Robinson Crusoe, Journal of Mercantile Virtues

The life and strange surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, mariner: who liv’d eight and twenty years all alone in an uninhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river Oroonoque; having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perish’d but himself. With an account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by pyrates. Written by himself.

Thus the frontispiece of the first edition of Robinson Crusoe, printed in London in 1719 by a publisher of popular books, W. Taylor, ‘at the Ship (in Pater Noster Row)’. No author’s name was given, for it purported to be the genuine memoir of a shipwrecked sailor.

This was a time when tales of the sea and pirates were all the rage. The theme of shipwreck on a desert island had already caught the public’s attention because of an episode that had genuinely taken place ten years previously, when a Captain Woodes Rogers had discovered on the island of Juan Fernandez a man who had lived on it all alone for four years, a Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk. This inspired a writer of pamphlets who was down on his luck and short of money to tell a similar tale in the form of an unknown sailor’s memoir.

This man who had suddenly turned novelist despite being nearly sixty was Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), well known to political columns of the time particularly for having been in the pillory, and the author of a plethora of works of every kind, either written in his own name or anonymously, as was more often the case. (The most complete bibliographies of his works list almost 400 titles ranging from pamphlets of religious and political controversy, to short satirical poems, books on the occult, and works on history, geography and economics, in addition to the novels.)

This forerunner of the modern novel, then, first comes to the fore far from the cultivated terrain of high literature (whose supreme model in England at the time was the classicist Pope): instead it emerges amidst the rank undergrowth of commercial book production which was aimed at a reading public composed of serving girls, backstreet traders, innkeepers, waiters, sailors, and soldiers. Though intended to conform to the tastes of this public, such literature was always careful to inculcate some moral lesson (and not always in a hypocritical way), and Defoe is anything but indifferent to this requirement. But it is not the edifying sermons, punctuating the pages of Crusoe at regular intervals, that make it a book of sound moral backbone: these are in any case rather generic and perfunctory; rather it is the natural and direct way in which a kind of morality and an idea of life, a particular relationship of man with the objects and possibilities in his hands, are expressed in images.

Nor can it be said that the ‘practical’ origin of the book, which the author drafted as part of a ‘deal’, undermines the prestige of what would come to be thought of as the bible of mercantile and industrial virtues, the epic in praise of individual initiative. That mixture of adventure, practical spirit and moralistic compunction, which would in fact become the staple ingredients of Anglo-Saxon capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic, is not inconsistent with Defoe’s own life, given his paradoxical role as both preacher and adventurer. Starting out as a merchant, Defoe soon became a trusted wholesaler in hosiery and a brick-manufacturer before going bankrupt; he became a supporter and adviser to the Whig party which backed William of Orange, a pamphleteer for the ‘Dissenters’, then he was imprisoned and saved by a moderate Tory minister, Robert Harley, for whom he acted as spokesman and secret agent, before going on to become the founder and sole editor of the newspaper The Review, for which he is known as ‘the inventor of modern journalism’. After Harley’s fall he moved first of all closer to the Whigs, then back to the Tories until the financial crisis which turned him into a novelist.

Sure evidence of his story-telling gifts had already surfaced on many occasions in Defoe’s previous writings, especially when narrating contemporary or historical events, which he embellished with imaginative detail, or when recounting the biographies of famous men which were based on apocryphal evidence.

With these experiences behind him, Defoe set about writing his novel. Given the autobiographical thrust of the work, it not only deals with the adventures of the shipwreck and the desert island, but actually starts from the beginning of the protagonist’s life and continues until his old age. In this respect Defoe was paying homage to a moralistic pretext, a kind of didacticism which, it must be said, is too narrow and elementary to be taken seriously: obedience to one’s father, the superiority of middle-class life, and of the modest bourgeois existence over all the blandishments of outrageous fortune. It is for contravening these lessons that Robinson meets such disaster.

Avoiding both seventeenth-century bombast and the sentimentality typical of eighteenth-century English narrative, Defoe’s language has a sobriety and an economy which, like Stendhal’s ‘dry as the Napoleonic code style’, one might compare to that of a ‘business report’: here the device of the first-person sailor-merchant, who is capable of entering in columns as in an accounts book both the ‘evil’ and the ‘good’ of his situation, and of maintaining an arithmetical calculation of the number of cannibals killed, turns out to be as much an appropriate stylistic expedient as a practical one. Like a business report or a catalogue of goods and utensils, Defoe’s prose is unadorned but at the same time scrupulously detailed. The accumulation of detail is aimed at convincing the reader of the veracity of his account, but also expresses better than any other style could the sense of the value of every object, every action, every gesture in the shipwreck’s condition (just as in Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack the anxiety and joy of material possession is conveyed by the lists of stolen objects).

The descriptions of Robinson’s manual operations are given in painstaking detail: how he digs his house out of the rock, surrounds it with a palisade, builds himself a boat which he is then unable to carry as far as the sea, and learns how to shape and heat vases and bricks. Because of this interest and delight in reporting Robinson’s technical progress, Defoe is famous even today as the writer who celebrates man’s patient struggle with matter, and exalts the lowliness and difficulty but also the greatness of all activity, as well as the joy of seeing things being created by our hands. From Rousseau to Hemingway, all those writers who have shown us that testing ourselves, and succeeding or failing in ‘doing something’ however great or small, are real measures of human worth, can recognise Defoe as their first model.

Robinson Crusoe is without doubt a book to be reread line by line, and we will continually make new discoveries. His capacity for avoiding, at crucial moments, any excessive self-congratulation or exultation by using just a few words before moving on to practical questions may seem to contrast with the sermonising tone of certain pages later on, once a bout of illness has led the protagonist back to the thought of religion: for instance, that moment when he realises that he is the sole survivor of all the crew – ‘as for them, I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows’ – and after the briefest of thanks to God he immediately starts to look round and consider his plight.

But Defoe’s approach in both Crusoe and in the later novels is very similar to that of the business man who obeys the rules, who when it is time for the service goes into church and beats his breast, but then hurries back out so as not to waste time away from his work. Hypocrisy? His behaviour is too open and urgent to deserve such a charge; Defoe maintains even in his brusque alternations of tone a basic, healthy sincerity which is his unmistakable hallmark.

Then again, sometimes his humorous vein broaches even the battlefields of the political and religious controversies of his age: as when we hear the arguments between the savage who cannot comprehend the idea of the devil and the sailor who cannot explain it to him. Or as in that situation when Robinson is lord of ‘but three subjects, and they were of three different religions. My man Friday was a Protestant, his father was a Pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist. However, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions.’ But not even this subtle and ironic emphasis is present when we read one of the most paradoxical and significant moments in the book: after longing for years to reestablish contact with the rest of the world, now every time he sees a human presence appear around the island Robinson feels the threats to his life increase; and when he learns of the existence of a group of shipwrecked Spanish sailors on a nearby island he is afraid of joining them in case they want to hand him over to the Inquisition.

Even on the shores of the desert island, then, ‘near the great river Oroonoque’, the ebb and flow of the ideas, passions and culture of an epoch are still felt. Certainly, although in his determination to play the role of adventure-story writer he dwells on the horror in his descriptions of the cannibals, he was not unaware of Montaigne’s reflections on the anthropophagi (these same ideas had left their mark on Shakespeare in his story of another mysterious island in The Tempest): without such ideas Robinson would never have reached the conclusion that ‘these people were not murderers’, but men from a different civilisation, obeying their own laws: ‘They do not know it to be an offence any more than those Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisoners taken in battle.’

[1955]