ABSTRACT
The noun 'sprawl' itself, as a term denoting unchecked urban development, was only in gestation at this point in history. This chapter examines more closely the moment, before 'sprawl' becomes first enunciated and then taken on as a keyword within the discipline of Town Planning. Before thinking about the adoption of 'sprawl' by twentieth-century Town Planning as one of the keywords within its disciplinary lexicon, it discusses an unusually early prototype version of the 'octopus' metaphor for sprawl that occurs in Anthony Trollope's The Three Clerk. The chapter addresses a specific element of the 'genealogy' of the term 'sprawl', one of a number of prototype metaphors that began to circulate fairly widely in literature and journalism around the time that Ruskin was searching for the right word: the city as octopus. Language is replete with the 'dead' metaphors, mutations which have become assimilated through their 'literalization' into the corpus of general usage.
