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9 - Defoe and London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2009

John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

“I BEGAN my Travels, where I Purpose to End them, viz. At the City of London ...” (Defoe, Tour I, 1) / Daniel Defoe began and ended his own travels, so to speak, in London, and the city of London is the implied or explicit setting, subject, or structuring principle of just about every work he wrote, didactic or fictional, prosaic or poetic. Cities in general fascinated Defoe, but he wrote most particularly of London, its boundaries and buildings, streets and occupations, trade and crime, strengths and vulnerabilities, ancient patterns and constant permutations. He knew it intimately and represented it vividly; however fictional the plots and characters of his novels might be, London is always precisely real. The streets are accurately mapped, the buildings reliably themselves. And yet, for Defoe, there are many Londons overlapping in those precisely drawn streets. There is the economically charged city, buoyant with trade, a city of shops and houses and traffic and merchants and apprentices and servants. But there are darker Londons with ragged children and forgotten elderly swept into corners, thieves lurking in the underworld, stockjobbers corrupting financial networks, watermen and hackney drivers imperiling the streets, plague and fire ravaging the whole. Places of safety and prosperity are simultaneously the spaces of danger and vulnerability. Defoe's London teems with contradictions and ambiguities and peculiar linguistic, social, and topographical codes - and he employs different genres to explore them.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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  • Defoe and London
  • Edited by John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe
  • Online publication: 28 March 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521858403.010
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  • Defoe and London
  • Edited by John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe
  • Online publication: 28 March 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521858403.010
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Defoe and London
  • Edited by John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe
  • Online publication: 28 March 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521858403.010
Available formats
×