Very Rare. OCLC/COPAC records copies of the first and second editions at McMaster (second edition), California Riverside (second edition), Michigan (edition not specified) and Princeton (copies of both the first and second edition) only in the USA. No copies recorded in the UK. There also appears to be three copies in French libraries and three in Swiss libraries, but there is no copy in the BnF. Neither edition is dated but the first was probably published c.1810 and the second c.1818. A facsimile was produced in Paris in 1963.
A truly remarkable book: a re-telling of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe through 150 fine engraved illustrations with short captions beneath. The creator of this book - François Aimé Louis Dumoulin - states in his introduction that Robinson Crusoe was the most treasured book of his childhood and inspired him to travel later in life. Dumoulin departed on a storm-ravaged voyage to Grenada in 1773 where he witnessed the invasion of that island by the French (and where he was injured and taken prisoner of war) before later spending time on Trinidad and Tobago. Dumoulin makes it clear in his introduction that all of the engravings in this book are based on his own sketches taken in the West Indies.
The striking - and at times harrowing illustrations - include many that are familiar to readers of Crusoe (such as Crusoe rescuing goods from the wreck of his ship and his attempts to re-build a rudimentary life on his new island home) but many show dramatic scenes of shipwrecks and depictions of people of colour which must be drawn from and inspired by the native populations of the West Indies and conflated with imagery associated with the slave trade and the slave revolts of the period.
The Swiss painter and engraver François Aimé Louis Dumoulin (1753-1834) was born in Vevey and later spent some time in London before travelling to Granada in 1773 where his ship was ravaged by a terrible storm that destroyed 60 vessels. during the French invasion of Grenada Dumoulin was injured and taken prisoner of war. He later travelled to Trinidad and Tobago where he was reminded of his childhood passion for Robinson Crusoe and which prompted him - on his return to Switzerland - to produce the sketches that would later be engraved and which form this re-telling of Defoe’s classic story. Dumoulin writes: “…mes dessins sont une copie fidèle de ce que j’ai vu et observé, tant pour le paysage que pour la marine” (p.5).
This wonderful book must have been time-consuming to produce and very expensive to publish and was surely produced in only a very small number of copies. David Blewett has noted that, “It may well be that the evolution of the Crusoe myth depends as much on the power of illustrations as on Defoe’s text” (The illustration of Robinson Crusoe, 1719-1920 (1996) p.15) and that in many cases the vast majority of people aware of the Crusoe story are aware because of the famous images taken from the novel rather than from actually reading it. Dumoulin’s book extends this idea as he states, “Dès mon enface, ce livre et ses figures qui y étaient attachées, fixèrent singulièrement mon attention” - i..e, it was Crusoe that fired his imagination and drove him to want to travel, while at the same time his real-life experiences in the West Indies were subsequently understood and depicted by him through what he had seen on his travels.
David Blewett writes of Dumoulin that he was, “one of the earliest instances of a man who became possessed by the fascination of Robinson Crusoe” and that his book was, “the first attempt on a large scale to replace the text with a series of pictures sufficiently detailed and complete to tell a story that could be followed in pictures alone” (p.37-40).
Provenance: This copy has a partial signature of two women on the front pastedown “Elizabeth et Mathilda ?Franklin 3 April 1861” and curiously on the verso of one of the engravings is a sketched chart of what appears to be the area around Greenland and Canada.
