This study explores the role of fiction in the social production of the West Central district of London in the nineteenth century. It tells a new history of the novel from a local geographical perspective, tracing developments in the form as it engaged with Bloomsbury in the period it emerged as the city¿s dominant literary zone. A neighbourhood that was subject simultaneously to socio-economic decline and cultural ascent, fiction set in Bloomsbury is shown to have reconceived the areäs marginality as potential autonomy. Drawing on sociological theory, this book critically historicizes Bloomsbury¿s trajectory to show that its association with the intellectual ¿fraction¿ known as the ¿Bloomsbury