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Religion and the Anglican Narrator in Defoe’s Tour
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 53, Number 3, Summer 2013
- pp. 565-582
- 10.1353/sel.2013.0027
- Article
- Additional Information
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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.