’Crusoe at Home:’ Coding Domesticity in Children’s Editions of Robinson Crusoe

para. 1: "This essay has emerged from a reconsideration of Robinson Crusoe through the ideological lens of domesticity. Recent scholarship on Defoe’s novel has tended to emphasise its articulations of colonialist, bourgeois individualist, and proto- capitalist ideologies. Coming from decidedly different critical perspectives, Pat Rogers and Nancy Armstrong have both rightly drawn attention to the generally overlooked, or at least underconsidered. importance of the domestic both within the novel itself and in the didactic functions the novel has been deemed most suited to serving. Arguing against the increasingly popular reading of Robinson Crusoe as narrative of imperialist ambition and colonial expansion, Pat Rogers emphasises what should seem quite obvious: the novel spends more time accounting for Crusoe’s day-to-day household duties than it does anything else. Rogers is half right, however. Robinson Crusoe is about making a comfortable nest, but it is still also about colonial adventure. In her brief remarks on Defoe’s novel in Desire and Domestic Fiction, Armstrong remarks that it was, in the very late eighteenth century. considered by such pedagogical experts as Maria Edgeworth better suited to girls’ than to boys’ reading. This evaluation of Robinson Crusoe was based precisely on the anticipated effect its attention to the minutiae of homemaking and domestic comforts might have on young female readers. At the same time, Edgeworth worried about the potentially dangerous wanderlust, with its attendant shirking of domestic responsibility, that Crusoe might inspire in boys."