Work record

Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe

1719 · 18th Century · Novel · English

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Abstract

Written: 1719 (presented as Crusoe's own account)
Setting: 1651-1687; Crusoe is on the island from 1659 to 1686; Hull and the sea, Sallee on the Moroccan coast, Brazil, and an uninhabited island near the mouth of the Orinoco
Author: Daniel Defoe
Country: Kingdom of Great Britain (United Kingdom)
Language: English
Genre: Adventure novel in the form of a fictional autobiography
Form: First-person prose narrative incorporating a dated journal
Recommended: Grades 6–8

Background. Defoe, a merchant, pamphleteer and Dissenter nearing sixty, drew partly on the reported marooning of Alexander Selkirk on Juan Fernández. The title page offered the book as written by Crusoe himself.

Narrative. Defying his father, Crusoe sails from Hull in 1651, is enslaved by Moorish corsairs, escapes, and prospers as a planter in Brazil. A slaving voyage ends in shipwreck, and he alone reaches land. From the wreck he salvages tools, guns and a Bible, builds a fortified dwelling, tames goats, grows barley and rice, and makes pottery and a canoe. Fever brings a dream of judgment and a conversion. A single footprint in the sand terrifies him; years later he rescues Friday, and finally an English ship carries him home after twenty-eight years.

Structure. Retrospective narration is interrupted by Crusoe's journal, kept until his ink runs low, and by ledgers weighing evil against good. The pace shifts from rapid voyages to a slow, itemized record of island years, then quickens again with the mutineers.

Themes. Providence and repentance, labour as order, solitude and fear, and the obligations of mastery and friendship.

Significance. Often called the first English novel, it spawned sequels, countless imitations known as Robinsonades, and a lasting image of self-reliance studied by Rousseau, economists and novelists alike.

Main characters

Robinson Crusoe: York-born narrator, a wanderer who survives twenty-eight years as a castaway
Crusoe's father: Merchant who urges the contentment of the middle station of life
Xury: Boy who escapes slavery in Sallee with Crusoe
The Portuguese captain: Honest seaman who rescues Crusoe and later guards his Brazilian estate
Friday: Young man saved from captors, who becomes Crusoe's servant, pupil and companion
The Spaniard and Friday's father: Captives rescued from a cannibal feast who join the island company
The English captain: Officer put ashore by mutineers, whose ship Crusoe helps recover

Early edition of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Source · Public domain

Summary

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) follows a restless young Englishman who ignores his father’s counsel, goes to sea, and after storms and slavery is cast alone on an island where industry, improvisation, and providence remake his life. The novel invented a lasting modern myth of solitude: journal-keeping, goat pens, canoe failures, fear of footprints, and the arrival of Friday. Chart Crusoe’s first month of tools beside his first recorded thanks after the wreck. Friday’s arrival turns inventiveness into a test of justice toward a companion. The ignored parental counsel at the start remains the hinge that makes island industry a repentance. His early adventures move quickly: a storm off Yarmouth nearly ends his first voyage, a later trading trip ends in capture by a Sallee rover, and after two years of slavery he escapes in a small boat with a boy named Xury and is picked up by a Portuguese captain who carries him to Brazil. Prosperous but restless, he joins a voyage to buy slaves in Africa, and the ship is wrecked near the mouth of the Orinoco. On the island he makes repeated trips to the wreck for supplies, marks the days on a wooden post, and slowly learns to bake bread, weave baskets and build a boat too heavy to launch. A severe illness leads him to read the Bible he saved and to pray in earnest for the first time. After years alone he finds signs that cannibals visit the shore, and when a captive escapes them he rescues the man, names him after the day of the week, and teaches him English and the Christian faith. Later the two free Friday's father and a Spaniard, and help an English captain retake his ship from mutineers; that ship finally carries Crusoe back to England, where he learns that his Brazilian estate has made him rich.

Virtues in this work

Industry: Island survival depends on patient skilled work day after day.
Prudence: He learns to plan stores, tools, and defenses after early folly.
Piety: Deliverances drive him toward prayer and thanksgiving.

Plot or Argument

Disobedience and voyage
Crusoe rejects settled advice and meets maritime disaster and captivity.
Island industry
Alone, he builds tools, shelter, and a rhythm of work and prayer.
Companionship and return
Friday’s arrival and rescue reopen human society and homeward motion.

Characters

Robinson Crusoe, protagonist
Castaway who remakes life by work and faith.
Friday, companion
Rescue and companion who shares the island’s later years.

Lessons

Counsel refused
Crusoe’s first fault is restless contempt for wise limits.
- What does his father advise?
- How do early scrapes warn him?
Related across the library
- The Lord of the Rings, Lesson: Wounds that do not heal
  Wounds that do not heal. Frodo saves the Shire but cannot live in it. His knife wound, the spider's sting and the Ring's long weight return on their anniversaries, and he finally sails West for healing. Tolkien, a Somme veteran, treats victory honestly: some who win a war carry it with them for life.
- The Last Battle, Lesson: A lie dressed in a lion's skin
  A lie dressed in a lion's skin. Shift does not deny Aslan; he uses Aslan's name to command what Aslan would never command. Because the Narnians have been told that Aslan is not a tame lion, they find it hard to say that these orders are wrong. The book teaches that a true thing can be bent into a lie, and that real faith must know the character of the one it trusts.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Lesson: Wisdom cannot be handed over
  Wisdom cannot be handed over. Siddhartha respects the Buddha but insists that knowledge can be transmitted while wisdom must be lived. The novel prizes personal experience over doctrine.
- The Lord of the Rings, Lesson: Faithful service
  Faithful service. Sam is a servant who thinks of himself as nothing special, yet his loyalty is the steadiest strength in the book. He carries Frodo up the mountain, refuses to keep the Ring, and returns to plant the Shire again with Galadriel's gift.
- Fear and Trembling, Lesson: When ethics cannot be spoken
  When ethics cannot be spoken. Problema III asks whether a person can be justified in keeping silent about a decision others cannot understand. The question bears on confession, secrecy and the limits of explaining oneself to family or community.
Work as repentance
Island labor becomes thanksgiving and ordered stewardship.
- What does he build first?
- How does the journal shape him?
Related across the library
- Washington Square, Lesson: Sentimentality is not sympathy
  Sentimentality is not sympathy. Aunt Penniman delights in Catherine's drama but often fails to care for Catherine's actual suffering. James distinguishes emotional performance from real attention.
- Fahrenheit 451, Lesson: Distraction and despair
  Distraction and despair. Mildred has every comfort, a wall of television family, music in her ears, and a car to drive fast, yet she swallows a bottle of sleeping pills and does not remember doing it. Bradbury links constant distraction to a hidden unhappiness that the society refuses to name.
- The Odyssey, Lesson: Storytelling heals and endangers
  Storytelling heals and endangers. Odysseus's narratives win aid and preserve memory, yet stories can also conceal, manipulate and defer accountability. The poem asks readers to value narrative skill while watching its moral risks.
- On the Origin of Species, On The Origin Of Species. Introduction.
  work to do this For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question and this cannot possibly be here done I much regret that want of space prevents my having the satisfaction of acknowledging the generous assistance which I have received from very...
- Hippocratic Writings, Classis Iv.
  of them are not sufficiently well defined Hydrothorax is also described and paracentesis recommended in the treatment of it After describing lethargy which was clearly a species of remittent fever he gives descriptions of certain diseases under the names of morbus resiccatorius Febris mortifera Lividus morbus morbus ructus ciens and morbus pituitosus No one can fail to recognize in these descriptions the spirit of the Cnidian school of medicine and one very different from that of Hippocrates Indeed we have posit...
Mastery and neighbor
Friday’s coming tests justice, teaching, and friendship in power.
- How does Crusoe treat Friday?
- What does deliverance cost and give?
Related across the library
- The Last Battle, Lesson: A lie dressed in a lion's skin
  A lie dressed in a lion's skin. Shift does not deny Aslan; he uses Aslan's name to command what Aslan would never command. Because the Narnians have been told that Aslan is not a tame lion, they find it hard to say that these orders are wrong. The book teaches that a true thing can be bent into a lie, and that real faith must know the character of the one it trusts.
- The Cost of Discipleship, Lesson: Community as a visible alternative
  Community as a visible alternative. The last part insists that the church must take up physical space in the world, with its own order and discipline, rather than being an inward association. Finkenwalde was Bonhoeffer's experiment in that visibility.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §7
  Knowledge kills action, action requires the veil of illusion--it is this lesson which Hamlet teaches The Dionysian man, returning from ecstasy to everyday reality, is seized by nausea and an ascetic paralysis of the will, like Hamlet.
- The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, Summary
  The Major Symptoms of Hysteria gathers Janet's Harvard lectures into a clear account of dissociation, narrowed consciousness, fixed ideas, amnesia, anesthesia, motor symptoms, crises, and suggestibility. Janet stands close to Charcot but less theatrical; he is interested in how psychological functions fall apart, become dissociated, or continue automatically outside ordinary awareness. Hysteria here is not merely a set of dramatic attacks. It is a disturbance in the integration of perception, memory, movement, e...
- Commentaries on the Laws of England, Introduction, Section the Third
  canons enacted by the clergy under James I in the year and never confirmed in parliament it has been solemnly adjudged upon the principles of law and the constitution that where they are not merely declaratory of the antient canon law but are introductory of new regulations they do not bind the laity z whatever regard the clergy may think proper to pay them Footnote z Stra THERE are four species of courts in which the civil and canon laws are permitted under different restrictions to be used The courts of the ar...

Context

Early English novel of solitude at sea and on an island, commerce, and Protestant self-examination. It remains a formative English-language classic for school and home in the public domain.

Composition

Published 1719; presented as a true autobiographical account.

Reception

Perpetual school classic of adventure and self-reliance.

Travel Journey Home Exile Faith / Religion Technology Modernity Virtue Ethics Isolation / Alienation

Comparisons

treasure-island
Island ordeal and resourcefulness.
around-the-world-in-eighty-days
Travel ordeal under different clocks.

Quotes

“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.”

— Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Opening (1719).Quote card

Related across the library

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter XVIII
The whole earth is the Lord's, and where, as in his sight, you lead good and useful lives, there is your home The father blesses Franz's wish to go to school in Europe, defining home by faithful living rather than by place.
The Journey of the Mind into God, Introduction
no genus its higher order and so on Hence the process downward from Being was degeneration When one stops to think that the Christian religion insisted upon man's nature as having been vitiated by sin--sin which though committed by our primordial parents was nevertheless inherited by us--one can also see why to a Christian the fusion of the logical and the value-hierarchy was natural enough We still look in vain for the perfect exemplification of animal and vegetable species though we are inclined to believe tha...
The Sickness Unto Death, Lesson: The self is a task, not a given
The self is a task, not a given. Anti-Climacus defines the self as an activity of relating to oneself, a synthesis that can be held together well or badly. On this view selfhood is achieved rather than possessed, and despair is the failure to become the self one is. The idea underlies much existentialist and humanistic psychology.
Lord Jim, Chapter 1
ragged screen of leaves It had stood there for centuries but the trees around probably remembered the laying of the first stone Below the red front of the rectory gleamed with a warm tint in the midst of grass-plots flower-beds and fir-trees with an orchard at the back a paved stable-yard to the left and the sloping glass of greenhouses tacked along a wall of bricks The living had belonged to the family for generations but Jim was one of five sons and when after a course of light holiday literature his vocation...
Novum Organum, New York
in pressing their point and pursuing their intercourse with nature thinking as it seems that the better method was not to dispute upon the very point of the possibility of anything being known but to put it to the test of experience Yet they themselves by only employing the power of the understanding have not adopted a fixed rule but have laid their whole stress upon intense meditation and a continual exercise and perpetual agitation of the mind Our method though difficult in its operation is easily explained It...

“I was born in the year 1632”

— Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Opening (1719).Quote card

Related across the library

Up from Slavery, Full Text
Mackie the lady principal asking me to return to Hampton two weeks before the opening of the school in order that I might assist her in cleaning the buildings and getting things in order for the new school year This was just the opportunity I wanted It gave me a chance to secure a credit in the treasurer s office I started for Hampton at once During these two weeks I was taught a lesson which I shall never forget Miss Mackie was a member of one of the oldest and most cultured families of the North and yet for tw...
House Divided Speech, Paragraph 1
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. The opening sentence, which frames the whole speech as a diagnosis before a prescription.
The Republic, Lesson: Politics begins in psychology
Politics begins in psychology. The Republic treats constitutions as enlarged souls. Plato teaches that public order and inner order are mutually illuminating.
Natural History: A Selection, Showers Of Stones.
OF THE INEQUALITY OF CLIMATES CHAP IN WHAT PLACES ECLIPSES ARE INVISIBLE AND WHY THIS IS THE CASE CHAP WHAT REGULATES THE DAYLIGHT ON THE EARTH CHAP REMARKS ON DIALS AS CONNECTED WITH THIS SUBJECT CHAP WHEN AND WHERE THERE ARE NO SHADOWS CHAP WHERE THIS TAKES PLACE TWICE IN THE YEAR AND WHERE THE SHADOWS FALL IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS CHAP WHERE THE DAYS ARE THE LONGEST AND WHERE THE SHORTEST CHAP OF THE FIRST DIAL CHAP OF THE MODE IN WHICH THE DAYS ARE COMPUTED CHAP OF THE DIFFERENCE OF NATIONS AS DEPENDING ON THE...
The Natural History of Selborne, To Pennant, Letter XXIV
this circumstance will prove anything either way I shall not pretend to say I return you thanks for your account of Cressi-hall but recollect not without regret that in June I was visiting for a week together at Spalding without ever being told that such a curiosity was just at hand Pray send me word in your next what sort of tree it is that contains such a quantity of herons nests and whether the heronry consists of a whole grove or wood or only of a few trees It gave me satisfaction to find that we accorded so...

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

Father’s counsel and Crusoe’s refusal.
Shipwreck and first island days.
Journal, calendar, and crops.
The footprint and fear.
Friday’s arrival and teaching.

Key terms and names

Castaway: One left alone after shipwreck.
Providence: God’s governing care Crusoe learns to read in events.
Journal: Crusoe’s written record of days and conscience.
Industry: Steady skilled work that remakes survival into culture.

Seminar Questions

Comprehension Why does Crusoe go to sea?
Comprehension What does he do in the first weeks on the island?
Comprehension Who is Friday according to the text?
Interpretation Is solitude mainly punishment or education?
Interpretation How does work relate to prayer?
Interpretation What moral risks come with mastery?
Big Question What must a person rebuild first when everything familiar is gone?

Faith Connections

Psalm 107:23-24 (Scripture)
They that go down to the sea in ships see the Lord’s works.
Luke 15:18 (Scripture)
I will arise—repentance after restless disobedience.
Protestant providence narratives (Great Conversation)
Journaling deliverance into thanksgiving.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Restless disobedience leads to exile that industry and faith can redeem.

Rhetorical device: realistic detail. Tools and journals make survival believable.

Debate: Resolved: that hard work can become thanksgiving.

Memory Work

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.
Opening. Opens Crusoe’s birth and family setting.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace one tool Crusoe invents and what virtue it trains.

Comparison with Treasure Island: Compare Crusoe’s solitude with the Swiss Family’s shared island labor.

Medical Lens

Isolation and fear are narrative, not clinical case study.

Grief

Listen to the book

Running time 13 hr 55 min (13:55:12) · 20 tracks · Solo reading

Public-domain audiobook from LibriVox, read by Denny Sayers (d. 2015). Recording: Robinson Crusoe on LibriVox (Internet Archive).

LibriVox recordings are volunteer readings released into the public domain. The reading may follow a different edition from the text in this library.

Creative Prompts

Classroom
Keep a three-day castaway journal of tasks and thanks.
Essay
How does the footprint change Crusoe’s solitude?
Fiction
A tool that fails twice before it works.