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Why Was Defoe's Story Both Widely Read and Repeatedly Abridged?

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Why Was Defoe's Story Both Widely Read and Repeatedly Abridged? CHAPTER FOUR PIRATING ROBINSON CRUSOE Why was Defoe’s story both widely read and repeatedly abridged? It was exciting and relevant to its readers. It was topical, touching on the Orinoco coast, survival, plantations, and piracy. It fit popular genres: autobiography, spiritual self-analysis, and shipwreck stories. Defoe attempted to engage his contemporaries by this ironic imitation of popular genres. When readers looked at the text, however, they read it as an affirmation of both contemporary genres and imperialistic adventure. The abridged versions focused this popular interpretation of the text and eventually prevailed in the market. The sequence of texts and abridgements as a dialogue The history of Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe1 is nearly as strange and surprising as the adventures of its main character. No sooner was it published than it was kidnapped by other London publishers, who brought out their own abridged versions. When Defoe tried to reclaim the book through threats of legal action and through the publication of a second and third volume, he failed. He and his publisher soon gave up the fight over the text. There is even some evidence that suggests that when the 1 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, where-| in all the Man perished but himself. | WITH| an Account how he was at last as strangely deli-| ver’d by PYRATES. | [Rule] | Written by Himself.” This description of the first edition title is given by Henry Clinton Hutchings in his Robinson Crusoe and Its Printing 1719-1731, New York, 1925, 52. Early eighteenth century capitalization and spelling often does not match modern usage. When I refer to the first volume of Defoe’s series, I will use shortened title with modern spelling and capitalization. I will also give page references from Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn. 88 A Spectacular Failure book was serialized in 1720, the year after its first publication, Defoe himself helped in that abridgement. Defoe claimed that the changes made to The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by its pirate abridgers radically altered the book. We will examine that claim and show that the amazing success of Defoe’s classic story is at least partly a re- writing of his text by its readers. The sequence of texts and abridgements amounts to a dialogue between Defoe and the abridgers. The spadework for this study is Erhard Dahl’s survey of all the English editions of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe for the hundred years after its first publication. In his 1977 study Dahl reports: “They range all the way from the complete 364-page volume to a drastically shortened 8-page penny pamphlet.”2 This re-writing took place so quickly, and the abridgements were so popular, that the original text was overshadowed by the abridged versions. All the abridgements focused on the first volume of the series, and the chapbooks cut the first volume itself down to the island adventure. These alterations made the book available to a broad public. Dahl judges that the abridgements made the book into a much greater cultural force than it might have been: Such changes in the text, price, and form probably resulted in Defoe’s novel having an influence in England beyond its original public. That public, though socially in the middle class, was very limited in numbers.3 We know that Defoe was a writer with a political agenda and we know that he had been a propaganda writer for Robert Harley’s government. He is less well known for his volumes of advice on marriage and raising children, though he published books of advice just before writing the Robinson Crusoe series. Thinking of Defoe as an ethical advisor may strain our categories, but Defoe tries to present his castaway narrative as a kind of parable, with Robinson Crusoe as a spiritual exemplar. In “Robinson Crusoe’s Preface” to Serious 2 Erhard Dahl, Die Kürtzungen des “Robinson Crusoe” in England zwischen 1719 und 1819 vor dem Hintergrund des zeitgenössichen Druckgewerbes, Verlagswesens und Lespublikums, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, 7 (my translation here and hereafter). 3 Ibid., 8..
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