Coming to Our Senses : Narratology and the Visual
In this article, I want to compare two travelogues that mark the submission of the travel report to the paradigm of the eyewitness. The two texts in question are Daniel Defoe's Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26) and Edward Ward's account of his ramblings through London in The London Spy, originally published as a periodical between 1698 and 1699. While the two texts deal with roughly the same subject matter, London around the year 1700, they present two very different accounts of it. In line with the century's empiricist imperative to observe, both emphasize that they will only report those things they have personally witnessed. However, the resulting reports could not be more unlike. Defoe's calm, plain, and objective description of the streets and buildings of the city is contrasted by Ward's rushed, exuberant and excited account of its inhabitants. How can the two descriptions be so different, when the perceived object is basically the same?
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