The Swiss Family Robinson was pirated extensively upon publication.
Many versions exist, some containing less of the original than desirable.
Also, too many abridged versions exist.
What is the best, unabridged, English language edition, and can you give me a link to purchase it?
From wiki:
The closest English translation to the original is that of the Juvenile Library in 1816, published as The Family Robinson Crusoe, or, Journal of a Father Shipwrecked, with his Wife and Children, on an Uninhabited Island, in two volumes, by the husband-and-wife team William Godwin and Mary Jane Clairmont[1][2], reprinted by Penguin Classics.[2]
I’m not sure if you can purchase a copy, but here’s the online version:
Here it is on Project Gutenberg. If you have an e-reader/kindle, you could load it up in that.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72813
Wiki also says
- Wyss, Johann. The Swiss Family Robinson, ed. John Seelye. Penguin Classics, 2007. The only unabridged complete text genuinely by Wyss (and his son) is currently in print.
Which, I think, is this:
Ordered, with my thanks. 
Okay, now I’m curious. I have a bad case of FOMO, fear of missing out. What’s special about this book? Should I be reading it? Why are you interested in it?
It’s a bit silly (with kangaroos and lions on the same island, e.g.), but it’s still kind of interesting to see what kind of society the family sets up. I read it because it’s a semi-classic novel that has survived in some form to today.
The version I read was from Project Gutenberg, but I don’t think it was the one linked above by Joey_P.
That does sound interesting. Thanks.
It’s kind of long in parts, and “a bit silly” in the original form, while also having a natural age-range in the characters, (many of whom get good plot points), so it’s a natural for abridgement and re-writing
It lacked a certain gravitas until a robot and a campy curmudgeon were included.
Interesting! I took several graduate school courses on the Romantics and recognized the name William Godwin as the philosopher who was Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband and Mary Godwin Shelley’s father. And today I learned that Godwin and his second wife Mary Clairmont (mother of Byron’s mistress Claire Clairmont) supported themselves with their Juvenile Library’s publications and translations.
So William Godwin was the father of Percy Shelley’s mistress and the step-father of Lord Byron’s mistress? That must have made for interesting family get-togethers!
It’s even more complicated than that. Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin eloped when she was 16 and married when she was 18, after his first wife (whom he had abandoned for Mary) died by suicide. Percy and Claire Clairmont also had an affair (while he was married to Mary) before Claire took up with Byron and had his child.
There were no family get-togethers with William Godwin, who wanted nothing more to do with Mary after she eloped. But in 1816, Mary, Percy, Claire and Byron were at a house party. It was “the year without a summer”, cold and rainy, and they entertained themselves with a storytelling contest. Mary won, with the story of Frankenstein.
I was interested in it because Disney had adapted it into a movie in 1960, which was further adapted into a comic book. (There was also a version made in 1940 that Disney bought the rights to in order, probably, to suppress it. And a 1958 made-for-TV movie staring Walter Pidgeon)
The movie is interesting in seeing how the family survives and their ingenuity. It was so popular that Disney built a “Swiss Family Robinson” jungle house at Disneyland (which was later repurposed as Tarzan’s House).
Clearly Jonathan Wyss was drawing on the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but without the angst, self-blaming, and isolation of Daniel Defoe’s novel (and without the “Man Friday”). It was a happy, attractive take on the "living-on-a-desert-island trope, and it was popular long before the movies. Jules Verne was so fond of it that he wrote two sequels to it. He was also so taken by the “surviving on a desert Island” trope that he wrote lots of them himself, including The Mysterious Island, The School for Robinsons, and Two Years’ Holiday.
I think part of the draw is one of “getting away from it all”. Another is people thinking about how they would cope with the situation. Yet another is seeing the creativity and ingenuity of the castaways. (Verne’s Captain Harding in The Mysterious Island is the guy you’d want to get shipwrecked with. He could deduce where they were located without a sextant, make nitroglycerin and other chemical substances from scratch, and build a forge for making iron.)
So, sort of like The Professor on Gilligan’s Island?
Well, yeah. Except that Harding could not only fix a gaping hole in the side of a boat, he got his fellow castaways to build a complete new seaworthy ship, which they used to rescue a castaway on another island.
If they had radios in Harding’s day, he would’ve probably built a transmitter.
The first English edition of the book was translated by the Godwins from the French, not from the original German. In the wiki article on William Godwin, William Godwin - Wikipedia, footnote 59 in the section of his book publishing has a link to an ebook with details about the translation, showing how it follows the French version: Telling Tales - 6. The Swiss Family Robinson - Open Book Publishers
I was also curious as to how the Godwin translation dealt with religion, since the original is said to be full of sermons, but William Godwin, son of a Protestant Nonconformist minister, renounced Christianity. I did a search for “God” in this version The Swiss Family Robinson (easier to read than the same edition linked above from Internet Archive) and came up with 30 hits; there are 43 hits for “Gott” in the original German: Schweizerischer Robinson: Ein lehrreiches Buch für Kinder und Kinderfreunde - Johann David Wyss, Johann Rudolf Wyss - Google Books
Also the German has “Jesu” once and “Amen” twice, but none of them are in the Godwins’ translation.
Damn, I love this board.
I just learned that the original Swiss Family Robinson was written by a Swiss person. Asked hubby and he also didn’t know.
I first learned about it when visiting Disneyland in the early 1980s, and my parents told me that it was based on a show which was based on the book. At some point I probably got it confused with the Just So Stories and thought I had read a version of it.
Thank you for sharing the query and the links.
“What would you do if you were ship-wrecked on a deserted island?” was sort of the 18th/19th century equivalent of “What would you do during a zombie apocalypse?”
There’s a great book called Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls that tells the stories of real people shipwrecked on deserted isles. “What would happen if you were shipwrecked with only five other people with a whole ship-load of supplies at your disposal” is a scenario that NEVER happens.