLAND was an unexplained place, though he inhabited it alone for twenty-eight years. He was swept to its shore by a storm that wrecked his ship and all those on it except himself. The sea that saved him and drowned them was ‘as high as a great hill, and as furious as an enemy’. It buried him under thirty-foot waves.

His island, like Selkirk’s, was volcanic, part of an archipelago and uninhabited by man. It was susceptible to earthquake, with freak waves and hurricanes, great rains and uprooted trees. It had mountains and a brook of running water. But it had scant reality of its own. It existed to serve Crusoe. Providence dictated that it should be his estate. It ‘looked like a planted garden’. ‘Leadenhall Market could not have furnished a better table.’ It provided him with pigeons,