Daniel Defoe, England's Roads, and the Politics of Movement.

Daniel Defoe's novels are informed by his fear of isolation. This article argues that his major work of travel writing A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (3 volumes 1724–6) highlights a solution to this anxiety. The work is constructed around a sequence of thirteen tours that chart his movement through the varied landscapes and urban centers of the newly united kingdom. In this way England specifically is characterized as a mobile society accentuated by Defoe's close narration of the emerging toll road system. It is this concern with the infrastructure of roads and routeways that weaves together the southern kingdom and supports its economic development. Infrastructure provides the mechanism through which citizens of the realm congregate in towns and cities which are in turn understood as places of social mixing and of political freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]