Defoe's Tour and Early Modern Britain
Panorama of the Nation

Authoritative yet accessible, this is the first-ever comprehensive account of a true landmark in eighteenth-century writing on Britain.

Pat Rogers (Author)

9781009102773, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 July 2025

342 pages
27 x 18 x 2.2 cm, 0.496 kg

'A richly historicized and compellingly written account of Tour's literary-historical significance. … Rogers has created a compendium of resources - remarkable in its breadth and depth of contextual and intertextual material - that will prove invaluable to literary and historical scholars of Tour, Defoe, and Great Britain itself.' Bethany Williamson, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cat

Authoritative yet accessible, this is the first-ever comprehensive account of a true landmark in eighteenth-century travel writing. Daniel Defoe's Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain is constantly cited even now by students in practically every branch of history, and there are few topics essential to our understanding of the nation in the early modern period that do not show up in its pages. Historians since the late nineteenth century have looked to the Tour as one of the richest and most insightful works describing Britain in the lead-up to the Industrial Revolution, and critics and biographers of Defoe have regularly named it as among his most characteristic and central works. Indispensable for virtually any interdisciplinary approach to the nation in this period, this new study provides wide-reaching, up-to-date analysis of the content of the Tour, and of its methods, sources, form, and vast historical significance.

Introduction
Part 1. Form and Function: 1. The identity of Britain
2. Embedding and embodying the nation: Textual practices and form in the Tour
3. The epic strain
4. The shape of the nation
Part 2. Time: 5. The role of the Tour in the historiography of early modern Britain
6. The Jacobite rising in the Tour: Preventing the ruin of Scotland
7. The impact of the bubble
8. Local proverbs and folk wisdom
Part 3. Place: 9. The uses of topography
10. Road-testing the first turnpikes: Defoe's account of English highways
11. Defoe on Bristol: The text with an introduction and annotation
12. Atlas Maritimus: The case for Defoe's authorship.

Subject Areas: Historical geography [HBTP], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], British & Irish history [HBJD1], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]