Robinson Crusoe – or, as its amazing sub-title would have it ‘The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited 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’ is quite an extraordinary book. Published in 1719 at the very dawn of the novel, it was widely taken as a true story. It was wildly popular, running through four editions in its first year of publication, and according to Wikipedia, by the end of the 19th century no book in the history of Western literature had more editions, spin-offs and translations (even into languages such as Inuktitut, Coptic and Maltese), with more than 700 such alternative versions.
This 1722 ‘portrait of the face of London now indeed strangely altered’ offers a fascinating perspective on our current crisis
Sam Jordison
T
his month, we’re going to read A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, free to read on Project Gutenberg. This has been a popular request, for obvious reasons. It’s a book that will give us some useful perspective on our current crisis. It’s also been a source of wonder for centuries, with its stories of “the face of London now indeed strangely altered”, where, over 18 months in 1665 and 1666, the city lost 100,000 people – nearly a quarter of its population.
Photograph: Hulton Getty
The first thing to say about A Journal of the Plague Year is that it is not, strictly speaking, a first-hand record. It was published in 1722, more than 50 years after the events it describes. When the plague was ravaging London, Defoe was around five years old. Defoe claimed that the book was a genuine contemporary account – its title page states that the book consists of: “Observations or Memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665. Written by a CITIZEN who continued all the while in London. Never made publick before” and credited the book to HF, understood to be his uncle Henry Foe. But that shouldn’t be taken too seriously: Defoe also claimed that Robinson Crusoe was written by a man who really lived on a desert island for 28 years, and that his book about the celebrated thief Moll Flanders was written “from her own memorandums”. He even put that claim in the latter’s title, which is worth recounting in full: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Etc. Who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.)
The end of coronavirus: what plague literature tells us about our future
From Thucydides to Camus, there are plenty of hopeful reminders that there’s nothing unprecedented about the coronavirus lockdown - and that pandemics do end
Marcel Theroux
Friday 1 May 2020
Shortly before the London lockdown, at an eerily quiet branch of Waterstones, I managed to get my hands on The Decameron, by Boccaccio,and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. But Camus’s The Plague had gone the way of dried pasta and toilet roll; there was just a desolate gap on the shelves where the copies had once been.
The primary lesson of plague literature, from Thucydides onwards, is how predictably humans respond to such crises. Over millennia, there has been a consistent pattern to behaviour during epidemics: the hoarding, the panicking, the fear, the blaming, the superstition, the selfishness, the surprising heroism, the fixation with the numbers of the reported dead, the boredom during quarantine.
Defoe would have recognised the impulses behind the strange tableaux of life interrupted in central London: piles of ice melting outside abruptly closed bars; a truck unloading gym equipment at an oligarch’s house in Mayfair; jittery shoppers with overloaded trolleys. “Many families,” he writes, “foreseeing the approach of the distemper laid up stores of provisions sufficient for their whole families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely, that they were neither seen or heard of till the infection was quite ceased.”
The sudden, powerful need to know what’s coming is predictable, too. We turn to historical witnesses who can explain what it’s like. Defoe’s motive for writing A Journal of the Plague Year was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Marseille in 1720. Anticipating its spread, readers wanted to know what it had been like in 1665. Defoe, responding to demand, provided them with an instant book, fashioned out of statistics, reminiscences, gossip, anecdote and blood-curdling dramatic detail. “Passing through Token-House Yard in Lothbury, of a sudden a casement violently opened just over my head, and a woman gave three frightful screeches, and then cried, “O death, death, death!”
Bring out your dead ... a depiction of the Great Plague in London, 1665.
Defoe almost certainly didn’t witness this – he would have been about five. Novelistic moments such as these would make the book compelling at any time, but right now it has a painful relevance. Defoe is particularly strong on the unpreparedness and prevarication that made the impact of the plague more severe. Or, as he puts it: “I often reflected upon the unprovided condition that the whole body of the people were in at the first coming of this calamity upon them; and how it was for want of timely entering into measures and managements, as well public as private, that all the confusions that followed were brought upon us, and that such a prodigious number of people sunk in that disaster which, if proper steps had been taken, might, Providence concurring, have been avoided.”
Bracingly vivid ... Daniel Defoe’s religious fanatic Solomon Eagle from A Journal of the Plague Year. Photograph: Colin Waters/Alamy
Defoe is sometimes dismissed as a hack, but his lack of vanity about his prose is one of the things that gives the book its power. There’s something amazingly bracing about his vividness and curiosity – the bills of mortality, quoted in full; minor characters such as the religious fanatic Solomon Eagle who walks around naked with a pan of burning charcoal on his head; and the imprudent John Cock, a barber who is so relieved by the apparent retreat of the epidemic that he returns to normal life too soon and pays the penalty. Moral: don’t be a John Cock.
So much of the behaviour of our 17th-century forebears is uncomfortably familiar. The citizens of east London watch complacently as the plague tears through the West End, and assume they will be fine. They’re proved terrifyingly wrong. Defoe adds in a chilling parenthesis: “For indeed it came upon them like an armed man when it did come.”
Even before germ theory, Defoe’s common sense and perceptiveness lead him to conclusions of which our chief medical officer would approve. He gives a prescient warning about the danger of asymptomatic carriers: “The plague is not to be avoided by those that converse promiscuously in a town infected, and people have it when they know it not, and that they likewise give it to others when they know not that they have it themselves.”
If human behaviour remains dismayingly constant, one thing that has changed for the better is science and our understanding of it. Seven hundred years on, there’s something deeply poignant about Boccaccio’s pre-scientific description of the spread of the Black Death in his native Florence. “What was particularly virulent about this plague was that it would leap from the sick to the healthy whenever they were together, much as fire catches hold of dry or oily material that’s brought close to it. And that was not all. Not only did speaking with the sick and spending time with them infect the healthy or kill them off, but touching the clothes of the sick or handling anything they had touched seemed to pass on the infection.” You feel like the audience in a pantomime, wanting to shout across the centuries and tell him who the villain is and how he operates.
‘There was particularly high mortality among doctors,’ Thucydides tells of the plague in fifth-century Athens. Photograph: Science History
Not everyone responds to plague by immersing themselves in data about epidemics. The escapist response to disaster is another predictable move and The Decameron epitomises it. After his short but terrifying description of the Florentine plague, Boccaccio sends his troupe of young characters into quarantine, where they spend the remainder of the book, swapping funny, ribald stories: the plague doesn’t feature again. It’s a welcome relief to lose yourself in a world of cuckolds and randy nuns. And once more, plus ça change. The gilded Florentine youths are doing the 14th-century equivalent of binge-watching Sex Education on Netflix.
Thomas Mann and Camus are less interested in plague itself than in using it to make existential points. The plague in Death in Venice is an avatar of death in general, the terrible mystery, the pale horse; it is something that strips away vanity and reveals unpalatable truths. In Mann’s novella, it is the catalyst for Von Aschenbach’s humiliating descent into clownish self-destruction. At the same time, the pages dealing with the cholera epidemic are vigorous and apposite. The hotels in Venice empty swiftly, despite official protestations that there is nothing to worry about. It’s a young English travel agent who finally cuts through the official flannel. The doubts he raises about administrative competence and probity are ones that in due course we’ll all be obliged to consider. “‘That is,’ he continued in an undertone and with some feeling, ‘the official explanation, which the authorities here have seen fit to stick to.’”
FacebookTwitterPinterestExistential epidemic ... a scene from Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Camus’ The Plague at the Arcola theatre, London, in 2017. Photograph: Jane Hobson/Rex/Shutterstock
Camus is the real odd one out. The Plague is often read as an allegory of the French experience under occupation, but right now there seems nothing allegorical about it: the hero, Dr Rieux, seems like a naturalistic depiction of a frontline care-worker forced into impossible decisions over who gets a ventilator. At other historical moments, the constant reflection on the meaning of the plague could seem heavy-handed – Gallic, not in a good way – but in 2020 it’s like reading The Cruciblewhile your elderly parent is on trial for witchcraft. For long stretches, you forget any notion of allegory and simply wonder how Camus could have got it so right: from the panic buying of peppermints that people think will be a prophylactic, to the high mortality rate in the municipal jail, to the exhausted healthcare workers, and the terrible monotony of quarantine, something with which we are only just beginning to get acquainted.
And then, of course, the plague ends. That’s the actual good news that these books bring. The epidemic always passes. The majority of people survive. Thucydides himself had it and recovered. “I shall simply tell it as it happened,” he promises of the plague that ravaged fifth-century Athens, “and describe the features of the disease which will give anyone who studies them some prior knowledge to enable recognition should it ever strike again.”
Should it ever strike again is the phrase that awakens our sense of hubris. For all the talk of an unprecedented crisis, we are living through something with many precedents. “There was particularly high mortality among doctors because of their particular exposure,” Thucydides wrote 2,500 years ago in a sentence that could appear in tomorrow’s paper. We have assumed that deadly epidemics belonged to a phase of history that was behind us, as quaint and irrelevant as candlelight and milking your own cows.
When the number of fatalities finally peaks and dwindles, Defoe’s citizens pull up their windows and shout to each other to share the news. Camus’s Oran is liberated; its citizens struggle to make sense of what has happened to them. Back in fifth-century Athens, the Peloponnesian war continues. Whether society changes for the better or worse, or simply stays the same, is what we will find out.
A 1719 illustration of Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday on the desert island. Photograph: Mpi/Getty Images
English fiction began with The Pilgrim's Progress, but nearly 50 turbulent years, including the Glorious Revolution, passed before it made its great leap forward. The author of this literary milestone is a strangely appealing literary hustler of nearly 60 years old originally named Daniel Foe (he added "De" to improve his social standing), a one-time journalist, pamphleteer, jack of all trades and spy. Like Bunyan, he had suffered at the hands of the state (the pillory, followed by prison in 1703). Unlike Bunyan, he was not religious.
His world-famous novel is a complex literary confection. It purports to be a history, written by Crusoe himself, and edited by Daniel Defoe who, in the preface, teasingly writes that he "believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it".
So what do we find in this "History" ? Robinson Crusoe has three elements that make it irresistible. First, the narrative voice of the castaway is Defoe's stroke of genius. It's exciting, unhurried, conversational and capable of high and low sentiments. It's also often quasi-journalistic, which suits Defoe's style. This harmonious mix of tone puts the reader deep into the mind of the castaway and his predicament. His adventures become our adventures and we experience them inside out, viscerally, for ourselves. Readers often become especially entranced by Crusoe's great journal, the central passage of his enforced sequestration.
And here is Defoe's second great inspiration. He comes up with a tale, often said to be modelled on the story of the castaway Alexander Selkirk, that, like Bunyan's, follows an almost biblical pattern of trangression (youthful rebellion), retribution (successive shipwrecks), repentance (the painful lessons of isolation) and finally redemption (Crusoe's return home). In storytelling terms, this is pure gold.
And third, how can we forget Defoe's characters? The pioneer novelist understood the importance of attaching memorably concrete images to his narrative and its characters. Friday and his famous footstep in the sand, one of the four great moments in English fiction, according to Robert Louis Stevenson; Crusoe with his parrot and his umbrella: these have become part of English myth. Defoe, like Cervantes, also opts to give his protagonist a sidekick. Friday is to Crusoe what Sancho Panza is to Quixote. Doubles in English literature will regularly recur in this list: Jekyll and Hyde, Holmes and Watson, Jeeves and Wooster.
Which brings me to Defoe's final quality as a writer. He was the complete professional, dipped in ink. Throughout his life, he produced pamphlets, squibs, narrative verse and ghosted ephemera (he is said to have used almost 200 pen names). He was a man who liked to be paid for what he wrote, lived well and was almost always in debt. He was not a "literary novelist", and would not have understood the term, but his classic novel is English literature at its finest, and he hit the jackpot with Robinson Crusoe.
By the end of the 19th century, no book in English literary history had enjoyed more editions, spin-offs and translations than Robinson Crusoe, with more than 700 alternative versions, including illustrated children's versions. The now-forgotten term "Robinsonade" was coined to describe the Crusoe genre, which still flourishes and was recently revived by Hollywood in the Tom Hanks film, Castaway (2000).
Note on the text:
The text was first published in London by W Taylor on 25 April 1719. This first edition credited the work's fictional protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, and its title was The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: Written by Himself. It sold well; four months later, it was followed by The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. A year later, riding high on the market, came Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Most readers will only encounter the first edition.
Some have said
that the story of Robinson Crusoe is feigned, that it is all fiction. They say
there never was such a man, and never such a place or such circumstances in a
man's life.
They say that
the entire story is an invention imposed on the world.
I, Robinson
Crusoe, being of perfectly sound mind and memory (and I thank God for this) do
hereby declare that such objections are false and scandalous.
I affirm that
the story, though allegorical, is also historical. It is the beautiful
representation of a life of unparalleled misfortune and of varied experiences
found nowhere else in the world. It has been adapted with the common good of
the reader in mind. It was designed from the very first for the most serious
purposes possible.
Further, I wish
to affirm that there is a man alive, and well known too, whose life is the
proper subject of these volumes and to whom all, or the most part of the story,
directly alludes. This may be depended upon as truth, and to this I set my
name.
The famous
story of Don Quixote, a work which thousands read with pleasure, was an
emblematic history of the Duke de median Sidonia, a remarkable person in Spain
at that time. To those who knew the original, the figures were alive and easily
uncovered, as is the case here also.
The Emblem and
the Original
Without taking
the reader into a closer explication of the matter, I proceed to let him know
that the happy deductions I have drawn from all the circumstances of my life
will abundantly make up for his not having the Emblem explained further by the
Original. When in all my observations and reflections in theses volume I
mention my solitude and allude to my lonely circumstances, every part of the
story is a real fact in my history, by whatever borrowed lights that history
may be represented.
So the way in
which I was driven up on the shore by the surging sea, the ship on fire, the
story of my man Friday, and many more incidents I relate and on which my
spiritual reflections have been made, are all historical and true to fact. The
fright and fancies which followed the discovery of the print of a man's foot,
and the surprise of the old goat, are also real stories.
It is most real
that I kept a parrot and it called me by my name. It is true that I had a
servant who later became a Christian, that his name was called Friday, and that
he was taken from me by force and died in the hands of those who took him. This
is all literally true and there are many alive who could testify to the comfort
and assistance he gave to me in my real solitudes and disasters.
Desolate and
Afflicting Circumstances
In a word, the
adventures of Robinson Crusoe are one whole scheme of a real life of
twenty-eight years spent in the most desolate and afflicting circumstances that
a man ever went through. I have lived for this long a time a life of continual
storms. I have fought with the worst kind of savages and have met with
unaccountable and surprising incidents. I have been fed by miracles greater
than that of ravens feeding Elijah, and have suffered all manner of oppression
and violence, including the contempt of men, the attacks of demons, corrections
from Heaven and oppositions on earth.
I have faced
innumerable ups and downs in my fortune. I have been picked up at sea, rose
again and fell again, and that oftener perhaps in one man's life than has ever
been known before. I have been shipwrecked often, though more on land than at
sea.
In a word,
there is not a circumstance in the imaginary story that does not have its exact
allusion to the real story and chimes part for part and step for step with the
inimitable life of Robinson Crusoe.
In the same
way, when in my reflections I speak of particular actions and circumstances
which happened in the solitude of my island-life, the reader will be so kind as
to take it as it is, that it is intended as a part of the real story, to which
the island-life is an exact allusion.
Moral and
Spiritual Enrichment
Besides all
this, there is here the proper and good purpose of all parables and allegorical
history, that it is for moral and spiritual enrichment.
Here,
invincible patience is recommended under the worst of misery, and undaunted
resolution under the most discouraging circumstances. I say, these are
recommended as the only way to work through these miseries. The fable is always
made for the moral, not the moral for the fable.
Had the common
writing of a man's personal history been undertaken and I had given you the
life of a man you know, along with his misfortunes and infirmities, all I could
have said would have yielded no diversion and probably would scarcely have
obtained a reading. The teacher, like the Greater One, would find no honor in
his own country. Thoughts that are designed to touch the mind must come from a
great way off. Even the miracles of the blessed Savior of the world were met
with scorn and contempt when it was seen that they were done by the Carpenter's
Son, one whose brothers and sisters were ordinary people like themselves.
But I am far
from being anxious about whether or not these thoughts of mine will be
effective. I am certain that even if the obstinacy of our age should shut its
ears against the meaningful reflections presented in these pages, there will
come a time when the minds of men will be more open.
There will come
a time when the guidelines of virtue and Christian living which I have
recommended will be more gratefully received than they are now. One generation
will be strengthened by the same teaching which another generation has
despised.Robinson Crusoe, 1720