ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how Defoe, a life-long student of geography, managed to narrate British space through cartography, chorography and fiction and discusses the interconnection between the geographic and literary tools that he brought to his travel account. In the Tour Defoe offers an account of all regions of Great Britain without exception, that is to say, in the context of the beginning of the eighteenth century, including Scotland, which inspired a lot of anxiety and distrust for English travellers. Research methods and advice for travellers were also prescribed; as Vickers shows in her book titled Defoe and the New Sciences: in the Royal Society's pursuit of knowledge. Defoe's other texts, such as those on the plague, where as Bell notes, Defoe states clearly that the reorganisation of space by the authorities to circumscribe the epidemics influenced the history of that tragedy of the poor' by imposing a quarantine policy in the parishes that were most hit by the Pestilence.
