Daniel Defoe, who also features in our previous series, the 100 best novels (No 2), with Robinson Crusoe, was first and foremost a great reporter, who marshalled the English language to describe the variety and wonders of a changing world: Defoe’s astonishing career spanned the making of the society that came to call itself, with a certain insular pride, Great Britain.

Defoe is great, too. With his near contemporaries Swift, Johnson and Pope, he is one of those English writers who invented our literary tradition, and whose work resonates down the centuries. As a writer in many genres, he embodies the spirit of the English amateur, and some of his nonfiction is suffused with a quasi-lyrical sensibility.

Defoe’s Tour was first published in three volumes at intervals of just above a year, in 1724-26. The third volume was dated 1727 (which explains the bibliographical detail), but actually first appeared in August 1726. Another complication: the Tour was indeed based on Defoe’s extensive travels, but the last of these (Defoe was getting on; he would die in 1731) seems to have occurred in 1722. In fact, the Tour had a life long after Defoe’s death. The novelist and printer Samuel Richardson, with an eye to the market, published new editions with new material in both 1738 and 1742.

Defoe’s Tour was an outstanding version of an established genre, the literary travel guide to these islands. As Great Britain acquired its first empire and domestic tourism took off there was no shortage of new, informative surveys of the kingdom, from Arthur Young to William Cobbett. It’s a long tradition. English topographic writing flourishes to this day in the writing of Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane. Defoe is their mysterious godfather, a rackety, cross-grained, indomitable writer mildly obsessed with the peculiar and intangible character of the indefinable entity known as England (or Albion, or Britain or – now – the United Kingdom).

He was perfectly equipped for his momentous task. The guide’s qualities of readability, precision, surprise, imaginative breadth and literary charm, derive from Defoe’s many careers as a businessman, a government spy, journalist and pioneer novelist. He was always prolific, and his Tour is the work of a man who not only loves to write, and perhaps even wishes to be a poet. This passage is very far from the work of a Pevsner or a Shell guide:

“This town is a testimony of the decay of public things, things of the most durable nature … [The decay of the town] seems owing to nothing but to the fate of things, by which we see that towns, kings, countries, families, and persons, have all their elevation, their medium, their declination, and even their destruction in the womb of time, and the course of nature.”

Defoe was an instinctive stylist, when he needed to be; he was also at pains to arrange his material into a most engaging narrative, pleasing his audience: the Tour is superbly well organised to satisfy his readers. Cast in the form of “a letter”, each journey – at least to start with – begins and ends in his native London. Letter 3, which goes as far west as Land’s End, opens:

I intended once to have gone due west on this journey; but then I should have been obliged to crowd my observations so close (to bring Hampton Court, Windsor, Blenheim, Oxford, the Bath and Bristol, all into one letter … ) as to have made my letter too long, or my observations too light and superficial, as others have done before me … Hampton Court lies on the north bank of the river Thames, about two small miles from Kingston … so that the road straightening the parks a little, they were obliged to part the parks, and leave the … Great Park, part on the other side of the road; a testimony of that just regard that the kings of England always had, and still have, to the common good.”

By Letter 8, he is roaming the Midlands, from 11 to 13, he is in Scotland, a country in the process of merging its fortunes with England, after the Act of Union, a treaty signed and sealed in Defoe’s lifetime. He was at pains to present himself, as usual, in the guise of a neutral observer:

Hitherto all the descriptions of Scotland, which have been published in our day, have been written by natives of that country, and that with such an air of the most scandalous partiality, that it has been far from pleasing the gentry or nobility of Scotland themselves … In the meantime, as I shall not make a paradise of Scotland, so I assure you I shall not make a wilderness of it. I shall endeavour to show you what it really is, what it might be, and what, perhaps, it would much sooner have been, if some people’s engagements were made good to them, which were lustily promised a little before the late Union…”

Defoe’s aim, throughout, was to report on “the present state” of his country. About 300 years on, his portrait is both an elegy for a lost world and a thrilling advertisement for an extraordinary society on the brink of a greatness that it’s now in the process of squandering through a crazy act of national suicide.

A signature sentence

[Dunwich] is a testimony of the decay of public things, things of the most durable nature … the ruins of Carthage, or the great city of Jerusalem, or of ancient Rome, are not at all wonderful to me; the ruins of Nineveh, which are so entirely sunk, as that ’tis doubtful where the city stood; the ruins of Babylon, or the great Persepolis, and many capital cities, which time and the change of monarchies have overthrown; these, I say, are not at all wonderful, because being the capitals of great and flourishing kingdoms, where those kingdoms were overthrown, the capital cities necessarily fell with them.”

Three to compare

William Cobbett: Rural Rides (Two Vols), (1830)
Henry Mayhew: London Labour and the London Poor (1851)
George Orwell: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

• A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe is published by Penguin Classics (£14.99)