Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain

Daniel Defoe was born Daniel Foe in London in 1660. It was perhaps inevitable that Defoe, an outspoken man, would become a political journalist. As a Puritan he believed God had given him a mission to print the truth, that is, to proselytize on religion and politics and, in fact, he became a prolific pamphleteer satirizing the hypocrisies of both Church and State. Defoe admired William III, and his poem The True-Born Englishman (1701) won him the king’s friendship. But an ill-timed satire on High Church extremists, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, published during Queen Anne’s reign, resulted in his being pilloried and imprisoned for seditious libel in 1703. At 59 Defoe turned to fiction, completing The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719), partly based on the saga of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor; Moll Flanders (1722); Colonel Jack (1722); A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); and Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress (1724).

PAT ROGERS is DeBartolo Professor in the Liberal Arts at the University of South Florida. He was educated at Cambridge where he gained a double first in English and went on to obtain a Ph.D and Litt.D. He has held teaching posts at the universities of Cambridge, London, Wales and Bristol. His books include Grub Street(1972), The Augustan Vision (1974), Eighteenth-Century Encounters(1985) and Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (1985), as well as works on Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding and Johnson. He is editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature (1987) and advisory editor of The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment. He has also edited Joshua Reynolds' Discourses and Jonathan Swift: Selected Poems for Penguin Classics.