Study notes: The Swiss Family Robinson
A family is wrecked on an island and turns it into a treehouse kingdom. They find useful animals and plants at a rate no real island would allow. Wyss wrote it as lessons for his sons: building, naming, and staying cheerful. As a story it is a catalogue of inventions. As a picture of the world it imagines land as empty and waiting. Read the building chapters for fun, and say out loud that real islands were not empty and real castaways were not this lucky.
Themes
Cooperation. Ingenuity. The fantasy of a world that exists only for one family.
People to follow
The father who narrates, the mother, and their sons.
Talk about
- Which invention is clever, and which one is pure fantasy?
- Who does the work, and who gets the credit?
- What is missing from an island story with no earlier inhabitants?
Public-domain text.