Over a Century of Shipwrecks: American Child Readers and Robinson Crusoe

This chapter explores the uses American child readers found for one, quite literally, transatlantic plot – the Robinson Crusoe story ¹ – through an examination of the evidence offered not only by publication history, but also by children themselves. At stake in this project are two kinds of crossings: between Europe and America, and between adulthood and childhood. This is also, therefore, an essay that crosses disciplinary boundaries since (at least within the US academy) ‘the islanding’ of national literatures and ‘the castaway’ status of writing for children have proved to be remarkably durable institutional tendencies. This chapter traces the national, geographic, even linguistic crossings by which this British book, and its European permutations, was claimed by American readers, and the temporal, maturational crossings by which it became a staple of the schoolroom and the nursery.