ABSTRACT
Maps hold enormous cultural significance, yet they are representative failures: implying spatial precision, they simultaneously signal their own formal limits. Rather than simply helping students recognize the broader socio-historical context in which Victorian literature is situated, cartography pushes them to consider how maps provide us with tools for organizing information and for creating new – if at times problematic – spatial realities. The Victorians' complex relationship to mapping is one of the focal points in author's classes that touch on issues of empire, the nation, Victorian self-definition, or the relationship between country and city. The cartographic discussions in most of author's Victorian classes necessarily start with topics such as the expansion of the British Empire across the century, sociological maps of London such as Booth's Descriptive Map of London Poverty, and other spatial renderings of knowledge such as phrenology maps.
