Swiss Family Robinson

Garden City New York: Garden City Publishing, n. d,. hardcover. In exceptionally good condition/No dust jacket. Octavo, [23cm/9.25inches], full verdegrie-embossed pictorial cloth sans dust jacket, pp. xi, 436. Illustrated with frontis and 7 colour plates by T. H. Robinson. Please feel free to inquire as to particulars and/or additional photographs. ... Written by Swiss writer, Johann David Wyss, which was edited by his son Johann Rudolf Wyss and illustrated by another son, Johann Emmanuel Wyss, the novel was intended to teach his four sons about family values, good husbandry, the uses of the natural world and self-reliance. Wyss' attitude towards its education is in line with the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and many chapters involve Christian-oriented moral lessons such as frugality, husbandry, acceptance, and cooperation. Wyss presents adventures as lessons in natural history and physical science. This resembles other educational books for young ones published about the same time. These include Charlotte Turner Smith's Rural Walks: in Dialogues intended for the use of Young Persons (1795), Rambles Farther: A continuation of Rural Walks (1796), A Natural History of Birds, intended chiefly for young persons (1807). But Wyss' novel is also modeled after Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, an adventure story about a shipwrecked sailor first published in 1719 and the source of the "Robinson" in the title "Swiss Family Robinson".