"What, you come no farther?" (See p. 211), signed by the engraver rather than Paget. Paget has positioned Friday only slightly lower down on the limb, and does not imply that the sleepy bruin is about to lose his balance, or attack his jovial tormentor. Although the illustrator in the earlier Cassell's edition depicts Crusoe's travelling companion as a merry adolescent, Paget treats Friday more seriously, as character rather than caricature, and has removed the jaunty feather from his hat which the earlier Cassell's illustrator included in Friday and the Bear. One-half of page 209, vignetted: 10.2 cm high by 12.5 cm wide. Running head: "Friday and the Bear" (pages 209 and 211).

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

The Passage Illustrated: Further Adventures on the Continent

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 continues the visual themes of foreigners and foreign locales.

Having dealt with financial matters in Lisbon and visited his elderly friend, Crusoe decides to lead a group of merchants overland to Calais, fearing perhaps further mishaps if he takes a sea route. The Cassell's​house-artists of 1863-64 and Wal Paget nearly thirty years later offer very different interpretations of the incident with the bear. Although Friday appears sanguine in both bear encounters (indeed, his posture and facial expression convey a fearless attitude in the earlier illustrations of Cruikshank and Phiz), the bear is about to lunge at the daring Caribbean in the 1863-64 wood-engraving, whereas he seems half-asleep in Paget's version. The reader must consult Defoe's text to see which is the more accurate interpretation:

“What, you come no farther? pray you come farther;" so he left jumping and shaking the tree; and the bear, just as if he understood what he said, did come a little farther; then he began jumping again, and the bear stopped again. [199]

At this point, then, the bear is standing, and is attempting to maintain his balance, whereas only moments before, in the moment that Paget chose to realise, the bear "stood still, and began to look behind him" — but clearly poses Friday no real danger at this point. Hence, both illustrators have taken some liberties with the text in order to convey very different impressions of the bear. Paget's Friday is more soberly dressed, and, although smiling, is not the reckless practical joker one sees in the earlier illustrations. The five horsemen with Crusoe (at the very bottom of the vignette) in their lead are enjoying a light-hearted moment rather than expressing apprehension about Friday's antics.

Related Material

Related Scenes from ​Cruikshank (1831), Phiz (1864), and the earlier Cassell's edition (1863-64)

Left: Phiz's slightly whimsical realisation of the same scene: Friday and the Bear out on a Limb (1864). Centre: From the 1831 John Major edition Cruikshank's treatment on the same adventure on the road, Friday and the Bear. Right: From the 1863-64 edition by the same publisher, a delighted, playful Friday unmoved by the bear's attack: Friday and the Bear. [Click on the images to​enlarge them.]

Reference

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.

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner. As Related by Himself. With upwards of One Hundred and Twenty Original Illustrations by Walter Paget. London, Paris, and Melbourne: Cassell, 1891.


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Last modified 23 March 2018