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Mr. Wright’s hypothesis.

Mr. Aitken supplied the key when he announced in the Athenæum for August 23rd, 1890, his discovery that Daniel Defoe was born, not in 1661 (as had hitherto been supposed), but earlier, and probably in the latter part of the year 1659. The story dates Crusoe’s birth September 30th, 1632, or just twenty-seven years earlier. Now Mr. Wright, Defoe’s latest biographer,[A] maintains that if we add these twenty-seven years to the date of any event in Crusoe’s life we shall have the date of the corresponding event in Defoe’s life. By this simple calculation he finds that Crusoe’s running away to sea corresponds in time with Defoe’s departure from the academy at Newington Green; Crusoe’s early period on the island (south side) with the years Defoe lived at Tooting; Crusoe’s visit to the other side of the island with a journey of Defoe’s into Scotland; the footprint and the arrival of the savages with the threatening letters received by Defoe, and the physical assaults made on him after the Sacheverell trial; while Friday stands for a collaborator who helped Defoe with his work.

Defoe expressly states in his Serious Reflections that the story of Friday is historical and true in fact–

“It is most real that I had … such a servant, a savage, and afterwards a Christian, and that his name was called Friday, and that he was ravished from me by force, and died in the hands that took him, which I represent by being killed; this is all literally true, and should I enter into discoveries many alive can testify them. His other conduct and assistance to me also have just references in all their parts to the helps I had from that faithful savage in my real solitudes and disasters.”

It may be added that there are strong grounds for believing Defoe to have had about this time assistance in his literary work.

All this is very neatly worked out; but of course the really important event in Crusoe’s life is his great shipwreck and his long solitude on the island. Now of what events in Defoe’s life are these symbolical?

The ‘Silence.’

Well, in the very forefront of his Serious Reflections, and in connection with his long confinement in the island, Defoe makes Crusoe tell the following story:–

“I have heard of a man that, upon some extraordinary disgust which he took at the unsuitable conversation of some of his nearest relations, whose society he could not avoid, suddenly resolved never to speak any more. He kept his resolution most rigorously many years; not all the tears or entreaties of his friends–no, not of his wife and children–could prevail with him to break his silence. It seems it was their ill-behaviour to him, at first, that was the occasion of it; for they treated him with provoking language, which frequently put him into undecent passions, and urged him to rash replies; and he took this severe way to punish himself for being provoked, and to punish them for provoking him. But the severity was unjustifiable; it ruined his family and broke up his house. His wife could not bear it, and after endeavouring, by all the ways possible, to alter his rigid silence, went first away from him, and afterwards from herself, turning melancholy and distracted. His children separated, some one way and some another way; and only one daughter, who loved her father above all the rest, kept with him, tended him, talked to him by signs, and lived almost dumb like her father near twenty-nine years with him; till being very sick, and in a high fever, delirious as we call it, or light-headed, he broke his silence, not knowing when he did it, and spoke, though wildly at first. He recovered of his illness afterwards, and frequently talked with his daughter, but not much, and very seldom to anybody else.”