"They all came to me." — illustration for Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1891)

"They all came to me" (See p. 306). Paget has employed the previous illustrations to establish the identities of Crusoe with gold-braided coat and cane (left) and Will Atkins holding his feathered hat (centre). The other three men must be the English settlers. The scene is one of a series depicting Defoe's discussion of the Christianizing of colonizers and colonized alike. Half of page 316, vignetted: 9.4 cm high by 12 cm wide. Running heads: "Will Atkins and His Wife" (page 317) and "Our Talk with Atkins" (page 315).

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Passage Illustrated: Agreeing to Formal Marriages for the English colonists

We then parted, and I went back to my clergyman, and Will Atkins went in to talk with his companions. I desired the French gentleman not to say anything to them till the business was thoroughly ripe; and I told him what answer the men had given me.

Before I went from their quarter they all came to me and told me they had been considering what I had said; that they were glad to hear I had a clergyman in my company, and they were very willing to give me the satisfaction I desired, and to be formally married as soon as I pleased; for they were far from desiring to part with their wives, and that they meant nothing but what was very honest when they chose them. So I appointed them to meet me the next morning; and, in the meantime, they should let their wives know the meaning of the marriage law; and that it was not only to prevent any scandal, but also to oblige them that they should not forsake them, whatever might happen.

The women were easily made sensible of the meaning of the thing, and were very well satisfied with it, as, indeed, they had reason to be: so they failed not to attend all together at my apartment next morning, where I brought out my clergyman; and though he had not on a minister’s gown, after the manner of England, or the habit of a priest, after the manner of France, yet having a black vest something like a cassock, with a sash round it, he did not look very unlike a minister; and as for his language, I was his interpreter. [Chapter VII, "Conversation betwixt Will Atkins and his Wife," page 306]

Commentary

Crusoe, the priest, and Will Atkins have been discussing the issue of the young English colonists' marrying their native wives in a formal "Christian" (but essentially non-denominational) ceremony. Significantly, however, the only marriage ceremony realised in the Paget illustrations for the novel is that of Crusoe's Jack-of-all-trades and the maid, Susan, the result (apparently) of a shipboard romance. All of the English settlers have taken native wives, but Defoe deals only with the rather spiritual relationship between Will and Mary Atkins.

The French priest has been discussing the desirability of European colonists' formally marrying rather than simply cohabiting with indigenous women. With Crusoe he has adopted the position that it is better for a young man and woman of different backgrounds to marry, even if the union transgresses the boundaries of race or class. This was an issue that Dickens would dramatise that same year that the Cassell's volume appeared in the relationship of lower-class Lizzie Hexam and the attorney Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend (1864). As Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre points out, the Caribbean colonies of France and England tended facilitate miscegenation in in the kinds of European-Creole liaisons that polite society back in Europe did not readily accept — Bertha Mason and Edward Rochester being a case in point. Sexual desire, as the 1848 novel dramatises, was a significant cultural factor in the European colonisation of the West Indies, Africa, India, and Asia.

Related Material

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 5 April 2018