The Swiss Family Robinson

The Swiss Family Robinson (German: Der Schweizerische Robinson) is a novel by Johann David Wyss, first published in 1812, about a Swiss family shipwrecked in the East Indies en route to Port Jackson, Australia.

Written by Swiss pastor Johann David Wyss, edited by his son Johann Rudolf Wyss and illustrated by another son, Johann Emmanuel Wyss, the novel was intended to teach his four sons about family values, good husbandry, the uses of the natural world and self-reliance. Wyss' attitude toward education is in line with the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and many episodes involve Christian-oriented moral lessons such as frugality, husbandry, acceptance and cooperation.

Wyss presents adventures as lessons in natural history and physical sciences. This resembles other educational books for children published about the same time. These include Charlotte Turner Smith's Rural Walks: in Dialogues intended for the use of Young Persons (1795), Rambles Further: A continuation of Rural Walks (1796), A Natural History of Birds, intended chiefly for young persons (1807). But Wyss' novel is also modeled after Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, an adventure story about a shipwrecked sailor first published in 1719 and the source of the "Robinson" in the title "Swiss Family Robinson".

The book presents a geographically impossible array of large mammals (including antelopes, brown bears, capybaras, cheetahs, dingos, elephants, giraffes, hippos, hyenas, jackals, kangaroos, koalas, leopards, lions, monkeys, moose, muskrat, mustangs, onagers, pangolins, peccaries, platypuses, porcupines, rhinos, tapirs, tigers, walruses, wild boars, wolves, wombats, and zebras), birds (including black swans, blue jays, bustards, ducks, eagles, falcons, flamingos, grosbeaks, herons, ostriches, parakeets, parrots, peafowls, penguins, pigeons, and snipes), and plants (including the bamboos, cassavas, cinnamon trees, coconut palm trees, fir trees, flax, Myrica cerifera, rice, rubber plant, potatoes, sago palms, and an entirely fictitious kind of sugarcane) that probably could never have existed together on a single island for the children's education, nourishment, clothing and convenience.