A tour through brexit Britain

Abstract

This article embarks on a tour of Brexit Britain in the company of the eighteenth-century writer Daniel Defoe. The closer text is his A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, published between 1724 and 1726. Defoe wrote his Tour, in considerable part, as a gentleman’s guide to the newly ‘United’ Kingdom of Great Britain. It seems apt to revisit Defoe’s Tour given the stresses which presently test the integrity of this same union three centuries on. Stresses which moreover have been exacerbated by Britain’s tortured attempt to extricate itself from another Union, the European. The article will, in fact, revisit just three of the places to which Defoe invited his readers; Rochester, Westminster and Edinburgh. The reason for these three destinations will become apparent.