Mapping poverty in late-victorian fiction

Abstract

The increasing numbers of urban poor and the unprecedented growth of Victorian London significantly altered the ways in which social and moral differentiations came to be written into the structure of the city in the late nineteenth century. In George Gissing and Arthur Morrison’s city, this paper argues, the ‘otherness’ and ‘isolation’ of the poor were explicitly identified and narrated through mapping poverty with a naturalistic representation of smaller spatial units within the borders of impoverished districts. Considering Charles Booth’s distinctive analysis of London as a physical structure in Labour and Life of the People (1889-1903), this article provides a comparative approach to the representation of urban poverty and slums in Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) and Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896) with an emphasis on physical boundaries, spatial segregation and naturalism. In these works, the outcast poor dwell in strongly classified spaces because of their difference; they are considered deviant and a threat to the structure of power in the metropolis, where an increasing consciousness of boundaries and of spatial order exists. Gissing’s city is generally described as dull and monotonous, while Morrison’s streets are full of grotesque and lively characters corrupted by socio-economic conditions and trapped in East London. © 2016 University of Bucharest Review: Literary and Cultural Studies Series. All Rights Reserved.