It becomes necessary, to an English tradesman, to give him a state of the English trade,

an account of its present, not its past situation: Rejection of Antiquarianism and
Practising of Mercantile Economy in Defoes Tour
Arindam Ghosh and Sharanya Dutta
Daniel Defoes A Tour thro the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-1727) was the
culmination of a lifelong interest in the literature and the art of travel. The narrative technique
and the range of topics discussed in the Tour represent a radical departure from the dominant
antiquarian1 studies of England in the 16th and l7th centuries. While respecting the quality of
the scholarship of the best antiquarians, represented by William Camden 2, Defoe states
clearly in his private discovery of Britain that his business is not with antiquities but with the
present state of the nation. The antiquarians had recognized the need for a discovery of
Britain to place the nation within the context of European scholarship; Defoe recognized a
need for a portrait of the new and the changing, directed toward the middle-class.
By an examination of Defoes predecessors and his use of antiquarian material in the
Tour, we can come to an understanding of his contribution to the travel narrative. His
contribution can be further delineated by a comparison of the Tour with the travel account of
John Macky3, whose Familiar Letters rivalled Defoes Tour in popularity in the early 18th
century. Defoe scorned Mackys account in particular among his contemporaries because he
claimed that Macky failed to observe accurately and displayed little interest in the trading
world4. Defoes personal preferences in a description of his nation are also apparent in
relationship to the changes made by the editors of the Tour, who in the course of the 18th
century changed the Tour so drastically that it could no longer be identified as Defoes work.
Defoe chose to describe the trade, commerce, and manufacture of Britain as it existed
in his own day, thereby creating a dynamic map of the land. We would argue that Defoes
primary aim in the Tour was to educate the middle-class English tradesman about some basic
knowledge of his nation. To do so, he created a narrator who embodied the attributes of a
complete English tradesman to an even greater extent than Defoe himself. The Tour becomes
the narrators journey of education, leading him to the identity of a merchant able to earn a
living and to respond successfully to his environment. The reader, if he or she makes a similar
journey, may also assume the identity of a successful and resourceful tradesman who travels
about England verbally mapping the landscape in terms of its economic configuration.
When Daniel Defoe began A Tour thro the Whole Island of Great Britain in 1724, he
had already written his major novels and spent much of the sixty years of his life travelling
about his country as government agent, newspaper man, merchant and much else during his
long public career. The Tour was the culmination of a life-long interest in the literature and
the art of travel. Through his tours and his extensive knowledge of the descriptive literature,
Defoe had acquired what he recommended to others as a complete education. His interest
in travel and the literature that had developed from it greatly influenced his own account, as
well as influencing the creation of his fictional works.
The narrative technique and the range of topics discussed in the Tour represented at
the time of composition a radical departure from prominent studies of England, which were
dominated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the concerns of the antiquarians. The
antiquarians, by the very nature of their calling, were most interested in the past. Most of
their works, which often purported to be complete accounts of England, dealt with the Roman
and British past. William Camden, for example, whose Britannia represented the epitome of
antiquarian studies, chose to organize his portrayal of England around the geography of the
Celtic tribes. What often emerged from such a bias toward the past, particularly in those later

descriptions of Britain which contained little original material, were static and monolithic
works primarily of use to the scholar interested in the past as a relic. Antiquarians in the late
seventeenth century, who were heavily dependent on the work of their more scholarly
predecessors, often plagiarized large portions of Camdens books and those of Lambarde 5,
Dugdale6, and others, because they had a basic fear of a present they did not understand and
which was rapidly changing around them.
While Camden in his Britannia viewed history as static and monumental, Defoe
created a view of Englands past that was dynamic. His work was concerned with the process
of discovery itself. He produced a scheme which would educate the reader, enabling him to
create a map responsive to his environment. While the antiquarians had recognized the need
for a discovery of Britain to place the national history within the context of European
scholarship, Defoe recognized a need for a portrait of the new and the changing, directed
toward the middle-class.
Defoes primary aim in the Tour was to give the middle-class English tradesman the
basic knowledge of his nation. In doing so, he created a narrator who embodied the attributes
of a complete English tradesman. The journey which the narrator relates is a journey of
education which leads him to a new and successful identity. He becomes an example for
every reader of the Tour who wishes to attempt such a journey himself or herself to earn a
living and to respond successfully to the instabilities of a changing environment. The identity
of the narrator, a resourceful tradesman who travels about England verbally mapping the
landscape in terms of its economic configuration, is the identity that the reader may assume if
he or she makes a similar journey.
The Tour, although published after the novels had been written, can be seen as a type
of those novels, in that it provides an indication of the formation of Defoes view of travel
and his interpretation of previous travel literature. John Robert Moore, in a brief comment on
the Tour of Defoe in the Pillory and Other Studies accurately refers to the Tour as one of
Defoes most characteristic works since it exemplifies his great interest in travel of every sort.
The Tour is expressive of the authors personal interest in the commerce and trade of Great
Britain. In the work, Defoe expresses his interest in improving physical conditions of roads
and highways, as well as collecting data on trade centres and important markets for use by the
centrally located London merchants. By placing the Tour in a context of contemporary
popular guidebooks, Moore attempts to show that this unusual emphasis on trade and
commerce is peculiar to Defoe. He classifies Defoes work with a new type of guide which
combines both the system and the detail of the antiquarians with the personal records of
foreign travellers.
Although Defoes Tour was of considerable importance in the early eighteenth
century, it has received little critical attention. It has been chiefly considered for its
importance to economic history; for example, T. S. Ashton assesses Defoes comments on
agriculture in An Economic History of England (London, 1955) Paul Dottin, Moore, as well
as other Defoe biographers such as Sutherland and W. P. Trent give the work only brief
mention. Godfrey Davies has studied the relationship of the original edition of the Tour to its
eight revisions in Daniel Defoes A Tour Thro the Whole Island of Great Britain (Modern
Philology, 47 (1950), 21-36).
A study of the nature of the Tour holds implications for an understanding of Defoes
world view and the theory of history implicit in his work. At the end of the seventeenth
century, eye-witness accounts began to fulfil part of the need for a record of the time. The
traveller produced a record that would be utilized by later historians in their assessment of
eighteenth century life. James Sutherland finds Defoes Tour a characteristically fresh piece
of writing, and with its account not only of trades and manufactures, but of topography and
local history, It gives a valuable picture of provincial life in the early eighteenth century

(Sutherland 263). The concern of the historian examining early travel literature would be with
the accuracy and reliability of the factual data. But few of the travellers themselves were
concerned with an historical interpretation of the world they described. Defoe, in creating a
discovery of Britain as a scheme for the education of the tradesman provided a historical
interpretation of his time. By demonstrating the effect of the landscape on the success of the
tradesmans vocation, he was delineating the impact of eighteenth century life on a
representative of the middle-class commercial community.
Daniel Defoe did not attempt to record his discovery of Britain until 1724, seven
years before his death and shortly after he had completed the last of his major novels. But he
had made that discovery for himself years before as his career in government service and his
well informed treatises on internal affairs attest. When he began to write his tour, he had
already travelled extensively through the island and had apparently read most of the
significant travel literature of the seventeenth century. He made liberal use of facts gleaned
from earlier writers and from observations made at first hand throughout his active life. On
this myriad of information he imposed a unique point of view. He had become acquainted
through his knowledge of travel literature with the historiographical problems that had to be
resolved before making a discovery. It was not enough to record blithely the passing scene.
Writers like the antiquarian William Camden adopted implicitly a theory of history which
compelled them to structure their material according to a myth of the land which was
essentially monumental. This monumental view of history resulted in a static portrait of
England because the chief components of the landscape outlined by the antiquarians, the
works of the ancient Britons and the Romans, did not change with time. The landscape did
not consist of a horizontal map like Defoes, but was constructed like a vertical or pictorial
composition, with each feature in chronological relation to the hierarchical and historical
record. Camden and his followers had created a map of England which coincided with their
monumental historiography, but by the 1720s, their world view had become anachronistic.
Even in the previous centuries, the work of the antiquarians anticipated the qualities
that were to become anachronisms in the following century. Harrison found a gap between
city and country in the 1570s. His dislike for the city reflected a basically pastoral response
to humanitys place in the landscape. But pastoralism has often had an anachronistic quality
because it results in part from a distrust of the changing and the modern. By the late l600s,
antiquarian writers were using Harrison and Camden as part of their pastoral myth. To return
to the deans of antiquarian scholarship was to retain the spirit of a former time and to
disparage and often completely obliterate the contemporary scene.
Coming at the end of the great period of British antiquarian scholarship, Defoe was
faced with two problems in creating his individual response to the discovery of Britain.
Antiquarian scholarship, despite its pastoral bent, still represented an essential element in the
education of the gentleman. Defoe had recognized this element himself and was a student of
the earlier authors. Yet his own pragmatism had led him to insist that classical knowledge and
its attendant pastoralism could be only a small part of the education of a new man, the
complete English tradesman, and perhaps, as importantly, of the complete English gentleman.
In response to the second problem, the organization of the antiquarian scholarship around a
monumental view of history, Defoe again opted for change by choosing to reorganize the
traditional map of England. The map he created through the Tour was horizontal and
dynamic. His verbal map can be called horizontal because it was analogous to a road map, a
utilitarian guide to be spread before the traveller and marked with important roads, major
towns and cities, key market places, natural resources, etc. Defoes map was in fact an
economic map of England and can be served as the complete tradesmans introduction to
commerce and trade. The map itself could be called dynamic because it provided a guide to
any individual who must move physically and mentally through his or her country, and,

therefore, such a map necessitated constant revision. By extension, it implied a social and
economic mobility for which the Tour was a kind of guide. What Defoe was doing in one
sense in the Tour, was creating an example for others to follow in drawing their own maps.
He realized that any description of the present state of a nation must be revised to remain
accurate, a process which would fulfil the dynamic potential of such a work as a tour.
Defoes response to antiquarian travel literature was ambivalent, as we have stated
earlier. He respected the antiquarians knowledge of the past, yet placed a higher premium on
knowledge of the present. He recognized the importance of a study of the history and
antiquities of the nation, but insisted that the knowledge gained from such study be used to
promote a fuller understanding of economic man and to help him create for himself in any
age an economic map of England and of the world. The shift from rivers to roads can be used
to exemplify the adjustment made by Defoe to the map of Britain created by the antiquarians
in the seventeenth century. Camden organized Britain in terms of its river systems; these
rivers led him from the coasts inland past monuments Roman ruins, monasteries, crypts,
and cathedrals. The rivers, and an occasional Roman road, were the connecting links to guide
the traveller who could leisurely set sail in a metaphoric sense to explore his countrys place
in history. In contrast, Defoe built his map with roads, modern roads whose often
questionable state of repair became a major topic of several treatises and a section of the
Tour. Roads and their improvement already represented links between commercial centres,
means of transporting produced livestock, and eventually manufactured goods. They were
also important as routes for the tradesman, who must know his markets and his sources of
raw material. Rivers remained important, but not so much as divisions of the land, as a
potential system of waterways to facilitate the movement of heavy goods to the markets of
London and to the coasts for export. But in no manner were the rivers the placid landmarks of
Camdens scheme; Defoe was concerned with capacities and tonnage.
By the close of the seventeenth century, the antiquarian movement had passed its
peak, and many of Defoes contemporaries were turning to the composition of Journals as
the primary vehicle for travel narratives. Of necessity, Journals had to be concerned with
routes and roads since they represented individual experiences of the land and it was of little
use to the authors to sit at home and collect data from previous accounts. Authors of this time
like Chamberlayne, Brome, Cox and sometimes Dugdale, often chose to forget their own
times and return to some earlier age by plagiarizing long sections of obsolete works. What
they produced were curious descriptions of extinct places leaving the reader with a
purportedly new guide leading to places long since abandoned. Defoe knew the uselessness
of obsolete descriptions and encouraged each individual to make his or her own map and to
educate himself or herself in the world. Often the same writers had distinctly upper-class
biases. Like John Macky they found security in a world of established class structures and the
accompanying traditions. Reliance on tradition caused them to create static pictures. Because
they adhered to the existing structure they tended to appreciate wealth and titles, and a return
to the calm pastoral society that they believed had existed in an earlier, more self-sufficient
time. Paralleling this admiration for the established upper classes was a denigration of the
middle-class, even though many of the travel authors had thoroughly middle-class
backgrounds.
It might be argued that Defoe was far from the only writer in the early eighteenth
century who saw England in a dynamic economic sense. Celia Fiennes, for one, was
exhilarated by the industrial scene. But Defoe was unique in the extent of his concentration
on an economically-oriented man and his ability to adapt his world view to a fictional mode,
as well as to travel literature. Much attention has been given up critics to Robinson Crusoe as
economic man and to the influence of mercantilism on Defoes fiction, but relatively little
attention has been given to the historical and topographical milieu in which Defoe worked.

Nowhere does one find a similar devotion to the economic world as is found in the Tour7.
Only seven years after Defoes death, with the publication of the second edition in 1738, the
balance had already shifted. None of the subsequent editors seemed to have been at all
interested in what Defoe had been attempting in the Tour for the education of the English
tradesman. The development of the editions of the original work paralleled the shift in
English travel literature from concentration on antiquities to concentration on nature 8. The
map had been changed again to contain such tourist spots as mountains and lakes, moving
toward the natural landscape of the nineteenth-century artists. Editors eliminated references
to trade while replacing important sections of the Tour with accounts of antiquities often
lifted from sources over a hundred years old. Such a change in content was a direct attempt to
appeal to the pretensions of the middle-class audience. The middle classes were only
beginning to find leisure for travel by the mid-century and were more than willing to follow
the dictates of the travel writers. Defoes interest in the commercial scene was quickly
forgotten.
Daniel Defoe insisted in the Preface to the first volume and throughout the Tour that
he would deal with the present state of the nation and that he would include in his treatise
many topics of interest that had been omitted by other authors. In a brief outline of his topics,
he included agriculture, employment of the poor, manufactures, merchandizing, navigation, a
full description of the manner of living of the people, and all of their arts and industries.
Throughout he would point to the general dependence of the whole country upon the city of
London, as well for the consumption of its produce, as the circulation of its trade (Tour, I,
3). These topics clearly establish Defoes bias toward commerce and industry. Of the
approximately twenty topics outlined, at least twelve are concerned directly with trade. It is
possible to open the Tour to almost any page and find some comment on trade and industry;
the pace of the work is slowed only when the author begins to deal with topics distant from
his primary interests or when he borrows from the antiquarians.
When a writer undertakes a tour of his or her country, he or she hopes to make many
and diverse observations which will enable him or her to grasp the essence of the nation and
convey that essence to others to encompass a landscape in its broadest sense, with words.
To illustrate his meaning about the perception of the viewer, Defoe, true to his habit of
sketching characters to illustrate a point, provided a description of two travellers who
journeyed about England together. One traveller took brief notes on whatever interested him;
the other kept a detailed journal. The first gentleman produced an account that was both
interesting and informative because he was a keen observer and described only those scenes
which excited his own eye. The other produced a minute account of trivia, including every
detail of his trip from the hour of arrival to exact descriptions of every dinner. Of course,
Defoe chose as his model the first traveller, so like himself, whose work would not be a
journal of trifles (Tour, II, 136), but a textbook for anyone who would know the England of
1727.
The scheme of a tour permitted Defoe to record his journeys in an interesting manner.
At the same time, it provided him with a means of organizing material so that its significance
would become apparent to the reader. The physical movement of the narrator became in itself
an important segment of the narrative. This movement encouraged the rapid pace of the
descriptions because the writer had a compelling knowledge of the progression of the
material. Defoe acknowledged his awareness of a force encouraging him to move forward.
He explained at one point that upon crossing the Trent, both physically at the time of his
journey and mentally as he recorded it, he was faced with so many choices, so many
recollections, that he scarce knew where to begin lest he leave something out. But he returned
to his scheme, explaining:

that I call this work, a Tour, and the parts of it, Letters, I think, that tho I shall go a great length
forward, and shall endeavour to take thing with me as I go, yet I may take a review of some parts as I
come back, and so may be allowed to pick up any fragments I may have left. (Tour, II, 148)

The crowd of ideas that came to him with every new name forced him to move ahead, or
become drowned in detail, although he admitted that he might add to his material when he
reviewed it.
The rapid pace of the narrative, encouraged by the physical reality of a journey,
produced a style of prose in the Tour that seemed to have greatly disturbed Defoes editors.
Defoe has frequently been accused of writing too rapidly, of producing sentences that contain
so much that one often becomes lost in them. The editors of the Tour attempted to curb this
exuberance of style by eliminating redundancies. In one such case, Defoe described his
entrance into Halifax, a town which he greatly admired for its thriving industry and growing
population:
Having passed the Calder at Sorby Bridge, I now began to approach the town of Hallifax in the
description of which, and its dependencies all my account of the commerce will come in, for take
Hallifax, with all its dependencies, it is not to be equalled in England. First, the parish or vicaridge, for
it is but a vicaridge is, if not the largest, certainly the most populous in England in short it is a monster,
I mean, for a country parish, and a parish so far out of the way of foreign trade, courts, or sea ports.

(Tour, II, 97)

In the second edition the editor reduced this account to the following:
Having passed the Calder at Sorby Bridge, I now began to approach the town of Hallifax with all its
dependencies, it is not to be equalled in England. First, the parish or vicaridge, for it is but a vicaridge
is, if not the largest, certainly the most populous in England.

Certainly, the editor produced a more coherent and neat paragraph, but only at the expense of
several subtle nuances conveyed by the original. Defoe was not involved in describing
Halifax: he was reminded by the name of the city on his itinerary, of all the commercial
interests he had seen, of the growing numbers of people in the vicinity, of the problems with
local governmental structure which did not allow a large and important city to be an
independent parish. The size of the city itself demanded an implicit comparison with London,
causing Defoe to be amazed at the ability of an outland town to compete favourably for
wealth despite the continued dominance of the chief city in terms of foreign commerce.
Halifax lacked the presence of the commercial courts and the key to wealth, according to
every economist of the time, a seaport to allow for external trade. The prose in this instance,
for all its incoherence and redundancy, reflects an author who had a great deal to impart and
whose mind was crowded with ideas. The sentence is dynamic, produced by a man who was
himself constantly on the move and whose view of the world demanded the presence of a
state of flux.
In the course of the narrative, Defoe made note of his trips between towns. Often,
these descriptions were for humorous effect, anecdotes of the road, such as the time that he
and his companion were forced to cross the Humber to Hull in an open boat with fifteen
horses and a dozen cows. After the four-hour ride, all aboard were sick of the voyage as well
as sick of the sea. (Tour, II, 94) At other times, he pointed out mileage between places and
which roads he used, the condition and location of the roads, and the type of country passed
over. Part of Defoes purpose was to present a view of the whole country as I come on; that I
may make no incongruous transitions from one remote part of England to another at least as
few as may be. (Tour, I, 144)
Defoe insisted that there be no incongruous transitions because he was interested in
the conditions of roads, as well as schemes for their improvement, and he recognized the
importance of roads to the facilitation of inland trade. As an appendix to the second volume
of the Tour, he included a lengthy treatise on the state of roads and the means for their repair.
Along the way, he often took note of particularly bad roads and good roads that he met with.
He admired the construction of the Roman roads, most of which were still in good structural

condition after some thirteen hundred years, and recommended that any new roads in
England be constructed on their model. In his treatises, he offered several methods for
repairing existing roads and financing the work. Many of the roads were so bad that travel
was almost impossible over them in rainy weather or during the winter months. Great
numbers of horses were killed each year pulling heavy loads to markets. But improvements
were being made in some areas through the institution of toll roads or turnpikes which
provided funds for repair work.
In addition to his knowledge of the importance of roads to the increase of internal
trade, Defoe included information about roads and routes between commercial centres
because he considered such knowledge essential to the education of the English tradesman.
The Tour as a whole is a textbook for this education. Part of the education was an
understanding of the economic geography of the nation. In the first volume of the Tour Defoe
explained that it was not his intention to give the geographical boundaries of any county: As
my business is not to lay out the geographical situation of places, I say nothing of the buttings
and boundings of this county. (Tour, I, 78)
What he referred to at this point was geography in its traditional cadastral sense of
mapping the physical features of the land, for he immediately continued his statement by
describing the county in terms of its economic configuration; Cambridgeshire had useless
fens in part, the rest all corn country; part of the corn was barley for malting. There was no
manufacturing as in the neighbouring counties; in fact, there was little for a man of Defoes
interests to describe because little in the county would be of use to the tradesman. The only
occurrence worthy of notice was the Sturbridge Fair; the rest was ancient history.
Most early mapmakers and the antiquarians who studied the ancient ownership of the
land were concerned primarily with questions of inheritance. Because wealth was based upon
land ownership, the descent of property from one generation to another was significant to the
history of the nation and to the stability of its property-monetary structure. Land was rarely
purchased since patterns of wealth followed established genealogical lines. But in the
seventeenth and particularly in the eighteenth centuries, land could be purchased by newly
wealthy members of the middle-class. Land was being divided and ownership changed too
quickly to be of any great interest to antiquarians. Defoe not only was disinterested in the
principles of stewarded land but he took for granted the exchange of land as real estate to
such an extent that he was only interested in its physical characteristics and the economic
configurations indicated by these.
What Defoe did with Cambridgeshire and the rest of England was to create a map
through verbal description a map which was expressly intended for the education and use of
the London tradesman. Since, in terms of the Tour, the main business of life was getting
money, preferably through manufacture and trade, it was the business of the author to record
the sources of raw materials and the means for their transportation. His interest in roads as a
necessity to efficient marketing is clean equally, his interest in other aspects of the country
stemmed from an interest in trade. He says of Somersetshire and Wiltshire that he should:
...upon my entering (describe) where the centre of this prodigy of a trade (Spanish medley cloth) is,
sum it all up together, and shew you the extent of the land which it spreads itself upon, and give you
room, at least, to make some guess at the numbers of poor people, who are sustaind and enrichd by
it... (Tour, I, 272)

In effect, Defoe was drawing a map of England for the use of tradesmen by charting land
according to its economic topography. To do so he created a narrator for the Tour who was
himself a merchant in training, who in the process of travelling through the English
countryside was simultaneously learning the lay of the land according to trade and
manufacture. In The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe outlined what he was in practical
effect doing in the Tour:

It becomes necessary, to an English tradesman, to give him a state of the English trade, an account of
its present, not its past situation; and to let him see, not what it has been, but what it is, and not what a
tradesman was to do forty years ago, but what he is to do now, in order to carry on his business
prosperously and successfully.

This work, published concurrently with the Tour, accounts for both the concentration on the
present state of England in the Tour and the commercial mapping of England which the Tour
represents.
Thus, we can say that Defoes choice of the travel narrative as the best medium for his
economic geography was a radical one. Even the editors of the subsequent editions of the
Tour thought that trade was not the proper topic for a tour. They felt compelled to alter his
accounts until by 1780, the work was more like the journal accounts of antiquities and
sublime landscapes that had become popular in the course of the century. But Defoes
impulse to write a tour in which trade dominated arose from his knowledge of the great
antiquarian works as well as from his personal background in trade. The antiquarians hoped
to lead their countrymen in a discovery of Britain which would make them knowledgeable in
terms of European scholarship but would also guide them to a conviction of the glory and the
potential for greater glory of their homeland. Defoe, too, was intensely patriotic but with a
determinedly pragmatic bent. He believed that the glory of Britain was best demonstrated by
a picture of industry and commerce. He was excited by the sight of thousands of sheep
grazing, of the northern wool industry, of colliers at Newcastle, and much more. He also
believed that Britains reputation could be augmented by providing a scheme by which the
middle-class tradesman could learn about his nation, increasing his effectiveness as a
tradesman. Defoe hoped that an effective and complete tradesman would increase his own
wealth, adding it to the wealth of the nation.
It would appear from Defoes treatises on the nature of trade and commerce and his
schemes for the education of the tradesman, that he adhered to a utilitarian view of the world
in which the most important business of life is earning a living. But such a view of Defoes
work would fall to account for the dynamic energy he imparted to apparently mundane
concerns. The world he portrayed throughout his career was extraordinarily active and vital.
His awareness of the daily, even momentary, changes that the nation and the world were
undergoing, and the compelling need for a man to respond to such changes as occurred in
the nature and consequence of things, and by the length of time (Tour, II, 3 ) forced him to
portray dynamic forces at work rather than a status quo. Despite the utilitarian concerns
Defoe often reflected in the process of creating a fictional world, such a dynamic world view
reflects a basic romanticism. Defoes writing contains great expectation for an individual in
the world the excitement of the moment, the hope for future projects and successes, the
spirit of challenge and adventure.

Notes and References

1. The term is used for those who study history with particular attention to ancient artifacts,
archaeological and historic sites, or historic archives and manuscripts. The essence of
antiquarianism is a focus on the empirical evidence of the past, and is perhaps best
encapsulated in the motto adopted by the 18th-century antiquary, Sir Richard Colt Hoare,
We speak from facts not theory. Today the term is often used in a pejorative sense, to
refer to an excessively narrow focus on factual historical trivia, to the exclusion of a sense
of historical context or process.
2. William Camden (1551-1623) was an English antiquarian, historian, topographer, and
officer of arms. He wrote the first chorographical survey of the islands of Great Britain

3.

4.

5.

6.
7.

8.

and Ireland and the first detailed historical account of the reign of Elizabeth I of England.
His great work was Britannia, a topographical and historical survey of all of Great Britain
and Ireland. His stated intention was to restore antiquity to Britaine, and Britaine to its
antiquity (Britannia 95).
John Macky (died 1726) was a Scottish spy. He was the first person to inform the British
of James IIs intended invasion of England in 1692 after he fled from France to England.
He published an attack on James exiled court in A View of the Court of St Germains from
the Year 1690 to 1695 in 1696. His network of spies was crucial to the discovery in
February and March 1708 of the Jacobite plans to invade Scotland. In 1733 his son
published Memoirs of the Secret Services of John Macky.
That Defoes outlook towards travel narrative was completely different from that of John
Mackys becomes evident from the comparison of the following relevant passages
from Familiar Letters and Tour. Mackys description of the Bury Fair sounds like a
whos who of the local gentry and he concludes that: I must own, I never saw a fairer
Assembly of Beauties in any part of the world, than at this Fair; which seldom concludes
without some considerable matches or intrigues. And indeed it is more a Market for
Ladies, than Merchandizes. (Familiar Letters, 6). Mackys interests are clear; he
preferred the company of the gentry to any scene of trade and commerce. Defoe
deliberately misrepresented Mackys comment regarding Bury Fair in the Tour when he
said of Bury that the ladies come to sell themselves rather than to buy anything, so that
the Fair was a sorry place where little trade was carried on. We can consider the
difference in Defoes appreciation of Sturbridge Fair, which he considered one of the
busiest and most exciting in the nation: If it is a diversion worthy a book to treat of
trifles, such as the gayety of Bury Fair, (the reference is to John Macky) it cannot be very
unpleasant, especially to the trading part of the world, to say something of this fair, which
is not only the greatest in the whole nation, but in the world. (Tour, I, 80)
William Lambarde (1536-1601) was a British antiquarian and politician. He completed
his Perambulation of Kent, the first English county history. Circulating in manuscript
before being printed in 1576, it proved to be very popular and went through several
editions. Lambarde considered writing a similar work for all of Britain, but he set the idea
aside when he learned that William Camden was already working on the same project.
William Dugdale (1605-1686) was influential in the development of medieval history as
an academic subject. He wrote some influential books like Monasticon Anglicanum
(1655-1673); Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), History of St Pauls Cathedral (1658).
For studies of Defoes economic views see Maximillian Novak, Defoe and the Nature of
Man (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963) and Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe,
University of California English Studies, No. 24 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962). For discussions of the 17th century traveller see E. S. Bates, Touring in
1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1911) and the 18th century traveller in Rosamond Bayne-Powell, Travellers in
Eighteenth-Century England (London: John Murray, 1951).
For a complete study of shifting appreciation of nature see Marjorie Hope Nicholson,
Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959).

Works Cited
Camden, William. Britannia. Ed. Edmund Gibson. London: Gale ECCO, 1965. Print.
Cox, Edward G. A Reference Guide to the Literature of Travel. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1946. Print.
Defoe, Daniel. A Tour thro the Whole Island of Great Britain. Ed. G.D.H. Cole. London:
Dent, 1927. Print.
---. The Complete English Tradesman. London: Dent, 1895. Print.
Fussell, G.E and Constance Goodman. Travel and Topography in Eighteenth Century
England. London: Bibliographical Society, 1930. Print.
Macky, John. A Journey through England in Familiar Letters from a Gentleman here, to a
Friend Abroad. Michigan: Michigan University Press, 1922. Print.

Short Biographical Note of the Contributors

Arindam Ghosh has finished his M.Phil. on Samuel Beckett and Poststructuralism in the
department of English, University of Calcutta and is now a U.G.C - Junior Research Fellow
in the same department.
Sharanya Dutta has finished his M.Phil. on the figure of the tormented child in the works of
Charles Dickens from the department of English, University of Calcutta and is also a U.G.C Junior Research Fellow in the same department.