The Swiss Family Robinson - Paperback

THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON - 1910 - INTRODUCTION - THE Swiss Family Robinson, said its most friendly critic Charles Nodier, is Robinson Crusoe in the bosom of his family. Such a conversion, he adds, changes the whole effect of his fable it takes you from the last abode of a solitary voyager to the very cradle of human society. Crusoes island expands under your eyes, and you see there the advance of a civilisation which covers every era of the worlds history. This is high praise, and it offers the best of good reasons for keeping the book in its place on the shelf, which is between that of the school-books below and the story-books above. To older people it has often seemed that the conquest of wild life and nature on this fortunate island by the Swiss Family was too easy and convenient to be really exciting. They who make this objection to the story forget that it is a timehonoured law of the nursery, which demands a Fortunate Isle where all may be had for the asking where figs grow on thistles, apples on thorn-trees, and roasted pigs were crying out, Oh, eat me, if you please. Hence all those tales in which the wishing-cap, the fairy-wand and the flying-carpet break through the hedges and hindrances of too difficult a world. Here it is the brain of the good pastor and father of the Happy Family which is the talisman, sure and unerring, that charms creatures out of air, earth, and sea to supply their hunger and other wants. The result may seem to the critical only a parlour pastime and a pretend desert-a game in which you get a shark out of a book and a beast from a Noahs Ark. But in truth it is much more thanthat. It is another species of kindergarten which is offered an Eden where thisnew and trustful Crusoe-with-a-family asks, as M. Nodier said, of Nature all the help Nature can give to men, and Nature refuses him nothing because all creation is at mans service and disposal. It adds, if anything, to our respect for the perfect childish good faith with which the book is written, to know that it W first of all simply a home-made tale, not intended for the great public outside. Jean Rudolph Wyss, its nominal or completing author, was born at Berne in Switzerland in 1781, went to school there, studied then in Germany, and became while still a young man professor of philosophy at the college in his native town. It is safer to say completing author, because the fist idea of the story was his fathers and there seem to have been additions and changes made by others before it reached its final shape. But his was the chief pen concerned in giving it to the world and the three volumes of legends which he collected and published show him to have had a sense of the folk-tale and kindmkchen which must have been of use to him also in his work upon this Swiss Saga of the Guinea Coast. He died at Berne on March 31, 1830. E. R. The following are the chief editions of the Sdss Family Robinson -The Swiss Family R o b i n, begun by the author in 1800, was not published until after his death. His son, the well-known Swiss pat, Was responsible for the form in which it appeared in 1841, another son supply ing the illustrations for this edition. A great part of the work, it seems, was written down from r collections of the original and instructive con versations of the father, who had been a pastor at Miinster, during walks and holiday excursions. A fifth edition was published under thecare of H. C. Erka in 1873...