Defoe by Virginia Woolf

The fear which attacks the recorder of centenaries lest he should find / himself measuring a diminishing spectre and forced to foretell its / approaching dissolution is not only absent in the case of _Robinson / Crusoe_ but the mere thought of it is ridiculous. It may be true that / _Robinson Crusoe_ is two hundred years of age upon the twenty-fifth of / April 1919, but far from raising the familiar speculations as to whether / people now read it and will continue to read it, the effect of the / bi-centenary is to make us marvel that _Robinson Crusoe_, the perennial / and immortal, should have been in existence so short a time as that. The / book resembles one of the anonymous productions of the race itself / rather than the effort of a single mind; and as for celebrating its / centenary we should as soon think of celebrating the centenaries of / Stonehenge itself. Something of this we may attribute to the fact that / we have all had _Robinson Crusoe_ read aloud to us as children, and were / thus much in the same state of mind towards Defoe and his story that the / Greeks were in towards Homer. It never occurred to us that there was / such a person as Defoe, and to have been told that _Robinson Crusoe_ was / the work of a man with a pen in his hand would either have disturbed us / unpleasantly or meant nothing at all. The impressions of childhood are / those that last longest and cut deepest. It still seems that the name of / Daniel Defoe has no right to appear upon the title-page of _Robinson / Crusoe_, and if we celebrate the bi-centenary of the book we are making / a slightly unnecessary allusion to the fact that, like Stonehenge, it is / still in existence.[6]

The great fame of the book has done its author some injustice; for while / it has given him a kind of anonymous glory it has obscured the fact that / he was a writer of other works which, it is safe to assert, were not / read aloud to us as children. Thus when the Editor of the _Christian / World_ in the year 1870 appealed to "the boys and girls of England" to / erect a monument upon the grave of Defoe, which a stroke of lightning / had mutilated, the marble was inscribed to the memory of the author of / _Robinson Crusoe_. No mention was made of _Moll Flanders_. Considering / the topics which are dealt with in that book, and in _Roxana, Captain / Singleton, Colonel Jack_ and the rest, we need not be surprised, though / we may be indignant, at the omission. We may agree with Mr. Wright, the / biographer of Defoe, that these "are not works for the drawing-room / table". But unless we consent to make that useful piece of furniture the / final arbiter of taste, we must deplore the fact that their superficial / coarseness, or the universal celebrity of _Robinson Crusoe_, has led / them to be far less widely famed than they deserve. On any monument / worthy of the name of monument the names of _Moll Flanders_ and / _Roxana_, at least, should be carved as deeply as the name of Defoe. / They stand among the few English novels which we can call indisputably / great. The occasion of the bi-centenary of their more famous companion / may well lead us to consider in what their greatness, which has so much / in common with his, may be found to consist.