The Swiss Family Robinson

In her biography, A Backward Glance , Edith Wharton mentions, almost as an after thought, the novel The Swiss Family Robinson.

"When, on the Mount of Transfiguration, the disciples cry out: "Lord, it is good for us to be here; if Thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles," the German version causes them to say: "So lasset uns Hutten bauen!" The cry, which suggested to me something fresh and leafy and adventurous, like a Mayne Reid story or "The Swiss Family Robinson," is a picturesque instance of the way in which racial character colours alien formulas".

I looked it up.......Google Translate translates the German, "So lasset uns Hutten bauen!" as "So leave it build us huts."  Hard to imagine the Apostles saying that at Christ's Transfiguration.

 

Be that as it may........

Wharton's mention of "The Swiss Family Robinson" led me to wikipedia. Although I had never read the book, I was somewhat familiar with it through films and comic books. Most of us know that Lost in Space is a space age adaptation of the 19th Century novel.

Later, I went to Project Gutenberg and downloaded a copy (as mobi).

Johann David Wyss wrote the story to teach his sons Christian values, discipline and self-reliance. A few of these "family values" would be considered unacceptable by some families today.

Although more restrictive gun laws are enforced today, in Wyss' day, Swiss citizens were required to teach their children the safe use of firearms. In Wyss's story, even his 10 year old son has a rifle. Of course, you'd expect a 19th century novel about people stranded on an island to include tales of hunting animals, but the amount of shooting in "Swiss Family Robinson" might be considered.....if you'll pardon the expression, over kill.

When apes wreak havoc upon the family's secondary farm, the father sets out traps filled with poisoned food to get rid of the apes.

There is no precise indication how large the island is, but it must be quite large. Nearly every sort of animal imaginable makes its home there. Lions, tigers, elephants, boa constrictors. You name it, it's there, and the family has no qualms killing it. The family have domesticated animals that were rescued from the shipwreck, but the amount of food they're able to store by hunting and fishing is enough to feed a family five times their size.

The father finds no end to the projects he embarks on. He can build anything and he is a never ending source of knowledge. He makes the Professor on "Gilligan's Island" look like a Piker.

After ten years on the island, the family find a young woman who has been stranded on another part of the island for three years. She's found near the end of the book. Wyss can't have her appear too early and possibly introduce sex into the story. Of course, her introduction was simply a way of bringing about a plausible explanation for a rescue by the British navy.