Ghent University

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

Department of Literary Studies: English Studies

August 2015

Robinson Crusoe

A Textual and Paratextual Study of Chapbook Versions of

Daniel Defoe’s Novel

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of

Master in Historical Linguistics and Literature

Joy Vanbesien

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung

Ghent University

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

Department of Literary Studies: English Studies

August 2015

Robinson Crusoe

A Textual and Paratextual Study of Chapbook Versions of

Daniel Defoe’s Novel

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of

Master in Historical Linguistics and Literature

Joy Vanbesien

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung

iv

Acknowledgement

My first thanks must go to my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung, whose exceptional

knowledge and expertise, and unstinting guidance and support have been invaluable. He

generously shared his time, ideas and advice with me. I owe him a debt of gratitude.

I would also like to warmly acknowledge the generous support and encouragement

extended to me by Dr. Kwinten Van De Walle. He provided much-needed background

information on eighteenth-century chapbooks and shared with me primary and secondary

materials that otherwise would have been difficult to procure.

I am deeply grateful to my parents, Bérangère and Chris, and my sisters, Sidney and

Whitney, for their encouragement, patience, and support throughout my studies. To them, my

love and gratitude.

I would also like to thank my friends and schoolmates who have been an immense source

of motivation and support. Special thanks are due to Ans and Greet who read the entire work

in draft and made some valuable comments and suggestions, many of which have been

incorporated in the present text. And finally, thanks to my dearest friend, Dorothea Eiserhardt,

for her endless friendship.

v

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Copy original frontispiece (M. Angus and Son, p. 1) ............................................... 28

Figure 2: Copy original frontispiece (J. Dean, p. 2) ................................................................. 28

Figure 3: Copy original frontispiece (C. Dicey (?), p. 1) ......................................................... 28

Figure 4: Copy original frontispiece (Francis Orr & Sons, p. 1) ............................................. 28

Figure 5: Copy original frontispiece (A. Swindells, p. 1) ........................................................ 28

Figure 6: Copy original frontispiece (Thomas Wilson and Son, p. 1) ..................................... 28

Figure 7: Original frontispiece by Clark and Pine ................................................................... 29

Figure 8: Title page (J. Dean, p. 1) ........................................................................................... 30

Figure 9: Title page (R. and W. Dean, p. 1) ............................................................................. 30

Figure 10: Robinson threatening to kill Muley (M. Angus and Son, p. 6) .............................. 39

Figure 11: Robinson threatening to kill Muley (J. Neilson, p. 6) ............................................ 39

Figure 12: Robinson threatening to kill Muley (J. and C. Evans, p. 13) .................................. 39

Figure 13: Robinson threatening to kill Muley (J. Pitts, p. 13) ................................................ 39

Figure 14: Friday rescue scene (M. Angus and Son, p. 14) ..................................................... 39

Figure 15: Robinson as master (M. Angus and Son, p. 23) ..................................................... 43

Figure 16: Recycled woodcut of Cleopatra(?) (M. Angus and Son, earlier edition, p. 23) ..... 43

Figure 17: Title page (London (?), p. 1) ................................................................................... 46

Figure 18: Original title page ................................................................................................... 46

Figure 19: Front-cover page (Darton and Son, p. 1) ................................................................ 54

Figure 20: Back-cover page (Darton and Son, p. 12) ............................................................... 54

Figure 21: Dinner scene (Darton and Son, p. 2) ....................................................................... 55

Figure 22: Dinner scene (Yorkshire J. S. Publishing & Stationary Co., p. 1) .......................... 55

Figure 23: Dinner scene (W.S. Fortey, p. 1) ............................................................................ 56

Figure 24: Dinner scene (J. Lindsay, p. 17) ............................................................................. 56

Figure 25: Robinson before the fireplace (J. G. Rusher, p. 7) ................................................. 56

Figure 26: Robinson leaving domestic comfort (Darton and Son, p. 3) .................................. 59

Figure 27: Robinson leaving domestic comfort (J. and C. Evans, p. 5) ................................... 59

Figure 28: Robinson building a fence around his abode (Darton and Son, p. 7) ..................... 62

Figure 29: Robinson building a fence around his abode (W.S. Fortey, p. 6) ........................... 62

vi

A Note on the Text

The text of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe quoted throughout this thesis is that of

Penguin Classics, edited by John Richetti (London: Penguin Books, 2003). As regards the

chapbook editions discussed in this dissertation, all the original features of the texts are

preserved, with the exceptions of the capitalisation of common nouns and the long “s.”

Obvious errors and misprints have been corrected; those that merit special attention are

indicated in the notes.

vii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement ..................................................................................................................... iv

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................................................... v

A Note on the Text .................................................................................................................... vi

Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... vii

Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1

Chapbooks and Children’s Chapbooks .................................................................................. 2

Chapter Division .................................................................................................................... 3

1 Contextualisation and Methodology .................................................................................. 6

1.1 Research Context of the Chapbook ............................................................................. 6

1.2 Chapbook Abridgments as a Form of “Refraction” .................................................... 8

1.3 Research Questions and Methodology ...................................................................... 12

2 Systemic Context: Defining the Chapbook ...................................................................... 14

3 Juvenile Chapbooks .......................................................................................................... 21

4 Crusoe Chapbooks for the Common Reader .................................................................... 25

4.1 Twenty-Four-Page Crusoe Chapbooks: London-Congleton-Stockport-Newcastle .. 25

4.1.1 Macro Level: Front and Back Matter ................................................................. 26

4.1.2 Micro Level: Textual and Pictorial Analysis ..................................................... 32

4.2 Eight-Page Crusoe Chapbook: London (?) ................................................................ 44

4.2.1 Macro Level: Front Matter ................................................................................. 44

4.2.2 Micro Level: Textual Analysis ........................................................................... 47

5 Crusoe Chapbooks for the Child Reader .......................................................................... 50

5.1 Robinson Crusoe as a Children’s Book ..................................................................... 50

5.2 Juvenile Crusoe Chapbooks: Domesticity ................................................................. 53

5.2.1 Macro Level: Front and Back Matter ................................................................. 53

5.2.2 Micro Level: Textual and Pictorial Analysis ..................................................... 57

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 64

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 67

Primary Texts ....................................................................................................................... 67

Secondary Readings ............................................................................................................. 69

1

Introduction

Upon its publication in April 1719, Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing

Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner was an immediate success, the first printing

of a thousand copies rapidly being exhausted. 1 Because of the book’s popular demand,

Defoe’s printer, William Taylor, issued another five separate printings that same year.2 By the

end of the eighteenth century, the novel had already run through about forty editions.3 Those

legitimate editions were, however, not the sole version on the market: the eighteenth century

saw hundreds of Robinson Crusoe editions, of which some seventy-five per cent can be

categorised as abridgments.4 The least expensive Crusoe abridgments appeared in chapbooks

– unauthorised print objects, which between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth

centuries constituted the most widely circulating form of cheap reading material. Those

cheaply produced booklets subjected Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to a higher level of textual

reduction and manipulation than longer abridgments as they had to shorten the novel’s

original length to a fixed number of pages – usually between eight and thirty-two – and alter

the source text in such a way that it conformed to the tastes and expectations of the chapbook-

reading public. Those alterations, of course, affected the original narrative, reshaping

Robinson Crusoe into different versions that, while retaining a clear connection with the

source novel, are in effect different stories. Somewhat surprisingly given their sheer quantity,

the way in which these chapbooks refashioned the source material has received little scrutiny

from scholars and academics, possibly because of their perceived inferior status.5 However,

considering that Robinson Crusoe reached its widest readership in chapbook form, it may be

worthwhile to explore some of these chapbooks and to find out exactly what tale they told.

That is what this dissertation ventures to do.

1 Katherine Frank, ‘Crusoe’s Secret’, in Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth

(London: Random House, 2011), p. 12. 2 John Richetti, ‘Note on the Text’, in Robinson Crusoe, ed. by John Richetti (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p.

xxxiii. 3 Jordan Howell, ‘Eighteenth-Century Abridgments of Robinson Crusoe’, in The Library: The Transactions of

the Bibliographical Society, 15.3 (2014), p. 292. 4 Ibid., p. 295. 5 According to Jonathan Rose, chapbook editions of Defoe’s novel outnumbered editions of the complete book,

with 151 chapbook versions opposed to 57 complete editions published in the century following the novel’s

1719 debut (Jonathan Rose, ‘The Difference between Fact and Fiction’, in The Intellectual Life of the British

Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 107). However, Andrew O’Malley points out

that Rose’s number requires some clarification: ‘certainly not each of these editions was unique or original, and

many are exact reprints of earlier editions merely produced in different locations and at different times’ (Andrew

O’Malley, ‘Notes’, in Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe (Hampshire: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2012), p. 169).

2

Chapbooks and Children’s Chapbooks

This study considers two types of Crusoe abridgments: chapbooks and juvenile

chapbooks. Which original elements those versions included in their retellings of Defoe’s

novel, what they amplified through the allocation of textual space and/or woodcuts and wood

engravings, and which features they downplayed, or even jettisoned altogether, offers a

deeper insight into their target audiences.6 Chapbook publishers reconfigured and rewrote the

source novel in such ways that they intensified, lessened, or modified the ideological stances

of the source text, and thereby created stories quite disparate from the original narrative. I

have deliberately chosen to focus on short-length chapbooks only (thirty-two pages or less),

because those abridgments entail some kind of hyper-redaction and can therefore be seen as

the best indicators of what chapbook publishers regarded as the key elements of the original

novel, and by extension as obligatory or indispensable to the chapbook form.

The distinction between chapbooks and juvenile chapbooks should be made with

caution.7 The former is identified here as those Crusoe versions which were geared for an

adult (or mixed-age) readership, largely made up of people from the lower social classes.

However, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was not unusual for those

chapbooks to be read by middle- and upper-class children as well. A reasonable assumption

for this phenomenon is that children were relegated to a similar status as lower-class people in

terms of their unsophisticated taste and underdeveloped reading and understanding skills.8

The very fact that children read those chapbooks as well as the limited level of literacy they

shared with the plebeian reader, of course, makes it harder to determine whether a particular

Crusoe abridgment should be analysed as a children’s chapbook, that is as a chapbook

designed specifically for a juvenile reader, or not. Various elements offer clues about the

implied audience for which publishers produced the chapbooks, and help to categorise the

6 Both woodcuts and wood engravings use relief carving on the surface of a block of wood, but the difference

lies in the way in which the wood is used. While woodcuts are produced by cutting along the grain, wood

engravings were made by cutting into the end-grain. The latter made possible the production of more detailed

and precise prints opposed to the cruder and less refined products of the former (Roger Baynton-Williams,

‘Woodcuts and Wood Engraving’, in The Art of the Printmaker: 1500-1860 (London: A&C Black Publishers

Limited, 2009), p. 35). 7 The meaning of the phrase “children’s chapbook” should be clarified. One can approach the term from two

different angles: the productive and the receptive. A productive definition defines a children’s chapbook as a

chapbook which was written and published specially for children. A receptive definition, by contrast, defines

children’s chapbooks as chapbooks which were not particularly directed at children, but which children were

likely to have read. My concern here is solely with the first. 8 Both child and plebeian readers were marginalised by adults who belonged to the central culture. The latter, as

opposed to children and common people, expected a high level of sophistication and complexity from the text

and would be able to read and understand such sophisticated and complex texts in full.

3

Crusoe abridgments under consideration. For example, an eight-page chapbook issued by

Elizabeth Hodges might be classified as a juvenile chapbook because of such indications as its

date of publication (which, in all likelihood, falls between 1845 and 1855), and its way of

distribution (which was through her toyshop “Wholesale Toy House” in London).9 Another

undated chapbook published in Montrose is likewise considered a children’s chapbook

because of its publisher, James Watt (who printed a numbered series of penny books for

children), its illustrations (the frontispiece, for instance, depicts five boys and girls seated in

front of a fireplace seemingly discussing the booklet that lies on the table before them), and

the texts included in the end-page advertisement (The Illustrated Primer, The Pictorial

Alphabet, and Barbauld’s Lessons for Children are among the twenty-six titles to be found on

the back cover).10 Finally, more literal indicators in the spirit of ‘To all pretty little boys and

girls’ as in Thomas Wilson and Son’s edition or simply ‘juvenile books’ as in Darton and

Son’s publication allow the categorisation of abridgments as children’s chapbooks.11

Chapter Division

This study is divided into five chapters. Chapter One opens with a general overview of

the chapbook’s research context. It stresses that while much work has been done on the

chapbook trade, the role of chapbook ornaments and their connection with the text alongside

which they are printed have generally been ignored. In addition to the lack of research about

the chapbook’s paratextual features, there is also a scarcity in research regarding the

chapbook’s appropriative act of simplifying and adapting more complicated texts which

originated in the dominant culture for consumption by an audience consisting mostly of less

educationally and economically privileged readers with lower reading skills and different

reading practices. The second section of this first chapter discusses chapbook abridgments as

a form of “refraction”, a term introduced by André Lefevere to signify a large category of

9 Robinson Crusoe (London: Hodges, [between 1845 and 1855]). Elizabeth Mary Ann Hodges was the

housekeeper of chapbook printer John Pitts and an inheritor of his estate. From this, Leslie Shepard deduces that

she ‘obtained some of his stock of sheets and set up in business [...] for a number of years, maintaining a “Toy

and Marble Warehouse”, just as John Pitts had done’ (Leslie Shepard, John Pitts: Ballad Printer of Seven Dials,

London 1765-1844: with a Short Account of his Predecessors in the Ballad & Chapbook Trade (London: Private

Libraries Association, 1969), p. 85). Hodges operated from 31 Monmouth Street, Seven Dials, London, from

1844 to 1845, and when the street’s name changed to Dudley, at 31 Dudley Street. In 1855, she relocated to 26

Grafton Street, Soho, and continued her business up until at least 1861. The fact that the colophon reads “Dudley

st” suggests that the chapbook was published between 1845 and 1855. 10The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Montrose: James Watt, [between 1820s and 1850s]),

pp. 2 and 32. Bibliographical information was found in the National Library of Scotland Scottish Book Trade

Index, <http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/scottish-book-trade-index/watt-williamson> [accessed 17 February 2015]. 11 The Wonderful Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (York: Thomas Wilson and Son, 1812), p. 30; and

The History of Robinson Crusoe (London: Darton and Son, [between 1837 and 1840]), p. 12.

4

derivative productions which encourage the persistence and the diffusion of their sources.12

Lefevere argues that a source-oriented approach fixes abridgments, illustrations, and such as

separate entities, and explains that such a narrow perspective results in a distorted view of

refractions as inferior substitutes and threats to the literary qualities of their root narratives.

He proposes a de-sacralisation of the canonical, aesthetic text, and a recognition of the

refractor/rewriter as the composer of a “new” text for a new audience. The third and fourth

sections of the chapter then outline the study’s research questions and the general

methodological approach behind the analyses of the selected Crusoe chapbooks.

Chapter Two provides a definition of the term “chapbook”, paying close attention to

the medium’s various characteristics – distribution, form, wood-cut ornaments, price, content,

readership, and authorship – while Chapter Three sketches the historical development of the

juvenile chapbook and identifies the main differences compared to the more traditional

chapbook. In other words, these chapters provide the necessary background information to

better understand the formal and conceptual transformations chapbooks perform on the

original text.

Chapters Four and Five examine a corpus of twenty chapbooks and juvenile

chapbooks of Robinson Crusoe, published between c. 1750 and c. 1870. 1750 is chosen as the

starting point simply because the oldest chapbook edition of Robinson Crusoe available

online was published around 1750.13 Of course this is not to say that other Crusoe chapbooks

did not circulate before this date.14 Two factors make it difficult to establish the exact moment

when Defoe’s novel made its first appearance in chapbook format: first, chapbooks were

seldom recorded in probate inventories – this for the simple reason that ‘they were not worth

listing’ – and the very few records concerning their production and distribution are almost

12 Although Lefevere is interested in only one group of refraction – translation – his remarks remain valid when

looking at other types of refraction, such as chapbook abridgments. 13 The ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) database was used to uncover the earliest accessible

chapbook abridgment of Defoe’s novel. 14 Nonetheless, it seems likely that the first chapbook edition of Robinson Crusoe was published around 1750.

Brian Alderson, though referring to another 1750 chapbook version than the one concerned in this dissertation,

writes the following: ‘the first chapbook edition [of Robinson Crusoe] noted is an Aldermary Churchyard one

conjecturally dated in the 1750s’ (Frederick Joseph Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England, revised by

Brian Alderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, a reprint of 1932), p. 354). Furthermore, John

Ashton has reproduced a chapbook version of Defoe’s novel, and included a comment which reads: ‘the

illustrations […] in this edition are quainter than in the earlier one published at Aldermary Churchyard’ (John

Ashton, Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century (London: Chatto, 1882), pp. 418-419). Ashton does not provide a

date for the version he reproduces, but it is not impossible that the Aldermary Churchyard edition mentioned

here is the same one Alderson refers to.

5

completely lost; 15 and second, due to their ephemeral nature – chapbooks are ‘flimsy’,

‘fragile’, and generally ‘printed on poor quality paper’ – and their unbound condition, a great

many chapbooks have doubtlessly not survived.16 1870 has been chosen as the end point for

the reason that by then the chapbook trade had already begun its decline. Further, the chosen

period allows for the study of juvenile chapbooks, which saw its birth and growth around

1800.

15 Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-

Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, a reprint of 1981), p. 48; and Victor E.

Neuburg, ‘The Old Classics of the Nursery’, in The Penny Histories: A Study of Chapbooks for Young Readers

over Two Centuries (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), p. 22. 16 John Simons, ‘Introduction’, in Guy of Warwick and Other Chapbook Romances: Six Tales from the Popular

Literature of Pre-Industrial England, ed. by John Simons (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), pp. 1 and 4.

Chapbooks were usually sold unbound (Neuburg, ‘The Old Classics’, p. 6).

6

1 Contextualisation and Methodology

1.1 Research Context of the Chapbook

The heyday of the British chapbook is typically taken to be the period between 1750

and 1850, when hundreds of thousands of chapbooks were being produced.17 Despite this

enormous output, chapbooks have received little critical attention. That is, until recently.

During the last twenty years, there has been growing scholarly interest in the British

chapbook, resulting in a number of studies on the topic conducted by revisionist literary

scholars and academics whose field of study is ephemeral printed media.18 In what follows, a

brief overview of the research context is provided as well as an identification of the literature

specifically relevant to this study on chapbooks.19

An interest in chapbooks picked up in the beginning of the nineteenth century. A

notable work, published in 1882 by collector John Ashton, consists of reproductions of

chapbook texts and woodcuts, with accompanying notes on their origins.20 However, that

study is primarily of antiquarian rather than scholarly interest: it brings together material

without much textual or cultural analysis.21 In the early twentieth century, chapbooks were

hardly deemed worth preserving, and hence neglected by researchers. But the growing interest

in mass media and the sociology of reading during the 1940s and 1950s gave impetus to the

investigation of previously ignored print genres for mass readerships.22 Harry B. Weiss’ work,

for example, offers a general introduction to all aspects of the chapbook and an initial attempt

17 Casie Hermansson, ‘Cheap Thrills: Bluebeard in Chapbooks and Juveniles’, in Bluebeard: A Reader’s Guide

to the English Tradition (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), p. 69. 18 Ephemeral materials include, for example, chapbooks, broadsides, ballads, and pamphlets. Those ephemeral

genres are often excluded from literary histories which tend to maintain a focus on canonical, aesthetic texts,

ignoring popular and vernacular media. 19 The website <http://www.chapbook.ugent.be/> has been a valuable source and serves as the basis for this

section, which is not an all-inclusive account, but a selective list of some of the most important works with

respect to this dissertation (from <http://www.chapbook.ugent.be/research-context/> [accessed 24 November

2014]). 20 John Ashton, Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century (London: Chatto, 1882). 21 “Antiquarianism” is used to describe the study of antiquity by antiquarians – individuals who examined the

past through its texts and physical remains. The term sometimes carries negative connotations because of its

association with pre-scientific dilettantism. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, “popular antiquarianism” or

‘the study of British national culture’, concentrated on common people’s leisure, that is ‘ballads, dialect words,

superstitions, customs, and sports’ (Theresa Adams, ‘Representing Rural Leisure: John Clare and the Politics of

Popular Culture’, in Studies in Romanticism, 47.3 (2008), pp. 372-373). 22 A landmark text in the field of the sociology of reading is Richard D. Altick’s The English Common Reader: A

Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). The book

offers a study of the new mass reading public of the nineteenth century: it discusses the rise of mass literacy and

imagines the common reading practices.

7

to establish a systematic list of bibliographic references. 23 A more comprehensive

bibliographical list is provided by Victor E. Neuburg in 1964.24

Other early studies include those of Leslie Shepard and Margaret Spufford, which, like

Weiss, concentrate predominantly on the chapbook trade – i.e. the publishing, selling, and

buying of chapbooks – rather than on detailed analysis of the chapbooks’ contents and

illustrations, and their relation to each other.25 Shepard’s semi-scholarly work – it is meant for

‘the man in the street’ as well as for ‘the scholar’ – provides a detailed account of the history

and development of street literature, and how the latter influenced other forms of literature.26

Spufford’s study investigates, for example, distribution networks and inventories of

publishing firms, but is somewhat limited in that it concentrates solely on the late seventeenth

century and that it analyses only chapbooks in Samuel Pepys’ collection. Another work that

offers insight into the chapbook trade is that of Tessa Watt, which provides a thorough

examination of a range of cheap printed media in the period after the Reformation. 27

Published in 1980, Rainer Schöwerling’s sociological and reception-historical study marks a

change in chapbook research as it examines how chapbooks promoted cultural literacy

amongst the masses.28

More recent studies have dealt with chapbooks consisting of, for example, legends and

fairy tales. John Simons, for instance, has concentrated on chapbook romances, and especially

on the legend of Sir Guy of Warwick, while Casie Hermansson has discussed chapbook

editions of the fairy tale of Bluebeard.29 Other studies, among which those of M.O. Grenby

and Zohar Shavit, have discussed the chapbook as a major catalyst in the development of a

specialised literature for children, which emerged around the mid-eighteenth century. 30

23 Harry B. Weiss, A Book about Chapbooks: The People’s Literature of Bygone Times (Hatboro: Folklore

Associates, 1969, a reprint of 1942). 24 Victor E. Neuburg, Chapbooks: A Bibliography of Reference to English and American Chapbook Literature of

the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: The Vine Press, 1964). 25 Leslie Shepard, The History of Street Literature: the Story of Broadside Ballads, Chapbooks, Proclamations,

News-Sheets, Election Bills, Tracts, Pamphlets, Cocks, Catchpennies, and other Ephemera (Devon: David and

Charles, 1973); and Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership

in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, a reprint of 1981). 26 Shepard, p. 9. 27 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 28 Rainer Schöwerling, Chapbooks: Zur Literaturgeschichte des einfachen Lesers: Englische Konsumliteratur

1680-1840 (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1980). 29 John Simons, Guy of Warwick and Other Chapbook Romances: Six Tales from the Popular Literature of Pre-

Industrial England, ed. by John Simons (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998); and Casie Hermansson,

Bluebeard: A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2009). 30 M.O. Grenby, ‘Before Children’s Literature: Children, Chapbooks and Popular Culture in Early Modern

Britain’, in Popular Children’s Literature in Britain, ed. by Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts, and M.O. Grenby

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 26-46; and Zohar Shavit, ‘Translation of Children’s Literature’, and

8

However, researchers have largely ignored the textual transition of fictional narratives from

an audience of middle-class readers to one constituting mostly of lower-class people.

Chapbook adaptations of Robinson Crusoe, for example, have received little scholarly

treatment; the few exceptions would be the studies by Pat Rogers, Michael Preston, and

Andrew O’Malley.31 Rogers has examined chapbook editions of Robinson Crusoe and Moll

Flanders, and especially paid attention to what has been omitted in these highly abbreviated

versions of the novels. His conclusion is somewhat disappointing: chapbooks are quickly and

carelessly made, hardly preserving a connection with the original source text.32 Preston has

analysed chapbooks of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels in the contexts of folklore,

looking at the text’s materiality and its wood-cut images, while O’Malley has examined how

chapbook adaptations of Defoe’s novel can function as “appropriation”, that is the adoption of

products of the dominant culture and their adaptation to serve the interests of the common

reader.33

1.2 Chapbook Abridgments as a Form of “Refraction”

That terminology is somewhat problematic in adaptation studies is apparent from the

various terms, among others, abridgment, reduction, condensation, simplification, version,

transformation, reworking, rewriting, and appropriation. For simplicity’s sake, chapbook

abridgments are discussed here as a form of “refraction”, an umbrella term coined by André

Lefevere and taken to mean any creation based on a literary text with the purpose of rewriting

‘Stratification of a System’, in Poetics of Children’s Literature (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2009), pp.

111-130 and pp. 158-176. 31 Crusoe chapbooks have also been briefly explored by Rainer Schöwerling, ‘Abenteuer zu Wasser und zu Land

– Reisen und die Erschließung der Welt’, in Chapbooks, pp. 212-230; Seth Lerer, ‘Canoes and Cannibals:

Robinson Crusoe and its Legacies’, in Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 129-150; and Teresa Michals, ‘Rewriting Robinson

Crusoe: Age and the Island’, in Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 19-61. 32 Pat Rogers, Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1985).

Rogers’ assessment, of course, ignores the non-negligible fact that the chapbook versions of Defoe’s novels were

among the very few additions to a body of chapbook literature that had changed very little over the centuries.

Other contemporary works of fiction that were reproduced in chapbook version include John Bunyan’s The

Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The moral and didactic chapbooks

which started to appear by the mid-eighteenth century were also added to the traditional chapbook titles. 33 Michael J. Preston, ‘Rethinking Folklore, Rethinking Literature: Looking at Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s

Travels as Folktales: A Chapbook-Inspired Inquiry’, in The Other Print Tradition: Essays on Chapbooks,

Broadsides, and Related Ephemera, ed. by Cathy Lynn Preston and Michael J. Preston (New York: Garland,

1995), pp. 19-73; Andrew O’Malley, ‘Poaching on Crusoe’s Island: Popular Reading and Chapbook editions of

Robinson Crusoe’, in Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe (Hampshire: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2012), pp. 76-101; and Andrew O’Malley, ‘Poaching on Crusoe’s Island: Popular Reading and

Chapbook editions of Robinson Crusoe’, in Eighteenth-Century Life, 35.2 (2011), pp. 18-38. All subsequent

references are to the article, unless mentioned otherwise.

9

and adapting that text for a specific audience.34 As such, the term refers to all forms of

derivative production, including abridgments and translations, comic strips and illustrations,

films and TV series.35

In ‘Translated Literature: Towards an Integrated Theory’ (1981), Lefevere discusses

the significant role which refractions play in the diffusion and survival of literary works. He

explains that refractions make literature available ‘to audiences that are not interested or

motivated enough to gain access to originals’.36 And in the case of chapbook abridgments,

one could add that the literary work is also made accessible to those audiences that lack the

financial means or the skills necessary to read the work in its original form.37 Furthermore,

Lefevere argues that refractions are responsible for the canonised status of a text. Canonical

works, he maintains, ‘achieve that status only after they go through a sometimes very

protracted process of refraction’.38 During this process, the classic is adapted to the generic

and formal conditions of the new medium in which the text is transmitted, and to the needs,

interests, and expectations of the intended audience. The result of this process of mediation,

Lefevere continues, is often a discrepancy ‘between our perception of the classic […] and the

actual text itself’.39

The importance of refractions as impetuses to both the dissemination and popularity of

a text is barely acknowledged by the literary and academic world. Refractions are generally

considered as second-rate substitutes, posing a threat to the creative novelty of the canonised

source text. 40 Unsympathetic views like this, according to Lefevere, originate from two

Romantic notions that dominate the literary stage, the first being that of the artistic genius, the

second that of the text’s unassailable authority on account of its author’s divine inspiration.41

34 André Lefevere, ‘Translated Literature: Towards an Integrated Theory’, in The Bulletin of the Midwest

Modern Language Association, 14.1 (1981), p. 72. 35 Ibid., p. 73. 36 Ibid., p. 77. Sanders observes that ‘in many instances [appropriations] now define our first experiences or

encounters with their precursor work of art’ (Julie Sanders, ‘Afterword’, in Adaptation and Appropriation

(London: Routledge, 2006), p. 158). 37 Taylor’s edition was sold at five shillings which implies that Robinson Crusoe would initially have been

accessible only to a restricted (largely middle-class) book-buying public (Frank, p. 12). Indeed, it is self-evident

that the poorest and least educated would not have had access to Defoe’s work before it appeared in a one- or

two-penny chapbook. 38 Lefevere, p. 72. 39 Ibid., p. 73. 40 Similarly, Elizabeth Hutcheon notes that ‘[a]n adaptation is likely to be greeted as minor and subsidiary and

certainly never as good as the “original”’ (Elizabeth Hutcheon, ‘Preface to the First Edition’, in A Theory of

Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2013, a reprint of 2006), p. xiv). It should, however, be noted that academics

and researchers begin to realise that refractions have value on their own and that they are not necessarily of an

inferior quality in relation to their sources. 41 Lefevere, p. 71.

10

Lefevere clarifies that any writing that is thought of as innovative and unique, as ‘the product

of genius’, is incorporated into the canon, ‘which is used both as a model and as a yardstick,

for production and evaluation respectively’.42 Ultimately, then, any form of refraction, or any

kind of interference with the text for that matter, ‘becomes, quite logically, sacrilege’.43

However, refractions do not have to be secondary in value. Elizabeth Hutcheon insists that ‘to

be second is not to be secondary or inferior’.44 Her view is shared by Julie Sanders who states

that ‘[a]fter need not [...] mean belated in a purely negative sense’. 45 To enable the

acknowledgement of the importance of refractions, it is necessary, according to Lefevere, to

move away from the source-oriented view, and towards ‘a system concept of literature’.46 The

latter involves the de-sacralisation of the canonical text, meaning that one recognises that the

text does not ‘exist only in [its] “unique” form’, but that it exists alongside ‘a great number of

[…] refracted texts’.47

Returning to the form of refraction examined by this thesis, chapbook abridgments, it

seems that scholars have only recently come to adopt Lefevere’s system concept. Previously,

chapbook abridgments were read from the perspective of the source text, and therefore

regarded as defective and unrefined. Pat Rogers, for example, observes the following, when

discussing chapbook editions of Moll Flanders:

There is of course no attempt to mimic Defoe’s style: […] chapbooks cease to

maintain any organic relationship with the classic text they feed upon: they treat their

subject as a legend, an object of common property, and ignore the precise literary

mechanics of whatever book it is that lies behind their production.48

This quotation resonates with the aforementioned negative views of refractions. Chapbook

abridgments, as Rogers understands them, are still largely identified with blatant

manipulations of an untouchable, authorised text.49 They are perceived as a threat to the

uniqueness of the original novel: they “feed” on it, ignoring Defoe’s literary craftsmanship.

42 Ibid., p. 71. 43 Ibid., p. 71. 44 Hutcheon, p. xiii. 45 Sanders, p. 158. 46 Lefevere, p. 72. 47 Ibid., p. 72. 48 Rogers, p. 186. 49 Rogers’ assessment of how chapbook versions of Robinson Crusoe relate to the original novel does not

acknowledge how those abridgments adapt their source material to meet the demands of a broad and mainly

popular audience. According to him, ‘chapbooks are hasty, formulaic, with no sense of tempo or climax, and no

relation beyond plot outline to the original text’ (Ibid., p. 196). His view echoes that of Victor E. Neuburg, who

states that ‘in their severely truncated form [chapbook adaptations] bore little relationship to the originals from

which they were quite illegally derived’ (Victor E. Neuburg, ‘Chapbooks’, in The Popular Press Companion to

11

Contrary to Rogers’ source-oriented approach, Andrew O’Malley, for example,

postulates that the meanings and effects of chapbooks can best be discerned when they are

analysed within the context of their production.50 In other words, he believes that chapbooks

should be examined in the light of how they served the needs and interests of the intended

audience – the plebeian reader, and in the case of juvenile chapbooks, the (plebeian) child

reader – rather than how they fail to serve those of the “modern” reader. O’Malley, who

focused on Crusoe chapbooks which were geared first and foremost for a popular audience,

explains that if researchers were to adopt such a target-oriented view, they would appreciate

that ‘[t]he seemingly strange omissions and alterations chapbooks perform on their original

texts align with the popular responses to and rejections of the dominant ideological forces

embedded in the original work’.51 The choices made by chapbook publishers are target-

oriented, and while some of these alterations may come across as hasty or arbitrary, they

nonetheless reflect the interests and preferences of the chapbook reading public.

Popular Literature (Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983), p. 51). Alex Davis concurs,

maintaining that chapbooks ‘brutally abbreviated their originals, but […] retained the bare bones of the

narrative’ (Alex Davis, ‘Chapbooks’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, ed. by David Scott

Kastan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 432). 50 O’Malley, p. 23. 51 Ibid., p. 23.

12

1.3 Research Questions and Methodology

As has been observed above, during the adaptation process, the source text is modified

according to both the conventions of the new medium and the tastes and needs of the target

audience. The questions central to this study are then: How was Robinson Crusoe adapted to

fit the format of the chapbook – a medium that catered at a largely lower-class audience and

was marked by a series of conventions, practices and conditions quite desperate from those of

the medium of the source text? Which original features did Crusoe chapbooks and juvenile

versions omit, which elements did they add, which did they retain, albeit perhaps with a

changed function or emphasis, and why? How do juvenile chapbooks differ from their more

traditional counterparts?

In order to answers those questions, I established an interpretative framework in

Chapters Two and Three. In these chapters I provided a definition for the term “chapbook”

and sketched the historical developments of juvenile chapbooks, pointing at the dissimilarities

with the “true” chapbook.

In the first phase of this study, I obtained twenty-five texts from various sources. The

majority originated from the Lilly Library Chapbook Collection of Indiana University. The

remaining chapbooks were obtained from other libraries that made their materials available

online, namely the British Library (ECCO), the Glasgow University Special Collections, the

Chetham’s Library and the McGill Library’s Chapbook Collection. Because of the diverse

character of the juvenile chapbooks, I reduced the corpus from twenty-five to the twenty most

relevant texts.

A cursory reading enabled me to sort the different chapbooks into categories, based on

their textual and/or paratextual similarities. Of the five “true” chapbooks, four could be linked

together based on a textual analysis, despite major differences on the pictorial level, while the

oldest “true” chapbook made up a category of its own. A third and final category consisted of

the remaining fifteen chapbooks, all juvenile editions.

After this first glance at the corpus, I determined the criteria most relevant to this

dissertation. In order to answer my research questions, I examined the religious dimensions,

the retention of detail in descriptions, the chapbook’s lottery mentality, and domestic ideas.

These three criteria were analysed on both the textual and the pictorial levels.

13

In order to structure this dissertation in a neat and logical manner, I divided the fourth

and fifth chapters into macro and micro level analyses. The macro analysis is concerned with

the form of the chapbooks and their front and back matter, while the micro analysis conducts

a textual and pictorial examination of the actual Crusoe chapbook texts.

Having contextualised my research and described the method I adopt to analyse the

chapbooks under consideration, the next section addresses the question: what is a chapbook?

14

2 Defining the Chapbook

The purpose of this section is to establish what is meant by the word “chapbook” in

order to avoid definitional confusions. This is not an easy task as scholars disagree

significantly on how chapbooks are best defined. Some use the term to describe practically

any kind of printed matter, provided it was carried and sold by chapmen.52 Harry B. Weiss,

for example, contends that ‘[t]he term chapbook may include anything from a broadside to a

good-sized book […] carried for sale by a chapman into villages, hamlets, towns’.53 Tessa

Watt, similarly, states that ‘the term “chapbook” is simply any book carried by a chapman’.54

Their definitions highlight the importance of the chapbook’s ‘social and economic context’:

both Weiss and Watt consider the chapbook’s distribution by chapmen as more defining than

its ‘properties (content, size and price)’, even though they indirectly admit that the latter

should not be ignored altogether.55

Another, stricter definition of chapbooks is offered by John Simons, who focuses on

their physical characteristics: ‘[a] chapbook is best defined strictly and briefly thus: a single

sheet of paper printed on both sides and then folded so as to make a book of twelve leaves or

twenty-four pages’.56 This definition is somewhat problematic, since chapbooks can take any

number of lengths – this will be demonstrated shortly, when different-length chapbooks of

Robinson Crusoe will be considered. It must be noted, though, that Simons acknowledges that

besides the commonest form of twenty-four pages, other lengths also exist – the number of

pages generally varying from eight to thirty-two.

52 Chapmen were itinerant vendors, who travelled the country, hawking household goods, textiles and

haberdashery (e.g. needles, buttons, ribbons, and pins), trinkets, and other small necessities and luxuries (e.g.

chapbooks) which were otherwise difficult to lay hands on in rural areas. There is some disagreement as to the

significance of the prefix “chap”. Some scholars have suggested that it is a corruption of the adjective “cheap”,

hinting at the “cheapness” of the material concerned. Others, like Roy Stokes, believe it is more likely that the

term “chapman” is derived from the Anglo-Saxon “ceapman”, “ceap” meaning trade (Roy Stokes, ‘Chapbook’,

in A Bibliographical Companion (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2011, a reprint of 1989), p. 54). 53 Harry B. Weiss, ‘Chapbooks and Chapmen’, in A Book about Chapbooks: The People’s Literature of Bygone

Times (Hatboro: Folklore Associates, 1969), p. 1. 54 Tessa Watt, ‘The Chapbook’, in Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1991), p. 266. 55 Watt, p. 269. Watt has demonstrated that the 1620s ‘saw the development of a specialist trade in books which

were purposefully small’ – both in format so as to fit into the chapman’s pack and in price so as to attract ‘a

market of potential readers who had been hitherto unlikely to purchase the printed word, except in the form of a

broadside ballad’ (Watt, p. 278, emphasis added). The chapbook’s small size and price are also pointed out by

Weiss, who states that although ‘there was really nothing fixed about their size or about the number of their

pages’, chapbooks would usually be about ‘5 by 3 inches in size’, contain ‘from 4 to 24 pages’, and be sold at

any price ‘ranging from a few farthings to a shilling’ (Weiss, p. 1). The property “content” follows below, note

15. 56 John Simons, ‘Introduction: Why Read Chapbooks?’, in Guy of Warwick and Other Chapbook Romances: Six

Tales from the Popular Literature of Pre-Industrial England, ed. by John Simons (Exeter: University of Exeter

Press, 1998), p. 4.

15

Victor E. Neuburg incorporates the above criteria and adds another two defining

features to his definition of a chapbook. According to him, a chapbook is ‘a small paper-

covered book or pamphlet, usually measuring some three and a half inches by six inches,

containing 4, 8, 12, 16 or 24 pages, […] almost always enlivened by the inclusion of crude

woodcut illustrations’, and ‘offered for sale by pedlars, hawkers and other itinerant merchants,

who were known collectively as chapmen’.57 This definition needs some further refinement.

The actual size of a chapbook depends on both the size of the full sheet of paper on which the

text is printed and the number of folds. Chapbooks therefore vary in size, but on average, they

are fifteen by ten centimetres or smaller – they had to be small enough to be carried in a

crammed chapman’s pack. As regards the ornaments, the majority of chapbooks feature

woodcuts, as these could be printed simultaneously with letterpress type – a much cheaper

and simpler procedure than illustrating with copper-engraved plates, which had to be printed

separately.58 The text-image relationship in wood-cut decorated chapbooks, and especially in

traditional chapbooks with only a single ornament on their title page, is often vague and

problematic. Frequently, woodcuts have little or no relevance to the text alongside which they

are printed, being intended first and foremost to appeal to the purchaser/reader by giving a

visual element to the text, and not necessarily to “illustrate” that text.59 That the relevance of

an ornament was not a matter of much importance for chapbook printers is easy to

understand; it surely would not have been cost-effective to commission a new woodcut for

each individual chapbook title. As such, a single cut would have been reused repeatedly for

long periods of time, and ‘for completely different subjects’.60 It is self-explanatory that this

excessive usage of the same cut produced crude, faded, ‘cracked, broken, and worm-eaten’

57 Victor E. Neuburg, ‘1700-1800’, in Popular Literature: A History and Guide (New York: Routledge, 2013, a

reprint of 1977), p. 103. 58 An additional advantage is that woodcuts could produce more copies without wearing down. While copper

engravings would yield but a few hundred impressions before they would reveal signs of deterioration, woodcuts

could produce several thousand, and the time required for each impression was also shorter (Tessa Watt, ‘The

Woodcut Picture Trade’, in Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991), p. 141). However, some groups of chapbooks did use copper-engraved illustrations (e.g. early

nineteenth-century gothic chapbooks). The inclusion of copper engravings made these chapbooks more

expensive and more exclusive items that catered for a different, more affluent reading public. 59 It is only sensible to suppose that chapbooks, like broadsides, were often purchased simply for their wood-cut

images as these ‘could be used to decorate private houses or alehouses’ (Anne Stott, ‘The Cheap Repository

Tracts 1795-1798’, in Hannah More: The First Victorian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 171). 60 Weiss, p. 4.

16

prints.61 Most chapbooks are of poor quality, not only in ornaments, but also in paper, printing

and type, a fact that accounts for their low price: a halfpenny or penny each.62

This technical definition of the chapbook must be completed by taking into account its

subject matter. However, attempts to define chapbooks based on their content have proven to

be unsuccessful: due to the chapbook’s wide and diverse subject range, Barry McKay believes

that the term “chapbook” cannot be more than a ‘bibliographical conceit, employed as a

generic term to cover a particular genre of pocket-sized booklet’.63 Indeed, chapbooks cannot

easily be limited content-wise. In an attempt to indicate some of the chapbook’s most

frequently developed themes and narratives, Weiss has singled out the following: ‘[d]evils

and angels, scoundrels and heroes, love and hate, murders, deathbed statements, witchcraft,

riddles, tragedy, romance, song, jests, fairy tales, religion, shipwrecks, confessions, fables,

hymns, speeches, executions, and all that goes to make up life, real and unreal’.64

Despite this diversity, it is possible to arrive at some generalisations. Susan Pedersen

asserts that chapbook literature is ‘unified in tone’, and that the greater part is ‘profoundly

irreverent and often amoral’. 65 The stories are usually sceptical of authority, critical of

religious duty, and antagonistic of middle-class virtues, such as industry and thrift. Chapbooks

also frequently introduce either a fantasy landscape with giants, witches, and fairies or a

world turned upside down wherein crafty maidservants marry their masters, poor but valiant

heroes gain wealth and stature, and the rich and powerful meet their deserved punishment.

The ‘lottery mentality’ embedded in these booklets put forward the idea that fortune and

61 Ronald McKerrow, ‘The Decoration of Books’, in An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 115. 62 Chapbooks were sold at a retail price that varied between one farthing and six pence (or even one shilling),

depending on the chapbook’s content and number of pages (Schöwerling, p. 18). The typical selling price,

however, was one penny, which does not necessarily mean that chapbooks were cheap. Simons has shown that in

the late eighteenth century a farm worker’s wages were often not sufficient to cover anything but the bare

necessities of life (Simons, ‘Introduction’, p. 4). An agricultural labourer earned about eight shillings (40p) a

week – the weekly income could vary between seven and twelve shillings (35-60p), depending on the seasons,

e.g. winter, haytime, harvest (see Eric J. Evans and Gordon Mingay). The proportion of earnings that a farmer’s

household weekly spent on ‘bread, salt, meat, tea, sugar, butter, soap, candles, thread’ was ‘9s 7½d (48p)’

(Simons, ‘Introduction’, p. 4). As such, most lower-class homes would not have been able to buy chapbooks.

Simons’ suggestion, then, that the regular purchase of chapbooks was only possible for ‘those members of rural

communities who lived in relative comfort (say on 10s [or 50p] a week)’ seems more than plausible (Ibid., p. 7).

(Eric J. Evans, ‘Agriculture in the Early Industrial Age’, in The Shaping of Modern Britain: Identity, Industry

and Empire 1780-1914 (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 64; and Gordon Mingay, ‘Agriculture and Rural Life’,

in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. by H.T. Dickinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd,

2002), p. 155.) 63 Barry McKay, An Introduction to Chapbooks (Oldham: Incline Press, 2003), p. 5, quoted in O’Malley, p. 79. 64 Weiss, p. 1. 65 Susan Pedersen, ‘Hannah More meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late

Eighteenth-Century England’, in Journal of British Studies, 25.1 (1986), p. 103.

17

social advancement can be achieved not through hard work, but by chance: the “classic”

chapbook hero triumphs by relying on ‘traditional plebeian virtues [such] as cunning and wit

[…] luck, and supernatural assistance’.66

Pederson clarifies that the subversive chapbook adventures are to be understood as

fundamentally escapist in nature – the reader could temporarily “flee” his present reality and

dwell in the fictional world of luck and adventure – and not as an indication of real, material

opportunities for the poor or an expression of radical political views. ‘For chapbook literature

is, as a rule, innocent of ulterior motives, didactic or otherwise, and often without direct social

relevance’. 67 Neuburg argues that, in their absence of any immediate relation to current

affairs, chapbooks resembled the non-topical pamphlets which had preceded them.68 The lack

of topicality was in fact pivotal to the continuity of the chapbook’s popularity throughout the

long eighteenth century (1680 to 1830), for unlike the topical ballad sheets, ‘[c]hapbooks […]

could be expected to sell steadily and widely over a much longer period’.69

Thus, the majority of chapbooks had little or no relevance to contemporary events,

offering instead a large variety of traditional reading matter – especially stories replete with

travel, adventure and marvellous feats. This is, for instance, evidenced by the chapbook’s

repertoire of narrative fiction. According to Simons, chapbook fiction can be broken down

into three basic groups. The first includes chapbooks that have their origins in medieval

romance.70 Examples of these are Guy of Warwick, Valentine and Orson, and Sir Bevis of

Southampton. The second group of chapbooks is derived from late medieval and Renaissance

narratives and concerns short stories about the lives of popular figures like Dick Whittington,

Robin Hood, and Fortunatus. The third contains chapbooks that draw on various traditional

tales, amongst which some of the most popular are Jack the Giant Killer, Tom Thumb, and

Thomas Hickathrift. In addition to the three core categories, there are a number of chapbooks

based on fictional narratives by famous authors, such as Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe and

Moll Flanders), Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels), Ann Radcliffe (The Italian and The

Mysteries of Udolpho), and Matthew Lewis (The Monk).

66 Gary Kelly, ‘Revolution, Reaction, and the Expropriation of Popular Culture: Hannah More’s Cheap

Repository’, in Man and Nature, 6 (1987), p. 149; and Andrew O’Malley, ‘The Coach and Six: Chapbook

Residue in Late Eighteenth-Century Children’s Literature’, in The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s

Literature in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 24. 67 Ibid., pp. 104-105. 68 Neuburg, ‘1700-1800’, p. 103. 69 Ibid., p. 105. 70 Simons, ‘Introduction’, pp. 12-13.

18

Some chapbook narratives thus stem from “high” cultural contexts. This relationship

between elite or middle-class cultures on the one hand and lower-class cultures on the other is

not limited to the chapbook’s content: Alex Davis notes that this continuity is also observable

when one turns to the question of who read chapbooks.71 It is traditionally assumed that the

generality of chapbook readers came from the lower classes, but this assumption is not quite

warranted.72 It is true, of course, that chapbooks usually cost only a penny, but bearing in

mind that the financial situation of the very poor was particularly difficult and that the

expense of even a few pence could make a large sum, chapbooks were presumably beyond the

reach of most labouring families.73 Nevertheless, there is proof that chapbooks circulated

amongst the lower classes – most notably the autobiographical writings of John Clare.74 Yet,

there is also proof that chapbooks were bought and read by more affluent members of

society.75 In Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Peter Burke has demonstrated that the

rich and the educated often took part in popular culture: they participated in the same festivals

and rituals as the commoners, attended the same sermons, and enjoyed the same literature.76

‘Broadsides and chap-books’, Burke determines, ‘seem to have been read by rich and poor,

71 Davis, p. 433. 72 Spufford, p. 72; and M.O. Grenby, ‘Before Children’s Literature: Children, Chapbooks and Popular Culture in

Early Modern Britain’, in Popular Children’s Literature in Britain, ed. by Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts, and M.O.

Grenby (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008), p. 31. Richard Altick’s assertion that ‘apprentices,

common labourers, peasants, [and] rivermen’ constituted the principal part of the chapbook market is certainly

valid, for the (rural) poor did indeed comprise the largest proportion of the chapbook-reading audience in

eighteenth-century Britain, but this does not mean that chapbook readership was limited to that class (Richard

Altick, ‘The English Common Reader: from Caxton to the Eighteenth Century’, in The Book History Reader, ed.

by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 346). 73 See above, note 62. However, John Simons specifies that ‘[i]n pre-industrial societies […] the lack of means to

possess or read a text [did] not by any means preclude access to writing’ (Simons, ‘Introduction’, p. 6). Among

rural communities made up mostly of poor and illiterate people, and at a time when reading in public constituted

a widespread form of entertainment, it is only sensible to assume that chapbooks were passed around and read

aloud in alehouses, inns, taverns, and other places of popular resort (Spufford, p. 66; Simons, ‘Introduction’, p.

6; and O’Malley, ‘Poaching’, p. 32). 74 The poet John Clare was born in 1793 into a family of rural labourers so poor that by the age of ten he was

compelled to work. He nonetheless read chapbooks during his childhood, remembering in his autobiography that

he ‘savd all the pence [he] got to buy them’ (John Clare, ‘Autobiography’, p. 19, quoted in Grenby ‘Before

Children’s Literature’, p. 40). 75 Notable collectors include Samuel Pepys and James Boswell. The former collected chapbooks during the

1680s and bound them together in leather volumes entitled “Penny Merriments”, “Penny Witticisms”, “Penny

Compliments”, “Penny Godlinesses”, “Old Novels”, “Loose Plays”, and “Vulgaria” (Henry Benjamin Wheatley,

‘Pepys’s Books and Collections’, in Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived in (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2010), p. 91). The collection is now housed in the Pepys Library at Cambridge University.

James Boswell also collected chapbooks, but he did so out of nostalgia as the following inscription on the first

bound collection makes clear: ‘Having, when a boy, been much entertained with Jack the Giant-Killer and such

little story-books, I have always retained a kind of affection for them, as they recall my early days. I went to the

printing office in Bow Church-yard and bought this collection, and had it bound up with the title of Curious

Productions’ (James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal: 1762-1763, p. 264-265, quoted in Johanna Bradley,

‘From Chapbooks to Plumb Cake: The History of Children’s Literature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University

of Illinois, 2007), p. 47). Boswell’s collection is now at Harvard University Library. 76 Peter Burke, ‘Unity and Variety in Popular Culture’, in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Surrey:

Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009), pp. 51-54.

19

educated and uneducated’.77 On the whole, however, it appears more probable that, despite

the fact that members of the more privileged classes also read chapbooks, chapbook

publishers primarily catered for members of the poorer classes, that is, those members who

were relatively better off.

In general, eighteenth-century chapbooks were intended for an adult readership. But,

given their small format, their short and fairly straightforward texts, and their simple wood-

cut images, it may come as no surprise that they also appealed to young readers.78 As such,

one can argue – as does Teresa Michals – that the eighteenth-century chapbook stood for a

mixed-age audience, an audience ‘that did not differentiate according to numerical age’:

chapbooks provided entertainment for adults and children alike.79 At the turn of the century,

however, a growing number of chapbook publications were designed exclusively for an

audience of child readers.80 The birth of juvenile chapbooks, and their increase after 1800

should be interpreted as an indication of young readers having become an important part of

the chapbook audience.

Even though the aforementioned elements (i.e. distribution by chapmen, short length

and small size, low price, and plebeian content) apply to the chapbook in general, none of

those elements is fixed, exclusive or without exception. M.O. Grenby outlines the difficulties

in defining the chapbook by its subject matter, form, price and audience, and concludes that

‘size, length, type, content, cultural associations and tone, and the mode by which it was sold’

were of considerable importance, but that the classification of a text as “chapbook” did not

77 Ibid., p. 53. 78 M.O. Grenby, ‘Chapbooks, Children, and Children’s Literature’, in The Library: The Transactions of the

Bibliographical Society, 8.3 (2007), p. 290. There is wide agreement that before the creation of a literature for

children that sought to amuse as well as instruct, boys and girls would have read the entertaining stories that

circulated in chapbook form. Chapbooks were initially enjoyed by children from the lower and upper classes, but

by the turn of the eighteenth century, they were increasingly restricted to children from less sophisticated and

financially privileged households (Ibid., pp. 290-291). 79 Teresa Michals, ‘Rewriting Robinson Crusoe: Age and the Island’, in Books for Children, Books for Adults:

Age and the Novel from Defoe to James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 35. 80 Neuburg argues that in the first half of the nineteenth century the chapbook was ‘no longer the most important

element in popular literature; it was now entirely intended for child readers’ (Victor E. Neuburg, ‘James Catnach

and the Chapbook Revival’, in The Penny Histories: A Study of Chapbooks for Young Readers over Two

Centuries (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), p. 65). In the same lines, Johanna Bradley asserts that

‘after approximately 1800, chapbooks ceased to be of such interest to the working class, and they were exiled to

the nursery’ (Bradley, p. 55). Zohar Shavit, similarly, states, when discussing chapbook and children versions of

Gulliver’s Travels, that chapbooks ‘continued to appear even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but by

that time were issued for children and young people only’ (Zohar Shavit, ‘Translation of Children’s Literature’,

in Poetics of Children’s Literature (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2009), p. 116). These chapbooks were

typically advertised as being “for the entertainment of Juvenile readers”, or “for the amusement of good

children”.

20

depend on any one of those characteristics alone: it required a combination.81 The exact

combination of the determining factors in defining the chapbook changed from century to

century. Grenby maintains that during the eighteenth century, ‘the plebeian associations of the

texts […] were more important in their designation as chapbooks’.82

A final issue which needs to be taken into account is the concept of “authorship”.

Weiss points out that it is a little specious to talk about ‘chapbook authors’, as the large

majority of these print objects was written anonymously.83 Furthermore, a high number of

chapbooks were taken from ‘folk tales and popular stories of our ancestors’, the authorship of

which is inevitably ‘lost in antiquity’.84 And even in cases where chapbooks were abridged

and adapted from a literary text by a “name” author, the actual name of the latter was rarely

included in these booklets. It is therefore pertinent to make a distinction between the “author”

and the “writer” of a chapbook: the former is the creator and source of the literary work (e.g.

folk tale, legend, romance), while the latter is the composer, adapter or abridger, who merely

wrote out the chapbook text. This distinction is valid and indeed unavoidable as the chapbook

writer did not aspire to artistic creativity – this is evidenced, for instance, by the chapbook’s

unoriginal subject matter.85 The relevance of the distinction between “author” and “writer”

becomes even clearer when considering a tale of which not only numerous chapbook

adaptations exist, but of which the author is also known. An obvious case in point is Robinson

Crusoe: the various chapbooks, produced by different writers, are not independent creations

with authorial intent but easily identifiable as heavily abridged adaptions of Defoe’s source

text. Thus, in such cases, it is not only advisable but actually essential to differentiate between

the chapbook’s author and its writer.

81 Grenby, ‘Before Children’s Literature’, pp. 32-33. 82 Ibid., p. 33. 83 Harry B. Weiss, ‘Chapbook Authors’, in A Book about Chapbooks: The People’s Literature of Bygone Times

(Hatboro: Folklore Associates, 1969), p. 11; and O’Malley, ‘The Coach’, p. 22. 84 Weiss, p. 11. 85 Neuburg, ‘The Old Classics’, p. 7; and O’Malley, ‘The Coach’, p. 22.

21

3 Juvenile Chapbooks

The previous chapter has defined the “true” chapbook as a small booklet, generally

ranging between eight and thirty-two pages, featuring a woodcut on its title page, typically

sold at a penny and usually by a chapman, and containing “low” subject matter that primarily

appealed to the labouring or plebeian classes. Around the mid-1700s, those true chapbooks

became subjected to the influence of the then newly accepted literature for children, as a

result of which a new group of chapbooks emerged at the turn of the century: chapbooks

which specifically catered for children. The following paragraphs offer a brief overview of the

historical context in which the juvenile chapbook originated and point out the main

differences between the children’s chapbook and its more traditional counterpart.86

In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the chapbook broadened its

readership from an audience of almost exclusively adult readers to include children as well.87

Two factors that contributed to this development were the chapbook’s low retail price and,

perhaps of greater importance, the lack of other print materials for young readers. Grenby

maintains that up until 1800, ‘children seem just as likely to have bought their own chapbooks

as to have acquired them as gifts or as teaching tools’.88 However, as the education of children

grew in importance, so did their reading material – chapbooks, therefore, became less

accepted by the pedagogical establishment.89 The chapbook’s primacy of entertainment over

instruction and the “lottery mentality” promoted in the chapbook stories were perceived by

middle-class pedagogues as posing a danger to the moral development of children. 90

86 This chapter is necessarily a summary that draws largely on the works of M.O. Grenby and Zohar Shavit. 87 Shavit, ‘Stratification’, p. 163. 88 Grenby, ‘Chapbooks’, p. 290. 89 Concerns about the content of juvenile literature arose by the end of the seventeenth century, around the time

when John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) was published. Locke’s treatise on moral

education and its prominent role in shaping the character of the child had a major influence on the perception of

childhood as well as on the kind of literature for children that was to be produced in Britain in the following

centuries. Locke believed that the child was a “blank slate” and that he or she had to be kept away from

(external) corrupting forces. His recommendation of amusement as a means of instruction stimulated the

production of moral stories for juvenile readers. Such tales of morality emerged in the mid-eighteenth century

and continued to flourish well into the nineteenth (Alysa Levene, ‘The Childhood of the Poor’, in The Childhood

of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 3). Another

influential work was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762). Similar to Locke, Rousseau emphasised the

“malleability” of the child, but unlike Locke, he foregrounded the child’s natural capacity for reason. He insisted

that education should be restricted to guiding the innate predispositions of the child in order to create a

responsible and independent adult (Ibid., pp. 3-4). 90 Kelly, p. 149; Pederson, p. 105; and O’Malley, ‘The Coach’, p. 27. It was especially the chapbook’s lottery

mentality – i.e. the belief that wealth and status would come unexpectedly and by chance – that was deemed

unacceptable because this plebeian view defied the middle-class ethos of hard work and its connection with

success.

22

Consequently, the romances and fairy tales of popular culture were no longer deemed suitable

for young readers.91

Zohar Shavit explains that as the popularity of chapbooks increased and the concern

about the absence of “proper” reading material grew, ‘the book trade came to realize the

commercial potential of the children’s market [and] began to produce books for children

which could serve as an alternative to the popular chapbooks’.92 This new juvenile literature

then emerged, to a certain extent, as a reaction against the chapbook: designed to attract those

who could afford to purchase more expensive printed matter for their children, these new

books were often of a materially better quality than the crudely printed chapbooks, and

packed with bourgeois virtues so as to meet the prevailing moral and pedagogical demands of

the middle-class parent and educator.93

The official children’s literature displaced the ephemeral chapbook neither directly nor

entirely.94 On the contrary, it stimulated the chapbook market. In order to compete against

their new rivals, chapbook publishers had to implement some production-related changes. As

a result, ‘two new phenomena arose in popular literature: the growth of chapbook production

and the publishing of chapbooks especially for children’.95 The latter emerged as a response to

the demands for suitable children’s books which, as a consequence of the broader

91 In the latter half of the eighteenth century, teachers and religious instructors attempted to keep juveniles from

reading the popular stories of fairies and giants, believing chapbooks to be unrefined and morally injurious.

O’Malley speculates that chapbook versions of Defoe’s novel ‘may have been more likely to escape the attention

of adult gatekeepers of children’s reading since they, unlike other chapbook narratives, bore the pedagogically

approved name of Crusoe on their title pages’ (O’Malley, ‘Poaching’ (2012), pp. 76-77). 92 Zohar Shavit, ‘The Historical Model of the Development of Children’s Literature’, in Aspects and Issues in the

History of Children’s Literature, ed. by Maria Nikolajeva (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995), p. 33. 93 Grenby, ‘Chapbooks’, p. 303; and Shavit, ‘Stratification’, p. 164. John Newbery’s A Pretty Little Pocket Book

(1744) is generally considered the beginning of this juvenile literature. This is not to say that before the mid-

eighteenth century, there were no books available for child readers. However, most of those books had an almost

exclusively didactic function (e.g. ABC’s, primers, arithmetic books and guides to conduct). Thus, what sets

Newbery apart from previous publishers is that he was one of the first to publish children’s books that

deliberately sought to amuse as well as to instruct (Frederick Joseph Harvey Darton, ‘Children’s Books: An

Introductory Survey’, in Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2011, a reprint of 1932), p. 2). 94 Indeed, this new moral literature rather coexisted and mixed with the chapbook tradition. O’Malley, for

instance, posits that the works of John Newbery were transitional or hybrid texts that preserved some elements of

the chapbook, including its appearance and format – e.g. small in size, printed on cheap paper, and adorned with

woodcuts – but at the same time foregrounded the importance of moral education, and promoted middle-class

values, such as industriousness and religious duty. That those hybrid texts catered at a (lower-) middle-class

audience is evidenced by the retail price which was higher than the chapbook’s average one-penny charge

(O’Malley, ‘The Coach’, p. 21). 95 Shavit, ‘Stratification’, p. 174. Chapbook publishers had at least one advantage over their opponents: they

could print material that was forbidden in official literature for children, and thus only accessible in the format of

the chapbook (e.g. romances and fairy tales). Unlike the moral narratives of the middle class, chapbooks featured

stories that stimulated the imagination with exhilarating and miraculous adventures.

23

dissemination of pedagogical values, had begun to grow in the lower sections of society as

well. Grenby indicates that the more widely accepted rational and moral children’s literature

became, the higher priced the juvenile books would become.96 This ‘concurrent upscaling of

mainstream children’s books’, Grenby continues, ‘created a widening gap between demand

and affordability’, a gap which only juvenile chapbooks could bridge.97 These new, child-

directed chapbooks were generally more instructive and morally improving, thereby

establishing a link with the moral tales of the respectable literature, but they were also cheap

so that they could be purchased by the poorer classes, who were unable to buy the expensive

children’s books.98

Juvenile chapbooks differ from “traditional” chapbooks not only in their content, but

also in their physical form and distribution.99 According to Grenby, the former are usually

smaller and shorter, measuring about six to nine by four to six centimetres and ranging

between eight and sixteen pages in length. Furthermore, children’s chapbooks often contain a

woodcut on each page; the woodcut might even be dab- or stencil-coloured. Despite their

being ‘generally better printed’ and ‘sometimes covered with Dutch flowered paper wrappers,

or with coloured paper’, juvenile chapbooks, just like earlier chapbooks, cost as little as a

penny.100 As regards the distribution, it seems that children’s chapbooks were no longer

vended by chapmen, but sold through book- and toyshops. The late eighteenth century saw

two developments which made the chapman’s trade fairly obsolete.101 The first was the rapid

growth of cities and towns, which meant that the population living in rural areas was far less

isolated than before. The second was the establishment of bookshops, lending libraries, and

printing firms in smaller towns and villages. As such, the rural poor were no longer dependent

on itinerant vendors for the supply of inexpensive reading matter. The majority of early

nineteenth-century chapbooks also carry a publisher’s imprint, clearly indicating the name

96 Grenby, ‘Chapbooks’, p. 302. 97 Ibid., p. 302. 98 Grenby, ‘Before Children’s Literature’, p. 43. In general, chapbook publishers would either pirate texts of

these new books for children or reprint earlier chapbook texts (sometimes with small alterations) and reuse

earlier ornaments, thus preserving a connection with the traditional (plebeian) chapbook. It may come as no

surprise then that some of the Crusoe chapbooks advertised as being intended for children merely reproduced the

texts and ornaments of earlier versions (O’Malley, ‘Poaching’ (2012), p. 76). 99 Grenby, ‘Chapbooks’, p. 291. 100 Ibid., p. 291. 101 Grenby, ‘Before Children’s Literature’, p. 41.

24

and address of the publisher, which further suggests that chapbooks were now sold in book

stores rather than hawked from one area to another.102

Having very briefly discussed the historical development of the juvenile chapbook and

its most important differences compared to the more traditional one, the following chapters

conduct a textual and paratextual analysis of twenty Crusoe chapbooks to see how publishers

adapted Defoe’s novel to meet the needs of the common reader and the (plebeian) child reader.

The structure of the analyses is fairly similar: after a discussion of the form, and front and

back matter (title page, frontispiece, publisher’s imprint, advertisement, and such) has been

given in the macro level, the chapbook text and its visual paratext are discussed in the micro

level.

102 Ibid., p. 41. Earlier chapbooks often bore no imprint, offering no indication with respect to the

printer/publisher, and the place and year of publication.

25

4 Crusoe Chapbooks for the Common Reader

That Robinson Crusoe had a high popular appeal is confirmed by the fact that the

refraction of Defoe’s novel began almost immediately after its publication, as well as by the

huge popularity of the Crusoe abridgments. In the source text, however, the popular element

is mixed up with, and weakened by, ideas of middle-class culture – values such as order and

hard work, which are, for instance, noticeable in Robinson’s high degree of circumstantial

detail in describing his various labours. Consequently, a number of adjustments and

alterations had to be made so as to reinforce those features which would draw the attention of

a popular (mixed-age) readership. The two subsequent sections of this dissertation explore

how Robinson Crusoe was turned into a popular tale.

4.1 Twenty-Four-Page Crusoe Chapbooks: London-Congleton-Stockport-Newcastle

This section examines four chapbook editions of Robinson Crusoe published in the

latter half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – the first was issued in London,

possibly by C. Dicey; the second in Congleton by J. Dean; the third in Stockport by R. and W.

Dean; and the fourth in Newcastle by M. Angus and Son.103 The editions match the definition

of the “chapbook” as proposed in Chapter Two. They are small, short, and likely to have still

been distributed by chapmen as the back-page advertisement of the Stockport edition reveals:

‘shopkeepers and hawkers may be supplied’.104 Although none of the booklets carries a

selling price, the same advertisement page lists Robinson Crusoe under the heading ‘penny

103 The Life of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (London, [c. 1775]). The chapbook was presumably published

by Cluer Dicey, son of William, their publishing firm being located at Aldermary Church Yard, Bow Lane,

London. Father and son were active from 1700 to 1756 and 1763 to 1775, printing both chapbooks and ballads

(Patricia Fumerton, ‘Digitizing Ephemera and its Discontents: Ebba’s Quest to Capture the Protean Broadside

Ballad’, in Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print, ed. by Kevin D. Murphy, and

Sally O’Driscoll (Maryland: Bucknell University Press, 2013), pp. 84 and 87); The Life of Robinson Crusoe, of

York, Mariner (Congleton: J. Dean, [c. 1785]); The History of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (Stockport: R.

and W. Dean, [c. 1800]); The Surprizing Life, and most Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of the City of

York, Marine (Newcastle: M. Angus and Son, [between c. 1800 and 1812]). Some librarians have proposed

different dates of publication, ranging between c. 1770 and c. 1790. However, biographical information makes

those dates unlikely. Thomas Angus began publishing chapbooks and broadsides in 1774 and continued to do so

up until his death in 1788, using the publisher’s imprint “Angus”. During the following twelve years, his widow,

Margaret, carried on the business on her own. In 1800, she replaced her late husband’s imprint with “M. Angus

& Son”, as first her elder son, Thomas, and then her younger son, George, joined the business. In 1812, the latter

took over, changing the imprint to “G. Angus”, and continuing the business (on his own) until 1825, when he

went bankrupt (Peter Wood, ‘The Newcastle Song Chapbooks’, in Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain,

Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions, ed. by David Atkinson, and Steve

Roud (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014), p. 63). The edition bears the imprint “M. Angus and Son”,

which necessarily means that the chapbook was produced between 1800 and 1812. 104 R. and W. Dean, p. 24. Emphasis added.

26

histories’, which necessarily implies that this edition was sold for a penny.105 It is quite certain

that the other chapbooks would have an equally low retail price. The form the publishers

adopted for their chapbooks is the twenty-four-page duodecimo format. In terms of printing

and design, the editions already differ from the more coarsely produced, rough-and-ready type

of chapbook in that the printers paid attention to both typography and layout, and that two of

them included wood-cut illustrations specially designed to reproduce moments and scenes

from Defoe’s novel.

In what follows, first the macro level, with three paratextual features – frontispiece,

title-page illustration, and back-page advertisement – will be discussed, before proceeding to

the micro level, that is the textual and pictorial analysis of the chapbooks proper.

4.1.1 Macro Level: Front and Back Matter

A high number of chapbooks have wood-cut ornaments in their front matter or on their

title pages. The recto of the first leaf of the edition issued by M. Angus and Son – the

youngest and “finest” printed among the four editions under consideration – features, for

example, a neatly executed woodcut, depicting a bearded Crusoe, standing full-length on a

shore, clad in a goatskin jacket, breeches, and a conical cap, a rifle resting on each shoulder

and a sword hanging from his belt. In the left middle-ground is a ship on choppy waves and in

the right a line of sharpened wooden stakes set upright in the ground – presumably

representing part of the outer wall of Robinson’s abode (figure 1). The woodcut bears a

striking likeness to the Clark and Pine frontispiece portrait of Crusoe (figure 7). The latter was

the only illustration included in the first edition of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and, according to

Richard Phillips, ‘among the most enduring elements of Defoe’s original’, being reprinted in

most editions with little to no variation.106 The Newcastle edition is certainly not the sole

chapbook that features a copy of the original frontispiece: publishers of Crusoe chapbooks

often used a modified version of it, either as frontispiece or as title-page illustration (figures

105 Ibid., p. 24. According to Schöwerling, the reason for the frequent omission of the chapbook’s retail price is

that it allowed chapmen to demonstrate their selling skills and to adapt to the prevailing market situation

(Schöwerling, p. 18). 106 Richard Phillips, ‘Mapping Adventures: Robinson Crusoe and some Victorian Robinsonades’, in Mapping

Men and Empire: Geographies of Adventure (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 30. That the first edition of

Defoe’s novel included only a frontispiece portrait of the protagonist suggests that initially illustrations did not

form an integral part of Robinson Crusoe. The reason for this is explained by Percy Muir: before the nineteenth

century, ‘illustrations were used only after a novel had proved a success […] a large and assured public was

looked for before a publisher could entertain the possibility of an illustrated edition’ (Percy Muir, Victorian

Illustrated Book (London: Batsford, 1971), p. 1).

27

2-6).107 This simplified copy of Clark and Pine’s original established a direct intertextual

relation with the source novel, but also, perhaps more importantly, created in the

woodcut/wood engraving a connection with the eponymous hero of the Crusoe story. It is this

clear correspondence between text and visual paratext that sets these editions apart from the

more traditional eight-page chapbook, whose text-image relationship, as discussed in the

second chapter, was often vague and problematic.108

107 The title-page illustration of The Life and Wonderful Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Glasgow: Francis Orr

& Son, [between 1834 and 1850]) is identical to the illustration found on the title page of The Adventures of

Robinson Crusoe, the York Mariner (Paisley: J. Neilson, 1822). The in-text cuts of Neilson’s edition, too, were

reused in the edition by Francis Orr & Son. This information allows for further consideration. Francis Orr &

Sons produced a numbered series of 150 twenty-four-page penny histories – the Crusoe chapbook carries

number 46 – identifiable by the imprint ‘Glasgow: Printed for the Bookseller’ (Adam McNaughtan, ‘A Century

of Saltmarket Literature, 1790-1890’, in Six Centuries of the Provincial Book Trade, ed. by Peter Isaac

(Winchester: St. Paul’s Biographies, 1990), pp. 169-170). However, the Crusoe chapbook along with numbers

43, 100 and 161-165 of the series bear the imprint: ‘Glasgow: published by Francis Orr & Sons’ (National

Library of Scotland Scottish Book Trade Index, <http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/scottish-book-trade-index/oliver-

peat> [accessed 2 February 2015]). The chapbooks ‘were printed by stereotype, and it seems probable that the

plates were made by the Paisley firm of Neilson’, which could explain the reuse of the same wood-cut images

(McNaughtan, p. 170). Stereotyping is a process which involved printing from stereotypes, which are metal

plates cast from a plaster mould (i.e. flong) of moveable type. 108 I am grateful to Professor Jung for showing me his ASECS conference paper on chapbook ornaments.

28

Figure 5: Copy original frontispiece

(A. Swindells, p. 1)

Figure 1: Copy original frontispiece (M.

Angus and Son, p. 1) Figure 2: Copy original

frontispiece (J. Dean, p. 2)

Figure 3: Copy original

frontispiece (C. Dicey (?), p. 1)

Figure 4: Copy original

frontispiece (Francis Orr &

Sons, p. 1)

Figure 6: Copy original frontispiece

(Thomas Wilson and Son, p. 1)

29

A very different woodcut features on the title pages of the two Dean editions (J. Dean

and R. and W. Dean), which shows Robinson as a placid young man, standing on a seashore,

looking slightly to the right with a fixed stare, his left hand on his hip, his right arm gesturing

to the left (figures 8-9). He is unarmed, wearing a shirt, buttoned waistcoat, loose jacket,

pantaloons, buckled shoes, a flat cap and a neck-scarf tied in a knot, the two ends dangling in

front. In the left middle-ground is a three-master at sea and in the right are some rocks.

Although the images of the two editions look very similar, they are not identical, as is

apparent from such details as Robinson’s facial expression, the buckles on his shoes, and the

form of the rocks. One question that might be asked, is why there are two different

woodblocks instead of just one for the two editions. The shared surname suggests a family

connection, but there is no absolute confirmation of this. Biographical data on the publishers

is scarce.109 It is known that James Dean was a bookseller, printer, and patent medicine seller,

operating in Congleton during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, and that his son,

John Dean, was taken into partnership from 1790 to 1793 – three years during which they

109 The little information I have of the publishers was obtained from the British Book Trade Index (BBTI),

<http://www.bbti.bham.ac.uk/Detailswithsource.htm?TraderID=19417> [accessed 22 May 2015]; and from

Exeter Working Papers in Book History, <http://bookhistory.blogspot.be/2013/06/printers-of-popular-literature-

1.html> [accessed 12 June 2015].

Figure 7: Original frontispiece by Clark

and Pine

30

traded under the imprint of “James Dean & Son.” This John was in all likelihood the brother

of Randle Dean, who operated in Stockport (and presumably also in Manchester), first alone

during the year 1796, and then together with William from 1798 to 1800. The ECCO list of

books issued by the publishers provides some further indication of a possible family

relationship, for it includes a 1796 chapbook, the title page of which features the names: J.

Dean and R. Dean.110 This evidence, though scanty and inconclusive, is suggestive. If one is

to assume that there is indeed a family link, then it is somewhat surprising, even though the

printers are based in different places, that they used different versions of the same image. One

would imagine that in towns so geographically close to each other – the distance between

Congleton and Stockport is but twenty-eight kilometres or seventeen miles – related printers

would use the same woodblock. The fact that they did not, that they used two different

woodblocks yet featuring the same elements, does show how popular the image was.

110 John Reece, The good shepherd; or, The Mercy and Power of Jesus Christ, manifested to the Saints in

Distress: in a Friendly Conference between a Shepherd and a Farmer. By John Reece (Congleton: (printed for

the author) and sold by J. Dean; R. Dean, Stockport; and G. Sael, in the Strand, London, [1796]) from Eighteenth

Century Collections Online (ECCO),

<http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=gent&tabID=T0

01&docId=CW3318369374&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMIL

E> [accessed 04 February 2015].

Figure 8: Title page (J. Dean, p. 1) Figure 9: Title page (R. and W.

Dean, p. 1)

31

Another paratextual feature which might appear in the front matter, but which – if the

chapbook contains it – is usually included in the back matter, is a publisher’s

advertisement.111 The aforementioned back-page advertisement of the Stockport edition reads

thus: ‘Shopkeepers and hawkers may be supplied with the following articles on the lowest

terms’.112 These articles range from slip songs and penny histories to battledores and reading-

made-easies to school bibles and testaments. In this publisher’s list, Robinson Crusoe is

sorted alongside twenty-three other titles, most of which are common and well-known staples

among chapbooks:

Babes in the Woods; Bamfyeld Moore Carew; Card Fortune-book; Doctor Faustus;

Dreams and Moles; Fair Rosamond; Friar and Boy, 2 parts; Guy, Earl of Warwick;

German Fortune-teller; Jane Shore; Jack and Giants, 2 parts; Lancashire Dialect, 2

p.; London ‘Prentice; Mother Bunch, 2 parts; Nixon’s Prophecy; Parents Best Gift, or

Church Catechism; Robin Hood; Robinson Crusoe; Sir Richard Whittington; Sleeping

Beauty; Simple Simon’s Misfortunes; Tom Hickathrift, 2 parts; Tom Long; Valentine

and Orson.113

It might be useful to have a brief look at some of those histories in order to facilitate a better

understanding of the typical chapbook hero. The History of Jack and the Giants, for example,

follows the adventures of the title character, a farmer’s son, who, through strength and

cunning, outsmarts several giants and rescues many noblemen and women.114 As a reward,

Jack is not only made a Knight of the Round Table and given the hand of a Duke’s daughter

in marriage, but also gifted with a noble house and a large estate. Similarly, in The History of

Tom Hickathrift, the eponymous hero, a son of a poor day-labourer, is endowed with

remarkable physical strength, enabling him to overpower a giant with merely the axletree of

his cart. Taking possession of the latter’s silver and gold, cave and surrounding grounds, Tom

escapes his poverty-stricken condition.115 And as his fame spreads through the country, Tom

also rises in social status and becomes “Mr. Hickathrift” The History of Sir Richard

Whittington follows the same narrative pattern as the aforementioned. It tells the story of

Dick, a poor orphan and badly treated kitchen boy, who makes a large fortune by virtue of the

ratting skills of his cat.116 After having established himself as a successful merchant, Mr.

Whittington marries his former master’s daughter and eventually becomes Lord Mayor of

111 An earlier Crusoe edition by M. Angus and Son, for example, has a publisher’s advertisement at the bottom of

the title page (The Sureprsing [sic] Life, and most Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of the City of York,

Mariner (Newcastle: M. Angus and Son, [c. 1800])). 112 R. and W. Dean, p. 24. 113 Ibid., p. 24. 114 The History of Jack the Giant-Killer (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [n.d.]). 115 The History of Thomas Hickathrift (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [n.d.]). 116 The History of Whittington and his Cat (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, 1852).

32

London. Thus, what those chapbook narratives have in common are their ‘humble, if risible,

heroes’ – poor figures who eventually climb to the ranks of wealthy gentlemen by using

strength or cunning, or simply through luck. 117 To meet the expectations of the target

audience, in the chapbooks, Defoe’s Robinson had to be shaped into a character that better

resembled those typical chapbook heroes. The beginning of the original novel, of course,

already provides a rather important detail with respect to Robinson’s initial condition: being

‘the third son of the family’, Crusoe would inherit little and would be obliged to earn his own

living. 118 Not surprisingly, this detail is included by the chapbooks, already aligning

Robinson, to a certain extent, with the “poor” hero of the classic chapbook.

The next section will further address the concept of the chapbook’s “lottery mentality”

and how Robinson Crusoe was adapted to include this narrative pattern of a protagonist’s

remarkable rise up the economic and social ladder through luck.

4.1.2 Micro Level: Textual and Pictorial Analysis119

The texts in the chapbooks under consideration are nearly identical except for a

handful of sentences and some minor changes in syntax and wording, and will therefore be

examined together here as one chapbook text.120 A calculation of the number of words of the

three main sections reveals that the most palpable omissions from the standard text take place

in the island portion of the Crusoe tale – a detail which already tends to support O’Malley’s

statement that chapbooks redirect the focus of the source text by transforming a story

predominantly about a man’s self-reliant survival on a desolate island into a tale about

maritime travel.121 In what follows, I will demonstrate that the transformation from survival

117 Spufford, p. 147. Some chapbooks, like The Life and Adventures of Robin Hood (Glasgow: Printed for the

booksellers, 1858), do not follow this pattern of a poor hero who rises in wealth and status through luck, strength

or wittiness, but instead feature a protagonist who is ‘particularly sympathetic to the poor’ (Pederson, p. 100). 118 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. by John Richetti (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), p. 5. 119 The discussion is much indebted to Andrew O’Malley’s critical analysis of twenty-four-page chapbook

versions of Robinson Crusoe. Unless mentioned otherwise, all references to O’Malley in this section are to his

article ‘Poaching on Crusoe’s Island: Popular Reading and Chapbook editions of Robinson Crusoe’, in

Eighteenth-Century Life, 35.2 (2011), pp. 18-38. 120 One obvious difference can be found on the structural level. With the exception of the Newcastle edition

which contains a continuous text without any subdivision into sections, the chapbook text in the three remaining

editions is structured into four chapters, each of which is introduced by a short summary and further divided into

paragraphs, which are either indented (as in the London and Stockport editions) or neatly separated by

whitespace (as in the Congleton edition). The J. Dean version also adds catchwords on the bottom right-hand

corner of each page, the original purpose of which was to ensure the correct folding and arranging of the sheets,

but borne in mind the oral reading practices, the catchwords may also have assisted the performer in reading

aloud as the reader’s eyes could move easily from one page to the next. While the written text in the four

editions remains nearly identical, there are clear dissimilarities on the pictorial level, as will be observed shortly. 121 The pre-island portion is compressed from 17360 to 590 words; the island stay from 81450 to 1910 words;

and the post-island section from 22170 to 980 words. The figures are approximate and given as rounded.

33

into sea story has been brought about by both an emphasis on the seafaring aspects of the

original and a de-emphasis (or a complete neglect) of two different elements: the religious

aspects of the source novel and the passages dealing with Crusoe’s daily domestic tasks.

Furthermore, I will show that the chapbook publishers sought to erase such middle-class

values as hard work and perseverance, substituting them with a “lower-class lottery

mentality”, one of the archetypal characteristics of the “classic” chapbook.

Rogers notes that ‘the popularity of the book [Robinson Crusoe] among uneducated

people seems to have had comparatively little to do with religion’.122 Indeed, the religious

aspects of the original, though not dropped entirely, are drastically weakened in the chapbook

editions. For example, Robinson’s intense remorse for his disobedience towards his father – a

significant aspect of the source text, in which Crusoe describes his act of filial disobedience as

his ‘original sin’, a clear reference to Genesis – is not mentioned at all, or dealt with in an

overly cursory fashion, meriting but one sentence upon his arrival on the island: I ‘severely

reproached myself with disobeying my father’s command, and withal his speech, that if I

went, as it was, without his blessing, I could expect no success’.123 Crusoe’s revelatory dream

and the subsequent spiritual transformation he undergoes on the island are dismissed in a

similar manner. While Defoe relates in satisfying detail the dream in which an avenging angel

threatens to kill Robinson for not having repented of his sins, the chapbook text drops the

dream entirely, and merely communicates what takes place immediately before and after it:

‘At last I fell sick of a fever, which after some time left me, for which I returned thanks to the

Almighty Being’.124 The original extract of the dream is succeeded by the development of

Robinson’s spirituality. It is at this point in the narrative that Robinson commences to pray

and read the Bible regularly; Crusoe quotes and alludes to several biblical verses and at times

even seeks inspiration and moral guidance by randomly opening the Bible. This bibliolatry is

much lessened in the chapbook text, which refers to the Bible just once and only in passing:

‘And having several good books, particularly a Bible, I used to comfort myself […] in my

solitude’.125 At the end, the chapbook writer does, however, speak of the ‘very remarkable

chain of providence’ apparent in the Crusoe tale, and asserts that ‘all people’, but particularly

‘those who are inclined to learn the art of patience and submission to the Divine will’, will

122 Rogers, p. 166. 123 Defoe, p. 154; and Dicey (?), p. 7. The edition by M. Angus and Son does not include the sentence. 124 J. Dean, p. 12. 125 M. Angus and Son, p. 9.

34

benefit from perusal of the work.126 The writer contends that Robinson’s mistakes may serve

‘as examples to others’, and bids the reader to honour and have faith in ‘the wisdom of

Providence’.127 Clear references to religious matters, such as the aforementioned, are very few

indeed and are considered ‘unenthusiastic afterthoughts’ by O’Malley, and ‘sententious

peroration[s]’ by Rogers.128

Besides downplaying the religious aspects of the original, the chapbook writer also de-

emphasises the techniques Defoe uses to authenticate his character, starting with Robinson’s

‘new method of making an almanac’ as well as ‘[h]is journal of incident’.129 Just like the

protagonist of the source text, the chapbook hero takes care not to lose track of time, making

himself a “calendar” by which he is able to count the days. In the Newcastle and London

editions, woodcuts illustrate how Crusoe, dressed in a goatskin tunic, marks the passing of

days by cutting a notch into the surface of a piece of wood he has set up near the shore.

However, unlike Defoe, the chapbook writer makes no attempt to recreate an accurate

timeline of Crusoe’s events. 130 Indeed, all the chapbooks present incorrect and unlikely

chronologies, misprinting those dates they retain from the original novel. The London edition,

for example, states that Robinson was born in the year 1642, that he landed on the island in

1695, that he left it in 1680, and that he arrived in England in 1688.

The chapbook writer also briefly adopts the journal form, but attempts to establish a

correct correspondence between actions and dates, as found in the original text, are not

repeated. The chapbook editions, for example, combine several months’ events into a single

entry. Dated ‘From Nov. 17, to Jan. [14]’, the journal record reads:

I made shelves, a dresser, and table, killed and wounded some goats; one wounded I

cured and brought up tame; and then employed my time in finishing a wall round my

habitation, in searching the island, in taking and taming wild [pigeons], some of which

126 R. and W. Dean, p. 23. 127 Ibid., p. 23. 128 Andrew O’Malley, ‘Crusoe at Home: Coding Domesticity in Children’s Editions of Robinson Crusoe’, in

British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (2006), p. 340; and Rogers, p. 172. 129 J. Dean, p. 7. 130 Ian Watt, ‘Realism and the Novel Form’, in The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding

(California: University of California Press, 2001, a reprint of 1957), pp. 21-25, and p. 32. Robinson Crusoe is

often hailed as the precursor text of the realist novel. Defoe’s plain style and his attention for such matters as

numbers and quantities make him the first to have effectively used the techniques of formal or circumstantial

realism, as Ian Watt has called it. Defoe’s attempt to offer a correct chronology of his hero’s activities is part of

this formal realism.

35

being shot, were excellent food; and with goats tallow, and a little [oakum] for the

wick, I furnished myself instead of candles.131

Overall, this brief extract is exemplary of other chapbook passages in its economy of words.

Robinson’s difficulties in hunting wild goats and pigeons as well as the cumbrous work of

building, fencing, and furnishing his hut are here compressed into a single sentence. It is, of

course, necessary in order to fit the text into the chapbook’s fixed number of pages to jettison

the many details concerning Robinson’s efforts and conditions. However, as O’Malley points

out, the redactional choice not to include specific temporal references for the individual

actions, at the same time, indicates that the chapbook publishers had no intention or interest to

replicate the formal characteristics Defoe uses in his novel.132 Both Robinson’s keeping of a

calendar and a journal, and the amount of circumstantial detail he provides in his descriptions

serve to authenticate his actions and to make them more likely to the middle-class reader. Yet,

this “authentication” of Robinson’s activities seems to have been no major concern to the

plebeian reader.

The chapbook writer significantly reduces – and on most occasions even eliminates

altogether – the details and pedantic descriptions of Robinson’s daily activities, his feelings of

weariness and frustration when he tackles his challenging tasks, and his surprise and joy when

‘all these things [are finally] brought to perfection’.133 A telling example is Robinson’s two-

month struggle to make earthenware vessels. In the novel, the reader learns of his first few

bungling attempts which fail miserably: ‘what odd misshapen ugly things I made; […] many

of them fell in […] many fell out, […] many crack’d by the over violent heat of the sun’.134

Little by little, however, Crusoe learns the complicated techniques of shaping, firing, and

glazing and, by the end, he reaches ‘an unexpected perfection in [his] earthen ware’, having

made himself a potter’s wheel to facilitate the manufacturing of ‘things round and

shapable’.135 The detail with which Defoe’s Robinson relates his trial-and-error labour of

fabricating pots out of clay, complete with all the accompanying thoughts and feelings, is

131 M. Angus and Son, p. 11. After two more of such short and incomplete journal entries, the diary fragment

ends as suddenly as it began: ‘[s]o far my journal’ (Ibid., p. 11). 132 O’Malley, p. 28; and Watt, ‘Realism’, p. 32. Watt maintains that the inclusion of details, such as the temporal

(and spatial) environment of the hero’s actions, allows for more particularised individuals. 133 Defoe, p. 49. The page restriction necessarily means that the chapbook text has to abandon what Margaret

Cohen has identified as Defoe’s “formula of problem-solving”, and coupled with it, his “performing description”

(Margaret Cohen, ‘Remarkable Occurrences at Sea and in the Novel’, in The Novel and the Sea (New Jersey:

Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 72-78). The meanings of these concepts are fairly straightforward; Defoe

meticulously relates the problems Crusoe encounters on the island and his attempts to solve them, detailing both

his initial mistakes and his cognitive processes towards a solution. 134 Defoe, p. 96. 135 Ibid., p. 114.

36

entirely discarded in the chapbook text, which condenses those passages of the source text

into less than one sentence: ‘A great part of my time was employed in sowing corn, and

making earthen pots to hold water’.136

Indeed, the novel’s popularity among common readers did certainly not rest upon

Crusoe’s scrupulousness in reporting his domestic work on the island. ‘It would be too

tedious’, the chapbook hero states, ‘to mention every day’s transaction till the conclusion of

the year, I shall [therefore] only observe, that fishing and hunting were my delight’.137 This

quotation clearly illustrates that adapting a text for a specific audience requires more than

simply leaving out particular sections or aspects of the source text. The inclusion of this

sentence shows the chapbook writer’s awareness of addressing a readership with (potentially)

little interest in Crusoe’s detailed accounts of his arduous activities – to enumerate all of them

would simply be “too tedious”; hence their elimination from the chapbook text.138 The writer

thus shifts the original focus from Crusoe’s hard work to his delights, anticipating that his

target audience, the labouring poor, was likely to find Robinson’s leisure pursuits more

diverting.

The fact that the plebeian readers were more interested in Robinson’s voyages and

adventures than his domestic duties and the religious implications of Defoe’s novel is

apparent from the considerable amount of textual space and large number of woodcuts

chapbook publishers allotted to those scenes.139 Robinson’s capture by and subsequent escape

from the Moors, for example, was deemed fairly important, being included in almost all of the

editions considered in this dissertation, often related in careful detail (borne in mind, of

course, the limited space a chapbook affords), and frequently accompanied by an illustration

136 R. and W. Dean, p. 12. 137 M. Angus and Son, p. 11. 138 That hard work is no longer the success factor is exemplified, for instance, by the chapbooks’ retention of

Robinson’s semi-miraculous discovery of green barley: after having carelessly tossed out a bag with husks of

corn, Crusoe finds crops of barley growing, which ‘afforded [him] good provision for many years’ (R. and W.

Dean, p. 12). It is noteworthy that while the chapbooks do communicate the surprising growth of barley plants,

they choose not to mention Robinson’s labour and care in cultivating them. 139 All editions, except the one by R. and W. Dean, include in-text woodcuts. The Congleton edition features five

cuts within the text, three of which are small, rough and co-optable. The fourth, larger woodcut opens the second

chapter, and is a reversed (and rather poor) copy of the third cut to the Newcastle edition, showing two men, who

are about to board a three-masted ship. The fifth cut represents Friday’s advent. The London edition incorporates

nine cuts, which are, overall, both relevant to the verbal text they accompany and consistent with each other.

They are smaller in size than those in the Newcastle edition, occupying roughly a quarter to a third of the page,

and of a lesser quality, being generally simpler and cruder. The illustrations to M. Angus and Son’s version are

discussed below.

37

representing the moment after Crusoe has pushed Muley overboard into the water.140 More

precisely, this image shows Xury and Robinson in a small fishing boat, the latter standing and

pointing a gun at Muley, who is swimming towards the boat to be taken in( (figures 10-12). In

the right background is a castle on high ground with a flag fluttering at the top.141 It is

noteworthy that John Pitt’s close-up illustration of the scene (figure 13), which has Crusoe

and Xury in a small boat with two triangular sails, a flag tied to the top, and Muley swimming

alongside with his left arm reaching out of the water, appears to have been based on Thomas

Stothard’s third engraving for Robinson Crusoe (1781), an illustrated edition which appeared

in the reprint series, The Novelist’s Magazine (1780-1788), issued in London by Harrison &

Co.142

Furthermore, the passages on the island receiving detailed attention are those

concerned with adventure rather than diligence.143 One of the most iconic and visual scenes of

Crusoe’s story is the advent of Friday, which has been ornamented in many chapbooks,

among which those of Dicey (?), J. Dean, and M. Angus and Son.144 The woodcut in the

Newcastle edition merits special comment here as it “squeezes” the various stages of the

rescue event into a single picture (figure 14). The image is composite and diachronic – that is,

it presents the successive moments as if occurring at the same time – and should be read

sequentially, moving in a circular, clockwise manner, starting in the left foreground. Here,

one sees Friday and another war prisoner on their knees, begging the captor to spare their

lives, while in the left background, the cannibals are dancing around a huge fire, getting ready

for their feast. In the right background one sees Robinson’s fenced-in dwelling from whence

140 Some juvenile chapbooks even include a second illustration, depicting the moment when Robinson kills the

lion on the African coast. The Congleton edition also inserts a woodcut in this part of the chapbook text, though

it has no discernible relevance to the scene, or to Robinson Crusoe for that matter, being an image of a little bird

flying towards a tree. 141 J. Neilson used the same woodcut as title-page image for an eight-page chapbook, containing naval ballads:

The famous sea-fight between Capt. Ward and the Rainbow: To which is added, The haughs of Crumdel, a

memorable battle fought by the G e t Montrose and the clans against Oliver Cromwell. (Paisley: J. Neilson for

G. Caldwell, bookseller [n.d.]). 142 Robinson Crusoe and the picaresque novel by Alain-René Lesage, Gil Bias (1750-1735), composed the fourth

volume in a series of twenty-three. The engraver of the scene depicting Robinson threatening to kill Muley was

Charles Heath. 143 These adventure scenes include the arrival of Friday, the cannibal slaughter, and the defeat of the mutineers.

In this chapbook text, Robinson’s adventures in the Pyrenean mountains, where Friday kills two wolves and a

bear ‘with a great deal of sport’, are also preserved, and in the Newcastle edition even illustrated (M. Angus and

Son, p. 22). 144 Dicey (?) chooses to insert a woodcut to accompany the moment when Friday decapitates one of his pursuers

and then returns the sword to Robinson. However, the image does not “illustrate” the text with which it appears,

showing three men in the left foreground, one swinging a sword with the intention to kill the man knelt in front

of him, the third lying dead on the ground, and two men in the right foreground, hidden behind some bushes,

observing the event. J. Dean’s illustration depicts the moment when Robinson shoots Friday’s second pursuer.

38

the “barbarous” practices were observed, whereas the centre-to-right middle-ground shows

the actual rescue moment: the Indian on the left side of the creek gives up the pursuit, while

two others have crossed the stream, one lying on the ground, having been knocked down, the

other aiming his bow, while being shot by Crusoe. Simultaneously, one sees Friday, behind

Robinson, ‘[running] for his life towards [Crusoe’s] castle’.145 It might be observed that the

illustration bears a close resemblance to one of the six illustrations published in the sixth

edition of Robinson Crusoe (1722).146

145 M. Angus and Son, p. 14. 146 David Blewett, ‘Robinson Crusoe, Friday, and the Noble Savage: The Illustration of the Rescue of Friday

Scene in the Eighteenth Century’, in Man and Nature / L’Homme et la Nature, 5 (1986), pp. 29-30. An obvious

difference is that the original illustration adds another detail: between Robinson and his abode is the scene of

Friday placing Robinson’s foot on his head in token of subservience.

39

The shift from a survival story towards a tale about adventurous seafaring life is

highlighted by the large number of maritime ornaments chapbook publishers insert in their

booklets. M. Angus, for example, adopts eleven wood-cut illustrations, of which one serves as

Figure 10: Robinson threatening to kill

Muley (M. Angus and Son, p. 6) Figure 11: Robinson threatening to kill Muley

(J. Neilson, p. 6)

Figure 12: Robinson threatening to kill

Muley (J. and C. Evans, p. 13) Figure 13: Robinson threatening to kill Muley

(J. Pitts, p. 13)

Figure 14: Friday rescue scene

(M. Angus and Son, p. 14)

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the frontispiece, three are distributed across the pre-island portion, three across the island

narrative, and four across the rescue episode and post-island section. Seven of those are

ornaments with a maritime theme.147 As already observed, woodcuts are an attraction to

chapbook purchasers; it is not surprising then to find that the verbal text makes way for such a

high number of pictures.148 The physical prominence of these illustrations – they occupy

nearly half the space on the page – further attests to their importance. These images provide

visual restatements of the written text; in fact, because of their size and number, they have

become more important than their written counterpart. This “eviction” of the verbal text,

though best observable in children’s chapbooks (which, as mentioned above, often contain a

woodcut on each page), is already apparent in Angus’ edition and perhaps best illustrated by

the episode of Crusoe’s first shipwreck, which merits but one sentence in the chapbook text.

The sixty-two words which comprise it communicate at a swift pace the key events regarding

the Yarmouth-Cromer narrative: a storm arises, six days of incessant toil and sickness follow,

the ship founders at Cromer but all are saved, the crew then walks to Yarmouth from whence

Crusoe proceeds to London. Despite the extreme concision at the textual level, the importance

of the scene is nonetheless made clear by the inclusion of a wood-cut ornament.149

The seafaring aspects are underscored once more by the chapbooks’ retention of the

novel’s mutiny episode. That the scene was deemed important is not only reflected in the total

number of words, 457, but also evidenced by the fact that all publishers, except R. and W.

Dean, considered it necessary to insert woodcuts to accompany it. 150 The preservation of this

147 The third page also has a headpiece made up of a rectangular field decorated with flower designs. 148 The eviction of the text is generally better noticeable in children’s chapbooks as more and larger illustrations

are included to substitute the written part (Hermansson, p. 84). In profusely illustrated (juvenile) chapbooks, the

importance of the illustration has become such that one can even speak of a reversal of the conventional text-

image relationship: the illustrations are so numerous and extensive that they, instead of the verbal text, constitute

the main basis of the story. 149 It should, however, be noted that the image in all likelihood represents the fatal shipwreck. This first in-text

cut shows a small, wrecked rowboat in the foreground with one figure still on board and three others drowning in

a somewhat choppy sea, their hands reaching out of the water. Another shipwreck survivor is clambering onto a

rock in the left middle-ground, whilst a three-master is seemingly sailing away from them to the right. The cut

has presumably been transplanted in the pre-island section, for in another chapbook, reproduced by John Ashton,

it represents Robinson’s fatal shipwreck (Ashton, p. 420). Also, the original novel states that during this cast-

ashore scene, Crusoe is eventually ‘dash’d […] against a piece of a rock’ (Defoe, p. 38). However, as the

chapbook does not mention the rock (neither during the first nor during the fatal shipwreck), it could be that

chapbook readers – who, in most cases, had no access to the source text – read the woodcut as a visual extension

of the written account of the Cromer narrative. 150 M. Angus and Son, for example, incorporates two illustrations, one representing the arrival of the mutineers,

the other the seizing of the ship. J. Dean also inserts two ornaments, which are so vague and unspecific that they

could easily feature in other chapbooks, representing a ship and a bird. The reuse of those woodcuts produces no

major disjunction with the verbal text as the cuts pertain to the content of the written part, being inserted below

the sentence in which Crusoe boards the ship with his ‘man Friday [and his] parrot’ (J. Dean, p. 21). The reuse of

wood-cut ornaments across different chapbook titles is not uncommon, as has been observed above. Stephen C.

41

particular scene deserves special attention since the passage seems to have served a different

purpose in the chapbooks. O’Malley has discussed the episode of Crusoe’s victory over the

mutineers in a chapbook edition not included in this dissertation, but his remarks apply just as

well to the chapbook text concerned here.151 He observes that the chapbook’s alterations to

the scene accentuate Robinson’s attainment of titles and dignities and his resulting increase in

social status and prestige. In the novel, Crusoe and the captain trick the mutineers into

believing that the island’s ‘Governour’ intends to kill them, but will pardon all, except Will

Atkins, if they yield and lay down their weapons.152 Thus, the honorific title of governor that

the captain designates Robinson is merely a deception, designed to frighten Atkins and his

comrades into surrender. In the chapbook text, the deceptive dimension of this authority is left

out; the fictitious titles of ‘Captain-General’ and ‘Lieutenant-General’ Robinson bestows

upon himself and Friday ‘no longer have the same ironic quality’.153 Furthermore, Crusoe

informs the chapbook reader that, after the rebel captain, whom in the chapbook text is called

‘the pirate captain’, is killed and the ship recovered, ‘the captain came on shore, thanking

[him] for his preservation, offering his ship and service at [his] command’.154 In the novel, the

captain, of course, makes a similar offer – ‘there’s your ship, for she is all yours, and so are

we and all that belong to her’ – but the difference lies in the fact that the novel clarifies that

the captain’s offer is no literal gift, but a grateful acknowledgment of his indebtedness, while

the chapbook text does not.155 As such, the chapbooks accentuate not only Robinson’s victory

over the armed intruders, O’Malley explains, but, more importantly, his reward, that is ‘his

rise in stature above that of the ship’s captain’.156

Crusoe’s social elevation is paired with a rise in wealth. Arriving in Lisbon, Robinson

learns that his Brazilian plantation has been most profitable, finding himself in the possession

Behrendt further explains this phenomenon: ‘[I]ndividual illustrations functioned at times for their publishers as

visual “set pieces,” as interchangeable stock images that drew more upon conventions associated with particular

subjects, themes, and genres than upon the particularized details of individual literary works’ (Stephen C.

Behrendt, ‘Sibling Rivalries: Author and Artist in the Earlier Illustrated Book’, in Word & Image: A Journal of

Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 13.1 (1997), p. 27, quoted in Alice Colombo, ‘Reworkings in the Textual History of

Gulliver’s Travels: A Translational Approach’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Portsmouth, 2013), p.

177). 151 O’Malley, pp. 31-32. The edition to which O’Malley refers is The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of

York, Mariner (Hull: J. Ferraby, [n.d.]). 152 During the mutiny episode, Robinson assumes the identity of governor as well as that of the latter’s aide-de-

camp (Defoe, pp. 211 and 213). 153 R. and W. Dean, p. 20. In the novel, Crusoe claims the title of ‘Generalissimo’ (Defoe, p. 210); O’Malley, p.

31. 154 M. Angus and Son, pp. 20-21. 155 Defoe, p. 214. 156 O’Malley, p. 32.

42

of a plentiful fortune: ‘an hundred a year, and four thousand pounds in money’.157 Desirous to

settle in Brazil, yet reluctant to become a Roman Catholic, Robinson writes his old friend to

sell his plantation investment. In the novel, Crusoe earns 33,000 pieces of eight with the sale;

in the Newcastle edition, this has become ‘8,280,000 pieces of eight, and a hundred moidores

a year’.158 The last woodcut of that same edition communicates in satisfying detail Crusoe’s

eventual affluent, elite social position (figure 15).159 It depicts Robinson fashionably dressed

in a full-bottomed wig, tricorn hat, high-quartered buckled shoes, and full-skirted coat

buttoned at the waist with wide sleeve cuffs. He is standing in a refined room with curtained

windows and a checkered floor, assuming a rather swaggering pose, his right hand leaning on

a cane, his left resting on his hip. Although this woodcut is not consonant with the rest of the

images, it is nonetheless pertinent to the verbal text it is illustrating. This, however, cannot be

said of the last ornament in an earlier edition by M. Angus and Son (figure 16), which shows

a whole-length, standing female figure, possibly Cleopatra, clad in a long dress, but bare-

breasted, a scarf looped around her, holding two serpents in her right hand with a cityscape in

the distance at the left.160 That such a recycled wood-cut ornament was ‘acceptable to readers

of chapbooks’, O’Malley explains, ought to ‘be understood in terms of the familiarity,

repetition, and continuity between different texts that characterize oral narrative and popular

culture’. 161 The “refractive” role of the wood-cut pictures was instrumental in the

popularisation of Defoe’s novel: while the simplified images of the Clark and Pine

frontispiece illustration established a clear link with the source novel, the reused ornaments

“guaranteed” that Defoe’s work complied with the ‘accepted and expected conventions of the

already existing norms of chapbook literature’, hence transforming Robinson Crusoe into a

story for popular consumption.162

157 Dicey (?), p. 22. 158 M. Angus and Son, p. 22. 159 The same ornament is employed on the title page of A Garland of New Songs, containing 1. Robinson Crusoe,

2. Jack at the Windlass, 3. The Sons of Britannia. (Newcastle: [Angus], [c.1800]). 160 The Sureprsing [sic] Life, and most Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of the City of York, Mariner

(Newcastle: M. Angus and Son, [c. 1800]). The editions are identical except for the title page – the earlier edition

includes a publisher’s advertisement at the bottom – and the final woodcut on the penultimate page. 161 O’Malley, p. 27. 162 Ibid., p. 27.

43

Figure 15: Robinson as master (M. Angus

and Son, p. 23)

Figure 16: Recycled woodcut of

Cleopatra(?) (M. Angus and Son, earlier

edition, p. 23)

44

4.2 Eight-Page Crusoe Chapbook: London (?)

This section discusses an eight-page chapbook edition presumably issued in London

around 1750, and examines if this older and shorter version of Robinson Crusoe underwent a

similar textual and pictorial transformation as the longer Crusoe chapbooks discussed

above.163 In what follows, the chapbook’s front matter (i.e. the recto and verso of its title

page) will be discussed, followed by an analysis of the chapbook text.

4.2.1 Macro Level: Front Matter

A study of the title page provides a good deal of information about the chapbook’s

content and also reveals some common features and dissimilarities with the original title page.

Within the double-lined borders, both novel and chapbook version are put forward as

autobiographical travel narratives (figures 17-18). Their long synoptic titles speak of Crusoe,

his isolated, shipwrecked state and his eventual rescue by pirates. Due to the wood-cut

illustration, which takes up a good part of the page, the chapbook’s summary title is slightly

shortened and re-organised. The limited space required a smaller font size, the abandonment

of capitalisation and white space, and a concentration on the most important and supposedly

non-redundant information at the expense of related details, such as the specification of ‘near

the Mouth of the Great River Oroonoque’.164 In both the novel and chapbook version, the

hero’s name is given typographical emphasis, either through capitalisation and italicisation or

through a larger font size. Whereas “LIFE” and “ADVENTURES” are still accentuated on the

original title page, they carry less emphasis on that of the chapbook, which highlights in turn

the phrase “VOYAGES and TRAVELS”. This phrase served as a genre indication, informing

the potential buyer what type of tale this was: a story of maritime travel. The chapbook’s

genre is further confirmed by the woodcut, which is a simplified and rather crude copy of the

Clark and Pine frontispiece portrait. 165 At the bottom of the title page is the authorship

163 Voyages and Travels: being the Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. Who lived Eight

and Twenty years all alone in an unihabited [sic] Island on the Coast of America, having been cast on Shore by

Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With an Account how he was at last as strangely delivered

by Pirates ([London (?)], [c. 1750]). Just like the twenty-four-page versions discussed above, this chapbook does

not indicate the year of its publication. A reasonable assumption for this omission is that publishers might have

been able to achieve better sales results; it is easy to suppose that contemporary chapbook purchasers wanted the

“latest” tales and adventures (Schöwerling, p. 45). Additionally, there are a number of chapbooks that carry the

imprint “Printed this present year”. Such an imprint made it possible for chapmen, at least in the rural areas, to

advertise and sell the same story as brand-new reading material, years, or even decades, after its publication

(Ibid., p. 45). 164 Defoe, p. 1. 165 The function of the title-page illustration was two-fold. First of all, it attracted the attention of the potential

buyer (Neuburg, ‘The Old Classics,’ p. 6). Secondly, it informed the purchaser about the chapbook’s content

(O’Malley, p. 23).

45

declaration.166 The pretence that Robinson Crusoe is “written by himself” has been given

typographical prominence through the use of a Gothic typeface. Moreover, the phrase’s

separation from the rest of the text, by the inclusion of the woodcut mid-page, highlights the

impression that the text is a genuine autobiographical travel narrative reported by a real-life

adventurer named Robinson Crusoe. The verso of the title page has the same autobiographical

claim, placed in italics and separated from title and text by two rows of fleurons. Immediately

above that shorter title is a crude woodcut, representing a shepherd holding a crook in his

right hand, and seven sheep or goats grazing by his side. The background is made up of three

houses and a few trees. Surrounded by a special double-lined border, this wood-cut headpiece

is the chapbook’s only ornament, besides the one on the title page. The fact that it bears no

relevance to the story’s content suggests that the cut has been borrowed from another

chapbook. In general, this booklet falls short of other Crusoe chapbooks with regard to both

printing quality and organisation for readability. Although paragraphed and indented, the

many typographical mistakes – or ‘blunders’ as Rogers calls them – suggest that the chapbook

was produced rather quickly.167

166 London(?), p. 2. Robinson Crusoe incorporates the three fundamental components of the eighteenth-century

title page: ‘a title at the head, an authorship declaration mid-page, and a publisher’s imprint at the foot’ (Janine

Barchas, ‘The Title page: Advertisement, Identity, and Deceit’ in Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the

Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 67). The title page’s make-up of

the chapbook version differs from the “typical” layout in that the authorship declaration, which is usually found

in the middle of the page, is now found at the bottom, displacing the publisher’s imprint. It is noteworthy that

none of the chapbook versions discussed above include this autobiographical claim “written by himself.” 167 While typographical mistakes are surely not uncommon in chapbooks, the great number of errors in this

edition bears noting.

46

Figure 17: Title page (London (?), p. 1) Figure 18: Original title page

47

4.2.2 Micro Level: Textual Analysis

The textual analysis shows that Defoe’s novel has been submitted to a higher degree of

manipulation in this edition than in other Crusoe chapbooks. Taking into account that this

version comprises only seven pages (excluding the title page), this difference should come as

no surprise. The shortening of the sections can be observed in the decrease of the number of

words: the pre-island portion corresponds to 890 words, the island narrative to 1625, and the

post-island part to 165. The word count indicates two things: first, that the most extensive

deletions occur in the post-island passages of the novel, and second, that the fatal shipwreck

(240 words) and its immediate after-effects (1135 words) serve as the core elements of this

edition. This already reveals that the chapbook considered here differs, to a certain extent,

from the twenty-two-page versions discussed above. In the next few paragraphs, it will

become apparent that the lottery mentality is less observable in this edition than in the longer

versions.

The first striking feature that can be identified on the textual level is the chapbook’s

faithfulness to the source text at the start of the story. The first paragraph remains nearly

identical to the original, although some source elements have been replaced with synonymous

phrases, which do not visibly shorten the text.168 For example, the chapbook writer replaces

‘good estate’ with ‘plentiful estate’, and ‘very good family’ with ‘a family of good repute’.169

The exact purpose of these alterations can only be a matter of conjecture, but Rogers

presumes that such changes were made in order to avoid charges of piracy: ‘the publisher

might be able to claim he was not infringing the Copyright Act, since his text was not a literal

reprint of the Taylor text’.170

From the second paragraph onwards, the text is increasingly reduced, even though the

chapbook writer still includes all the pre-island voyages, devoting nearly 200 words to

Robinson’s first shipwreck and almost 170 to the Xury episode, thereby using up a significant

amount of the booklet’s limited space before reaching the scenes deemed most important to

this “autobiographical” version: the wrecked ship and the events immediately following

Robinson’s stranding on the island. The listing of the various items Crusoe attempts to

168 The chapbook’s opening paragraph provides, just like the original, information on Crusoe’s date and place of

birth, and on his father’s German immigration to Great Britain. The purpose of those facts is to verify Robinson

as a “real individual” and their presence in the chapbook (or even elaboration, for the number of words is

increased from 106 to 113, instead of being compressed to the chapbook’s average of twenty-seven) is thus in

keeping with the chapbook’s intention of delivering an authentic report. 169 Defoe, p. 5; and London (?), p. 2. 170 Rogers, p. 169.

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salvage from the wreck controls this portion of the book. It occupies roughly a page and a

half, and carefully details all of the collected goods: provisions, arms and powder, clothing

and bedding, coins, books and nautical instruments, carpentry tools and other portable items.

Crusoe’s scrupulousness in reporting those salvaged articles is not continued when he

proceeds to his domestic tasks, though. More than in the chapbooks discussed above, this

edition reduces and eliminates the detailed and minute descriptions of Robinson’s daily

works. While the chapbook writer still briefly mentions the construction of Crusoe’s tent as

well as his hunting and goat rearing, he completely discards Robinson’s other activities,

including his pottery-making, basket-weaving, agricultural production, bread-baking, and

clothes-making.171 Other related passages that are affected by the chapbook’s extensive cuts

are Robinson’s creation of a calendar and his keeping of a journal – the former being

completely discarded, the latter being retained albeit in a severely condensed form. Printed in

italics and written in a language very close to the original, the excerpt comprises six entries,

which appear to have been randomly taken from the journal extract of the source.

Besides excessively downplaying Crusoe’s domestic labours, this edition also de-

emphasises the religious aspects, and more surprisingly, the adventure episodes of the

story. 172 While the pre-island voyages still receive considerable attention, the adventure

scenes on the island do not. Unlike the twenty-four-page Crusoe versions, which give a vivid

account of Robinson and Friday’s slaughter of the cannibals – ‘we fired, and killed three, and

wounded five; then coming down upon them we killed two, and wounded another’ – this

edition only narrates Crusoe’s discovery of the abominable cannibalistic practices, the

bloodshed itself is omitted. 173 Other glaring omissions are Friday’s rescue scene and

Robinson’s post-island adventures in continental Europe. The mutiny episode, which features

so prominently in the twenty-four-page editions, is related here in only ninety-six words.

Those omissions and reductions appear not to have been the result of an active editorial

decision, but seem to have been necessitated by the shift into an eight-page chapbook. It is

telling that at the end of the chapbook, the writer does include an exact account of the value of

the property Crusoe eventually obtains:

171 For example, the planting of grains and the subsequent crop tending, which still deserve a hasty mention in

the twenty-four-page editions, are entirely dismissed in this chapbook version. 172 Overall, the chapbook discards the religious dimensions of Defoe’s novel. The only clear reference to

spiritual matters is found on page seven, where Crusoe relates his anniversary day of his landing on the island –

a day which he ‘kept as a solemn fast, setting it apart to religious exercise, prostrating [himself] on the ground

with the most serious humiliation, confessing [his] sins to God acknowledging his righteous judgments upon

[him] and praying to have mercy on [him] thro’ Jesus Christ’ (London (?), p. 7). 173 R. and W. Dean, p. 17.

49

enquiring after my effects in Brasile, found I was worth 5000 pounds sterling in

money, besides having an estate there worth above 1000 pounds a year, so making the

best of my way home to England, by way of France, on the 14th of January, 1686, and

sold my estate and effects, beyond sea, for the sum of 328000 pieces of eight.174

The inclusion of Crusoe’s rise in wealth along with the chapbook’s neglect of the detailed

descriptions of Robinson’s various labours and the religious dimensions of the novel suggests

that the lottery mentality is still an important aspect in this edition, even though the social

elevation that usually accompanies the economic rise is not retained.

174 Ibid., p. 8.

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5 Crusoe Chapbooks for the Child Reader

Compared to the earlier chapbooks of Robinson Crusoe, nineteenth-century children’s

editions are characterised by a large diversity in terms of their printing quality, textual

configuration, and visual paratexts. As it would be beyond the scope of this dissertation to

examine each of these juvenile chapbooks in depth, this chapter outlines some generalisations,

which must necessarily be treated with caution, precisely because the corpus is so diverse.

Before proceeding to the analysis, however, it might be useful to first briefly explore how late

eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century educational theorists and writers for the young

regarded the text in the light of its suitability as children’s literature.

5.1 Robinson Crusoe as a Children’s Book

Soon after its first publication, Defoe’s work was understood to have pedagogical

value, as it was consistent with Lockean theory and praised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in

Émile, or On Education (1762).175 However, despite the fact that the novel also has a religious

and moral dimension, it is the story of travel and adventure that appealed most to children.

Not surprisingly, it was precisely this adventure element that was not accepted as suitable for

young readers by many of the day’s leading educators and children’s writers. Sarah Trimmer,

for instance, expressed some level of wariness. She reviewed Defoe’s novel in her periodical

The Guardian of Education (1802-1806), receiving it with a mixture of praise and reservation.

Trimmer considered the novel as a ‘most interesting and entertaining’ book, commended it for

‘shewing what ingenuity and industry can effect, under the divine blessing’ and for

stimulating ‘mental and bodily exertion, and patient perseverance’.176 On the other hand, she

also stressed that the book could not be ‘put into the hands of all boys’, for while Defoe

properly and colourfully describes ‘the misery that follows the breach of filial duty’, this

175 Andrew O’Malley, ‘Crusoe’s Children: Robinson Crusoe and the Culture of Childhood in the Eighteenth

Century’, in The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary,

ed. by Adrienne E. Gavin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 87. Samuel Pickering has observed that the

rebirth Crusoe experiences on the island articulates the Lockean concept of the new-born child as tabula rasa:

‘Indeed, after the shipwreck he resembled Locke’s infant with a mind like a blank tablet or empty cabinet’

(Samuel F. Pickering Jr., Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children, 1749–1820 (Athens: University of Georgia

Press, 1993), p. 60, quoted in Andrew O’Malley, ‘Performing Crusoe and Becoming Crusoes: the Pedagogical

uses of Robinson Crusoe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Children’s Literature, Popular Culture,

and Robinson Crusoe (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 24); Rousseau praised Defoe’s novel in Émile

– ‘This book will be the first that my Émile will read. For a long time it will alone compose his whole library,

and it will always hold a distinguished place there’ – and maintained that the naturally educated child would

benefit from reading Robinson Crusoe (especially, the island section), as it represented the perfect example of

the isolated, self-reliant adult that Rousseau sought to produce (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Book III’, in Émile, or

On Education, transl. by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 184). 176 Sarah Trimmer, ‘Review of Robinson Crusoe’, in The Guardian of Education, 3 (1804), p. 298,

<http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/guardianeducation.pdf> [accessed 7 April 2015].

51

essential and highly instructive moral message is ‘commonly overlooked, when the curiosity

of the mind is strongly excited, and the feelings powerfully engaged, by the circumstances of

the story’.177 In other words, Trimmer believed that the attractiveness to imitate Robinson’s

adventure among boys was such that the novel was only to be read under parental supervision

or by a child whose ‘mind and temper have been properly regulated’.178

In their treatise Practical Education (1798), Maria and her father Robert Edgeworth,

equally warned of the wanderlust that Robinson Crusoe could stimulate in boys. It was

believed that girls, on the contrary, would not think of re-enacting Robinson’s commercial

adventure: ‘To girls this species of reading cannot be as dangerous as it is to boys: girls must

soon perceive the impossibility of their rambling about the world in quest of adventure’.179 A

further reason why the novel was deemed more fitting (and even valuable) to young female

readers was that girls could learn something from Robinson with regard to his construction of

‘a totally self-enclosed and functional domain’, a domestic space unaffected by the market.180

Edgeworth’s assessment of Robinson Crusoe underscores the two opposing literary genres

that the novel includes: the adventure tale of travel and exploration, and the domestic story of

homemaking and housekeeping. In his article ‘Crusoe’s Home’, Pat Rogers has argued that

Robinson is actually more “homo domesticus” than “homo economicus”, calling attention to

the fact that ‘much of the time Crusoe is making a nest’.181 Indeed, a large portion of the

island narrative deals with Robinson’s careful descriptions of how he transforms his cave to

‘accommodate [him] as a warehouse or magazine, a kitchen, a dining-room, and a cellar’, and

how he learns to make himself domestic items, such as ‘strong deep baskets’, ‘flat dishes,

pitchers, and pipkins’, and ‘earthen pot[s]’.182 The detailed recording of Robinson ‘managing

177 Ibid., pp. 298-299. 178 Ibid., p. 298. In her Thoughts on Domestic Education; the Result of Experience (1829), Maria Elizabeth

Budden gives parents instructions on how to assist their child through his reading of Robinson Crusoe.

According to Budden, parents should ‘guide the thoughts of children imperceptibly to just conclusions’, and if

the young reader finds ‘himself incapable of pointing out the merits or failings depicted, a consciousness of them

could be insensibly awakened in his mind; thus the industry, the ingenuity, the resignation displayed by Crusoe

might be noticed and praised’ (Maria Elizabeth Budden, ‘Reading’, in Thoughts on Domestic Education; the

Result of Experience. (Boston: Carter & Hendee, 1829), p. 39).

<https://archive.org/details/thoughtsondomest00bost> [accessed 7 April 2015]). 179 Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education (1798), p. 111, quoted in Nancy Armstrong, ‘Introduction: The

Politics of Domesticating Culture, Then and Now’, in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the

Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 16. 180 Armstrong, p. 16. 181 Pat Rogers, ‘Crusoe’s Home’, in Essays in Criticism, 24 (1974), p. 380. Michael McKeon concurs and

contends that although Defoe’s novel is ‘an exemplar’ of the adventure novel, it is ‘the domestication of the

island [which] lies at the heart of […] Defoe’s novel’ (Michael McKeon, ‘Secret History as Novel’, in The

Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2005), p. 623). 182 Defoe, pp. 60, 86, and 96.

52

[his] household affairs’ indicates a clear focus on ‘the domestic rather than the mercantile

aspect of bourgeois life’.183 This concern with domestic matters is observable in the children’s

chapbooks, which tend to de-emphasise the novel’s adventurousness, at least to some degree,

accentuating instead its domestic aspects with the intention of providing a good exemplar for

young boys and girls to follow at home.

183 Ibid., p. 62; and Rogers, ‘Crusoe’s Home’, p. 380.

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5.2 Children’s Chapbooks of Robinson Crusoe

The corpus of juvenile chapbooks considered in this section is very diverse. The

editions range between eight and thirty-two pages, and measure on average eight by twelve

centimetres. As this information indicates, the children’s versions do not entirely match the

physical criteria of the typical juvenile chapbook as outlined in Chapter Three. Although

some are provided with a coloured paper wrapper, many others are not, and while the majority

features a high number of wood-cut images – often quite clearly recycled from other

chapbook titles – none of them have a woodcut on every single page. The content of the

editions, however, more clearly links them to the typical juvenile chapbooks, for the

children’s versions of Robinson Crusoe are generally more instructive and morally improving

than the “true” Crusoe chapbook discussed in the previous chapter.184 The main concern in

this section, then, is with those elements that distinguish the juvenile booklets from their more

traditional counterparts. More precisely, what follows is an exploration of how the

chapbook’s story of (sea-faring) adventure is transformed, to a certain extent, into the

children’s tale of the domestic.

5.2.1 Macro Level: Front and Back Matter

A sufficiently representative children’s chapbook I would like to consider here is the

twelve-page, illustrated Crusoe edition issued by Darton and Son (figures 19-20). The front

cover is adorned with a wood engraving showing Friday’s advent, and more specifically, the

moment when Robinson kills Friday’s second pursuer, before the latter is able to shoot off an

arrow. At the top of the cover is the title, The History of Robinson Crusoe, at the bottom the

publisher’s imprint and the chapbook’s retail price: ‘London: Darton and Son, Holborn. One

Penny’.185 The back-cover list enumerates twenty-four ‘juvenile books, embellished with neat

engravings’, to be purchased at a ‘penny’ or ‘halfpenny’.186 Upon opening the book, one is

immediately struck by the relationship between image and text: the verso of the front cover

bears the title, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, above a three-quarter-page

illustration, whereas the adjoining page contains an introductory illustration below yet another

title, Robinson Crusoe. More than half of the first three pages is taken up by pictures, and they

all precede the actual text. As has been observed, the primary function of the cover-page

184 The majority of the children’s versions considered here are likely to have been sold in book stores and

toyshops, rather than vended by chapmen. This is evinced by both literal indications such as ‘[a]t the place where

this book was bought may be had the following’ and the fact that most editions plainly display the address of the

chapbook’s publisher (Thomas Wilson and Son, p. 30). 185 Darton and Son, p. 1. 186 Ibid., p. 12.

54

illustration – and in cases where the title page is printed on the first leaf in lieu of the cover,

the title-page illustration – is to attract the attention of the potential buyer. This might explain

why the publisher has chosen to open with an adventure episode. The two remaining

illustrations, however, indicate a shift away from adventure towards the domestic, and suggest

a different and “correct” way to read the text that follows by highlighting two specific scenes

in the child’s mind before their introduction in the chapbook text.

The title-page illustration to this edition already suggests that the domestic elements of

the original novel will lie at the core of the narrative (figure 21). As has been observed in the

previous chapter, the image that most often represents the Crusoe story on early chapbook

covers and frontispieces – and, thus, the most iconic image of the more traditional Crusoe

chapbooks – is a simplified version of the original frontispiece, depicting Crusoe alone, in his

goatskin coat and hat, armed with a sword by his side and a shotgun upon each shoulder,

standing outside on a shore, properly prepared to meet the dangers on his ‘horrid island’.187

Although variations of this image still feature as the title-page illustration or frontispiece to

some juvenile chapbooks (figures 4-6), the image is usually pushed to the side, in favour of an

187 Defoe, p. 52.

Figure 19: Front-cover page

(Darton and Son, p. 1)

Figure 20: Back-cover page

(Darton and Son, p. 12)

55

illustration, which shows Robinson indoors, seated down to dinner with ‘[his] family’ – his

dog at his right hand, his parrot, Poll, on his shoulder, and his two cats at the other end of the

table.188 The details of this mealtime scene – the cooked meal around the dinner table in a

well-ordered, comfortable, homely space – capture the booklet’s insistence on domestic well-

being and contentment. There are several variants of this image (figures 22-24), all of which

seem to display the same household objects and articles.189 They usually have Robinson’s

guns and sword hung up unused on the wall of his cave, and his pots, bottles, baskets and

other such goods tidily organised around him or upon his shelves.190

188 The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Glasgow: [James Lindsay], 1852), p. 16. With his pets, Crusoe

succeeds in recreating a new household on his desolate island. His dog, parrot, and cats become members of this

self-created nuclear family, which is later extended and completed with Friday’s arrival on the island. 189 The in-text illustrations of Watt’s edition are identical to the illustrations found in the Glasgow chapbook. The

latter carries the imprint ‘Glasgow: Printed for the Booksellers’, but also bears the heading ‘New and Improved

Series’, indicating that the chapbook was almost certainly issued by James Lindsay, a printer whose firm was

situated in the Saltmarket of Glasgow (McNaughtan, pp. 170-171). His “New and Improved” chapbooks are

sixty-one in number – the Crusoe version has number 40. Lindsay also obtained the stereotypes of the 150

twenty-four-page history chapbooks from Francis Orr & Sons, the numbered series I have already mentioned

earlier. 190 M.O. Grenby, ‘The Adventure Story’, in Children’s Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd,

2008), p. 178; and O’Malley, ‘Crusoe at Home’, p. 342. Unless mentioned otherwise, all subsequent references

to O’Malley in this section refer to this article.

Figure 21: Dinner scene (Darton and

Son, p. 2) Figure 22: Dinner scene (Yorkshire J. S.

Publishing & Stationary Co., p. 1)

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Figure 23: Dinner scene (W.S. Fortey, p. 1)

Figure 24: Dinner scene (J. Lindsay, p. 17)

A different illustration, but still closely connected with the above in terms of emphasising the

happiness, comfort, and tranquillity Robinson finds within his own home, is the one in a

c.1840 edition published by John Golby Rusher at Banbury, which shows ‘Crusoe as

Englishman, sitting with his dog before what appears to be a fireplace’ (figure 25).191 The

fireplace is one of the basic elements of a nineteenth-century room. Associated with warmth

and comfort, the fireplace, the hearth, as the preeminent symbol of the home, represents the

essence of the domestic ethos. The inclusion of this illustration then underscores the booklet’s

promotion of the domestic ideal.

191 Life an Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Banbury: J. G. Rusher, [c. 1840]); and Preston, p. 27.

Figure 25: Robinson before the fireplace (J. G.

Rusher, p. 7)

57

What all the illustrations (except Rusher’s) have in common is a specific perspectival angle

that asserts, first, that the realm of the domestic is superior to and more preferable than the

wider world outside of it, and second, that the most appropriate and natural place for the child

is within that domestic space of home and family.192 A division of realms – the domestic

versus the external sphere – is made visual in the illustrations to the W.S. Fortey and James

Lindsay editions, in which a wall separates inside and outside, the home (i.e. the well-ordered,

sheltering, cosy, domestic sphere) and the wilderness (i.e. the uncultivated, densely-grown,

unsafe, jungle outside). The young viewer looks at this picture of domestic peace and safety

from within Robinson’s place of happiness and order, and by thus sharing Crusoe’s point of

view, the child is encouraged to inhabit that loving, warm, protective realm of home with the

hero.193

5.2.2 Micro Level: Textual and Pictorial Analysis

The microanalysis shows that although the adventure and seafaring aspects (e.g.

Crusoe’s shipwreck at Cromer, his captivity in Moorish North Africa and his escape with

Xury) still clearly predominate in most of the chapbooks for the young, they have lost some of

their originally undisputed supremacy, as ideas of domesticity are incorporated as well.194 Not

surprisingly, Robinson’s disobedience towards his father and his departure from his parental

home get considerably more attention in juvenile chapbooks than they tended to receive in the

versions discussed above. While the hero of the earlier chapbooks scarcely seemed bothered

by his disobedience, Crusoe’s rejection of the domestic space and its consequences –

especially the resulting mental suffering – become important aspects in the children’s

editions. The opening paragraph, which narrates Robinson’s determination to leave home, is

192 O’Malley, p. 342. 193 Ibid., p. 342. 194 The emphasis on adventure and travel in some children’s chapbooks remains such that there are no real

differences to be found, compared to the earlier Crusoe versions, except at the beginning (and often also at the

ending) of the story. A case in point is the eight-page edition by Elizabeth Hodges, which markedly accents the

pre-island voyages, the adventure scenes on the island, and the mutiny episode. The only textual evidence there

to categorise the booklet as a children’s version is found in the opening paragraphs, which include the mother’s

‘tenderest entreaties’ and Robinson’s comment on the ‘rash and disobedient step [he] had taken’ (Hodges, pp. 2

and 3). Other editions, however, such as those by George Ford and Son and Alice Swindells, try to tone down

the adventurous aspects – the former by excluding the mutiny episode, the latter by omitting the cannibal

bloodshed (The Wonderful Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: G. Ford & Son, [1832-1836]); and

The Renowned History and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Manchester: A. Swindells, [between 1790 and

1828])). It might be observed that Swindells’ edition features the same written text as Thomas Wilsons and

Son’s, apart from a few sentences.

58

usually extended to include Crusoe’s ‘wickedness in disobeying the best of parents’.195 The

sentences found in the W.S. Fortey chapbook are illustrative and read thus:

[M]y father often persuaded me to settle in some business, and my mother used the

tenderest entreaties, yet nothing could prevail upon me to lay aside my desire of going

to sea, notwithstanding the extreme uneasiness which my father and mother always

shewed at the thoughts of my leaving them. I hardened myself against the prudent and

kind advice of the most indulgent parents […].196

This quotation emphasises both Robinson’s resistance to pursue the career his father has

chosen for him and his inattention to his mother’s pleas to remain at home. O’Malley has

examined various children’s versions and observed that they often tend to highlight the

mother’s tearful appeals, not only because of their pitiable impact, but to buttress the

importance of the basic kin unit, the nuclear family. By including the “tenderest entreaties” of

Robinson’s mother, O’Malley explains, the children’s writers effect a change in register ‘from

biblically-coded transgression of paternal authority [as found in Defoe’s novel] to a

domestically-coded transgression of the nuclear family’s integrity’.197

In the Darton and Son edition, the text is reinforced, or even extended, by an

illustration (figure 26). The engraving that serves as the introduction to the Crusoe tale

represents the dissolution of the nuclear family: while Robinson’s parents are standing in the

centre of a simple interior, holding hands in front of a fireplace, the boy hero, Robinson, is

standing alone in the right foreground, looking away unhappily, assuming a pose of

repentance. Although the accompanying text says nothing about Crusoe regretting his

decision at this stage, the picture makes it abundantly clear that his present act of defiance will

result in remorse and self-blame. The engraving underscores Robinson’s folly in wilfully

leaving domestic comfort, and, as such, guides the child reader, or, more pointedly, the child

viewer towards the correct interpretation: to stay home and shun adventure.

195 Wonderful Life, and Suffering Adventures, of that Renowned Hero, Robinson Crusoe; Who lived twenty-eight

Years on an Uninhabited Island, which he afterwards Colonized (Falkirk: T. Johnston, 1823), p. 2. 196 The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Yorkshire Mariner (London: W.S. Fortey, [between 1860

and 1885]), p. 2. 197 O’Malley, p. 346.

59

Figure 26: Robinson leaving domestic comfort (Darton and

Son, p. 3)

Figure 27: Robinson leaving domestic comfort (J. and

C. Evans, p. 5)

A similar illustration, incidentally also the opening picture, is found in a thirty-two-

page children’s chapbook issued by J. and C. Evans in London (figure 27). 198 It shows

Robinson dressed in expedition gear – shorts, a long sleeved shirt, and a pith helmet – about

to leave his parents’ home to become a traveller. Crusoe’s mother is crying, covering her face

with both hands, while his father is holding onto him tightly, with both arms clasped around

his forearm, urging him to stay. The importance of this message – i.e. remain at home and

abandon all thoughts of an adventurous seafaring life – is further strengthened in this edition

by its inclusion of the passage in which Robinson’s ‘father, Mr. Crusoe’ presses him not to go

to sea.199 The publishers devote three pages or almost 300 words to the father’s injunctions

and accompany the scene with an illustration.200 The following is an extract from that passage

and deserves special mention here, because it suggests that the J. and C. Evans geared for a

specific child reading audience:

198 The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: J. and C. Evans, [between 1822 and 1828]). 199 J. and C. Evans, p. 5. The text of Evans’ edition features in two other juvenile chapbooks (the text is identical

apart from a few minor dissimilarities): Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Written by Himself (York: J.

Kendrew, [1810]); and The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Written by Himself (London: J. Pitts,

[between 1802 and 1819]). John Pitts operated from 1802 up until 1844 in London, Great St. Andrews Street,

Seven Dials, first at number 14, and after 1819, at number 6. Given that the publisher’s imprint reads 14, the

chapbook’s publication date must lie between 1802 and 1819. 200 The image has Crusoe’s father sitting in his chamber, holding Robinson’s hand, persuading him to stay home.

Pitts’ version has a comparable illustration, but adds a specific detail: Crusoe, who is particularly young in this

picture, gestures towards the ship that is visible through the window, thus marking his desire to go to sea. The

close connection between the images indicates that Pitts’ and Evans’ editions can be linked not only on the

textual level – they feature the same chapbook text – but also on the pictorial level. Both children’s chapbooks

offer a series of illustrations of the same selected iconographic moments, with two exceptions (Pitts’ picture of

Friday’s submission is replaced by an image of Crusoe shooting a deer in Evans’ edition, and the latter also

includes an illustration of two departing ships). The matching pictures are reversed and have a different

completion, but they feature the same elements. Besides those in-text cuts, the editions also contain an almost

identical frontispiece illustration, depicting a scene which is usually neither verbally nor visually narrated in

(juvenile) chapbooks (the Darton and Son version is an exception as it contains both a written and a visual

account of the episode): the moment when Crusoe finds a dying he goat in a cave.

60

Such a resolution is madness in you, which possibly might have been prudence in

another lad; for instance was you the son of a poor man, and had got into bad

company, wherein your character had suffered, in that instance, the resolution for

going into strange countries, with the intent of retrieving his character and fortune,

would be commendable; but, as you are, by my industry, placed above the probability

of want, and as much respected by your acquaintance as any lad in the city, what can

possess thee to think of leaving such happiness?201

The supposed reader here is a young boy of a better-off family, who can be fully pleased with

his life, being in a state of peaceful happiness, free from the vicissitudes that typifies the lives

of boys from the lowest social classes. The quotation thus indicates that the edition catered

not so much for the plebeian child as for the lower-middle-class child, a child whose parents

perhaps ‘[had] only recently left the ranks of the labouring classes’.202 This assumption is

further supported by the chapbook’s physical appearance. The Crusoe edition can be

characterised as a fine-printed chapbook, adorned with beautiful wood-engraved illustrations,

and provided with a blue-coloured printed paper cover. Its publishers have paid particular

attention to the layout and have made a real effort to avoid typographical errors and syntactic

flaws which could weaken both the imparting of the moral message and the quality of the

edition. Those features allowed J. and C. Evans to put their Crusoe chapbook up for sale at a

higher price – two pennies – which suggests that they aimed for a slightly more affluent

reading public: the lower middle classes.203 That a chapbook’s appearance can reveal a great

deal about the producer’s target market, is further demonstrated by a sixteen-page London

edition printed for R. Carr, which contains a shortened version of Evans’ chapbook text.204

Unlike the aforementioned edition, this chapbook is of a low printing quality, exhibits broken

syntax (several sentences remain unfinished) and typographical mistakes (the penultimate

page displays such errors as “nuderstand”, “fvə yeaas”, and “brrbarity”), and features rough

wood-cut images which bear no “real” connection to the text, thus marking this version as a

more typical (juvenile) chapbook.205 It should come as no surprise that this one-penny version

201 Ibid., pp. 8-10. Emphasis added. 202 O’Malley, ‘The Coach’, p 21. 203 On the basis of its physical and textual characteristics, one could categorise the Evans edition as a

“transitional” or “hybrid” work (see above, note …). 204 The Surprising Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and his Man Friday (London: [s.n.], [n.d.]). The

publisher shortened the Evans text simply by deleting unnecessary and undesirable paragraphs; the remaining

text is thus identical. 205 Excluding the frontispiece illustration, which is a rather poor copy of the original, the six in-text and two

cover-page cuts offer some insight into the level of flexibility that characterises the making of a typical

chapbook. The images are undoubtedly borrowed from other chapbook titles. Some cuts have absolutely no

relevance to the story; the last in-text picture, for example, shows a boy with a mask running towards his friend

who is gesturing to come closer. Others bear only a minimal connection to the content of the text; the

introductory cut, for instance, shows a few houses and a church presumably representing the city of York, while

the fourth cut within the text, which depicts a chubby man who is seated at a table drinking from his cup, is

61

does not preserve the aforementioned extract – the poor boy might after all read the passage

as an encouragement to leave home and pursue an adventurous life.

The domestic concerns of the original text are also highlighted in the island section.

Juvenile chapbooks allot a non-negligible portion of their limited space to descriptions

concerning Robinson’s homemaking and domestic duties, whereas those were deemed “too

tedious” to be inserted in earlier chapbooks. The manufacturing of earthen pots and other

household utensils, for example, is generally retained, albeit in shortened form:

I made some misshapen pots of clay, that all broke in the sun except two, which I

cased in wicker work; but I succeeded better in little pans, flat dishes, and pitchers,

which the sun baked surprisingly hard; but they could not bear the fire so as to boil

any liquid, and I wanted one to boil my meat.206

The children’s versions also pay close attention to the construction of Crusoe’s ‘habitation’,

relating in quite some detail, the process of ‘set[ting] up [his] tent’, making a strong ‘fence’

and creating an ‘entrance’ via ‘a short ladder.’ 207 Some booklets further emphasise the

importance of Robinson’s laborious efforts in building his home by inserting a picture of

Crusoe driving in the large piles to surround his abode (figures 28-29). This increased detail

of the homemaking scenes indicates that the juvenile books pay more (though still very

limited) attention to such bourgeois values as industriousness and perseverance. 208 That

Robinson tends to be more industrious in children’s editions than earlier chapbooks is further

supported by an extract of an 1852 edition issued at Glasgow, which emphasises that it is

through diligence, and not idleness or luck, that Crusoe is able to make his habitation

increasingly comfortable:

inserted just above the sentence in which Crusoe says that Xury and he ‘now felt the want of nothing but fresh

water’ (R. Carr, p. 8). On other occasions, the insertion of the woodcut brings about a change in the written text.

Page five, for example, features an (unclear) image of two or three individuals standing outside in a fenced

garden. The sentence accompanying it reads thus: ‘One morning he [Crusoe’s father] called me into his garden’

(R. Carr, p. 5, emphasis added). This differs from the original and the thirty-two-page edition which have: ‘One

morning he called me into his chamber’ (J. and C. Evans, p. 6, emphasis added). 206 Francis Orr & Son, p. 11. 207 J. Neilson, p. 10. It may be useful to provide an indication of the number of words devoted to this

homemaking episode in different-length chapbooks. Whereas the twenty-four-page editions of the previous

chapter relate the event in a mere fifty words, the juvenile chapbooks pay considerably more attention to the

episode: the thirty-two-page children’s version by James Watt devotes roughly 195 words to the scene; the

twenty-four-page edition by J. Neilson about 245; the sixteen-page edition by Darton and Son approximately 95;

and the twelve-page edition by Thomas Goode around 125 (The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: T.

Goode, [between 1829 and 1879])). 208 Another middle-class virtue often ignored by chapbooks, piety, is still generally downplayed in children’s

editions. However, some do refer more overtly to religious matters and include, for example, biblical lines: ‘I

opened my book, and the first words on which I cast my eyes were, “Call upon me in the day of trouble, and I

will deliver thee.” The words struck me’ (Lindsay, p. 15).

62

When my habitation was finished, I found it far too small to contain my movables, I

had hardly room to turn myself, so I set about enlarging my cave, and laboured till I

had worked sideways into the rock farther than my outside pale, and hewing a way

through, made a back door to my store-house. I then made me a table and chair, which

were great conveniences; shelved one side of my cave, and knocked up pieces of wood

into the rock, to hang my things on. When my cave was set to rights, it looked like a

general magazine of all necessary things.209

Figure 28: Robinson building a fence around his abode

(Darton and Son, p. 7)

Figure 29: Robinson building a fence around his

abode (W.S. Fortey, p. 6)

The household Crusoe creates on the island is a self-enclosed domestic space barred

from the public sphere of commerce; it is a refuge in which money is not essential.210 This

‘idea of the home as an anti-economy’ constitutes a fundamental element of the domestic

ideology and a matter of obvious interest in the juvenile chapbooks.211 That money is not of

prime importance to Robinson is best observable in the episode in which he salvages goods

from the wrecked ship. While the 1750(?) chapbook edition of the previous chapter gives a

precise account of the currency Crusoe collects from the wreck – ‘36 pounds value in money,

some European coin, some Brazile, some pieces of eight, some gold, some silver’ – juvenile

versions generally do not.212 Instead, they emphasise that coins are worthless, without use-

value, by including, for example, Crusoe’s assertion that ‘the carpenter’s chest […] was worth

209 Lindsay, p. 14. 210 Armstrong, p. 16. 211 O’Malley, p. 345. There are exceptions, of course, particularly the Glasgow edition which, in a language that

closely echoes Defoe’s, relates the scene in which Robinson finds the money on his twelfth sortie to the wreck,

realises its uselessness, yet keeps it nonetheless: ‘At the sight of this money I smiled to myself, and said, “O

drug! what art thou good for? […] I have no manner of use for thee: e’en remain where thou art, and go to the

bottom.” However, upon second thoughts, I took it away, and [wrapped] it all in a piece of canvas’ (Lindsay, p.

12). 212 London (?), p. 6.

63

more to [him] than a ship load of gold’.213 Indeed, juvenile editions tend to include the

original sentences in which Robinson prioritises carpentry tools – useful for constructing

basic household necessities – and domestic articles over riches. As he searches the second

wreck, Crusoe finds besides ‘several bottles filled with cordial waters, and some shirts, which

were very useful to [him]’, also ‘about 1,100 pieces of eight, and about a pound weight of

solid gold’, but this wealth is of no use to him; he ‘would have given it all for three or four

pairs of shoes and stockings’.214 That the children’s publishers choose to preserve those

particular sentences in which Robinson asserts the worthlessness of money is suggestive: it

underscores the importance of the domestic realm as opposed to that of the external economic

sphere.

Finally, the ending of the children’s chapbooks is often rewritten in a spirit more in

accordance with the domestic ideology. At the close of the story, the child reader learns that

Robinson renounces his yearning for adventure and that he is happy about that: ‘I now

abandoned all further desire to rove, and lived contented and grateful on my paternal

estate’.215 Quite obviously, this view is very different from those advanced in the original text

and earlier chapbooks, wherein Robinson either promises to ‘give a farther account of’ his

‘new adventures’, or departs from England on ‘a voyage to the East Indies’.216 Comparatively,

the large majority of juvenile chapbooks close with Crusoe returning home for a permanent

stay, and a complete repudiation of adventure. Indeed, Robinson’s quest for adventure, his

desire to separate himself from home and family, has brought about a total disavowal of this

longing upon his return. In an 1823 edition published by Thomas Johnston at Falkirk,

Robinson expresses his intention to remain at home to adopt a sedentary and religious mode

of life: ‘And now resolving to harass myself no more, I am preparing for a longer journey;

hoping to end my days in peace, and in the true worship of my Almighty Deliverer’.217 Most

children’s chapbooks also present a final warning against disobedience as well as a soothing

reaffirmation of familial ties by including both Robinson’s distress over the death of his

parents and the comforting fact of their forgiveness: ‘I was very much grieved to hear that

213 T. Johnston, p. 10. 214 W.S. Fortey, p. 7. 215 The Singular Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Leominster: James V. Chilcott, [between 1839 and 1850]), p.

12. The text of Chilcott’s edition is identical to the one in Goode’s version despite some slight differences in

word choice and syntax. The popular aspect in these two children’s versions is still clearly apparent from the

attention paid to the mutiny scene – approximately 330 words, even retaining the pirate element: ‘the pirate

chief’ – and the lack of concern for Robinson’s detailed reports of his various activities: ‘it would be two [sic]

tedious to mention […]’ (T. Goode, pp. 11 and 5). 216 Defoe, p. 241; and J. Dean, p. 23. 217 T. Johnston, p. 24.

64

both my parents were dead; but I was somewhat consoled when I found that they had forgiven

me, and had left me all their property’.218 What the quotation also shows is that the Crusoe of

the children’s chapbooks acquires his property not through the riches he accumulates from his

plantations in Brazil (as in the earlier chapbooks), but through the inheritance from his

deceased parents. This stands in stark contrast to Defoe’s work in which Robinson only

briefly remarks on his parents’ passing, but still makes clear that he inherits nothing: ‘as I had

been long ago given over for dead, there had been no provision made for me; so that in a

word, I found nothing to relieve, or assist me’.219 While most children’s publishers produce a

relatively happy ending, the thirty-page London edition by James Pitt closes on a more

negative note. Here, Robinson’s rejection of parental authority continues to haunt him:

I went to York, but was greatly shocked at the news of the death of my father and

mother, who left me sufficient property to live like a gentleman. – I cannot

comfortably enjoy it; and at this moment I believe myself the most miserable object

living, and heartily repent giving way to the restless disposition, which made me leave

my parents to grieve and die; as from that time, [I] date all the subsequent misfortunes

of my life.220

Crusoe rues having deserted his parents and caused them sorrow. He is tormented by guilt and

remorse; in James Kendrew’s edition published at York, this feeling of deep regret is

reinforced by the addition of two more sentences: ‘I cannot express the agony it causes in me;

I consider myself as the author of their deaths’.221 In yielding to his desire for a seafaring life,

Robinson has rebelled against parental domination, and points to his “subsequent misfortunes”

as a solemn warning for the child who wishes to re-enact his adventures. Thus, young readers

learn about the consequences of disobeying parental authority and are so encouraged to

remain at home – that safe and comfortable domestic space and the child’s rightful place.

Conclusion

In this dissertation, two types of Crusoe abridgments have been explored: chapbooks

and children’s chapbooks. The above has shown that those “refractions” extended the

accessibility of Robinson Crusoe from a restricted middle-class audience to common readers

and (plebeian) children. This extension in accessibility coincided with the transformation of

218 W. S. Fortey, p. 12. 219 Defoe, p. 219. 220 J. Pitts, p. 29. 221 J. Kendrew, p. 31.

65

Defoe’s novel from a story essentially about survival into a popular tale of adventurous

seafaring life and a children’s story of the domestic. Chapbook publishers rewrote the

standard text of Robinson Crusoe, modifying the ideological dimensions of the source text;

and in so doing, they adapted the original novel according to both the tastes and expectations

of the new target audience (the common reader, or the plebeian child) and the norms of the

different literary genres (the adventure tale of maritime travel, or the domestic story of

housekeeping) and forms (the “true” chapbook, or the children’s version).

More precisely, the textual and paratextual analyses have shown that the “traditional”

Crusoe chapbooks introduced Robinson Crusoe to a popular readership by adapting it ‘to fit a

new, or rather, an old, framework’, that is ‘an already existing popular repertoire of exotic

adventures in strange lands, of lowborn characters overcoming incredible odds and

miraculously ascending the social heights’.222 Chapter Four has demonstrated that in the

chapbooks, Crusoe’s success and well-being are not premised on industriousness, effort, and

religious devotion – as is the case in Defoe’s novel, the pairing of industriousness and piety

on the one hand and prosperity on the other being a chief component of the bourgeois ethos –

but supported by the very antithesis of bourgeois values: chance and luck. Robinson’s move

up the economic and social scale through good fortune rather than labour imitates the

narrative pattern of many chapbooks, and is of course characteristic of the lower-class lottery

mentality embedded in those booklets. Furthermore, the chapter has shown that the chapbook

publishers implement a shift from the original focus on the survival narrative to an emphasis

on the seafaring scenes, thereby adding the Crusoe versions to the already existing chapbook

tradition of ‘seafaring adventure tales and pirate intrigues’.223

Chapter Five, by contrast, has shown that juvenile chapbooks attempt to turn Defoe’s

novel into a sincere cautionary tale, warning the child about the dangers of disobeying

parental authority. The clear focus on Robinson’s guilt over his filial disobedience and his

repentance suggests that the publishers of the children’s booklets intended to instil into the

young at least some minor moral lessons of obedience. While the adventure and seafaring

aspects of the original are still observable, most juvenile chapbooks tend ‘to minimise the

appeal and likelihood of adventure’ by focusing instead on the domestic ideas of the novel.224

The emphasis on the peaceful, safe, and comfortable domestic space encourages the child

222 O’Malley, ‘Poaching’, p. 23. 223 Ibid., p. 24. 224 M.O. Grenby, ‘The Adventure Story’, p. 178.

66

reader to stay home and avoid adventure. Furthermore, the increased attention paid to the

homemaking and housekeeping scenes effects a shift away from the chapbook’s “lottery

mentality”; Robinson’s hard work on the island and his religious devotion at the end of the

story replace good fortune and luck as the factors of success. While this rejection of the

narrative pattern of the classic chapbook hero reveals that the juvenile versions are no

“typical” chapbooks, their inclusion of the seafaring and adventure aspects indicates that the

children’s booklets are not all too morally concerned either.

67

Bibliography

Primary Texts

Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, ed. by John Richetti (London: Penguin Classics, 2003)

Glasgow University Special Collections

Bh13-c.11 item 19, A Garland of New Songs, Containing 1. Robinson Crusoe, 2. Jack at the

Windlass, 3. The Sons of Britannia ([Newcastle upon Tyne]: Angus, [n.d.])

Bh13-c.11 item 55, The Famous Sea-Fight between Capt. Ward and the Rainbow: To which

is added, The Haughs of Crumdel, a Memorable Battle Fought by the G e t Montrose

and the Clans against Oliver Cromwell (Paisley: J. Neilson for G. Caldwell, bookseller

[n.d.])

Bh13-c.19 item 2, The Life and Adventure of Robinson Crusoe (Glasgow: Printed for the

Booksellers, 1852)

Bh13-c.19 item 3, The History of Whittington and his Cat (Glasgow: Printed for the

booksellers, 1852)

Bh13-c.19 item 5, The Life and Adventures of Robin Hood (Glasgow: Printed for the

booksellers, 1858)

Bh13-d.25 item 16, The Wonderful Life and Suffering Adventures, of the Renowned Hero,

Robinson Crusoe … which he afterwards Colonized (Falkirk: Printed and sold by T.

Johnston, 1823)

Mu25-f.22 item 13, The History of Jack the Giant-Killer (Glasgow: Printed for the

booksellers, [n.d.])

Mu25-f.22 item 20, The History of Thomas Hickathrift (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers,

[n.d.])

Mu24-f.36 item 9, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the York Mariner (Paisley: J. Neilson,

1822)

Lilly Library Chapbook Collection

PR974.A1 56, The Wonderful Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (York: Thomas

Wilson and Son, 1812)

68

PR974.A1 105, The Surprising Life, and Most Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of the

City of York, Mariner (Newcastle: M. Angus and Son, [n.d.])

PR974.A1 167, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: J. and C. Evans, [n.d.])

PR974.A1 210, Life an Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Banbury: J. G. Rusher, [n.d.])

PR974.A1 294, The Wonderful Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: G. Ford &

Son, [n.d.])

PR974.A1 296, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: J. Pitts, [n.d.])

PR974.A1 297, Robinson Crusoe (London: Hodges, [n.d.])

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Orr & Son, [n.d.])

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Watt, [n.d.])

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Chilcott, [n.d.])

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Dean, [n.d.])

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McGill Library’s Chapbook Collection

PN970 K4 D4 1810, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, Written

by Himself (York: J. Kendrew, [n.d.])

PN970 S95 R46 1790, The Renowned History and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

(Manchester: A. Swindells, [n.d.])

69

Chetham’s Library

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British Library (ECCO)

T016648, John Reece, The good shepherd; or, The Mercy and Power of Jesus Christ,

manifested to the Saints in Distress: in a Friendly Conference between a Shepherd and

a Farmer. By John Reece (Congleton: (printed for the author) and sold by J. Dean; R.

Dean, Stockport; and G. Sael, in the Strand, London, [1796])

T072304, Voyages and Travels: being the Life and Adventure of Robinson Crusoe, of York,

Mariner. Who lived Eight and Twenty Years All Alone in an Unihabited [sic] island on

the coast of America, … Written by Himselfe ([s.l.]: [s.n.], [n.d.])

T072323, The Life of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (Congleton: Printed by J. Dean,

[n.d.])

T072332, The Sureprsing [sic] Life, and Most Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of the

City of York, Mariner, giving an Account how … Home to his Native Country

(Newcastle: M. Angus and Son, [n.d.])

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