The recent increase in scholarly attention to Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720) does not mean that scriptwriters will scramble to expand their Crusoe adaptations to accommodate the castaway’s metaphysical philosophizing. Neither even will university lecturers revise their syllabi to include a book that its present editors confess is “diffuse and rambling,” “lacks the genius of the earlier volumes,” and ultimately ranks “among Defoe’s infrequent failures” (xxxiv, xv, xxxv). However, as this new edition demonstrates, the third installment is a valuable part of Defoe’s oeuvre because he was an author of “fictions that contain meaningful ideas” (xx) and Serious Reflections harbors his “cherished ideas on a variety of subjects” (xvii). Or should they be considered merely as Crusoe’s ideas? Whether regarded as an integral part of a fictional trilogy that extends the development of the character who became a modern myth, or as a collection of leftover essays Defoe opportunistically assigned to his castaway adventurer with at best superficial commentary on the narrative volumes, Serious Reflections deserves serious consideration. This edition does admirable work by placing it in a broader history of ideas, showing that Defoe was reacting to live intellectual debates about Christianity, consciousness, ethics, the emotions, and far more besides. All told, the edition is a welcome contribution to Defoe scholarship and eighteenth-century studies more generally.

The edition of Serious Reflections by G. A. Starr in Pickering and Chatto’s Works of Daniel Defoe is in my view the best volume not just of the ten volumes of Novels (2008) but of the entire forty-four volumes of Works (2000–8). Starr’s 47-page introduction adroitly identifies Defoe’s “moderate Protestant position” between extremes of skepticism and credulity (1). Starr is excellent on the book’s “venturesome” play with fictionality and reality, and how it constitutes “Defoe’s retroactive self-fashioning” even if it is not straightforwardly allegorical and autobiographical, let alone the key to the whole work, as Crusoe asserts in the preface (4, 6). Starr resolves the tension between reading Serious Reflections as a coherent part of the Crusoe fiction versus reading it as Defoe’s miscellaneous musings by attending to the mediation of philosophy by a subjective perspective, positioning the book as a “series of contemplative essays, which take as subject matter various principles and attitudes, and explore them as ways of looking at oneself and the world,” so that “Crusoe’s experience provides a point of departure, not an object of analysis” for the book’s essays (32, 14). Starr’s 793 explanatory endnotes span nearly 150 pages in his edition and explore in rich detail many parallels with contemporaneous religious and philosophical writings, the Bible, and Defoe’s own oeuvre.

The notes to the Stoke Newington edition are yet more numerous at 1,343, presented as footnotes that frequently take up more of the page than the original text (page 106 has two lines of Defoe to fifty-three lines of explanatory annotation). The notes here, in general, are more interpretive than those of Starr, which I regard as an advantage of the edition when the two are considered as complementary rather than competing endeavors. A disadvantage, however, is the fact that the Stoke Newington edition proceeds pretty much as though the Starr edition does not exist, meaning that opportunities for productive dialogue and engagement are not taken. The five index entries to Starr in this edition contain just one reference to his edition of Serious Reflections, made in the context of preferring the 1720 first edition’s reading “Decoration of Government” over Starr’s emendation to “Decorum of Government” (108 n. 152). There is no citation of the edition even in that note, though it is in the bibliography, and I recall no other mention of it. Similarly, readers expecting engagement with criticism on Serious Reflections produced in recent years (e.g., Hans Turley, Leah Orr, Jason Pearl) will not find it here.¹ Melissa Free’s work on the publication history of Crusoe complicates the blanket assertions in this edition that Serious Reflections was “seldom reprinted” (xv) and that “it was almost never published along with The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures or The Farther Adventures” (xxxiv). Using Lovett’s checklist of editions, Free calculates that nearly 50% of English-language editions of Robinson Crusoe in the eighteenth century contained all three volumes, and the data indicate the unreversed plummet in editions’ inclusion of Serious Reflections only in the 1820s (91). So, Serious Reflections was the third most published work of Defoe’s in the eighteenth century, behind only its two predecessors. The edition is not as up to date and well-informed as it could have been.

The previous installment of the Stoke Newington edition’s Crusoe trilogy, the same editors’ The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, was criticized in a review by James E. May for “insufficient and sometimes inaccurate bibliographical and textual information and […] hundreds of incorrect readings in the text and in the historical collation” (50). Serious Reflections does not have the complexity of early-edition variants seen for The Farther Adventures, and this edition therefore does not contain anything comparable to the 5,703 variants noted in that edition. The “Bibliographical Descriptions” in Serious Reflections describe four copies of the 1720 first edition (and some early translations) (337-49), so I assume the criticism May levels against the edition of Farther Adventures for relying on “a single copy … as representative of all other individual copies” is inapplicable (50). I will concentrate on the text, and when reviewing scholarly editions I choose to do spot-checks. I checked the edition’s text against copies of the 1720 first edition, comparing pages 50, 100, 150, 200, and 250 of Serious Reflections and pages 28 and 78 of the Vision of the Angelick World (separately paginated in 1720). I used Harvard Houghton EC7.D3623R.1720, as well as ECCO’s copy, the Harvard copy being the one named by the editors as the “Note copy-text” at the head of their “List of Editorial Emendations” (351).²

Readers can judge for themselves the significance of the errors or silent alterations in this sample. Something has gone wrong with the “List of Editorial Emendations,” not just because apparent emendations are not recorded but also because the pages and lines do not correspond to the text. For example, “Crocrodile” is amended but this appears to be on page 27, not “17:8,” which I assume (in the absence of any explanation otherwise) refers to page 17, line 8 (it is page 13 of the 1720 text). And when “formd” is altered to “form’d” on p. 290 (a page within my spot-check sample), that would appear to correspond to an identified emendation at “213:25” (it is page ²28 of the 1720 text). I can only think the page and line references were done before the final setting of the edition and then not converted.

That is enough fussing over the text and bibliographical apparatus. The explanatory notes are the edition’s main strength and they deserve high commendation. They take the book’s content seriously and expound upon the intellectual and topical influences that shaped Defoe’s writing. I am sure that this edition will stimulate further criticism that grapples with how Serious Reflections fits into Defoe’s thought as well as Robinson Crusoe’s narrative.

Nicholas Seager, Keele University

Notes

¹ I do not mention yet more recent work, recognizing that scholarly editions may have been completed a while in advance of publication.  And I understand that the present edition was intended for publication by AMS Press before its demise.

² My thanks for assistance to Keele University doctoral candidate, Emma Stanbridge, who was on a Houghton Library Fellowship as I was writing this.

Works Cited

 Defoe, Daniel. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian E. Novak, Irving N. Rothman, and Manuel Schonhorn. Bucknell UP, 2022.

Free, Melissa. “Un-Erasing Crusoe: Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century,” Book History 9 (2006): 89-130.

Lovett, Robert W. Robinson Crusoe: A Bibliographical Checklist of English Language Editions (1719–1979). Greenwood P, 1991.

May, James E. “Review: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian E. Novak et al.” Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer 37:1 (2023): 50-56.

Orr, Leah. “Providence and Religion in the Crusoe Trilogy.” Eighteenth-Century Life 38:2 (2014): 1-27.

Pearl, Jason. “Desert Islands and Urban Solitudes in the Crusoe Trilogy.” Studies in the Novel 44:2 (2012): 125-43.

Turley, Hans. “Protestant Evangelicalism, British Imperialism and Crusonian Identity.” A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, edited by Kathleen Wilson, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 176–93.