DEFOE’S “particular and diverting account of whatever is curious and
worth observation” in his native country, told in a series of letters,
was founded upon seventeen separate tours in the counties, and three
larger tours through the whole country. He said he had “viewed the north
part of England and the south part of Scotland five several times over,”
and he thought it worth while to note what he saw, because, “the fate of
things gives a new face to things; produces changes in low life, and
innumerable incidents; plants and supplants families; raises and sinks
towns; removes manufactures and trade; great towns decay and small towns
rise; new towns, new palaces, and new seats are built every day; great
rivers and good harbours dry up, and grow useless; again, new ports are
opened; brooks are made rivers; small rivers navigable pools, and
harbours are made where there were none before, and the like.” We are
endeavouring, by little books published from time to time in this
“National Library,” to secure some record of the changes in our land and
in our manners as a people, and of what was worth record in his day we
can wish for no better reporter than Defoe.
Here, therefore, is Defoe’s first letter, which describes a Tour through
the Eastern Counties as they were in 1722. It opens his first volume,
published in 1724, which was entitled, “A Tour through the whole Island
of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journies. Giving a Particular
and Diverting Account of whatever is Curious and worth Observation, viz.,
I. A Description of the Principal Cities and Towns, their Situation,
Magnitude, Government, and Commerce. II. The Customs, Manners, Speech,
as also the Exercises, Diversions, and Employment of the People. III.
The Produce and Improvement of the Lands, the Trade and Manufactures.
IV. The Sea Ports and Fortifications, the Course of Rivers, and the
Inland Navigation. V. The Public Edifices, Seats and Palaces of the
Nobility and Gentry. With Useful Observations upon the Whole.
Particularly fitted for the Reading of such as Desire to Travel over the
Island. By a Gentleman.” The Second Volume of the Tour was published in
June, 1725; and the Third Volume, giving a Tour through Scotland with a
Map of Scotland by Mr. Moll, followed in August, 1726, completing the
record of what Defoe called “a tedious and very expensive five years’
Travel.” However tedious the travel may have been, Defoe’s account of it
is anything but tedious reading.
The change of times is in this letter vividly illustrated in this volume
by Defoe’s account of life as he found it in the undrained Essex marshes.
Life in them was so unhealthy that the land was cheap, men thus were
tempted to take fevers for grazing and corn-growing. They became fairly
acclimatised, but when they brought their wives in fresh and healthy from
the uplands the women sickened and perished so fast, that it was common
to find a man with his sixth or eighth wife, and Defoe was told of an old
farmer who was living with his twenty-fifth wife, and had a son about
thirty-five years old, who had been married to about fourteen wives.
Custom had even dulled the sense of this horrible state of things until
the frequent change of wives became a local joke.
We have also a reminder in this volume of the traces and fresh memories
of Civil War in the account of the Siege of Colchester, which is a bit of
realisation such as no man could give better than Defoe. We may note
also the fulness of detail in his account of Ipswich, a town that he
first knew as a child of seven. He tells how it was once noted for
strong collier vessels built there, he maintains its honour and explains
its decay, while he makes various suggestions for the restoration of
prosperity, even to the hint that Ipswich would be a healthy and pleasant
place for persons to retire to who would live well upon slender means.
He writes, indeed, of Ipswich like a loyal townsman who had lived there
all his life.
At Bury St. Edmunds Defoe tolls us how in a pathway between two churches
a barrister of good family attempted to assassinate his brother-in-law
whom he had invited with his wife and children to supper. On excuse of
visiting a neighbour he led him to the ambush of a hired assassin. They
left their victim for dead, horribly mangled on the head and face and
body with a hedgebill. He lived to bring them to justice, and was living
still when Defoe wrote. But the assassins had been condemned to death
“on the statute for defacing and dismembering, called the Coventry Act.”
This Tour also recalls the days when Bury was a place of fashionable
holiday resort. Defoe meditates upon the decline and fall of Dunwich,
tells of the coming and going of the swallows from our east coast, and of
innumerable swallows whom he saw one day waiting for a favourable wind on
the roofs of the church and houses at Southwold. We read of the coming
up to London of the Norfolk turkeys on foot, in droves of from three
hundred to a thousand, and so many droves that by one route alone, and
that not the most crowded—over Stratford Bridge—a hundred and forty
thousand birds travelled to London between August and October.
In Norwich, Defoe was less interested than in Ipswich; but of Yarmouth
his account is full, and the frequency of wrecks on the east coast,
especially about Cromer Bay, which seamen called the Devil’s Throat, is
illustrated by the fact that in all the way from Winterton towards Cromer
that “the farmers and country people had scarce a barn, or a shed, or a
stable, nay not the pales of their yards and gardens, not a hog sty, but
what was built of old planks, beams, wales, and timbers, etc., the wrecks
of ships, and ruins of mariners’ and merchants’ fortunes.”
Defoe saw the races at Newmarket, where he was “sick of the jockeying
part.” He went also to Bury Fair, of which he gives a full description,
and at Cambridge he paid honour to the University.
There was another Tour told in letters so near to Defoe’s in date and
form that the first or second volume of one work is often sold with the
second or first volume of the other. The book not by Defoe was entitled
“A Journey through England in Familiar Letters from a Gentleman” here to
his friend abroad, in two vols., 1722, with a third volume on Scotland in
1726. All editions published after Defoe’s death in 1731 have matter
added by others. The addition of new matter began with the novelist
Samuel Richardson in 1732.
Some time afterwards there were changes announced as “by a gentleman of
eminence in the literary world.”