Books

Quarto. Two volumes. I: xii, 389pp.; II: v, 456, 14pp. I: []1, A6, B8-Z8, Aa8-Bb8, Cc6 (- Cc6 blank); II: []1, A2, B8-Z8, Aa8-Gg8, Hh2 (Hh2 blank). First Stockdale edition. Modern brown half calf over marbled boards. With a folding copper-engraved map, and 17 copper-engraved plates (16 of them by Medland after Stothard) including the frontispieces & titles. Lewine, Bibliography of 18th Century Art & Illustrated Books, p. 131; ESTC N47632; Lowndes, III, 613; NCBEL, II, 900 (first few editions only); Ray, Illustrator and the Book in England, 19.

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, is one of the earliest and most influential novels in the history of English literature. It is a fictional autobiography of the title character, a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story is widely perceived as a comment on the British Imperialism of the age and the emerging ideology of the 'self-made man', and it reflects on the author's vast array of experiences.