Michael Shinagel has compiled the reprints containing all six official editions published by Taylor in 1719, in order to achieve a text faithful to the original edition of Defoe. The annotations help the reader with unfamiliar words and idioms, biblical references, and nautical terms. The "Context" section allows the reader to understand the historical and religious significance of the novel. Four contemporary testimonies of castaways are included, excerpts from Defoe's autobiography regarding the allegorical foundation of the novel, and aspects of the Puritan symbolic tradition that are essential for understanding the religious exercises of the work. The section "Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Opinions" is a comprehensive study of early assessments from prominent literary and political figures, including Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. The section "Twentieth Century Criticism" includes a collection of fourteen essays (five of which are new to the Second Edition) presenting a variety of views on Robinson Crusoe from Virginia Woolf, Ian Watt, Eric Berne, Maximillian E. Novak, Frank Budgen, James Joyce, George A. Starr, J. Paul Hunter, James Sutherland, John J. Richetti, Leopold Damrosch, Jr., John Bender, Michael McKeon, and Carol Houlihan Flynn. A Chronology of Defoe's life and work and a revised Selected Bibliography are also included.