Robinson Crusoe
HarperCollins is proud to present a range of best-loved, essential classics.'It happen'd one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz'd with the Print of a Man's naked Foot on the Shore.'Shipwrecked in a storm at sea, Robinson Crusoe is washed up on a remote and desolate island. As he struggles to piece together a life for himself, Crusoe's physical, moral and spiritual values are tested to the limit. For 24 years he remains in solitude and learns to tame and master the island, until he finally comes across another human being. Considered a classic literary masterpiece, and frequently interpreted as a comment on the British Imperialist approach at the time, Defoe's fable was and still is revered as the very first English novel.
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About the Author
Daniel Defoe was born at the beginning of a period of history known as the English Restoration, so-named because it was when King Charles II restored the monarchy to England following the English Civil War and the brief dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. Defoeâs contemporaries included Isaac Newton and Samuel Pepys.
Defoe was born in London and during his formative years was witness to the Great Plague (1665-6) and the Great Fire (1666), both of which had considerable effect on the neighbourhood he lived in. In addition to these disasters, the English were at war with the Dutch between 1665 and 1667, which saw many privateer ships involved in attacking the Dutch fleet as Charles had insufficient money to fund the war. Privateers essentially paid themselves with the booty they acquired from the enemy ships, which included trade vessels as well as menâoâwar. In turn this led to the evolution of piracy in times of peace. It is undoubtedly this roguish activity on the high seas that inspired Defoe to write his famous novel Robinson Crusoe.
Defoeâs original surname was simply âFoeâ and his family were humble traders, but he added the prefix to make himself sound more continental and sophisticated. Defoe became interested in social reform and used his first efforts at writing to promote ideas for improving social and economic conditions in London. He was arrested for his activities but had caught the attentions of Robert Harley, 1>st Earl of Oxford, who made him an agent for gathering intelligence about his political rivals.
His literary journey began soon after this when Britain was struck by a full scale hurricane in 1703, which travelled across the Atlantic Ocean and ravaged the southern British Isles for two whole days. The storm killed thousands of people, felled millions of trees and damaged every building in its path. Defoe was inspired to record many first-hand accounts of the hurricane, which he published the following year in The Storm.
For the next fifteen years Defoe was very active politically, writing hundreds of documents for the Tory party, a party which had emerged as a political wing of the Cavaliers following the English Civil War. They were essentially royalists with deeply held conservative views. There had been many stories of pirate adventures in exotic places and a Scotsman named Alexander Selkirk had been rescued in 1709 after four years castaway on Juan Fernández, a tropical island in the south Pacific, off the coast of Chile. Clearly Defoe had been inspired by these tales of danger and derring-do. In 1719, Defoe published his masterpiece,
