Family Instruction in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Consider the Children

Abstract:This essay argues that The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the sequel to the best-selling Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is an argument for early religious education. In the verdant world of Crusoe’s island, we see the importation of religious instruction from Defoe’s The Family Instructor, written only a few years before the Crusoe trilogy. At the outset of The Farther Adventures, Robinson Crusoe departs for his island, leaving his children in the care of his “good Friend the Widow.” Repeating the past, Crusoe deprives his own children of paternal involvement in their religious education, just as his own father had neglected to participate in his own religious upbringing. As the island becomes Christianized by a French Catholic priest and as its inhabitants embrace family life and religious education, Crusoe finds himself an outsider who cannot remain on the island. Unable to join the “circle of Christianity” on the island and unable to resist his compulsion to wander, Crusoe sets off for the “Brazils.” As a result, the lessons of family instruction, transplanted by Defoe into Crusoe’s Caribbean island, have to be taught without the aid of the hero.