ESSAYS IN CRITICISMA QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF LITERARY CRITICISM

Volume I April 1951 No. 2

Robinson Crusoe as a MythIAN WATT

WE do not usually think of Robinson Crusoe as a novel. Defoe'sfirst full-length work of fiction seems to fall more naturallyinto place with Faust, Don Juan and Don Qjiixote, the greatmyths of our civilization. What these myths are about it isfairly easy to say. Their basic plots, their enduring images, allexhibit a single-minded pursuit by the protagonist of one of thecharacteristic aspirations of Western man. Each of their heroesembodies an arete and a hubris, an exceptional prowess and avitiating excess, in spheres of action that are peculiarly impor-tant in our culture. Don Quixote, the impetuous generosity andthe limiting blindness of chivalric idealism; Don Juan, pursuingand at the same time tormented by the idea of boundlessexperience of women; Faustus, the great knower, his curiosityalways unsatisfied, and therefore damned.

Crusoe does not at first seem a likely companion for theseother culture-heroes. They lose the world for an idea; he forgain. Their aspirations are conscious, and defiant, so that whenretribution comes it is half expected and already understood;whereas Robinson Crusoe disclaims either heroism or pride;he stolidly insists that he is no more than he seems, that youwould do it too in the circumstances.

Yet of his apotheosis there can be no doubt. By the end ofthe nineteenth century, there had appeared at least 700editions, translations and imitations, not to mention a populareighteenth-century pantomime, and an opera by Offenbach.1

1 For a survey of the work done on this subject, with very full references, secPHILIP BABCOCK GOVE, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction . . . (New York, 1941).The study of Robinsonaden is particularly connected with the name of HermannUllrich, author of Robinson und Robinsonaden (Weimar, 1898), and Defoes RobinsonCrusoe, Geschkhte eines Weltbuchcs (Leipzig, 1924). H. C. Hutchins has studied theearly editions of Robinson Crusoe in his Robinson Crusoe and Its Printing (New York,1925), and William-Edward Mann is responsible for a useful study of RobinsonCrusol tn Franct (Paris, 1916).

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There are other more picturesque examples of his fame. In1848, an enterprising French industrialist started a restaurantup a tree, a particularly fine chestnut in a wood near Paris:he called it 'Robinson', and now restaurateurs vie for the titlein a village of that name.1 And 'un robinson' has become apopular term for a large umbrella.

Nor, as Virginia Woolf has pointed out,1 is he usually thoughtof as a hero of fiction. Instead, partly because of Defoe'sverisimilitude and partly for deeper reasons, his author's namehas been forgotten, while he himself has acquired a kind ofsemi-historical status, like the traditional heroes of myth.When his story appeared it is reported to have been 'universallyreceived and credited as a genuine history';' and we today cansurely apply to it Malinowski's description of primitive myths:'It is not of the nature of fiction, such as we read today in anovel, but it is a living reality, believed to have once happenedin primeval times, and continuing ever since to influence theworld and human destinies.'*

Almost universally known, almost universally thought of asat least half real, he cannot be refused the status of myth. Butthe myth of what?

It is at first difficult to answer, especially if we take intoaccount the later portions of the Crusoe trilogy. For Defoe atonce cashed in on the success of the Strange and SurprisingAdventures of Robinson Crusoe with two other books, the FartherAdventures and the Serious Reflections. They complicate theanswer because, though the character is the same, he is nolonger on the island. But, perhaps, there is no need to considerthem in detail. Myth always tends in transmission to bewhittled down to a single, significant situation. Hardly anyoneknows the later books of the trilogy; the stark facts of the hero'sisland existence occupy almost all our attention, and the rest islargely forgotten, or plays a very secondary role. Even theother portions of the first volume of the trilogy, comprising theearly adventures and the eventual return to civilization,though better known, are hardly part of the myth, which

1 REN6 POTTIBI, Hiitoire d'un VUlagt (Paris, 1941), pp. 171-4.• DEFOE, The Common Reader, First Sena (London, 1995).• Cit. M A X GUNTHER, Enlstehungsgeschichte von Drfoes Robinson Crusoe (Griefswald,

1909), p. 99. « Myth m Primitiot Psychology (London, 1926), pp. 18-9.

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retains only the island episode. But even if we ask what is theessential social meaning of that one episode, that solitude,many answers suggest themselves.

Defoe himself gives two main explanations for Crusoe'ssolitude. At times Crusoe feels he is being punished for Ir-religion;1 at others for his filial disobedience in leaving home— in the Farther Adventures he even accuses himself of having'killed his father'.1 But Crusoe as a man isolated from God, oras a modern Oedipus, is not our subject here. For the myth asit has taken shape in our minds is surely not primarily aboutreligious or psychological alienation, nor even about solitudeas such. Crusoe lives in the imagination mainly as a triumph ofhuman achievement and enterprise, and as a favourite exampleof the elementary processes of political economy. So, in ourattempt to understand the causes for Crusoe's apotheosis, wewill look first at the relationship of his story to some of theenduring traits of our social and economic history.

It is easy to see that Robinson Crusoe is related to three essentialthemes of modern civilization—which we can briefly designateas 'Back to Nature', 'The Dignity of Labour' and 'EconomicMan'. Robinson Crusoe seems to have become a kind ofculture-hero representing all three of these related but notwholly congruent ideas. It is true that if we examine whatDefoe actually wrote, and may be thought to have intended, itappears that Robinson Crusoe hardly supports some of the sym-bolic uses to which the pressure of the needs of our society hasmade it serve. But this, of course, is in keeping with the statusof Robinson Crusoe as a myth, for we learn as much from thevaried shapes that a myth takes in men's minds, as from theform in which it first arose. It is not an author, but a society,that metamorphoses a story into a myth, by retaining onlywhat its unconscious needs dictate, and forgetting everything else.

iThe term 'Back to Nature' covers the many and varied forms

of primitivism, of revulsion from the contemporary complexities1 The L\fe and Strange Surprising Adntnturts of Robinson Crusoe, ed. George A. Aitken

(London, 1902), pp. 41-3, 95-100 and passim.• The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. G. A. Aitken (London, 1902),

pp. 149-50. Abo, Lift, p. a 16.

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of civilization into a simpler and more 'natural' order. Themovement necessarily features two forms of regress: techno-logical and topographical, a simpler economic structure andits associated rural setting. Both are involved in RobinsonCrusoe, and it is interesting to see that Rousseau, the greatprophet of both these trends, was the first to see in it somethingwhich far transcended the status of a mere adventure story.The book played an important role in his imaginative exper-ience, and he frequently referred to it. The most famousreference occurs in £mile.1 There, after announcing that inprinciple 'he hates books' and that he is determined to correctthe predominantly bookish tendency of traditional methods ofeducation, Rousseau solemnly proclaims an exception. Onebook exists which teaches all that books can teach. It is 'thefirst that my Emile will read; it will for a long time be thewhole contents of his library; and it will always hold anhonoured place there . . . What then is this marvellous book? Isit Aristotle? Is it Pliny? Is it Buffon? No, it is Robinson Crusoe.'

The hero, alone on his island, deprived of all assistance fromhis fellows, and nevertheless able to look after himself, isobviously a figure that will enthral readers of all ages. Thebook's consequent entertainment value renders palatable itsmoral and philosophical merits which are Rousseau's mainconcern. We cannot here give a full account of them, but twoare particularly relevant. One is based on the descriptions ofCrusoe's labours: they will fire fimile's imagination with thepractical, natural, and manual education to which he isdestined. Bacon, Comenius and Locke had urged this changeof emphasis, but Rousseau takes it very much further; Defoe'sstory, a box of tools, and the philosopher of Geneva, these willsuffice fimile: anything more would be superfluous, nayvicious.

But the pattern which £mile must imitate is not only that ofthe simple life of toil. Crusoe also stands for another of Rous-seau's favourite ideas — radical individualism. To attain thisway of life, Rousseau believes that 'the surest way to raise one-self above prejudices and to order one's judgment on the realrelationship between things, is to put oneself in the place of an

1 &nile, ou De V'Education, ed. F. and P. Richard (Paris, 1939), pp. 210-4.

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isolated man, and to judge of everything as that man wouldjudge of them, according to their actual usefulness'.1 Hence,again, the pre-eminent utility of Robinson Crusoe as a basictext: for the hero's life is its demonstration.

The book as Defoe wrote it (strictly speaking, the Life andStrange Surprising Adventures as Saint Hyacinthe and VanEffen transposed it into the more formal French literary tradi-tion)1 is not perfect. So Rousseau proposes a version freed ofall 'fatras';' one which was in fact that of the myth. The storywas to begin with the shipwreck and to end with the rescue:fimile's book would be less instructive if it ended in the way itactually does — with a return to civilization.

Defoe, of course, would have been surprised at this canoniza-tion of his story. His surprise would have been increased byRousseau's other references where Crusoe becomes a sort ofJohn the Baptist, who in his solitude made straight the ways ofthe final incarnation of the extravagancies of romantic in-dividualism. For Crusoe is after all a 'solitaire malgre" lui', asPaul Nourrison points out in his Jean-Jacques Rousseau et RobinsonCrusoe.* He is an involuntary and unapp'reciative prisoner ofthe beauties of nature. Rousseau was a botanist but Crusoe isa seed merchant: and the moral of his activities is quite differentfrom that which Rousseau extracts. Indeed, if we, perhapsunwisely, attempt to draw any general conclusions fromCrusoe's life on the island, it must surely be that out of human-ity's repertoire of conceivable designs for living, rationaleconomic behaviour alone is entitled to ontological status.Crusoe 'returns to nature' only according to Defoe's character-istic definition of that accommodating word: in his newspaperthe Review, Defoe had written that 'Nothing follows the courseof Nature more than Trade. There Causes and Consequencesfollow as directly as day and night.'* So in the island the

1 Ibid., p. an.• See GOVE, The Imaginary Voyage, p. 36; MANN, Robinson Crusol en France, pp. 51-5

and 102; W. J . B. PIENAAR, English Influences in Dutch Literature and Justus VanEffen as Intermediary (Cambridge, 1929), pp. 248-9.

• Envle, p. a n .• Paris, 1931, p. 30. This hostile and somewhat exaggerated polemic discusses

Rousseau's other references to Robinson Crusoe.• Review, II , 26; cit., WALTER WILSON, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel

Defoe (London, 1830), II, 319.

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nature of the universe is most importantly manifested in therationality of the processes of economic life. There are the'real relationships between things' which Crusoe discovers,relationships whose value and interest come from the way theyhelp man to secure the maximum utility from his environment.

Defoe's 'nature' appeals not for adoration but for exploita-tion: the island solitude is an exceptional occasion not forundisturbed self-communion, but for strenuous efforts at self-help. Inspired with this belief, Crusoe observes nature, notwith the eyes of a pantheist primitive, but with the calculatinggaze of colonial capitalism; wherever he looks he sees acres thatcry out for improvement, and as he settles down to the task heglows, not with noble savagery, but purposive possession.

The interest of Rousseau and Defoe in a 'state of nature' hasonly one motive in common: it and it alone will allow them torealize without interference their own thwarted vocations.The island offers exemplary opportunities for total laisser-faire:or, perhaps we should say, for 'Laisse-moi faire' — to put thedoctrine in psychological terms, which reveal the cause of itsappeal to Rousseau.

But the vocations are different, and indeed contradictory.The primitive setting of the island which is Rousseau's goal isonly a starting point for Crusoe. He finds himself on a desertisland, but he has no intention of letting it remain as such.Rousseau wanted to flee the complication and corruptions ofthe town, to take refuge in a solitary pastoral retreat: Defoe'ssolution of the dilemma is much more deeply representative ofour culture. If the pace gets too fast at home — go overseas.Not to pastoral retreats but to colonies. There the imaginationis fired by a splendid prospect which shows the true andnecessary conclusion of the ancient conflict between urban andrural ways' of life. That conflict can only be resolved in oneway — by the urbanization of the countryside. The newculture-hero's task is done only when he has taken possessionof his colony and stocked it with an adequate labour force;presumably Rousseau did not read The Farther Adventures ofRobinson Crusoe where his favourite hero rejoices that 'never wasthere such a little city in a wood'.1 But this is the ultimate

'p. 118.

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message of Defoe's story. The most desolate island cannotretain its natural order; wherever the white man brings hisrational technology there can only be man-made order, andthe jungle itself must succumb to the irrestible teleology ofcapitalism.

11

That is the direction which Defoe gives his story. It isfundamentally anti-primitivist. If many readers have inter-preted it as a 'back to nature' story, they have done so tosatisfy their own needs, and contrary to Defoe's general develop-ment of his theme. The implications of Robinson Crusoe areequally equivocal as regards the 'Dignity of Labour': but theimmediate justification for seeing in it a panegyric of work is agood deal stronger.

Rousseau saw Defoe's story as an object lesson in the educa-tional virtues of manual labour; and Crusoe does indeed drawthe correct moral from this activity: 'By stating and squaringeverything by reason, and by'making the most rational judg-ment of things, every man may be in time master of everymechanic art. I had never handled a tool in my life, and yet intime, by labour, application and contrivance, I found at leastthat I wanted nothing but I could have made it, especially if Ihad had tools.'1

The pleasures of this discovery to Crusoe and his readers arelargely the result of the Division of Labour. The term isAdam Smith's, but he was to a large extent anticipated byDefoe's contemporary, Bernard Mandeville.* The process towhich the term refers, and which, of course, began very earlyin human history, was at that time as far advanced in Englandas anywhere. This advanced development of the division oflabour is an important condition of the creation and immediatesuccess of Robinson Crusoe, just as the later accelerated develop-ment of the process is a condition of the subsequent triumph ofthe myth. For the main processes by which man secures food,clothing, and shelter are only likely to become interesting whenthey have become alien to his common, everyday experience.

ablt qftht Bets, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford, 1924), I, oooriv-cxxxv, II, 14211.

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To enjoy the description of the elementary productive pro-cesses reveals a sophisticated taste. Obviously, primitivepeoples can never forget for a day what Crusoe announces withthe tones of one making a discovery: 'It might be truly saidthat now I began to work for my bread. 'Tis a little wonderful,and what I believe few people have thought much upon, viz.,the strange multitude of little things necessary in the providing,producing, curing, dressing, making and finishing this onearticle of bread.'1 The account continues for seven pages, andeach detail is new or at least unfamiliar, and reminds us of thevast ignorance that separated production and consumption inthe London of Defoe's day, an ignorance that has inevitablyincreased since then, and that surely explains much of thefascination we find in reading the detailed descriptions ofCrusoe's island labours.

Rousseau was very much aware of these factors. In hispolitical and economic writings the development of the artsand sciences past the stage of patriarchal simplicity and theconsequent growth of the division of labour, urbanization, andthe political state, are the villains.1 One deplorable result is toseparate manual from mental labour. For Rousseau's purposes,therefore, Robinson Crusoe was a valuable corrective to the un-natural intellectualism which society inflicts upon the middleclass.

Progressive education and the arts and crafts movement owea good deal to Rousseau's pages on Robinson Crusoe in £mile.Educationalists try to rectify many of the results of the divisionof labour and of urbanization, by including in the curriculummany of the practical and manual activities which Crusoepursued on the island, and which Rousseau recommended forhis pupil. In the adult sphere, many reformers have attemptedto bridge the gap between the allegedly inventive, satisfyingand humanizing processes of primitive methods of production,and the dehumanizing effects of most economic activities undercapitalism. The Arts and Crafts movement, for example, andthe cult of the rough edge, are two of the most obvious attempts

lLifs, p. 130.1 Sec ARTHUR LOVEJOY, The Supposed Primitivism of Rousscau'j Discourse on

Inequality', Essays in tht History oj fdeas (Baltimore, 1948).

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to remedy the social and esthetic effects of the division of labourin industrial capitalism with an artificial primitivism in tech-nique and way of life. The same attempted diagnosis andremedy — in which one can often detect a residue of moral andreligious overtones — can be traced in many of the modernforms of leisure activity. It seems typical of our civilization totry to palliate the distortions of specialization by re-introducingthe basic economic processes in the guise of recreations. Inschool, and in later life, it is suggested, by such pursuits asgardening, home-weaving, woodwork, the keeping of pets, wecan all partake of Crusoe's character-forming satisfactions.

There are other aspects of the glorification of labour whichare relevant to the function of Robinson Crusoe as a myth. Manypolitical reformers since Rousseau have been occupied with theidea of rectifying the effects of the division of labour in thewhole of the economic and political system. Both on the rightand the left they have tried to realize in practice, by new socialarrangements, the ideal of the dignity of labour.

For Marx, man and man's universe are the products of work,and his political system was designed with the idea thathuman labour under changed conditions could undo thecontemporary estrangement of most men from their labour, andrecreate a society where all economic activities would increaseeach individual's moral stature. William Morris and the GuildSocialists in advocating a return to a simpler communaleconomy suggested a different road: but they were trying toachieve the same moral end, and accepted, in the main, Marx'sanalysis of the real conditions of human labour in the society oftheir day. And on the right, Samuel Smiles, for example, wasalso trying to persuade us that hard work even in the presentstate of society is the key to all: that 'labor omnia vincit'.1

1 Smiles gives thi« epigraph to his delightfully entitled Life and Labour or Character-istics of Men of Industry, Culture and Genius, attributing it to Virgil. Virgil actuallywrote, of the coming of the Age of Iron:

labor omnia vicit ;

improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas. (Gcorgics, I, 145-6)The time-hallowed misquotation is an interesting example of the forces whichhave made Robinson Crusoe into a myth. That labour does and always will conquer allis a modern view which cannot be derived from Virgil. There seems no reason toconsider vicit as a gnomic perfect: Connington remarks that 'the poet is narrating,not uttering a sentiment', although he approves of the general characterization ofthe Georgia as a 'glorification of labour . (P. Vergili Maronis Optra . . . (London

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Much of Carlyle's political theory and moral teaching derivesfrom his idea that the great lesson is 'Know what thou canstwork at'. All these and many others — educationalists, moral-ists, social and political reformers, publicists, economic theorists— seem to base themselves upon a dogma which finds itssupreme narrative realization on Crusoe's island.

The reader's ignorance of the basic processes of production isnot the only source of the appeal of Crusoe's island labours.He is also affected by the obscure ethical and religious over-tones which pervade Defoe's intense concentration upon eachstage of Crusoe's exertions. Eventually, they fasten upon ourimaginative life a picture of the human lot as heroic only whenproductive, and of man as capable of redemption only throughuntiring labour. As we read we share in an inspiring and yetwholly credible demonstration of the vitality and interest of allthe basic economic pursuits. If we draw a moral, it can onlybe that for all the ailments of man and his society, Defoeconfidently prescribes the therapy of work.

The extent both of Defoe's concern with labour, and that ofthe whole ideology of our culture, is certainly unprecedented.Older cultural traditions would probably have seen RobinsonCrusoe as a glorification of the purely contingent (if not whollydeplorable) aspects of human experience. Certainly most oftheir myths, the Golden Fleece, Midas, and the Rheingold areconcerned, not with the process by which people ordinarilymanage to subsist, but with the sudden magical seizure ofwealth: they are inspired by the prospect of never having towork again.

Defoe's interest in labour is part of the ideology of a new andvast historical process. The dignity of labour is ultimately thecreed of the religion of capitalism. In this religion Marxfigures as the arch-schismatic who — like all heretics — became1881), I, 151-5). F. Plessis and P. Lcjay comment acidly: 'Le polite n'exalte pasle travail pour lui-meme, ce qui est une affectation toute modeme, une ideed'Encydopidiste, mais pour ses resultats.' (CEuvres (Paris, 1945), p. 29). L. P.Wilkinson, in a recent article, writes, "The text of Virgil's Gospel of Work was notlaborare et orare, as some have suggested, but laborare tt vivere.' ('The Intention ofVirgil's Georgia', Greece and Rome, XVIII (1950), 24.) Virgil's interpretation ofthe end of the Golden Age, bears obvious resemblances to the Christian, andespecially Protestant, welcome to the loss of Eden, as Adam says in Paradise Lost,'Idleness had been worse.' See also, A. LOVEJOY and G. BOAS, Primitivism andRtlaUd Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935), p. 370.

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so by taking one part of the creed too seriously and trying toapply it universally and inconveniently.

It is impossible to deal summarily with this creed. But someattention to that part of it which is directly related to thecreation of Robinson Crusoe seems necessary.

It is no accident that the idea of the dignity of laboursounds typical of the Victorian Age, for it was then that the newideology was most publicly and variously established. Butactually, of course, the Gospel of Work was by no means neweven in 1719. In Greece, Cynics and Stoics had opposed thedenigration of manual labour which is a necessary part of aslave-owning society's scale of values. In the Christian tradi-tion labour had never been a dishonourable estate. In the six-teenth century, Protestantism, in harmony with the obscureneeds of social and economic change, revived and expanded anold belief until it loomed much larger in the total picture of thehuman lot The Biblical view that labour was a curse forAdam's disobedience was displaced by the idea that hard work— untiring stewardship of the gifts of God — was a paramountethical obligation.

The extent of this shift of values can be measured by com-paring Defoe's attitude to work with that of Sir Thomas More.In More's Utopia hours of work are limited to six, and all sur-pluses of production are redistributed in the form of extraholidays.1 Defoe, in The Complete Tradesman, proposes verylong hours, and insists that leisure activities, even an inordinatecraving for sermons, must be kept in check.1 The sametendency can be observed in the practice of Robinson Crusoe,to whom More's ideal would have seemed moral laxness. ForCrusoe hard work seems to be a condition of life itself, and wenotice that the arrival of Friday is a signal, not for increasedleisure, but for expanded production.

One of the reasons for the canonization of Robinson Crusoe iscertainly its consonance with the modern view that labour isboth the most valuable form of human activity in itself, and atthe same time the only reliable way of developing one's

1 Ideal Commonwealths, ed. H. Morley (London, 1899), pp. 97, 101.• Thi Complete English Tradesman (Oxford, 1841). I, 32"4- See also, A. E. LEVETT,

'Daniel Defoe', Social and Political Ideas of Some English Thinkers of the Augustan Age,ed. F. J. C. Hearnihaw (London, 1928), p. 180.

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spiritual biceps. Defoe's version of this attitude is at times overtlyreligious in tone. Crusoe's successful improvisations, his perfectlycontrolled economy, foreshadow his ultimate standing in thedivine design. Defoe has taken the idea from his own dissentingmilieu, and from its conduct books, whose message has beenmade familiar to us today in the writings of Weber, Troeltschand Tawney, and given it a fascinating narrative form.

The combination of this aspect of the ideology of AsceticProtestantism, or Puritanism, with a kind of return to nature,is particularly happy. Defoe thereby embodies in the samestory two historically associated aspirations of the bourgeoisclass with whom he and his hero have been long and justlyidentified. In his epic of individual enterprise he bequeathedthem both a programme of further economic action, and afigure on whom to project a quasi-religious mystique whichretained from the ebbing fervours of Calvinism its essentialsocial and economic teaching. The programme of action isEmpire: and it includes, as we have seen, temporary submissionto primitivism, or at least to the lure of the wide open places.The mystique is one which distracts attention from the enor-mous and rapidly growing differences between the kinds ofwork and their economic rewards, by lumping them togetherunder the one word 'labour', and erecting a creed which

. bestows the same high 'dignity' on all forms of activity whichare subsumed under that one word.

That the mystique of the Dignity of Labour helped to ensurethe later success of Robinson Crusoe as a myth seems certain. Itneeded a gospel. But much of what Defoe actually wrote hadto be overlooked. This may seem surprising, since Defoe, thecomplacent apologist of nascent industrial capitalism, certainlyapproved of the new ideology. But as a writer his eye was sokeenly on the object, and second thoughts so rarely checkedthe flow of his pen, that he reported, not his wishes, but theplausible image of the moment, what he knew people wouldactually do. So it is that he tells us much which, if analysed,questions not only the simple message of the myth, but evensome of his own cherished beliefs. And as these details do notprotrude, we must consider them a little more closely.

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On the desert island Robinson Crusoe turns his forsakenestate into a triumph. This is a flagrant unreality. Othercastaways in the past, including Defoe's main model, AlexanderSelkirk, were reduced to an extremely primitive condition, andin the space of a few years.1 Harassed by fear, dogged byecological degradation, they sank more and more to the levelof animals: in some authentic cases they forgot the use of speech,went mad or died of inanition. One book which Defoe hadalmost certainly read, The Voyages and Travels of J. Albert deMandelso, tells of two such cases: of a Frenchman who, aftertwo years of solitude on Mauritius, tore his clothing to pieces ina lit of madness brought on by a diet of raw tortoise;' and of aDutch seaman on St. Helena who disinterred the body of aburied comrade and set out to sea in the coffin.*

Defoe's readers, perhaps, from their own ordinary experiencesof solitude, may suspect as much, even if in a less dramaticform. But as they read Robinson Crusoe they forget that isolationcan be painful or boring, that it tends in their own lives towardsapathetic animality and mental derangement. Instead, theyrejoice to find that isolation can be the beginning of a newrealization of the potentialities of the individual. Theirinertias are cheered by a vicarious participation in Crusoe'stwenty-three years of lonely and triumphant struggle. Theyimagine themselves to be sharing each representative step inhis conquest of the environment, and perform with him aheartening recapitulation of humanity's success story.

To all who feel isolated, those who get tired of their job —and who at times does not? — the story has a deep appeal andsends our critical faculties asleep. Inspired by the theme, andblinded, perhaps, by our wishes and dreams, we forget thesubtle ways by which a consolatory unreality has been made toappear real.

The psychological unreality has its complement in the materialone. The normal economic picture — that known to most ofDefoe's readers — has been tampered with, unobtrusively butdecisively. Defoe's hero — unlike most of us — has been en-dowed with the basic necessities for the successful exercise of

1 A. W. SECORD, Studia in the Narratiot Mtthod of Defoe (Illinois, 1924), p. a6.1 Ibid., p. 28. » Ibid.

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free enterprise. He is not actually a primitive or a proletarianor even a professional man, but a capitalist. He owns, freehold,an estate which is rich, though unimproved. It is not a desertisland in the geographical sense; it is merely barren of ownersor competitors, and, above all, the very event which bringshim there, the shipwreck, which is supposed to be a retributivedisaster, is in fact a miraculous present of the means of produc-tion, a present rendered particularly felicitous by the death ofall the other passengers. Crusoe complains that he is 'reducedto a state of nature'; in fact he secures from the wreck 'thebiggest magazine of all kinds. . . that ever was laid out . . .for one man'.1

The possession of this original stock, which Defoe's imitatorsusually retain, usually on a more lavish and less utilitarianscale, is a major practical unreality overlooked by many ofhis admirers of the classic idyll of individual enterprise. Yetit alone is enough to controvert the myth's wishful affirmationof a flagrant economic naivety — the idea that anyone has everattained comfort and security entirely by his own efforts.

The myth demanded that the storm be presented as a tragicperipety, although it is really the dens ex macfdna which makesits message plausible. Some such legerdemain was necessarybefore solitary labour could even appear to be not an alternativeto a death sentence, but a solution to the perplexities of econo-mic and social reality.

The dignity of labour is salvaged, then, under the mostapparently adverse conditions, mainly because Crusoe has beenlucky with capital stock. One wonders whether his 'instinctof workmanship' would have been of any avail if he had reallybegun from scratch. Certainly Johann Heinrich Campe, thehead master of the Philanthropium at Dessau, felt that there was alogical objection here which should be countered. He acted onRousseau's suggestion that only the island episode was improv-ing, and produced a Nouveau Robinson for the young whichsuperseded Defoe's original version both in France and Ger-many. In it, the stock of tools was omitted.1

1 Lift, p. 60.1 See MANN, Robinson Cnisol en France, pp. 85-101. It was this venion which

H. H. Gossen uied in deriving economic laws from Crusoe (W. START, The Ideal

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This version imposes a severe strain on the credulity of its read-ers ; at least on that of anyone who does not live in a Philanthropium.But even if we grant the possibility of an isolated man reaching ahigh technological level unaided, there remain other more drasticdifficulties in interpreting Robinson Crusoe as a myth of autarkicindividual enterprise — difficulties based on the fact that theisland is, after all, an island, and that whatever happens thereis exceptional and does not seem to happen anywhere else.

On the island there is — with one exception to which weshall return — only real wealth. The perplexities of moneyand the price mechanism do not exist. There is there, asperhaps nowhere else, a direct relation between productionand consumption. That is one obvious reason why we shouldnot argue from it to our society; another follows from the factthat Crusoe did not want to go to the island, and once there,doesn't want to stay. The fact that he is forced to be a model ofindustry does not mean that he likes work. Actually, in thetotal setting of the trilogy, it becomes quite clear that Crusoeregards his little profits on the island only as a consolationprize. What he wanted (and later obtained), were unearnedincrements from the labour of others. In Brazil, he had soontired even of the tasks of a sugar plantation owner, and it washis quest of the more spectacular rewards of the slave tradewhich took him to the island.1 To use Max Weber's distinction,he preferred the speculative rewards of 'adventurer's capital-ism' to the uneventful, though regular, increments which aretypical of the modern economic order.1 And after Crusoe leavesthe island, he again succumbs to the lure of foreign trade,which at that time gave the highest and quickest returns oncapital.' It is only on his island that Crusoe shows the regulateddiligence combined with accurate planning and stocktakingwhich is so important in modern economic organization. Defoe

1 JJfi, pp. 40-2. See also, Farther Adventures, p. 66, where Defoe shows his aware-ness of the dangers of this type of enterprise by attributing it to idle ne'er-do-wells.

• WEBER, Tht Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (London,1930), pp. 21, 74-8 and The Theory of Economic and Social Organization, trans. T.Parsons and A. M. Henderson (New York, 19^7), PP- 50-2, 2793".

* A. L. MERSON,/The Revolution and the British Empire', The Modern Quarterly,IV (1949). >52-

Foundations of Economic Thought (London, 1948), p. 159): and was probably that ofFREDEHIC BAJTIAT, Harmonies Economiquei (Bnixelles, 1850), pp. 9gf, 2i4f.

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knew this theoretically; he dealt with such matters in his econo-mic manuals. But he himself had not been able to carry out hiseconomic ideals into practice. They were to be realized onlyon Crusoe's 'island of despair' which is actually a Utopia,though of a new and peculiar kind.

Most Utopias have been based upon the ideal of a more har-monious relationship among men. Those of Plato and More arewholly social in inspiration. They, and many later Utopias, arealso characterized by a certain static quality, and by the factthat people seem to do much less work and get much more for itthan in the real world. But this new Utopia is the answer, not tothe easy and expansive yearnings of the heart for individualhappiness and social harmony, nor even to Crusoe's acquisitiveinstincts; it is the answer only to a very rigorous conceptionof what kind of life Defoe feels is good for other people.

Crusoe, in fact, has been stranded in the Utopia of the Pro-testant Ethic. There temptation, whether economic or moral,is wholly absent. Crusoe's energies cannot be deflected, eitherby the picnic promises of pastoral Utopias, or by the relaxingand uneconomic piety of the hermits and mystics who are theheroes of an earlier form of Christianity, heroes whose faith ismeasured by their certainty that 'God will provide'. On Crusoe'sisland, unremitting toil is obligatory; there, and only there, itis instinct both with moral value and calculable personal reward.

If we look further afield for economic motivation in Defoe,if we leave the island, we find a very different picture. Theother adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and the lives of Defoe'sother heroes and heroines do not point in the direction of thedignity of labour. Defoe knew very well that the normal socialconditions of his time caused very different adjustments to theenvironment. Moll Flanders, Roxana, and Colonel Jacquesatisfy their needs in ways which no one would propose forimitation. Indeed their exploits demonstrate quite anothertype of political economy, and point the moral that — to thoseoutside Crusoe's island, and without his heaven-bestowedcapital — 'La proprie^, c'est le vol.'1

1J. Sutherland points out that on the island, although stealing is impossiblethe satisfactory emotions of successful theft are suggested by the looting of thewreck. Dqfoe (London, 1937), p. 232.

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Defoe, then, is a realist about the individual and his economicenvironment. He has no illusions about the dignity of thelabours of most people in the England of his day. He expressedtheir lot in a moving passage which William Morris used asepigraph to his lecture on 'The Art of the People': 'And themen of labour spend their strength in daily struggling for breadto maintain the vital strength they labour with: so living in adaily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working butto live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome life,and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.'

If we wish to trace in Defoe any universal and overriding ideait is certainly not that of the dignity of labour as a social factor even as a moral dogma. The key to the basic motivation ofbis characters and the hypothesis that best explains theirhistory both apply to Crusoe. For he is only a special case ofeconomic man. Just as the doctrine of the dignity of labour canbe understood as the optimistic and deluding myth whichhides the realities involved in the division of labour, so thefortitude of Defoe's isolated man withdraws from generalattention the true lineaments of that lonely and unlovelyarchetype of our civilization, homo economicus, who is alsomirrored in Robinson Crusoe.

in

Homo economicus is, of course, a fiction. There has long beena conflict about the utility of the abstraction. Briefly, theclassical political economists found in the idea of RobinsonCrusoe, the solitary individual on a desert island, a splendidexample for their system-building. On the other hand, theircritics who, like Marx, were concerned to prove that economicscan be a guide to reality only when it is a historical and asocial science, have denied the relevance of Robinson Crusoeto any realistic economic thinking.

Marx began his polemic against classical political economyby insisting on the social nature of production. He, therefore,attacked the starting points of Adam Smith and Ricardo —the isolated hunters and fishers, who were, he said, 'Robinson-ades', and belonged to 'the insipid illusions of the Eighteenth

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Century'.1 Later, in Capital, he appropriated Crusoe to supporthis own theory of value. For Crusoe, 'in spite of the variety ofhis work . . . knows that his labour whatever its form, is but theactivity of one and the same Robinson, and consequently, thatit consists of nothing but different modes of human labour . . .All the relations between Robinson and the objects that formthis wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clearas to be intelligible without exertion.'1 But it is only on theisland that the value of any object is directly proportional tothe quantity of labour expended upon it. In Western capitalismthe rewards of labour and the price of commodities are subjectto market considerations which are capricious and unjust,especially to labour.' The use of Crusoe as an example there-fore distracts attention from the dark realities of the economicsystem as it is.

Marx does not make the useful polemic point which Crusoe'sfortunate acquisition of capital might have afforded him. Nordoes he mention the extent to which his personality embodiesthe moral evils which he ascribed to capitalism. This is nodoubt because he is using Crusoe only as an example of oneparticular theme, and not for any general purpose. For actu-ally Crusoe exemplifies another aspect of Marx's thought; theprocess of alienation by which capitalism tends to convertman's relationships with his fellows, and even to his ownpersonality, into commodities to be manipulated.

This view of economic man is not, of course, limited to Marx.Max Weber's idea that the Protestant Ethic involves a thoroughsystematization of behaviour according to rational norms ofpersonal profit is very similar,* and so is Tawney's picture ofthe acquisitive society composed of individuals pursuing theirindividual interests without any recognition of social or moralsolidarity.' But these theoretical formulations had long before

X'A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (ist ed., 1859: New York, 1904),pp. 265-6.

1 Chap, i, section iv.1 Defoe had experienced this for himself. His bookseller, Taylor, owned the

whole share of all three parts of Robinson Crusoe and is said to have made hisfortune by it (HUTCHINS, Robinson Crusot and Its Printing, p. 185.) Defoe workedindefatigably for most of his seventy years of life, and though he was at times rich,he died alone, hiding from a creditor. (SUTHERLAND, Defoe, pp. 269-74.)

4 WEBBR, Theory of Economic and Social Organization, pp. 191-249 et passim.' R . H . TAWNBY, The Acqwsitiot SocUty (London, 1921), p. 3a.

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been anticipated by literary realization. For, as an ironiccommentary upon the myth, the book of Robinson Crusoedepicts in its casual reports of the hero's behaviour and of hisoccasional parenthetic reflections, the shameless and pervasiveimpact of the cash nexus upon the character and personalrelationships of the archetypal economic man. Defoe hassupplied the antidote to the myth of his unwitting creation —not only in the incidental unrealities of the plot mentionedabove, but positively, in the sombre touches which are partof his picture of the personality of the protagonist.

Crusoe treats his personal relationships in terms of theircommodity value. The Moorish boy, Xury, for example,helps him to escape from slavery, and on another occasionoffers to prove his devotion by sacrificing his own life. Crusoevery properlyv resolves 'to love him ever after',1 and promises'to make him a great man'. But when chance leads them to thePortuguese trader, and its Captain offers Crusoe sixty pieces ofeight — twice Judas's figure — he cannot resist the bargain andsells Xury into slavery. He has momentary scruples at thebetrayal, it is true, but they are soon economically satisfied bysecuring from the Captain a promise 'to set him free in tenyears if he turn Christian'.* Remorse later supervenes, butonly when the tasks of his island existence renew his need fora slave.'

Slaves, of course, were his original objective in the voyagewhich brought him to the island. And eventually Providenceand his own exertions provide him with Man Friday, whoanswers his prayers by 'swearing to be my slave for ever'.*The unsolicited promise is prophetic, and the development ofthe relationship is instructive. Crusoe does not ask Friday hisname, he gives him one; and there is throughout a remarkablelack of interest in Friday as a person, as someone worth tryingto understand or converse with. Even in language — themedium whereby human beings may achieve something morethan animal relationships with each other — Crusoe is a strictutilitarian. 'I likewise taught him to say yes and no,'5 he tellsus, though, as Defoe's contemporary critic Gildon not unjustly

1 L\fe, p. 27. • Ibid., p. 36. • Ibid., p. 164.* Ibid., p. 226. • Ibid., p. 229.

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remarked,1 Friday still speaks pidgin English at the end of theirlong association.

Yet Crusoe regards the relationship as ideal. In the periodalone with Friday he was 'perfectly and completely happy, ifany such thing as complete happiness can be found in asublunary state'.* A functional silence, apparently, adds to thecharms of the idyll, broken only by an occasional 'No, Friday'or an abject "Yes, Master.' Man's social nature is whollysatisfied by the righteous bestowal, or grateful receipt, ofbenevolent but not undemanding patronage.'

Only one doubt ruffles Crusoe's proprietary equanimity. Hebecomes obsessed with the fear that Friday may be harbouringan ungrateful wish to return to his father and his tribe. Butthe fear proves groundless and they leave the island together.Crusoe later avoids any possible qualms about keeping Fridayin servitude by the deferred altruism of a resolution 'to dosomething considerable for him, if he outlived me'.* Fortun-ately, no such sacrifice is called for, as Friday dies at sea, faith-ful to the end, and rewarded only by a brief word of obituarycompassion.

Crusoe's attitude to women is also rtlarked by an extremeinhibition of what we now consider to be normal humanfeelings. There are, of course, none on the island, and theirabsence is not deplored. When Crusoe does notice the lack of'society', he prays for company, but it is for that of a maleslave. With Friday, he is fully satisfied by an idyll withoutbenefit of woman. It is an interesting break from the tradi-tional expectations aroused by desert islands, from the Odysseyto the New Yorker.

Defoe's view of the individual was too completely dominatedby the rational pursuit of material self-interest to allow anyscope either for natural instinct or for higher emotional needs.Even when Crusoe returns to civilization, sex is strictly subor-dinated to business. Only after his financial position has been

1 Robinson Crusot Examin'd and Criticised; . . . ed. P. Dottin (London and Paris,1923). PP- 7°. 78, " 8 .

1 Life, pp. 245-6.3 The Crusoe-Friday relationship is representative in many other ways. Not

least in showing how the quat for the white man's burden tends to end in thediscovery of the perfect porter and personal servant.

4 Farther Adventures, p . 133.

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fully secured by a further voyage does he marry, 'and that noteither to my disadvantage or dissatisfaction'.1

Some of Crusoe's colonists have the same attitude. He tellshow they draw lots for five women, and strongly approves ofthe outcome: 'He that drew to choose first. . . took her that wasreckoned the homeliest and eldest of the five, which mademirth enough among the rest . . . but the fellow consideredbetter than any of them, that it was application and businessthat they were to expect assistance in as much as anything else;and she proved the best wife of all the parcel.'1

The conflict is put very much in Weber's terms.* Sex is seenas a dangerously irrational factor in life which interferes withthe pursuit of rational self-interest: and economic and moralworth in the male does not guarantee him a profitable matri-monial investment. On his colony 'as it often happens in theworld (what the wise ends of God's Providence are in such adisposition of things I cannot say), the two honest fellows hadthe two worst wives; and the three reprobates, that were scarceworth hanging, . . . had three clever, diligent, careful andingenious wives'.* It is therefore no accident that love plays avery minor part in Crusoe's own life, and is eliminated from thescene of his greatest triumphs.

One could illustrate the ideology of homo economicus at muchgreater length from Robinson Crusoe. Everything is measuredfrom the rational, a-social, and anti-traditional standards ofindividual self-interest, and some of the results are not pleasant.But these results are surely lamentable, but necessary, corol-laries of the social process which the story reflects; and thecommon tendency to overlook them in the hero must beattributed to the obscure forces that guard the idols of oursociety, and shape its myths.

Malinowski has said that 'myth is . . . an indispensable in-gredient of all culture'.' It would indeed appear to be so, but

1 Life, p. 341.1 Farthtr Aaoentures, p . 77.• M A X WEBER, Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gcrth and C. Wright Mills

(New York, 1946), p. 350.4 Farther Adventures, p . 78.* Myth in Prmuliot Psychology, p . 125.

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I have no wish to be numbered among those who would proveour common humanity by putting us back on a level with theTrobriand islanders. The aim of this essay is rather to do some-thing they don't do; that is, scrutinize one small item of ourcultural repertoire in the hope of clarifying its role in the pastand present of our society.

Much has had to be omitted. The appeal of the adventurein itself, for example, and the theological dimensions of thestory, which modify the picture considerably. Some of thesocial and economic matters have been treated somewhatcavalierly. The case of Robinson Crusoe as homo economicus hasbeen somewhat oversimplified. For Defoe does suggest on atleast one occasion (the famous episode when Crusoe comesacross a hoard of gold on the island and, after declaiming on itsuselessness, 'upon second thoughts' takes it away)1 the irra-tionality of the goals which shape the character of economicman more powerfully than his own understanding of his realneeds. And, of course, in a wintry sort of way, Crusoe hashis pleasures. He does not, as Selkirk had done, dance withthe goats, but he does at least occasionally supplement occu-pational by recreational therapy. Still, it seems true to say thatthe reality of Defoe's masterpiece, its ultimate referent, iseconomic man. So that if we seek a general meaning for hissolitude it must be the social atomization which homo economicusbrings in his train. That, surely, is the main historical basis ofthis metaphor of human solitude which has haunted thewestern consciousness. And the need to obscure the regrettablesocial and psychological corollaries of the rise of economicindividualism must explain much of the very general disin-clination to see the darker side of Defoe's hero.

It is certainly curious to observe how all but universal hasbeen the reluctance to challenge Crusoe as a model for imitationand inspiration. In some cases there may be other explanationsfor this. The myth of national character, for example. Someforeign commentators have had ulterior motives in presentingRobinson Crusoe as the typical Englishman. Marx calls him a'true-born Briton';1 and Dibelius echoes the impeachment of

1 Life, p. 6a.1 Capital, chap, i, section vi.

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a nation of shopkeepers with more obvious venom.1 For France,de Vogue, in his study of what he calls 'Le livre anglais',though more polite, is equally disparaging by implication.1

What is curious is to find that most English writers, too, havetended to accept Crusoe as the typical Englishman, apparentlyundeterred by any of his anti-social idiosyncrasies.

There have been occasional dissentients. Dickens, for ex-ample, was revolted by Crusoe's attitude to the death of Friday,and to women generally; and he wrote in a letter that Defoemust have been a 'precious dry and disagreeable article him-self.* Ruskin — another critic of the mentality of industrialcapitalism — uses the phrase 'a very small, perky, contented,conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe, sort of life'.* Yet on thewhole, Crusoe has been accepted as the typical Englishman byhis fellow-countrymen, although, as it happens, Defoe made hisfather 'a foreigner of Bremen'.

In some ways, of course, the character of Robinson Crusoeis a natural one. Courage, practical intelligence, not making afuss, these are not the least of the virtues, and their combinationin Crusoe does seem to be according to an English pattern.But these virtues cannot be regarded as exemplary and suffi-cient. Dickens wrote of Robinson Crusoe that it is 'the onlyinstance of a universally popular book that could make no onelaugh and no one cry'.5 This suggests the major flaw. Defoe'sepic of the stiff upper lip does not propose a wholly satisfactoryideal. For Crusoe's merits are combined with a stolid and in-hibited self-sufficiency which is disastrous both for the individualand for society. That is Crusoe's hubris — a defect not unlikeRousseau's 'hypertrophie du moi'.

There is, even on Crusoe's own showing, very little contentor peace in this way of life. Pascal said that the misery of mancan be traced from a single fact, his inability to stay still in hisown room. Crusoe can never stay still. His brisk and business-like exterior cannot wholly conceal the deadening compulsion

1 Englischt Romanhmst (Berlin, 1910), I, 36.1 Revue des Deux Monies, October 1st, 1895. As is Jean Giraudoux in Suzanne et

le Pacifiquc (Paris, 1921), pp. 228-33.• JOHN FORJTBR, Life of Charles Dickens, rev. J . W. T. Ley (London, 1928), p . 611.* PETBK QUENNEL, John Ruskin (London, 1949), p. 15.*Loc cit.

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of an alienation which is assuaged only by ceaseless economicactivity. He is modern economic man putting a poker face onthe fate that Pascal found intolerable. 'Nothing else offering,and finding that really stirring about and trading, the profitbeing so great, and, as I may say, certain, had more pleasurein it, and more satisfaction to the mind, than sitting still, which,to me especially, was the unhappiest part of life . . .'l So, inthe Farther Adventures, he sets out on yet another lucrativeOdyssey.

His author, deeply implicated in the character that Walter,de la Mare has called Defoe's 'Elective Affinity',1 appears toapprove. But he certainly does not see his work in an optimisticvein: 'Nothing else offering . . .' suggests why. Defoe wrestleswith the meanings of his creation in the essay 'On Solitude'which begins the Serious Reflections. The essay is inconclusive,and there are several different strands of thought in it. But thebitterness of isolation as the primordial fact repeatedly movesDefoe to a great fervour of communication. One of the passagesseems a particularly moving commentary on the isolation whichthe pursuit of individual self-interest creates in the human spirit.'What are the sorrows of other men to us, and what their joy?Sometimes we may be touched indeed by the power of sym-pathy, and a secret turn of the affections; but all the solidreflection is directed to ourselves. Our meditations are allsolitude in perfection; our passions are all exercised in retire-ment; we love, we hate, we covet, we enjoy, all in privacy andsolitude. All that we communicate of those things to any otheris but for their assistance in the pursuit of our desires; the endis at home; the enjoyment, the contemplation, is all solitude andretirement; it is for ourselves we enjoy, and for ourselves wesuffer."

The loneliness of economic man was a tragic fact. ManyStoic or Christian thinkers might have said 'We love, we hate. . . all in privacy and solitude'. But 'we covet, we enjoy' ischaracteristic of a later ideology. To the solitude of the soulwhich so many have expressed, Defoe adds 'all we communicate

1 p. an.1 Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe (London, 1930), p. 7.• Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, ed. G. A. Aitken (London, 1902), pp. 2-3.

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of those things to any other is but for their assistance in the pur-suit of our desires'. A rationally-conceived self-interest makesa mockery of speech, and suggests silence.

So, although Robinson Crusoe is a mutation of a very ancienttheme, its specific cause and nature are wholly modern. Andnow that it is possible to see fairly clearly the realities of whichCrusoe is the menacing symbol,, we must surely question hisdesirability as an ideal prototype. What has happened in thelast 200 years has shown that where Defoe's new culture-herois admitted into the pantheon of myth, he soon crowds out orsubjugates the other figures, whether comic or tragic, roundwhom have gathered those . more generous aspirations thatoccasionally mitigate the bitterness of history.

Essays in Criticism will be publishing the following articles in its next few numbers:

W. H. AUDEN: Pope (:688-i744).F. W. BATESON: Dissociation of Sensibility: The Phrase and the Myth.M. C. BRADBROOK: The Disguise-Convention in Elizabethan Drama.CLEANTH BROOKS: History or Criticism? The Case of Lovelace*! 'Grasshopper*.K. M. BURTON: Chapman and Jonson: The Dramatic Handling of Political

Themes.J. M. COHEN: Prophet without Responsibility: the Poetry of Coventry Patmore.PATRICK CRUTWEIX: The Poetry of Lord Herbert of Cherbury.ERNST ROBERT CURTUIS: Balzac Today. Translated from the original German

by ELAINE ROBSON-SCOTT.

ALBERT GERARD: Coleridge, Keats and the Modem Mind.HUMPHRY HOUSE: Kubla Khan.D. W. JEFFERSON: Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit.M. M. MAHOOD: The Fatal Cleopatra: Shakespeare and the Pun.G. M. MATTHEWS: Sex and the Sonnet.KENNETH MUIR: The Meaning of Keats's 'Hyperion'.R. V. OSBOURN: Marius the Epicurean: a Re-appraisal.

Also notes and remezo-articUs by]. M. Cohen, Stephen Floersheimer, John Holloway,J. C. Maxwell, Janet Spens, John Wain and others.

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