"It was all to no purpose." — illustration for Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1891)

"It was all to no purpose." (See p. 224), signed by Wal Paget, bottom left. Paget has positioned the couple on a bench in front of the window, but offers no further context for the argument about Crusoe's undertaking a voyage to his Caribbean island. One-half of page 225, vignetted: 8.5 cm high by 10.5 cm wide. Running head: "Preparation for Departure" (page 225).

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The Passage Illustrated: Crusoe Depressed by the Quietude of Home Life

But to return to my story. In this kind of temper I lived some years; I had no enjoyment of my life, no pleasant hours, no agreeable diversion but what had something or other of this in it; so that my wife, who saw my mind wholly bent upon it, told me very seriously one night that she believed there was some secret, powerful impulse of Providence upon me, which had determined me to go thither again; and that she found nothing hindered me going but my being engaged to a wife and children. She told me that it was true she could not think of parting with me: but as she was assured that if she was dead it would be the first thing I would do, so, as it seemed to her that the thing was determined above, she would not be the only obstruction; for, if I thought fit and resolved to go — [Here she found me very intent upon her words, and that I looked very earnestly at her, so that it a little disordered her, and she stopped. I asked her why she did not go on, and say out what she was going to say? But I perceived that her heart was too full, and some tears stood in her eyes.] “Speak out, my dear,” said I; “are you willing I should go?” “No,” says she, very affectionately, “I am far from willing; but if you are resolved to go,” says she, “rather than I would be the only hindrance, I will go with you: for though I think it a most preposterous thing for one of your years, and in your condition, yet, if it must be,” said she, again weeping, “I would not leave you; for if it be of Heaven you must do it, there is no resisting it; and if Heaven make it your duty to go, He will also make it mine to go with you, or otherwise dispose of me, that I may not obstruct it.”

This affectionate behaviour of my wife’s brought me a little out of the vapours, and I began to consider what I was doing; I corrected my wandering fancy, and began to argue with myself sedately what business I had after threescore years, and after such a life of tedious sufferings and disasters, and closed in so happy and easy a manner; I, say, what business had I to rush into new hazards, and put myself upon adventures fit only for youth and poverty to run into? [Part Two, Chapter I, "Revisits the Island," pp. 206-7]

Commentary

Having returned to England, Crusoe immediately sets out for Lisbon to visit the Portuguese sea-captain who picked him up three decades earlier off the African coast. Defoe's putting his protagonist onto the Continent and into a series of adventures at this late point in the narrative of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe may strike modern novel-readers as somewhat anticlimactic. However, Defoe was essentially making up the conventions of the new prose narrative form on the fly, and was perhaps already thinking in terms of a sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published almost immediately after the first novel, and subsequently published with it during the Victorian era as "Part Two." The present illustration some seven pages into the sequel occurs after a scene of Crusoe's ploughing his own land, and prior to the scene of a ship on fire. Paget realizes Crusoe's description of his married state at the age of sixty-one, an age at which he freely admits that he should "have been a little inclined to stay at home, and have done venturing life and fortune" (p. 219). Fortunately for the reader, he is not. Like Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses in the 1842 dramatic monologue, Crusoe finds to his own dismay that he "cannot rest from travel" (line 6).

Nearly thirty years after the initial Cassell edition, Paget presents an even more disturbing psychological portrait of Crusoe and his wife, for they actually seem to be arguing about the possibility of his returning to the island. In the earlier illustration simply entitled Crusoe Married, the returned and presumably retired adventurer stares into the fire (left) as his wife studies him, troubled by his wander-lust. The fashionable clothing, the comfortable domestic interior, and the handsome woman seated across the table from him seem to mean nothing to the middle-aged Crusoe. Paget does not provide such contextual clues to the nature of Crusoe's home-life in Bedfordshire, but shows that, despite his affluence and comfortable home (merely suggested by the window-panes and the clothing worn by the couple), he finds something lacking and takes no joy in his marriage.

Related Material

Relevant illustrations from the other nineteenth-century editions, 1831 and 1891

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: The 1863-6 composite woodblock engraving showing Crusoe deep in thought, reflecting depression at not having the stimulus of combat and travel, Crusoemarried.

Reference

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Exciting Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, as Related by Himself. With 120 original illustrations by Walter Paget. London, Paris,and Melbourne: Cassell, 1891.

Last modified 23 March 2018