The Mysterious Island is Verne's deliberate scientific rewrite of Robinson Crusoe, and the book says so from inside: the castaways call their settlement Granite House and repeatedly compare themselves to Crusoe, favourably, because they have an engineer. The form is Defoe's:
- Men thrown onto an unknown island with nothing
- The plot is the work: shelter, fire, pottery, iron, nitroglycerine, a telegraph
- A companion acquired rather than arrived with (Ayrton, found on a neighbouring island, which is the Friday position rewritten as a rescue from savagery of a different kind)
Verne's argument is the difference. Crusoe survives by providence and salvage from the wreck; Cyrus Smith survives by knowing chemistry, and the novel is a case for the nineteenth century over the eighteenth.