This may sound like a peculiar question, but why do novelists make things up? In particular, why do they invent places? I can understand why they would create imaginary places for fantastical fictions – it would be rather odd to have the Starks of Stirling and the Martells of St Ives in Game Of Thrones – but why does Thomas Hardy send Jude to Christminster when it’s clearly Oxford? Why did George Eliot set her study of provincial life in Middlemarch, North Loamshire, rather than Coventry? What prevented Charles Dickens writing about Preston rather than Coketown? From Barsetshire to Yoknapatawpha County, St Mary Mead to Chester’s Mill, authors have been nudging, shifting, switching and smudging real places into fiction.



I’ve been thinking about the nature of fictitious places for the BBC Radio 3 series The Essay, in particular, fictitious Scottish places. When Sir Walter Scott started writing poetry, it was very much rooted in actual, specific locations. The Lay of the Last Minstrel namechecks Hawick, Melrose, Minto Crags, Bowden Moor, Riddell and a host of even smaller places.

William of Deloraine’s midnight ride is specific down to the names of fields. Coleridge sneered at this in a letter to Wordsworth: “The first business must be a vast string of patronymics, and the names of Mountains, Rivers &c – the most commonplace imagery of the Bard gars look almaist as well as new by the introduction of Benvoirlich” (actually in Ireland and New Zealand, not Scotland). But in Waverley, with the exception of places connected with the historical record, Scott sends his characters to Tully-Veolan and Glennaquioch, even if Tully-Veolan is clearly recognisable as Traquair House.

There is no one reason why an author should fictionalise a place. John Galt, Scott’s contemporary, invented places called Oldtown and Dalmailing, Guttershiels and Gudetown, because he regarded his novels as “theoretical histories of society”. The places were exemplary, not individuated. They also had a certain onomatopoeia that Dickens would take much further (in his character names as well as place names). It also circumvented the kind of green-ink letters authors still receive, pointing out, say, there are no buses from Heriot to Galashiels after 10.30pm, or that the bookshop on Buccleuch Street closed four years before the action of the novel. Places that aren’t anywhere can be everywhere.

There is also a certain amount of safety in anonymity. It worked for JM Barrie with Thrums, the village based on Kirriemuir in his stories and novels; but spectacularly failed with Lorna Moon’s underrated Doorways in Drumorty. To spare the blushes of her one-time neighbours, she translated her native Strichen into the fictional Drumorty. Nevertheless the book was banned in Strichen public library. Given its theme was the small-mindedness of smalltown Scotland, the irony was not lost on her.

It’s also a kind of sly joke, a wink to the wise. The reader who does recognise the real identity of a fictional place is in a collusive relationship with the author. When Scott returned to writing about Melrose in his novels The Monastery and The Abbot, he called in “Kennaquair” – which, translated from Broad Scots, would mean “Don’t know where”. When James Robertson set The Testament Of Gideon Mack in Monimaskit, he was paying homage to this game. Likewise, readers from the Midlands who recognise where Turnhill, Bursley, Hanbridge, Knype and Longshaw really are when reading Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns books enjoy a little thrill of superiority.

It’s curious that apart from Faulkner the modernist novel forewent, for the most part, the fictitious place. Joyce’s Dublin, Bely’s St Petersburg, Musil’s Vienna, Döblin’s Berlin, Dos Passos’s Manhattan, Céline’s Paris, Woolf’s London were almost overwhelmingly realistic. Was this a reaction to the quaintness of Little Baddington, Glimmerglass Lake, Dotheboys Hall, Pemberley, Tillietudlem and Langdirdum?

Do join the discussion below and give examples of your favourite (or the most infamous) ways in which novelists have disguised real places.