3 Childhood reading of Robinson Crusoe

We know from many sources that Robinson Crusoe was immensely popular with young readers, and so it is not surprising that the records in RED are predominantly for children, not adults.

One of the earliest references to children reading the novel comes in an introduction to a collected edition of Defoe’s works edited by Sir Walter Scott, published in 1810, where he claims that Robinson Crusoe was ‘read eagerly by young people’. He put this down to the way in which Defoe’s story gripped their imagination: ‘there is hardly an elf so devoid of imagination as not to have supposed for himself a solitary island in which he could act Robinson Crusoe, were it but in the corner of the nursery’.

Scott’s claim that the novel was particularly popular with children can be backed up from other sources of evidence. In a poll of nearly 1,000 children carried out for the Daily News in 1899, where they were asked to make lists of all their favourite books, Robinson Crusoe came out on top, mentioned by no fewer than 921 of them.

However, anecdotal evidence such as Scott’s comment, and statistics like these from newspaper surveys, cannot tell us why children responded in such large numbers to this particular book, and not others. To begin to get at this kind of information, we need now to turn to study in detail the comments of individual readers as recorded in RED.