Defoe and London

Abstract Daniel Defoe was a Londoner born and bred, and across his writings he explores the significance of the capital at a time when London underwent rapid growth and modernization. Defoe chronicles, celebrates, and wrestles with the implication of that growth, recognizing it as a sign of national prosperity but contemplating it in the wake of the South Sea Bubble as a potential sign of corruption. The chapter analyses Defoe’s representations of London in tracts about economics, in periodicals, and in A Tour thro’ the whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6). It also examines representations of London in Defoe’s fiction, both the historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), which depicts a city in peril during the 1665 Great Plague, and criminal narratives such as Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack (both 1722), in which Defoe’s conception of personal identity and agency is bound up with urban experience.