Information
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). Ramsgate was no exception. What seems chiefly to have struck him about the place was the tendency on the part of the inhabitants to give their town a historical importance which it probably did not merit.
Quotations
…Ramsgate, a small port, the inhabitants are mightily fond of having us call it Roman’s-Gate; pretending that the Romans under Julius Caesar made their first attempt to land here, when he was driven back by a storm…
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... |
