Introduction
Richard D. Altick noted in 1985 that in the eighteenth century ‘Robinson Crusoe was for a long time not taken seriously by artists other than those commissioned by publishers’ (Altick, Reference Altick1985, p. 380). His statement speaks to his sense of the inferiority of visualizations of literature for use in books, a view that has proven dominant in traditional illustration research – for which reason scholars studying illustrations have often felt the need to adopt a defensive stance, justifying the choice of their subject on the basis of formal-aesthetic criteria and artistic value. The recycling and reuse of illustrations, the adaptation of existing designs and studies focusing on the secondary, derivative character of illustrations based on auratic works have largely been neglected in accounts that centre on originality and aesthetic achievement. Illustrations, then, are routinely studied for their interpretive, formal and artistic uniqueness, rather than for the pragmatic or opportunistic uses to which a publisher, who has access to the printing plates, puts them. As a result, most scholars of illustrations have privileged higher-end eighteenth-century literary illustration practices at the cost of obscuring the significance of lower-end text technologies such as the woodcut, which reached a far greater number of readers.
Such preference for one medium of illustration over another testifies to the illustration scholar’s aim to read for complexity, both of design and of semiotic visual inscription, rather than the desire to map literary reception holistically across different media forms that coexisted and often competed, in the process affecting how readers encountered texts presented iconically. Prioritizing one illustration in one medium or book format as opposed to the same visualization in another simplifies contexts of meaning construction and mistakes the role that multimedial transmission plays in the reception of a literary work. For instance, the copperplate illustration, captioned ‘R. Crusoe rescues his Man Friday and kills his Pursuers’, which was included in William Taylor’s 1721 edition of Robinson Crusoe, anchored its iconotextual meaning in a cue to the volume and page number it refers to and visualizes. Yet this anchoring and the meaning of the illustration (in relation to the text) changed once the design appeared in a different text format. For the abridgement that Edward Midwinter published in 1722, the same design was scaled down and executed as a woodcut, the image accompanying a redacted version of Defoe’s text and appearing on a page which introduces Friday and his escape from the cannibals:
The poor Creature look’d round him with a wishful Eye, trembling at the Thoughts of Death; yet seeing himself a little at Liberty, Nature that very Moment as it were inspir’d him with Hope of Life, that he started away from them, and ran with incredible Swiftness along the Sands directly to that Part of the Coast, where my ancient and venerable Castle stood.
Beyond Midwinter’s abridgement, the illustration was also adopted – though printed upside down – for the twenty-four-page Newcastle chapbook issued by M. Angus and Son, this time, however, being framed by a much shorter narrative: ‘I saw upon the shore two canoes, and eleven savages going to land; and that they had with them another savage whom they were going to kill, in order to eat him, when in an instant a savage jumped on his feet, and ran for his life towards my castle’ (Defoe, Reference Defoeundated, pp. 14–15). In each case of reuse the presentational and textual context of the illustration changed: the representational inscription of the design remained the same, but the verbally rendered action reproduced on the printed page was reduced. Defoe’s text was rewritten and reshaped as part of the abridgement process. As a result, the semiotic value of the illustration, including its iconic depiction of spatio-temporally constructed narrative, increased as Defoe’s work was abridged. In other words, both Midwinter’s abridgement and the Newcastle chapbook told ‘a variant story’ (Preston, Reference Preston, Preston and Preston1995, p. 27) as part of which, and unlike the text–image relationship in the 1721 edition, the woodcuts provided more narrative inscription than the printed text. For a holistic reading history of Robinson Crusoe, all uses of illustrations – and especially of the same designs – are important, irrespective of whether they appear in high-end or low-end publications: illustrative paratexts direct meaning, more or less prominently, depending on whether they visualize a longer or shorter textual passage. As such, they function as part of the transmission of a work by catering to different kinds of literacy and allowing multimedial access to textual meaning.
Increasingly, the limitations of traditional illustration studies, which are not grounded in print culture research, are being recognized. In this respect, Christina Ionescu has aptly captured one of the key dilemmas of the majority of current illustration research: ‘What recent studies … have in common … is a resolute focus on word and image interaction. When this approach is adopted, historical and technical considerations of the illustrations are normally set aside’ (Ionescu, Reference Ionescu and Ionescu2011, p. 29). But it is these commonly obscured contexts of production and consumption, including social uses of illustrations (such as their epitextual, metonymic function once they are removed from the text and circulate independently as a placeholder for the text), which reveal dynamics between agents of print and readers, as well as meaning-making strategies. These are essential areas to be probed, beyond the study of the image–text relationship, if scholars want to recover how illustrations conveyed meaning, at times ‘enhancing rather than serving their texts’ (Haywood, Matthews and Shannon, Reference Haywood, Matthews, Shannon, Haywood, Matthews and Shannon2019, p. 3).
This Element concerns itself with the book illustrations that introduced visual-interpretive castings of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Farther Adventures to their earliest readers. It conceives of literary illustrations – irrespective of their mode of execution or representational conventions – as interpretive metatexts that are central to the holistic mapping of literary reception (Jung, Reference Jung2021). They are nexuses of text work, the printed image being made to signify in relation to the typographical text by the reader and at times reflect a vantage point other than the narrator’s from which the work is presented visually (Jung, Reference Jung2022). Illustrations not only ‘realize significant aspects of the text’ (Hodnett, Reference Hodnett1982, p. 13), operating intra-textually, as Edward Hodnett has insisted; they are frequently also extra-textually connected as part of a network of signification and inter-iconicity that underpins visual literacy. Above all, an illustration is ‘a portal between the text and its cultural context’ (Haywood, Matthews and Shannon, Reference Haywood, Matthews, Shannon, Haywood, Matthews and Shannon2019, p. 5). For this reason, the Element seeks to recover the place the earliest illustrations of Robinson Crusoe and Farther Adventures occupy in a visual reading history of literature. In this account, reading text via printed visualizations took place both within the hybrid medium of the illustrated edition (where the plates functioned intermedially), but also beyond a single edition via the book market which disseminated knowledge of illustrations to competing booksellers and readers.
This study will examine the ways in which different methods were utilized and strategies were devised by illustrators to create readable visual matrixes that communicated textual meaning via visual narrative and characterization. It will offer an account of the illustrated editions published in London and on the Continent between 1719 and 1722. It will start with a discussion of the copyright edition, undertaken by William Taylor in 1719, examining how the bookseller subsequently responded to competition by issuing a more extensively illustrated edition, the sixth edition of Robinson Crusoe, in 1721. A central concern to be explored is the readability of the plates, especially in terms of how Taylor’s artisans mapped spaces and actions, including travel. The Element then will focus on the transnational efforts to capture the protagonist’s visual and ideological character by examining two different sets that two Amsterdam publishers issued in their 1720 editions of the Dutch and French translations of the novel respectively. These plate designs will be shown to constitute the basis for visual apparatuses included in German editions of Robinson Crusoe and, in turn, to have influenced the English illustration of Defoe’s work in 1722 as well. They thus featured as part of a network of circulation in which different agents of print realized Crusoe in ever new iconic forms. While the illustrations in Taylor’s sixth edition do not demonstrate an engagement with the Dutch illustrations, an extended set of woodcuts that accompanied an abridgement of Defoe’s work, which was published by Midwinter in 1722, reflects the designer’s familiarity with both Taylor’s and the Dutch editions – instances of inter-iconicity that will be probed. The practices of borrowing and cross-fertilization that informed Midwinter’s use of earlier visual models will also underpin my discussion of the five editions which, within three years, generated a largely unexplored corpus of illustrations that visualized forty-six distinct subjects from Robinson Crusoe and Farther Adventures. Particular emphasis will be placed, especially in the context of Taylor’s sixth-edition illustrations and those of Midwinter’s editions, on the iconic strategies that underpin the construction of spatio-temporal iconic structures and different models of maps of character and action.
My examinations of the different illustrative apparatuses will argue in favour of a model of illustration studies that takes into account actual practices of publishing illustrated editions at a time when the commissioning of illustrations – in both copper-engraved and woodcut form – would have involved significant expense. Engraved illustrations are not an essential paratextual addition per se, as they supplement and amplify typographically rendered textual meaning. They also require financial outlay that is not necessary for the constitution of the codex and the sale of a work; once a bookseller decides on their inclusion, however, they become essential because their publishers intended them to be so and were willing to pay for their devising and manufacture. In this respect, and depending on their metatextual and aesthetic realization, ‘Engravings marked certain books as exceptional’ (Walsh, Reference Walsh2017, p. 39) – and the editions of Robinson Crusoe to be discussed were certainly understood as such.
In its book-historical focus on illustrated editions as indices of visual reading practices, as well as the dynamics between different illustrative apparatuses, English, Dutch and German, the Element differs from previous scholarship on book illustrations of Defoe’s work. It is distinct, in both approach and rationale, from David Blewett’s The Illustration of Robinson Crusoe, 1719–1920, the only monograph on the subject, which was published in 1995. For it heeds a call articulated by Edgar Breitenbach to study book illustrations based on a systematic bibliography that takes into account interconnections between editions and illustrations (underpinned by competitive marketing and deliberate diversification) that make possible an understanding of how publishers reinterpreted literary works through illustrations and with reference to earlier editions (and other works) (Breitenbach, Reference Breitenbach and Katz1994, p. 299).
In contrast to this Element, Blewett’s study devoted cursory attention only to Taylor’s 1719 and 1721 editions and did not investigate the transnational mechanisms of exchange that promoted cross-fertilization by English illustrators looking to illustrations produced in Amsterdam in 1720. While he briefly considered the illustrations to the French translation published in Amsterdam, he neither referenced nor studied the sets of plates accompanying the Dutch translations and German editions issued in the same year. In addition, in his unacknowledged focus on higher-end editions, he ignored the extensive series of woodcuts in Midwinter’s abridgement, in the process not accounting for cross-cultural and cross-medial fertilization which was to shape – through subject choice – later eighteenth-century developments in the illustration of Robinson Crusoe.
My account is not the first to note the shortcomings of Blewett’s study, a range of reviewers commenting on these at the time of the work’s original publication: termed by one scholar a ‘fleeting’ ‘survey’ (Schonhorn, Reference Schonhorn1997/8, p. 213), The Illustration of Robinson Crusoe, 1719–1920 was faulted by Peter Sabor for being ‘highly selective’ (Sabor, Reference Sabor1996, p. 122), focusing impressionistically on editions only which, on the basis of an art-critical bias favouring sophisticated execution, Blewett deemed to be of ‘historical or artistic interest’ (Blewett, Reference Blewett1995, 191). Janis Svilpis also lamented that no rationale was provided regarding ‘the principles on which material has been selected’ (Svilpis, Reference Svilpis1998, p. 199). Scepticism regarding some of his readings was articulated repeatedly by reviewers, one objecting to the author’s ‘over-fanciful’ (McLean, Reference McLean1996, p. 410) interpretations, especially those that are not grounded in the visual literacy and reading (as well as iconic-compositional) practices of the time (Schonhorn, Reference Schonhorn1997/8, p. 213). Blewett privileged artistically demanding illustrations, in the process obscuring the significance of those illustrated editions – such as Midwinter’s and illustrated chapbook versions – which reached (because they were more affordably priced) a larger eighteenth-century audience than those he discusses.
In his 2018 essay, ‘The Iconic Crusoe: Illustrations and Images of Robinson Crusoe’, Blewett still insisted on the application of hierarchical notions of quality that reject (and omit from consideration) ‘commonplace and uninspired’ (Blewett, Reference Blewett and Richetti2018, p. 160) visualizations. To him (and wrongly), they hold no significance for an understanding of the visual life of Robinson Crusoe: their role in and effect on the reading history of the work are not probed as a result. Likewise, he was not interested in recovering inter-iconic dialogue with earlier visual models (including earlier visualization of Defoe’s novel) that underpins designers’ work.
Despite these shortcomings, Blewett’s study has proven influential in that scholars of the visual life of Defoe’s works have followed his impressionistic and highly selective approach to make sense of subjects ranging from the Rousseauvian landscape of Crusoe’s island to the imperial castaway body (Lipski, Reference Lipski2019, Reference Lipski2024). A deliberate attempt to move away from Blewett’s mode of study, applying a systematic approach to Robinson Crusoe illustrations based on my earlier book-historical approach to the illustrated history of James Thomson’s The Seasons, ‘Book Illustration and the Transnational Mediation of Robinson Crusoe in 1720’ (Jung, Reference Jung2020b) unearthed missing links in an early visual reception history of Defoe’s novel that no previous scholar had studied. Unlike other work on the illustrations, my research built on the excellent early twentieth-century bibliographical accounts of Robinson Crusoe such as Hermann Ullrich’s (Reference Ullrich1898) and Otto Deneke’s (Reference Deneke1934). There is consensus, however, that ‘[e]xisting analysis is still far from comprehensive’, a critique specifically articulated in relation to Blewett’s research and those who followed in his footsteps, but that it nevertheless ‘is instructive [in the absence of a systematic account] to reconsider the wide-ranging and sometimes complex approaches illustrators have adopted’ (Cooke, Reference Cooke2024, p. 268).
This Element will demonstrate that the use of book-historical approaches in illustration studies can materially contribute to the mapping of visual reading history. Ignoring the print culture contexts that shaped the ways in which booksellers were able to devise strategies to fashion different versions of Defoe’s novel through illustrations (more than fifty-five plates realizing the forty-six subjects selected), including the adaptation and redaction of existing plates, reduces the work’s Wirkungsgeschichte as hybrid media product. Informed by my work on the iconic re-narrating of Robinson Crusoe, illustrated material culture using book illustrations and media hybridity (Jung, Reference Jung2023, pp. 60–79), the Element will examine how editions’ illustrative apparatuses provided both interpretive metatexts and blueprints for the visual realization of the novel to which competing booksellers responded with their own editions. Unlike Blewett and subsequent work, it will adopt a holistic approach, considering illustrated full-text editions, translations and abridgements, and study how their illustrators devised different modes of readability.
1719–1721: William Taylor’s Editions
Within less than four months, Robinson Crusoe, which William Taylor first published on 25 April 1719, had gone through four editions.Footnote 1 The first edition of Farther Adventures appeared at about the same time as the fourth edition of Robinson Crusoe in August. And Serious Reflections was published a year later. All of these editions featured copperplate illustrations (ranging from portrait frontispieces to fold-out maps) that this section will discuss in terms of how they affected the reading history of Defoe’s novel. Specifically, it will examine the earliest visualization of Crusoe on his island – the portrait frontispiece – that accompanied the first edition of Robinson Crusoe and consider its replacement in the fifth edition with an updated version. Rather than privileging the frontispiece to the first edition, as all previous scholars of early illustrations of Defoe’s work have done, I will argue for an integrational reading of the different 1719 illustrations that highlights the significance of the two maps which respectively record Crusoe’s journey, adventures and the sites of various actions. For these are central subjects that I will also investigate in my discussion of the plates that accompanied Taylor’s 1721 edition of Robinson Crusoe and the 1722 (third) edition of Farther Adventures.
The mapping of movement and action, rather than stressing the importance of the portrait offering iconic characterization, appears to have been taken by Taylor to be a more appealing subject to readers, which he consistently flagged in his advertisements from August 1719. As a result, the portrait frontispiece was glossed as ‘the Author’s Effigies [sic]’ only once in April 1719, the visualized character obscured in the marketing of the title in favour of references to ‘the Map of the World, in which is Delineated the Voyages of Robinson Crusoe’.Footnote 2 Advertisements highlighted what Taylor considered essential: the map was clearly understood as such, since it informed how the genre of Robinson Crusoe was apprehended – despite the fact that readers purchasing a copy of the work would still encounter a visual embodiment of the narrator that complicated any simple identification of him as an adventurer. Once Crusoe on the island was seen on opening the book, readers would seek to contextualize and situate him within the author’s narrative map, which was, in turn, framed by the cartographical document Taylor supplied to comprehend him in the roles he performed as traveller, adventurer and colonizer. In order to understand the realization of action both concrete and imagined, I will contextualize the portrait frontispiece in terms of the visual strategies used in later plates commissioned by Taylor, including synoptic modes of iconic narration. I will read the illustration as a mapping exercise on the part of the reader, who needs to devise a mode of meaning making that orders and narratively integrates discrete iconic clusters into a synoptic image, bringing together both past and present. Throughout, my principal concern will be the readability of the illustrations, their relationship with the typographical text and the strategies through which the designers construct spatio-temporal narratives within the visual medium.
Signed ‘Clark & Pine’ by the engravers John Clark and John Pine, the portrait frontispiece, which has been termed ‘One of the most famous frontispieces, if not the most famous ever attached to an eighteenth-century novel’ (Collé, Reference Collé, Lipski and Newbould2024, p. 398), introduces a full-length rendering of the eponymous hero: he is dressed in goat skins and armed with two fowling pieces across his shoulders, a pistol tucked in his belt and a sword (Figure 1). The bearded figure’s gaze is cast downwards, not facing the reader. At the same time civilized and ‘grotesque’ (Lipski, Reference Lipski2024, p. 21) in his appearance because of his clothing and weapons, he is also a man of nature, in touch with the soil through his bare feet. While his exotic appearance is reinforced through the plant in the left-hand foreground, the image also presents a version of the newly accultured Crusoe, since he has made use of the natural, indigenous resources of the island, the goats specifically, to manufacture his own clothes. So even Crusoe’s iconic characterization, rather than merely translating Defoe’s verbal description, puts into relief his transitional state of existence: he is shipwrecked and needs to adapt to new living conditions, including making the most of animal skins in the absence of woven fabric, while at the same time utilizing both fire and sword power to defend himself. His visualization testifies to a new kind of progress he undergoes as a resourceful shipwrecked individual who seeks to colonize the island realm with his own knowledge of civilization, including the mastery of the natural environment.
Copperplate portrait frontispiece, executed by Clark and Pine for Taylor’s 1719 edition of Robinson Crusoe.
The readability of Crusoe’s figure is complicated once he and his agency are related to the two scenes in the background, which have been described as a ‘quasi-coulisse’ to the castaway’s performance as ‘an allegory of dominance’ (Lipski, Reference Lipski2018, p. 29). Synoptic in nature, the frontispiece, composed of three image clusters, tells a story, but the precise meaning of the illustration and the narrative its designer sought to realize have been contested variously. Robert Folkenflik has observed that Crusoe’s visual characterization, including its pictorial framing, defines the illustrated work’s genre identity and ‘suggests its role as a counterfeit autobiography rather than a novel’ (Folkenflik, Reference Folkenflik and Downie2016, p. 308). Like the maps that would subsequently be issued by Taylor, the first illustration of Robinson Crusoe emphasized the story’s realism and its being grounded in fact. It was aligned through its association with Alexander Selkirk’s more than four months’ existence as a castaway on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific (which location is also introduced in the map of the world furnished by Taylor), with an authentic and widely known shipwreck narrative (Jung, Reference Jung2018, p. 40). As such, the frontispiece did not exclusively embody a protagonist whose island existence and adventures readers did not as yet know at the time of opening the codex. But his visualization also stood emblematically for other shipwrecked individuals (such as the Scottish Selkirk) with whom they were already familiar.
The three image clusters define Crusoe’s identity on the island. On the left, a storm-tossed vessel can be discerned, whereas on the hill to the right the designer has introduced the protagonist’s palisade wall protecting his habitation. Despite the appearance of simultaneity, the frontispiece deploys a method by which at least two different temporal moments are represented, the ship under full sail signifying the manner in which Crusoe arrived on the island (rather than the means of his removal from it), the fenced-off area being constructed only once he has established a habitation and begun to cultivate crops. Read from left to right, from ship to habitation, the illustration moves from non-agency to agency, the latter facilitated by the tools and resourcefulness by which the individual in the foreground is characterized.
In what amounts to a psychological reading of Crusoe, especially in relation to the ship, Blewett opines that the illustration ‘is intended to sum up the experience of Crusoe – his strange costume, his solitude, his melancholy existence, his desire for rescue’. The image supposedly reflects ‘Crusoe’s mind’: the castaway ‘imagines’ the vessel at sea, ‘remembering the ship that brought him to the island and longing for the one that will arrive to take him away’ (Blewett, Reference Blewett and Möller1988, p. 66). This focus on the protagonist’s subjectivity, including access to his thoughts, induces Blewett to identify a ‘haunting quality’ in the frontispiece that derives from the castaway’s ‘thinking about his fate and his delivrance, represented by the background ship’ (Blewett, Reference Blewett and Möller1988, p. 67). The illustration thus offers ‘a moody picture evoking Crusoe’s predicament’ (Blewett, Reference Blewett and Möller1988, p. 67). But does it, really? Blewett’s reading testifies to his recognition of the significance of the ship, but it privileges the character’s psychology in a way that is not grounded in early eighteenth-century illustration practice and the kind of literacy that readers viewing the frontispiece would have possessed. Readers were focused on representation, identifying iconic convention, rather than reading for states of mind (Jung, Reference Jung, Hammond and Rose2020a). Blewett identifies as ‘haunting’ what, iconically, would not have been understood as such. For what is at stake in the illustration is how Crusoe’s materialized, physical appearance facilitates a meaningful reading that incorporates both the ship and the palisade construction as part of a narrative on the island, rather than one of projected intention and longing.
Not agreeing with Blewett’s reading, Janine Barchas has observed that the frontispiece represents an ‘old-fashioned and allegorical summary “style of illustration” … that proves irreconcilably out of step with the modernist realism and novelistic ambitions of Defoe’s text’ (Barchas, Reference Barchas2003, p. 47). She proposes an interpretation that highlights the illustration’s rootedness in past representational conventions, specifically the dream vision, which did not aim for ‘temporal cohesion’, as the typographical work does. Rather, it ‘renders Crusoe’s wishes and memories as concrete objects to the viewer’s/reader’s gaze’ within the associative visual framework of ‘delivering Crusoe’s story “under the Similitude of a Dream”’ (Barchas, Reference Barchas2003, p. 47). Extending Barchas’s reading, Geoffrey Sill has understood the frontispiece as
an emblematic portrait of the supposed author with the themes of his book on display: the life of a mariner turned agriculturalist; his solitary struggle to survive and live with grace; his discovery of the delicate balance of power between humanity and nature; his conversion and deliverance by the Providence of God, assisted by his own passion and action; and his material deliverance a second time by the same Portuguese captain.
In contrast to Blewett, Barchas and Sill, Folkenflik has argued that the illustration ‘is based on a particular episode and that Defoe … probably gave the designer a copy of the relevant passage and possibly additional directions and text’ (Folkenflik, Reference Folkenflik and Downie2016, p. 312). This episode introduces Crusoe ‘fitted … up for a battle’ and also features a reference to his castle and his observation post. Folkenflik suggests that the ‘ship, then, is not emblematic of the shipwrecked soul but represents Crusoe’s deliverance in this novel of guilt and redemption’ (Folkenflik, Reference Folkenflik and Downie2016, p. 313). Lipski likewise reads the frontispiece as depicting ‘the castaway bracing himself for the possible defence of his island against newcomers’, but, unlike Folkenflik, who recognizes that not all verbal details are faithfully reproduced by the designers, Lipski insists that ‘the exact number and type of weapons’ (Lipski, Reference Lipski2024, p. 22 and p. 22, note 20) are visually reproduced, which they are not.Footnote 3 Folkenflik’s rejection, on the basis that the illustration ‘does not correspond [in all aspects] to the portrait’ given by Defoe, of the possibility that the frontispiece rendering represents the famous description that the protagonist gives of himself is undermined by the caption provided in the revised plate for the fifth edition, ‘Robinson Crusoe as describ’d Page 176 Vol. I’, a reference to exactly that passage.Footnote 4
Removed from the contextual setting of the passage Folkenflik introduces to explicate the presence of the ship, his reading – seeking to anchor and situate all three image clusters together in a single typographical passage – is no longer possible. For, rather than operating as part of (and capturing) a single description, the synoptic character and diachronic framework of the illustration produce an iconic-narrative structure that will be used in later illustrations in the 1721 set of plates. Importantly, it is in the readability of the illustrations’ narrative make-up that the frontispiece aligns with the later plates. Questioning whether eighteenth-century readers would have read the plate the way Folkenflik has proposed, Helen Cole has furthermore pointed out that the text–image relationship between the illustrations and the page number referenced on the 1721 plate changed as the typographical text was reset but the engraved plate reused in subsequent editions. At that point, the page number on the engraving referred to a new textual passage altogether that was no longer aligned with the synchronizing text–image dynamic in the fifth edition, which Taylor had himself supervised still (Cole, Reference Cole2016, p. 493).Footnote 5
Among those image features that have inspired ‘interpretive dissonance’ (Barchas, Reference Barchas2003, p. 42), the ship in the background has been variously understood. Both Blewett and Folkenflik have cast the ship as a potential symbol of redemption that will, in due course, return the castaway to Britain: it is under full sail, but the cross-hatching in the earliest impressions generates a deliberately constructed dark area, which may represent damage to the hull. Russell Palmer has usefully noted that ‘the ship appears to sit in the breakers, surrounded by surf, suggesting it is caught on rocks or a sandbank’ (Palmer, Reference Palmer2025). Despite the full sail, it appears immobilized – a potential prelude to the wrecked vessel that would be represented in the redacted fifth-edition frontispiece, where the ship has been stripped of its sail and has a similar darkened, cross-hatched area on its hull to convey damage that will ultimately lead to its sinking. Earlier scholars’ readings have concentrated on the ship’s direction, the full sails indicating that it is moving away from the island. But, as copies of the frontispiece in the second to fourth editions of Robinson Crusoe frequently evidence, the printing of the part of the copperplate that contained the engraved ship was repeatedly faint and did not allow the ship’s outlines and sails to be discerned clearly. By the time Taylor published his fourth edition in August 1719, at least 3,000 copies of the illustration will have been printed – a far greater number of impressions than can commonly be printed with good results, without requiring the recutting of the plate (Maslen, Reference Maslen1969, p. 148). Henry Clinton Hutchins’s characterization of the frontispiece in a copy of the fourth edition as ‘a faint impression [of the plate], the outlines of the ship in the background being indistinguishable’ (Hutchins, Reference Hutchins1967, 78, note 3), applies to all copies examined for this study. Once the printing plate was too worn to reproduce the engraved ship clearly, then, the reading that both Blewett and Folkenflik offer would not have been supported by the visual evidence of the ship’s direction. For the movement away from the island would not have been identifiable due to the poor quality of the impression.
When the design that Clark and Pine had engraved was altered for the fifth edition of Robinson Crusoe, the design of the ship was replaced with a new one: no longer does it feature sails, but only the mast and broken rigging are visible (Figure 2).Footnote 6 The position of the vessel has been changed as well to indicate that the ship has been incapacitated by the storm and that it has hit the rocks. While this redaction of the plate may indicate a potentially major change in meaning (when read within the three-cluster structure of the original illustration), this change is only striking if the artisan responsible for the altered plate – Clark and Pine are no longer credited with the execution of the sixth-edition frontispiece – was aware of the prior design – that is, if the actual copperplate to be reworked still sufficiently revealed the outlines of the ship. But this may not have been the case, as the engraved outlines may have been too worn to have been copied by the engraver. Rather than understanding the change in the realization of the ship as a deliberate corrective, an attempt to alter and direct the readability of this part of the composition, the engraver may have been instructed to fill the area only palimpsestically visible with a ship of his own devising, a ship that was supposed to convey a wrecked and immobilized appearance. No shift in meaning of the overall readability was likely intended. This ship, as I will explain, could also more straightforwardly be replicated in the 1721 set of plates where the frontispiece’s synoptic readability and make-up were introduced in a number of other illustrations as well. In contrast to my own reading of the ship in the 1719 frontispiece, which takes a more expansive view to consider its 1721 redaction as well as the material condition of the printing plate and the kind of impressions that could be taken from it, Blewett and Folkenflik read it in isolation, not regarding its later uses, including how its narrative order relates to that of Taylor’s additional illustrations for the sixth edition. None of the later illustrations feature the kind of psychological drama that Blewett and Folkenflik have identified in the frontispiece. Rather, they utilize its narrative-compositional strategies that repeatedly require the readers’ recognition that landscapes and settings lack straightforward directions for reading: they boast apparently simultaneous actions, but this is not the case. Instead, their diachronic order and mapping need to be respectively established and undertaken by those who look at these illustrations and recognize ways of seeing (such as those rooted in chapbook illustrations) with which they are familiar.
Revised copperplate portrait frontispiece for Taylor’s 1720 edition [fifth edition].
The dominant paratextual position the portrait frontispiece had occupied in the first three editions was challenged by the introduction of a second visual medium in Taylor’s fourth edition of Robinson Crusoe, the publication of which was announced on 8 August 1719 in the Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer. According to the advertisement, the bookseller had ‘added a Map of the World’ to Defoe’s first volume, which ‘delineated the Voyages of ROBINSON CRUSOE’. Taylor’s decision to include the map that would also feature in the first and subsequent editions of Farther Adventures was likely motivated by his seeking to distinguish his authorized volumes from the non-illustrated ‘pretended Abridgment of this Book clandestinely Printed for T. Cox’, the publisher of which he intended to prosecute, as stated on the title page of the fourth edition (Hubbard, Reference Hubbard1926).
Whereas the portrait has been read as an index to ‘Crusoe’s conquest’ of the island, the protagonist symbolizing ‘the imperial father figure’ (Lipski, Reference Lipski2024, pp. 20, 21), the mapping of his journey and the anchoring of actions in an island he makes secure are foregrounded by the cartographical medium. The map catered to readerly expectations of Crusoe as a traveller and adventurer, whose stasis is conveyed by the portrait frontispiece, despite his being framed on either side by different temporally situated moments, which render him as part of a progressive narrative to be inferred. Focusing on the essential nature of Defoe’s works the map captures, Ala Alryyes has observed: ‘Where Crusoe adventures, Defoe maps: the novel frequently presents Crusoe’s motion and even ocular surveys as hypotyposes (a rhetorical figure by which something that is not present is brought, “as it were, before the eyes of the hearer or reader”) of different kinds of maps, including navigational charts and topographical maps’ (Alryyes, Reference Alryyes2020, p. 57). Compared to the portrait illustration, maps facilitate a different mode of visually experiencing and sensing Crusoe vis-à-vis the environment. The inclusion of two different kinds of plates – the portrait and the map – in the same volume in the fourth edition not only amplified the visual apparatus but also introduced a new way of making sense of the character and the story as both an island and a travel narrative. Two illustrations, as opposed to one, enriched the reading experience and increased the symbolic capital function of the plates. The two visual media both characterized Defoe’s hero and traced his story geographically. His mobility and its inferred narrative were conveyed via the routes indicated on the map.
The ‘Map of the Voyages of ROBINSON CRUSOE’ represents a scientific-cartographical knowledge platform onto which the engraver has imposed Crusoe’s geographically anchored narrative by means of a dotted line ‘that transforms the static cartographic space into an interactive medium and opens it up temporally for narrative movement’ (Min, Reference Min2018, p. 87) (Figure 3). It was designed, according to Sally Bushell and James O. Butler, in ‘direct imitation of that published in William Dampier’s A New Voyage around the World (1697) which was made by the same famous map-maker, Hermann Moll’ (Bushell and Butler, Reference Bushell and Butler2023, p. 188). Relating the map to the printed text of Robinson Crusoe, the reader authenticates the work, even though fact meets fiction, of course, as Taylor utilizes an existing map to provide information regarding the geography of the globe and Crusoe’s travels across the surface of the earth. In other words, ‘there is a perceived need to conflate real world and imaginary geographies in order to validate the latter as the former’ (Bushell and Butler, Reference Bushell and Butler2023, p. 188).
Copper-engraved ‘Map of the World’ from Taylor’s fourth edition of Robinson Crusoe, 1719.
Likewise, when Taylor decided to commission ‘a curious Frontispiece, representing the most remarkable Incidents of his [Crusoe’s] Life’ (executed by Clark and Pine) for Serious Reflections, he opted for another map in which concrete actions and sites were visualized as part of iconic micro-clusters (Figure 4). Scenes visualized include the feasting of the cannibals, Crusoe’s battle against the savages and a rendering of Crusoe’s castle at the centre of the map, while the foreground features both a wrecked ship in the process of sinking and the English captain’s ship that will facilitate the castaway’s return home. However, as an illustration that brings together different temporal moments and spatial settings, this map offers a problematic realization of Crusoe’s island narrative. Bushell and Butler have stated that the ‘rather clumsy shape of the island [in the frontispiece] stems from the way it is mapped verbally within the narrative, with Crusoe unable to make a survey of the coastline and tending to provide detailed, localised accounts of different parts, without fully relating these to each other, or to the island as a whole’ (Bushell and Butler, Reference Bushell and Butler2023, p. 189). Far from being an aerial view proper of the island, the map presents an imagined spatial structure into which the designer has implanted ‘a series of vignettes relating to key scenes and sites’ (Bushell, Reference Bushell2020, p. 65), albeit in an order that remains to be made sense of by the reader. For the narrator does not anchor actions in discretely defined geographical sites. It is the task of the designer of the map to localize and embed actions within concrete surroundings, fulfilling the function of illustrations to ‘elucidate, modify, and supplement the meaning of the verbal text’ (Halsband, Reference Halsband1980, p. vi), which is undertaken by arranging an inhabited tableau that underwrites Crusoe’s own involvement. According to Jason H. Pearl, and in contrast to the map of the world in Farther Adventures, the ‘curious Frontispiece’ ‘portray[s] … the island all by itself, disproportioned according to experience, independent of the surrounding Caribbean. … The island is a totally realized space, filled with both discrete objects and an ambient context that pulls them all together’ (Pearl, Reference Pearl2012, p. 139). Above all, however, it is the representation of settings (wooded areas, mountains, hills, rivers and instances of the built environment), human agents and the objects of mobility (canoes and ships), the latter invoking life beyond the island, which make them authentic to the reader eager to anchor the narrative iconically within the spatial matrix of the island given physical-representational shape by the map.
Copperplate ‘curious Frontispiece’ to Taylor’s 1720 edition of Serious Reflections, executed by Clark and Pine.
The three kinds of illustration Taylor commissioned in 1719 allowed, through their multimodal character, but also through their different ways of mapping both character and topography, multiple viewpoints on and versions of Crusoe in relation to his environment. For the visual reading history of Robinson Crusoe, the year 1719 is of central importance, then, since readers encountered two different modes of representing Crusoe and his travels. Importantly, the portrait frontispiece prepared them in terms of its readability for how to comprehend the 1721 set of plates. The portrait thus functioned as an exercise in reading and the training of visual literacy, facilitating an understanding of the strategies by which narrative was being reconstructed and realized visually. Out of the three illustrations Taylor commissioned in 1719, only the final map would not be sold as part of an edition that year, accompanying Serious Reflections (August 1720) instead. The editors of the Stoke Newington Edition of that work have suggested, however, that the ‘curious Frontispiece’ ‘may originally have been intended for The Farther Adventures[,] either accompanying the map of the globe tracing Crusoe’s travels that was used in that volume or as a substitute illustration’ (Defoe, Reference Defoe, Novak, Rothman and Schonhorn2022, frontispiece, note 1). While the visual apparatus of the fourth edition of Robinson Crusoe had used two discrete forms of visualization to render both Crusoe’s character and his journey, an illustrative model that was continued in the fifth edition (but using the updated portrait frontispiece), these concerns were brought together in the ‘curious Frontispiece, representing the most remarkable Incidents of his Life’. Two modally and representationally different illustrations – whether the original portrait and the map of the world, the updated portrait and the map, or the ‘curious Frontispiece’ and the map – offered different ways of seeing Crusoe and imagining his story (by means of the route of his journey and the actions he is engaged in).
Focusing on the examination of the visual apparatus of Taylor’s sixth edition of Robinson Crusoe, the following discussion will, for the first time, explain the significance of the illustrations, the majority of which are not credited to any artisan. The plates were produced after those that accompanied the Dutch and French translations and that appeared in Amsterdam in 1720, which will be introduced in the next section. But they deployed fundamentally different visual strategies that necessitated the readers’ meaningful mapping of the diachronically unfolding narrative in each action-focused tableau. Rather than privileging detail in the realization of human relationships, these illustrations’ designers drew on conventions grounded in cheap print, which I will discuss in detail in relation to Edward Midwinter’s 1722 edition in the third section of this Element.
Though dated 1722 on the title page, the sixth edition of Robinson Crusoe, which was, in fact, published in October 1721, constituted Taylor’s most ambitious attempt to counter the piracies that had been published since Cox’s. For as early as November 1720 a two-shilling piracy, advertised as an edition of Robinson Crusoe ‘faithfully abridged, in which not one remarkable Circumstance is omitted’, again contested Taylor’s copyright monopoly. His issuing the novel in two formats and presumably at two price points, ‘2 Vols. 8vo, adorn’d with Cuts’ and subsequently ‘neatly printed in an Elzevir Letter, in 2 Vol. in 12mo, adorned with fourteen Copper Plates’, conveyed the bookseller’s assurance to customers that only illustrated editions were authorized ones.Footnote 7 As such, their added value, the extensive visual apparatus, became the most striking feature to distinguish Taylor’s editions from his competitors’, the two different book sizes in which the bookseller issued his editions further catering to those with varying purchasing power. More than that, through Taylor’s consistent use of plates in all his editions, illustrations advanced to an essential – that is, expected – part of the reading experience of Defoe’s work.
The expanded body of illustrations was equally distributed across Robinson Crusoe and Farther Adventures: each volume was accompanied by six illustrations, in addition to the revised portrait frontispiece in volume 1 and the ‘Map of his Travels’ in volume 2. The readability of the plates is repeatedly complicated by the synoptic character of the illustrations. In these plates, the narrative depicted visually, even though anchored textually through a cue in the image caption (establishing an interpretive connection with a specific page and the subject rendered), often is more elaborate than the spatially defined place within the typographically represented text. As a result, textual elements not introduced to the reader ahead of their reaching the illustration are anticipated by the designer, who creates a new temporal framework in which different image clusters need to be read in relation to one another.
Out of the six newly commissioned illustrations, only the first two copperplates in Robinson Crusoe capture situations that occurred prior to the protagonist’s island shipwreck. Not visualizing Crusoe, the designer, whom the caption to the plate entitled ‘R. Crusoe at Yarmouth’ credits as Clark, introduces three large vessels at sea, as well as a rescue attempt on the part of another ship to assist the crew on Crusoe’s ship to get to land safely. The plate is devoid of an explicitly rendered human agency and constitutes a simple composition that conveys the ships’ distress and impending destruction. By contrast, the plate following the visualization of Crusoe’s early shipwreck, a rendering of Crusoe’s ‘shooting a Lyon’, as the caption glosses the subject of the illustration, depicts multiple actions simultaneously (Figure 5). Crusoe and Xury are in their boat on ‘the Coast of Guinny’, communicating with the local population to obtain food and drink when ‘two mighty Creatures’ (Defoe, Reference Defoe1722 [1721], 33) are making their way to the sea. Mistaken for lions but then identified as ‘most curious Leopard[s], spotted and fine to an admirable degree’ (34), these animals frighten the indigenous population and Crusoe shoots one of them swimming towards his boat. The moment of the killing of the leopard is captured by the printed image: ‘as he came fairly within my Reach I fir’d, and shot him directly in the Head’ (34). The action involving the animal in the background is a consequence of Crusoe’s shooting its companion: ‘frighted with the Flash of Fire and the Noise of the Gun’, the creature’s running away is subsequent to the action of the foreground. It is part of a diachronic account that involves the indigenous people’s supplying Crusoe with food and him, in turn, killing the beast of which they were terrified. Rather than a composition in which three clusters represent actions simultaneously, the illustration requires a reading that centres on the page of the text referenced in the caption – that is, page 34.
Copperplate of Crusoe shooting a lion, 1721 Taylor edition [sixth edition].
While the spatio-temporal arrangement of the second plate necessitates cross-referencing and synchronizing with the typographical text, more complex mapping strategies underpin the design of the third plate (Figure 6). Subtitled ‘R. Crusoe saving his Goods out of the Wreck of the Ship’, the plate (which features a notation in the caption referring to ‘Vol. I, p. 56’, a reference to the typographical text on that page, which has supposedly been remediated by the plate) incorporates narrative elements relating to the inventory he creates of the objects he removes from the ship and that are introduced by Crusoe from pages 55 to 58 – a much larger text portion than signalled by the caption notation. But the illustration also serves as a map of the geography of both the island and the narrative. It highlights the significance of the creek, which is both his landing place and a central geographical feature in the scene – illustrated by plate 4 – that depicts Crusoe’s rescue of Man Friday. Despite the fact that the illustration shows the creek in the background of the illustration visualizing Crusoe on his raft, the reference to its location, including ‘the Mouth of a little River’, which Crusoe had not visited before, is introduced by the narrator only on page 59 – once he is approaching the shore and is looking for a suitable place to land. The narrator stresses that he ‘hop’d to find some Creek or River’ which he ‘imagin’d’ he would chance upon – rather than which he had seen previously: ‘there appear’d before me a little opening of the Land’ (59). Just as the creek was visually implanted into a scene in which it should not have been present, so the dog and cat should not have been visible in this illustration that purports to realize page 56 only.
Copperplate of Crusoe salvaging goods from the wreck, 1721 Taylor edition [sixth edition].
The dog in the water and making its way to the shore is not introduced in the printed text until page 75, where Crusoe recalls that ‘he jump’d out of the Ship of himself, and swam on Shore to me the Day after I went on Shore with my first Cargo’ (75). Rather than limiting himself to the visual realization of Crusoe’s ‘saving his Goods’, then, the illustrator does not provide a synchronic moment at which the various actions – Crusoe standing on his laden raft, the oar in the water to steer his vessel, the dog swimming towards the shore and a cat sitting on one of the cases – occur at the same time. Instead, he conflates different temporal periods, ostensibly creating a scene of simultaneity, even though the actions occur at different moments – unless the illustration represents Crusoe’s second trip to the wreck, which would, however, contradict the cue offered by the page notation below the illustration. But the plate also offers to the reader’s view part of the island that Crusoe has not yet visited at the time of his first trip to the wreck. In fact, the spatial arrangement of the plate reorganizes the narrative for the benefit of the reader, who will be able to identify the location where Crusoe will land the raft. Rather than zooming in on Crusoe as the agent of the narrative who salvages goods that will prove essential to his survival, the illustrator embeds him within a more complex spatial-temporal visual framework, which draws on textual details that are given only once Crusoe has reached the creek and landed his raft. The reader, then, is proleptically provided with a view of part of the island which cannot be seen by Crusoe from his vantage point near the wreck. It is an imaginative act of locating and anchoring action but also of signalling connections – with the dog, for instance, who, though not as physically close to Crusoe as the cat facing him, will become ‘a trusty Servant to me [for] many Years’ (75). The illustration, rather than being focused on a single description, encompasses a much larger narrative arc which the illustrator assembles into a fictitious representation of a scene that did not occur synchronously but diachronically. As such, the progress of actions is not apprehendable to the reader before all of the elements of the narrative that are reconstituted by the printed image have been encountered typographically.
The division of the illustration into foreground and background not only represents a spatial organization of the landscape and the scene at sea, but it also entails a temporal rewriting of Defoe’s narrative. For Crusoe, ahead of reaching the wreck, will have started from the shore – although surely from a site that must have been quite remote from the locality of the creek, which he would otherwise have seen. The image’s temporal order starts with the raft moving towards the land, however, the direction of the raft also being indicated by the dog swimming towards the shore, although, strangely, Crusoe faces the reader rather than the direction into which he will be steering the raft. The anthropocentric image cluster of Crusoe on the raft showcases his salvaging efforts, his movement towards the left indicating that he has completed the loading of the vessel and is now in the process of returning to the island. He has appropriated one of the broken oars to steer the raft, and the illustrator’s attention to detail has provided an elaborate assemblage of goods specifically mentioned by the narrator. The protagonist has loaded the vessel with ‘three of the Seamens [sic] Chests’ (57), ‘several Cases of Bottles’ (57) and ‘the Carpenter’s Chest’ (58), in addition to ‘two very good Fowling-Pieces’ (58), ‘two Pistols’ (58), ‘a small Bag of Shot, and two old rusty Swords’ (58), as well as ‘Barrels of Powder’ (58). In addition, the illustrator accurately describes Crusoe’s appearance, his chest bare, due to his having ‘pull’d off [his] … Cloaths, for the Weather was hot to Extremity’. The secondary character in the plate, who, likewise, has been affected by the weather, is the ship.
Following the textual description closely, the illustrator provides an effective contrast between the enterprising Crusoe exploiting the resources available to him in the ship and the deteriorating situation of the vessel, which will face speedy destruction by the natural elements: ‘her Stern lay lifted up upon the Bank, and her Head low almost to the water’ (57), although the dark area enveloping the ‘Head’ may indicate major damage caused by the storm (Figure 7). In fact, the reader recalling Taylor’s new frontispiece may have recollected that they had already seen the ship that is now being divested of its cargo. For the ship in the plate depicting Crusoe on the raft had been copied from the frontispiece, in the process being reversed and implanted into a calm sea as opposed to the violent sea of the frontispiece, a use of the ship not previously recognized by scholars. In this respect, the inter-iconic connection between the frontispiece and the illustration rendering Crusoe on the raft reflects the changed role and function of the vessel: whereas in the frontispiece the vessel functioned as a reminder of the danger the protagonist experienced during the storm that led to the destruction of the ship, the designer of the later plate no longer associates the ship with a threat to Crusoe’s life. Rather, the wreck’s resources will facilitate his survival. As such, the frontispiece and the third illustration in Taylor’s volume partly visualize the same subject: Crusoe’s survival and use of skill and tools that are already manifest in the frontispiece (in the form of the palisade on the hill but also through the role he casts for himself as armed individual and architect) and anticipated through the many tools and other goods that he will put to use in his creation of habitations and other forms of the built environment. Just as the frontispiece, as the caption informed readers, depicted ‘Robinson Crusoe as describ’d Page 176 Vol. I’ – that is, in the form of a portrait grounded in (but not copying exactly) the description furnished on the page referenced – so the illustration of Crusoe on the raft focuses on the central character’s agency.
Detail from Taylor’s 1721 frontispiece (left)/detail from ‘R. Crusoe saving his Goods out of the Wreck’, Taylor 1721 edition (right).
One reason for the duplication of the ship, apart from the cost-effective copying of a visual component, may have been the designer’s desire to create visual connections between individual plates to facilitate their being read as part of a series, an interconnected sequence of narrative events. Such reuse of a visual device also occurs in those illustrations that feature the creek, which – though repeatedly embedded in landscapes that strikingly differ from one another – centralize this location as particularly important in Crusoe’s narrative, not only in the illustration of Man Friday’s rescue but also in the penultimate and the final plates in Taylor’s edition, which are respectively entitled ‘An English Ship comes to R. Crusoes [sic] Island’ and ‘R. Crusoe recovers the Ship for the Capt.n and Conquers the Pyrates’.
In a visual reading of Defoe’s work that interrelates illustrations, the revision of the frontispiece facilitated an alignment with the raft scene in Taylor’s 1721 set of plates. It demonstrates that, even though the illustrations were spatially distributed across the codex and not placed within close proximity of one another, they were still linked by means of iconic repetition. Reading, as Blewett does, the two frontispieces as fundamentally different interpretations of Crusoe’s conception and the character’s relationship with the ship in the background does not take into account that the latter illustration functions as part of a set of plates. The latter frontispiece, through the iconic device of the ship, reproduced in the raft scene, proleptically evokes a connection with Crusoe’s life. Because of its functioning as part of a pattern of visual reproduction, its semiotic inscription represents an open system of meaning that anchors a later representation of Crusoe, in the process of securing goods that will ensure his survival. In this respect, the original frontispiece, as the only illustration in the first-edition volume, functioned as a closed semiotic system rather than an open one.
The plate visualizing Crusoe on the raft stands out from the others in that it initiates the island narrative at the same time it essentially casts Crusoe as a resourceful survivor who will feature next – 171 pages later – as an armed individual shooting the savages who pursue Man Friday. It also initiates a process of replicating image devices such as the creek and the ship that emphasize internal connectedness among the plates, a method of presenting the illustrations formally as a series and not as detached images that centralize Crusoe in the manner of the two Amsterdam sets of plates.
Another example of a plate that boasts a complex structural make-up featuring several discrete scenes that need to be read interconnectedly, rather than simultaneously, is the illustration of Crusoe’s rescue of the English captain whose ship crew had committed mutiny and who had taken the captain, as well as the first mate and a passenger, to Crusoe’s island in order to kill them (Figure 8). Captioned ‘An English Ship comes to R. Crusoe’s Island’, the title misleadingly places emphasis on the ship’s presence on the island coast. It does not evoke (or accurately describe) the visual narrative that is constructed above the caption text, including the longboat’s movement from the ship to the shore, the mutineers’ taking their prisoners to the island, and Crusoe’s observing the mutineers’ threatening behaviour towards the captives. The visual repetition of the longboat close to the ship on the shore indicates its movement, the illustration, however, not accurately representing eleven sailors in the boat but only ten, their number being further reduced by the illustrator once they arrive on land. This kind of inaccuracy was common and the result of a designer’s avoidance of cluttered compositional clusters. The individual standing out from the group on shore is the one ‘lift[ing] up his Arm with a great Cutlass … or Sword, to strike one of the poor Men’ (298). As in previous plates, the reader needs to make sense of the individual iconic clusters of the illustrations by connecting some and not others. The account provided of the barbarous treatment of the captives – Crusoe shares with the reader his apprehension on behalf of the prisoners, for he ‘stood trembling with the Horror of the Sight, expecting every Moment when the three Prisoners should be kill’d’ (298) – is given by Crusoe, having climbed his ladder, observing the scene from the hill in the background. Even though the reader can see the creek to the left of the group of mutineers, the creek is not in fact discovered, the narrator insists, by the sailors looking for a suitable place to land the boat: ‘they did not see the little Inlet where I formerly landed my Rafts’ (297). Just as in the plate depicting Crusoe on the raft, the accompanying text to which informed the reader that Crusoe had not yet located the creek, this illustration provides the visual element of the creek to situate Crusoe’s place of residence. The plate unrealistically compresses into a single iconic capture what is unfolded sequentially in the text. At the same time, in this instance, the typographical narrative possesses greater priority and authority for the reader than the visualization of the geography – and the mutineers’ proximity to the creek – presented to the viewer.
Copperplate of Crusoe saving the English captain, 1721 Taylor edition.
In contrast to the Continental designs in the two 1720 Amsterdam editions, Taylor’s set of plates – with the exception of the frontispiece – does not use the zoomed-in presentation mode. Rather, Crusoe’s actions are featured in image structures in which the reader needs to establish diachronic order by identifying temporal progression. These illustrations either render Crusoe in the foreground and as identifiable through his garments and appearance – as in the illustration of Crusoe on the raft – or they introduce him within a schematic realization where he is to be recognized contextually through his carrying of weapons or his position vis-à-vis the built environment. The miniaturized representation of Crusoe was pragmatic and necessitated less labour on the part of the designer, who did not need to expend elaborate effort on the figure design, including details that would have aided the visual characterization of Defoe’s protagonist. As a result of the less detailed execution of both the design and the engraving of the plates, Taylor’s illustrations would have been significantly cheaper to produce than those manufactured in Amsterdam. At the same time, the designer of the plates did not look to the modes of representation that had introduced Crusoe as a realist figure to reader-viewers on the Continent. On the contrary: he looked to the often schematic modes of visual representation in cheap print media but complicated the structural make-up of the plates by introducing interrelated actions and diachronic narrative rather than focusing on a single moment only.
Even though the illustrations to Farther Adventures are supposed to depict different localities remote from Crusoe’s island, their designer drew on the visual-narrative conventions that had already been used in the illustrations for Defoe’s first volume. Importantly, the creek as an iconic device is revisited, the outline of the coast and the way the landscape are being rendered resemble the aerial mapping of the ‘curious Frontispiece’ to Serious Reflections: like those of Robinson Crusoe, the plates for Farther Adventures are both topographical maps of sorts as well as indices to actions which are mapped onto the landscape and seascape. Collectively, the fourteen illustrations that accompanied Taylor’s two-volume editions charted visually Crusoe’s adventures both on the desert island and beyond. They were not simply a series of moments that followed the order of the diachronic narrative but were also anchored in the frontispieces to each volume, at times, as in the portrait frontispiece, offering versions of Crusoe as master of the island utilizing his weapon power to liberate Man Friday and other captives. In the case of the map of the world, the physical unfolding and viewing of the fold-out cartographical device also involved a mental unfolding and reordering of the narrative, as part of which different stations in Crusoe’s narrative are located on the map by the reader. Both frontispieces, then, operated within a feedback loop: their respective characterization and inferred action were replicated by the plates following them – miniaturized at the level of representation in the full-page plates beyond the portrait frontispiece and enlarged and zoomed in on by the plates in Farther Adventures, where the miniscule representational convention of the dotted line on the map was transformed into multifocal narrative illustrations in the full-page plates. In the process, they enriched the readability of the frontispieces, no longer limiting the portrait to an allegorical reading but casting it as an illustration that centralized Crusoe’s strategies of survival and the construction of an island society, as well as the expansion of his influence beyond the island.
The first English novel to be illustrated with such a profusion of plates, Robinson Crusoe transformed into a visual phenomenon for English-language readers, who were steeped in exactly those visual traditions that had characterized illustrated cheap print reading matter using woodcut designs – the same kind of design conventions identifiable in Taylor’s plates. Taylor certainly recognized that illustrations would enhance his edition, but he was cautious in the manner in which he invested in the illustrative apparatus. Competitive marketing of the kind seen later in the century in relation to James Thomson’s The Seasons, when competing booksellers would invest heavily in ambitious illustrative apparatuses to demarcate and distinguish one edition from another (Jung, Reference Jung2015), did not exist for Taylor’s edition and therefore made his manner of proceeding a viable one. Nevertheless, the presence of copperplates, which conveyed a sense of depth through the tonality of the medium, albeit achieved through concentrated engraved areas and others that remained unprinted, demonstrated the bookseller’s seeking to align himself with copper-engraved works and their higher status within the print-cultural economy.
1720: The Amsterdam and German Editions
The illustrations to Taylor’s 1719 editions of Robinson Crusoe and Farther Adventures were known on the Continent. Clearly aware of the English portrait of Crusoe and reprinting the map, in the course of the year 1720 publishers in Amsterdam issued Dutch and French translations that boasted elaborate series of plates. These sets of copper-engraved illustrations differed significantly in their readability and iconic meaning-making strategies from those Taylor would include in his sixth edition of Defoe’s novel. They did not exert an influence on Taylor’s series but were consulted for Midwinter’s editions, which will be discussed in the next section. In order to make sense of the transnational reach of Robinson Crusoe, this section will introduce how Defoe’s work was being visually realized in two sets of illustrations, one of which included a frontispiece by the eminent French engraver-designer, Bernard Picart. It will discuss the subjects the Dutch designers selected to cast a visual identity for Crusoe and his actions, both on the island and beyond it during his travels in Farther Adventures. I will argue that the two sets of plates promoted a different mode of reading when compared to Taylor’s sixth edition illustrative apparatus. For the two sets possessed influence beyond the respective editions in which they were published: they affected how Crusoe was visually imagined on the Continent, especially via the dissemination and adaptation of the designs beyond the Low Countries and specifically in German editions issued in 1720 (and, through their reuse, up to the mid 1770s).Footnote 8 Less directly, the choice of the subjects in these editions, being strikingly different from Taylor’s, had an impact on later English illustrators.
Previous scholars have argued in favour of reading the Clark–Pine frontispiece as a visualization of the protagonist as colonizer. More substantial evidence for a visual reading of Crusoe in this role is, however, furnished by the two Dutch editions’ illustrative apparatuses: they introduce the hero as an enterprising individual who dominates not only the island’s nature but also its population, both animal and human. The eponymous character looms large in these illustrations. He is routinely shown to be the prime agent, except for those illustrations that depict him at moments of (spiritual) crisis. Miniaturized and simplified, schematic designs, as in Taylor’s edition, are not adopted. Instead, the plates reveal a formal-compositional complexity and interpretive depth that recommends the second illustrative set for the Dutch translation to a reading of Crusoe as colonizer whose conscience and benevolence are, however, foregrounded as well.
The first volume of the French translation, La Vie et les Avantures Surprenantes de Robinson Crusoe, was published by April 1720, a year after the London publication of the English original. By October 1720, the translation of Farther Adventures had appeared, both renderings into French being undertaken by Justus van Effen and Thémiseul de Sainte-Hycinthe and published by L’Honoré & Chatelain. The publishers had commissioned twelve illustrations for their two volumes, which have been characterized as ‘inferior engravings’ (Collé, Reference Collé, Lipski and Newbould2024, p. 401), despite their sensitive visual realization of Robinson Crusoe. By contrast, the Dutch translation, issued by the firm of de Jansoons van Waesberge only two months after each of the French-language volumes, boasted eighteen plates.Footnote 9 Work on both editions will have started as early as 1719, and L’Honoré & Chatelain instructed Picart to undertake the portrait frontispiece, which was redacted at the request of the publishers for the Dutch translation (Figure 9). The designer-engraver is prominently acknowledged in the bottom left area of the plate – ‘B. Picart. del. sculp. direxit 1720’ – but it is clear from copies of the frontispiece published by L’Honoré & Chatelain later in 1720 that at least one further engraving plate existed of the design, without the credit line referencing Picart, which was used for subsequent editions. Demand for the French translation must have been such, then, that another plate needed to be manufactured to produce a sufficiently high number of impressions of the frontispiece. The design of the illustration was copied also beyond the Low Countries, by Frankfurt, Leipzig and Nuremberg publishers in Germany, and in Italy.
Copperplate portrait frontispiece, designed and executed by Bernard Picart, La Vie et les Avantures Surprenantes de Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: L’Honoré et Chatelain, 1720).
Picart’s plate evidences, according to Blewett, greater ‘accuracy of detail’ (Blewett, Reference Blewett and Möller1988, p. 67) than the Clark–Pine illustration:
Crusoe’s stockade is indicated not by a flimsy picket fence but is shown with the stakes that have sprouted into trees and the ladder that can be pulled up for security. In the details of Crusoe’s appearance, dress, and equipment, Picart follows Defoe closely, giving Crusoe a ‘large Pair of Mahometan Whiskers’, a hat of goat-skin, saw and hatchet, pouches for powder and shot, a basket on his back, buskins tied with laces on his legs, and, the most famous detail of all, the ‘great clumsy ugly Goat-Skin Umbrella’.
Folkenflik disagrees with Blewett’s estimation, noting that Picart ‘is not more accurate’ (Folkenflik, Reference Folkenflik and Downie2016, p. 313) than Clark and Pine, but that he chose a different scene from the one Folkenflik identified as having underpinned the English design. While the design of Crusoe’s figure is modelled on that of the English plate, the left-hand background, depicting a building protected by the palisade, conveys a sense of home. Like the tortoise, so called by Crusoe, but likely a turtle, which is making its way from the right to the left, that is inland, so the focus of the image beyond the protagonist is on the habitation he has constructed. The turtle, rather than functioning as an exotic accessory (like the plant in the foreground of the Clark–Pine plate), represents ‘culinary gold on the shores of his fruitful and productive island’ (McMillen, Reference McMillen, Baird and Ionescu2013, p. 203). The Clark–Pine ship has been omitted and replaced by a rock, potentially the rock – depicted in the second illustration in L’Honoré & Chatelain’s first volume, which visualizes ‘Naufrage de Robinson, il est jetté dans une Ille [sic] déserte’ – onto which Crusoe saves himself during the storm causing the shipwreck.Footnote 10 No backward-looking to a time before the shipwreck is conveyed. Rather, Crusoe has made the island his own, appropriating even the flora – in the form of the palisade branches – which, once planted, transform into an impenetrable fence offering him protection.
Picart’s realization of Crusoe with ‘large … Mahometan Whiskers’ strikingly distinguishes the figure from the Clark–Pine rendering. For, as has been noted: ‘Underneath his layers of apparel Crusoe also sports Asiatic – even goat-like – features …, perhaps not a coincidence given the influence of Asian art and iconography upon the artist’ (Yang, Reference Yang2022, p. 226). His facial features and his apparel denominate his strangeness, but he is making the strange island familiar through his Georgic application. Among those attributes added to the Clark–Pine ‘prototype’ (Palmer, 2025), the parasol essentially reflects Crusoe’s cultural hybridity in that, as Irene Fizer has observed, what to British viewers will have appeared as a version of an umbrella, here ‘adapted from a Brazilian parasol into a dual-purpose shield against the sun and the rain’, presents Crusoe ‘as a man who has fused English and foreign modes into a composite habit of dress’. More than that, for the castaway, it serves as ‘an indispensable component of daily wear’ (Fizer, Reference Fizer, Baird and Ionescu2013, p. 217). The protagonist’s visual characterization, then, highlights three roles: he is hunter, gatherer and maker, roles that are partly reflected by the material manifestation of his labour in the form of his fenced-off habitation and storehouse. Compared to the three image clusters of the Clark–Pine engraving, Picart’s design can be more straightforwardly read. For Crusoe is represented as having established a physical island existence for himself, as part of which process he had used tools – the ones displayed on his person – to create a home. While the earlier frontispiece had introduced different temporally anchored scenes (deriving from the past and the present, or, according to Folkenflik, the future) which the reader needed to relate to Crusoe as an armed individual, the temporal framework of this Dutch illustration is one that operates on the same level, the hunter-gatherer-maker inhabiting a civilized space he has fashioned through his own effort.
The designer of the plates for the Dutch translation adapted Picart’s illustration, copying Crusoe’s figure, reversing it in the process, but redacting – with the exception of the turtle, which remains – the contextual iconic framing that Picart had introduced (Figure 10). Facing to the left, the protagonist is now depicted in front of a large tree and flanked by a hill. Rather than featuring ‘ROBINSON CRUSOE’ as a caption title below the image, as in Picart’s plate, the frontispiece to the Dutch edition glosses the work illustrated by introducing a headstone on the left, inscribed ‘Robinson Crusoes vreemde levens gevallen’, a title that emphasizes the strangeness of the castaway’s life, rather than his adventures. The (smooth, rather than storm-tossed) sea, which had still occupied half of the middle ground in Picart’s design, is now seen in the far distance, behind a large wooden structure, resembling a house. This more solid structure contrasts with its predecessor in the plate that had accompanied the edition of the French translation. A fence, but not realized in the accurate manner of the earlier design, and not sprouting leaves, is not high enough to conceal the building. Altogether, this frontispiece changes the ways in which readers are able to make sense of the protagonist via iconic cues. The sea is no longer essential to his characterization. Instead, he is shown to be an accomplished builder, having used the tools he recovered from the wreck of the ship not only to devise provisional shelter in the form of Picart’s habitation but to construct a wooden building that jars with the primitive association of the desert island. The use the publishers of the Dutch translation made of Picart’s Crusoe figure testifies to both the mobility and malleability of Defoe’s character (Collé, Reference Collé, Lipski and Newbould2024, p. 410), who could be recontextualized iconically by different publishers, each time facilitating a different reading and interpretation.
Adapted copperplate portrait frontispiece, Het Leven en Wonderbaare Gevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: de Jansoons van Waesberge, 1720).
The decision to adopt only Picart’s figure design and to revise the plate radically, at short notice, was made possible by these editions being undertaken in Amsterdam. For, rather than reprinting an illustration to save cost, booksellers utilized the thriving engraving industry in the Dutch capital – an established and highly developed sector of cultural production, while the London market at the beginning of the century still largely drew its engravers from the Low Countries who subsequently trained native English artisans (Hammelmann, Reference Hammelmann and Boase1975, pp. 1–2). Taylor’s sixth edition illustrations testify to the non-sophisticated realization of the engravings, which strikingly contrasted with the illustrative work included in both the editions of the Dutch and French translations. At the same time, literary illustration was an established field in the Dutch republic, whereas in England it was not (de la Fountaine Verwey, Reference De la Fountaine Verwey1934).
The illustrations for both the volumes of the French and Dutch translations do not centrally use the synoptic mode of realization that would be characteristic of the 1721 Taylor set of plates (Figure 11). Captioned ‘Le Sauvage apres sa delivrance se prosterne aux pieds de Robinson’, Plate 4 foregrounds the subject of the caption title. But, above the scene of proskynesis, Friday in the process of lifting Crusoe’s left foot, the castaway having killed two savages who persecuted Friday, another scene – spatially separated from the one in the foreground – is depicted. It is a gathering of the savages, some of them dancing in the middle of the composition, while their canoes (with sails) are visible close to the shore. This image cluster, in terms of the succession of narrative moments, must have preceded Crusoe’s delivery of Friday. While not synoptic in the mode of Taylor’s illustrations, two temporal planes are introduced which contextually gloss – through a rendering of the savages’ feasting and their cannibalistic rites – Crusoe’s intervention. The plate does not depict Crusoe’s actual killing of the savages, as the illustration related to Friday’s delivery in Taylor’s edition does. Instead, it centralizes the interpersonal relationship between Crusoe and Friday, the former resting his right arm on his rifle while he benignantly is reaching out towards Friday’s head in a manner reminiscent of a blessing. It also reflects, according to Blewett, Man Friday’s transition from savage existence to civilization: ‘The stream that divides the foreground from the background … also divides Crusoe’s terrain from that of the cannibals. We have no doubt that Friday has moved from one world to another’ (Blewett, Reference Blewett1986, p. 30). Likewise, the fifth illustration in the series offers a diachronic visualization of Crusoe’s shooting the cannibals in the middle strip of the image, his attack causing great disarray, including the savages’ speedy retreat in their canoes (Figure 12). No longer holding his rifle, Crusoe is again represented in the foreground, where he unties the Spaniard lying on the ground. Crusoe is recognizable in each of his two appearances in the illustration due to his visual characterization, though his clothing, including his hat, differs from Picart’s design. Far from schematic, the two illustrations show Crusoe not only as a defender of his island but also as a benevolent individual who rescues those it is in his power to save.
Copperplate of Friday’s rescue, La Vie et les Avantures Surprenantes de Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: L’Honoré et Chatelain, 1720).
Copperplate of Crusoe’s killing the savages and his delivery of the Spaniard, La Vie et les Avantures Surprenantes de Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: L’Honoré et Chatelain, 1720).
Only one illustration in the set focused on the capturing of a moment before the young Crusoe is shipwrecked. The opening plate, ‘Robinson devant son Pere, qui lui predit toute sortes de malheurs’, offers a tableau of the admonishing father and the prodigal son, which centralizes Crusoe’s disobedience of his father as the reason for all his misfortunes. At the same time, it introduces a religious contextualization of Crusoe’s ‘wandering inclination’ that will be revisited midway through the series when his dream and conversion are selected as the subjects of the third plate. This illustration is of particular interest, as the subject is also chosen for visualization by the publishers of the Dutch translation, though realized in a different manner. Neither synoptic in the sense of Taylor’s illustrations, nor using the kind of two-part compositions that were deployed in Crusoe’s battle scenes, the designer introduces an older mode of representation by which the dream, including the castaway’s encounter with an avenging angel, is contained in a thought bubble. The angel, enveloped in mystic clouds and holding a spear, is advancing, as Crusoe cowers helplessly on the ground (Figure 13). It is this dream experience that causally motivates the protagonist’s turning to the Bible, the open pages of the volume in front of him reading ‘Invoque moi au jour de ton affliction et je te deliverai’ (Psalms 50:15). It is thus the aid that God will furnish to a true believer which will prevent Crusoe’s prophetic dream from coming true. The light on the table symbolically signifies spiritual enlightenment, allowing the castaway to accept his lot and lead a productive life on the island. The dream, then, serves as an amplification of the warning Crusoe’s father had given him at the beginning of the visual series. But this time, the warning is heeded, in the process turning the protagonist into a believer capable of true repentance, not only of his disobedience to his father but the neglect of his duties to his maker as well. The iconic device of the thought bubble is rooted in Puritan dream allegories. It constitutes a third reading mode, in addition to the single-scene plates and those depicting multiple actions occurring at different times but compressed into a single illustration, that makes the set of plates to the French translation more complex in terms of its readability than both Taylor’s and the Dutch translation’s illustrative apparatuses.
Copperplate of Crusoe’s dream and conversion, La Vie et les Avantures Surprenantes de Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: L’Honoré et Chatelain, 1720).
Altogether, the Dutch designer does not emphasize Crusoe’s adventures, which are visualized in his two battle scenes but also, at least, anticipated in the second plate, where he has been shipwrecked and has saved himself on a rock. Though capturing his survival, this illustration nevertheless requires the caption to gloss the scene as the result of the shipwreck and the beginning of his life on the desert island. Rather, the introduction of the father’s admonition and warning at the start of the narrative and Crusoe’s conversion indicate that the story is just as much a tale of discovery and adventure as it is a narrative about the revelation of the ways of God to Crusoe. In other words, Robinson Crusoe has a spiritual message that is prominently shown in the illustrations, including in the plate depicting Crusoe and Friday, where the former is cast as a benevolent individual who will provide spiritual guidance to the savage and, in doing so, convert him. Destruction is thus juxtaposed with salvation, the illustrations addressing these dual concerns, which neither Taylor’s nor the Dutch translation’s plates adopted as part of a holistic visual characterization of Crusoe.
In contrast to the plates for the French translation of Defoe’s first volume, the set for Farther Adventures illustrates predominantly the adventures Crusoe experiences once he leaves his island again (Figure 14). While religious subjects had featured in the first series to characterize the protagonist as both secular and spiritual, the visualization of the destruction of the pagan idol, Cham-Chi-Taungu, the final plate in the volume, no longer only reflects Crusoe’s own spirituality but also his outrage at the sacrifices to the idol. For arriving in ‘the Muscovite dominions’, he learns that the local population are ‘professed Christians, yet [in fact] the inhabitants were mere pagans, sacrificing to idols, and worshipping the sun, moon, and stars, or all the host of heaven; and not only so, but were, of all the heathens and pagans that ever I met with, the most barbarous’. With missionary zeal, he wishes to teach these pagans a ‘lesson’ by burning the idol. The illustration featuring what Crusoe terms a ‘scarecrow’, a ‘hideous block of wood’, ‘a hobgoblin’ and ‘that vile, abominable idol’ in front of which ‘sixteen or seventeen creatures [were] all lying flat upon the ground’ introduces the effigy Crusoe will destroy by setting fire to it. To that effect, (presumably) the protagonist, after he and his helpers have covered the wooden structure with tar, is depicted lighting a combustible substance that has been placed in the idol’s mouth and eyes. From the right-hand background to the foreground, different stages of the capture of the pagan priests are being depicted, for Crusoe wants them, hands bound, to witness Cham-Chi-Taungu’s destruction. In order to comprehend the image narrative, the reader’s gaze needs to focus on the open doorway of the cabin where Crusoe and his crew surprise the guards and the priests, taking them prisoners and leading them to the front, where, helpless and unable to prevent the burning of their deity, they will witness its demolition. The burning and its being seen by those in front of the idol take place simultaneously, whereas the capture and moving of the priests to the foreground of the illustration is a diachronic process preceding the conflagration.
Copperplate of the destruction of the pagan idol, La Vie et les Avantures Surprenantes de Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: L’Honoré et Chatelain, 1720).
Crusoe regards himself as a guardian of the Christian religion, but – above all – as an individual who needs to prevent ‘degenerate’ behaviour. For that reason, he introduces marriage to the inhabitants of his island, which is illustrated by another plate. Likewise, he intervenes in a scene of chaos where the atrocities committed by his own countrymen are depicted as part of the massacre, the crew members seeking to revenge the murder of one of their own (Figure 15). His back to the reader and his left hand raised, he tries to address and induce them to stop their slaughter. Framed by the huts on fire, the reason for the massacre is displayed centrally: the half-naked body of the crew’s ‘poor mangled comrade’, Tom Jeffry, hanging from a tree, it even being possible to recognize that ‘his throat was so cut that his head was half off’. The violence exerted is put into relief in the foreground, where one of the ship’s crew is about to kill one of the natives. The illustration conveys the horror the narrator experiences himself. The unarmed villagers are slaughtered as a punishment for their murder of Jeffry, even though he was the original aggressor. It is a scene in which Crusoe’s helplessness is being shown at the same time that the reader is invited to contemplate the causes underpinning this massacre.
Copperplate of the massacre, La Vie et les Avantures Surprenantes de Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: L’Honoré et Chatelain, 1720).
In Farther Adventures, the illustrations increasingly show Crusoe as part of group actions, including the battle with natives on the occasion of which Friday is killed. Rather than being singled out, he is presented as a member of a community (on the island) where he is able to affect the life of his colony. In contrast to Taylor’s illustrations, the twelve plates for L’Honoré & Chatelain’s volumes offer demanding and imaginative compositions that are rich in descriptive, realistic detail and that provide the reader with caption titles which allow the identification of the primary subject visualized. While the battle scene, during which Friday is mortally wounded, iconically conveys the combat between the ship crew and the savages attacking, it is through the addition of the caption only, ‘Mort de Vendredi’, that the reader’s attention is drawn to this highly affective event for Crusoe: the loss of his companion and friend. Captions thus possess a guiding power that allows them to foreground and prioritize subjects that may not have been visually singled out. They shape the reading experience by directing attention rather than summarize merely the holistic subject of the illustration. Inter-iconic connections between illustrations are not a characteristic of the set, which does not highlight the mapping of topography either. And yet the second illustration to Farther Adventures introduces in like manner the building, surrounded by the palisade, which the redacted frontispiece to the Dutch translation boasted, in the process testifying to how Crusoe’s habitation was imagined by two designers in Amsterdam.
Crusoe appears as a dynamic and multifaceted individual in the plates that accompanied the Dutch translation, in volume one alone featuring on his own in seven out of the thirteen illustrations, the frontispiece included. The first volume of Het Leven en Wonderbaare Gevallen van Robinson Crusoe is divided into two parts, the first one boasting nine plates, the second four. Two plates capture scenes that precede the castaway’s island existence, but the largest number of illustrations is devoted to Crusoe’s multifarious characterization, including his nightmarish encounter with the angel. Unlike the illustration for the French illustration, it is not, however, glossed in terms of a conversion. Crusoe is presented as practical and resourceful once he arrives on the island and is introduced to readers in the various roles he assumes as the sole focus of the illustrations: as builder of his own home (‘Crusoe begint een Logement te vervaerdigen’), as potter (‘Crusoe maakt potten tot zyn provisie’), as maker of a boat (‘Crusoe maakt een Kanoe’) and as tailor (‘Crusoe bereydt zich Kleedren’) (Figures 16–18). The latter three illustrations constitute a cluster, for these illustrations occur within a forty-page-long part of the narrative. They function as the iconic heart of the visual narrative, not only through the proximity of the individual plates to one another – a proximity of a kind not otherwise seen in the edition – but also through their focus on Crusoe as maker. The castaway is rendered as self-sufficient in the sense that he develops skills which will ensure his survival, even as he constructs a boat that, in the end, he is unable to move to the water due to its weight.
Copperplate of Crusoe as potter, Het Leven en Wonderbaare Gevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: de Jansoons van Waesberge, 1720).
Copperplate of Crusoe constructing a boat, Het Leven en Wonderbaare Gevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: de Jansoons van Waesberge, 1720).
Copperplate of Crusoe producing his own clothes, Het Leven en Wonderbaare Gevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: de Jansoons van Waesberge, 1720).
The plate depicting what is described in the caption as Crusoe’s terrible dream stands out from the Georgic focus of the first part (‘Eerster Deel’) of the first volume (Figure 19). For it introduces Crusoe visibly afraid of the figure with a spear in his right hand, an image that centralizes what appears representationally to be an attack which the castaway will not survive. This misreading is not corrected by the caption. Instead, the reader needs to turn to the typographical text to situate the encounter between the angel and the sinner:
He mov’d towards me, with a long spear or weapon in his hand, to kill me; and when he came to a rising ground, at some distance he spoke to me, or I heard a voice so terrible, that it is impossible to express the terror of it; all that I can say I understood was this, Seeing all these things have not brought thee to repentance, now thou shalt die. At which words, I thought he lifted up the spear that was in his hand to kill me.
The illustration centres on what the dreaming narrator expects to be his imminent death. The French translation plate had offered a more complex, explanatory visual narrative rather than the sensational realization that would contrast strikingly with the subject of work as a means of salvation, if underpinned by faith. The spiritual message that was asserted through two plates in the edition of the French translation is not foregrounded in the visualization of Crusoe’s dream in the de Jansoons van Waesberge volume. Rather, once the reader had contextualized the later plate in terms of the typographical narrative, they would have understood that this dream marked a turning-point: it will enable the castaway to gain a new sense of confidence in his own ability to survive – because he has realized that God has not abandoned him. Naturally, the modal difference between the illustration visualizing the angel’s visitation and the other plates jars with the realist mode that underpins Crusoe’s depiction of his engagement in acts of work and his life in the cave. Unlike the set of illustrations for the French translation, however, the illustrations for the Dutch translation do not adopt different kinds of visual strategies that necessitate a range of reading modes. Even though Crusoe’s dream is part of an allegorical vision, it is not represented and framed as such, as in the two-part illustration accompanying the French translation.
Copperplate of Crusoe’s dream, Het Leven en Wonderbaare Gevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: de Jansoons van Waesberge, 1720).
The second part (‘tweede deel’) of the first volume introduces two new visual foci, which highlight destruction and salvation, including Man Friday’s rescue from the savages. Opening with a plate that captures Crusoe’s discovery of the site of the cannibals’ feasts, including remnants of their horrific slaughter, the next two plates visualize the castaway as a saviour: for, in the second illustration, he rescues Friday from the cannibals, who had intended to execute him. The third plate renders Crusoe’s rescue of the Spaniard from the savages, and the concluding illustration, captioned ‘Crusoe werd geproviandeerd en gekleedt’, presents him to the reader transformed and ready to return to England (Figure 20). Compared with the earlier illustration capturing Crusoe’s delivery of Friday, the plate differs in significant details from that accompanying the French translation. Importantly, the caption deploys the same kind of strategy employed in the concluding illustration and that of the dream, for it withholds information that would make the subject straightforward to read. It does not reference Man Friday but terms him ‘Een cannibal’, in the process depersonalizing the relationship that both men will establish subsequently. At this stage, Friday is merely a representative of his race whom Crusoe found worthy of being saved – a correct capturing of the situation, as Friday’s name has not been bestowed on the savage yet. In the plate, he is visually characterized in an act of prostration, his saviour already having placed his right foot on the savage’s head. Unlike the earlier plate, Crusoe has not dropped his rifle, but is holding it, his being armed and placing his foot on Friday’s head marking his absolute power over the savage, even though the caption states that the savage submits (‘onderwerpt’) to Crusoe.
Copperplate of Friday’s submission to Crusoe, Het Leven en Wonderbaare Gevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: de Jansoons van Waesberge, 1720).
Both the visualization of the massacre and the destruction of the pagan idol are realized in fundamentally different ways from the respective illustrations for the French translation (Figure 21). While Tom Jeffry’s murder brings about the massacre, the violence against the natives that was so shockingly rendered in the earlier plate is not represented. Rather, the illustration depicts the moment that Crusoe is shown the murdered crew member, naked and hanging from a tree. The designer accurately captures the victim’s nearly severed head, the shock at seeing Jeffry being reflected by the three onlookers’ wild gestures. The caption merely notes that Crusoe is shown Jeffry’s body. In this casting of the story of the massacre, which visualizes Crusoe and his companions on the way to find their comrades, the reader is not given the reason for Jeffry’s death. Instead, they visually perceive the dead man, unaware of why he was executed or of what atrocities will ensue. Opting for an iconic realization of the viewing of the murdered crew member, the designer mutes that which in the illustration to the French translation was represented as the inexcusable violence on the part of the crew members. In other words, while the question of liability and guilt is ambivalent in the plate for the earlier edition, the murdering sailors in the foreground contrasting with the dead Jeffry in the background, in the later illustration it is Jeffry’s murderers who are implicitly condemned – especially since the dead man’s own violence is not inferred until the illustration is read alongside Defoe’s text.
Copperplate of Crusoe being shown the murdered Tom Jeffry, Het Leven en Wonderbaare Gevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: de Jansoons van Waesberge, 1720).
While Crusoe was referenced by the caption as the observer of the murdered victim, he features again in the caption to the destruction of the idol – this time as the main agent of its demolition. Like the illustration involving Jeffry, this plate focuses on a single moment. No extended visual narrative of the kind offered for the plate for the French translation is provided. Rather, Crusoe and an unnamed individual are seen laying hands on the figure, the former hitting it with his sword, the latter ripping off parts of its covering. The idol represents a threat to Crusoe’s faith, and the physical violence towards the wooden figure is an expression of his personal response to the abominable sacrificial practices the pagan religion represents. Compared to the one devised for the French translation, the idol looks fiercer and fiendish, the horns, in particular, but also its sharp teeth, emphasizing its evil nature. The means of its eventual destruction – fire – is not introduced, nor are any of the priests and worshippers depicted, although in the far distance a small group of individuals can be discerned. These are not, however, clearly defined as those who will be taken prisoner before Cham-Chi-Taungu is set alight.
The sets of illustrations respectively accompanying the French and Dutch translations deployed different methods of meaning-making, the latter focusing largely on the representation of synchronic moments, as opposed to more complex diachronically developing visual narratives. In its use of the image caption, the latter edition offers a different multi-medial reading experience, however: the captions do not gloss holistically the subject of a plate. Rather, they highlight one central element of the image – such as Crusoe having been provided with provisions and new clothes – without revealing to the reader (as the caption to the French translation, ‘Robinson s’embarque et quitte L’Ile, ou il avoit été plus de 28 Ans’, does) that the scene depicted precedes the castaway’s departure for his mother country. These captions thus provide only partial access to the iconic meaning of the plate, very much like the depiction of Crusoe’s dream provided only a capture of the encounter of the angel and the dreamer, an incomplete visual gloss that omits the context of Crusoe’s illness, his lack of faith and his conversion. Captions as used in the edition of the Dutch translation complicate J. Hillis Miller’s notion of the caption–illustration relationship, for he held that a caption introduced an ‘effect’ of ‘strange[ness]’ to the reading of a printed image: ‘It shows that even verbal narratives are made of synchronic segments that are obscure when their causal links to before and after are broken. The power of a picture is to detach a moment from its temporal sequence and make it hang there in a perpetual non-present representational present, without past or future’ (Miller, Reference Miller1992, pp. 65–6). Captions as used by the Dutch illustrator offer (mis)direction in that they privilege iconic elements over others. As part of the partial cuing of actions and characterization, the reader needs to compare the visual realization of the typographical text with the actual text, for the caption functions as part of a triangulated medial relationship – consisting of caption, plate and illustrated text – where the directed reading advanced by the caption is incomplete as long as all features of this triangulated structure have not been interrelated.
The reach of the illustrations to the French (and, to a lesser extent, the Dutch) translation is evidenced by the use of these editions’ plates in German editions. Within the single year of 1720, five different editions of German translations were issued in Germany, the first in Hamburg in April 1720 by the firm of Thomas von Wiering, Philip Härtel selling the title in Leipzig.Footnote 11 Ludwig Friedrich Vischer had undertaken the translation from the English original, Des Lebens und die gantz ungemeine Begebenheiten des Weltberuffenen Engelländers, Mr. Robinson Crusoe, which was published in the same month as L’Honoré & Chatelain’s French translation. Wiering’s edition, independently conceived of L’Honoré & Chatelain’s, reprinted the Clark–Pine frontispiece, executed by the Hamburg engraver, Christian Fritzsch, as well as the map. German rival publishers, especially at Leipzig, would, however, look beyond the English frontispiece to furnish their customers with illustrated editions of Defoe’s work. By November, at the earliest, a fifth edition of a translation was issued in Leipzig by Moritz Georg Weidmann, featuring the publishing imprint ‘Franckfurth and Leipzig’. Another Leipzig publisher, Johann Christian Martini, had been responsible for earlier editions, including Des Welt-berühmten Engelländers Robinson Crusoe Leben und gantz ungemeine Begebenheiten, the preface of which was dated July 1720. Rather than reprinting the Clark–Pine portrait of Crusoe, Martini had the twelve plates to the French translation re-engraved for his own volumes, providing not only captions but also an explanatory gloss to the frontispiece to Farther Adventures: ‘Vorgesetztes Kupffer-Blatt stellet dir den Welt-beruffenen Robinson Crusoe in neuen Unternehmungen und wunderlichen Begebenheiten zum andern mahl für. Er ist noch nicht ermüdet, seinen Lesern zu erbaulichem Zeit-Vertreib oder unschuldigen Ergötzen ein mehrers von seinen fernern merckwürdigen Reisen und Schicksalen aufrichtig mitzutheilen’ (Defoe Reference Defoe1720 Martini ‘Vorrede’). This extended explanation of the meaning of the plate testifies to Martini’s recognition that German readers would benefit from this paratextual aid. For the illustration of fiction in Germany, like that in Britain, was in its infancy and readers, as a result, would be assisted in their intermedial meaning-making through more discursive glosses and the kind of holistic captions that had featured on the plates for the French translation. So, even though the designs for the engravings for the French translation were more sophisticated in terms of their realization than those for Taylor’s sixth edition, their readability could not, according to Martini, be taken for granted. For this sophistication catered to a visual literacy and immersion in iconic literary meaning that readers in Leipzig may not yet have possessed.
The Martini firm published the first volume of its third edition (the fourth German edition overall) in September 1720, reflecting the high level of demand for Defoe’s novel in the German language. In a study of the visual reading history of Robinson Crusoe, the set of plates that accompanied this edition is of particular interest, especially since the two scholars, who have previously charted iconic interpretations of Defoe’s work, Otto Deneke and Bethany Wiggin, failed to identify these plates correctly as deriving from existing visualizations. Both scholars suggested that the illustrations were based on new designs commissioned by Martini, Deneke arguing that they were devised and engraved by the Leipzig artisan, J. G. Krüger (Deneke, Reference Deneke1934, p. 12), while Wiggin considered the engravings (in what she mistakes to be Weidmann’s edition) as part of a ‘fashionable’ project, which ‘emphasized its novel appeal’ (Wiggin, Reference Wiggin2011, p. 199). The illustrative apparatus for Das Leben und die gantz ungemeine Begebenheiten des Robinson Crusoe consisted not of twelve plates, as in Martini’s previous editions, but of eighteen plates. The six illustrations, which both scholars were not able to ‘locate’ in any previous edition (Wiggin, Reference Wiggin2011, p. 198), are, in fact, adapted from the illustrative apparatus of the Amsterdam edition of the Dutch translation, though – importantly – two of these (the second and third plates) have been redacted (Figures 22 and 23). As I have noted elsewhere, Martini’s ‘plates captioned “Robinson will sich eine Wohnung machen” and “Robinson macht große Toepffe zu seinem Proviant” differ in terms of quality and tonality from the Dutch models; and, apart from the clumsily rendered body of the protagonist, they feature Robinson with a hat that he is not wearing in the originals’ (Jung, Reference Jung2020b, p. 189). That the edition of the Dutch translation circulated beyond the Low Countries and reached such an important city of the book trade as Leipzig is no surprise, but it is uncommon for illustrations – even in a composite apparatus such as Martini’s, which is grounded in two different editions by different publishers – to feature visual revision. The hat that was added to the design of Crusoe facilitated an iconic identification of the castaway through a device of his dress, despite the fact that his visual characterization differed decidedly from that of Picart’s frontispiece. The Martini version of Crusoe appears much younger than the individual depicted by Picart. Especially the ‘moustachios, or whiskers’ are missing, even though in the plate captioned ‘Robinson macht grosse Toepffe zu seinem Proviant’ the potter sports a small moustache, which in the original illustration he did not possess. So Martini likely decided to have the plates redacted for imagological coherence, allowing readers to identify representational continuity among the illustrations.
Copperplate of Crusoe as potter, Das Leben und die gantz ungemeine Begebenheiten des Robinson Crusoe (Leipzig: J. C. Martini, 1720).
Copperplate depicting Crusoe constructing his home, Das Leben und die gantz ungemeine Begebenheiten des Robinson Crusoe (Leipzig: J. C. Martini, 1720).
The composite make-up of the illustrative apparatus to Martini’s third edition allowed him to differentiate his edition from those that were produced in Leipzig (by Weidmann) but also those issued, from 1720 to the mid 1770s, in Nuremberg (and Frankfurt) by the firm of Adam Jonathan Felßecker (and subsequently his heirs). Where his own, earlier, as well as subsequent, editions featured only six illustrations per part, for Martini’s third edition the publisher augmented the apparatus for the first part by six. These new plates did not feature as part of any other German edition, and that is why they were mentioned centrally in his image-marketing for his edition. For he announced that he would supply those purchasers of his volumes, who had not purchased his latest edition featuring the six new illustrations, with a set of these plates free of charge. He thus specifically offered those who had purchased his earlier editions (but also Wiering’s edition) an extra set of plates so that – in the case of his editions – they would be in possession of the full image series, at no extra cost, an enticing offer at a time when attractive book illustrations also retailed separately. Disposing of the plate impressions to purchasers of his earlier editions free of charge was a potentially expensive undertaking, although Martini’s extensive investment in engraved illustrations appears to have been lucrative. For, as has been recorded by Deneke, engravings in different copies of Martini’s editions, at times, featured engravers’ names, at others not. This indicates that there will have been multiple copies of engraving plates, some of which may have needed replacing in the course of reprinting them for three editions.Footnote 12 Thematically, with two exceptions, the illustrations from the edition of the Dutch translation depict Crusoe as a maker engaged in acts of labour: the six additional plates in Martini’s volume represented a subject focus that the set of plates for the French translation did not possess. The new illustrative apparatus, then, introduced a mode of characterization by means of a subject cluster that had not featured in the earlier Amsterdam edition. Visually amplifying Martini’s editions, these plates – especially since they were publicized as potential gifts to the publisher’s client base – were marketed as an addition that was both costly and desirable but also metatextual in that these illustrations aided readers in making sense of the castaway’s character.
Even though it was known to purchasers of German translations of Robinson Crusoe that the illustrations to the majority of them had been copied from those commissioned for the French translation, a fact noted in reviews of the editions, knowledge of the derivative character of the illustrations did not minimize their desirable role as attractive metatexts – for illustrations of fiction were not the norm. Rather, they represented symbolic capital: deriving from a visual culture that had achieved high proficiency in the reproductive arts, they catered to German cultural aspirations that centred on the introduction of printed images into the domestic space – both as fashionable and as educational objects of cultural production. As such, their inclusion in a fashionable work of modern fiction demonstrated that the engraving industry in centres of the book and print trade such as Hamburg, Leipzig and Nuremberg was developing rapidly, striving – like artisans in Britain did – to achieve the quality of Dutch and French engraving. The fact that the illustrations to L’Honoré & Chatelain’s edition circulated beyond the Low Countries to be recruited by German booksellers for no fewer than four editions issued in different cities reflects the demand for Defoe’s novel, which was not issued in Germany in non-illustrated form until the 1760s. Martini’s hybrid illustrative paratext, bringing together illustrations from two editions, impressed upon readers encountering the amplified body of plates the visually diverse character of Robinson Crusoe that was nevertheless punctuated by plates such as those concerned with labour and faith. Unlike the practice of distinguishing one illustrated edition from competing ones through the commissioning of new engraved plates, such competitive marketing, involving investment in the design and execution of illustrations, was not practised in Germany between the 1720s and the 1770s. And yet Martini’s third edition testifies to a similar practice, for he recruited illustrations not used by his competitors, even though these were not specially commissioned by him, in the process producing a new and desirable media product.
While the earliest English portrait frontispiece remained paradigmatic in Britain until the 1780s (and was occasionally adopted by other Continental publishers, such as Gottfried Kiesewetter in Stockholm in 1752), Picart’s rendering of Crusoe replaced, in terms of its repeated reprintings in German editions, the Clark–Pine visualization of the protagonist.Footnote 13 Not only was Picart’s frontispiece reprinted in Leipzig and Nuremberg editions until the mid 1770s, but it even accompanied – in a woodcut version – a review of Wiering’s edition, despite the fact that this edition did not use the French engraver’s portrait.Footnote 14 The influence of Picart’s design beyond Robinson Crusoe, but still as part of the visual casting of a robinsonade, is also manifest in Der Holländische Robinson Crusoe (1721), ‘where the protagonist, Henrich Texel, is depicted with a large saw and axes in front of a maritime setting. A ship is visible in the right-hand background. The illustrator omits Picart’s parasol but introduces three buildings, on the left-hand side of Texel’ (Jung, Reference Jung2020b, p. 195). In the case of this robinsonade, the illustrative similarity to Picart’s well-known design served both as a generic marker and as a proleptic cue to the hero’s characterization.
The illustrations to the French and Dutch translations provided readers with visual retellings of Defoe’s work, in the case of L’Honoré & Chatelain’s series providing readers, for more than forty years, with an iconic interpretation that emphasized Crusoe’s spiritual-religious concerns. Compared with the Dutch translation, the market for the French rendering of Robinson Crusoe was likely larger. As a result, fewer illustrated editions in Dutch appeared, although by 1791 a Dutch translation, with a new set of plates, was issued (Palmer Reference Palmer2021). That the 1720 illustrations could be adapted for other works as well is evidenced in the case of one of the illustrations for the 1720 Dutch translation: with very little alteration, the plate representing Crusoe as potter was included in the German 1776 edition of Hendrik Smeeks’s Des Herrn Juan de Posos Beschreibung des mächtigen Königreichs Krinke Kesmes, the illustration not being included in any editions of Smeeks’s work.
Collectively, the two Amsterdam sets of plates helped to define a default format for Continental editions of Robinson Crusoe: these volumes were illustrated in ways that demonstrated a significant investment on the part of the publishers who had copious illustrative apparatuses devised in line with their expected sales, while also consolidating the novel’s status as deserving of such visual treatment. These series advanced visual mappings of Crusoe’s actions which readers had to integrate in their own reading experience of the media hybrid of the illustrated edition. Seeing the plates involved making sense of them, the visual apprehension affecting the way in which Robinson Crusoe was mentally realized. That these two sets of illustrations initiated a reading history that was not grounded in Taylor’s plates but that exerted wide-reaching influence on readers needs to be understood in light not only of a connected transnational reception history of Robinson Crusoe. Rather, these illustrations represented an important contemporaneous iconic alternative to Taylor’s visualizations, a version of an alternative hybrid text that would also coexist temporally with the illustrated abridgement Edward Midwinter published in 1722.
1722: Edward Midwinter’s Edition
Edward Midwinter’s ‘faithfully abridged’ version of The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1722), which was sold at a price of 2s. 6d. by Arthur Bettesworth, John Brotherton, William Meadows and Matthew Hotham and reissued in a second and third edition by these booksellers in 1724 and 1726, was decidedly cheaper than each volume of Taylor’s authorized edition, which respectively sold at 5s. (Palmer, Reference Palmer2023). Unlike Taylor’s volumes, Midwinter’s flagged on the title page that the narrative was ‘set forth with Cuts proper to the Subject’. The first volume of Midwinter’s title included a woodcut frontispiece copying the revised frontispiece Taylor had commissioned for his sixth edition, as well as twenty-nine woodcuts (measuring 8 × 7.5 cm). Volume 1 boasted fifteen woodcut illustrations, the second volume fourteen. The significance of Midwinter’s edition lies in the longevity of the text of his abridgement and its illustrations which were reprinted throughout the eighteenth century.Footnote 15
Midwinter’s volumes also furnished the illustrations for what in the Preface to The Wonderful Life, and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a more radical one-shilling, 154-page abridgement, was termed an ‘Epitome’ of Defoe’s work, which was published by Midwinter in 1724. The title page of The Wonderful Life noted that the abridgement was ‘Faithfully Epitomized … and adorned with Cutts suited to the most remarkable Stories’, but the volume did not include the full set of twenty-nine woodcuts: instead, it boasted only nineteen different illustrations, three of these being used twice, resulting in an image–text ratio of one image every seven pages. The woodcuts thus affected the uptake of Defoe’s work over the next six decades by allowing successive generations of readers to see Crusoe in the way readers in the 1720s had seen him.
This section will argue that the visual apparatus of Midwinter’s edition, which has not been studied by scholars of Robinson Crusoe before, is unique in a number of respects: it complicates a narrative in which Taylor’s editions have been centralized in the visual transmission of Defoe’s work. For, in contrast to Taylor’s sixth edition, Midwinter’s offered a large-scale visual sequence of moments that is far more ambitious than Taylor’s sixth edition illustrative apparatus. Even though Midwinter commissioned illustrations in the cost-effective medium of the woodcut, these visualizations of Defoe’s work do not fulfil common expectations in relation to woodcut illustrations at the time, especially in terms of their metatextual-interpretive sophistication and the quality of their material execution. These woodcuts’ function goes beyond merely introducing context-definitional features or genre-defining visual elements, as well as vaguely rendered characters and their actions, as was common in chapbooks: they are specific and closely make present Defoe’s narrative. Through a consideration that pays attention to the iconic storytelling strategies of the woodcuts, this section will argue in favour of a complex readability of the illustrations that is not primarily grounded in cheap print traditions, even though the illustrator-artisan borrowed from the formal repertoire of traditional woodcuts. Finally, it will demonstrate that some of the woodcuts reflect familiarity with those illustrations that had accompanied the two editions of the Dutch and French translations of Robinson Crusoe published in Amsterdam, evidencing an influence these plates exerted on the English tradition, a dynamic not previously recognized.
Seen within the context of illustrated editions of literature in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, the special status of Midwinter’s visual apparatus is striking. For, even given the large number of illustrations in his volumes, Midwinter’s specific drawing attention to illustrative material on the title page was not the norm, title pages only occasionally referencing cuts as adornments: only three titles before 1750, including Midwinter’s and William and Cluer Dicey in their 1740(?) edition of Robin Hood’s Garland (which featured twenty-seven woodcuts), used the exact phrase ‘cuts, proper to the subject’. James Knapton’s edition of William Rose’s The History of Joseph. A Poem (1712) had characterized the copperplates included as ‘Cuts proper to each book’: these illustrations differed not only medially from those of Midwinter’s title but also in their number, there only being six. The publishers of Robin Hood’s Garland termed the woodcut illustrations in their volume ‘neat and curious cuts, proper to the subject of each book’. Variations of the phrase used by Midwinter also occur, as in Thomas Norris’s Gesta Romanorum (1722), the title page of which noted that the publication was ‘Adorn’d with a new set of cuts proper to Illustrate and Explain the Respective Stories’. Rather than emphasizing only that they were ‘proper’, which Samuel Johnson defines as ‘fit’, ‘suitable’, ‘qualified’ and ‘adapted’ (Johnson, Reference Johnson1755), the ‘cuts’ included in Gesta Romanorum have an elucidating and explanatory function that is closely related to the modern meaning of literary illustration involving the ‘strong commitment to sensitive and intelligent textual interpretation’ (Behrendt, Reference Behrendt and Möller1988, p. 29). They are interpretive in that they represent in a ‘proper’ manner that which is rendered in the typographical narrative. Being ‘proper’ also entails that they are specifically produced ‘to Illustrate and Explain the Respective Stories’, as in Norris’s work. In other words: they embody the intention to convey a mutually enlightening relationship between image and text and they are meant to be synchronized and aligned with the typographically realized work in a way that does not allow a mistaking of their interpretive function and specificity. As a result of their being ‘proper’ in the senses outlined, the opportunistic recycling of woodblocks for publications ‘often with no clear graphic link to the texts in which they are found’ (O’Malley, Reference O’Malley2011, p. 27), as in chapbooks and ballad sheets of the time, is not to be found in Midwinter’s volumes.
The signalling on title pages of their ‘proper’, interpretive function not previously conveyed by woodcut illustration emphasized an emerging media practice in illustrated works, which was consolidated in subsequent decades. Some very few publications of the period opt for a cognate adjective to ‘proper’, ‘suitable’, to convey the particularity by which the woodcuts accompanying the text are characterized. Bettesworth’s 1708 edition of The Unfortunate Concubines, the History of Fair Rosamond and Jane Shore introduces the nineteen woodcut illustrations by informing the reader on the title page that the works are ‘illustrated with cuts suitable to each subject’, ‘illustrated’ here being synonymous with ‘glossed’. Likewise, the 1711 edition of The Noble and Renowned History of Guy Earl of Warwick, also issued by Midwinter’s co-publisher of the (second edition of the) Robinson Crusoe abridgement, Bettesworth, boasted twenty-five woodcuts ‘suitable to the history’, ‘suitable cuts’ also being mentioned on the title page of The Famous History of Montelion, Knight of the Oracle (1720). These examples of references to ‘cuts’ and to their function are not arbitrarily chosen but – in the period from 1700 to 1724 – represent some of the very few instances of this particularized flagging of visual metatexts (in the medium of the woodcut illustration) on title pages. In fact, very few illustrated editions of literary works featuring specially commissioned woodcuts were published in this period.
In the context of the production of woodcut images that illustrate a single work only, and specifically, rather those than that are recycled for numerous works of cheap print, Midwinter’s illustrative apparatus for his editions appears to be aligned with those other titles whose publishers, like Midwinter, highlight the nature and function of their cuts on the title pages of their works. And yet his publication differs from them because the abridgement he has had amplified by an illustrator-artisan is a recent one and its woodcuts are executed far more painstakingly than those printed in staples of the book trade such as the works published by Bettesworth, which had been published in the seventeenth century already. Of a much higher standard of design and execution, the woodcuts in Midwinter’s abridgement of Defoe’s novel represent the earliest set of literary illustrations in a medium associated with cheap print that offer a sophisticated visual narrative of an eighteenth-century work.
Unlike the woodcut images accompanying broadside ballads, however, Midwinter’s woodcut designs did not predominantly rely on a ‘basic vocabulary of communication through images’ based on ‘an iconography of the Bible and from popular lore’. In fact, the ‘character’ of his multi-medial version of Robinson Crusoe, more so than that of broadside ballads, ‘must have derived from the illustrations’ which ‘enabled [readers] to navigate’ the text through ‘these [designs’] visual cues’ (Franklin, Reference Franklin, Murphy and O’Driscoll2013, pp. 171, 170, 171). And while most of the designs are sensitive portrayals of action and individuals, components that could usefully be adapted from existing sources were, on occasion, copied or redacted in order to minimize the designer-artisan’s creative labour. In yet another respect, the woodcuts are closely related to earlier illustrations, specifically those that Taylor commissioned for his sixth edition of Robinson Crusoe in octavo, which predated Midwinter’s edition by four months only, the former having been published in October 1721, the latter in February 1722.Footnote 16 The speed with which Midwinter produced his abridgement testifies to the market demand for a cheaper edition of Defoe’s work he likely expected. His decision to devote comparatively more space to the illustrations than Taylor demonstrates their image-marketing function. Midwinter’s apparatus, then, was partly responsive in that the bookseller asked his designer-artisan to select the subjects of four of the six illustrations in the first volume of Taylor’s edition for his own, in one case even copying the image faithfully.
Thematically, the woodcuts range across the spectrum of subjects Taylor’s full-text version introduces, including action at sea, encounters with hostile savages and travel to faraway destinations such as China. But they also go beyond that series, introducing moments of religious import and acts underpinning the construction of civilization on the island that had featured in the illustrations of the Amsterdam editions. The series opens with a woodcut that renders a sailing ship in the foreground, while two figures, a young Crusoe and a school fellow of his, are standing in the background. The scene is set at Hull and Crusoe decides to accompany his friend, whose father is the master of a ship, on his journey to London. This illustration is still largely a stock image, its inscription as the beginning of Crusoe’s journey only apparent once the accompanying text is read. Within eight pages, however, having experienced a terrible storm, the protagonist is taken prisoner by pirates and taken to the African coast where he becomes the ship captain’s slave. The woodcut shows Crusoe and Xury in the boat, the former directing a rifle at Muley, whom Crusoe has thrown overboard, threatening him with instant death if he follows the boat. The fortified castle the narrator mentions is visible in the background. The specificity of the group of three, including their interactions, the background and the boat, anchor this illustration clearly in Defoe’s narrative.
Two woodcuts – one visualizing Crusoe’s shooting of the leopard, the other Crusoe and Xury continuing their journey and seeing on the shore natives ‘black and stark naked’ (Defoe, Reference Defoe1722, 16) – precede the illustration of the shipwreck that will lead to the desert island narrative (Figure 24). This woodcut goes beyond traditional renderings of shipwrecks, as it offers a progressive-diachronic map of actions and events: read from right to left, the ship – still intact – shortly after ‘struck upon Sand, and in a Moment the Sea broke over her’ (22). While the actual sinking is not represented and needs to be inferred through a causal relating of the vessel in the background and the figures in the foreground, the designer introduces an intermediate stage between the sinking of the ship and the drowning of the seamen: a boat still partially visible but sinking has brought the crew closer to land; yet – out of the eleven who got into the boat – only Crusoe, ‘clambering up the Clifts of the Shore’ (24), manages to save himself. Schematically represented, those drowning appear skeletal, compared to Crusoe, who is holding on to the rock.
Woodcut depicting Crusoe’s shipwreck, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe … The whole Three Volumes faithfully Abridg’d (London: A. Bettesworth, T. Brotherton and M. Hotham, 1722).
Adopting a fundamentally different mode of representation, the next woodcut offers a visualization of his dream. This moment of spiritual self-discovery is succeeded by illustrations that show Crusoe undertaking various tasks and being involved in a range of actions, including setting up a post that will serve him as a ‘wooden Calendar’ (98), examining a recently shipwrecked vessel, in the process adopting a dog that survived the destruction of the crew, and the liberation of Friday from the savages. Friday’s rescue redefines Crusoe’s existence on the island. His companion commonly appears in those woodcuts – including the ones depicting the delivery of the Spaniard from the savages, the felling of trees (with Friday’s recently recovered father), the liberation of the crew and captain of an English vessel, and the repelling of an attack by wolves – which depict measures on Crusoe’s part to ensure the safety of his island and to establish himself as its ‘Governour’. Next to the woodcut rendering Crusoe’s dream, one woodcut illustration in particular stands out from the set for Midwinter’s first volume in that it does not depict Crusoe as an individual establishing order or as the defender of his island community: the humorous scene in which Friday lures a bear onto a tree represents a light-hearted moment that contrasts with the generally serious nature of the subjects visualized (Figure 25). The woodcut to conclude the first volume of Robinson Crusoe introduces a different kind of confrontation – not with mutineers or savages but with ravenous wolves. They are shown approaching from the right, the horses barely visible on the left; Crusoe and his companions are protected only by a provisional barrier of timber but their rifles are raised and one already discharged and smoking. The woodcut separates two paragraphs describing the action from one another, the first capturing the actual scene rendered visually, the second narrating the result of the attack, on the part of the shooters: ‘they killed several of the Wolves at the first Volley’ (186), even though they need to continue firing, as the animals ‘came on like Devils pushing one another with the greatest Fury’ (186).
Woodcut depicting the attack of the wolves, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe … The whole Three Volumes faithfully Abridg’d (London: A. Bettesworth, T. Brotherton and M. Hotham, 1722).
The woodcuts to Midwinter’s second volume centre on Crusoe’s return to his island, Friday’s reunion with his father, the role the three barbarous Englishmen played in the destruction of their countrymen’s homes, a massacre between two rivalling groups of savages, two engagements between the colonizers and the savages, and the conversion of Will. Atkins, as well as the latter’s marriage to one of the savages, who had turned Christian. The figure of the young friar appears in three of the woodcuts, the opening one (introducing Crusoe’s return to the island) and another in which he and Crusoe overhear Will. Atkins’s religious instruction of his future wife. The final illustration features the priest performing Atkins’s marriage. In Taylor’s edition, none of the illustrations had featured the friar, as a result leaving out the central motif of Atkins’s conversion, which mirrors Crusoe’s own in Midwinter’s first volume. The plates in Taylor’s edition of Farther Adventures concentrated on the visualization of Crusoe’s adventures once he has left the island again, subjects – including the massacre and burning of two villages, as well as the passing of the great wall of China with the Muscovite caravan – that were also adopted for illustration by Midwinter’s designer-artisan. Midwinter’s edition introduces a woodcut ahead of the exploration of foreign territories that also underscores Crusoe’s attachment to Friday, for the departure from the island is visualized by means of a woodcut which represents the savages’ attack of the ship and Friday’s being killed in the process (Figure 26). Given Friday’s centrality in the illustrations, especially to the first volume, devoting a visualization to his death impresses on the reader his personal significance for Crusoe. At the end of Farther Adventures, Midwinter’s illustrator, furthermore, aligning himself with the Amsterdam editions, adopted a subject that had not been visualized in Taylor’s edition: the destruction of the pagan idol, an act in which Crusoe is cast as a defender of his faith, even though the woodcut image does not focus on the protagonist, instead showing the idol aflame.
Woodcut depicting Friday’s death, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe … The whole Three Volumes faithfully Abridg’d (London: A. Bettesworth, T. Brotherton and M. Hotham, 1722).
Midwinter’s illustrations possessed an uncommonly dominant role in the mixed media economy of the edition. As iconic gateways to meaning, the woodcuts recurred far more frequently than in Taylor’s edition, in the process affecting the reading experience more prominently. Midwinter’s series represented a range of (modally different) subjects, which necessitated a continuous shift of mode to make sense of the dual narrative of the edition’s text–image framework. As a result, illustrations may collectively have been understood as a narrative sequence that – if not replicating – intersected with the typographical narrative by highlighting (and, in the process, assigning significance to) some scenes in favour of others. Compared with Taylor’s sixth edition, Midwinter’s woodcut frontispiece and the twenty-nine woodcut vignettes were distributed across 376 pages of text, which comprised both parts of Defoe’s work: readers would, on average, encounter an illustration every 12 pages of printed text. Taylor’s fourteen illustrations, by contrast, were distributed across 628 pages, resulting in an illustration–text ratio of, on average, one illustration per every 45 pages of printed text. So the visual economy of Midwinter’s edition facilitated a reading of Defoe’s work that was both strikingly visual and typographical. It advanced a dual mode that was unusual because such a profusion of text-interpretive woodcuts had been unprecedented in a literary edition of an eighteenth-century work, even though in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress ‘on average, a reader would have found thirteen to twenty or so illustrations per edition’ (Collé-Bak, Reference Collé-Bak2010, pp. 228–9). Importantly, however, very few of these would have been woodcuts of the same metatextual quality as Midwinter’s and a large number of them were, in fact, executed as copperplates.
Not catering to the same readers whom producers of chapbooks would primarily target, Midwinter’s woodcuts were characterized by varied complexity that would have had consequences for the readers’ experience of the visually framed works. A visual reading of the intermedial narrative of Midwinter’s volumes required the reader-viewer to be familiar with reading practices that had characterized early modern media of cheap print such as illustrated broadsides. These involved the three modes – reflective, narrative and allusive – that Alexandra Franklin has identified in ballad illustrations (Franklin, Reference Franklin, Murphy and O’Driscoll2013, p. 171). But Midwinter’s illustrations also utilized more sophisticated strategies of meaning-making commonly associated with copperplate illustrations, specifically multi-modal literacy, that is ‘the use of textual, visual, aural, and somatic components to communicate meaning’ (Ezell, Reference Ezell2018, p. 358). Woodcuts, unlike copperplate illustrations, were not tonal media and, for that reason, could not effectively reproduce and convey perspective or communicate a sense of depth through gradation. Compared to the illustration that Taylor had included of Crusoe’s rescue of Friday as well as of his killing of the savages (which actions are captured by a caption in Taylor’s image, ‘Robinson rescues his Friday and kills his Pursuers, Vol. I. Page 238’), Midwinter’s woodcut, which copies the larger illustration closely while changing the format from portrait to landscape orientation, does not convey a sense of depth that would aid the viewer in devising a directional order for the visual reading (Figures 27 and 28). Image clusters co-exist without a particular order being indicated, but these clusters were not supposed to be understood as occurring at the same time. In fact, such a multi-cluster design on a temporal plane of simultaneity was uncommon: as a result, image structures had to be made sense of interrelatedly as part of a diachronic narrative. In this, the woodcut image frequently functioned as an introductory and proleptic medium the full meaning of which would only be unravelled once the reader continued their reading and returned to the woodcut as an essential map and anchoring framework to the more complex verbal narrative.
Copperplate of Crusoe rescuing Friday, 1721 Taylor edition.
Woodcut of Crusoe rescuing Friday, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe … The whole Three Volumes faithfully Abridg’d (London: A. Bettesworth, T. Brotherton and M. Hotham, 1722).
Compressing the composition of Taylor’s illustration in the way the designer-artisan for Midwinter’s illustration did obscures the mapping of the image whereby the viewer establishes a directional order and ostensibly moves from the larger figures in the foreground to those in the middle ground and, thence, to the background. Taylor’s image possesses discrete clusters, which represent multiple moments in a progressive narrative which reveals the narrator’s viewing of the savages having brought two prisoners onto the shore, the escape of one of the prisoners, Crusoe’s intervention to deliver him and his killing of the savages who pursue their destined victim. Even a reading that moves from the foreground to the background mistakes the way in which the designer has realized Crusoe’s observation and his eventual intervention. For the earliest moment recorded by the narrator is, in fact, the one in the left-hand background where the savages are shown dancing around the fire. It is a scene that concentrates on their merriment rather than on their consumption of human flesh, as Crusoe records.
In Midwinter’s edition, the woodcut occurs on page 112 but it visually compresses and reorganizes a long account on Crusoe’s part that extends over four pages. The core stages of the narrative are captured in this extract.
My Spirits sunk within me, when I perceiv’d them drag two miserable Creatures from the Boats, to act afresh the dreadful Tragedy, as I supposed they had done before. … You may imagine I was dreadfully affrighted upon this Occasion, when, as I thought they pursued him [Man Friday] in a whole Body, all running towards my Palace. … I was infinitely pleased with what Swiftness the poor Creature ran from his Pursuers. … Between them and my Castle there was a Creek, that very same where I sail’d into with all my Effects from the Wreck of the Ship, on the steep Banks of which, I very much fear’d the poor Victim would be taken. … But soon was I out of Pain for him, when I perceiv’d he made nothing of it, tho’ at full Tide. … The other Savage seeing his Fellow fall, stopt as if he had been amazed, when advancing towards him, I could perceive him take his Bow from his Back and fixing an Arrow to it, was preparing to shoot me, and without Dispute might have lodg’d the Arrow in my Breast, had I gave him Leave; but in this absolutely necessary Cause of Self-Preservation, I immediately fired at him, and shot him dead, just as his Hand was going to draw the fatal String.
At the bottom of the page preceding the woodcut – that is, page 111 – the narrator described ‘two miserable Creatures [being dragged] from the Boats’, one of them subsequently being killed. Friday ‘seeing himself a little at Liberty, Nature that Moment as it were inspir’d him with Hopes of Life, that he started away from them [his captors], and made with incredible Swiftness along the Sands directly to that Part of the Coast, where my ancient and venerable Castle stood’. The design does not capture the full narrative Crusoe presents to the reader but zooms in on Friday who, at the time he crosses the creek, according to the narrator, was followed by the savages and was turning towards the castle. The two pursuers whom Crusoe kills are presumably those who had followed Friday – Crusoe’s future companion already rendered in the far-right background – escaping from those who have just been felled by the narrator. Furthermore, the introduction of Crusoe into the scene is belated, as he decides only on seeing that Friday is making an escape and has successfully crossed the creek that he should intervene and protect the captive. Overall, the visual composition centralizes the captive’s arrival on the island, his captors’ demise and Crusoe’s gaining a companion. Rather than being synchronized with Defoe’s verbal narrative, then, the woodcut furnishes a more concentrated narrative of action, the exact number of agents, their spatial location and their movements not being accurately rendered. On the contrary, the iconic repetition of Friday in the design makes him the most important individual in the woodcut, the narrator – not represented from his observation post in the castle – only entering the action once he considers Friday’s rescue opportune.
The woodcut’s complicated readability demonstrates that Midwinter’s illustration introduced a visual storytelling device that, even in an abridgement and half the price of the full novel, was deemed accessible to its readers. It should also be borne in mind that, rather than being used exclusively for silent reading by one individual only, eighteenth-century editions were read communally, frequently as part of family gatherings where the illustrations would have served a synoptic and explanatory function by which listeners to a reading may have obtained a visual map of what they had just listened to (Williams, Reference Williams2017). As part of this reading process, listeners had to situate themselves vis-à-vis the woodcut once the illustration was shown to them at the end or as part of an interrupted reading of passages visualized. In fact, the very process of defining iconic reading order and meaning-making may, at that point, have been a collaborative, conversational one, negotiated and determined by the individuals viewing the woodcut.
Because of a spatial ordering principle not being apparent, Midwinter’s image seems to conflate the discreteness of the individual image clusters, including the meaningfulness associated with the size of individual figures or design clusters, a practice with which readers would have been familiar. For these readers, rather than seeking representational realism, would have been attuned to identifying narrative by discerning causality and action as manifested by movement and spatial organization. Midwinter’s woodcut thus brings together in a condensed space five different moments that culminate in Friday’s delivery. In fact, the figure of Friday is visualized three times: he is one of the prisoners who has just been dragged from the boat on to the shore, he is then depicted running in the direction of the creek (which readers would also have seen represented in woodcut 7, where Crusoe was depicted ‘Casting up my Notches on my Post’ [55] beside the creek) while turning round to ascertain whether he is followed. And he is finally shown close to Crusoe’s habitation, having escaped his persecutors, whom Crusoe has just shot. The creek fulfils an important function of inter-iconic cohesion: a device central to the geography of Crusoe’s island, it is both landing place and a point of orientation that facilitates the anchoring of actions. Readers recognizing the creek will be able to create a mental map that is punctuated by such locations as Crusoe’s habitation in the frontispiece. Such a map had, of course, already been furnished by Taylor as the ‘curious Frontispiece, representing the most remarkable Incidents of his Life’, to his 1720 edition of Serious Reflections. This ‘diachronic and synoptic’ (Blewett, Reference Blewett1995, p. 29) map represented at least fourteen different clusters of activities, zoomed-in encounters between individuals and objects (ranging from the habitations the Spaniards constructed to the English ship that will remove Crusoe from the island).
Following Midwinter’s woodcut visualizing Friday’s rescue, the next illustration adopts a similarly complex spatio-temporal narrative structure (Figure 29). In fact, it compresses representationally a typographical narrative that unfolds over three printed pages, the killing of the savages marking the final action occurring. The principal points of the narrative which structure the printed image are contained within a much larger textual unit, which provides Crusoe’s own reaction to the horrible spectacle he is witnessing as well as his terror at seeing the savages approach him, including the instructions he supplies to Friday:
They were all about their Fire, eating the Flesh of one of their Prisoners; … another lay bound upon the Sand, a little distant from them, which they design’d to be their next Sacrifice; and this, he told me, was not one of their Nation, but one of those very bearded Men, who was driven by a Storm into their Country, and of whom he had so often talk’d to me about. … I saw plainly, by my Glass, a white Man, who lay upon the Breach of the Sea, with his Hands and Feet ty’d. … From the Tree, where I took this Prospect, I perceived another Tree and a Thicket beyond it, about fifty Yards nearer to them, than where I was, which, by taking a small Circle round, I might come at undiscover’d, and then I should be within half a Shot of these Devourers. … Now, Friday, said I, mind what I say. … Why then Fire at them, said I; and that very Moment I gave Fire likewise.
Only once the narrator’s description of the event is concluded does the reader encounter the woodcut, an intentional order of text–image arrangement that organizes readability. The woodcut’s placement is deliberate, not only for reasons governing the interpretive relationship the image entertains with the printed text. But it is also technologically conditioned, for – unlike copperplates, which had to be printed on separate paper stock and could not be printed as part of the typeset text – the physical woodblock was set alongside the type and printed at the same time. The spatial placement of the illustration is thus meaningful, since the typesetter, if not instructed otherwise, could have chosen to place the woodblock anywhere within the three pages of the narrator’s description. That the illustration follows the printed text allows a reading that looks back to the text which has preceded it: it visually facilitates a recapitulation of the actions, offering a spatial map that needs to be endowed with direction through mnemonic recall. In other words, the woodcut is mapped onto the printed text, using image clusters but relying on the syntactic connections and relationships that are provided by the typographical text.
Woodcut rendering Crusoe and Friday killing the savages, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe … The whole Three Volumes faithfully Abridg’d (London: A. Bettesworth, T. Brotherton and M. Hotham, 1722).
The visual cohesion and interconnectedness between illustrations, which had already been established by means of the recurrent representation of the creek at the centre of two earlier woodcuts, is emphasized again in the illustration following the one depicting the shooting of the savages. For the designer closely copies the background of the previous illustration, focusing on Crusoe’s fortified habitation on the right, the mountains in the distance and the fire around which the cannibals are celebrating their savage feast on the left. The narrator’s viewing the group of savages – nineteen individuals according to the text, of which the illustrator has, however, rendered six only – represents the beginning of the narrative, the wood from which Crusoe is spying on them not being visualized. The reader’s suspension of disbelief is required to assume that Crusoe’s habitation, including its palisade, is not, in fact, visible to the savages. The creek, which had been central to the previous image, has been omitted, and a shift in viewpoint appears to have taken place: the scene presented shows four boats that have carried the savages to the shore, the Spanish prisoner sitting under a tree and another captive about to be beaten to death by a savage lifting a club on the left. Rushing from the right to the left, Crusoe and Friday are firing their rifles in the direction of the cruel spectacle ahead of them, although their aim is poor and the bullets will surely miss the captive’s slayer.
The woodcut design departs in a number of respects from Crusoe’s narrative: within the spatial compass of the illustration, it is not possible to realize iconically what the narrator informs the reader he is able to see (‘From the Tree, where I took this Prospect, I perceived another Tree and a Thicket beyond it, about fifty Yards nearer to them’ [158]) or how he is able to approach the savage unseen. The Spaniard in the foreground, whom the text characterizes as having ‘his Hands and Feet ty’d with Flag, or things resembling Rushes’ (158), is not fettered at all. The most striking deviation from the text is introduced in the small group of an imploring kneeling figure and the cannibal about to kill him – a standard visual composition invoking Cain and Abel but here added to impress upon the viewer the threat faced by the Spaniard. This addition of a visual cluster complicates the temporal framework of the illustration, since it provides the immediate reason for Crusoe and Friday’s intervention: the imminent threat to the captive’s life. Rather than capture the moment on which the narrator focuses – that is, the large group of cannibals sending two of their own (as opposed to the single figure depicted) to ‘untie the Bands from’ the feet of ‘this poor unhappy Christian’ (158) – the illustrator offers a more dramatic image that represents an instance of ‘imaginative expansion’ by which the moment of the killing is, in fact, anticipated.Footnote 17 As in the case of the multiple occurrences of Friday in the previous woodcut, the Spaniard appears twice – once as a prisoner on his own, the second time – and slightly further back – as the imploring figure on his knees expecting death. This reintroduction of the figure reinforces causal relationships but also makes him the semantic centre of the woodcut, which turns into a visual narrative of his liberation.
The complex reading order underpinning the woodcut, including the lack of synchronization and mimesis between the typographic text and its iconic representation, constitutes a narrative device that amplifies textual experience, even while it recapitulates in the compact form of a single illustration the different actions that the designer thought essential for an understanding of Crusoe’s narrative. This kind of woodcut contrasts in its readability and temporal-spatial make-up with the majority of illustrations included in Midwinter’s volumes. For the next woodcut in the edition provides the reader-viewer with a much simpler design in which three image clusters are brought together (Figure 30). These clusters capture three activities – the cutting down of trees by Friday and his father, Crusoe’s shooting of ‘the wild Dams, and his bringing home their Kids to my Enclosure’ (166). Compared to the more extended narrative that had been reworked by the preceding woodcut, the illustration depicting Crusoe in the background and Friday and his father in the foreground visualizes merely two sentences from the text. The two moments narrated – the shooting of the goats and the removing of their kids to Crusoe’s enclosure – are not captured discretely but rather as a single scene in which the causality between the action behind the enclosure and the removal of the kids from their mothers is not evident. The temporal sequentiality of moments is thus less important for an understanding of the text than the occurrence of different actions which will sustain Crusoe and the others on the island, in terms of both defence and food.
Woodcut of Friday and his father felling trees and the goats’ kids being taken to Crusoe’s enclosure, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe … The whole Three Volumes faithfully Abridg’d (London: A. Bettesworth, T. Brotherton and M. Hotham, 1722).
The woodcuts’ narrative function, including their make-up and complexity, determine the pace at which the action can be apprehended not only through a reading of the typographical text but also through its remediation in iconic form, especially if the woodcut punctuates a narrative by interrupting the development of the action through its physical placement on the printed page. The modal identities of the illustrations range from those that bring together scenes of labour and cultivation with those, as in the woodcut succeeding the one in which Crusoe stocks his enclosure with kids, that offer moments which need to be perceived as part of a continuous narrative. Less than one page of text spatially separates the one illustration (depicting the woodcutting scene) from another (rendering the mutineers’ arrival on the island), requiring that the reader switch code and mode of perception rapidly from the representation of Georgic labour to that of human drama (Figure 31). For the latter woodcut depicts Crusoe on the mountain, which he has just climbed via his ladder, looking through his ‘Prospective-Glass’ (168) at the English ship in the distance. The longboat visible on the right has brought the English mutineers and their hostages to the shore. Crusoe informs the reader that the central group in the foreground is composed of three ‘unarm’d and bound’ (169), even though only two figures are kneeling and lifting their hands imploringly, while one of the mutineers has raised his sword. This visual cluster makes non-ambiguous Crusoe’s characterization of the figures kneeling as prisoners, without rendering the qualification he offers as to their gestures and the degree of fear and affliction their behaviour demonstrates. Crusoe thus serves as an observer not only of the ship, which may pose a threat to him at the same time that it might be a means of removing himself from the island. But he also discerns through his ‘Prospective-Glass’ the emotional-psychological distress the prisoners are experiencing.
Woodcut depicting Crusoe observing the mutineers’ treatment of their captives, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe … The whole Three Volumes faithfully Abridg’d (London: A. Bettesworth, T. Brotherton and M. Hotham, 1722).
The reader, not possessed of a means to zoom in on the group of mutineers and captives, primarily needs to recognize their representational roles. The mode of their realization – one figure brandishing a sword, while two figures are on their knees – conveys their status alternately as mutineer and prisoners. Crusoe’s account offers a focused act of interpretative perception that provides the qualified assessment which the medium, rendering the figures at such a small size and without nuanced expressiveness, is unable to communicate. The design of the woodcut reduces Crusoe’s narrative to its human agents and the ship. Relations among the individuals and objects rendered need to be established, at times by mapping the narrative that has already typographically preceded the physical woodcut onto the iconic realization of it, at others by anticipating imaginatively that which has been set typographically, following the illustration.
Modal variation, from observational reportage (as in Crusoe’s narrating what he perceives in the distance) to sympathetic identification and concern once he witnesses the mutineers’ behaviour towards the captives, is not conveyed by the illustration but needs to be intermedially introduced, the illustration being infused with meaning through the typographical text (Figure 32). Humorous scenes, such as Friday’s luring a bear onto a tree, are not straightforwardly readable in the visual medium, since the illustrator focuses on Friday’s position on a bending branch, the bear approaching him. That this scene is, in fact, one of Friday’s own contriving is not clear to the reader who has not read that Friday tells Crusoe and his companions, ‘he would make us good laugh’, and that the scene presented is part of this endeavour: ‘he call’d out, that he wanted to discourse with him [the bear]; and then throwing Stones on Purpose to incense him, the Beast turns about in Fury, and with prodigious Strides shuffles after him’ (181). Friday intends the spectacle as an entertainment for the onlookers, but the detailed execution of his figure, including his face, allows an expressiveness that the figures in the background lack. Part of Friday’s performance entails that he drop from the branch and take up the rifle he left on the ground, shooting the bear as it makes it way down the tree to follow him. While the triangulated composition consisting of Friday, the bear and the rifle are at the centre of the action, the group of riders on horseback to the left appear detached, owing to their gaze being turned away from Friday.
Woodcut depicting Friday and the bear, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe … The whole Three Volumes faithfully Abridg’d (London: A. Bettesworth, T. Brotherton and M. Hotham, 1722).
The realization of the riders, which does not reflect the general insistence on specificity and detail in the other woodcuts, was not an original part of the design. In fact, it was derived from an existing, extra-textual illustration, such as woodcut 4 in Bettesworth’s The Famous History of Montelion, Knight of the Oracle where the horses provided a model for those reproduced in Midwinter’s woodcut. Much in the same way, taking inspiration from earlier woodcut illustrations, the designer of woodcut 6 in Farther Adventures looked to an earlier design of a battle engagement that appeared in The English Hero: or, Sir Francis Drake Reviv’d (1695) and The Noble and Renowned History of Guy Earl of Warwick (1711). Midwinter’s illustrator followed the general structure of a profile view of soldiers fighting but amplified it through the addition of arrows flying in the air, a placing into relief of the different kinds of weapons, a juxtaposition between the spears and lances, on the one hand, and the bows and arrows, on the other. The latter had already featured in the woodcut for The English Hero, even though in Midwinter’s illustration the group on the left are rendered as black savages.
Grounded in a fundamentally different iconographic tradition, the woodcut depicting Crusoe’s dream uses the formal visual conventions of dream allegory (Figure 33). It is the only illustration in Midwinter’s edition which does not primarily focus on action and realism. The illustrator visualized the angel along the lines of the illustration in the edition of the Dutch translation, although that illustration had not given an indication – save the caption – that what is seen by the reader is, in fact, a dream. Instead, the woodcut for Midwinter’s first volume represented two distinct scenes which occur simultaneously: Crusoe’s sleeping as a result of his having consumed tobacco steeped in rum, on the one hand, and his actual dream vision where he is admonished by the angel, on the other. The depiction of a dream in two separate compartments – one image showing the sleeper, the other representing the dream – was an established convention and was also used in another Midwinter publication, William Hill’s The True and Wonderful History of Nicholas Hart; or a Faithful Account of the Sleeping Man’s Visions (1711). At the same time, the illustrator may have been inspired by the manner in which the illustration of the same subject in the edition of the 1720 French translation had captured Crusoe’s encounter with the otherworldly agent. For the dream had been depicted in a thought bubble above Crusoe, who, once he has woken up, starts reading the Bible, in the process heeding the angel’s warning. The textual moment captured in Midwinter’s edition precedes the one realized for the edition of the French translation, which highlights his conversion. Asleep, Crusoe is as yet unrepentant, for he has not imbibed the message the angel will convey. Defoe’s text moves from sleep to apparent wakefulness during the dream, culminating in real awakening because of Crusoe’s being frightened.
Woodcut of Crusoe’s dream, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe … The whole Three Volumes faithfully Abridg’d (London: A. Bettesworth, T. Brotherton and M. Hotham, 1722).
The very presence of the woodcut in the first third of Midwinter’s edition emphasizes the significance of the subject, especially because it would remain unillustrated for Taylor’s authorized editions. Once this illustration is omitted in the epitome version of Robinson Crusoe (and in chapbook versions whose publishers derive illustrations from Midwinter’s apparatus), ‘narrative recodification’ (O’Malley, Reference O’Malley2011, p. 27) of the kind seen in illustrated chapbooks of Defoe’s work is the result, as a text that is redacted more substantially and accompanied by a smaller number of illustrations enters into different medial relationships, especially once the woodcuts of the series are read cumulatively.
In the interest of shaping interpretation by using the same (modal) kind of illustrations – that either focused on Crusoe’s adventures and his island existence or employed iconic modes of readability that would resemble one another (or both) – low-end abridgements of Defoe’s work, including chapbooks published in the second half of the eighteenth century, furnished simplified visual apparatuses. This section has, however, argued that Midwinter’s set of woodcut illustrations resisted earlier modes of readability by drawing on illustrations by Taylor and looking to the Amsterdam editions (especially the visual realizations of Crusoe’s dream and the destruction of the pagan idol, but also in the introduction of the friar in several illustrations), while, at the same time, utilizing strategies of iconic meaning-making that were derived from earlier woodcut illustrations. While derivative in some instances, the woodcut series as a whole demonstrates how its designer sought to produce different maps to the actions of the narrative, which necessitated – in the cases of the multi-action images involving the savages – careful decoding and the recovery of the intended diachronic and narrative order intended by the illustrator.
The illustrator introduced different modes of representation, ranging from realist to symbolic. In doing so, he deployed techniques that involved the physical enlargement of an object or figure to emphasize their significance and centrality in the narrative. The ‘Prospective-Glass’ and sword in the woodcut in which Crusoe observes the mutineers and their captives defy the realism of proportionate size and dimension. But they are realized in this manner to serve as cues that direct the reader’s gaze. Curiously, it is this formal-compositional counteracting of realistic and proportionate representation that centralizes the circumstantial detail and cements the credibility of the realism of the narrative: Crusoe’s bringing closer to the reader, through magnification, that which can be found in the distance – first the ship and, subsequently, the mutineers – closes a narrative feedback loop by which the reader follows this magnification and a medially and representationally asserted focus by seeing (like Crusoe) the mutineers and the treatment of the captives as well, but from a different physical vantage point. The enlarging of an important image component is also undertaken in the woodcut that renders the shooting of Friday in Farther Adventures: Friday occupies nearly one third of the length of the ship on which he is lying, the length of the arrow stuck in his body exceeding the height of the rowers in the boats approaching. He appears a Gulliver among the Lilliputians, and his extraordinary size makes him the centre of the image, even though the dimensional enlargement is only one element in which Crusoe’s account is altered. For, ‘unfortunately for him, poor Creature! Who fell under the Cloud of Three Hundred Arrows, no less than Seven piercing thro’ his Body, killing one of the best of Servants, and the faithfullest of Companions in all my Solitudes and Afflictions’ (284). Friday’s figure is magnified to emphasize his significance, not only in relation to the narrative, but also, as Crusoe’s memorial makes clear, as a monument of what he meant to the narrator while on the island. What will follow the moment represented is a massacre during which Crusoe will kill those who murdered his friend. The woodcut thus freezes a moment, one in which the destructive action on both sides seems to be suspended, only to erupt afresh and with redoubled force on Crusoe’s part.
In providing woodcuts that emphasized or singled out particular agents and objects or that rearranged textual narrative in a way that necessitated the cross-referencing of typographical text and woodcut as part of an intermedial reading, the designer went beyond period practice. Midwinter’s abridgement, reinforced as it was semiotically by the woodcuts, provided a multimedia product which shaped the reading experience through the dominant presence of the illustrations. For these images physically punctuated the printed work and required a slowing down of the reading pace to apprehend their meaning. In their extended life beyond Midwinter’s abridgement and ‘Epitome’, they promoted a reading of versions of Robinson Crusoe and Farther Adventures that – because of the editions’ more affordable price (compared to the full-text editions) – shaped the way in which readers understood Defoe’s works by seeing actions and scenes as part of a series rather than a comparatively small number of copperplates, as in Taylor’s editions.
Conclusion
Maximilian E. Novak has pointed out that ‘the cliché about Defoe’s realism resembling a Dutch painting may in fact suggest that Defoe drew much from the contemporary artistic form that best represented the real’ (Novak, Reference Novak2015, p. 43). The painterly analogies critics have used to understand the novelist’s realism diagnose the author’s visual-verbal manner of reification. Likewise, illustrators throughout the eighteenth century sought to make readers see the scenes iconically rendered in ways the earliest readers of Robinson Crusoe did in England and on the Continent in the early 1720s. Because of their dominant medial presence in full-text editions and abridgements, illustrations were integral to the reading process. As such, the reading history of Defoe’s novel encompasses not only how readers made sense of the text. Rather, it is also a history of the visual text presented as part of the medial hybrid of the illustrated edition. Recovering reading experience of Robinson Crusoe in the first decade of its publication entails a process of intermedial reading in which the illustrations function as interpretive lenses. Illustrations are increasingly recognized and studied, even in the literature classroom, as part of the large body of Crusoeiana and its material culture (Swenson, Reference Swenson, Harrow and Saxton2020, pp. 214–19), as well as their ‘place in the cultural imagination’ (Swenson, Reference Swenson, Harrow and Saxton2020, p. 213), and scholars are beginning to be more attuned to a visual reading history than they have been in the past.
Where previous scholarship focused on a handful of illustrations of Robinson Crusoe from the period 1719 to 1722, this Element has demonstrated the range of visual responses that publishers both English and Continental offered to Defoe’s work. The fact that forty-six subjects involving the eponymous character and his actions were selected by illustrators demonstrates that there was no monopoly in terms of the visual identity of Robinson Crusoe; in fact, the reprinting of the plates from Taylor’s sixth edition in full-text editions beyond Taylor’s death in 1724 and up to the 1780s, had long created the impression that these illustrations enjoyed paradigmatic status until they were replaced in the early 1790s by a number of strikingly different illustrative apparatuses. But this assumption could not be further from the truth: Midwinter’s woodcut designs – though not the entire series included in his abridgements – continued to be used just as long as Taylor’s. More than that, Midwinter’s woodcuts, as has been shown, are evidence that the transmission and visual framing of Defoe’s work was not only a national endeavour. While knowledge of this intercultural borrowing on the part of Midwinter’s designers – who clearly looked to the Amsterdam sets of plates for their woodcut series – would not have informed chapbook readers’ encounters with the images later in the century, the transcultural reception of Robinson Crusoe beyond Britain nevertheless demonstrates that on the Continent the protagonist and his adventures enjoyed a distinct and long-lived visual life. For the sets produced to accompany the French and Dutch translations not only were adopted in Germany, where they were reprinted for the next fifty years, but they also were reprinted in editions of the French and Dutch translations. Taken together, then, the illustrations produced in England and on the Continent between 1719 and 1722 generated the most extended archive of visualizations commissioned for use in books before series of modern novels, starting from the 1780s, were being undertaken. Of all illustrated eighteenth-century fiction, Robinson Crusoe was unique not only in terms of the number of plates commissioned within such a short period but that its international reach was such that illustrated editions became the default format which purchasers abroad encountered in the 1720s.
Especially in the Continental visual realizations of Defoe’s work, Crusoe looms large. His iconic character is defined from numerous perspectives and viewpoints, the Picart frontispiece serving as the first attempt outside England to embody the hero. Other illustrations operated as part of an intra-textual feedback loop in which they inferred Crusoe’s initial presentation. Both this portrait and the Clark-Pine rendering were super icons, but only the latter, as Russell Palmer has documented, was adapted variously by London and regional publishers in Britain throughout the eighteenth century. These super icons served as anchoring points for textual recall as much as proleptic castings of a hero whose multiple contextualizations would be presented as part of the series of illustrations studied in this Element. Attempts at synchronizing and aligning illustrations with Picart’s frontispiece were undertaken only in Martini’s Leipzig plates, which offered meaningful changes to Crusoe’s dress in an attempt to localize him imagologically. The addition of the hat to Crusoe’s figure design reinforced an iconic connection through the repetition of an ‘object emblem’ (Andries, Reference Andries1999, p. 96), even though the characterization of the hero in action differs fundamentally from the way in which Picart had rendered him. Making sense of Crusoe in the illustrations following the frontispiece entailed both a process of alignment and distinction, the visual differentiation signifying not only the castaway’s relocation to a different setting but also his immersion in a task that will be conducive to his survival on the island.
As part of a feedback loop in which all illustrations implicitly refer back to a master characterization, illustrations are to be understood as relational – both to the text they render interpretively and to one another. But this relationality could also function extra-textually, as has been demonstrated in Midwinter’s woodcuts drawing on earlier illustrative modes and concrete models. How malleable Crusoe’s figure was in early eighteenth-century print culture is also evidenced by a 1739 volume, Wundersame Erzehlungen aus dem Reiche derer Todten als Telemaqve, des Ylyssis Sohn, und der berühmte Engeländer, Robinson Crvsoe, einander daselbst angetroffen. The title was issued by Adam Jonathan Felseckers Erben and introduced an encounter in the realm of the dead between Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, and Robinson Crusoe (Figure 34). A frontispiece depicting the Greek and the English characters accompanied the work. Rather than copying the Picart design of Crusoe, which had been prefixed to all editions of Defoe’s first volume issued by Felßecker, the most recent having appeared in the year of publication of Wundersame Erzehlungen, the Felßecker firm’s plate reproduces the general appearance of the castaway, with the exception of his face, which is not based on the French engraver’s facial design. Instead, whereas Picart’s Crusoe looked to the right, to the ground, the new realization of Crusoe’s head faces the reader, while his body is turned slightly to the left. The updated face resembles that of another castaway, however, Philip Quarll, the English hermit, whose likeness was familiar to German readers via the frontispiece (copied from the English original) which had adorned Felßecker’s 1729 edition of Der englische Einsiedler, another edition (featuring the same plate) having been issued by Wiering in Hamburg a year earlier. In endowing Crusoe with the facial features of Quarll, the designer cast him as a benevolent and kindly individual whose open and smiling countenance essentially differs from Picart’s inscription of Crusoe. The frontispiece not only introduces relationality in bringing Defoe’s hero and Telemachus together in a single plate, but within the realization of the English novel’s character a new variant of the super icon is created, one that inter-iconically evokes a literary descendent of Crusoe (and associations of his story).
Copperplate frontispiece depicting Telemachus and Crusoe, Wundersame Erzehlungen aus dem Reiche derer Todten (Frankfurt: Felßecker, 1739).
This Element has argued in favour of taking into account a comprehensive view of text technologies involved in the visual realization of Defoe’s work – one that reads, irrespective of their production cost, copperplate engravings and woodcuts as meaningful metatexts. Transnational considerations have facilitated insight into the archive of Crusoe-related illustrations that was generated between 1719 and 1722. At times, these plates were amplified as well, in the manner of an augmented apparatus, as in Martini’s edition, but in a format that differed from the Leipzig publishers: an extra-illustrated edition. In a 1778 London edition that features John Lodge’s engraved version of the Clark–Pine portrait of Crusoe, ‘as describ’d in Page 176’, as well as the six plates Taylor commissioned for the sixth edition, but now signed by Lodge, a purchaser had additional plates bound in. This extra-illustrated volume introduced engraved prints (numbers 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11) from Carington Bowles’s ‘Twelve Prints representing the surprising Events in the Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’, which had been designed by Daniel Dodd and were published in January 1783. They were literary media, which, ‘when coloured, framed and glazed, ma[d]e elegant and pleasing Furniture’. Measuring 29.4 × 18.8 cm, the prints, the set of which sold at 3s., were significantly larger than the Taylor plates; as a result, they needed to be folded four times each to fit in the book. The ‘richness of design, and elegance of engraving’ Bowles noted in his 1784 catalogue distinguished these fold-out prints from the remaining plates, as did their captions (Figure 35).Footnote 18 For the captions consisted of two components: the first line provides a summative statement, capturing the subject realized, such as, for print 7, ‘Robinson Crusoe frightened at the appearance of the Old He-Goat in the Cave’. This line is followed by a quotation from the novel to focus on Crusoe’s reaction to the animal he has not yet seen: ‘I stepped back and was indeed struck with such a surprise, that it put me into a cold Sweat.’ In several ways, the extra-illustrations amplified the reading experience, not only adding visualizations of subjects that had not been introduced by Taylor’s fifty-seven-year-old plate designs, even though they are termed ‘New Cuts’ on the title page. But, in addition to illustrating the discovery of the footprint, the shooting of the savages and the mutineers’ arrival on the island, the prints also duplicate subjects such as Friday’s rescue and spatially map the action in the way the ‘curious Frontispiece’ to Serious Reflections had done.
Extra-illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe, 1778, featuring Carington Bowles’s Crusoe prints.
Even though the prints are more sophisticatedly executed in terms of their design than the earlier plates, they centrally use the strategies of narrative mapping that had underpinned the 1721 Taylor illustrations, even while they introduce extensive visual characterization in the manner of the Amsterdam illustrations. They are medially distinct, requiring the reader to unfold them before they can be viewed; like the Taylor ones, they are bound into the codex in the right places, allowing the reader an intermedial reading, not only between the print and the typographical text of the edition, but also involving the captions. The bifurcated captions’ paratextual function goes beyond that of the Amsterdam edition of the Dutch translation. It guides the intermedial reading by creating relations that need to be established not only with the semiotic components of the prints, the typographical text, but all other illustrations – Taylor’s and Bowles’s becoming part of one illustrative apparatus.
Taylor’s sets of illustrations remained current through their use in reprints of Defoe’s work. They were declared to be ‘new’ more than fifty years after their first publication and they were valuable aids to textual comprehension even then. They could, however, be made to signify in novel ways in such formats as the extra-illustrated edition where prints such as Bowles’s introduced subjects and modes of realization that had been used before in Continental editions. Far from arguing that these later visualizations were directly inspired by the Amsterdam illustrative apparatuses, Bowles’s prints nevertheless stood in dialogue with the visual archive examined in this Element as much as they were physically part of the 1778 extra-illustrated edition. Their inclusion in the volume was part of an effort – like Martini’s for his fourth edition – to generate out of disparate materials deriving from different sources an illustrative apparatus that would facilitate a new and iconically enriched reading of Robinson Crusoe.
Acknowledgements
The impetus for this study developed while I was researching, with the generous support of a EURIAS-FRIAS Senior Fellowship, a project on the transnational history of the robinsonade. At the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) I was able to focus on how, beyond Britain, readers experimented with the genre and imagined different versions of Daniel Defoe’s protagonist. I explored the German adoption of Defoe’s classic, focusing on how illustrations made sense of the work. The fellowship at FRIAS not only allowed me to identify blind spots in the documented international and material-crossmedial reception of Crusoe, but it also demonstrated to me that the earliest phase of the multi-medial interpretation of Defoe’s work had been all but neglected. I am grateful to the many exchanges with the vibrant research community I had the privilege to be part of at FRIAS. Particular thanks are due to the Institute’s then director, Bernd Kortmann, and his interest in the project.
I could not, however, have completed the Element without the colleagues and friends who have given me a platform to discuss my research at conferences they organized. Portions of different parts of the Element were presented as part of keynote addresses at the following conferences where I benefitted from productive conversations: the Second International Symposium on Foreign Literature and Comparative Literature, which took place at the Shanghai International Studies University in June 2023 and the 8th International Conference on Narratology and the 11th Seminar on Narratology in China, which took place at Zhejiang Gongshang University in November 2023. In addition, I presented material as part of guest lectures at East China Normal University and Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in 2022 and 2024 respectively. My sincere thanks to the participants of these events for their useful feedback. Lastly, I am grateful to colleagues and friends with whom I have, over the years, had the chance to discuss Robinson Crusoe and illustrations, especially Nathalie Collé, the late Robert Folkenflik, Russell Palmer, John Richetti, the late Angus Ross and Geoff Sill. In China, I am grateful for the support of colleagues and friends with whom I share an interest in things eighteenth and nineteenth century, as well as illustrated, and who have discussed my research with me: Chang He, Haifeng Hui, Wen Jin, Rong Ou, Xiaomei Qiao, Kwinten Van De Walle, Xin Wang, Xiao Yang, Qiping Yin and Min Zhou. At Fudan I would like to acknowledge the support I receive for my work from the College of Foreign Languages and Literature. It is a pleasure to work with Fudan’s engaged students and young scholars, and Xiaomeng Jin and Li Liu have assisted my research through their questions. I am beholden to Samantha Rayner and Andrew Nash, as well as Bethany Thomas, for their support for this project and for ensuring such a smooth peer review process.
Finally, I am grateful to my late mother for presenting me, when I was three years old, with an illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe and explaining the narrative by means of its pictures. She sparked my early interest in cross-medial meaning and the function of illustrations.
Series Editor
Samantha J. Rayner
University College London
Samantha J. Rayner is Professor of Publishing and Book Cultures at UCL. She is also Director of UCL’s Centre for Publishing, co-Director of the Bloomsbury CHAPTER (Communication History, Authorship, Publishing, Textual Editing and Reading) and co-Chair of the Bookselling Research Network.
Associate Editor
Leah Tether
University of Bristol
Leah Tether is Professor of Medieval Literature and Publishing at the University of Bristol. With an academic background in medieval French and English literature and a professional background in trade publishing, Leah has combined her expertise and developed an international research profile in book and publishing history from manuscript to digital.
Advisory Board
Simone Murray, Monash University
Claire Squires, University of Stirling
Andrew Nash, University of London
Leslie Howsam, Ryerson University
David Finkelstein, University of Edinburgh
Alexis Weedon, University of Bedfordshire
Alan Staton, Booksellers Association
Angus Phillips, Oxford International Centre for Publishing
Richard Fisher, Yale University Press
John Maxwell, Simon Fraser University
Shafquat Towheed, The Open University
Jen McCall, Emerald Publishing
About the Series
This series aims to fill the demand for easily accessible, quality texts available for teaching and research in the diverse and dynamic fields of Publishing and Book Culture. Rigorously researched and peer-reviewed Elements will be published under themes, or ‘Gatherings’. These Elements should be the first check point for researchers or students working on that area of publishing and book trade history and practice: we hope that, situated so logically at Cambridge University Press, where academic publishing in the UK began, it will develop to create an unrivalled space where these histories and practices can be investigated and preserved.
Publishing and Book History
Gathering Editor: Andrew Nash
Andrew Nash is Reader in Book History and Director of the London Rare Books School at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He has written books on Scottish and Victorian Literature, and edited or co-edited numerous volumes including, most recently, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 7 (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Gathering Editor: Leah Tether
Leah Tether is Professor of Medieval Literature and Publishing at the University of Bristol. With an academic background in medieval French and English literature and a professional background in trade publishing, Leah has combined her expertise and developed an international research profile in book and publishing history from manuscript to digital.
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