ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that concurrent developments of perception. It argues that, even if such journeys through the homeland were concerned with a very different set of issues to the Grand Tour, both are tied to empiricism and the empirical project of description. It explores how the representation of things sheds light on contemporary modes of perception. In contrast, the rise of a new genre in the mid-1700s, the country-house guidebook, began to show a critical-comparative practice of perception that directed and instructed the tourist on what and how to see. Like Tobias Smollett, Joseph Addison seems to regard the eye as an opening between the self-contained spaces of world and mind. An exploration of the eighteenth-century writings of Daniel Defoe, hailed as a pioneer of the novel, serves to explicate what description was before it became visual, presenting the listing and naming of objects in Defoe's writing as a manner of description that relied on shared meanings and analogies.
