In brief
A young man from York ignores his father, goes to sea, is enslaved, escapes, prospers as a planter in Brazil, and is wrecked on an uninhabited island off the mouth of the Orinoco while sailing to buy slaves. He lives there alone for more than twenty years, then with a rescued captive he names Friday, and leaves at last, by his own count, “eight-and-twenty years, two months, and nineteen days” after he landed (ch. 19).
That is the adventure. The book’s real subject is what a single person does with time, tools and conscience when nobody is watching. Crusoe builds a house, grows corn, bakes bread, makes pots, tames goats, and in the same years reads the Bible, prays for the first time, and draws up the balance of his own life. Defoe gives equal weight to the spade and the soul, and the mixture is what made the book a myth.
The argument
On its surface the book is a Protestant spiritual autobiography: the story of a sinner who disobeys, is punished, repents and is delivered. Crusoe’s “original sin” is leaving home against his father’s advice. The father’s speech in ch. 1 praises “the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life” as the safest and happiest in the world, and Crusoe spends the next three chapters being shown that his father was right. On the island the punishment becomes a lesson. Struck by fever, he dreams of a man descending “in a bright flame of fire” to threaten him, opens the Bible at random, and finds “Call on Me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee” (ch. 6). Deliverance, he slowly learns, means deliverance from sin before it means rescue by a ship.
Under that argument runs a second one, less pious and more modern. Crusoe survives because he works, plans, saves and counts. Everything he gains he gains by labour, and every gain is recorded. The island starts as “The Island of Despair” (ch. 5) and ends as an estate. Providence and enterprise are meant to agree: God helps the man who keeps his powder dry and his accounts straight. Much of the book’s power, and most of the argument about it since, comes from the fact that the two stories do not always fit. His thanks to Heaven at the end arrive together with an exact account of what his Brazil plantation earned while he was away.
The shape of the book
The first edition ran continuously, without chapters. The Project Gutenberg text linked here (an edition illustrated by H. M. Brock) divides it into twenty, and they make the shape easy to see. Chapters 1 to 3 are a fast picaresque prologue: the storm off Yarmouth, capture by a Moorish rover and slavery at Sallee, escape in a boat with the boy Xury, the voyage to Brazil, the wreck. Chapters 4 to 13 are the solitary years, the part everyone remembers. Chapters 14 to 20 bring other people back: Friday, the cannibals’ prisoners, the English mutineers whose ship becomes Crusoe’s passage home, and a coda in Europe ending with wolves in the Pyrenees.
The middle section has its own rhythm. Defoe tells the first months twice, once as narrative and once as the journal Crusoe kept “though in it will be told all these particulars over again”, until the ink runs out (ch. 4). After that time thins out: years pass in a paragraph, and single days, a harvest, a failed canoe, are given pages. The great turn comes in the middle, in ch. 11: “the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore”. Crusoe stands “like one thunderstruck”, and the book’s mood changes from building to hiding. Solitude had been his punishment; now company is his terror.
The voice
The title page presented the book as the life of Robinson Crusoe “written by himself”, and nothing in the prose gives Defoe away. The style is a merchant’s: long, plain sentences joined by “and” and “but”, little imagery, numbers wherever numbers are possible. Crusoe tells us the ship carried “about thirty-six pounds value in money” and then that it is worthless to him: “O drug!” said I, aloud, “what art thou good for?” (ch. 4). He takes it anyway. That small scene shows the method. The voice moralises, then acts on a different principle, and Defoe lets the gap stand without comment.
The book’s most famous device is a ledger. In his first weeks Crusoe sets out his condition “like debtor and creditor”, in two columns headed Evil and Good: “I am cast upon a horrible, desolate island, void of all hope of recovery” against “But I am alive; and not drowned, as all my ship’s company were” (ch. 4). It is half bookkeeping and half prayer, and it is exactly how the book thinks. Defoe’s realism is not a matter of description but of inventory: lists of what came off the wreck, how many days a plank took, how many failures before a pot would hold water.
Things and work
No earlier fiction cared so much about making things. Crusoe has the ship’s stores, tools and guns, which he ferries ashore on rafts in ch. 4, but almost everything else he must learn by failing. A few stalks of barley spring up where he once shook out an old bag of husks (ch. 5), and it is years before they become bread (ch. 7). He works for months to hollow a great tree into a canoe, then finds he cannot move it to the water, and concludes, with a bookkeeper’s sigh, that he has learned “the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost” (ch. 9). He makes pots, a goatskin umbrella, a second, smaller boat, and a dairy.
The work changes how he speaks of the place. By ch. 9 he is “lord of the whole manor”, and in ch. 11 he makes a joke of it: “There was my majesty the prince and lord of the whole island”, ruling a parrot, a dog and two cats. The joke is affectionate, but it also says what the labour has produced: not just food and shelter but ownership. This is why the political economists liked him, and why Karl Marx, in the first volume of Capital, used Robinson on his island as the clearest case of a man whose every product is plainly the result of his own labour time.
The people
Crusoe
Not a hero in any grand sense. He is restless, prudent, anxious, often self-pitying, practical to the bone, and capable of real gratitude. His religious feelings are sincere and also intermittent: he prays hardest when frightened. He is honest about his own failures, which is why readers trust him even when they dislike him.
Friday
Crusoe rescues him from a cannibal feast in ch. 14 and at once names him: “his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life”. The next sentence is the one modern readers stop at: “I likewise taught him to say Master; and then let him know that was to be my name”. Friday is loyal, quick and affectionate, and Defoe gives him the book’s best question. Taught that God is stronger than the devil, he asks “why God no kill the devil, so make him no more do wicked?” (ch. 15), and Crusoe, who is “but a young doctor”, has no good answer.
The others
Crusoe’s father, who appears for one speech and governs the whole book. Xury, the boy who shares his escape from Sallee and whom he sells to the Portuguese captain for sixty pieces of eight, “loth to sell the poor boy’s liberty” but selling it all the same (ch. 3). The Portuguese captain himself, who keeps faith over decades and makes Crusoe rich at the end. Poll the parrot, who wakes him by crying “Poor Robin Crusoe! Where are you?” (ch. 10), the only voice he hears for years, and a voice that is his own.
Slavery and empire
The book is honest about its world even when its hero is not troubled by it. Crusoe is wrecked because, as a prosperous planter, he agreed to sail “supercargo to Guinea to fetch negroes” (ch. 14); he regrets the voyage as bad business, not as wrong. He has himself been a slave, and still sells Xury. On the island he debates at length whether he has any right to attack the cannibals, and reasons that they have done him no injury and that killing them would “justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America” (ch. 12). It is one of the most thoughtful passages in the book, and one of the most often forgotten.
By the end the island has become a colony in all but name. Crusoe jokes that he has three subjects of three religions, Friday a Protestant, his father a pagan, the Spaniard a Papist, and that “I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions” (ch. 16). In the last pages he revisits it, divides the land among the settlers, “reserved to myself the property of the whole”, and sends out women “proper for service, or for wives” (ch. 20). Few novels show so plainly how a castaway becomes a proprietor.
How it was made
Defoe was nearly sixty when the book appeared in London on 25 April 1719, published by William Taylor. He had been a hosier and merchant, gone bankrupt, written hundreds of pamphlets, edited the Review, worked as a government agent, and stood in the pillory in 1703 for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a satire taken literally. He had never written a novel. He was a Dissenter, raised outside the Church of England, and the book’s habits of self-examination come from that tradition.
The obvious source is Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who asked to be put ashore on Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernández Islands in 1704 and was taken off in 1709 by Woodes Rogers’s privateers. His story was well known by 1719. But Defoe moved the island to the Caribbean, lengthened the stay from four years to twenty-eight, and added everything that matters: the religion, the journal, the footprint, Friday. The book sold quickly and went through several editions within months. Defoe followed it with The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe later in 1719 and Serious Reflections in 1720, in which Crusoe claims the story was an allegory of a real life.
Readers and critics
Its first critic was hostile: Charles Gildon’s pamphlet of 1719 mocked its slips and its pretence of being a true history. Readers did not care. Rousseau, in Émile (1762), made it the first book, and for a long time the only one, his ideal pupil was to read: a manual of self-reliance and natural education. The nineteenth century read it as a boys’ book and an imperial primer.
Modern criticism has argued over its centre. Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) made Crusoe the type of economic individualism and the book a founding document of the realist novel. Critics such as G. A. Starr and J. Paul Hunter answered that its real model is Puritan spiritual autobiography and providential literature. James Joyce, lecturing in Trieste in 1912, saw in Crusoe the prototype of the British colonist, and in Friday the trusty subject race. Postcolonial readings have since made Friday, and the naming scene, the heart of the book.
Afterlives
The story gave its name to a genre, the Robinsonade, and “Man Friday” to the language. Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) put a family on the island; Jules Verne and R. M. Ballantyne made it an adventure for boys, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) turned that tradition dark. Michel Tournier’s Vendredi (1967) lets Friday teach Crusoe; J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) adds a woman castaway and makes Friday tongueless, a figure for everyone the story could not speak for. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Crusoe in England” imagines him old and lonely at home. On screen there are Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954), Cast Away (2000) and, in effect, The Martian (2015), Crusoe on another planet.
How to read it
- Read the first three chapters quickly. They are prologue; the book begins with the wreck.
- Watch the lists. Inventories, dates and counts are where Defoe’s realism lives, and where Crusoe shows what he values.
- Read the Evil and Good table slowly. It is the book’s method in one page.
- Notice when he prays. His piety rises with fear and falls with comfort; Defoe records both honestly.
- Do not skip the end. The money, the colony and the women sent out as wives show what the island was for.
Read next
- Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722). The same plain voice and ledger mind, applied to a woman surviving in London.
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726). A sea captain’s plain narrative turned into satire, partly at the expense of books like this one.
- John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). The Puritan journey of the soul that Crusoe’s story keeps half retelling.
- J. M. Coetzee, Foe (1986). The story retold by someone it left out.
- William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954). The island story with the confidence taken away.