HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge T88 32 39 Eduet 817.400.460 Harvard University, TRANSFERRED TO Copyright, 1895, All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. INTRODUCTORY SKETCH. It is a fact which throws great light upon the meaning of literature that Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, was as voluminous a writer as Sir Walter Scott, and yet his name is kept really alive by a single book. In this year of 1895 a new, carefully edited series of Defoe's writings has appeared in sixteen volumes, but the editor has confined his selection to whole books; in point of fact a list of Defoe's writings, confessedly incomplete, counts up at least two hundred and fifty books and pamphlets, and this does not take into account a great mass of newspaper writing. The list includes several narratives, real and fictitious, in which the same sort of power is shown as one discovers in Robinson Crusoe, yet it is very clear that these narratives have but a curious interest for students of literature to-day, while the one great book is read by thousands upon thousands who do not think of it as literature at all. What is the explanation of this most interesting fact? For a partial explanation we need to know something of the man behind the book, and it is not very difficult to trace the outward course of his life, though, in spite of his unnumbered writings, it is by no means easy to get at the real man himself. We must bear in mind that Robinson Crusoe was not the early work of a writer. It was not, for example, like Two Years Before the Mast, written by a young man at the beginning of his career and repre |