Desert-island reading.(Critical Essay)

Betteredge, the butler-narrator in Wilkie Collins's Moonstone, consults Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe much in the way that New Age spiritists consult the I-Ching, as a guide to future actions in difficult circumstances. The character of Betteredge, who in perplexity opens his faithful old copy of the novel at random and always finds wise advice wherever his eye falls, is a mild satire on religious fundamentalists who think that there is or ever could be a single book that answers to all human needs. He tells us:

 
   I am not superstitious. I have read a heap of 
   books in my time; I am a scholar in my own 
   way.... You are not to take it, please, as the 
   ...