By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Robinson Crusoe probably has more misconceptions surrounding it than just about any other novel in English literature.
For a start, it’s often claimed it was the first novel (it wasn’t). It’s sometimes claimed, with a little more nuance, that it was the first English novel (it wasn’t). It’s also claimed that it was inspired by one man, the real-life, shipwrecked Scot named Alexander Selkirk (it wasn’t). It’s then claimed that Crusoe was shipwrecked on a deserted island (he wasn’t). This last ‘fact’ is immediately refuted by the fact that it was on this supposedly deserted island that Crusoe met his servant Man Friday, who was so named because Crusoe discovered him on a Friday (he didn’t).
Let’s take these misconceptions one at a time. Defoe has traditionally been positioned at the head of the long tradition of novel-writing. But even if we grant that a ‘novel’ is not simply a fictional narrative of a considerable length written in prose but something more specific than this, there were other prose narratives written before Defoe’s which fit whatever definition we want to choose. Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister is just one such book, and that predates Defoe’s by over thirty years.
And Behn was English, so if we grant that her Love-Letters is an early novel, it also beats Defoe to the title of first English novel.
The myth that Robinson Crusoe was mostly based on the experiences of the real-life Alexander Selkirk has proved a persistent one. I’m not sure why, given the numerous differences between Selkirk and Defoe’s creation. Selkirk was Scottish, Crusoe English; Selkirk asked to be left on his island following a disagreement with the ship’s captain whereas Crusoe was shipwrecked following a storm; Selkirk’s island was in the Pacific, Crusoe’s in the Caribbean.
Writers are often inspired by real stories they hear or read about, but often it’s a case of borrowing a detail here, a feature there, and weaving the disparate influences into something new and rich and strange. That’s what Defoe appears to have done with Robinson Crusoe. Some scholars even pooh-pooh the idea that Selkirk’s was in the top five most influential real-life desert-island experiences that acted as Defoe’s source-material. I discuss this issue in my book The Secret Library, before outlining the two sequels Defoe wrote to his hugely popular novel.
Of all the numerous differences between Alexander Selkirk and Robinson Crusoe, an important one is that Crusoe’s island was never deserted, of course. Or at least, not all of the time. The shocking moment arrives when Crusoe ‘was exceedingly surprised, with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand.’
He gets forensic about it, and measures the size of the print against his own foot, to make sure he isn’t simply failing to recognise his own footprint. He confirms the foot – wherever it now is – belonged to somebody else. Robert Louis Stevenson thought this brilliant plot twist was one of the four most unforgettable images in imaginative literature. It turns out cannibals sometimes visit the island to eat prisoners they find, so Crusoe’s ‘desert island’ is actually pretty crowded.
And one of the island’s other inhabitants – a prisoner whom Crusoe rescues from the cannibals – became the second most famous character in Robinson Crusoe. He names him Friday: ‘In a little time I began to speak to him; and teach him to speak to me; and first, I let him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life’. Friday becomes Crusoe’s servant.
By the way, Crusoe never calls his faithful factotum ‘Man Friday’. The word ‘man’ (which is always rendered in lower-case) is preceded by the possessive pronoun ‘my’ every time it appears. He’s saying ‘my man Friday’, like an English gentleman referring to his valet or servant. Similarly a real-life Bertie Wooster would refer to his real-life Jeeves as his ‘man’.
So he was never ‘Man Friday’: just ‘Friday’, or ‘my man Friday’. We don’t talk about ‘Man Jeeves’, after all; P. G. Wodehouse wrote a book called My Man, Jeeves, rather than Man Jeeves.
But it turns out that even the Friday part is wrong, by Crusoe’s own admission. And it’s all because he got drunk on strong rum. In the course of his narrative he tells us,
I drank the rum in which I had steeped the tobacco, which was so strong and rank of the tobacco, that indeed I could scarcely get it down; immediately upon this I went to bed; and I found presently it flew up into my head violently; but I fell into a sound sleep, and waked no more till, by the sun, it must necessarily be near three o’clock in the afternoon the next day.
The result of this rum-induced coma is that he loses a day in his makeshift calendar: ‘I slept all the next day and night, and till almost three the day after; for otherwise, I know not how I should lose a day out of my reckoning in the days of the week, as it appeared some years after I had done’.
He doesn’t meet Friday until after this point, when the mistake has already been introduced into his ‘reckoning’. So when he thought it was Friday, it was actually Saturday.
‘Man Friday’ was really The Man Who Was Saturday.