Johann David Wyss' The Swiss Family Robinson

This young readers' classic first appeared in English in 1813. It began life as a manuscript story about a shipwrecked family that Johann David Wyss (1743-1818), a Swiss clergyman of Bern, read to his four sons. His son Johann Rudolf Wyss (1781-1830) established himself as a noted writer, philosopher and Swiss folklorist after graduating from university, and eventually adapted his father's manuscript into a novel.

The original Swiss edition, in German, was published in 1812 under the title Der Schweizerische Robinson, Oder der Schiffbruchige Schweizerprediger und Seine Familie. If it were literally translated, the English title could have come down to us as The Swiss Robinsons, or the Shipwrecked Swiss Preacher and his Family.

The novel's main characters are Pastor Robinson and his wife; their four sons, (ranging from 15 to 7 years of age) Fritz, Ernest, Jack and Franz; and their dogs, two mastiffs named Turk and Juno. They are shipwrecked on an island somewhere in the far southwestern Pacific, and defense against Malaysian pirates is an ongoing concern of the castaway family. After the Robinsons salvage livestock and goods from the shipwreck, they establish a highly elaborate settlement on the island that they eventually take to calling "New Switzerland."

Of course, the elder Wyss belonged to a generation that highly admired Daniel Defoe's famous castaway novel, The Life and Adventures Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719. Crusoe's adventures were in turn based on a real-life model, the accounts of a shipwrecked English seaman named Alexander Selkirk, who was marooned on an island off the Chilean coast in the late 16th century. The Wysses drew heavily, and unabashedly, upon the text of Robinson Crusoe for the realistic details of their story.

Most didn't mind the fact that the sea adventure aspects of the novel were borrowed from yet another novel. One notable reader took exception, though: a former naval captain who turned novelist in retirement, Fredrick Marryat. Marryat admitted that he wrote his two books of sea adventure, Midshipman Easy (1836) and Masterman Ready (1841), in a reaction of professional disgust toward the nautical inaccuracies depicted in Swiss Family Robinson.

The Swiss Family Robinson became public domain late in the 19th century, which explains why it's available in so many editions, and also why it's considered fair game for any sort of adaptation into other media, and into other adventure story genres ...

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