Title page from the first edition
| |
| Author | Daniel Defoe |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Adventure, historical fiction |
| Publisher | William Taylor |
Publication date
| 25 April 1719 |
| Followed by | The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe |
Robinson Crusoe[a] (/ˈkruːsoʊ/) is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. The first edition credited the work's protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents.
Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is presented as an autobiography of the title character (whose birth name is Robinson Kreutznaer)—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers, before ultimately being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra", now part of Chile, which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.
Despite its simple narrative style, Robinson Crusoe was well received in the literary world and is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre. It is generally seen as a contender for the first English novel. Before the end of 1719, the book had already run through four editions, and it has gone on to become one of the most widely published books in history, spawning so many imitations, not only in literature but also in film, television and radio, that its name is used to define a genre, the Robinsonade.
Plot summary
Pictorial map of Crusoe's island, the "Island of Despair", showing incidents from the book
Crusoe (the family name corrupted from the German name "Kreutznaer") set sail from Kingston upon Hull
on a sea voyage in August 1651, against the wishes of his parents, who
wanted him to pursue a career in law. After a tumultuous journey where
his ship is wrecked in a storm, his lust for the sea remains so strong
that he sets out to sea again. This journey, too, ends in disaster, as
the ship is taken over by Salé pirates (the Salé Rovers) and Crusoe is enslaved by a Moor. Two years later, he escapes in a boat with a boy named Xury; a captain of a Portuguese ship off the west coast of Africa rescues him. The ship is en route to Brazil. Crusoe sells Xury to the captain. With the captain's help, Crusoe procures a plantation.
Years later, Crusoe joins an expedition to bring slaves from Africa,
but he is shipwrecked in a storm about forty miles out to sea on an
island (which he calls the Island of Despair) near the mouth of the Orinoco river on 30 September 1659. He observes the latitude as 9 degrees and 22 minutes north. He sees penguins and seals
on his island. As for his arrival there, only he and three animals,
the captain's dog and two cats, survive the shipwreck. Overcoming his
despair, he fetches arms, tools and other supplies from the ship before
it breaks apart and sinks. He builds a fenced-in habitat near a cave
which he excavates. By making marks in a wooden cross, he creates a
calendar. By using tools salvaged from the ship, and some which he
makes himself, he hunts, grows barley and rice, dries grapes to make
raisins, learns to make pottery and raises goats. He also adopts a
small parrot. He reads the Bible and becomes religious, thanking God
for his fate in which nothing is missing but human society.
More years pass and Crusoe discovers native cannibals,
who occasionally visit the island to kill and eat prisoners. At first
he plans to kill them for committing an abomination but later realizes
he has no right to do so, as the cannibals do not knowingly commit a
crime. He dreams of obtaining one or two servants by freeing some
prisoners; when a prisoner escapes, Crusoe helps him, naming his new
companion "Friday" after the day of the week he appeared. Crusoe then teaches him English and converts him to Christianity.
After more natives arrive to partake in a cannibal feast, Crusoe
and Friday kill most of the natives and save two prisoners. One is
Friday's father and the other is a Spaniard, who informs Crusoe about
other Spaniards shipwrecked on the mainland. A plan is devised wherein
the Spaniard would return to the mainland with Friday's father and bring
back the others, build a ship, and sail to a Spanish port.
Before the Spaniards return, an English ship appears; mutineers
have commandeered the vessel and intend to maroon their captain on the
island. Crusoe and the ship's captain strike a deal in which Crusoe
helps the captain and the loyal sailors retake the ship and leave the
worst mutineers on the island. Before embarking for England, Crusoe
shows the mutineers how he survived on the island and states that there
will be more men coming. Crusoe leaves the island 19 December 1686 and
arrives in England on 11 June 1687. He learns that his family believed
him dead; as a result, he was left nothing in his father's will. Crusoe
departs for Lisbon to reclaim the profits of his estate in Brazil,
which has granted him much wealth. In conclusion, he transports his
wealth overland to England from Portugal to avoid traveling by sea.
Friday accompanies him and, en route, they endure one last adventure together as they fight off famished wolves while crossing the Pyrenees.
Characters
Robinson Crusoe: The narrator of the novel who gets shipwrecked.
Friday: Servant to Robinson Crusoe.
Xury: Former servant to Crusoe, helps him escape Sallee; is later sold to the Portuguese Captain.
The Widow: Friend to Robinson Crusoe. She looks over his assets while he is away.
Portugese Sea Captain: Helps save Robinson Crusoe from slavery. Is very generous and close with Crusoe; helps him with his money and plantation.
Ismael: Secures Robinson Crusoe a boat for escaping Sallee.
The Spaniard: Rescued by Robinson Crusoe and helps him escape his island.
Religion
Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719 during the Enlightenment period of the 18th century. In the novel Crusoe sheds light on different aspects of Christianity and his beliefs. The book can be considered a spiritual autobiography
as Crusoe's views on religion drastically change from the start of his
story and then the end. In the beginning of the book Crusoe is concerned
with sailing away from home, whereupon he meets violent storms at sea.
He promises to God that if he survived that storm he would be a dutiful Christian
man and head home according to his parent's wishes. However, when
Crusoe survives the storm he decides to keep sailing and notes that he
could not fulfil the promises he had made during his turmoil.
After Robinson is shipwrecked on his island he begins to suffer
from extreme isolation. He turns to his animals to talk to, such as his
parrot, but misses human contact. He turns to God during his time of
turmoil in search of solace and guidance. He retrieves a bible from a
ship that was washed along the shore and begins to memorize verses.
In times of trouble he would open the bible to a random page where he
would read a verse that he believed God had made him open and read, and
that would ease his mind. Therefore, during the time in which Crusoe was
shipwrecked he became very religious and often would turn to God for
help.
When Crusoe meets his servant Xury he begins to teach him scripture
and about Christianity. He tried to teach Xury to the best of his
ability about God and what Heaven and Hell was. His purpose was to
convert Xury into being a Christain and wanted to his with him his
values and beliefs. “During the long time that Friday has now been with
me, and that he began to speak to me, and understand me, I was not
wanting to lay a foundation of religious knowledge in his mind;
particularly I ask'd him one time who made him?”
Sources and real-life castaways
Statue of Robinson Crusoe at Alexander Selkirk's birthplace of Lower Largo by Thomas Stuart Burnett
Book on Alexander Selkirk
There were many stories of real-life castaways in Defoe's time. Most famously, Defoe's suspected inspiration for Robinson Crusoe is thought to be Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years on the uninhabited island of Más a Tierra (renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966) in the Juan Fernández Islands off the Chilean coast. Selkirk was rescued in 1709 by Woodes Rogers during an English expedition that led to the publication of Selkirk's adventures in both A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World and A Cruising Voyage Around the World in 1712. According to Tim Severin,
"Daniel Defoe, a secretive man, neither confirmed or denied that
Selkirk was the model for the hero of his book. Apparently written in
six months or less, Robinson Crusoe was a publishing phenomenon.
The author of Crusoe's Island, Andrew Lambert
states, "the ideas that a single, real Crusoe is a 'false premise'
because Crusoe's story is a complex compound of all the other buccaneer
survival stories." However, Robinson Crusoe
is far from a copy of Rogers' account: Becky Little argues three events
that distinguish the two stories. Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked while
Selkirk decided to leave his ship thus marooning himself; the island
Crusoe was shipwrecked on had already been inhabited, unlike the
solitary nature of Selkirk's adventures. The last and most crucial
difference between the two stories is Selkirk is a pirate, looting and
raiding coastal cities. "The economic and dynamic thrust of the book is
completely alien to what the buccaneers are doing," Lambert says. "The
buccaneers just want to capture some loot and come home and drink it
all, and Crusoe isn’t doing that at all. He's an economic imperialist.
He's creating a world of trade and profit."
Other possible sources for the narrative include Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, and Spanish sixteenth-century sailor Pedro Serrano. Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is a twelfth-century philosophical novel also set on a desert island and translated into Latin and English a number of times in the half-century preceding Defoe's novel.
Pedro Luis Serrano was a Spanish sailor who was marooned for
seven or eight years in the sixteenth century on a small desert island
after shipwrecking on a small island in the Caribbean off the coast of
Nicaragua in 1520s. He had no access to fresh water and lived off the
blood and flesh of sea turtles and birds. He was quite a celebrity when
he returned to Europe and before passing away, he recorded the hardships
suffered in documents that show the endless anguish and suffering, the
product of absolute abandonment to his fate, now held in the General Archive of the Indies, in Seville.
It is very likely that Defoe heard his story, 200 years old by then but
still very popular, in one of his visits to Spain before becoming a
writer.
Yet another source for Defoe's novel may have been the Robert Knox account of his abduction by the King of Ceylon Rajasinha II of Kandy in 1659 in An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon.
Tim Severin's book Seeking Robinson Crusoe
(2002) unravels a much wider and more plausible range of potential
sources of inspiration, and concludes by identifying castaway surgeon
Henry Pitman as the most likely. An employee of the Duke of Monmouth, Pitman played a part in the Monmouth Rebellion.
His short book about his desperate escape from a Caribbean penal
colony, followed by his shipwrecking and subsequent desert island
misadventures, was published by John Taylor of Paternoster Row, London, whose son William Taylor
later published Defoe's novel. Severin argues that since Pitman appears
to have lived in the lodgings above the father's publishing house and
that Defoe himself was a mercer in the area at the time, Defoe may have
met Pitman in person and learned of his experiences first-hand, or
possibly through submission of a draft. Severin also discusses another publicised case of a marooned man named only as Will, of the Miskito people of Central America, who may have led to the depiction of Friday.
Arthur Wellesley Secord in his Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe (1963: 21–111) analyses the composition of Robinson Crusoe
and gives a list of possible sources of the story, rejecting the common
theory that the story of Selkirk is Defoe's only source.
Reception and sequels
Plaque in Queen's Gardens, Hull, showing him on his island
The book was published on 25 April 1719. Before the end of the year, this first volume had run through four editions.
By the end of the nineteenth 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) than Robinson Crusoe, with more than 700 such alternative versions, including children's versions with pictures and no text.
The term "Robinsonade" was coined to describe the genre of stories similar to Robinson Crusoe.
Defoe went on to write a lesser-known sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(1719). It was intended to be the last part of his stories, according
to the original title page of the sequel's first edition, but a third
book, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World (1720), was written.
Interpretations
Crusoe standing over Friday after he frees him from the cannibals
Novelist James Joyce noted that the true symbol of the British Empire
is Robinson Crusoe, to whom he ascribed stereotypical and somewhat
hostile English racial characteristics: "He is the true prototype of the
British colonist. ... The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit in Crusoe: the manly
independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet
efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity."
In a sense Crusoe attempts to replicate his society on the island.
This is achieved through the use of European technology, agriculture and
even a rudimentary political hierarchy. Several times in the novel
Crusoe refers to himself as the "king" of the island, whilst the captain
describes him as the "governor" to the mutineers. At the very end of
the novel the island is explicitly referred to as a "colony". The
idealised master-servant relationship Defoe depicts between Crusoe and
Friday can also be seen in terms of cultural imperialism.
Crusoe represents the "enlightened" European whilst Friday is the
"savage" who can only be redeemed from his barbarous way of life through
assimilation into Crusoe's culture. Nonetheless Defoe also takes the
opportunity to criticise the historic Spanish conquest of South America.
According to J. P. Hunter, Robinson is not a hero but an everyman. He begins as a wanderer, aimless on a sea he does not understand, and ends as a pilgrim, crossing a final mountain to enter the promised land. The book tells the story of how Robinson becomes closer to God, not through listening to sermons in a church but through spending time alone amongst nature with only a Bible to read.
Conversely, cultural critic and literary scholar Michael Gurnow views the novel from a Rousseauian
perspective. In "'The Folly of Beginning a Work Before We Count the
Cost': Anarcho-Primitivism in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe", the
central character's movement from a primitive state to a more civilized
one is interpreted as Crusoe's denial of humanity's state of nature.
Robinson Crusoe is filled with religious aspects. Defoe was a Puritan moralist and normally worked in the guide tradition, writing books on how to be a good Puritan Christian, such as The New Family Instructor (1727) and Religious Courtship (1722). While Robinson Crusoe
is far more than a guide, it shares many of the themes and theological
and moral points of view. "Crusoe" may have been taken from Timothy
Cruso, a classmate of Defoe's who had written guide books, including God the Guide of Youth (1695), before dying at an early age—just eight years before Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe.
Cruso would have been remembered by contemporaries and the association
with guide books is clear. It has even been speculated that God the Guide of Youth inspired Robinson Crusoe because of a number of passages in that work that are closely tied to the novel. A leitmotif of the novel is the Christian notion of Providence, penitence and redemption.
Crusoe comes to repent of the follies of his youth. Defoe also
foregrounds this theme by arranging highly significant events in the
novel to occur on Crusoe's birthday. The denouement culminates not only
in Crusoe's deliverance from the island, but his spiritual deliverance,
his acceptance of Christian doctrine, and in his intuition of his own
salvation.
When confronted with the cannibals, Crusoe wrestles with the problem of cultural relativism.
Despite his disgust, he feels unjustified in holding the natives
morally responsible for a practice so deeply ingrained in their culture.
Nevertheless, he retains his belief in an absolute standard of
morality; he regards cannibalism as a "national crime" and forbids
Friday from practising it.
In classical, neoclassical and Austrian economics, Crusoe is regularly used to illustrate the theory of production and choice in the absence of trade, money and prices.
Crusoe must allocate effort between production and leisure and must
choose between alternative production possibilities to meet his needs.
The arrival of Friday is then used to illustrate the possibility of
trade and the gains that result.
Tim Severin's book Seeking Robinson Crusoe
(2002) unravels a much wider range of potential sources of inspiration.
Severin concludes his investigations by stating that the real Robinson
Crusoe figure was Henry Pitman, a castaway who had been surgeon to the Duke of Monmouth. Pitman's short book about his desperate escape from a Caribbean penal colony for his part in the Monmouth Rebellion, his shipwrecking and subsequent desert island misadventures was published by J. Taylor of Paternoster Street, London, whose son William Taylor
later published Defoe's novel. Severin argues that since Pitman
appears to have lived in the lodgings above the father's publishing
house and since Defoe was a mercer
in the area at the time, Defoe may have met Pitman and learned of his
experiences as a castaway. If he did not meet Pitman, Severin points
out that Defoe, upon submitting even a draft of a novel about a castaway
to his publisher, would undoubtedly have learned about Pitman's book
published by his father, especially since the interesting castaway had
previously lodged with them at their former premises.
Severin also provides evidence in his book that another publicised case[24] of a real-life marooned Miskito Central American man named only as Will may have caught Defoe's attention, inspiring the depiction of Man Friday in his novel.
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 on the sand.— Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, 1719
The work has been variously read as an allegory for the development
of civilisation; as a manifesto of economic individualism; and as an
expression of European colonial desires. Significantly, it also shows
the importance of repentance and illustrates the strength of Defoe's
religious convictions. Critics such as Maximillian E. Novak support the
connection between the religious and economic themes within Robinson Crusoe,
citing Defoe's religious ideology as the influence for his portrayal of
Crusoe's economic ideals and his support of the individual. Within his
article "Robinson Crusoe's 'Original Sin'", Novak cites Ian Watt's extensive research in Watt's book, Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe,
in which Watt explores the impact that several Romantic Era novels had
against economic individualism, and the reversal of those ideals that
takes place within Robinson Crusoe.
In Tess Lewis's review, "The Heroes We Deserve", of Ian Watt's article,
she furthers Watt's argument with a development on Defoe's intention as
an author, "to use individualism to signify nonconformity in religion
and the admirable qualities of self-reliance" (Lewis 678). This further
supports the belief that Defoe used aspects of spiritual autobiography
in order to introduce the benefits of individualism to a not entirely
convinced religious community. J. Paul Hunter has written extensively on the subject of Robinson Crusoe
as apparent spiritual autobiography, tracing the influence of Defoe's
Puritan ideology through Crusoe's narrative, and his acknowledgement of
human imperfection in pursuit of meaningful spiritual engagements—the
cycle of "repentance [and] deliverance." This spiritual pattern and its episodic nature, as well as the re-discovery of earlier female novelists, have kept Robinson Crusoe from being classified as a novel, let alone the first novel written in English—despite the blurbs on some book covers. Early critics, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, admired it, saying that the footprint scene in Crusoe
was one of the four greatest in English literature and most
unforgettable; more prosaically, Dr. Wesley Vernon has seen the origins
of forensic podiatry in this episode. It has inspired a new genre, the Robinsonade, as works such as Johann David Wyss' The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) adapt its premise and has provoked modern postcolonial responses, including J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and Michel Tournier's Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (in English, Friday, or, The Other Island) (1967). Two sequels followed, Defoe's The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and his Serious reflections during the life and surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe: with his Vision of the angelick world (1720). Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) in part parodies Defoe's adventure novel.
Legacy
The book proved so popular that the names of the two main protagonists have entered the language. During World War II, people who decided to stay and hide in the ruins of the German-occupied city of Warsaw for a period of three winter months, from October to January 1945, when they were rescued by the Red Army, were later called Robinson Crusoes of Warsaw (Robinsonowie warszawscy). Robinson Crusoe usually referred to his servant as "my man Friday", from which the term "Man Friday" (or "Girl Friday") originated.
Robinson Crusoe marked the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre. Its success led to many imitators, and castaway novels, written by Ambrose Evans, Penelope Aubin, and others, became quite popular in Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Most of these have fallen into obscurity, but some became established, including The Swiss Family Robinson, which borrowed Crusoe's first name for its title.
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, published seven years after Robinson Crusoe, may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability. In The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man, Warren Montag
argues that Swift was concerned about refuting the notion that the
individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. In Treasure Island, author Robert Louis Stevenson parodies Crusoe with the character of Ben Gunn,
a friendly castaway who was marooned for many years, has a wild
appearance, dresses entirely in goat skin and constantly talks about
providence.
In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's treatise on education, Emile, or on Education, the one book the protagonist is allowed to read before the age of twelve is Robinson Crusoe.
Rousseau wants Emile to identify himself as Crusoe so he can rely upon
himself for all of his needs. In Rousseau's view, Emile needs to imitate
Crusoe's experience, allowing necessity to determine what is to be
learned and accomplished. This is one of the main themes of Rousseau's
educational model.
Robinson Crusoe bookstore on İstiklal Avenue, Istanbul.
In The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, Beatrix Potter directs the reader to Robinson Crusoe for a detailed description of the island (the land of the Bong tree) to which her eponymous hero moves. In Wilkie Collins' most popular novel, The Moonstone,
one of the chief characters and narrators, Gabriel Betteredge, has
faith in all that Robinson Crusoe says and uses the book for a sort of divination. He considers The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
the finest book ever written, reads it over and over again, and
considers a man but poorly read if he had happened not to read the book.
French novelist Michel Tournier published Friday, or, The Other Island (French Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique)
in 1967. His novel explores themes including civilization versus
nature, the psychology of solitude, as well as death and sexuality in a
retelling of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe story. Tournier's Robinson
chooses to remain on the island, rejecting civilization when offered the
chance to escape 28 years after being shipwrecked. Likewise, in 1963, J. M. G. Le Clézio, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, published the novel Le Proces-Verbal. The book's epigraph is a quote from Robinson Crusoe, and like Crusoe, Adam Pollo suffers long periods of loneliness.
"Crusoe in England", a 183-line poem by Elizabeth Bishop, imagines Crusoe near the end of his life, recalling his time of exile with a mixture of bemusement and regret.
J. M. Coetzee's 1986 novel Foe recounts the tale of Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of a woman named Susan Barton.
The story was also illustrated and published in comic book form by Classics Illustrated
in 1943 and 1957. The much improved 1957 version was inked/penciled by
Sam Citron, who is most well known for his contributions to the earlier
issues of Superman.
A pantomime version of Robinson Crusoe was staged at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1796, with Joseph Grimaldi as Pierrot in the harlequinade. The piece was produced again in 1798, this time starring Grimaldi as Clown. In 1815, Grimaldi played Friday in another version of Robinson Crusoe.
Jacques Offenbach wrote an opéra comique called Robinson Crusoé, which was first performed at the Opéra-Comique
in Paris on 23 November 1867. This was based on the British pantomime
version rather than the novel itself. The libretto was by Eugène Cormon and Hector-Jonathan Crémieux.
There have been a number of other stage adaptations, including those by Isaac Pocock, Jim Helsinger and Steve Shaw and a Musical by Victor Prince.
There is a 1927 silent film titled Robinson Crusoe. The Soviet 3D film Robinson Crusoe was produced in 1947. Luis Buñuel directed Adventures of Robinson Crusoe starring Dan O'Herlihy, released in 1954. Walt Disney later comedicized the novel with Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N., featuring Dick Van Dyke. In this version, Friday became a beautiful woman, but named 'Wednesday' instead. Peter O'Toole and Richard Roundtree co-starred in a 1975 film Man Friday
which sardonically portrayed Crusoe as incapable of seeing his
dark-skinned companion as anything but an inferior creature, while
Friday is more enlightened and sympathetic. In 1988, Aidan Quinn portrayed Robinson Crusoe in the film Crusoe. A 1997 movie entitled Robinson Crusoe starred Pierce Brosnan and received limited commercial success. Variations on the theme include the 1954 Miss Robin Crusoe, with a female castaway, played by Amanda Blake, and a female Friday, and the 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, starring Paul Mantee, with an alien Friday portrayed by Victor Lundin and an added character played by Adam West. The 2000 film Cast Away, with Tom Hanks as a FedEx employee stranded on an Island for many years, also borrows much from the Robinson Crusoe story.
In 1964 a French film production crew made a 13-part serial of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. It starred Robert Hoffmann.
The black and white series was dubbed into English and German. In the
UK, the BBC broadcast it on numerous occasions between 1965 and 1977. In
1981 Czechoslovakian director and animator Stanislav Látal made a version of the story under the name Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a Sailor from York
combining traditional and stop-motion animation. The movie was
coproduced by regional West Germany broadcaster Südwestfunk Baden-Baden.
Musician Dean
briefly mentions Crusoe in one of his music videos. In the official
music video for Instagram, there is a part when viewers hear Dean's
distorted voice; "Sometimes, I feel alone . . . I feel like I'm Robinson
Crusoe . . ."
Editions
- 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; ... Written by himself., Early English Books Online, 1719. Oxford Text Archive
- Robinson Crusoe, Oneworld Classics 2008. ISBN 978-1-84749-012-4
- Robinson Crusoe, Penguin Classics 2003. ISBN 978-0-14-143982-2
- Robinson Crusoe, Oxford World's Classics 2007. ISBN 978-0-19-283342-6
- Robinson Crusoe, Bantam Classics
- Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe, edited by Michael Shinagel (New York: Norton, 1994), ISBN 978-0393964523. Includes a selection of critical essays.
- Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Dover Publications, 1998.
- Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Rand McNally & Company The Windermere Series 1916. No ISBN. Includes 7 Illustrations by Milo Winter
