"Crusoe in England" riffs on and responds to a single canonical text: the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Bishop treats the original novel as a source of loose inspiration, rather than as a strict set of limits. Her own Robinson Crusoe speaks in the vocabulary of the twentieth century as much as that of the eighteenth, and Bishop imagines an internal life for Crusoe inspired by but not at all identical to that described in Defoe's novel. Robinson Crusoe is an immensely important and influential text in its own right, sometimes considered the first English novel. Extremely popular at the time of its publication, it has not only remained widely read but also prompted a number of well-known artistic responses, including "Crusoe in England."
In its broadest strokes, Bishop's poem shares the plotline of the original novel: it tells the story of a shipwrecked sailor who survives alone on a seemingly deserted island, eventually befriends one indigenous inhabitant of the island, and then is rescued and returns home to England. This is, however, a somewhat streamlined version of the original Robinson Crusoe plotline. Defoe's Crusoe is a sailor who is shipwrecked multiple times and endures a host of dangerous adventures—but, as he sails on a slave ship set for Africa, he finds himself in an especially dramatic shipwreck. The only survivor on an island seemingly without human inhabitants, Crusoe sets about the business of solitary survival. He makes use of both materials salvaged from the shipwreck and those found on the island. One of these salvaged materials includes a Bible, which he reads until he himself becomes devoutly religious, repenting for the sins of his earlier life. Eventually, Crusoe does encounter humans after two decades—but these people are a tribe of cannibals. One of their prisoners, an indigenous man, escapes and becomes a friend of Crusoe; Crusoe dubs him "Man Friday" in recognition of the day the two met. Crusoe then converts Friday to Christianity. Eventually Crusoe is rescued and returned to England alongside Friday, but Crusoe's travels and adventures continue.
Robinson Crusoe is often referred to as the very first English novel. Indeed, the early eighteenth century—the period in which Robinson Crusoe was written—saw the rise, and eventually the dominance, of the novel form in the English-speaking world. Novels were distinct from other narrative prose forms in part because of their focus on the everyday lives, including the interior lives, of ordinary individuals. The early novel did not focus on famous protagonists, or on particularly powerful people such as kings. Instead, it directed the reader's attention towards unremarkable people, to whom remarkable things often happened over the course of the narrative. Though the events of the fictional Robinson Crusoe's life are out of the ordinary, Defoe devotes a great deal of space in the novel both to his protagonist's interior, particularly spiritual, evolution, as well as to the minutiae of everyday life—the small and ingenious ways in which Crusoe manages to survive. In this way, Robinson Crusoe also reflects and embodies the Protestantism-fueled values of self-improvement, individualism, and independence that were fundamental to the formation of the modern novel.
Robinson Crusoe was popular and influential from the moment of its publication. It was rapidly published in a series of new editions and subsequently translated into other European languages. Meanwhile, Defoe penned a sequel, the 1719 The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. In addition to being regularly referenced in fiction and nonfiction, Defoe's novel arguably spurred an entire novel sub-genre oriented around solitude and survival in novel environments. These included works directly referencing Robinson Crusoe, such as the early-nineteenth-century German children's novel The Swiss Family Robinson, and the Hollywood film His Gal Friday. Beginning in the twentieth century in particular, some writers adapted and responded to Defoe's novel in order to challenge its entrenched legacy. In particular, these more recent responding works have delved into the themes of colonialism, slavery, and conquest that hang in the background of the original Robinson Crusoe. The 1972 play Man Friday, by Adrian Mitchell, makes the indigenous Friday the story's point-of-view character, while Pantomime, a 1978 play by the Saint Lucian writer Derek Walcott, reframes Robinson Crusoe's narrative through the story of an English hotel owner and his creole employee rehearsing an adaptation of Robinson Crusoe.
Bishop's poem, too, challenges the legacy of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. In one interview, Bishop described her own distaste for the novel, noting in particular its moralizing Christian lens. Indeed, Bishop's version of Crusoe is less pious and less triumphantly self-sufficient than Defoe's, suffering vividly for lack of human company and creative stimulation. Bishop also injects queer and postcolonial subtexts into her novel, focusing partly, as many modern readers have, on the complexity of the relationship between Crusoe and Friday. In Bishop's own words, "Crusoe in England" was an attempt to flesh out the unspoken or ignored in the original text: "So I think I wanted to re-see it with all that left out," she explained in 1977.
