The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe
Peter Clines
Foreword
Throughout history, it's been the nature of storytellers to make their tale fit the audience, no matter what the truth of that tale may be. Most people are horrified to read the unedited fairy tales that were popularized by the Brothers Grimm. Many college students are stunned by the action-packed tale of Beowulf printed in its true form as a long epic poem. Even the epics The Odyssey and The Iliad are dry on the page without a skilled translation.
In a like manner, when writing out the biography of Robinson Crusoe, budding writer and pamphleteer Daniel Defoe decided on several edits to the assembled journals and accounts that made up the manuscript. While there were numerous popular tales of shipwrecked mariners at the time, Crusoe's experiences were so singular and unnatural that they far outshone the tales of contemporary castaways such as Alexander Selkirk and Henry Pitman. Still, Defoe felt certain changes needed to be made if Crusoe's story were to receive any sort of audience (indeed, if it was even to see print).
Chief among these changes, alas, was a personal bias. Defoe, a Presbyterian dissenter who once debated becoming a minister, felt the need to include numerous passages on Christianity, faith, and devotion in the manuscript, contrary to Crusoe's well-documented dislike of organized religion (having been raised in England during the religiously-conflicted reign of Charles I, at a time shortly after the Spanish Inquisition had burned almost a dozen people for witchcraft in Europe). In an angry 1721 letter to Jonathan Swift, rebutting that author's latest criticism of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe justifies the excessive additions by the belief it was impossible for a man to spend so much time in isolation without turning to Jesus Christ in some regular form or another.
In a similar vein, Defoe also decided that Crusoe must have tried to escape the island. This belief, however, posed the problematic question of, if such a capable man had built a boat, why did he remain stranded for over a quarter-century? Thus, Defoe's account shows Crusoe repeatedly building canoes and boats, yet through a series of flimsy constructions never once reaching the nearby island of Trinidad.
As a historical note, Crusoe was enraged by the random omissions and additions to his biography, which made him alternately appear to be a bumbling fool, a zealot, or a senile old man. At least one account says he was infuriated by the idea he spent 27 years on his island carrying a parasol to block the sun. Over the irreverent matter of "the dancing bear" inserted at the end of Defoe's text, Crusoe was driven into a rage and threatened the writer with bodily violence at least three times. The writer was intimidated enough by the old man that he did not attempt to publish the work until a few months after Crusoe's reported death at the then-remarkable age of 87.
To his credit, when Defoe first edited the journals and accounts of Crusoe, he took great pains to maintain the original (and often creative) spellings and grammar that his worldly-yet-uneducated subject had used. For example, like so many dabblers at writing, Crusoe thought commas were not so much placed as scattered like ashes. He was also, if Defoe’s manuscript is to be believed, the creator of the run-on sentence.
In the three centuries since, countless publishers and scholars have "improved" the manuscript. Misspelled or inconsistently spelled words have been replaced and grammar adjusted to modern standards with little regard for the flavor of the original tale. This has resulted in hundreds of varying editions being produced over the years.
Faced with the decision of which edition was to be judged “correct,” I've done the same as many scholars before me and satisfied my own ego, falling back on the interpretation of the tale I was first familiar with. While this version is not as raw as the original manuscript, it still contains far more of Crusoe's original spellings and phrasings than many readers are used to. I have also taken the liberty of dividing the book into chapters, of a sort, where the narrative seemed most inclined for a break.