"I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called--nay we call ourselves and write our name--Crusoe; and so my companions always called me."
So begins one of the world's classics, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
The book was published on April 25, 1719. The positive reception was immediate and universal. Before the end of the year, this first volume had run through four editions. Within years, it had reached an audience as wide as any book ever written in English.
By the end of the 19th century, no book in the history of Western literature had spawned more editions, spin-offs, and translations (even into languages such as Inuit, Coptic, and Maltese) than Robinson Crusoe, with more than 700 such alternative versions, including children's versions with mainly pictures and no text.
It was praised by eminent figures such as Coleridge, Rousseau and Wordsworth. Even Karl Marx used Robinson Crusoe in "Das Kapital", citing Crusoe's rampant capitalist acquisitiveness to demonstrate economic theories in operation.
And yet by the 1950s it had been downgraded to children's book status despite Defoe's stated aim to inform his readers about the world beyond England and the wide possibilities for self-improvement both economic and spiritual.
I had, of course, read the book as a boy in its German translation and, coming to Australia in the 1960s, still remember the TV series which had one of the best theme music ever written:
Reading this almost 300-year-old book fifty years after I had first read it, I am struck by the resemblance it bears to my own life's experiences, such as when Robinson Crusoe, having successfully settled in Brazil but "born to be my own destroyer" and being "the wilful agent of all my own miseries" through "apparent obstinate adhering to my foolish inclination of wandering abroad ...", was ultimately shipwrecked through having "... obeyed blindly the dictates of my fancy rather than my reason".
This could well become my epitaph, "Blindly obeyed the dictates of my fancy rather than my reason."
