If spatial type 3 is all about 'nested' imaginative spaces – the careful situating of the fictional close by, or within travelling distance of, real-world cities – then Trollope is the ultimate example of this, gradually enlarging his fictional totality out from a small spatial core. His first book, The Warden is set in the tightly knit world and small-minded power-play of the Cathedral Close in Barchester (loosely based on Salisbury cathedral). With his second novel, Barchester Towers, Trollope enlarges the space of the fictional world to encompass Barchester itself and the Bishop’s Palace – which remains the central focus of Volume I. The old Bishop having died, a new progressive Bishop is installed to the disgust of the Archdeacon who had hoped to be given the post. As the novel unfolds, it also enlarges from Barchester to Barsetshire and incorporates the separate sites of Plumstead rectory (where the Archdeacon lives) in Volume II; and finally nearby Ullathorne (home of Mr Arabin) in Volume III. Spatial connections are also ecclesiastical and familial – emphasising the internecine nature of the in-fighting and petty quarrels that characterise the novel.

Trollope’s Barsetshire contains links to a world that exists at arm’s length from the main action. Characters may once have lived in London or in Italy, but the centripetal force of the provinces (and the provincial novel) demands that all action must occur in the nested world-within-a-world. Barchester/Barsetshire is what it is precisely because it is not London, or Italy. Provinces lend themselves nicely to Bakhtin’s chronotopic categories. The provincial novel, as part of the larger realist novel genre, is eminently ‘mappable’ – giving strict detail of places and their relations.