How Treasure Island drew on Robinson Crusoe
A documented line of influence: Robert Louis Stevenson demonstrably engaged Daniel Defoe’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe · 1719
EnlightenmentThe influenced
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1882
The Age of the NovelRelevance
7/10
On Treasure Island’s page
- Stevenson named Defoe outright among his sources in My First Book, and the borrowing shows: Ben Gunn is a marooned castaway lifted straight from the Crusoe mold, down to the goatskin clothes and the constant talk of Providence.
- Where Defoe's island is an empty workshop to be tamed by industry and faith, Stevenson keeps the marooning and the solitude but swaps in buried gold, mutiny, and a skeleton. Critics read Ben Gunn as a sly parody of Crusoe, exaggerating his religious posturing until piety looks like a goatskin you slip on and off.
On Robinson Crusoe’s page
- Defoe's castaway is the ancestor of every marooned man in adventure fiction, and Stevenson sends one of his own to the same fate. Ben Gunn is Crusoe run through a comic filter: a sailor left alone on an island who grows half-mad on goat meat and solitude, dressed head to foot in goatskin and forever talking of Providence.
- Stevenson openly counted Robinson Crusoe among his sources in his essay My First Book, where he tallied his debts to Defoe alongside Poe and Irving. The desert-island grammar Defoe invented in 1719 is the inheritance Treasure Island both honors and ransacks.