The story of a Swiss family that finds itself cast up on a tropic shore in the Pacific Ocean is as memorable if not as famous as its predecessor, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. But where Defoe’s novel is about the efforts of a man alone on a desert island to survive both hunger and loneliness, Johann Wyss’s story concerns the efforts of a father, mother, and four sons to establish a new home in an untenanted land. They are seldom hungry and never lonely, and though they occasionally miss their old home in Switzerland, the family is devoted chiefly to replicating it in a new world. Originally published in 1812 as Der Schweizerische Robinson, Wyss’s novel from the start acknowledged a debt to Defoe’s original (published nearly a century earlier, in 1718). But the title also resulted in some confusion, for the “Swiss Robinsons” are not named Robinson.
Moreover there are many differences between the two books, most of which are keyed by the single hero in Defoe’s story and the heroic family in Wyss’s tale. “We…read the famous history with an ardent interest…and never failed to feel lively gratitude towards God who had rescued us all together, and not permitted one only of us to be cast a solitary being on the island.” To begin with, Robinson Crusoe is a penitential parable. Its hero rebels as a young man against his father’s desire that he take over the prosperous family business in England; instead, Crusoe persists in following the exciting life of a sailor, despite a number of disasters that are clear hints of divine displeasure. These include being taken captive by Algerian pirates and serving as a slave before managing to escape. Eventually (and ironically) Crusoe becomes a successful slave trader, making a tidy fortune, but comes to recognize that the life of a businessman does not much differ in England or South America.
While on a slave-trading voyage, Crusoe’s ship runs into a terrible storm and runs aground on rocks surrounding a tropical island. Crusoe alone survives, and it becomes clear that he is being punished for disobeying the divine commandment regarding parental authority. He suffers terribly from loneliness, and although he is able to save supplies from the wrecked slave ship, this is small consolation for his isolation. Yet because of his penal solitude, Crusoe comes to accept God’s authority and is born again as a pious Christian. For this he is rewarded by the arrival of Friday, whose very name connotes redemption, and he is eventually rescued and returns to England.
But the Swiss family is not being punished for any single or collective sin. They have left their homeland not because of personal rebellion but because the Swiss revolution of 1798 (intimately related to the French Revolution of 1793) wiped out the father’s fortune and threw his beloved country into chaos. They are not seeking a life of excitement but hope to establish a stable existence in a new home in Australia. Their wrecked ship, like Crusoe’s, contains a veritable treasure of useful supplies, not in the service of the slave trade but to sustain the colony they had hoped to join. The disaster that overtakes them is a matter of chance, much like the revolutionary tumult they have escaped. Even the death of the ship’s crew is not regarded as punishment for their having deserted the passengers, and as the story develops, the prosperity of the family is a parable of providential helpfulness rather than punitive divine authority. Their new home is a veritable storehouse of useful and exotic commodities, “a perpetual tissue of wonders proceeding from the hand of a beneficent Creator” He has also given humans “the gifts of wisdom and intelligence, to employ those faculties, in discovering the utility of the different productions he has allowed to exist,” for “God has not made any thing to be wholly useless.”
Defoe’s novel was not meant for young readers, although it was eventually appropriated by them, often in editions that simplified the original book’s complex theological ideology while retaining its moral lessons and emphasis on stalwart individualism. Still, Robinson Crusoe appealed to a juvenile audience largely because of its heroic context; in sum, its young readers wanted a vicarious version of the same excitement that Robinson Crusoe sought. It was his adventures they found attractive, not the rigors of a punitive isolation on a desert (meaning unpopulated) island and the experience of grace that resulted from the hero’s ordeal. Crusoe’s capture by pirates, his ordeal as a slave in Algiers, his clever escape, his eventual shipwreck, his rescue of valuable supplies from the destroyed vessel, his fashioning a cave and palisade for safety, his attempts to manufacture utensils and even a boat—these all proved attractive to three centuries of young readers. And it was that excitement, including the dangers posed by visits of cannibals to the island, that inspired so many imitations of Defoe’s book that a genre—the Robinsonade—emerged.
In recent times, perhaps the most famous example of this genre is William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a roman noir that was a complex parody of the popular nineteenth-century British boys’ book The Coral Island by Robert Ballantyne’s, an imperial parable featuring a heroic triad of castaway youths. And Ballantyne’s book was preceded by Captain Frederick Marryat’s Masterman Ready, about a castaway British family who are saved because of the skills and bravery of an uncommon common sailor, the Ready of the title. These Robinsonades are not about the ordeal of a single individual but about communal efforts to survive. The genre therefore points back to Wyss’s book rather than to Defoe’s. Marryat declared that his story was intended as a specific corrective to the tradition carried forward from Defoe by Wyss of a wrecked ship containing all the necessities of a civilized life. Notably, castaways thenceforth had only whatever they carried in their pockets to help them survive. In Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, the three men on an island have only a pocketknife and a magnifying glass with them, yet by the story’s end they have created a technological wonderland including a telegraph line and a railway.
Unlike Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson and its immediate successors were purposefully aimed at young readers. Emerging from the eighteenth century’s didactic tradition, they had a moral stringcourse, yet they were also designed to entertain. If Robinson Crusoe can be considered the first English novel, then Wyss’s book is a pioneering example of a novel for children, being primarily about children. It was preceded in England by Thomas Day’s Sandford and Merton (1783–1789), and the two books share certain characteristics. Both are didactic stories that attempt to inculcate good behavior by illustrating exemplary actions. In Day’s book, the virtuous, hardworking Harry Sandford, a farmer’s son, is contrasted with Tommy Merton, the spoiled offspring of a rich merchant, who is both lazy and mischievous. They are put in the care of Mr. Barlow, an avuncular but stern tutor, who acts as a mentor to both boys, in an attempt to cure Tommy of his prolifigate ways by holding Harry up as a good example. Day thereby established a long-lived tradition in children’s literature, the good boy/bad boy pairing, which a century later Mark Twain would parody by creating in Tom Sawyer a “bad” boy who is essentially good.
Wyss did not imitate Day’s simplistic opposition (if he even knew of the book), for the four boys in the Swiss family are much more complex creations, each sharing both admirable and regrettable traits. But Fritz’s impulsiveness, Ernest’s laziness, and Jack’s propensity for rash actions are qualities that their father works to correct. And, like Mr. Barlow, he is a mentor par excellence, never failing to seize an opportunity to instruct or correct his sons: “It was always my endeavour to compensate to my children [for] our lack of books for their instruction.” A pastor, he is an apostle of moral rectitude but he is not severe in his admonitions, never using physical punishment but resorting to psychological corrections. Well-read, he is a virtual encyclopedia of miscellaneous knowledge, from identifying exotic animals to manufacturing candles.
“You now then perceive, my son,” he says to the increasingly bookish Ernest, “of what use it is to read, and to extend our knowledge, particularly on subjects of natural history and the productions of nature in general.” He fills the narrative with a positive paternal aura, and is a model of wise parenting, being the kind of father that most children would hope to have despite his occasional long-windedness. Though the adventures that sustain the narrative—from the family’s escape from the wrecked ship to their construction of several residences in the wilderness and encounters with strange creatures—proved attractive to many generations of young readers, the wise presence of the father and the loving presence of the mother most certainly were important features as well. Isolated from the rest of society and kept busy by a mentoring father, who “was pleased to find opportunities to keep my sons in continual action,” the four boys in the midst of a nature they were learning to turn to useful commodities “grew tall, strong, and were too much engaged to regret, in ignoble leisure, any of their past enjoyments in Europe.”
The mentor convention in children’s literature commenced with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, a novelized educational treatise that had a revolutionary effect on pedagogical theory and practice, continuing to modern times. Rousseau believed that since human society was chiefly responsible for an individual’s ills, a life removed from urban populations would nurture a person’s essential goodness. Thus the Swiss father, speaking of the ship’s crew, which had deserted his family in the midst of the storm, emphasizes that “they were not all bad people; and the greater part of them would have become better men here [on our island], because they would not have been exposed to the attacks of seduction.” Rousseau’s theory contradicted the theology of his fellow Genevan, John Calvin, which held that man was essentially depraved and that his salvation depended upon study of the Bible and God’s grace. Ironically, though Robinson Crusoe is a virtual Calvinistic allegory, it had a great influence on Rousseau, who regarded Crusoe as the type and symbol of a man redeemed by his isolation in nature, and Friday as the prototypical noble savage, being a literal child of nature.
Thus the young boy in Émile, who is kept in a rural setting, is allowed only one book, not the Bible, but Robinson Crusoe, a novel that Rousseau prized because it demonstrated the virtues of an education based on trial and error, on action rather than book learning. Émile is tutored by his only companion, an adult male who is Rousseau’s spokesman and alter ego, thereby initiating the mentor convention that would prevail in more than a century of literature written for children. Likewise, Rousseau’s revolutionary educational ideas had great influence on pedagogical practice in Europe and America. Speaking of his own mentoring efforts, the Swiss pastor observes that he was reminded more than once of the “wise system of education of the philosopher of Geneva, J.J. Rousseau; and particularly where he recommends that boys of all classes in society should learn a trade, and especially that of a carpenter.”
Thomas Day was one of Rousseau’s disciples in England but his personal eccentricities warped the philosopher’s theories; in Switzerland, a much more effective spokesman was Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who by means of novelized tracts became an influential reformer of classroom practice, urging the abandonment of teaching by rote memorization for the use of precept and example. In the United States, Bronson Alcott was an educational reformer influenced by both Rousseau and Pestalozzi, and his daughter Louisa Mary Alcott’s famous novel for young readers, Little Women, was shaped by her father’s influence. There, it is the mother of the March girls who is the presiding mentor, less interested in conventional education than in the development of moral character. William Godwin, the philosopher who in 1816 produced the first English translation of The Swiss Family Robinson, was himself an advocate of educational reform, which explains why the first English translation of Wyss’s book was undertaken by Godwin’s wife, Mary, and published by Godwin’s press. Reprinted many times thereafter, even after alternative translations were available, it was an effective dramatization of Rousseau’s and Pestalozzi’s theories.
We are not very far into The Swiss Family Robinson before the father tells us his notion of education. “One of the points of my system of education was to awaken the curiosity of my sons by interested observations, to leave time for the activity of their imagination, and then to correct any error they might fall into.” Standing on the deck of their wrecked ship, the family is attempting to launch their crude craft of half-casks nailed together when the pastor uses the opportunity to explain to his boys how a lever works. “God,” he pronounces, “sufficiently compensated the natural weakness of man by the gifts of reason, invention, and the adroitness of the hands; and that human meditation and reflection had composed a science called mechanics, the object of which was, to teach us how to make our own natural strength act to an incredible distance and with extraordinary force, by the intervention of instruments,” such as the crowbar.
Given the situation, with its attendant hazards, it would be difficult to find a more dramatic demonstration of the educational theories of Pestalozzi. But standing behind this incident is the occasion for the book’s creation, for it was the work of another Swiss pastor, who made up the story in episodes told to his own four boys over a period of time, borrowing from Defoe’s castaway story in order to educate his sons in an entertaining manner. As Wyss stated in his preface, the boys in the novel were modeled after his sons, sharing their strengths and weaknesses, a biographical fact that explained why there are no girls in the Swiss family. Wyss apologized for this omission, but hoped that the positive and active role of the castaways’ mother would help balance the gender arrangement, demonstrating an awareness of political correctness a century and a half before it emerged in popular discourse.
The actual writing of the book was the work of son, Johann Rudol, a poet who was also the author of the Swiss national anthem, and who gathered the manuscript fragments of his father’s story and produced a coherent narrative. He presumably had the help of Johann Senior, who did not die until 1818. The Swiss Family Robinson appeared in two sequential volumes, in 1812 and 1813, and was likewise translated and published by the Godwins in serial form, closely following the Swiss dates. The manuscript of the book still exists, illustrated by yet another of the Wyss sons. It would be difficult to match the familial intensity of this sequence, and surely, before Little Women, no novel in English was more positively domestic in its emphasis. “We then, so many adventures ended, pursued our road to Falcon’s Stream, and arrived there in safety and content;—so true it is, that home is always dear and sacred to the heart, and anticipated with delight…and our domestic animals welcomed our return in their own jargon and manner which did not fail to be expressive of their satisfaction in seeing us again.” Togetherness is the cohesive theme, and building houses that become alternative homes, from an improvised tent to a salt cavern, is a major activity.
The inspiration, once again, was the domestic model provided by Robinson Crusoe, who, having dug his cave and erected his palisade, next builds a farm on the pastoral side of his island, creating, as he says, a winter and a summer residence. Who can forget the image of Crusoe snug in his cave, surrounded by his “goods,” with a faithful dog and chattering parrot for company? And in the Swiss imitation the ante is upped, inspiring the statement that Wyss in effect placed “Crusoe in the bosom of his family,” although we might more accurately say that what we have is “Rousseau in the bosom of his family,” given the pedagogical emphasis of the book.
Where Defoe wrote a fictionalized spiritual autobiography, a Puritan classic illustrating the formula of the Protestant ethic with a concomitant emphasis on the individual, Wyss created its radical equivalent, in which a Deist emphasis on a benign and generous “Creator” points toward a democratic utopia of cooperative togetherness: “Social intercourse, common interests, united exertions, mutual services and counsels…are agents capable of powerfully contributing to the well being of the individual, and to a happy and successful industry.” As he tells his sons, “I want you all to form the habit of thinking and acting for the general good, rather than of what will most gratify or accommodate his single self.”
Defoe’s novel stresses the prevalence of adversity in life. As a sailor, Crusoe experiences one disaster after another. When his ship is wrecked and he is struggling in an angry sea, it takes him several efforts before he can crawl half drowned up onto the shore of his island. His attempts to create necessary artifacts, like his experiments with pottery, meet with failure at first before he is successful. His efforts to make a boat with which he can escape result in one so large that he cannot launch it. These episodes of adversity promote Defoe’s version of Milton’s “Fortunate Fall,” which regards as blessings the hardships experienced by the human race after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. It is a point of view that puts a premium on the virtues of hard work, essential to what became known as the Protestant ethic.
Early in Wyss’s story, the father wisely predicts that “having left our native country; fixed in the intention of inhabiting some more propitious soil, it was natural to expect that we must at first encounter difficult adventures.” Yet the Swiss castaways are much more fortunate than Crusoe, and few of their endeavors meet with disheartening difficulties, never mind failure. When they set out to make a boat, it is accomplished in a few day’s time, and when they start to excavate a cave inspired by Crusoe’s, the rock proves to be porous and soft, and after a few yards of excavation, they find the fabulous grotto within the cliff.
The tree they select to build their house in turns out to be hollow, allowing for a protected entranceway, and although the bees that inhabit the trunk attack the boys, they are soon put to sleep, their honey is harvested, and they are transferred to productive hives. All of the family’s immediate needs are supplied from the ship, a list of necessities and luxuries that is topped off by the beautiful little pinnace that they assemble and then free from the wrecked vessel with a spectacular display of pyrotechnics. In short order, they discover an abundance of nourishing foods on the island, from coconuts to manioc (cassava). In effect, it is Christmas year-round for the Swiss family, while Crusoe observes a perpetual Lenten season of hardship and divine denial.
Yet The Swiss Family Robinson does illustrate the work ethic. Though the family is successful in carrying out its projects, from bridge to boat building, the labor that is involved brings happiness, and its completion brings celebratory bliss. At the end of the first rainy season, the family emerges from its tree house, “with jocund, hopeful hearts, look[ing] forward to the toils of summer as enviable amusements.” When the mother is given a carding device made by her husband, she spends many joyous hours creating flax yarn for spinning, “a chore which became…a source of inexhaustible delight” and the boys set willingly to work at tasks assigned by their father, whether making candles, salting fish, or working with sago pulp: “My young manufacturers with stripped arms joyfully fell to work.”
These are happy campers, never more so than when they set off on yet another expedition, carrying back the bounty of an abundant nature. They are equally eager hunters, gatherers, and eaters, and most days end with a delicious meal prepared by the mother. Critics have scoffed at the great variety of flora and fauna found in the region, forgetting that the larger truth is in the details, for the abundance is not only a sign of a generous deity, it also provides the mentor father repeated opportunities to educate his children—and the reader. In effect, the place is a kind of zoological garden, an important adjunct to the age of Enlightenment.
Though the boys are perhaps too trigger-happy, as the father notes angrily at one point—“Why, said I, must we be always applying the means of death and annihilation to the creatures that fall in our way?”—they not only kill specimen birds and beasts in order to preserve them, they also bring a few home to tame, giving the domestic idea a further dimension.
Early in the book, the father tells his sermonic parable about the paternalistic King who gives his subjects an island to settle, a variation on the story of Creation. It is told in the language of colonization, and if, as James Joyce observed, Robinson Crusoe is an allegory of imperialism, then the Wyss’s imitation provides a very heavy gloss on that text. What the father’s parable lacks, however, is any mention of salvation through the agency of divine forgiveness, generally figured as the Christ. His is very much an Old Testament sermon, whereas Crusoe’s story turns on New Testament notions of grace and election.
Moreover, where Crusoe’s penitentiary home is an island, the map illustrating The Swiss Family Robinson reveals that despite several insular allusions in the book, the family has landed on part of a larger land mass. They are content to settle an area set off from an unknown interior, an impulse that is colonial only in a minor key. Crusoe manages to gain control over his entire domain, inspiring poet William Cowper’s line “monarch of all I survey,” and in the end, having expiated his sins and populated his island, Crusoe is free to return to England to discover that in the interval he has become a rich man—the material signature of God’s grace.
And yet the Swiss family in Wyss’s original story, the one translated by Mary Godwin, does not become wealthy save in the spiritual sense, and the story ends with them happy in their new home. “We had made the first steps towards a condition of civilization: separated from society, condemned perhaps to spend the remainder of life in this desert island, we yet possessed the means of happiness; we had abundance of all the necessaries, and many of the comforts desired by human beings!” Equally if not more important, they were grateful to the “celestial Providence who had so miraculously rescued and preserved us, and conducted us to the true destination of man—to provide for the wants of his offspring by the labour of his hands.”
Switzerland is virtually a byword for snug isolation from the world, and Wyss’s story is surely a Swiss narrative, in which colonization is not an expansive idea, and the acquisition of wealth is not the sine qua non of existence. “Money is only a means of exchange in human society; but here on this solitary coast, nature is more generous than man, and asks no payment for the benefits she bestows.” The captain who discovers the castaway family is given the father’s written account—in effect, the book that has reached its end—and, having been blown out to sea, is forced to leave the family still enjoying their modest and comfortable domain.
We may assume that this ending was improvised by Johann Junior, thereby bringing closure to his father’s creation.*But surely the family’s discovery of the salt cave, their new winter home, ensuring safety during the season of storms, along with their encounter with the platypus, the most exotic creature of them all—the “beast with a bill” that is unknown to even the all-wise, well-read father—suggests a measure of completion. Undoubtedly, though, there were readers who wanted more, and they were not disappointed, yet the further adventures of the Swiss family were quite different from those in the book written by Johann Rudolf. And it was more than thirty years before English-speaking people were able to enjoy the extended sequel, meaning that the book they knew was the one translated and published by the Godwins.
The extended narrative was the work of the Baroness Isabelle de Montolieu, who had earlier translated Johann Rudolf Wyss’s book into French, and, with his permission, added material that eventually became accepted as integral to the work. Yet, as Phillip Holden has noted, there are clear and definitive differences between the two parts of the augmented text, perhaps due to the translator’s national identity, for France during the nineteenth century was a major player in what Kipling would call the “Great Game” of imperialism. Thus the tidy little colony established by the Swiss family began, in the sequel, to respond to the colonial necessity, exploring the unknown territory that lay beyond their settlement.
They encounter much more ferocious beasts, including lions, tigers, elephants, and bears, than they had hitherto discovered, and tame an ostrich for little Frances to ride. Also, a huge boa constrictor comes out of the “savannah,” as it is called, and devours old Grizzle the donkey, a horrible event that is graphically described, as is the “war” the family declares against the tribe of mischievous monkeys who have destroyed the family farm. Instrumental in this battle are the two dogs rescued from the ship, called Bruno and Ponto in the original text (as here); the Baroness de Montolieu changed Ponto to Flora, thereby making possible a litter of puppies.*
As the Baroness’s narrative develops, so do the boys. Ernest, in particular, takes over his father’s role as a virtual encyclopedia, thanks to the books rescued from the ship. Then, posing a ten-year hiatus in the story, the Baroness gives us a Fritz who has become an adventurous young man in his twenties, and who, with a homemade kayak, makes a sea journey, discovering a region productive of pearls and other precious materials. The family thereby becomes wealthy, but Fritz’s most precious discovery of all is a young female castaway on a volcanic island, brought home and welcomed into the family.
This romantic event, though occurring late in the narrative, presumably—like Ponto’s sex change—was intended to rectify the gender imbalance. Notably, in the Baroness’s version, the mother, with her cornucopia-like “enchanted bag,” becomes less important to the story. Another of the Baroness’s revisions was to change the relationship between the sons from one of cooperation to competitiveness, thereby weakening Wyss’s emphasis on the communal necessity of the democratic spirit. Moreover, in adding so many exotic and ferocious animals to the book’s collective fauna, the Baroness only increased the reader’s sense that the place is located in an imaginary geography, an “absolute elsewhere,” to borrow Leslie Fiedler’s term for such dreamscapes of adventure.
I give a hurried recap of the Baroness’s sequel because, although it is relevant to the novel’s post-Wyss history, it is not included here. This text is the original, the faithful Godwin translation of Wyss’s novel, read in English by two generations of children before the Montolieu material was added to it. It is moreover a book quite different from the story that became familiar after 1848, with the earlier version having a much stronger tie to both Rousseau (who is twice cited) and Pestalozzi. It is notable that the English edition of 1848, with the Baroness’s many additions, was followed by other “translations,” all of which made changes to the original story. Holden has discussed three of these translations: that by Mrs. H.B. Paull (1868), Henry Frith (1878), and W. H. Kingston (1879). He found that each of the three, though written within the same period, are quite different, both from the Wyss-Godwin text and from one another. Notably, the latest Everyman edition (1910) of The Swiss Family Robinson (published as a “Children’s Classic”) ignores the Godwin priority and adds a cast of marauding “savages,” presaged by a bare footprint borrowed from Defoe’s story.
As we approach the bicentennial of the first German edition of The Swiss Family Robinson, it is clear that among the many differences between Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe is the fact that so many authors felt quite free to alter the Wyss text to suit changing notions of education and empire. Certainly Defoe’s classic was often abridged to make it more suitable for a young readership, even reducing it to the size of a chapbook, and in some versions the penitential cross on which Crusoe marks his days on the island was changed to a pole—or rod—presumably because of the Roman Catholic connotations of a cross. But the essential elements of the story remain constant, given form by illustrations of which perhaps the most famous was Crusoe with his fur outfit, musket, and parasol discovering the print of a bare foot on the beach. I have a lead garden ornament from the nineteenth century that shows Crusoe reading the Bible to a kneeling Friday, graphic testimony of the power of the Gospels to further imperial expansion.
Holden notes that there is no equivalent dominant image inspired by the adventures of the cast-up cast of the Swiss family. This alone can be taken as evidence that nothing is fixed in place in that novel, yet another aspect that opens the text to subsequent revisions. Commencing with the first German edition, the book was frequently illustrated, but no specific icon became conventional. Even the fabulous tree house is so generally described as to make a definitive image impossible. Yet this absence enhances the most singular aspect of The Swiss Family Robinson, which is that in the minds of so many editors, translators, and (therefore) readers, the book was considered the common property of the Western world, a purely democratic product of a culture that produced one of the first democratic republics. Though lacking the power of the archetype, the novel did serve as a fertile prototype.
Films inspired by the book continued the tradition of liberal revisions, usually increasing the element of adventure while downplaying the didactic dimension. Thus the pirates whose possible appearance the castaways fear actually invade the Swiss idyll in the 1960 Disney version, though more in the tradition of Terry and The Pirates than Malay reality. In effect, De Montolieu granted a license for future generations, who felt free to alter the text to suit changing tastes.
But the Baroness was not the first editor to tamper with the Wyss/Godwin ideology. After the Godwin press was sold, in 1824, The Swiss Family Robinson was altered throughout 1826. Many of the changes were for the sake of clarity—the editorial prerogative—but there were also sufficient excisions of text—at times involving whole pages—that may have been made to reduce the bulk but that also seem to have had a revisionary purpose. Thus we find that the role of the mother is reduced and that the stern teasing of the father is significantly cut back, as are the occasional quarrels between their sons. These changes seem aimed at making the text more acceptable for a young audience, but they also reduced the realism of the original and weakened the author’s intended gender balance. Whatever the intention of the unnamed editor, the revised version became the standard text for subsequent editions of The Swiss Family Robinson, and was incorporated into not only the De Montolieu version but also the Everyman text of 1910.
In 1984, when Holden concluded his study of the several Victorian translations of The Swiss Family Robinson, he wondered about the probable shape of any subsequent translation, and concluded: “A New Family Robinson might well find a market; it would be a rewritten version of Wyss’s text expressing the anxieties and challenges of a post-colonial society, foregrounding women and confronting racism. Such a text in its freedom, would be truer in spirit, if not in letter, to Wyss’s text; it might also have remarkable resemblances to the first of all English translations of The Swiss Family Robinson, that of Mary Godwin.” What follows is that text, in the hope that it will find its audience, two centuries after its initial publication, validating Holden’s opinion that Wyss’s great book “as a children’s classic in the manner of Ivanhoe or Treasure Island seems assured.”