Daniel Defoe, England’s Roads, and the Politics of Movement

Daniel Defoe feared isolation. The condition haunts his late novels, sparking his fearful creativity. Moll Flanders is a romp, but it is energised by Moll’s need for social connection; she observes at one juncture how ‘to be friendless is the worst condition, next to being in want, that a woman can be reduced to’.1
She bemoans how ‘when a woman is thus left desolate and void of counsel, she is just like a bag of money or a jewel, dropped on the highway, which is prey to the next comer’ and admits ‘this was evidently my case for I was now a loose, unguided creature, and had no help, no assistance, no guide for my conduct.’2
She feared her loneliness was a forerunner of penury; that her isolation would incur her destitution. In contrast, Robinson Crusoe (1719) is, most obviously, a forensic study of the effect of isolation on the individual. While still often written up as a capitalist fable, the novel also rehearses the question of how social animals survive when deprived of sociability. Even Crusoe, the book ultimately admits, requires companionship. Similarly, A Journal of a Plague Year (1722), now subject to a scholarly revival of interest, concerns the impact of isolation on
society. Again, commonly rendered as a fable of capitalist political arithmetic, this work also revolves around the sudden collapse of connection. In all these cases Defoe related isolation to constriction: can Moll find economic security through romantic sexual liaisons; can Crusoe survive when he is restricted to a single island; can a country cope when people cannot.
congregate?