The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe is stranded on an
uninhabited island far away from any shipping routes. With patience and
ingenuity, he transforms his island into a tropical paradise. For
twenty-four years he has no human company, until one Friday, he rescues
a prisoner from a boat of cannibals.
With Robinson Crusoe, Defoe wrote what is regarded as the
first English novel, and created one of the most popular and enduring
myths in literature. Written in an age of exploration and enterprise,
it has been variously interpreted as an embodiment of British
imperialist values, as a portrayal of 'natural man', or as a moral
fable. But above all it is a brilliant narrative.
Defoe's most celebrated story of Crusoe's shipwreck, his resourcefulness and ingenuity in his soliatry life on a desert island and his rescue of Man Friday has been abridged and retold many times since its publication (in two volumes) in 1719. It even appeared recently in graphic-novel form. In 1968 Kathleen Lines determined to make the original text more accessible to young readers by breaking Defoe's original, continuous narrative into chapters, slightly cutting Crusoe's long meditations, and compressing the relevant bits of THE FARTHER ADVENTURES into a neat Epilogue, so that readers learn what happened to Friday. The evocative engravings are reproduced from a mid-nineteenth-century edition published by Cassell, Petter & Gilpin.
