Friday, November 05, 2021

More references to Robinson Crusoe in Charles Dickens

Along with the references to Robinson Crusoe in Charles Dickens's "Dombey and Son" and "Martin Chuzzlewit", I've now come across another in a list of characters from David Copperfield's childhood reading: "Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe". There are four more references to Crusoe in that novel. I've checked in the earlier Dickens novels: "The Pickwick Papers" mentions Crusoe three times, and "The Old Curiosity Shop" once. Now I'd like to have a database of nineteenth-century English novels to search for Crusoe in other authors to get a sense of whether Dickens's frequent mentions of Crusoe are unusual. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 5 November 2021)


No comments: