Whig Dreams

Margaret Anne Doody

  • A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe, edited by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens
    Yale, 423 pp, £19.95, July 1991, ISBN 0 300 04980 3
  • James Thomson: A Life by James Sambrook
    Oxford, 332 pp, £40.00, October 1991, ISBN 0 19 811788 4

This new issue of Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain is very pretty. It is a glossy book, lavishly illustrated with 18th-century maps, portraits, landscapes, prospects of towns and representations of buildings, markets, ships. This is obviously meant to function as a coffee-table book, or as a book to put in the back of a car (along with the National Trust’s guides). It’s the sort of book that would look much more at home in a BMW or Mercedes than a Mini. This production breathes an odour of ‘England’s Heritage’: one can imagine it in a bookcase beside works with titles such as ‘Roman Highways of Old Britain’ or ‘Our Cathedral Towns’.

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