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.
6 places →
A Hero of Our Time
Mikhail Lermontov
Lermontov's portrait of the bored, brilliant, destructive Pechorin plays out across the Russian Caucasus of the 1830s. Its heart is the spa society of Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk, where Pechorin toys with Princess Mary and kills the vain Grushnitsky in a duel on Mount Mashuk, the very mountain where Lermontov himself would die in a duel a year after the book appeared. Two further tales range out to the smugglers' port of Taman on the Black Sea and to a frontier fort on the Georgian Military Road.
5 places →
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.
5 places →
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Moscow, Petersburg, and the railway between them. Anna arrives in Moscow past a man crushed at the station, and dies under a train at Obiralovka before her story ends. Levin's Pokrovskoe is invented; Tolstoy drew it from his own country life at Yasnaya Polyana. The line between the two capitals is the most important place in the book.
6 places →
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.
5 places →
Bruges-la-Morte
Georges Rodenbach
A widower, Hugues Viane, comes to Bruges to mourn his dead wife, keeping a plait of her hair as a relic, until he grows obsessed with a dancer who is her living double, and the silent 'dead city' becomes the mirror of his grief. Rodenbach makes the real Bruges a character: the still canals and their reflections, the great churches and their bells, the hushed enclosure of the Béguinage, and the belfry above the market square where the Procession of the Holy Blood ends the book in murder.
5 places →
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
A hot July in the Haymarket district, 1865. Dostoevsky censored his own street names, and this walk reconstructs them.
12 places →
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.
5 places →
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol
The smooth swindler Chichikov travels the Russian provinces buying up 'dead souls', serfs who have died but still count on the tax rolls, in a scheme to mortgage them for a fortune, and in doing so exposes a whole gallery of grotesque landowners. Gogol maps a satirical but recognisable Russia: the provincial town where Chichikov charms the officials, the estates of the misers and dreamers he visits, and the endless road along which his carriage rolls.
5 places →
Democracy
Henry Adams
Gilded-Age Washington seen from a hired house on Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Adams maps the real capital from the inside: the Senate gallery, the presidential reception, and the steamer excursion down the Potomac to Mount Vernon. He published anonymously and knew every one of these rooms.
6 places →
Dom Casmurro
Machado de Assis
The embittered old Bento Santiago, nicknamed Dom Casmurro, looks back on his boyhood love and marriage to the enigmatic Capitu, and on the jealousy, perhaps groundless, that convinced him she betrayed him with his best friend. Machado sets it in the real Rio of the Second Empire: the childhood house on Matacavalos and the wall between it and Capitu's, the seminary he is promised to, the church at Glória where his life turns, and the Flamengo shore where the sea takes his friend Escobar.
5 places →
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.
6 places →
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.
5 places →
Father Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's Paris of 1819, climbed one address at a time. The shabby Maison Vauquer stands in the poor Latin-Quarter streets behind the Panthéon; from there Rastignac reaches up to Mme de Beauseant's salon in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the new money of the Chaussee d'Antin, and buries Goriot on the heights of Pere-Lachaise. Balzac maps the whole social ladder onto real streets, and it brings the founder of the realist novel into the atlas.
5 places →
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev
The young graduate Arkady brings his friend Bazarov, a self-declared nihilist who believes in nothing but science and reason, home to his father's estate, and the clash between the generations plays out across the estates and towns of provincial Russia. Turgenev maps a real rural world: the Kirsanov estate of Maryino, the provincial town and its society, the estate where Bazarov meets the woman who defeats his creed, and the humble farm of his devoted parents.
5 places →
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Victor Frankenstein is a Genevese, and the lake is the fixed centre of the book: his family's house in the city, the campagne at Belrive, and Plainpalais across the water, where the creature kills his brother William. From there the story climbs to the Mer de Glace above Chamonix, the real glacier where Victor meets the creature face to face. The making of the creature at Ingolstadt, the destroyed mate in the Orkneys, and the final chase across the Arctic ice all lie far outside this frame, and are flagged as excursions.
5 places →
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.
6 places →
Heidi
Johanna Spyri
The orphan Heidi is sent to live with her gruff grandfather on the high alp above a Swiss mountain village, where she thrives among the goats and the sunshine, until she is taken away to be companion to the invalid Clara in Frankfurt and pines for the mountains. Spyri set her village, the Dörfli, at Maienfeld in the canton of Graubünden: the grandfather's hut on the alp above the town, the high pastures where Peter grazes the goats, and the return from Frankfurt to the healing air of the heights.
5 places →
Hunger
Knut Hamsun
The book calls the city Kristiania (Christiania in its own spelling); that is the old name for Oslo, which the capital carried until 1925. The unnamed narrator paces it in a fever of starvation, up and down Carl Johann Street, out to the fortress by the sea, and down to the wharves. Hamsun keeps to real streets a hungry man can still walk, and it brings Norway into the atlas.
6 places →
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.
5 places →
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.
5 places →
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.
6 places →
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Hugo's Paris is the heart of the book, and he maps it street by street: the Gorbeau tenement on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, the Luxembourg where Marius and Cosette fall in love, the convent of Petit-Picpus, the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie by Les Halles, and the sewers Valjean carries the wounded Marius through. The story reaches it from far off, though: from Digne in the Alps, from Montreuil-sur-Mer in the north, from the battlefield of Waterloo.
6 places →
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
The book never names the March sisters' town, but Alcott wrote it into her own: Concord, Massachusetts, and her family home on Lexington Road. The old brown March house is drawn from Orchard House, where Alcott lived and wrote and which is now a museum; the stately stone Laurence mansion next door is drawn from the real house over the hedge; and the country-like suburb, its groves and quiet streets, is the Concord of the Alcotts, Emerson and Thoreau. Amy's later tour of Nice and Switzerland is a real excursion abroad. It brings Louisa May Alcott into the atlas.
6 places →
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Emma's world is the invented village of Yonville-l'Abbaye, drawn from the real Ry east of Rouen, and Tostes (now Tôtes) to the north, where Charles first practises. Her escapes are to a real Rouen: the cathedral, and the closed cab that scandalised France, circling the city with its blinds down. That drive can be walked.
6 places →
McTeague
Frank Norris
Polk Street, block by block, above a dental parlour. Norris pins his people to specific corners of the 1890s city and the flats of the East Bay, most of it erased by the 1906 earthquake a few years after he wrote it. The story then flees south and east, out of the setting entirely, to end in Death Valley.
6 places →
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.
5 places →
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
Ishmael signs aboard the whaler Pequod out of Nantucket and is swept into Captain Ahab's monomaniac hunt for the white whale that took his leg, a voyage across the world's oceans toward annihilation. Melville roots the epic in the real whaling world of New England: the port of New Bedford where Ishmael meets Queequeg, the island of Nantucket where the Pequod sails, and the far Pacific grounds where the White Whale at last is found.
5 places →
Noli Me Tangere
José Rizal
Rizal's incendiary portrait of the Spanish colonial Philippines follows Crisóstomo Ibarra, home from Europe with plans to build a school, as the friars who rule the islands destroy him. The book moves between the capital and the provinces: the merchant houses of Binondo, the walled clerical fortress of Intramuros, the promenades along the Pasig, the killing field of Bagumbayan where the author himself would later be shot, and Ibarra's home town of San Diego in the countryside to the south.
5 places →
Notre-Dame de Paris
Victor Hugo
A novel written to save a building, and it worked. Hugo's Paris of 1482 is rebuilt street by street around the cathedral on the Île de la Cité, and every place the story turns on is real: the Place de Grève where Esmeralda dances, the Palais de Justice, the thieves' Cour des Miracles, the Bastille, the gibbet at Montfaucon. The cathedral itself has burned and been rebuilt since he wrote it.
6 places →
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.
5 places →
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.
6 places →
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.
6 places →
Quo Vadis
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Nero's Rome in 64 AD, and the fire that destroys it. The Palatine palace, the Circus Maximus quarter where the flames begin, the Circus of Nero on the Vatican Field where the Christians are burned, the Mamertine prison, and the Appian Way, where the risen Christ meets Peter fleeing the city. Sienkiewicz built the ancient city from the monuments that still stand, and it brings Rome into the atlas.
6 places →
Robbery Under Arms
Rolf Boldrewood
The bushranging and gold-rush country of colonial New South Wales, and the long ride south to Melbourne. Boldrewood (Thomas Alexander Browne) drew the Turon diggings, the cattle runs, and the rugged ranges from a lifetime in the bush. The Marstons' hidden valley, "Terrible Hollow", is invented, but it is set in real country and the Turon, Bathurst, the Weddin Mountains, and Melbourne are all on the map. It brings a whole continent, Australia, into the atlas.
5 places →
Romola
George Eliot
Eliot's Florence of the 1490s, researched to the stone. The Mercato Vecchio where the book opens, the Duomo and its Baptistery, the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno, San Marco where Savonarola is prior, the Piazza della Signoria of the Bonfire of the Vanities, and the Via de' Bardi in Oltrarno where the blind scholar Bardo lives with his daughter Romola. It brings George Eliot into the atlas, and a second Florence four centuries before A Room with a View.
6 places →
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.
5 places →
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.
5 places →
Taras Bulba
Nikolai Gogol
Gogol's fierce romance of the Zaporozhian Cossacks follows the old warrior Taras Bulba and his sons Ostap and Andriy from their studies in Kyiv out onto the steppe, to the Cossack stronghold of the Sich on the Dnipro, and into a savage war against the Poles. The geography is the wide Ukrainian steppe: the academy at Kyiv, the island fastness of the Sich near present Zaporizhzhia, the besieged Polish town of Dubno, and the Dniester cliffs where Taras meets his end.
5 places →
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.
5 places →
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Fleeing his drunken father, the boy Huckleberry Finn rafts down the Mississippi with Jim, a man escaping slavery, and the great river carries them past feuding families, con men and the whole moral tangle of the antebellum South. Twain maps the real river: Huck's town on the Missouri bank, the island where he meets Jim, the raft drifting ever southward, the shore towns of the Duke and the Dauphin, and the Arkansas farm where the journey ends.
5 places →
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.
5 places →
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
Twain renamed his boyhood Hannibal “St. Petersburg”, but built it exactly: the Mississippi bank, the cave, the graveyard on the hill, Cardiff Hill above the town. Hannibal has marked those spots for tourists ever since, which makes it a rare novel a reader can already walk. It brings Mark Twain and the Mississippi into the atlas.
5 places →
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
Two Louisianas, an hour and a century apart: the Creole summer colony on Grand Isle in the Gulf, and the Pontellier house on Esplanade back in New Orleans. Chopin named the real islands, streets, and church; the bbox spans the whole run from the barrier island north to the city.
6 places →
The Belly of Paris
Émile Zola
The whole novel is packed into Les Halles, the great iron-and-glass food market that fed Paris for eight hundred years, and the tangle of old streets around it under the church of Saint-Eustache. Zola makes the market a character, "some colossal belly, bolted and riveted, built up of wood and glass and iron": the fish and vegetable and butter pavilions at dawn, the Quenu-Gradelle pork shop on the Rue Rambuteau, the crooked Rue Pirouette. The escaped political prisoner Florent, gaunt and half-starved, washes up in this world of plenty. The pavilions were demolished in 1971; that absence is what the historical layer is for.
5 places →
The Bostonians
Henry James
A novel of reform-era Boston, mapped to real ground. Olive Chancellor's house stands on the water side of Charles Street, on the flat of Beacon Hill, looking over the new-made Back Bay; the reformer Miss Birdseye holds her meeting out in the South End; Verena crosses to Cambridge and the great Memorial Hall at Harvard; and the climax comes at the Music Hall, the concert hall where she is to give her big address. Summer takes them to "Marmion" on the southern cape, James's name for the real village of Marion, Massachusetts. A run of scenes moves the fight to New York.
6 places →
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
In a small Russian town, the dissolute Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons, the sensual Dmitri, the intellectual Ivan and the saintly novice Alyosha, are drawn toward the old man's murder and the questions of faith, doubt and guilt that surround it. Dostoevsky's fictional Skotoprigonyevsk is drawn from Staraya Russa, where he wrote the novel: the family house, the monastery of the Elder Zosima, the taverns of Dmitri's ruin, and the courtroom of the trial that closes the book.
5 places →
The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal
A young nobleman crosses Napoleonic Europe and the intrigues of a tiny Italian court. The map runs across northern Italy: Milan under the French, the family castle on Lake Como, and the little despotic state of Parma with its citadel prison, where the story ends in a monastery. One scene falls far outside the setting, at Waterloo in Belgium, where the hero wanders the battle without ever grasping it.
6 places →
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
It opens in the old harbour of Marseille, where the Pharaon docks and Edmond Dantès is arrested, and at the Château d'If, the real island fortress off the coast where he is buried alive for fourteen years. His escape and the treasure carry the story out of France: to the island of Monte Cristo in the Tuscan archipelago, and to Rome, before he returns to take his revenge in Paris. The Italian and Roman scenes are flagged as excursions beyond the setting.
6 places →
The Doll
Bolesław Prus
Prus's panorama of Warsaw at the end of the 1870s follows the self-made merchant Stanisław Wokulski, torn between a rational, ambitious life and a consuming, hopeless love for the cold aristocrat Izabela Łęcka. The city is mapped in detail: Wokulski's shop on the grand boulevard of Krakowskie Przedmieście, the royal park of Łazienki where he watches Izabela, the salons of the Aleje Ujazdowskie, and the riverside poverty of Powiśle from which he rose.
5 places →
The House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The gabled house is real. It still stands on Turner Street by Salem harbour, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion that Hawthorne knew and that is preserved today as the House of the Seven Gables museum. Around it the novel keeps its bearings in Salem: the little shop cut into the front gable, the garden and Maule's Well behind, the arched window over the by-street Hawthorne renames Pyncheon Street, and the railway on which Hepzibah and Clifford flee the town. The interiors are inferred to the real house, and Pyncheon Street is Hawthorne's name for a real Salem street, which is what the certainty labels are for.
5 places →
The House of Ulloa
Emilia Pardo Bazán
A mild young priest, Julián, comes to serve at the decaying manor of Ulloa in the wild Galician countryside, and finds it ruled by the brutish young marquis Don Pedro, his cunning majordomo Primitivo, and the coarse life of the estate. Pardo Bazán's naturalist masterpiece maps a real rural Galicia: the crumbling pazo among the hills, the surrounding hunting country, the city of Santiago de Compostela where Don Pedro takes a gentle wife, and the villages run by the caciques who really hold power.
5 places →
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Victor Hugo
In the Paris of 1482, the deformed bellringer Quasimodo, the archdeacon Frollo consumed by his desire for the gypsy dancer Esmeralda, and the cathedral itself are bound together in a tragedy of love, cruelty and sanctuary. Hugo's Paris is a real medieval city rendered in vast detail: Notre-Dame above all, the Place de Grève with its pillory and gibbet, the thieves' Court of Miracles, and the Montfaucon gallows where the story ends.
5 places →
The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's second great Petersburg novel, mapped from the terminus of the Warsaw railway through the salons and the merchant streets to the leafy summer resort of Pavlovsk, thirty kilometres south, where much of the second half unfolds. A companion to Crime and Punishment: the same city, a different fever.
6 places →
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.
6 places →
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.
6 places →
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.
5 places →
The Purple Land
W. H. Hudson
Richard Lamb loose in the Banda Oriental, the purple land east of the river: he lands at Montevideo, rides north through Canelones and Florida toward an estancia on the Paysandú border, and is swept into Santa Coloma's doomed revolt across the Cuchilla Grande and the coast of Rocha. Hudson rode this ground himself, and it brings Uruguay, and South America, into the atlas.
6 places →
The Red and the Black
Stendhal
The carpenter's son Julien Sorel, brilliant, proud and ambitious in a France where the army's red is closed to him and only the church's black offers a poor man a ladder, climbs through hypocrisy and seduction toward a ruin of his own making. Stendhal maps a real Restoration France: the provincial town of Verrières in the Franche-Comté, the seminary at Besançon, and the aristocratic Paris where Julien's rise and fall play out.
5 places →
The Red Room
August Strindberg
A young idealist quits a government sinecure to make his own way, and the novel follows him through the newspaper offices, publishers, theatres and bureaus of the capital, sharpening into satire as it goes. The map opens on the heights of Södermalm looking north over the water, crosses to the old-town islands where the officials sit, and comes to rest in the Red Room at Berns, the salon where the young bohemians drink and argue.
6 places →
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Puritan Boston in the 1640s, most of it long gone: the scaffold in the market-place, the jail on Prison Lane, Governor Bellingham's glittering hall, and the forest at the edge of the peninsula. Almost every pin here is inferred to its documented site, which is exactly what the certainty labels are for. The frame, The Custom-House, is a real excursion north to Salem, where Hawthorne worked and where the building still stands.
6 places →
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.
5 places →
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
The young Gascon d'Artagnan comes to Paris to join the King's Musketeers and falls in with Athos, Porthos and Aramis, plunging into the intrigues of Louis XIII's court, Cardinal Richelieu, and the deadly Milady de Winter. Dumas ranges across a real seventeenth-century geography: the Musketeers' Paris and the Louvre, the dash to London to save the Queen's honour, the siege of La Rochelle, and the convent where Milady meets her end.
5 places →
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.
6 places →
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
The mischievous boy Tom Sawyer roams a sleepy Mississippi river town through a summer of whitewashed fences, pirate games, buried treasure and a murder witnessed at midnight. Twain drew St Petersburg from his own Hannibal, Missouri, and maps its real world: the village and Aunt Polly's, the graveyard and the schoolhouse, Jackson's Island where the boys run wild, and the cave where Tom and Becky are lost and Injun Joe meets his end.
5 places →
Under the Yoke
Ivan Vazov
Bulgaria's national novel, set in the year of the April Uprising of 1876 against Ottoman rule, follows the escaped revolutionary Boycho Ognyanov as he returns to a small town in the Rose Valley below the Balkan Mountains and helps rouse it to a doomed rebellion. Vazov drew his town of Byala Cherkva from his own Sopot: the streets and houses of the town, the school and the monastery, the neighbouring town of Klisura burned in the rising, and the Sredna Gora mountains where the revolt is crushed.
5 places →
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.
5 places →
Villette
Charlotte Brontë
Brussels, thinly disguised as Villette in the kingdom of Labassecour. Brontë mapped her own two years teaching at the Pensionnat Heger on the Rue d'Isabelle into it: the boarding school, the old Flemish streets, the park across the way, the cathedral where she once made confession. It brings Belgium into the atlas.
6 places →
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
Across the Napoleonic Wars of 1805 to 1812, Tolstoy follows the Bezukhov, Bolkonsky and Rostov families through the salons of Petersburg, the society of Moscow, the country estates, and the battlefields where private lives and vast history collide. The novel maps a real geography: the imperial capital and the old city, the Bolkonsky estate in the provinces, the field of Austerlitz where Prince Andrei looks up at the infinite sky, and Borodino, after which Moscow burns and the French begin their ruinous retreat.
5 places →
Washington Square
Henry James
A single square, mapped to the door. James fixes the whole novel to a few blocks of Greenwich Village: Dr Sloper's wide-fronted house on Washington Square North, the real Row of Greek Revival houses that still stands; the Square itself, with its wooden paling and ailantus-trees; and the confident new Fifth Avenue taking its origin at the corner. Downtown, near the City Hall, is the old world the doctor left; uptown is the raw frontier fashion was chasing. A tour of Switzerland is the one excursion beyond the setting.
6 places →
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.
6 places →