ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses novelists’ uses of maps, mapping, and their naming of places, real and imagined. It considers the constraints and opportunities of setting fiction in real places, and whether readers read differently if they read in the context of external geographical knowledge. Does the use of ‘real’ locations authenticate or reinforce the improbability of melodramatic plot turns? Does the employment of pseudonymous or invented toponyms lay claim to the generality of experiences and events? Empirically, the chapter focusses first on the mostly real locations deployed by George Gissing in a series of working-class novels set in Victorian London, considered alongside Somerset Maugham’s first novel, Liza of Lambeth. Later sections of the chapter discuss Gissing’s comic novella, The Paying Guest , alongside H.G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, both parodying the conventions of middle-class suburban south London. The Paying Guest has an improbable plot set in a real suburb, Sutton; Ann Veronica is all too real in depicting the suffocating stuffiness of suburbia, but Wells set it in ‘Morningside Park’, almost but not quite the suburb of Worcester Park where he had once lived. Extending beyond the material circumstances of poverty and poor-quality inner-city housing, the chapter indicates the relevance of imaginative literature for urban historians’ understanding of middle-class and suburban materialities.
