Religion and the Anglican Narrator in Defoe’s Tour

Critics predominantly read Daniel Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26) as a work promoting a vision of Britain as an economic power. They also treat the Tour’s narrator as Defoe himself, or, at least, as a figure with the same beliefs as Defoe. In this article, I prove that the narrator of the Tour is not Defoe but a fictional persona, a staunch supporter of the Church of England. I also demonstrate that the work is not just an encomium of British commerce but a sophisticated argument for religious toleration.