routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

The novel
171
paraphrase Pope: whatever Crusoe does, is right. After Xury leaves,
Crusoe encounters ‘Friday’ – and has to convert him to Christianity.
After Friday and I became more intimately acquainted, and he
could understand almost all I said to him, and speak fluently,
though in broken English, to me, I acquainted him first, with
true Christian religion, and then with my own story, or at least
so much of it as related to my coming to into the place. . . .
I described to him the country of Europe, and particularly England,
which I came from; how we lived, how we worshipped God,
how we behaved to one another; and how we traded in ships to
all parts of the world.
So this novel, which has become a potent myth of survival, confirms
for the reader the ultimate rightness of Crusoe’s way of thinking and
acting. The novel ends positively in order not to subvert any of the
middle-class mercantile values Robinson Crusoe upholds.
I remained in Lisbon to settle my affairs. Within seven months, I
received what I was owed from the survivors of the trustees; the
merchants for whose account I had gone to sea.
I was now master, all on a sudden, of above £5,000 sterling in money,
and had an estate, as I might well call it, in the Brasils, of above a
thousand pounds a year, as sure as an estate of lands in England: and
in a word, I was in a condition which I scarce knew how to understand,
or how to compose myself for the enjoyment of it.
Crusoe, having survived twenty-eight years on his desert island, sees
his investments make him rich, and sees his island colonised, without
any sympathy for Friday whom he views as the simple native, improved
by his master and by his conversion to Christianity. Alternatively, Friday
can be seen as the victim of colonialisation whose territory and beliefs
are usurped by the coloniser.
It is significant that the Bank of England was founded in 1694, and we
recall Defoe’s railing against money (page 161). Robinson Crusoe has been
seen as one of the first capitalist heroes, who overcomes extreme difficulties
to reach economic security. This kind of success story is later repeated
through Charles Dickens in the nineteenth century to H.G. Wells and others