Topoi

The generation of Oliver Twist’s ‘topoi’ map has resulted in two fairly distinct spatial clusters: the top of the map roughly corresponds to the city, the bottom to the novel’s country/town settings. What becomes clearer from the topoi map by comparison with the complete one is that both clusters are dominated by the fictional within or appended to the ‘real’. This confirms the importance of our mapping method that allows the plotting of both ‘real’ and imagined places, and their relationship to each other. When the novel is plotted onto a ‘real’ map, sites such as ‘the workhouse’ and ‘the town’ become vague and disconnected from the whole.

Although the London section of the map has at once more ‘topoi’ and a greater cluster of connections (thus confirming the literary stereotype of the city/country binary) that city is more mobile and interconnected than the town or country. The spatial map of the novel lends equal prominence to the otherwise ‘unmappable’ sites. With the dominance of ‘Fagin’s other lair’ the map visually enacts the narrative impulse to expose the criminal spaces hidden beneath named, known London.