Acting out Crusoe: Pedagogy and Performance in Eighteenth-Century Children’s Literature

para. 1: "Well before Robinson Crusoe and the robinsonade became dominant features of the children's fiction landscape in the Victorian period, eighteenth-century writers for children explored the pedagogical utility of Defoe's most famous novel with a mix of enthusiasm and caution. Victorian robinsonades were, as many critics have remarked, primarily boys' adventure tales, championing empire, colonial expansion, and the masculine ideal of rugged, self-sufficient individualism.1 Eighteenth-century pedagogical writers tended to consider Robinson Crusoe in terms of its value to the promotion of the emerging middle classes' ideals, singling out in the novel the moral qualities they thought most necessary to inculcate in the rising generation: thrift, perseverance, industry, and piety, for instance. Many of these authors, however, expressed reservations about the kinds of impressions the soft wax of the child's mind might take from a story of sea-faring adventure. Eighteenth-century pedagogues regarded Crusoe as admirably independent, yet the children whom they would have become like him had paradoxically to be dissuaded from aspiring to an independence that threatened parental authority and social order."