After London; or, Wild England is a book of two halves joined, as the ‘or’ of the title implies, not altogether harmoniously, particularly in terms of temporality. The first part, ‘The Relapse into Barbarism’, is a natural history of a post-metropolitan world set in a future that has regressed to a feudal state. The second, ‘Wild England’, is a pseudo-medieval quest narrative.

The attention to detail and highly specified spatial descriptions in After London might lead us to define it in terms of the ‘Correspondent World’ of spatial type 1. There is, however, a key difference. Where (according to Bakhtin) realist novels treat nature as a fixed backdrop against which characters/society changes, in After London Jefferies inverses, or redresses, this balance so that character and incident form the milieu and narrative focus hones in on the environment to such an extent that it becomes the foreground.

Our range of maps demonstrate this tension between the influence and reversal of realism. On the one hand the book is a classic Bildungsroman following Felix as he transitions from boy to manhood. But, as the complete and the syuzhet maps make clear, it is far more concerned with the 'Bildung' of the external world. The familiarity of sites such as 'England' and 'London' is offset by qualifying adjectives such as ‘old’, ‘wild, ‘after’, and made more alien as they morph into invented places like 'Wolfstead' and 'Thyma'.