Literary Art in Defoe's Tour

IT IS TWENTY YEARS since Godfrey Davies opened an article with the stark judgment, None of the larger works of Defoe has received so little actual attention as the Tour.' This comment remains as accurate today. In the last two decades we have had the first collection of Defoe's letters, the standard bibliography, and one major biography-quite apart from a growing critical debate on the novels. This makes it all the harder to justify scholarly neglect of the Tour.2 Apart from anything else, A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26) represents the author's mature literary artistry. Coming where it does in the canon, it draws on something more than his accumulated experience as reporter, spy, and social observer. It derives, too, from the creative enterprises which had occupied Defoe in the preceding five years. The truth is that the Tour functions in a more rewarding and inward fashion than has been generally recognised. Defoe gives us abundant documentation of English life, certainly. But the interest of the Tour is not confined to the social and economic data it provides. The book deploys the resources available to a great imaginative writer, and it supplies less a picture of Britain than a vision of nationhood

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• Defoe and the wonders of the Peake

  Paul Hartle, P N Hartle•English Studies•1986

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• Imagining the Nation in Defoe's A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain

  Betty A Schellenberg•ELH•1995

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