'Robinson Crusoe Is a Gentleman'

“This day proving wet, we should have passed our time very uncomfortably, had we not found in the house two chests of books, which we eagerly ransacked.” 

Some time in the mid-sixties I was home alone on a rainy day. It was a summer afternoon. Self-conscious adolescent boredom was nagging me. I didn’t want to watch television. What would have been on? Game shows? Soap operas? I looked at the bookcase in my room, uncertain what to read or even if I wanted to read. For some reason I chose Robinson Crusoe, which I had already read at least once. I laid on my bed and read most of Defoe’s novel that afternoon. Even at the time I was surprised that the story sustained me, that it so thoroughly held my attention and enabled me to forget my boredom. It remains among the books I have most often read.

 

Dr. Johnson famously said: “Was there ever any thing written by mere men that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?” (The opposite of what he said of Paradise Lost: “None ever wished it longer.”)

 

The enduring appeal of Defoe’s masterpiece, first published in 1719, is rooted in a common fantasy: If I were marooned on a desert island, how would I survive and what sort of world would I create? You can see how this would appeal to a bored adolescent. Robinson Crusoe remains essentially an excellent adventure story for boys and girls of any age. Like an earlier hero, Odysseus, Crusoe is cunning, courageous and resourceful – the image of ourselves we entertain in reveries. He is also frightened and despairing – precisely our true selves, at least on occasion. I most admire Crusoe’s competence and self-reliance. He gets things done. The best gloss on the story I know comes from an unlikely source – Shirley Robin Letwin’s The Gentleman in Trollope (1982):

 

“What defines a gentleman is a way of being in any circumstances. Even alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe is a gentleman. He reveals a gentleman’s attitude to his plight in his unfailing respect for the humanity of himself and all men; his ability to appreciate the treasures of civilization; his efforts to refashion them for new circumstance; his readiness to build new skills on old; his learning to recognize and repent for his sins; his determination to give his days an orderly shape, to reconcile himself to his misfortune and endow his life with what grace and contentment he can manage.”

 

The passage quoted at the top is taken from the September 3, 1773 entry in James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785).