【實用書籍app】Robinson Crusoe|最夯免費app-綠色工廠好玩App

Robinson Crusoe is based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, who was born in Fife in 1676. Selkirk was marooned on an island off the coast of Chile in 1704 and not rescued until 1709. On his return to England,

Selkirk’s adventures caused a sensation. He was interviewed by Richard Steele, the founder of Tatler and co-founder of The Spectator, who published an essay on him in The Englishman in 1713. Steele said that Selkirk

‘frequently bewailed his Return to the World, which could not, he said, with all its Enjoyments, restore him to the Tranquility of his Solitude’.

The adventuring Selkirk found that ‘he was a better Christian while in this solitude than ever he was before, or than, he was afraid, he should ever be again’, adding that once he had conquered his melancholy through

reason, reading the Scriptures, moderation and vigorous physical exercise, his life had become joyful, ‘one continual Feast’.

Crusoe’s practicality and adaptability make him an ideal Western industrial-capitalist man. He believes in reason; that through reason anyone can become a ‘mechanick’ and reason consoles him in his despair. Like the best

British shopkeeper, Crusoe keeps an account of his condition, drawing up his ‘State of Affairs’ and stating ‘very impartially, like Debtor and Creditor, the Comforts I’d enjoyed, against the Miseries I suffered’. He heads the

left-hand side of his account ‘Evil’ and the right-hand side ‘Good’ (thereby falsely equating debits with bad and credits with good). Crusoe remarks that ‘by this experiment I was made master of my business’. And, like the

best English colonist, Crusoe surveys the island, seeing ‘the whole country was my own meer property’.

Robinson Crusoe has had such an enduring cultural influence that most people know its story of a sailor shipwrecked on an island. The French 19th century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau called it: ‘The one book that

teaches all that books can teach.’ It became so popular in France during the Revolution that until the 1930s a large umbrella was called in French ‘un Robinson’ after the goatskin umbrella Crusoe made.