[This document is annotation to the author's transcription of Charles Dickens's "The Lost Arctic Voyagers" (1854).]
Robinson Crusoe (1719-20) by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), properly The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, was a favourite of Charles Dickens as a boy, a book which he probably read in a cheap re-print. He alludes to it frequently in his fiction, notably as the boy Ebenezer Scrooge's favourite reading in A Christmas Carol (1843). Robinson Crusoe, the shipwrecked mariner, has served as a popular image or analogy for the past two centuries; see "Variations of Robinson Crusoe." It is, moreover, central to Wilkie Collins's purposes in the 1868 crime-and-detection novel The Moonstone: A Romance, as is apparent in the Harper's Weekly serial illustrations by William Jewett and "C. B."
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Related Materials
References
Chambers Biographical Dictionary, ed. Una McGovern. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap, 2003.
Last updated 19 September 2016