%0 Journal Article
%T The Place of Bloomsbury in the Novels of George Gissing
%A Richard Dennis
%J Opticon1826
%D 2009
%I Ubiquity Press
%R 10.5334/opt.070903
%X The Victorian novelist, George Gissing, is not often associated with Bloomsbury. Yet among his twenty-three novels published between 1880 and 1905, at least nine contain scenes set in the area between Oxford Street and Euston Road, Tottenham Court Road and Gray¡¯s Inn Road. We do not need a novelist to tell us about the topography of Victorian London or even to describe the conditions in which Londoners lived: there are more than enough social surveys, tourist guides and journalistic ¡®explorations¡¯ of ¡®how the poor live¡¯. But novels are invaluable in showing how the spaces of the city were perceived and used and how the city was ¡®performed¡¯ in everyday practice. So in this paper I am interested in how Gissing made use of the area¡¯s geography and how his characters moved through Bloomsbury and the wider metropolis at a variety of scales.
%K Victorian London
%K Bloomsbury
%U http://www.opticon1826.com/article/view/51