1 - Lost in Translation? Tracking Robinson Crusoe across the Eighteenth Century

Summary

Robinson Crusoe was never simply a book. From the beginning it was something of a cultural event. Published in April 1719, this tale of a Caribbean castaway was an instant success. The first edition of 1,000 copies sold out within a month; two further editions came out within six. And by that time its author, Daniel Defoe, a journalist and pamphleteer whose patron had been politically destroyed four years earlier during the Hanoverian accession crisis, had brought out a sequel. Entitled The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, it was very much part of the story in the eighteenth century, cruising through four editions by 1722.

The success of Robinson Crusoe, volumes 1 and 2, did not bring the impecunious Defoe a lot of money. It is doubtful if he made more than £150 from the venture. For the printer, William Taylor, it brought substantial returns, reputedly 1,000 guineas. It also brought him headaches. In an age of piracy and imperfect copyright, Robinson Crusoe was ripe for picking. Taylor took one interloper to Chancery court in an attempt to prevent a haemorrhage of his anticipated assets, but bleeding was inevitable. An unofficial edition from Dublin appeared in 1719; French, Dutch and German editions quickly followed. And by the 1720s, abridgements of the novel flowed from the presses. In 1731 a German author even coined the term ‘Robinsonade’ to describe the adaptations that were proceeding apace in the wake of the novel's popularity.

Popular it undoubtedly was. In the course of the eighteenth century, 129 productions of Crusoe appeared in print, from the double- or triple-volumed classic, if you include the afterthought Serious Reflections, to translations, abridgements and adaptations such as the New Robinson Crusoe by the German schoolmaster, Johann Heinrich Campe. Henry Baker of the Universal Spectator declared as early as 1737 that Robinson Crusoe had ‘been read over the Whole Kingdom, and pass’d as many Editions as perhaps any Book now extant’. Sixty years later, Thomas Percival could still agree, marvelling at the popularity of ‘the best and most entertaining moral romance now extant’. One London merchant, troubled by the booming readership of Tom Paine's Rights of Man among artisans on the frontiers of political literacy, feared that this seditious book would be ‘made as much a standard book in this country, as Robinson Crusoe & the Pilgrims Progress’.