The First English Novel? Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

On this trip, we're looking at the conventional candidate for the first modern novel in English.  Defoe's story of a resourceful man shipwrecked on a desert island is so much more than a ripping yarn: it speaks to the rise of a literary vernacular language, the values of an increasing bourgeois and expansionist society, and of spiritual awakening.  Come aboard!

Text: https://ia600207.us.archive.org/26/items/cu31924011498676/cu31924011498676.pdf

Additional Music:

"Theme from Emergency!" by Nelson Riddle. https://archive.org/details/tvtunes_206

"The Ballad of Gilligan's Island" by Sherwood Schwartz.  https://archive.org/details/tvtunes_275

Transcript

You know, Litterbugs, I started out as a child, and back then, I wanted to be a fireman when I grew up.  There was a TV show in the early 70s called “Emergency!” about a fire station and paramedics and I was just devoted and I took to calling my parents’ red VW microbus the “fire engine.”  Had a plastic firefighter’s hat that I wore everywhere.  Cute little tike. And that was the last time I ever thought I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.  College came along – had no idea what I wanted to do – and they said, “Kid, you have to pick a major.”  And I said, “Well, I like stories . . . .” and they plopped me over in the English building.  Got out of school with an English degree – which my father had been quite skeptical of, you may be sure – with no prospects or plan, so I drove a delivery van for a few years.  I ended up leaving that job in a fit of ineffective nobility, but I had some friends in the restaurant business and they hooked me up as a cook – did that for a few years.  At that restaurant I met my wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed – well, she wasn’t my wife at the time, but we soon squared that away and she decided to go back to graduate school and become a teacher.  Not having anything better to do, I went to school with her – more English.  No plan at all.  Had a vague idea I’d find something in publishing or editing afterwards.  For the nonce, I just read more stories.

Well, it happened one day that I went to the department chair to alter my class schedule.  I needed to switch from being a full-time student to a part-time one so I could go get another cooking job to pay the bills.  And she said, “Kid, we would like you to teach a class of freshman composition, but you have to stay full-time.”  And so I did.  And I’ve been teaching ever since – over 25 years.

Now, I tell that story for a couple of reasons.  1) To foster a personal and human connection with my audience.  But the other reason is that, well, when I look at my life now – a wonderful marriage, work that I find appealing and valuable – and I realize that I didn’t do anything to make any of it happen – no real effort, no scheme, no strategy, no goal, even – I wonder sometimes if destiny had this pleasant life planned for me.  Like it was always supposed to happen this way.  The grace of God, you know, divine providence.  Fate.  A benevolent cosmic order.

Or . . . am I just lucky?  A government-issue Gen X slacker dubs around long enough and eventually stumbles upon a nice girl and a nice job.  Phew.  Jammy bastard.  Maybe the cohesiveness of life right now makes me narratize the past, maybe it arranges what seems an orderly and ordained set of events, what only seems inevitable because it is what happened.

Now, I know what you're thinking: “Uh, thanks, McDonough, for taking us on a walk down Amnesia Lane to Navel-Gazing Boulevard.  What’s all this in aid of?”  Well, it’s my desultory way of getting us into today’s text.  Hello, fellow voyagers, and welcome aboard the Classic English Literature Podcast!  I’m so glad you could come along. Today, we’re shipping out with Daniel Defoe to the Caribbean Sea, just north of Venezuela.  Hope you packed the SPF 50 and some Dramamine – we’re headed to the tropics with the ever aimless Robinson Crusoe!

You see, reading Defoe’s most famous novel this time, I was struck by how much of what we think of now as just an adventure story is really concerned with the forces that shape human lives, especially individual human lives.  The main character – Robinson Crusoe – never really has a sense of what he wants to do with his life.  He defies conventional wisdom and makes a bunch of poor decisions and tries to make sense of it all later.  At the beginning of the novel, he says, “I should never settle to anything with resolution enough to go through with it.”   Rather like me in my erratic youth.  

Of course, it’s also a rollicking good adventure story, as well as a revealing cultural artifact from England's imperial expansion and colonization.  It also articulates a particularly Enlightenment view of Nature, one that has, for both good and ill, dominated Western society ever since.

More on all of that anon.  Let’s begin by learning a little bit about Daniel Defoe and how Robinson Crusoe, his most famous work, came about.

We were introduced to Mr. Defoe in the last Subcast episode, the Halloween one about his short story “The Apparition of Mrs. Veal,” etc. He was born in London, in 1660, to a tallow-chandler – well, a tallow-chandler’s wife, actually – whose surname was “Foe.”  The family were staunch Presbyterians and Danny Boy received his education at the firm hands of one Rev. Charles Morton, later the first vice president of Hahvahd.  Was supposed to go into the ministry, but didn’t feel he had a true vocation, so like many thwarted divines he became a haberdasher.  He married in 1684 and expanded his trade into tobacco, woollens, and wine.  His commercial interests took him to sea, of course, but only, it seems, in European coastal waters.  Despite his assiduity, he rarely, if ever, was out of debt.  1685 he throws in his lot with the Monmouth Rebellion to depose King James II.  He goes on to join Billy the Orange and after that coronation, Foe becomes a close ally and secret agent of the king.  A couple of bankruptcies between 1692 and 1702 finally drove him out of business.

At the same time, he began to take an interest in political writing, including verse satires on Jacobite plots, infrastructure plans for the kingdom, and treatises on the reformation of manners.  Got himself into a spot of bother over a pamphlet called “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” in 1702.  It’s a satirical tract, written from the point of view of an extremist High Church official who suggests that the best way to remove the danger of religious dissenters is to exterminate them.  Now, Daniel Foe himself is a Dissenter and his point is ironic – he’s saying that the extremists in the Anglican Church are the great danger, not the Dissenters.  But nobody gets the joke.  High Church officials and Tory politicians were delighted by the suggestion (rather proving the ironic point).  When they realized they'd been duped, Foe was arrested and fined, pilloried, and imprisoned.  By the by, around this time of public humiliation, Daniel adds the aristocratic “De” to his surname.  Quite the flourish.

From 1704-1713, Defoe ran “The Review”, a newspaper published thrice weekly.  We’ll talk more about the burgeoning periodical industry in an upcoming Subcast episode.  Of course, he continued with his pamphlets and satires, but it wasn’t until nearly his 60th year that the piece of writing for which he is still remembered was published.  Of the nearly 400 pieces he wrote during his life, the one that secured him immortality came out in 1719 and it was, of course, Robinson Crusoe.

In previous episodes, we’ve looked at some candidates for the “first English novel” : Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim's Progress, Behn’s Oroonoko, among others.  But DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe is the one traditionally cited as the first real novel in English.  Again, my caveat that usually there’s no such thing as the “first” anything, but, though I’ve put the case for other texts, rereading Crusoe for the first time in decades, I kind of get where the traditionalists are coming from.  Stanford professor Ian Watt articulated this case in the 1950s, saying that Defoe created “a form of prose narrative which, if not quite the novel in our sense, was in many respects much closer to it than had been written before in English.”  Um, I cannot disagree.  When I took it up again, I was struck by how modern the language and the prose style felt.  I mean, you wouldn’t mistake it for something written in the 21st-century, but it feels very removed from the style of 17th century prose fiction writers – is “stilted” too strong a word for them?  Defoe’s style – as presented through the character of Crusoe – feels intimate and conversational and, somehow, more fluid.  Watt again: “it is . . . much closer to the vernacular of the ordinary person than any previous writer’s.”  

Watt further maintains that “Defoe’s most important innovation in fiction was his unprecedentedly complete narrative realism.”  I think this stems from his experience as a pamphleteer and essayist, that no-nonsense journalistic style we spoke of in the “Mrs. Veal” episode.  Defoe intends, in much of his fiction, to fool the reader into believing his fictions to be true.  Professor James Sutherland calls this “realistic make-believe.”  The novel, Robinson Crusoe, is presented as an authentic account of a man’s experience of shipwreck and isolation on an uncharted island in the southern Caribbean.  The 1719 edition published by William Taylor sports this on the title page.  It’s longer than a wet week.  Here goes:

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself.

See?  Defoe appears nowhere on the title page – the author of the account is presented as Crusoe himself.  It’s to be read as an authentic memoir.  Defoe includes a note from the “Editor,” who, as in “Mrs. Veal,” vouches thus for the veracity of the text: it is a “just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.”  Well, I don’t know about that (there’s some pretty blatant foreshadowing and suspense-building in the first chapter that doesn’t ring quite true as an exercise in reportage), but it was certainly taken as authentic in its time, and Defoe staunchly denied writing fiction at all.

Defoe based his novel on the real-life story of a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk, a privateer, a euphemism for “pirate with a government license.” In 1704, he got into it with his captain, Thomas Stradling, over a ship he thought was falling apart.

So Selkirk made a bold bluff — demanded to be left ashore on a remote island off the coast of Chile if suitable repairs were not made. Stradling called that bluff and sailed away. The ship did, in fact, later sink . . . the historical record is silent as to the marooned Selkirk’s smug satisfaction at this turn of events.  

He spent four years and four months alone on that island, hunting goats, building huts, reading his Bible, and muttering “I told them so” to any sea birds who would listen.

When a rescue ship finally found him in 1709, he was bearded, barefoot, and half-feral — but alive and healthy. His story spread fast, and a few years later Daniel Defoe turned it into Robinson Crusoe.  Defoe puts his hero in the Caribbean, not the Pacific, but the island that Selkirk lived on, Más a Tierra – about 400 miles off the coast of Chile – was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.  Tourism soared.

This is probably a good time to fill in the outline of the story.  I imagine there are few listeners for whom Robinson Crusoe is an entirely unknown quantity, but let’s do a quick and dirty for the outliers.

Crusoe’s a middle-class kid from York, right? His dad, an immigrant from Bremen who changed the family name from Kreutznaer, urges him to follow the middle-path in life: “Son, be reasonable, stay home, get a job.” With overweening post-adolescent arrogance, Robin decides he’d rather risk death at sea than turn into his father.

So he heads out, immediately gets shipwrecked, gets enslaved by Moorish pirates, escapes with a boy named Xury, whom he sells as a slave (really? no self-awareness), gets rescued by a Portuguese captain, sets up a plantation in Brazil.  Then he gets involved in a scheme to run slaves – this guy hardly ever has a bad idea without doubling down on it. So, his ship wrecks again, this time near South America, and he washes up on a deserted island, the only survivor.

He freaks out a bit at first, but then goes full Macgyver survivalist. He salvages supplies, builds a hut, starts farming, makes furniture. Shoots a bunch of cats.  Talks to his parrot.  He even makes bread from scratch – scratch scratch, from seed to loaf.  He does this for a couple decades.

Then one day, he finds a footprint in the sand.  No, not his. He does double-check, but only after ages of worrying about what savages might be abroad in the land.  Turns out, there are cannibals who occasionally swing by the island for brunch.

Crusoe rescues one of their captives, names him Friday, and teaches him English, Christianity, and how to wear pants. Friday becomes his loyal sidekick — though, yeah, the whole “white savior master-servant” dynamic doesn’t age well. Still, they team up and fight off more cannibals, compel some mutineers to un-mutiny themselves, and — long story short — Crusoe finally catches a ride home after 28 years.

He gets back to England, rich from his old plantation, marries and has kids – becomes a wealthy version of his Dad – but he gets itchy and doubles down again, heading back out to sea.  Defoe wrote sequels (the ending of the novel leaves that door wide open), but they have largely been ignored and I see no reason to mess with tradition.

For an example of that more modern-feeling vernacular style, I think it best to begin at the beginning.  Here’s the novel’s opening:

I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull: He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me.

The novel's style is direct and informative, much like a memoir or a diary entry. Concrete facts – he is particular about dates and navigation coordinates – and a personal, unadorned narrative voice ground the reader in an immediate verisimilitude.  Defoe embellishes that factual and honest tone by occasionally admitting to things he can’t recall – which, perhaps counter-intuitively, contributes to the narration’s sense of integrity.

That tone is not reserved for mere exposition; it persists in what should be moments of great pathos, too.  Listen to this which follows his arrival on the island:

Upon the whole, here was an Island of mere Desolation, and I was in a State of perfect Misery; I had no Soul to speak to, or to speak to me, or to be a Companion to me. ... I had not that Relief in this Trouble from the Resignation I used to practise, that I hop'd to have, and I would have been very glad to have been thankful to God, if I could but have had any thing to be thankful for.

Note that opening phrase “upon the whole” – it feels very considered and dispassionate, as if he’s weighed up all options and observations, and this is his considered conclusion.  And, despite the first-person narration, the tone feels detached and measured.  There is very much a sense of recollection, of looking back on one’s own experiences and arranging them into coherence, into significance.

That kind of self-reflection and self-examination we very much associate with Protestantism, especially of the more radical, dissenting type.  We’ve spoken ad nauseum in this podcast about how the Protestant Reformation, with its doctrines sola fide and sola scriptura, made the individual conscience the main actor in the salvation drama.  Professor Watt: “The Puritan tradition saw the whole world, and every incident of individual experience, as alive with secret indications of divine intervention or intention.”  As Crusoe reconstructs his experience of shipwreck and isolation, this is exactly the lens through which he peers.

One might almost say that this kind of spiritual examination is the main arc of the novel.  When you think about it, there’s not much in the way of a plot, not in the rising action, climax, falling action, resolution scheme so beloved of middle-school teachers.  There are exciting episodes –  the shipwreck, the battle with the cannibals, the attack on the mutineers.  But these set pieces don’t themselves really add up to a plot.  The story just ends when he gets off the island. 

But his relationship to a Protestant version of divine providence does develop across the text.  At the start, we meet a young man who, as I mentioned earlier, never settled to anything with resolution, deciding on a whim to defy his father’s advice and go to sea.  At this point, Crusoe sees his experiences as entirely determined by some outside force: fate, prophecy, destiny.  Hardly does he ever acknowledge his own agency.  He says an “ill fate pushed me on now with an obstinacy that nothing could resist” and speaks of a “secret overruling decree that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction.”  He says that it was his fate “to choose for the worse” and that events can be ascribed to his “lot.”  This, of course, appears at first superstitious, almost heretical in the Christian scheme of things, not to mention that it absolves him of any personal responsibility.

But as he goes on, his language regarding his circumstances begins to change.  He speaks of being the “willful agent of all my own miseries.”  That adjective is key, a big shift in the way he regards his place in a divinely ordered world.  He recognizes his own free will in the valence of events.  Then one day, walking along the seaside, he has something of an epiphany:

I was very pensive upon the subject of my present condition, when reason, as it were, expostulated with me t’other way, thus: “Well, you are in a desolate condition it is true, but pray remember, where are the rest of you? Did not you come eleven of you in the boat? Where are the ten? Why were not they saved, and you lost? Why were you singled out? Is it better to be here, or there?” And then I pointed to the sea. All evils are to be considered with the good that is in them, and with what worse attends them.

He begins to adopt an “well, it could have been worse” outlook.  At least I survived.  At least I have a gun, and tools, and clothing (by the by – he seems to wear a lot of goat fur clothing, and a fur hat, which seems to me climatically inappropriate).  Nonetheless, he becomes rather thankful for his deliverance, and soon, becomes repentant for the sins that necessitated it.  At one point, he alludes to the prophet Jonah, who tried to escape God’s command, as well as to Job, who suffered as a test of faith. After a bit of low-grade bibliomancy, he looks

back upon my past life with such horror, and my sins appeared so dreadful, that my soul sought nothing of God but deliverance from the load of guilt that bore down all my comfort. As for my solitary life, it was nothing. I did not so much as pray to be delivered from it or think of it; it was all of no consideration in comparison to this. And I add this part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction.

His newfound faith is not impregnable – there are occasions when he is tempted to doubt.  But overall he starts to remind one of the medieval monk.  He speaks of his “solitary life” which allows him to focus on “things of a higher nature.”  

Along with this dawning religious awareness, Crusoe begins to see his own, well, conquest of Nature as integral to his salvation, both physical and spiritual.  Nature, in the Protestant view, is, of course, fallen and corrupt – because of Adam’s sin, humans are cursed to strive against Nature for their survival.  Civilization is thus the punishment for and the bulwark against chaos.  At his first shipwreck, we get a sense of such archetypal disaster: “We were not much more than a quarter of an hour out of our ship till we saw her sink, and then I understood for the first time what was meant by a ship foundering in the sea.”  Away from the ship, away from the shore, out on the open ocean (an ancient symbol of chaos and flux) civilization evaporates.  Later, he realizes that he must work in tandem with the forces of nature – the tides, the seasons, etc.  This indicates a taming of primordial forces, a going forth into the earth and subduing it.  It’s an Enlightenment view of Nature that still obtains in the West: Nature is where human beings aren’t – we are not part of Nature, we are its opposite and, if we succeed, its master.  For us, nature is merely the repository of natural resources.  This is Crusoe’s project: to exploit the resources of the island for his own survival, then comfort, then prosperity.  I think that’s why Crusoe treats us to so many lists and inventories and accounts.  He’s always very precise about what he has stored up and how he has made it multiply.  His is the ultimate example of the capitalist “self-made man” myth.  He didn’t just pull himself up by his bootstraps, he had to make the damn boots!

The language and attitudes of commerce run throughout the text.  Crusoe’s father is a merchant, Crusoe’s creator is a merchant.  The book reads like a paean to the trading classes, those plucky individuals whose heroic self-reliance triumphs over great odds.  

And here’s where we get to some of the more troubling aspects of Crusoe’s character: his dawning sense of himself as a member of God’s elect, coupled with his evident success in mastering his island – turning himself into its king:

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 looked. First of all, the whole country was my own property, so that I had an undoubted right of dominion. Secondly, my people were perfectly subjected—I was absolutely lord and lawgiver—they all owed their lives to me, and were ready to lay down their lives, if there had been occasion for it, for me.

Well, it’s not too hard to see Crusoe as an apologist for colonialism.  Indeed, for him, relations of power and trade are embedded in the very fabric of reality.  For instance, one might find it strange that Crusoe, having been a slave himself to Moorish pirates, does not condemn the practice of slavery.  He sells (or gives?) Xury, the Moorish boy, to a ship’s captain.  He buys another slave soo after.  The voyage which results in his being marooned begins as a slaving expedition.  And, of course, his treatment of Friday smacks of paternalism: he baptizes Friday, as it were, by giving him a new name, he converts him to Christianity, has him adopt English modes of dress (or their approximations) and expects Friday’s labor and compliance.  Of course, Crusoe had saved his life, and that of his father, and I think even the most ardent cultural relativist would balk a bit at cannibalism.  But Crusoe’s – and perhaps Europe’s – attitude here comes directly from everything we’ve talked about before: if you see yourself as charged by God to subdue Nature and prosper to evidence your worthiness of salvation, when you encounter peoples and cultures who regard themselves as part of Nature, as integrated into an organic whole, well, certainly they will need to be subdued, too.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a more remarkable book than its current reputation allows.  It presents us with a portrait of the “economic man” – especially as envisioned by that nation of shopkeepers.  It is a story of resilience, hard graft, rugged individualism, and competition.  These petit bourgeois values – on the rise in English society after the decline of the Stuart dynasty – are rooted in a common sense approach to life as business.  Thus, the blunt and unpretentious writing style, the focus on specific facts and details, the cataloging of assets and experiences.  Even the way the novel ends, with the hero returning to the sea, is a tribute to the unstoppable progress of commerce.  Catalyzing all this is a Protestant ethic of work, self-examination, and a duty to master creation.  Of course, while the novel celebrates all these – sometimes, to the modern eye, to the point of absurdity (more than once I had to remind myself that Defoe was an ardent Dissenting Christian and that the sometime effusiveness of Crusoe’s spiritual rapture was not to be read ironically) – it only hints at the negative consequences of imperial expansion.  Sometimes Crusoe blithely accepts domination, other times he questions his right to dominate, but those questions drift away by the end as he realizes his prosperity.  So, indeed, a rather modern novel.

Thanks for joining me on this cruise – I hope you found something valuable in it.  If you did, please leave a 5-star review on your listening platform – that helps to raise the podcast’s profile and attracts new listeners.  Also, maybe recommend the show to a friend or two.  I’d like to have as big a crowd as possible.  If you find yourself with a couple of bucks left over and you’re not sure what to do with them, I’d be happy to put them to work.  Just click the support the show button.  Thanks for your time and support.  I really appreciate it.  Till next time, stay safe!