2 Robinson Crusoe

Figure 1 Frontispiece and title-page of the first edition of Robinson Crusoe (1719)

From the moment of its first publication in April 1719, Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe was a commercial success. By the end of the year five further editions had been published, and pirated copies and abridgments had already begun to appear (a sure sign of real popularity). It went on to become one of the most frequently published novels in the English language, with nearly 1,200 separate editions up to 1979. It also attracted imitations, which were produced in such large numbers that they form an identifiable genre known as the Robinsonade. Among the most famous of these Robinsonades were works like The Swiss Family Robinson by a Swiss clergyman Johann David Wyss, translated into English from German in 1814, and The Coral Island (1858) by the Victorian children’s writer R. M. Ballantyne.

Many scholars have attempted to account for the extraordinary popularity of Robinson Crusoe and its imitations, and have speculated about what it was that readers were responding to in Defoe’s book. Pat Rogers, to take one example, made an intensive study of the history of publication of Robinson Crusoe in chapbook form, looking particularly at what was included or omitted in these cheaply produced and radically shortened versions of the novel.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online

Figure 2 Title-page of an eight-page chapbook version of Robinson Crusoe [c.1750]

Rogers concluded that the readers of these chapbooks were responding to Robinson Crusoe as ‘a story of survival, as an epic of mastery over the hostile environment, as a parable of conquest over fear, isolation and despair’. However persuasive this conclusion may seem, it can be little more than one scholar’s guesswork. To move beyond guesswork we need to study evidence of the responses of actual readers, and UK RED offers a quick and convenient method of accessing such evidence.

You might have wondered why a basic keyword search for ‘Defoe’ or ‘Crusoe’ returned so many more results than an advanced search for the author ‘Defoe’ or the title ‘Robinson Crusoe’. The answer is that the basic keyword search looks for the specified term in every text field of the database. This means that it will return entries where ‘Defoe’ or ‘Crusoe’ are mentioned, even if they are not necessarily the author or text being read.

For instance, a reader might have purchased ‘Robinson Crusoe’ on the day they also bought ‘Jane Eyre’, but because they only read ‘Jane Eyre’ that evening, ‘Jane Eyre’ is recorded as the text being read. Or again, someone reading some other travel narrative might have been reminded of the story of ‘Robinson Crusoe’, so again ‘Crusoe’ might appear in the evidence of the experience, even though it was not itself the text that was being read.

The point to remember is that using the ‘advanced search’ to search for ‘Robinson Crusoe’ as the text being read will give you very specific evidence about the reception history of Defoe’s novel; but searching for ‘Crusoe’ using the basic ‘keyword search’ will bring up all mentions of the text. This wider information might itself be of interest, and add another layer to the analysis. For example, it might be the case that ‘Crusoe’ was a book often bought or referred to, but not read; or that ‘Crusoe’ was so widely read that readers often referred to it when discussing their reading of other texts; or that ‘Defoe’ was such a famous author that he was frequently referred in discussions of reading.