On this day in 1709, a privateering vessel, the Duke, anchored within the Juan Fernandez archipelago and rescued a bedraggled Scottish sailor by the name of Alexander Selkirk.
Four and a half years after he had been marooned on a tropical island, Selkirk emerged barefoot and wearing goatskins. In those years, he'd had to eke out a life unaided by modern conveniences or help from his fellow man. He learned how to hunt, how to build his own shelter, and even domesticated cats to help defend him from the island's voracious rat population.
Though it's an astonishing story, Selkirk himself is not especially famous. Sure, when he made it back to Britain (during his time on the island Selkirk had missed more than just golf with his buddies: Scotland and England had joined together under the Acts of Union into Great Britain), he was the talk of the town. His name was on every tongue, from the Queen down to the lowliest guttersnipe.
Though his own fame was fleeting, the same is not true of his literary counterpart, Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe based the fictional Crusoe -- a shipwrecked man who must fend for himself on a deserted island -- on Selkirk's real-life experience.
While both Crusoe and Selkirk made mistakes that landed them on desert islands, perhaps their biggest mistake may have been being born about 150 years too early. The late 19th century was chockablock with people who not only inspired fictional counterparts, but who also all seemed to know one another in real life. Consider Alice Liddell. At the age of about seven, she was a companion of Charles Dodgson, a math professor at Oxford. Alice and her sister took boat trips with Dodgson, who would tell them the stories that Dodgson eventually published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (written under his pen name of Lewis Carroll), giving the real Alice a fictional immortality.
And, in an interesting coincidence, during a trip to America at the age of 80, Alice Liddell chanced to meet Peter Llewelyn-Davies, who, as a child, had inspired playwright J.M. Barrie to create the eternal boy Peter Pan. Barrie was a good friend of the Llewelyn-Davies family, and modeled the rest of the children in Peter Pan on Peter's siblings.
And it just so happened that J.M. Barrie was also good friends was none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the world-famous sleuth Sherlock Holmes -- who was based on Conan Doyle's professor friend and mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell.
Of course, literary inspiration isn't limited to the distant past. Harper Lee based Dill Harris in To Kill a Mockingbird on her real-life friend Truman Capote; Mario Puzo's The Godfather is full of characters based on actual mobsters and other underworld and show business types; and Ian Fleming allegedly based James Bond on himself after an encounter where he fancied that he'd played a round of baccarat with German spies in a Portuguese casino. And that sure beats being marooned on a deserted island.
Suggested Sites...
- LibriVox Audio Books - Robinson Crusoe - listen to the novel in its entirety, completely free!
- Lillie Ammann's Creating Fictional Characters - tips and tricks on how to create your own fictional characters.
- The American Scholar: 10 of the Most Influential Characters of All Time - like all "most" lists, a subjective listing of the most memorable characters from some of our most beloved books.
- Wikipedia: Fictional Characters Based on Real People - just scratching the surface.
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