Robinson Crusoe April 25

Robinson Crusoe, a novel by Daniel Defoe was first published 25 April 1719 and is regarded as the first novel in English. The novel was so successful that before the end of the year, this first volume had run through four editions. Within a matter of decades, it had reached an audience as wide as any book ever written in English. In fact, it is the most widely read book after the Bible, although the Guinness Book of World Records claims the same rank. As James Joyce put it (not altogether flatteringly if you are English): Robinson Crusoe "is the true prototype of the British colonist... the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity." Moving on from most popular books to most popular tunes, "La Marseillaise", a song written and composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle at Strasbourg was first sung on April 25, 1792. (Clearly, the French were still smarting over the success of Robinson Crusoe.) Its original name is (the slightly less catchy) "Chant de guerre de l’Armée du Rhin" ("Marching Song of the Rhine Army). The song became the rallying call of the French Revolution and was so-called because it was first sung on the streets by troops (fédérés) from Marseille upon their arrival in Paris, although why anyone would want to sing anything about armies of the Rhine on arrival in Paris escapes me. Nevertheless, all this artistic effort was obviously very draining, because apart from the American-Mexican War, the Suez Canal being started and the St Lawrence Seaway being opened, nothing much else happened on 25 April until 1953. Just as the world was beginning to despair of 25 April, Francis Crick and James D. Watson published the "Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid", which very nicely described the double helix structure of DNA. Whew.