General Editors: W R Owens and P N Furbank
Volume Editors: D W Hayton, N H Keeble, John McVeagh and Andrew Wear
This set includes many of Defoe’s key historical writings, which are crucial to an understanding of his view of contemporary life, and offer to modern scholars a unique resource for the study of eighteenth-century history, politics and travel. As a Pickering Masters edition, this set provides particularly high levels of annotation, including a general editor’s preface, introductions to each work, full explanatory and textual notes and consolidated index.
Volume 1
A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Vol. I (1724)
Volume 2
A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Vol. II (1725)
Volume 3
A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Vol. III (1726)
Volume 4
A General History of Discoveries and Improvements (1725-6); An Essay upon Literature (1726)
Volume 5
Due Preparations for the Plague (1722) and Mere Nature Delineated (1726)
Volume 6
Memoirs of the Church of Scotland (1717)
Volume 7
A History of the Union of Great Britain, Part I (1710)
Volume 8
A History of the Union of Great Britain, Part II (1710)
‘at last we have a modern and reliable edition [of A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain]...this edition should also provide the raw material for a major advance in our understanding of Defoe’s oeuvre in general and his more specific contribution to the geographical culture of the early eighteenth century.’
– Robert Mayhew, Journal of Historical Geography
'...excellent scholarly introductions... put the works in the context of Defoe's biography and the broader cultural and political issues of the time'
– John Harries, Scottish Studies Review