Crusoe epitomes were the earliest and most enduring of several transatlantic stories that challenged the realism and ideology of Robinson Crusoe, and rewrote it as a very different book. Crusoe epitomes are paired here with Ashton's Memorial, a double-layered narrative which issued from Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1725 and was reprinted in London in 1726. These stories highlight contemporaries' distrust of Defoe's “Reflections, as well Religious as Moral,” and their insistence that Atlantic narratives be “Historicall” or “founded on fact.” In the process, they exhibit the strange adventures of a story, as well as of a hero. But to understand what was at stake in the story's adventures, as well as the importance of abridgement in transatlantic print culture, it will be helpful to begin by briefly considering how epitome or abridgement (invariably treated as synonyms in eighteenth-century dictionaries) were viewed and used. I approach this question here through the contemporary controversy over the epitomizing of Defoe's novel.

ON EPITOME OR ABRIDGEMENT: THE CASE OF DEFOE

The often cited boast about Robinson Crusoe which Charles Gildon placed in the mouth of his character, Daniel Defoe – that “there is not an old woman that can go to the Price of it, but buys [the] Life and Adventures” – proved truer of epitomes and abridgements, than of Defoe's original. There were at least 136 English abridgements of the novel during the eighteenth century – more than twice the number of reprints of the full length novel – and this does not include the thirty-nine American abridgements published between 1774 and 1800, or serialization of the story in The London Post.