From “the Pen of an Itinerate”: Reimagining the British Nation in Defoe’s Tour

Abstract

This article examines Daniel Defoe’s use of mobility to imagine the British nation in his domestic travel narrative A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26). While many critics have noted his participation in the national project of imagining a unified Britain, which was of great importance due to the 1707 Act of Union, this article explores the liberating (or destabilizing) effect that Defoe’s travels have on the construction of a British national identity. After discussing how his carefully planned itinerary leads him to portray Britain as a prosperous nation primarily engaged in trade, I focus on his rambling movements as an “itinerant” traveler, which take on the qualities of what Paul Smethurst calls “disorderly mobility.” In examining how he repeatedly deviates from his itinerary to venture into less-traveled (and less-commercialized) areas, I argue that Defoe employs his wanderings to subvert the homogeneity of his own national vision and instead imagine Britain in terms of its geography. It is by envisioning Britain as an island, an inclusive space in which everyone within its borders is endowed with a British national identity regardless of how they may differ from each other, that Defoe is able to propose an alternative and more inclusive notion of the nation, which I assert the later editions of the Tour supplement with their “great Additions, Improvements, and Corrections.”