Daniel Defoe’s Journeys of the Mind

In his novels, Daniel Defoe’s eponymous protagonists travel far and wide and then yearn for a return to English shores. Robinson Crusoe hopes to be rescued from his ‘Island of Despair’. Moll Flanders craves a change of scene when married life in Virginia doesn’t work out: ‘I hankered after coming to England, and nothing would satisfy me without it.’ And, after passing from one protector to another in continental Europe, Roxana sails past the country she was ‘bred up in’ and is filled with a desire to break free and settle there: ‘I secretly wish’d, that a Storm wou’d rise, that might drive the Ship over to the Coast of England, whether they wou’d or not, that I might be set on Shore any-where upon English Ground.’