“Home thoughts, from abroad”: Mapping London in the Realist Novel

Abstract

The streets of London may be paved with stories, but, as the subject of a fictional world that is poetic and plausible, London is both a resource and a threat. A subject as salient and as resonant as London invites the appeal to the real that encourages a simplistic correlation of life and art, as exemplified in an admirer s praise of Fontane s Berlin novel Schach von Wuthenow, “es ist so spannend, man kennt ja alle Straßennamen”. In this essay I should like to consider some responses to the challenge of mapping a fictionalised London in nineteenth-century German novels. Mental mapping, a concept used by geographers, sociologists and psychologists, and, more recently, as a representation of writing fiction, allows London to be treated as subject, setting and process without privileging one function over another. While mental maps imitate official maps in enabling people to acquire and use spatial information, they are subjec-