SOURCE: "Recasting Crusoe: Frederick Marryat, R. M. Ballantyne and the Nineteenth-Century Robinsonade," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4, Winter, 1988, pp. 169-75.

In the following article, Maher traces popular response to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) in the nineteenth century, charting both criticism of the novel and its eventual influence on Victorian adventure fiction for boys.

When the formidable Leslie Stephen dismissed Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe [1719] as "a book for boys rather than men" [in "Defoe's Novels," The Cornhill Magazine, 1868], he was not far off the mark. By the time Stephen penned his disparaging comments in 1868, Robinson Crusoe had inspired numerous progeny ear-marked for the young. Following the 1814 English translation of J.D.R. Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson, among the most famous of the so-called Robinsonades that explore and adapt the premise of Defoe's novel, Robinsonades commanded an eager juvenile readership ready to devour the latest fiction about...