The life & strange surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, mariner

Full title: The whole life and strange suprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years all alone in an uninhabited Island, on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself: with An Account how he was at last as strangely deliverd by pirates. Written by himself. Volume I.

First of 2 volumes in 8vo. pp. 485. Calf. Contains plate.

Originally published in 1719, this is the first edition printed for John Walter’s new ‘Logographic Press,’ prior to the commencement there of his newspaper ‘The Times.’ A reprint, in three volumes, appeared five years later. Of Defoe’s many fictional works, four or five may be fairly characterized as ‘borderline forgeries,’ i.e. novels or personal memoranda presented as narratives of true events or autobiographical writings, buttressed by claims of authoritative provenance. Robinson Crusoe was the foremost of these, if believed genuine largely among young or unlearned readers. The present edition is the same as that given to the scholar-forger John Payne Collier as a boy by his father (a journalist on John Walter’s ‘Times’), and of which he later wrote ‘when first I found that the whole story of Robinson Crusoe was an invention and not reality [...] it really was one of the saddest days of my early life’ (see A. & J. Freeman, John Payne Collier. Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, 2004, I, p.13, 179). See also ESTC, T180363.

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