A tour thro 'the whole island of Great Britain

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A tour thro 'the whole island of Great Britain is a travelogue by the English author Daniel Defoe , which was first published in three volumes between 1724 and 1727. Except for Robinson Crusoe , this was Defoe's most popular and financially successful publication in the 18th century. The text appeals to both the need for fact and the imagination. Thanks to his extensive travels and his life as a soldier, businessman and spy, Defoe knows how to combine indisputable reality and personal opinion in his travelogue.

construction

The tour is divided into several trips. Volume 1 contains three travel letters. The first two, from Essex , Colchester , Harwich , Suffolk , Norfolk , and Cambridgeshire , and through Kent , Maidstone , Canterbury , Sussex , Hampshire , and Surrey , are round trips beginning and ending in London . Letter 3 describes a trip to Land's End with Letter 4 and the journey back from there begins Volume 2. Letter 5 focuses on London and the royal court. Volume 2 ends with letters 6 and 7, which describe a trip to Anglesey and back. In the third volume the story begins on the Trent or the Mersey , from where the narrator slowly travels north through the Midlands . This part consists of letters 8-10. In the end, Scotland is divided into three units for letters 11-13.

Defoe did not necessarily visit all of these places himself, nor did he undertake the trips just before or while he was writing the book. Rather, he built on his travels as a businessman or while working for Robert Harley . Occasionally he makes use of or is at least inspired by William Camden's Britannia and John Strype's version of John Stow's Survey of London .

Release history

After the first edition, which was printed between 1724 and 1727, further editions appeared. Ten years after the first publication, Samuel Richardson secured the rights and printed a second edition, which appeared on October 13, 1738 in a considerably revised form. Richardson was responsible for some of the revisions not only in this edition, but also in the editions of 1742, 1748, 1753, and 1761/62. Richardson's biographers judge that taking on a travel book was an unusual decision for Richardson, who traveled little. As a result of his revisions, the Burch became less and less of a travel book.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Humphrey Southall: Defoe Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Great Britain Historical GIS Project, 2009. ( visionofbritain.org.uk )
  2. ↑ a b c Pat Rogers (Ed.): A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Penguin, London 1971, ISBN 0-14-043066-0 .
  3. ^ TC Duncan Eaves, Ben D. Kimpel: Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1971 ISBN 0-19-812431-7 , p. 73.

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