422 Andrew Thacker

The only thing, one comes to feel, that can change the routine of the docks is a change in
ourselves. Suppose, for instance, that we gave up drinking claret, or took to using rubber
instead of wool for our blankets, the whole machinery of production and distribution
would rock and reel and seek to adapt itself afresh. It is we – our tastes, our fashions, our
needs – that make the cranes dip and swing, that call the ships from the sea. Our body
is their master. (Woolf 1993: 112)

As Snaith and Whitworth point out, Woolf shows here how “[c]onsuming bodies exist
for their part in the circulation and accumulation of capital” (2007: 26) and, cleverly,
the next essay in The London Scene collection shifts to the commodity spectacle of Lon-
don’s Oxford Street, where now the goods unloaded in the docks in their “crudity,
their bulk, their enormity” have been “refined and transformed” into objects for sale in
a location where “[e]verything glitters and twinkles” (Woolf 1993: 113).
This sudden change of spatial perspective, from London docks to Oxford Street
shops, is one of the specific ways in which Woolf’s geographical imagination often
works, shifting the narrative focus from one place to another in order to stress the
social-spatial connections between seemingly diverse locations. In A Voyage Out we
witness another such manoeuver when the Euphrosyne leaves the coast of England and
Woolf imagines a “singular view” in which England appears “to be an island, and a
very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned”
(VO 24; see Esty 2004). The change of spatial perspective is both a symbol of new
and widening horizons for the characters in A Voyage Out and also a way in which one
particular location – England – conjoins the rest of the world, as in the essays of The
London Scene. Woolf’s geographical imagination often seemed to function by means of a
globalized understanding of the interconnections between diverse spaces in the world.
This is illustrated later in the novel when Hewet and Rachel look down from the edge
of a cliff in South America and first experience “a sensation which is given no view,
however, extended, in England,” a feeling which is then replaced by an awareness that
the same sea they looked on “flowed up to the mouth of the Thames; and the Thames
washed the roots of the city of London” (VO 194).
In a letter of 1933 to Ethel Smyth, who was traveling around Scotland, Woolf
protested that she knew little about British geography:

I wish I knew the geography of the British Isles. I dont at once visualize Hebrides, Skye,
and the rest. I only see a black blot in mid air which is you, astride an aeroplane; firmly
grasping a rail, keenly envisaging the seascape; and completely master of your feet and
faculties. (Woolf 1979b: 217)

Woolf’s description of Smyth’s journey by airplane demonstrates how she often focused
more on the phenomenology of the experience of traveling through space – as in
her “Evening over Sussex” essay – than on any careful mapping of the routes of
the journey. Her decision, when writing To the Lighthouse, to relocate her child-
hood experience of St. Ives to the Scottish Hebrides has always seemed puzzling and
 Woolf and Geography 423

perhaps justifies her claim in her letter to Smyth that she knew little of the geogra-
phy of Scotland. However, when Woolf is writing of London, whose geography she
knew very well, there is much more precision in her rendering of space and place. The
strength, then, of Woolf’s geographical imagination consists in her demonstration that
external social space is intrinsically bound up both with the psychic development of
human beings, as shown in her depiction of St. Ives, and with questions of power and
politics, as seen in her writings exploring patriarchal spaces and the geography of Lon-
don. Like Lefebvre, Woolf believed that space is alive and speaks to us: one of the many
pleasures of reading Woolf consists in listening to the many lively ways in which she
speaks of space and geography.

Cross-References

Chapter 1, THE LIVES OF HOUSES: WOOLF AND BIOGRAPHY; Chapter 3, SILENCE AND CRIES:
THE EXOTIC SOUNDSCAPE OF THE VOYAGE OUT; Chapter 6, MRS. DALLOWAY: OF CLOCKS
AND CLOUDS; Chapter 7, A PASSAGE TO THE LIGHTHOUSE; Chapter 8, ORLANDO’S QUEER
ANIMALS; Chapter 14, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN IN THE WORLD: THE PRE-LIFE AND AFTER-
LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE’S SISTER; Chapter 22, FEMINIST WOOLF; Chapter 28, WOOLF’S URBAN
RHYTHMS

Notes

1 This estimate is based on a word search of an with five other essays in The London Scene. On
electronic corpus of Woolf. the publication history of the essays see Wood
2 It was first published in Good Housekeeping (2010).
(December 1931), and then republished along

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