Information
Defoe’s impressions of Queenborough, recorded in his 'A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain' (1722-5), seem to have been coloured by his scandalized discovery that such a lowly place was entitled to two members of parliament, the same as more populous and economically important districts of London. There is an echo here of his earlier days as a politically controversial journalist:
Quotations
At the south-west point of the Isle of Shepey, where the East-Swayle parts from the West, and passes on … stands a town memorable for nothing, but that which is rather a dishonour to our country than otherwise: namely, Queenborough, a miserable, dirty, decayed, poor, pitiful, fishing town; yet vested with corporation privileges, has a mayor, aldermen, &c. and his worship the mayor has his mace carried before him to church, and attended in as much state and ceremony as the mayor of a town twenty times as good. I remember when I was there, Mr. Mayor was a butcher, and brought us a shoulder of mutton to our inn himself in person, which we bespoke for our dinner, and afterwards he sat down and drank a bottle of wine with us. But that which is still worse … is, that this town sends two burgesses to Parliament, as many as the borough of Southwark, or the city of Westminster: though it may be presumed that all the inhabitants are not possessed of estates answerable to the rent of one good house in either of those places I last mentioned. The chief business of this town, as I could understand, consists in ale-houses, and oyster-catchers.
Place | Extract |
| Faversham | Defoe drew from his varied experiences as wholesaler, government spy and journalist to write a description of the counties he travelled through... |
| Queenborough | Defoe’s impressions of Queenborough, recorded in his 'A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain' (1722-5), seem to have been coloured by his scandalized discovery that such a lowly place was entitled to two members of parliament, the same as more populous and economically important districts of London... |
| Ramsgate | Not many of the towns of east Kent detained Daniel Defoe for long in his ‘Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain’(1724-6)... |
| Sheerness | More than a quarter of a century after Samuel Pepys and his fellow naval administrators had recommended the fortification and expansion of Sheerness as a dockyard, one of Daniel Defoe’s impressions of it in his 'Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain' (1724-6) was of a newly emerging town heavily shaped by its naval identity and conscious of its role in the defence of the Medway towns and London... |
