ROBINSON CRUSOE, the best-known work of Daniel Defoe and one of the most widely read of all modern books, was pub lished at London, on or about 25 April 1719, by William Taylor at the Sign of the Ship in Pater Noster Row, in an octavo volume some what exceeding 350 pages, with a frontispiece representing the hero in his goatskin clothes, and under the following show-case or display title: "The Life and Strange Surprizing Ad ventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself. It was a rather expensive, not ill looking book, marred, however, by a consider• able number of typographical blunders.
Defoe at the time of its publication was apparently in his 60th, possibly In his 61st year. He was very widely but not favorably known as a bankrupt merchant who more than 20 years before had turned pamphleteer and poli tician. His satire The True-Born English man' (1701) had brought him fame, but shortly afterward he was ruined through his exposure in the pillory and his imprisonment for writ ing his ironical tract The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,' and he became in consequence a political journalist, a secret government agent and a miscellaneous writer whose pen was supposed to be as venal as it was prohfic. Since the accession of the Hanoverian in 1715 he had been much attacked for his relations with Jacobite newspapers, the fact that he was in reality employed by the government to watch them not being generally known. Of his thousands upon thousands of pages in peri odicals, pamphlets and books nearly all had been anonymous, and, while his style often be trayed him, he had been detected in writing nothing that on the surface markedly resembled (Robinson Crusoe.' Yet it was not long before his hand was recognized in that, a fact which led to some rather stupid criticism of the book; and in our own day certain preliminary essays of his in more or less fictitious writing have been discovered, which make his success in the new vein, which he soon began to practise assiduously, somewhat less surprising than it would have been had he suddenly changed to an unwonted field of composition and produced a masterpiece. That something novel and im
portant had been added to English fiction was speedily shown by the unparalleled popularity of (Robinson Crusoe) in its full form, in cheap abridgments, in translations and in frank imita tions. We do not know the size of the editions, but we do know that before the end of 1719 there were probably six authorized impressions, a Dublin reprinting and several piratical issues, not counting serial publication in a newspaper. Noprevious English story had been so circu lated, and by August 1719 the canny author had presented the public with a second instalment of his hero's history, likewise published by Taylor, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of his Life, And of the Strange Surprizing Ac counts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe.' This, while fairly popular and a creditable piece of travel-fiction, was not, as Defoe fondly thought, contrary to the usage of second parts "every Way as entertaining as the First,' a verdict which applies with still greater force to the so-called third part pub lished by Taylor a year later (1720), not fiction at all but a volume of essays entitled 'Serious Reflections during the Life and Sur prising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World) Both of these parts, like the first, bore the legend 'Writ ten by Himself," for those were days when serious people denounced fiction as "lies,' and Defoe indulged in some curious exegesis in his prefaces in order to justify to his Non-Con formist's conscience his lucrative story-writing.