Saturday 2 January 2010

Clissold Park, N16

Stoke Newington has long been known as a bohemian area and its famous former residents have included Edgar Allan Poe and Daniel Defoe. What is lesser known, however, is the role that the public toilets in Clissold Park played in inspiring Defoe’s classic novel Robinson Crusoe.

Defoe spent much of his life in debt and after realising that he could no longer work at home without being disturbed by the bailiffs he had the idea of taking a week’s supply of food and writing materials and locking himself in one of the toilet’s cubicles in order to get some peace and quiet. This ploy worked far better than he could have imagined as after a few days he began to wonder about the effects of long term isolation and started writing a tale in which a man is accidentally locked inside a toilet just before it closes down for good and then has to survive there on his own for several months. However, shortly before publication Defoe realised that he could appeal to a public hungry for tales of foreign adventure by changing the location from a dank public convenience to a tropical island paradise and having undertaken a hasty rewrite a literary classic was born.

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