Mapped
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
One night's haunting, walked across the City of London. Cornhill, the Royal Exchange and Bob Cratchit's Camden Town are named outright and still on the map; Scrooge's counting-house and Fezziwig's warehouse are unlocated interiors, pinned to the courts off Cornhill that tradition and Dickens's own clues point to. That split is exactly what the certainty labels are for.
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A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
Between London and a Paris sliding into revolution, Dickens weaves the fates of the recalled prisoner Dr Manette, his daughter Lucie, the aristocrat Charles Darnay and the wasted lawyer Sydney Carton, toward a sacrifice at the guillotine. The novel maps two real cities: Tellson's Bank and the Old Bailey in London, and in Paris the wine-shop of Saint-Antoine, the stormed Bastille, and the Place de la Révolution where the blade falls.
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Atonement
Ian McEwan
A country house in the Surrey heat of 1935, where a girl's misreading of one scene wrecks three lives, then the war that follows it: a soldier's long walk to the beaches of Dunkirk, and the London wards where the two sisters nurse the wounded. The map anchors on southern England, from the Surrey estate to wartime Lambeth and Balham, and reaches across the Channel to the French coast of the retreat.
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Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Around the endless Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Dickens draws a whole society, from the fog-bound law courts to the rotting slum of Tom-all-Alone's, from a Lincolnshire great house to the good house in Hertfordshire where Esther Summerson makes a home. The novel maps a real geography: the Court of Chancery and Lincoln's Inn, the slum whose fever spreads to rich and poor alike, and the country estates on which its secrets turn.
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Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
Charles Ryder's memoir of the Catholic, aristocratic Flyte family between the wars. It begins in the sunlit Oxford of his undergraduate years, opens out to the vast baroque country house he calls Brideshead, and returns to the London and the faith he cannot leave behind. The map runs from the Oxford quads north to the Yorkshire house that stands in for Brideshead, with the family's town house in St James's and a youthful summer in Venice.
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Brighton Rock
Graham Greene
A razor-gang thriller set in the seaside Brighton of the 1930s, where the seventeen-year-old gangster Pinkie kills a man in the Whitsun crowds and marries a waitress, Rose, to keep her from testifying, while the cheerful Ida Arnold sets out to bring him down. Greene maps the town precisely: the Palace Pier where it starts, the racecourse where the gangs slash each other, the grand seafront hotels of the rival boss Colleoni, and the poor streets off Nelson Place that made Pinkie what he is. The chase ends on the cliffs at Peacehaven, east of town.
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David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Dickens's most autobiographical novel follows David Copperfield from a Suffolk childhood through cruelty, child labour and hard-won fortune, across an England he renders with tender exactness. It maps a real country: the village of his birth, the Yarmouth beach where the Peggottys keep their upturned-boat home, the London warehouse of his degradation and the improvident Micawbers, and Canterbury and Dover, where his aunt Betsey Trotwood gives him a second chance.
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Dracula
Bram Stoker
The abbey steps and the harbour at Whitby, where the Demeter runs aground, are exact and still walkable. Transylvania is drawn from maps Stoker never travelled and Carfax is invented, which is precisely what the labels are for.
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Emma
Jane Austen
Clever, rich and idle, Emma Woodhouse amuses herself matchmaking among the little society of her Surrey village, blundering through other people's hearts and her own until she learns what she has felt all along. Austen keeps the whole comedy within a few miles of real countryside: the family house at Hartfield and the village of Highbury, Mr Knightley's Donwell Abbey, and the outing to Box Hill where Emma's thoughtlessness brings her up short.
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Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Pip's road runs from the Kent marshes to London and back. Dickens lightly fictionalises the marsh village and "the town", but draws them from real ground: the churchyard at Cooling on the Hoo peninsula, and Rochester, whose Restoration House became Satis House. In London the places are named outright, Little Britain and Smithfield, Newgate, Barnard's Inn. The bbox spans the whole run, from the estuary marshes east of Rochester to Holborn.
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Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
The ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver sails from England on four voyages and is cast among the tiny Lilliputians, the giant Brobdingnagians, the mad projectors of flying Laputa, and the rational horses called Houyhnhnms, each a mirror held up to human folly. Swift frames the satire from a real England, and even gives his imaginary lands pseudo-coordinates, so that Gulliver departs from London's docks toward islands placed off Sumatra, the Pacific, Japan and the southern oceans.
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Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell
A retelling of the death of Shakespeare's son, told through his wife Agnes, the herbalist and healer at the centre of the family. The map stays in 1590s Warwickshire: the glover's house on Henley Street where the young family lives in a cramped apartment, the farm at Shottery where Agnes grew up among bees and woodland, the church by the Avon where the boy is buried, and the chapel and grammar school of the town. London, where the father disappears to work in the playhouses, runs alongside as a scene outside the setting.
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
J. K. Rowling
The Muggle London that hides a wizarding one: a zoo, a pub on Charing Cross Road, a station with a platform that is not there.
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How Green Was My Valley
Richard Llewellyn
The narrator Huw Morgan remembers his childhood in a South Wales coal-mining valley, in a close chapel-going community that the growing slag heap and the souring of the pits slowly destroy. Llewellyn set his idealised valley in the Rhondda, around Gilfach Goch: the terraced village and the Morgan house, the colliery that pays and kills, the slag tip creeping down the mountain to bury the green, the chapel at the moral centre, and the mountain top that survives above it all.
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Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
The orphan Jane Eyre makes her way from a cruel aunt's house to a bleak charity school, and on to Thornfield Hall as governess, where she falls in love with the brooding Mr Rochester and discovers the madwoman locked in his attic. Brontë sets the novel across a real northern England drawn from her own world: the moorland houses and schools of Yorkshire and the Peak, from Lowood's cold dormitories to Thornfield's fire and the wild moors to which Jane flees.
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Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
The stonemason Jude Fawley dreams of the university, but poverty, class and a doomed love for his free-thinking cousin Sue Bridehead break every hope, in Hardy's bleakest and most controversial novel. It maps his Wessex, drawn from real country: the village of his boyhood, the closed golden city of Christminster that will not have him, and the cathedral towns where he and Sue try and fail to live outside the rules.
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Kidnapped
Robert Louis Stevenson
David Balfour's road runs the width of Scotland in the year after the '45: from the House of Shaws by Cramond, out to the brig at Queensferry, wrecked on the reefs off Erraid by Mull, then east on foot through Appin and across the deserts of Rannoch back to Edinburgh. Almost every place is real and named, tied to the true Appin Murder of 1752; the bbox spans the whole crossing, Edinburgh west to Erraid.
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Middlemarch
George Eliot
In a Midlands town around the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, the idealistic Dorothea Brooke and the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate each marry badly and see their high hopes worn down by the pressures of provincial society. Eliot's Middlemarch is drawn from Coventry and its Warwickshire country: the town and its gossip, the parish of Lowick, the new fever hospital of Lydgate's reforms, and the estates on which fortunes and marriages turn.
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Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
A single Wednesday in mid-June 1923. The novel is ordered by the striking of clocks.
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Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
A quietly dystopian England where children raised at a secluded boarding school are clones bred to give up their organs. The map runs from the rural southern countryside that hides Hailsham, north-east through the remote farmland of the Cottages to the Norfolk seaside at Cromer, and out along the flat coastal fields Kathy drives as a carer.
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Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
Oceania's capital is the London Orwell knew in 1948: bomb-scarred, rationed and grey, its landmarks renamed and repurposed by the Party. He built the ministries and squares of Airstrip One from real buildings he had worked in and walked past, so the fictional city maps onto the actual one.
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Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
After an unnamed provincial workhouse, the book comes to London and stays in named ground: Saffron Hill and Field Lane, the real Clerkenwell rookery where Fagin keeps his den; Clerkenwell Green, where the Dodger picks Mr Brownlow's pocket; Pentonville, where Brownlow lives; Newgate, where Fagin is condemned; and Jacob's Island in Bermondsey, the notorious tidal slum Dickens's own footnote insisted was real, where Sikes dies. Most of these were cleared within Dickens's lifetime, which is what the historical map layer is for. The bbox runs from Pentonville down to the Bermondsey riverside.
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Persuasion
Jane Austen
Austen's last completed novel runs on a line from the Somerset countryside to Georgian Bath and out to the Dorset coast. Kellynch Hall and Uppercross are invented estates, but she plants them firmly in Somersetshire, near the real market country around Crewkerne and Taunton. Bath is the real spa city, named street by street: the Elliots take a house in Camden Place, the real Camden Crescent up on Lansdown, and Anne walks Milsom Street, the Pump Room and the White Hart inn. And at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast the party walks out on the Cobb, the real stone harbour wall, where Louisa Musgrove falls. The map draws Anne Elliot's England, from a Somerset drawing-room to the sea wall at Lyme and back to Bath.
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Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Austen builds her world out of invented houses set on real English ground. Longbourn and Meryton are fictional, but she plants them in Hertfordshire, four-and-twenty miles from London, near the real market towns of the county. The Gardiners' home in Gracechurch Street, by Cheapside, is a real City address; Mr. Collins's Hunsford is sited near the real Westerham in Kent; the militia camp at Brighton is the real resort; and the Derbyshire tour runs through the actual Peak, past Matlock, Dovedale and Chatsworth, where readers have looked for Pemberley ever since. The map draws the arc of Elizabeth's England, from a Hertfordshire drawing-room to the great house in the Derbyshire hills.
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Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
The Cornish coast near Fowey, where du Maurier set Manderley, the great house on the cliffs above the sea. She modelled it on Menabilly, the real estate she later leased and lived in, with its cove and ruined boathouse below at Polridmouth. The map runs from the house down to the drowning cove and along to the harbour town, with a distant opening at Monte Carlo.
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Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Dispossessed of their home, the Dashwood sisters, prudent Elinor and passionate Marianne, retire to a Devon cottage and are schooled by love and disappointment in the balance of sense and sensibility. Austen sets the story across a real England: the Sussex estate they lose, the Devon country of their new life and Marianne's romance, the London where hearts are broken, and the western house where illness brings the reckoning.
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Sons and Lovers
D. H. Lawrence
The Nottinghamshire coalfield that made Lawrence. He renamed his home village of Eastwood "Bestwood" and the pit "Minton", but placed them exactly on the ground he grew up on: the collieries where his father worked, the Chambers family's Haggs Farm that became Miriam's, and Nottingham itself, where Paul takes the train to work and to the art school. It brings the English mining Midlands into the atlas.
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Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
The respectable Dr Jekyll brews a potion that frees his hidden appetites as the monstrous Mr Hyde, and the lawyer Utterson traces the growing horror through a fog-bound London toward a locked cabinet and a confession. Stevenson's city is a real, gaslit London of double lives: the fine house with its sinister back door, the squalid Soho lodgings of Hyde, and the lanes where his violence erupts, all mapping the divided self onto the divided town.
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Sunset Song
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Chris Guthrie grows up on a hard-won farm in the Mearns, the farming country of north-east Scotland, torn between the land she loves and the learning that could take her from it, as the First World War comes to break the old crofting world for good. Grassic Gibbon set his parish of Kinraddie in the real Howe of the Mearns around Arbuthnott: the farm of Blawearie, the ancient standing stones above it, the parish kirk, and the market town of Stonehaven on the coast.
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
When her poor family learns it descends from the noble d'Urbervilles, Tess Durbeyfield is sent to claim kin, is seduced and ruined by Alec, and later loves and loses the high-minded Angel Clare, driven at last to murder and the gallows. Hardy sets the tragedy across his Wessex, drawn faithfully from real Dorset: the vale of Tess's village, the d'Urberville estate, the rich dairy country where she finds love, the bleak upland farm of her suffering, and Stonehenge, where she is taken at dawn.
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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
From the rooms at 221B Baker Street, the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson take on the twelve cases of the first collection, from a scandal in Bohemia to a speckled band, reading the whole gaslit city and the counties beyond it in a scratch, a splash of mud, a frayed cuff. Doyle maps a real Victorian London: the Baker Street lodgings, Scotland Yard on the river, the Strand where clients arrive, the dark East End of the opium dens, and the country houses where the darkest cases lie.
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The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles
Fowles's Lyme Regis is a small Dorset seaside town in 1867, where a gentleman's certainties come apart on a stone breakwater. The map holds the Cobb and the town, runs west into the tangled wilderness of the Undercliff, then follows the story inland to Exeter and up to London.
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The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
The London of a divorced writer and ex-Communist in the late 1950s: talk in a Bloomsbury flat, the Party's real offices off Covent Garden, and the espresso bars of Soho where the literary and political left argued out the aftermath of 1956. The long African chapters, Anna's Rhodesian past in the black notebook, sit outside this frame and are marked apart.
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The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
When Sir Charles Baskerville dies of fright near a legend of a spectral hound, Sherlock Holmes sends Dr Watson to guard the heir on the lonely wastes of Dartmoor while he works unseen. Doyle's most famous case maps a real and forbidding landscape: the Baker Street opening, Baskerville Hall on the moor, the treacherous Grimpen Mire, and the fog-bound heath across which the great hound comes.
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The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst
Moneyed London under Thatcher, seen by a young aesthete who lodges with a Tory MP's family. The map runs from the tall white houses and locked communal garden of a Notting Hill square out to the clubland of Westminster, the villas of Holland Park, and the night paths of Hampstead Heath.
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy
Hardy's Casterbridge is Dorchester barely disguised: the Roman amphitheatre at Maumbury Rings where Henchard keeps his furtive meetings, the King's Arms on the High Street where the mayor holds his banquet, the corn-market where a hay-trusser who once sold his wife at a country fair has risen to preside, the Ten Hatches weir on the Frome where he goes to drown. Hardy mapped his home town so exactly he later published the keys. Only Weydon-Priors, drawn from Weyhill in Hampshire, sits well outside the town.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Mayfair drawing rooms and the opium dens of the docks, a few miles and an entire moral universe apart. Wilde is precise about the geography of respectability: Lord Henry keeps a house in Curzon Street, Dorian one on Grosvenor Square, and the road to ruin runs east to the quays past Blue Gate Fields.
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The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
The spirited young American Isabel Archer, come into a fortune, prizes her freedom above all and chooses, of all her suitors, the one who will cage her, the cold aesthete Gilbert Osmond. James follows her across a real transatlantic world: the Touchetts' English house on the Thames, London, the Florence where Osmond weaves his trap, and the Rome where the marriage closes around her like a beautiful prison.
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
In 1930s Edinburgh, the charismatic and dangerous schoolteacher Jean Brodie grooms her chosen set of six girls in art, romance and her own admiration for Mussolini, until one of them betrays her. Spark's city is her own: the genteel girls' school of the south side, the walk Brodie leads through the poverty of the Old Town, the Links and Meadows where the set parades, and the village of Cramond on the Forth where the music master lives.
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The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
In the summer of 1956 an ageing butler borrows his new employer's Ford and drives west out of Oxfordshire across the English West Country, ostensibly to inspect the roads and secretly to call on a housekeeper he once worked beside. The map follows that six-day trip: a first night by Salisbury Cathedral, on through the Somerset and Devon country to the far coast, and back to a pier at Weymouth where the accounting of a wasted life finally arrives.
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The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad
Built around a real event: the 1894 attempt to bomb the Greenwich Observatory. Conrad walks his anarchists across a London he names honestly, from Verloc's shabby shop in Soho to the Embassy in Belgravia, and the Observatory is still standing. The bomb, the park, and Greenwich are exact; the street names around the shop and the Embassy are invented, which is what the labels are for.
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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson keeps the geography deliberately shadowy, but the districts are real. Hyde's sinister side-door opens on a by-street near Soho; the same building is Dr Jekyll's handsome house around the corner in a West End square; Dr Lanyon holds court in Cavendish Square, the citadel of medicine; Hyde keeps rooms in Soho; and Sir Danvers Carew is beaten to death by night in a lane near the river at Westminster. The named districts are exact; the exact doors are composite, which is what the labels are for.
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The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells
The Martian invasion mapped across real Surrey and London in strict order. The first cylinder lands in the sand-pits of Horsell Common at Woking; the tripods burn through Byfleet and are broken at the Thames by Shepperton and Weybridge; they push through Kew and Richmond into a London emptied by the exodus; and the last of them are found dead on Primrose Hill. Wells names the roads, stations, and church towers exactly. Horsell Common marks the landing with a tripod sculpture of its own.
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To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Woolf names the Isle of Skye, but the house, the bay and the lighthouse are drawn entirely from St Ives, Cornwall, where the Stephen family spent childhood summers. The map runs from Talland House, the Woolfs' real holiday home above the town, out across St Ives Bay to Godrevy Lighthouse, the light the children could see from the garden and the one the family in the novel longs to reach.
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Trainspotting
Irvine Welsh
Welsh's Edinburgh is the one the tourist city turns its back on: the tenements, schemes and pubs of Leith and Leith Walk in the late 1980s, where a group of young heroin users drift between deals, dole offices and squalid flats. The map runs down Leith Walk from the New Town to the docks, takes in the great curved council block on Cables Wynd and the derelict station that gives the book its name, and ends with a doomed trip south to London.
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Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
The penniless, ruthless Becky Sharp claws her way up through Regency society while her gentle schoolfellow Amelia Sedley suffers for her constancy, in Thackeray's panorama of a world where everything and everyone is for sale. The novel maps a real geography: the London of Russell Square and Mayfair, the Brussels of the ball on the eve of Waterloo, the battlefield itself, and the German spa town where the long story finds its close.
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White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Smith's North West London is a working, multicultural map: the terraced streets of Willesden and Cricklewood where the Iqbal and Jones families make their tangled lives from 1975 to the millennium, the high roads and cafés where the men gather, the local school, and a final swerve to a genetics institute in the centre of town. The map runs from Willesden Green east across Cricklewood and Kilburn to the West End.
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Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Tudor London seen from the desk of a blacksmith's son who rises to run a kingdom. The map holds the City around Cromwell's own house at Austin Friars, then reaches west to Cardinal Wolsey's York Place as it becomes the King's Whitehall, downriver to the Tower, and upriver past Putney to the palace at Hampton Court.
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Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
The West Yorkshire moors above Haworth, the country Emily Brontë walked from the parsonage. The two houses are invented but firmly rooted here: Wuthering Heights is traditionally the ruined farmhouse at Top Withens, Thrushcross Grange is drawn from Ponden Hall near Stanbury, Gimmerton from the local villages, and the open moorland of Penistone Hill lies the hour's walk between them that is the whole novel.
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Zuleika Dobson
Max Beerbohm
Oxford in one fatal summer term. A conjuror of dazzling beauty arrives to stay with her grandfather, the head of a college Beerbohm invents but sets in a city he keeps exact, and every undergraduate falls hopelessly in love. The map runs from the colleges of the High to the Sheldonian and Broad Street, then down through Christ Church Meadow to the Isis, where the young men drown themselves during Eights Week. It brings Oxford into the atlas.
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