It was all very well for HIM to joke. But I was not an eminent traveller—and my way in this world had not led me into playing ducks and drakes with my own life, among thieves and murderers in the outlandish places of the earth. I went into my own little room, and sat down in my chair in a perspiration, and wondered helplessly what was to be done next. In this anxious frame of mind, other men might have ended by working themselves up into a fever; I ended in a different way. I lit my pipe, and took a turn at ROBINSON CRUSOE.
Before I had been at it five minutes, I came to this amazing bit—page one hundred and sixty-one—as follows:
"Fear of Danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than Danger itself, when apparent to the Eyes; and we find the Burthen of Anxiety greater, by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about."
The man who doesn't believe in ROBINSON CRUSOE, after THAT, is a man with a screw loose in his understanding, or a man lost in the mist of his own self-conceit! Argument is thrown away upon him; and pity is better reserved for some person with a livelier faith.
Ian Whitcomb: Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go? (Link)
Text: Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Ch. X),1868
Top illustration: Plaque in Queen's Gardens, Hull—the former Queen's Dock from which Crusoe sailed—showing him on his island.
Lower illustration: Crusoe standing over Friday after he frees him from the cannibals.
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