CHAMBERS' EDINBURGH JOURNAL
CONTENTS
ROBINSON-CRUSOEISM OF COMMON LIFE.
AN EPISODE OF THE BATTLE OF THE BALTIC.
WHY DOES THE CLOCK KEEP TIME?
MAGIC IN INDIA.
WHERE DOES LONDON END?
EDUCATED SKILL.
ENGLAND'S FIRST COLONY.
A FLOATING CITY.
THE TWO PRAYERS.
CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, EDITORS OF 'CHAMBERS'SINFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE,' 'CHAMBERS'S EDUCATIONAL COURSE,' &c.
| No. 457. New Series. | SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1852. | Price 1½d. |
ROBINSON-CRUSOEISM OF COMMON LIFE.
It is wonderfully exciting to read the adventures of a shipwreckedmariner; to find him cast away on a desert island, destitute ofeverything that before seemed necessary to his very existence; to seehim settling himself down in a strange and untried form of life,substituting one thing for another, doing altogether without someother thing, turning constantly from expedient to expedient, bendingto his will the circumstances that seemed his fate, and at lengthnaturalising himself to the place, and living bravely on, truly andliterally the Monarch of all he surveys. The avidity with which wedrink in such details, seems to depend upon some principle in ournature; for a feeling of the same kind is excited by all othernarrations of vicissitude. The picture of calamity would be merelytiresome, were it not for the rebound we expect: we want to see whatthe unfortunate whose story we follow will do; by what steps he willtry to reascend, or by what expedients he will make for himself a newworld in the depths to which he has fallen. This principle is known tothe skilful novelist, and he is the most successful who knows it best.It is to the complete gratification afforded to the mystical sympathyreferred to—the sympathy, not with calamity, but with struggle—thatRobinson Crusoe owes its distinction as the most universally popularof all works of fiction; for although the facts of the narrative hadprobably never any actual existence, they are so rendered as to beinstinctively received as the component parts of a thing eternallytrue in nature.
But in actual life the Robinson Crusoes are few, and the shipwreckedmariners many. The mass of castaways, when they find themselvesseparated from their kind, their comforts, their necessaries, yield,after a few feeble efforts, or without effort at all, to what is