ABSTRACT
This chapter registers the importance of subnational identities and complexities and the power of internalised spatial metaphors in George Gissing's novels. A sea-breeze mitigated the warmth of the cloudless sun, and where a dark pine-tree rose against the sky it gave the azure of depths a magnificence unfamiliar to northern eyes. Gissing shows that he is alert to the clichés of Victorian spatial metaphors – the equation of the North with industry and commerce, the persisting centrifugal control and the consequent symbolic restraints. A similar emphasis on the value of the South prevails in Gissing criticism. To this is added the presumptive analogy between the allegorical dichotomy and Gissing's personal geography. The northern and southern locations of Gissing's novels are much more nuanced than this prototypical binary allows. The geographical divide is conveyed through topographical metonyms that frequently bleed out and remain uncontained.
