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Crusoe's farm in Bedford
Justyne, Leitch, Macquoid, Morgan, Pasquier, & Thomas
Engravers: Butterworth and Heath
1863-64
Wood-engraving
16 cm high by 14 cm wide, framed.
Cassell's Robinson Crusoe, page 209.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
I bought a little farm in the county of Bedford, and resolved to remove myself thither. I had a little convenient house upon it, and the land about it, I found, was capable of great improvement; and it was many ways suited to my inclination, which delighted in cultivating, managing, planting, and improving of land; and particularly, being an inland country, I was removed from conversing among sailors and things relating to the remote parts of the world.
In a word, I went down to my farm, settled my family, bought ploughs, harrows, a cart, waggon, horses, cows, and sheep, and, setting seriously to work, became in one half-year a mere country gentleman. My thoughts were entirely taken up in managing my servants, cultivating the ground, enclosing, planting, &c.; and I lived, as I thought, the most agreeable life that nature was capable of directing, or that a man always bred to misfortunes was capable of being retreatedto.
I farmed upon my own land; I had no rent to pay, was limited by no articles; I could pull up or cut down as I pleased; what I planted was for myself, and what I improved was for my family; and having thus left off the thoughts of wandering, I had not the least discomfort in any part of life as to this world. Now I thought, indeed, that I enjoyed the middle state of life which my father so earnestly recommended to me, and lived a kind of heavenly life, something like what is described by the poet, upon the subject of a country life: —
"Free from vices, free from care, Age has no pain, and youth no snare."
But in the middle of all this felicity, one blow from unseen Providence unhinged me at once; and not only made a breach upon me inevitable and incurable, but drove me, by its consequences, into a deep relapse of the wandering disposition, which, as I may say, being born in my very blood, soon recovered its hold of me; and, like the returns of a violent distemper, came on with an irresistible force upon me. This blow was the loss of my wife. [Farther Adventures, Chapter I, "Revisits the Island," pp. 208-9]
The presentscene is unusual in that it is set in England, and minimizes the figure of Crusoe as ploughman, right of centre, to such an extent that the viewer might well identify the picturesque scene as a landscape in the manner of Romantic Era painter John Constable.
Whereas Cruikshank in his small-scale 1831 illustration depicts Crusoe with his wife and child in an idyllic family scene, with 61-year-old gentleman-farmer thoroughly enjoying country retirement, the Cassell's artist emphasizes the material nature of the scene. Whereas Cruikshank, having entirely invented this scene of domestic felicity, implies the lure of the sea in the boat with which the child is playing as his parents sit in the sun before their vine-surrounded front-door, the 1863-4 scene emphasizes the house and outbuildings, and leaves the family out entirely.
Above: George Cruikshank's realisation of Crusoe's bucolic idyll, Crusoe, his wife and child on their farm in Bedfordshire (1831). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Above: Wal Paget's lithograph revealing Crusoe's depression at not having the stimulus of combat and travel, "It was all to no purpose." [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner. As Related by himself. With upwards of One Hundred Illustrations. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1863-64.
Last modified 25 March 2018