In Our Time - Robinson Crusoe

Episode Date: December 22, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe. Published in 1719, it was an immediate success and is considered the classic adventure story. There are several incidents that may have inspired the tale, although none of them exactly mirrors Defoe's thrilling yet didactic narrative. The plot is now universally known - the sailor stranded on a desert island who learns to tame the environment and the native population. The character of Friday, Crusoe's trusty companion and servant, has become almost as famous as Crusoe himself and their master-servant relationship forms one of the principal themes in the novel. Robinson Crusoe has been interpreted in myriad ways, from colonial fable to religious instruction manual to capitalist tract; although arguably above all of these, it is perhaps best known today as a children's story. With:Karen O'BrienPro-Vice Chancellor for Education at the University of Birmingham Judith HawleyProfessor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonBob OwensEmeritus Professor of English Literature at the Open UniversityProducer: Natalia Fernandez.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1719, a man aged nearly 60 published his first novel. It's neatly summarised in its title. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York Mariner, who lived 8 and 20 years all alone in an uninhabited,

island on the coast of America near the mouth of the great river of Urunokwe, having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself, with an account of how he was at last and strangely delivered by pirates. The author's name, Daniel Defoe, did not appear anywhere on the title page. Many readers believed they were reading a true account of a castaway desert island existence and his relationship with the man he calls Friday. It was enormously popular, so much so that by the end of the year, DeFoe had already written and published a sequel. The book has been heralded by some as the first English novel.

Its themes of capitalism, colonialism, and man's place in nature have made it the focus of perennial interest, not just to readers and literary critics, but also to philosophers, economists and historians. With me to discuss Robinson Crusoe, Karen O'Brien, pro-vice Chancellor for Education at the University of Birmingham, Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London,

and Bob Owen's Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the Open University. Karen O'Brien, can you tell us a bit about Daniel DeFoe himself? Yes, Daniel DeFoe's life was in some respects as eventful as Robinson Crusoe. He was born around 1660 in London, and his original name was Daniel Fo, and he added the D later on for effect. His father was a wealthy businessman and also a non-conformist. Daniel grew up in London, and when he was very young, he witnessed the Great Plague in London, and this is later reflected in one of his novels, saw bodies being taken out in carts as he wandered the streets of London, and he saw the fire of London. When he was a very young man, he took the extraordinarily risky step

of joining a rebellion against King James II, who had recently come to the throne, and he was very lucky to escape with his life, and he was subsequently pardoned. He then became in the 1680s a successful businessman, eventually going bankrupt in the 1690s. In 1888, when King William III came to the throne, Things really changed for Defoe because in many ways he shared the new government's philosophy of religious toleration and its belief in a limited kind of constitutional monarchy. And at that point he becomes something of a political writer and a successful poet. But he continues with his business ventures. When Queen Anne comes to the throne, however, the climate really changes

and it really hardens against the kind of dissenting religious beliefs that Defoe has. And he writes a pamphlet called The Shortest Way with Descenters, which satirises the hard-line attitude that the then government was taking towards people of his kinds of religious beliefs. And this lands him in a kind of show trial, and he's fined, and he's condemned to spend some time three times in the pillory, which was quite a terrifying ordeal. And he kind of turned it around by writing a hymn to the pillory at the time. And he spent some time in Newgate Prison.

He managed to get out of Newgate Prison, partly through the good offices of the Tory government and of Robert Harley, the then Speaker of the House of Com. who then got Defoe to act as a kind of paid writer and paid spy for the government for much of the 1700s and 17 teens. So Defoe leaves a kind of double life in this period as a writer, as a pamphleteer, as an opinion form of an agent for the government. Once King George I comes to the throne, he's once again out of favour, and it's then that he takes to becoming a writer of fictions, conduct books, but in 1719, Robinson Crusoe, then as you mentioned, the sequel, and then many, many novels after that. It's exhausting, isn't it, his life? Absolutely exhausting. Wow, all right.

Now, Robinson Cruser has been called the first English novel. It is in one sense, but in not in another. Can you brisk to tell us which sense is what? I agree. It both is and it isn't the first English novel. The term novel wasn't very well understood at the time, and there was considerable debate about whether novels were different from romances, whether novels were true what a novel was. There had been since ancient classical times, forms of prose fiction,

so it's not the first prose fiction piece of writing. And in DeFoe's own lifetime, there were all kinds of fictional writings that were very popular, spiritual autobiographies, which are retrospective first-person accounts of conversion and of a journey, a spiritual journey to salvation. And in some respects, Robinson Crusoe, being a retrospective first-person narrative,

has affinuses with those. Also, scandalous kind of amateur novels, often written by women writers, influential women-writers of the period, Afroben's a love letter between a nobleman and his sister written in the 1680s was very popular when Defoe was growing up. Also, in the early... But how was he, we've got to get a move on.

How was he particularly relevant to the beginning of the English novel? He was particularly relevant because unlike the tales of passion and courtly love and intrigue that was circulating at the time, DeFoe constructed a novel that gave a new intensity to the individualized psychology of its... a protagonist. It's not that the protagonist is exactly an example to others. You actually

enter into this character and ask yourselves, what would I do if I were in his shoes? And you actually enter a space that is so precisely mapped in terms of the location of the island that there's a new specificity to the novel that arrives with Defoe. Judith Hawley, could you carry on a bit?

He'd written on that line in a way. He was an accomplished writer of political propaganda. We told he'd written many, many, many pamphlets, an enormous number. But talk about the style he adopts in this novel and can we just try to keep to the theme of what it introduced into the English novel, Greek novellas and all the rest of the Italian novellas.

Let's leave them aside for the moment. Well, let's leave them aside for another programme. What can you tell us about the... The style of Robinson Crowe, Crusoe, it's one of the most meandering novels you might ever hope to read. It isn't divided into chapters. It's an almost seamless retrospective. but also journal accounts woven in,

all from the perspective of Robinson Crusoe mariner. It's full of the circumstantial details that we might expect from a mariner. So it sounds like the speaking voice of a man who's been to see, who's used to estimating and guesstimating things. It's a very mixed style. Each sentence holds together

a number of different ideas which you wouldn't expect to find together. And that mixture, I think, is crucial to the development of the novel. Why is that, do you think? The novel... Why is the mixture crucial? The mixture is crucial.

Mikhail Bakhteen, the great Russian critic, describes the novel as being essentially a heterogeneous form because it needs to be a mixed form in order to represent the mixed nature of reality. I mean, our lives are various. We are individuals, but we're also social beings. So we need a variety of stars and voices. All good novels don't have to be mixed, do they?

Some novels are not mixed. I mean, what did Defoe bring to it that other people had? DeFoe brought into the novel the kind of genres that he is working in already. Some of them were spiritual, some of them were secular. So we've heard about the spiritual autobiography. But he also used a form called the advice book or conduct literature or also a form known as casualistry where people would write to Defoe and say, I've got this moral problem, what do I do?

And he says, well, on the one hand you do this, on the other hand you do that. I know my uncle. Exactly, he was an agony uncle And that process of working out a problem Is something that characterises DeFoe Defoe's characters all the time Well, we got from Karen, a brilliant encapsulation of an extraordinary crowded life

Which she did for us It didn't dwell on the mariner And yet there's so much of the mariner Where did he get that kind of knowledge from? He possibly knew people He's a voracious reader He's a voracious reader of travel literature and among the direct sources for Robinson Crusoe are travellers' tales.

And can we bring in any real-life inspiration that might have helped him? Yes, there are a number of accounts. The most famous man was a man named Alexander Selkirk, who was cast away on one of the islands in the Juan Fernandez, archipelago of Ireland, on the Pacific side of South America. But as you've read from the title page, Crusoe is cast away on the... Atlantic site in the Caribbean.

So the islands are different. And Selkirk is also a very different man. He was a miserable old beggar who actually asked to be deposited on the island because he couldn't get on with the seaman. It's a bit more than that, isn't it? He suspected that the ship was not seaworthy and he didn't stay with it. And he proved to be right because it sank soon after they deposited on the island. I think that's smart thinking, isn't you.

With Robinson Crusoe, it's a sense of spiritual premonition, but in the case of Selkirk. it is a kind of seableness. I'm trying to get at the basis of the... We're going to talk about the mass of knowledge there is. I must have read when I was a kid. I can't remember reading it. I'd read the intensity of the knowledge

about what's the floor and fauna. And everything goes on there. Did he meet Selkirk? Did he read Selkirk? Did he publish it? There's other people you refer to who'd been left on Ireland's published stuff that he could read. Yes, there are a number of texts that DeFoe might have read. Richard Steele, the journalist and the great author of the Spectation Tatler,

seems to have interviewed Selkirk, and he might have read that. There is a story that he might even have met Selkirk, but it's impossible to verify. He seems to be the sort of person who absorbed in an extraordinary degree the language of people around him. He could mimic and parrot.

A parrot is an important character in Robinson Crusoe, and Defoe himself seems to be something of a parrot. to have picked up a turn of phrase, the canton jargon are thieves and pirates and so on, and to reproduce this with enormous intensity. So we had these people, and he's a great reader of travel literature, and so there would be lush descriptions of places visited. It was a big fad at the time. That's right, and he himself wrote travels both of wild countries but also the British Isles.

Can we go a bit more, Bob Owens, into the historical background against, in which DeFoe was working. What was going in England at that time? Yes, just before we come to that, I think the first point to make is that, of course, Robinson Crusoe, the novel itself, is set back in the 17th century. DeFoe switches back,

so Crusoe gets shipwrecked in 1659 and returns to England in 1687. So there's a sense in which DeFoe has obviously quite deliberately decided to shift his gaze away from the immediate circumstances. It's a neat encapsulation of a period that doesn't want to be contaminated, isn't it really?

Yes. Some people make a lot of the fact that it's set in the 17th century and certainly in the novel itself Crusoe is part of his particularity that he gives you these specific dates. I'm not myself sure that it is in fact essentially about the 17th century. I think it is more to do with

the period in which DeFoe is writing. So are we talking about two historical contexts here, the one in which he set the book, which is 1659 to 1687, and the one the period in which he was writing a book, which was later than that, about 20 years, 30 years later. Which are you going to talk about? I'm going to talk about now, this later period. When he was writing the book. When he's writing the book. I mean, Karen has already sort of sketched in a little bit about the immediate kind of run up to 1719. I mean it was a period of enormous stress and strain from one point of view

because England had been involved in a huge European war that had lasted from 1702 until 1714, a very long time. It was also a period of ferocious party political debate and cat and dog fights between the Tory party and the Whig Party. This was, as historians talk about, the rage of party in this period. It was also a period of anxiety about the succession of the monarchy. Queen Anne's, none of her children had survived. Who was going to succeed Queen Anne?

Well, in the event, George I did succeed perfectly smoothly and became the first of the Hanoverians. But although DeFoe was very much involved in all that kind of politics of that period, I think that isn't directly relevant to Robinson Crusoe. What is relevant, I think, is that this is the moment when Britain is emerging as, if you might say, a world power. It had come well out of the war, its economy was expanding,

trade was increasing, and in particular foreign trade. The first sproutings of the Industrial Revolution of that. The first glimmers of that are beginning to happen. DeFoe is very much involved in trade. he's very much a proponent of trade. He wants Britain's trade to expand. And that trade included the slave trade. And that trade included foreign trade

with the beginnings of the British Empire, its colonies in the West Indies and in the Americas. So they would import luxury goods like sugar and coffee and so on at this time. And it did also involve the slave trade. When Britain came out of the war, the peace of Utrecht awarded Britain the contract for supplying African slaves to the Spanish properties in South America. And historians estimate that in the first half of the 18th century, something like an average of 50,000 African slaves are being transported across the Atlantic and English boats in this period.

And this is very much a theme, not a theme, but it's very much a framework within which the novel Robbins. and Crusoe is written. Why do you think it was such an enormous success when it was published, Bob? Well, I think in some ways, following on from that last point, there was an enormous public interest in what we might call the wider world. People's Horizons were opening. These accounts of sailors and travellers were being published. There was a great appetite for them. You read out the marvellous title page of the novel. The novel is offering an account of adventure. in far-off places. Also, I think, I mean, I would want to say it becomes popular because it is a marvellous book. So those early readers... But we want to know more than that. But I think we've got to give credit to the critical judgment of those early readers.

Of those early readers. But I think the things we look at are, of course, it's offering adventure. It's offering that kind of excitement to the reader. but I think even more than that it's the character of Cruzeau himself and we've really touched on that it's this first person narrative voice there's a kind of intimacy with the reader

were taken into the character's thoughts and emotions he tells us about his failures as well as his successes sorry no I'm just saying I'd like to yes I want to talk about yeah thank you very much can just move on for the we're talking about the Desert Ireland. We're talking about Cruso, Karen O'Brien, and Robinson

Christopher 30. He takes an awful long time for him to get there. I didn't realize how long it took. I don't which page, 106 or something, you're right? And there many adventures beforehand. Is it that he couldn't make a bit mind what he was going to do with him? Or is he just wanted to have a long run-in? I think it's important, actually, that there's a long lead-up to the island story. We learn how Robinson Crusoe, as a very young man, growing up in Yorkshire as the son of a German immigrant family, is obsessed with running away to sea, his parents' remonstrations, he eventually does.

And he joins that trading world that Bob just described for us. He sets himself up as a guinea trader. And it's during one of those voyages that he's captured by some Moroccan pirates. And he's two years a slave off the coast of North Africa. So he is enslaved? Two years enslaved. And then he eventually manages to escape. And he's rescued by a very kind Portuguese captain.

He goes to Brazil, found his own plantation, growing tobacco and sugar, those commodities that Bob mentions. And it's when he decides to go back to West. Africa to get slaves for his plantation that he's eventually shipwrecked. This is important, I think, because it shows how in the world of Robinson Crusoe, you can be a stranger in the world, you can be vulnerable, you can be an enslaver and also enslaved. And it shows how people are so dependent on the gratitude and kindness of others. And constantly Robinson Crusoe is thinking of his own ingratitude towards his father. And he's beginning to shape a retrospective sense of

his own life as one that is a failure to recognize his obligations to his father, and then subsequently a failure to recognize his obligations to God, and he's been living a very ungodly life. And when he's on his Brazil plantation, he actually says, I live just like a man cast away upon some desolate island. So that long early section of the book prefigures a kind of isolation in the world that is then reenacted on the desert island. I'm not saying it isn't very exciting because it is. It is wonderful at describing sort of the terror of the sea, isn't it? It's like being inside a Turner painting. The waves are come out, you're 60 feet high,

and he's not going to survive. The boat isn't going to crawl up it. It's tremendously well done that. Because it's called Robinson Crusoe, you're thinking, where's the island, really? Still, you've answered all that. Judith Hawley, can we just move on a bit to describe Romerson Crusoe rather more?

What sort of a man is? What sort of a man he is? He's definitely a mariner. He always takes with him his CI, he's constantly assessing and measuring things. He's also always a trader. He's always thinking about the profit and advantage, the utilitarian value of things that he comes across.

But assessments of him have varied enormously. Corridge thought that the important point about him was that he was an every man. He doesn't do any more than anybody else were doing the same circumstances. Wordsworth, of course, disagreed and thought that he was extraordinarily resourceful. I think the fact is he's a mixed character.

And that is his appeal. He's not a paragon or a hero, but he has failings, and one of which is his treatment of his father, his weird attitudes. He escapes from... Well, actually, that doesn't strike out. A modern-day person, sorry to be a modern-day person.

No. Well, that's precisely the point is... He just says to his father, he stays with him for an extra year, from 18 to 9, and said, look, I really want to go away to see it. I've tried your way, doesn't work for me. So he nips off on a boat,

and then he beats his chest about it for the rest of the novel. But that's it's appease of it. for the modern reader, that it has that sense of the running away from homeness, which is so crucial for most narratives. But another thing which I think is crucial is that he's a very brave man, but he's also an extremely fearful man. And one of the things which is so arresting about the book is his insecurity almost to the point of paranoia, his fear of wild animals, of savages and so on. Well, would you be? Yes. So that's right. It's that sense of the reader can put themselves in that position of thinking

my God, this is my first night on an island what do I do? But when you were saying about the capitalism thing he's always investing for the future isn't just getting scraps of things together. When he goes back to the ship 11 times to get stuff from tools and books and anything he can bring back

wood, planks, gunpowder, muskets and so on and so forth, he's planning for what might happen way down the line and he's planting barley for what'll happen way down the line. Building, investing against the future. Against the future, that's right. And there's an extraordinary moment when on the boat he sees some gold.

And he says, oh, gold, thou drug, I will not touch you. And he has this great sort of sermonising moment. How awful, what wicked things it's done for us. And then he trousers it. And he puts it in his pocket. And then at the end of his time on the island, he counts up what he's got. And he's a great one for checking the balance sheet of things. Where am I now?

And that's his attitude to life. What's good, what's bad? Let's check the balance sheet at the end of the year. But while we're talking about him, before we move on, mustn't get away from the fact that this man is extraordinary enterprising. Your gasp, he's a super boy scouts. He's beyond the Barton Powell. He's a whole trooper boy scouts, isn't it?

I mean, he reinvents all the technology from scratch using nothing more than a penknife. Yes, and he makes rafts, boats. Pots, baskets, bread, the whole lot. Ways to do things. Rousseau loved it for that reason. He has a little country cottage by the sea. Raisins, the whole lot.

Walt wants to get in and disturb this dream. No, no, I'm just going to say that. I think that is really one of the central things that people remember in the book is what you might call his inventiveness, his creativity. I mean, Virginia Woolf famously was struck by the great passage where he manages to make a pot. And it's the intensity of his absorption in the process of making a pot or making bread or making his table to sit at

that I think is very attractive. And that's also part of the appeal. It's not just adventure. It's not just escapism, but this is a real physical world, the same world that the readers inhabit, that it takes days to do something. You know, that the world is physically resistant to his desire.

We were talking earlier about the appeal of it. I think one of the appeals of it, we all, on most of us, like to think, what will we do in that situation if we're completely alone and nobody to help us? With no luxurers, no records. With nothing at all. And he sort of answers us,

this is what you do, but of course he has a little help from the past, like the tools from the ship and all that sort of stuff. Yes, he couldn't have done it without. But even so, I think that's a fascination. You're in this cocoon on your own, and he makes the cocoon work into a world, doesn't he? How can you survive physically but also mentally? What are your mental resources? Yes, that sort of, that worried me, because it's a long time,

and the steadiness of his mind, I think, is more in Defoe's pen than in the mind of a man who'd been there for 28 years. But he has this religious conversion, which is part, seems to be part of, this, strengthening of his mind. And he's brought a couple of Bibles back from the ship, but there's religious conversion in a dream. How important was that for him?

Well, I think it's very important indeed. I mean, the whole novel is suffused with religious imagery and religious references. I mean, he compares himself to the prodigal son and to Jonah and to Job. But the conversion is an absolutely key turning point in the novel, almost as important or maybe even more important

than the famous footprint. scene. And the novel is, as it were, structured like a spiritual autobiography. I mean, spiritual autobiographies were very, it was a very important religious genre at the time, and Christians were expected to be able to give an account of your religious experience. And they usually fell into a fairly clear structure of a pre-conversion, sinful, early life, then a process of conversion, which might be quite sudden or it might be more protracted, and then a post-conversion account of your struggles and trials. And the novel is it where matches that kind of structure,

and the conversion is, of course, the central point in this. We must remember that he had been, defoe himself, had been brought up in the dissenting tradition, which meant you could, amongst other things you couldn't go to universities, so went in Ewington Green. They had their own open universes, which were far in advance of Oxford and Cambridge in many, many ways at that time. And that at a certain stage he was being encouraged to be a priest,

So the notion all that stuff would be Although for the first part of the novel, Romison Crusoe has got no religion at all. Well, that, you see, is precisely the point that he has not, as well, experienced his religious conversion. He lives as aware as if there is no God in the world. He doesn't recognise that Providence is putting warnings in his way and he's been chastised for his sins.

One of the most dramatic parts of the book, in fact, perhaps the most dramatic incident outside the great shipwrecks and waves and all that sort of stuff and tornadoes and hurricanes is the footprint in the sand. Right, Cater Bryant. Indeed, it occurs about halfway through the novel. He's been on the island for 15 years and I'm just going to read a few lines from the passage where this actually happens. He says, it happened one day about noon going towards my boat. I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition. I listened, I looked round me, I could hear nothing nor see anything.

I went up to a rising ground to look further. I went up the shore and down the shore, but it was all one. I could see no other impression but that one. I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy, but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the very print of a foot, toes, heel, and every part of a foot. And it's lovely at the end of the passage how he understands. underlines the material reality of that footprint.

He starts to wonder if it's his own, no, it's the wrong shoe size. So that imprint of that foot in the sand makes him think about his own body, the isolation of his own body, the potential presence of someone else's body. And after that, he becomes extraordinarily upset and beside himself. He's in a state of intense fear and turmoil for a very long time. And he only really recovers that kind of self-sufficiency that he had before by reconverting his island into a kind of fortress. It had been a prison.

After his conversion, it becomes a kind of garden in a wilderness. And then it has to be a fortress that he shores up against the possibility of cannibal invasion. And it's great when he's making that fortresses. I used to make – a lot of people make fortresses when they try to get the sleep, don't they? But his is a spectacular fortress. It is. Nobody can get in, and he needs a ladder. And you learn all about the logistics.

I mean, Robinson Bruce says 9-10 logistics. That's right. And it keeps him safe in the end. Then we bring in a Judeo's hall. we bring in Friday. What can you... We know about the encounter. Well, talk about the encounter of Friday

and how the two of them work out. Yes, it's many, many years after the finding of the footprint, Robinson Crusoe spies cannibals, and he's absolutely disgusted by them, and it revolts him in a physical and spiritual way. And he plans to destroy these cannibals, and then he weighs up the idea a bit. But again, as with the religious confession,

he has a dream and thinks, Wouldn't it be nice if I had a nice friend and, well, slave, to help me out on this island, a companion? And lo and behold, very shortly afterwards, he finds another group of cannibals, and he notices that one of the potential victims is more resourceful and stronger than the others. So the cannibals have come to this island from nearby island to perform their sacrifices. And eat them. And eat them on the beach. and he manages to rescue Friday from these cannibals

because by this time he's wearing goat skins and looks like an extraordinary monster, but also is armed to the teeth. And so he fires some guns, horrifies these ignorant cannibal people who flee, and he rescues Friday. And there's an immediate connection between them. First of all, Friday puts his head on the sand

and puts Crusoe's foot on his head and which Crusoe interpreters being a symbol that he would be my slave forever. We might interpret it in other ways, but he thinks it means you're my slave forever. But it goes beyond that. They form this extraordinary bond between them. He teaches Friday almost everything he knows,

and Friday is a mirror to reflect back to him, his own loneliness and also his own doubts. They have extraordinary religious conversations. And he gives Friday terrific English, doesn't he? I mean, it's a wonderful patois. Yes, well, it's a wonderful patro, but also rather insulting. you know, it's a lesser form of English than his own,

so Friday is always subordinate to him. And he tells Friday his name is master. I'm obviously sorry, I'm sorry. I was saying he names himself as master, so Friday before Friday knows the English language, he knows that there's a hierarchy. But just to pick up on what you said, do you think he deliberately teaches him

a language as is limited, or do you think that he thinks that that'll get by, so that'll do? No, I don't think it's that Crusoe deliberately teaches him a lesser English, but that Defoe assumes that he would not have the ability to pick up English quite so fluently.

Do you want to add to this, Bob? Yes, I mean, just to say that I think, I mean, what strikes you about the relationship between Friday and Cruz, is that this is the most important relationship of Cruzeau's entire life. I mean, he's not one for close human relationships. And I think the thing about Friday is that he really likes Friday. And is liked in return. And is liked in return by Friday.

And there's a lovely passage where Cruzel describes Friday for, you know, for the reader. He was a comely, handsome fellow, perfectly well made, with straight, strong limbs, not too large, tall and well-shaped. And as I reckon about 26 years of age, he had a very good countenance, not a fierce and surly aspect, but seemed to have something very manly in his face. And yet he had all the sweetness and softness of a European in his countenance too, especially when he smiled. So, I mean, what comes across is the close, I mean, it's almost like love. I think it's very important that although that moment that you described when

he puts Cruzo's foot on his head and talks about being a slave is there in the novel and Crusoe knows all about slavery. I mean he was going to collect slaves from Africa when he was shipwrecked. He never refers to Friday as a slave and I think that it's much better to think of him as a servant. It's a very unequal relationship certainly

but in the social context of the early 18th century when servants were absolutely everywhere, everybody had servants and the idea of servants and masters. Actually, everybody was a servant and some people had served. That's right. So I mean, to me, I think that that's... It's manned Friday. It's man Friday, yes, right.

But also in that scene that you described, there's affection and admiration, but there's also the merchant's appraisal of him, as if you were eyeing up a horse that he might. might buy. But he takes him with him everywhere, doesn't he? I mean, he's... But this, Judas,

then the Catholics turn up, the Roman Catholics turn up. I mean, all human life is there at that time. And the, except sex is not there at all. Absolutely none. There's no hint of homosexuality. There's no hint of... Well, of course, there isn't a woman in...

She isn't in the ocean, really, is she? And certainly not in defoece thoughts. His mother and nothing's about his mother either. I come to think of it. Anyway, never mind. We've got race there We would now think of it In the way that you were hinting

And we've got religious differences there Can you just give us Which is more important to defoe at that time Yeah I think for defoe and for Crusoe And for Cruceau religion is more important He engages in a very important passage of cultural relativism When he first is revolted by the cannibals

And then he thinks well actually Who am I To put myself above them and say I'll destroy them and their behaviour is no worse than the Spanish conquistadors. He's absolutely revolted by the Spanish, and it's Catholicism. But he also distinguishes between different types of Catholics. He likes the Portuguese. It's a Portuguese captain who's rescued him,

and he goes back when he leaves the island and makes friends with the Portuguese captain. But he says he won't go back to Brazil because he doesn't want to live and die a Catholic. He doesn't think it's a good religion to die in. And the business of the... the business of this, the Bob Owens, again, let's just come to an end of this. It seems to be more an embattled position with regard to the Roman Catholics.

It's more that they're congistadors than they have a different way of looking at God. Is that right? Yes, I mean, it's now known as the black legend. I mean, there was a terrific amount of propaganda, anti-Spanish propaganda. Of course, England had been at war with Spain for a very long time. So the Spanish were the enemy. But this idea that the Spanish were somehow uniquely cruel, which was in part generated by Spanish accounts, Las Casas,

his account of the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. And there were stories of millions of people, I mean, a kind of genocide. So as far as Defoe is concerned, yes, this is quite true. This is what you could expect from Catholic, I mean, he says at one point, you know, he would rather fall into the hands of the cannibals than the Spanish Inquisition. Karen, do you want to come in on that?

Yes, I think I agree that there is this dividing up of the world into Christians and non-Christians, but within Christianity these crucial differences between Catholics and non-Catholics. I think it's also part of his justification for his control over the island. He's morally superior to the cannibals, but also to the Spanish.

And he earned the right to be master and governor and king of his island, and first by working the land. He now owns the land because he's produced food from it. And then he's morally superior to all the people who come to the island. But importantly, the island has to be a space of religious toleration, and it's a big question in this novel and in The Secret about how you manage religious toleration in a kind of multicultural society.

And that's a question that interested to bear a great deal. He does establish a multicultural society before he leaves. But in a way, there's no sort of idealism that. It still moves forward very practically. He accommodates people with reference to their particular situation. He isn't like Coleridge and a gang rushing off to have an ideal world. It's as it comes, Karen. I think that's how philosophy works in Defoe,

that there is a deep engagement with quite fundamental philosophical questions to do with toleration, the nature of man, the nature of society, but they're realised through very practical, logistical iterations within the novel. DeFoe was certainly very well read in religious controversy, and in political philosophy, but he comes at those questions through this very practical realization within fiction. Did this appeal to the argument going on about the place of the individual in society?

I think that's very much part of what I was describing in Defoe, and he'd read his Hobbs and his lock, and he'd read that kind of philosophy that was concerned with looking at sociability, society, and political organisation from the perspective of a state of nature. In other words, what would man be without society and could he survive alone as an individual of what do people really like?

And when he encounters Friday, he asks those questions anew, and he's delighted and amazed to discover that Friday is intrinsically irrational, potentially a very good person like himself, and so this sets him thinking about political organisation more generally. And then another very pressing question for Crusoe is self-preservation. Locke says we have a right to preserve ourselves. But when he realises that these cannibals have come to the island, he asks that question again,

do you have the right to preemptively kill? somebody else if you think that they might threaten yourself preservation. So in other words, what are our mutual obligations as individuals, irrespective of religion and race, to each other, and what are the limits of those obligations? Very practical, but also deeply philosophical questions. Judith Hawley, quite a lot happens to Cruzeau on Friday after they leave the island. Can you briskly tell us that? I'm going back to what everybody really remembers it for the island story. It's incredibly messy. Crusoe decides to leave the island and he can

because God has put in his path a useful ship that he can depart on. He speeds over the final journey. There are some sort of elements of closure of tying things up. He goes back to the Portuguese captain. He goes back to the widow who's helped him. He ties up his estates in Brazil, as I've said, he didn't want to go back and have to become a Catholic. But then there's this bizarre land passage across northern Spain

in the Pyrenees with page after page of accounts of a Friday teasing a bear and then a huge battle with wolves. Well I think Crusoe is wanting to continue adventure but now he can't actually massacre people

in Europe so he's got to massacre wolves instead and then he briefly summarises 10 more years of adventures that he could if you wanted tell you more about if you liked Robbins Crusoe you'll love the further adventures. So it actually ends with

the trailer for the sequel. Which he rushed out before the end of the year. Before the end of the year. And he was right. The book was phenomenally popular. Yes, it was. Yeah. As well. Karen Abilner, I mentioned this before. One element which is absent from the novel is any sort of romance at all.

What do you make of it? It's absolutely true. Towards the end in the trailer for the sequel, we briefly learn that he gets married, he has a wife and then she appears. It's just a sentence. He gets married, has a wife, three children, pushes off again. That's right. It's a world without women. and unless you count the relationship with Friday as a kind of romance, it is a world without romance.

I think the way to come at this is in terms of genre, funnily enough. He's writing at a time when romances, stories about intense passions between men and women which are dramas of power and desire, are circulating very widely. What DeFoe is trying to do is give us a different kind of story, which is a story of masculine adventure. And I think it's deliberately in some ways

pitting itself against that particular tradition of novelistic writing at the time. I'm told from that he, I read that it didn't introduce one of the new, nothing's due, okay, but one idea that he introduced very firmly is the idea of the island as a place where a novel could take place.

You went to the island, you changed, life change, and then you moved on to somewhere else. Would you say that, does that have any purchase? He doesn't entirely introduce it because we have it in The Tempest. But certainly that idea of the island becomes enormously important in fiction, both for adults and children

ever after. There's a whole genre dubbed it. I don't know how to pronounce it. Robinson Aids, Robinson Arts, from Swiss family Robinson through to the Lord of the Flies. And then also, I mean, there are a lot of people who treat it as something that they admire, but then there's the kind of the empire writing back. There are writers like J.M. Kertsia and Michel Tournier with his novel Vondredi Friday, giving the other side, the island side of the story, the native side of the story. But it is that place of experiment where you can go and be transformed.

And there's a literal example of this HG Wells is the island of Dr. Moreau where there's a scientist literally conducting vivisection experiments on animals to try and turn them into pseudo-humans. And I think Judith's right, that idea of the island is a kind of laboratory space for exploring fundamental questions about survival, the will to survive, the nature of man and the individual when left alone, and how whether people degenerate or whether they survive morally in those kinds of situations has been very, very persistent.

Bobones, we've been mentioning, referring to. to, and a lot of philosophers, Rousseau had a lot to say about it, a lot of people have a lot. But it quickly became a children's book, and then, when the thing kicked in, quickly became a pantomime. When did the transition take place? That's happening in the 18th century, and it's partly perhaps due to the fact that the novel is immediately being abridged, because of course literacy, people could be more or less literate in the 18th century, and so there's a whole market for shortened versions of long books to make them available to less

literate readers. But also particularly there came to be a market for these chapbooks, as they were called, for children. And so children picked it up. And as early as the early 19th century, so Walter Scott is saying that Robinson Crusoe is peculiarly a book that appeals to the imagination of children. And in the 19th century, you get then books being written specifically geared to children, adaptations of Robinson Crusoe, four children. The one I remember best because I was given it as a Christmas present by my aunt

Flory was the Coral Island by R.M. Valentine and the great inspiration of R.M. Ballantyne was to get rid of adults. He just puts three boys on an idyllic island. And then Golding did for that with Lord of the Flies, didn't it? And we have to mention

Treasure Island, the ultimate island adventure. Robinson Crusoe reappears as Ben Gunn, this mad man in goatskins who wants cheese and talks about Providence all the time. It's a brilliant retelling of the same. story. Well, thank you very much. I really enjoyed that. Judith Hawley, Karen O'Brien, Bob Owens. That's Robinson Crusoe next week. Macro-Molecules. Thank you for listening. Thank you. I was going to say Merry Christmas. Why not?

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