Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe (1659 – 1731[1]), born Daniel Foe, was an English writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularize the form in Britain and is among the founders of the English novel[2].

Daniel Foe (his original name) was probably born in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate London. (Defoe later added the aristocratic-sounding “De” to his name and on occasion claimed descent from the family of De Beau Faux.) The Great Fire of London (1666) hit Defoe’s neighborhood hard, leaving only his and two other homes standing in the area[3]. In 1667, when Defoe was probably about seven years old, a Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway via the River Thames and attacked Chatham.

By the time he was about thirteen years old, Defoe’s mother had died[4]. His parents were Presbyterian dissenters; he was educated in a Dissenting Academy at Newington Green run by Charles Morton and is believed to have attended the church there[5]. In 1692, Defoe was arrested for payments of £700 (and his civets were seized), though his total debts may have amounted to £17,000. Following his release, he probably travelled in Europe and Scotland and it may have been at this time that he traded wine to Cadiz, Porto and Lisbon.

By 1695 he was back in England, using the name “Defoe”, and serving as a “commissioner of the glass duty”, responsible for collecting the tax on bottles. In 1696 he was operating a tile and brick factory in what is now Tilbury, Essex and living in the parish of Chadwell St Mary[6]..

Defoe’s first notable publication was An Essay upon Projects, a series of proposals for social and economic improvement, published in 1697. Within a week of his release from prison, Defoe witnessed the Great Storm of 1703 which raged from 26 to 27 November, the only hurricane ever to have made it over the Atlantic Ocean to the British Isles at full strength. It caused severe damage to London and Bristol and uprooted millions of trees and killed over 8,000 people, mostly at sea.

The event became the subject of Defoe’s The Storm (1704), a collection of witness accounts of the tempest[7]. From 1719 to 1724, Defoe published the novels for which he is famous. In the final decade of his life, he also wrote conduct manuals, published a number of books decrying the breakdown of the social order, and works on the supernatural. Perhaps his greatest achievement with the novels is the magisterial A tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–27), which provided a panoramic survey of British trade on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Daniel Defoe died on April 24, 1731, probably while in hiding from his creditors. He was interred in Bunhill Fields, London, where his grave can still be visited. Defoe is known to have used at least 198 pen names[8].

“Robinson Crusoe” is a story of a man’s shipwreck on a deserted island and his adventures. There are some indications that the author may have based his novel, or at least a part of it, on the life of Alexander Selkirk. This novel is an allegory, but various critics still disagree on the true meaning of the message Defoe sent us. In this paper, I’ll try to analyze Daniel Defoe’s most famous novel from a bit different point of view: how can it be used in teaching/learning English language? Its fine and not so understandable allegories, style and vocabulary are, in my opinion, an excellent base for understanding both 18^th century British literature and the whole genre of stories similar to Robinson Crusoe, later called Robinsonade[9]. Thus, in this paper, we would like to highlight the implications of teaching literature in general and in English teaching class in particular. We will consider first what it means to teach literature; and secondly, taking the context as an illustration of teaching English as a foreign language, we would like to shed light on the different exercises involved in the study of literature in an English class