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Adventure · Animals

The Swiss Family Robinson

Johann David Wyss · first published 1812

A pastor, his wife and their four boys are left on a sinking ship when the crew takes the only boats, float ashore in a boat made of four casks sawn in half, and spend the next ten years turning an island into a country — a tree house, a salt cave, a farm, a fleet, and names for everything.

Free EPUB & KindleGrades 6–9Original Milo Winter (the 1916 Rand McNally Windermere edition — all fourteen colour plates) art
Worth knowing ⓘ
Worth knowing: The killing is constant and it is the texture of the book, not an event in it. The family shoots, spears, snares or clubs nearly every animal it meets — jackals, a shark, a walrus, flamingos, a boa constrictor, a hyena, a bear, a lion and lioness, a tiger, buffaloes, ostriches, penguins, a whale — mostly for meat, skins or safety, and often described at the moment of dying. Two deaths are meant to land: Grizzle the donkey is taken by the boa constrictor in front of the whole family, and the father refuses to shoot because the snake has to be waited out ('our old friend is lost to us forever'), and the boys watch the swallowing; and Juno the dog is killed by a lioness, carried home wrapped in canvas, and buried under an epitaph one of the boys writes. The taming is not gentle either — the father subdues the wild onager by a method he says he learned that the American Indians use, springing on her back and biting through her ear. Religion is the frame, not the background: the father is a Swiss pastor, the family prays morning and evening, chapter four is a Sabbath given over to a long parable he tells instead of a sermon, and 'God' appears 35 times. The book was written to teach, and the father teaches on every page — a kangaroo cannot appear without a paragraph on marsupials. Dated language is limited but present: 'savages' is used 25 times, mostly of animals, and several times of unnamed distant peoples described in the third person as a category — the source of a clever technique in some places, a feared danger in others; no Indigenous person ever appears in the book. 'Negroes' occurs once, in a passing remark about a way of splitting a gourd learned from books of travel. The colonial frame is unexamined: the family names the island New Switzerland, claims it, and the last chapter hands it to England as a colony with the father proposed as governor. The mother is capable and constantly right, and is also the only adult woman in 119,000 words; the only other female character, Jenny, appears in chapter seventeen. No word here has been altered.

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Why your kid will love it

01

The tree house is built, not found

Ten chapters in they are still sleeping in a tent, and the mother is the one who says she has seen an arbour up a lime tree back in Switzerland and why can't they do that. What follows is the whole job: the sticks they throw at the branch and cannot get over it, the arrow that finally carries a thread across, the rope ladder built from it, the plank floor, the roof of sailcloth, and years later the hollow trunk cleared out from the inside — 'we could look up the trunk, which was like a great smooth funnel, and see the sky above' — and a spiral staircase built round a sapling inside it. Kids who draw floor plans on graph paper will read this with a pencil in their hand.

02

Each boy gets a mount, and they are ridiculous

Fritz breaks an onager and calls it Lightfoot. Jack rides a buffalo named Storm and keeps a jackal called Fangs, who catches game beautifully and then eats it. Ernest has a monkey, Knips, trained to climb the palms and drop the coconuts into a basket. Franz is given a bull calf and names it Grumble, 'hear what a low muttering noise he makes.' Later Jack lassoes an ostrich, and their father solves the problem of steering a bird with a leather hood and two whalebone-sprung blinkers wired to the reins: close the right eye and it turns left, close the left and it turns right, shut both and it stops. Four brothers, four animals, and an argument about whose name is better.

03

Everything gets named, so the island becomes a place

Safety Bay, Tentholm, Falconhurst, Shark's Island, Flamingo Marsh, Prospect Hill, Cape Disappointment, Jackal River, Woodlands, Rockburg — and then the whole island, New Switzerland. They argue about every one of them. A kid who has ever named the tree at the end of the road, or drawn a map of the back garden with places on it, already knows exactly what this family is doing and why it matters so much to them.

Reading it together?

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The background for parents

The pitch

A Swiss pastor, his wife Elizabeth and their four sons wake on the seventh day of a storm to find the ship aground and the crew gone in the only boats. What follows is not a rescue story. They get ashore in four sawn-up tubs, and then they stay — for ten years, by choice as much as by accident — and the book is the father’s journal of how a bare coast became a country. A tent, then a house up a tree, then a home hollowed out of a wall of rock salt. A bridge, a sledge, a bark canoe, candles made from wax berries, a loom, a sugar press, a kayak. Four boys who each tame an animal to ride and argue about whose is best. And somewhere in the middle of it, a boa constrictor comes out of the marsh and the family loses the donkey. It is the ancestor of every treehouse, every desert island and every kid who has ever built something out of what was lying around.

What to know

This is a harder book than the Disney film suggests and an easier one than its reputation. The sentences are Victorian but they move, and about a third of the book is four brothers talking — published measures put the full text at 1270L with an ATOS of 9.7, and the AR quiz for the unabridged version is worth 23 points against roughly 117,000 words. Two warnings about shopping for it. The first is abridgement: nearly every paperback of this title on the market is a retelling, and the 540L-to-610L figures you will find online belong to those, not to this. The second is translation, which matters more here than for almost any other classic. Wyss’s German was expanded in French, and then translated into English half a dozen times by people who felt free to add and cut; the versions differ by whole chapters. Ours is W. H. G. Kingston’s 1879 text, which is the one nearly every modern edition uses, taken from the 1916 Rand McNally Windermere printing — and we checked it against a second complete edition before building it, because the most widely circulated alternative is missing the pearl fishery, the ostriches, the walrus and the albatross entirely. The chapters are the edition’s own, and they are long: eighteen of them, averaging about 6,800 words, which is roughly twenty-five minutes of reading aloud. They have proper titles, so you can see where you are, but plan a stopping point rather than being caught by one. The illustrations are Milo Winter’s fourteen colour plates, and there is a story in them: the copy Project Gutenberg transcribed is a reduced printing carrying only eight, so we took all fourteen from a full copy of the same edition and put each one where the book’s own list of illustrations says it belongs. The six that Gutenberg’s copy is missing include the boa closing on the donkey, which is the most reproduced picture in the book. Read the content note before you hand this over: the animal killing is relentless, and the religious frame is the whole architecture rather than a decoration on it.

Life when written

Johann David Wyss was a pastor in Bern and an army chaplain, and he made the story up for his own four sons somewhere between 1794 and 1798, telling it to them episode by episode — which is why the book reads like a serial and why the four boys in it behave like four boys somebody actually knew. Those were not calm years to be a father in Bern. French troops crossed into Switzerland on 5 March 1798, the old Confederacy collapsed within weeks, and the Helvetic Republic that replaced it was resented above all for what it did to religious practice. Wyss put the manuscript away. It was his son Johann Rudolf — professor of philosophy at Bern, and fresh from writing the words of Rufst du, mein Vaterland, a war song for Swiss gunners set to the tune of God Save the King that Switzerland then kept as its national anthem until 1961 — who edited the manuscript and got it printed in 1812 and 1813; another son, Johann Emmanuel, drew the pictures. Their father lived to see it become the most translated Swiss book ever written and died in 1818, and the family’s own peculiar arrangement is stamped on every page of it: a father who cannot watch his sons find a plant without explaining it, and four sons who keep interrupting.

The book vs. the movie

Disney's film invents a pirate siege, a girl disguised as a cabin boy, and an animal race, cuts one of the four brothers, and then reverses the ending: on the page it is Fritz who sails away.How they differ →

If they like it, read these next

Modern books (still in copyright, so not free) that scratch the same itch.

The Explorer by Katherine Rundell

For the reader who liked four children working out how to live somewhere with no adults to organise it. A plane goes down over the Amazon, four kids survive, and Rundell does what Wyss does — food first, then shelter, then the discovery that somebody has been here before. It reads at grade 4–7, so it suits a younger sibling who wants this book and cannot have it yet.

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen

For the reader who wanted the survival and could do without the lectures. One boy, one hatchet, fifty-four days, and 192 pages instead of 400. Paulsen keeps only the mechanism — how do you make fire, what do you eat, what do you do about the plane in the lake — which is exactly the part of Wyss a reluctant reader is really there for.

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Prefer a printed copy? Union Square Kids Unabridged Classics — the full text, with Scott McKowen's scratchboard plates. Check the word 'unabridged' on any copy you buy; most paperbacks of this book are not (affiliate links). Not sure whether your reader needs the original or an abridged edition? Our guide to choosing →

Read it on any device

Kindle

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Computer

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Quick answers

What age is The Swiss Family Robinson right for?

We shelve it for grades 6–9 — that's where the language and the length sit for a reader on their own. Read aloud, it works earlier, from about age 8–9 — kids follow a story by ear well before they can read it alone.

What reading level is The Swiss Family Robinson?

The unabridged text measures 1270L Lexile, AR level 9.7 (23 points). (Lerner's edition of the full Kingston text is listed 1270L; the 540L–610L figures everywhere online belong to retellings, not to this book.) In everyday terms: grades 6–9, and easier as a read-aloud.

Is The Swiss Family Robinson scary?

Animals are killed constantly, and a boa constrictor swallows the family donkey while they watch. The killing is constant and it is the texture of the book, not an event in it. The family shoots, spears, snares or clubs nearly every animal it meets — jackals, a shark, a walrus, flamingos, a boa constrictor, a hyena, a bear, a lion and lioness, a tiger, buffaloes, ostriches, penguins, a whale — mostly for meat, skins or safety, and often described at the moment of dying. Two deaths are meant to land: Grizzle the donkey is taken by the boa constrictor in front of the whole family, and the father refuses to shoot because the snake has to be waited out ('our old friend is lost to us forever'), and the boys watch the swallowing; and Juno the dog is killed by a lioness, carried home wrapped in canvas, and buried under an epitaph one of the boys writes. The taming is not gentle either — the father subdues the wild onager by a method he says he learned that the American Indians use, springing on her back and biting through her ear. Religion is the frame, not the background: the father is a Swiss pastor, the family prays morning and evening, chapter four is a Sabbath given over to a long parable he tells instead of a sermon, and 'God' appears 35 times. The book was written to teach, and the father teaches on every page — a kangaroo cannot appear without a paragraph on marsupials. Dated language is limited but present: 'savages' is used 25 times, mostly of animals, and several times of unnamed distant peoples described in the third person as a category — the source of a clever technique in some places, a feared danger in others; no Indigenous person ever appears in the book. 'Negroes' occurs once, in a passing remark about a way of splitting a gourd learned from books of travel. The colonial frame is unexamined: the family names the island New Switzerland, claims it, and the last chapter hands it to England as a colony with the father proposed as governor. The mother is capable and constantly right, and is also the only adult woman in 119,000 words; the only other female character, Jenny, appears in chapter seventeen. No word here has been altered.

Is the free ebook really the whole book?

Yes — the complete, unabridged text, with the original Milo Winter (the 1916 Rand McNally Windermere edition — all fourteen colour plates) illustrations. The Swiss Family Robinson was published in 1812, so it's in the US public domain: sharing it free is legal, and there's no signup or catch. We build the ebook ourselves from the original edition.

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