Robinson der Jüngere, zur angenehmen und nützlichen Unterhaltung für Kinder

by Joachim Heinrich Campe

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429 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1779

About the author

German writer, linguist, educator and publisher. He was a major representative of philanthropinism and the German Enlightenment.

Reviews

[Ida De Boodt · Rating 2 out of 5]

ein interessantes historisches Dokument, eine unglaublich ärgerliche Geschichte

[Suzettexd · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5 - Racist, speciesist, and inherently problematic but the rest of the story was actually quite funny.

[Uri Cohen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This odd retelling of Robinson Crusoe is fanfiction from the 1700s. TL; DR: The New Robinson Crusoe has some interesting aspects, but it's way too preachy to recommend.

There is so little available online in English about this once-popular book that I need to explain about the background. If you're not interested, feel free to skip to the paragraph below that starts "Now for the content!"

STEP ONE
Daniel Defoe's 1719 English novel Robinson Crusoe (which I reviewed here) has inspired lots of castaway fiction. Mostly, the stories are entirely new. (That includes Swiss Family Robinson, the title of which is a hat-tip to Defoe's character.) True, some of the movie versions of Robinson Crusoe take major liberties with the plot (such as the 1988 British film Crusoe starring Aidan Quinn and the 1997 film Robinson Crusoe starring Pierce Brosnan), but that's par for the course when it comes to movies. With books, though, even abridged versions for children tend to stick to the original plot.

STEP TWO
Enter Joachim Heinrich Campe, who was part of an educational reform movement in Germany called Philanthropinism. In 1779-1780, sixty years after Defoe's novel, Campe published a fanfic in German called Robinson der Jüngere, literally Robinson the Younger (which became the title of one of the English translations). Apparently it was the first German novel written specifically for children, and for a while it was very popular, with more than 100 editions in 20 different languages. (For more about the book's editions and also its illustrations, see the blog post entitled Crusoe’s Adventures in Enlightenment Germany.) However, as I will argue shortly, Campe's book has not stood the test of time.

STEP THREE
About ten years later, British publisher John Stockdale translated (or had someone translate) Campe's fanfic into English and titled it The New Robinson Crusoe. I went looking for an online copy and was dismayed to find that absolutely nobody has uploaded this book in a format for ebook readers (epub, MOBI, etc). It's PDF or nothing. Even Project Gutenberg doesn't offer a version in English (only Tagalog and Latin). That was my first indication that nobody today is interested in reading it. I'll theorize shortly why that is.

(I chose from multiple editions at the HathiTrust website. Largely to avoid the hard-to-read versions printed on yellow paper or with the letter "s" looking like an "f," I ended up with the 2-volume 1811 edition (listed by Goodreads here and here). Understandably for a children's book, the print is relatively large, but that means it has a lot more pages: vol 1 ends on p. 328 and vol 2 ends on p. 308. In retrospect, perhaps I should have chosen the 1832 edition, which has a lot more words per page and is only one volume which ends on p. 312.)

Now for the content! The first big difference between The New Robinson Crusoe (hence TNRC) and the original (hence RC) is that the latter is a first-person account by the shipwrecked man, and the former is in third-person about him – as a bedtime story retold over the course of a month in the late 1700s by a British homeschooling dad to his six well-behaved kids. He does keep the major plot points of Defoe's book (at least the island part, as opposed to the beginning and the end). But as with storytelling in general, the storyteller changes the details when he thinks it will make a better story.

And what would make Robinson Crusoe a better story? According to the translator's preface, Jean-Jacques Rousseau points to an answer in his Emile, or On Education, where Rousseau praises RC as the book he would like to use as the basis of his lessons: "It shall be the text to which all our discourses upon natural science shall serve as a commentary." Rousseau goes on to gush about the great premise in which Crusoe is alone "without tools of any sort," to which the translator retorts with a footnote: "Mr. Rousseau is mistaken here. The Old Robinson Crusoe has plenty of tools and instruments, which he saves from the wreck of a ship; whereas the New Robinson Crusoe has nothing but his head and his hands to depend on for his preservation." Aha! That makes a big difference.

In other words, this fanfic retells the story with one major "what if" – what if Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked with nothing whatsoever but the clothes on his back? To survive, he would have to be much more resourceful than Defoe's original character. So for the first half of TNRC, Crusoe has to make do without grain (except corn), without a gun (only a makeshift bow and arrow), and without the goats of the original book (though he does find llamas). He doesn't even have fire – that is, until the second half of the book, when he saves Friday. The resourceful native knows a lot of stuff that Crusoe doesn't, including how exactly to get fire with nothing but two sticks. This premise may appeal to scouts and others who are interested in the thought experiment of how to succeed at wilderness survival under difficult conditions.

(For more details about the plot of TNRC, see the Google translation of the German Wikipedia entry about the book.)

While the dad tells the story, there is a lot of interaction between him and his kids. He prompts them at every step to figure out what Crusoe did or should have done. They ask him to clarify a wide range of issues that come up in the course of the story, such as anthropology (why some natives are cannibals), geology (how do volcanoes work), and zoology ("What are these creatures, these muskitoes?" Apparently these children live in a part of 1700s England that is mosquito-free). Sometimes the dad challenges the kids with an activity, such as making their own bag out of flax or writing a letter to Robinson Crusoe at the point in the story where they have stopped. Perhaps a parent today could get ideas from TNRC about how to present RC as part of a homeschooling curriculum.

Unfortunately, this book is not likely to appeal to today's parents or children, for one simple reason: it's ridiculously didactic. The problem isn't that the dad wants to inculcate values such as hard work, self-control, obeying parents, and trusting God. It's that he harangues his kids continually about them. This hit-you-over-the-head approach ruins the storytelling, to the point that even good students today would be turned off. Perhaps kids 200 years ago were different, or perhaps they just had a lot fewer kids' books to choose from than we do. (Or both.) But I now understand why this well-intentioned fanfic has been out of print for a long time.

P.S. Why did I go looking for The New Robinson Crusoe in the first place? Because it's on the list of 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up. The editors of this excellent book do not include children's books that are historically significant unless they are also worth reading, which is why the list has very few books before the 1800s. I appreciate that policy, but it seems an error was made in this case. (In fact, I wonder just how recently Georg Sponholz read TNRC before writing the review that appears in the 1001 book, since his description of the book fails to mention that it's written as a bedtime story featuring dialogue on most pages between the dad and the children. Furthermore, Sponholz claims that Campe made a point of "choosing a young boy as the protagonist." Really? At the beginning of Defoe's book, Crusoe is 19, while Campe lowers the age slightly to 17. That's hardly a young boy! Perhaps Sponholz read the book when he was a child and remembered its reputation more than its details.) Despite this, I still recommend the 1001 book.

[Linda]

Open Library - in English as "The New Robinson Crusoe"

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL18149...

[L. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ich musste Robinson der Jüngere für ein Seminar in der Uni lesen. Ich dachte es wäre vielleicht etwas weniger rassistisch und kolonialistisch als “Robinson Crusoe“, was ich in der Grundschule gelesen und damals noch nicht wirklich verstanden hatte, da der Autor in der Einführung betont, dass er an den “moralischen Werten“, die durch dieses Buch vermittelt werden, Kritik findet, das ist allerdings nicht so.
1779/80 als eine Version von “Robinson Crusoe“ für Kinder veröffentlichtes Lesebuch, soll “Robinson der Jüngere“ Kindern vor allem christliche moralische Werte und Tugenden, aber auch “naturwissenschaftliche“ Fakten und Allgemeinwissen beibringen. Dabei ändert Campe nicht sehr viel an der Originalgeschichte, verschiebt zwar einige Elemente zeitlich und umgibt die Erzählung mit einer Rahmenhandlung, die die Wichtigkeit familiärer Beziehungen noch einmal hervorheben soll, allerdings bleibt es extrem kolonialistisch, noch am wenigsten grausam ist etwa, dass den Kindern beigebracht wird, dass gute Menschen kein Gold und keine Edelsteine aus Brasilien mitnehmen dürfen, da die ja dem König von Portugal gehören. Allgemein wird der Kolonialismus hier durch die typisch christliche Linse gezeigt, nach der die brutale Art und Weise zwar schlecht ist, in der “manche“ Europäer ihn vollziehen, er allgemein aber eine positive Sache ist, da die weniger kultivierten Ureinwohner so zum Beispiel vom Kannibalismus ab- und zum christlichen Glauben hingekehrt werden.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever. I found the frame story, however, to be extremely intrusive after the first few chapters. This novel was written during the time period when authors often lectured directly to the readers, so the frame story was an improvement. Still, I found myself annoyed by the constant interruptions.

[Martin · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is nothing better than a cheap knockoff of a classic, told in a frustrating, annoying style in which the text keeps interrupting itself to ruin everything. This was no fun at all.