Well before Robinson Crusoe and the robinsonade became dominant features of the children’s fiction landscape in the Victorian period, eighteenthcentury writers for children explored the pedagogical utility of Defoe’s most famous novel with a mix of enthusiasm and caution. Victorian robinsonades were, as many critics have remarked, primarily boys’ adventure tales, championing empire, colonial expansion, and the masculine ideal of rugged, self-sufficient individualism. 1 Eighteenth-century pedagogical writers tended to consider Robinson Crusoe in terms of its value to the promotion of the emerging middle classes’ ideals, singling out in the novel the moral qualities they thought most necessary to inculcate in the rising generation: thrift, perseverance, industry, and piety, for instance. Many of these authors, however, expressed reservations about the kinds of impressions the soft wax of the child’s mind might take from a story of sea-faring adventure. Eighteenth-century pedagogues regarded Crusoe as admirably independent, yet the children whom they would have become like him had paradoxically to be dissuaded from aspiring to an independence that threatened parental authority and social order. Sarah Trimmer’s somewhat mixed feelings about Robinson Crusoe were undoubtedly shared by many of her contemporaries. Reviewing the book for her Guardian of Education, Trimmer praised it for “shewing what ingenuity and industry can effect, under the divine blessing” and for acting as “a stimulus to mental and bodily exertion, and patient perseverance”(298). It was a book, however, that required parental supervision or at least a child reader with a “mind and temper [that] have been properly regulated,” in other words, one who had already been successfully interpellated as the type of self-regulating subject that much eighteenth-century pedagogy