Topoi Map

Formally, The Lonely Londoners is presented as a single continuous text, uninterrupted by chapter or section breaks or other structuring devices. Despite this lack of formal textual organisation, the novel is structured around a series of episodes in the lives of the characters: Captain, Big City, Tolroy and his family Tanty, Ma and Agnes, Galahad and Moses himself. The centrality of Moses to the novel is visible in this topoi map: by far the largest node on the graph is Moses’ room in Bayswater, from which many of the stories are related. Though the text here is not mapped geographically, the locations to which it returns most frequently — Bayswater, Marble Arch, the Harrow Road — are all in North West London, the area in which the first of the Windrush generation settled.