From the Strada di Chiaia, the narrow street winding between immense houses, all day long congested with the merry tumult of Neapolitan traffic […] where cocchieri crack their whips […] and yell their "Ah—h—h! Ah—h—h!"—where teams of horse, ox, and ass […] jingling their fantastic harness, and primitive carts […] rattle recklessly along, […] turn into the public staircase and climb through the dusk, with all possible attention to where you set your foot, past the unmelodious beggars, to the Ponte di Chiaia bridge which […] looks down upon its crowd and clamour […]; thence proceed uphill on the lava paving, between fruit-shops and sausage-shops and wine-shops, always in an atmosphere of fried oil and roasted chestnuts and baked pine-cones; and presently turn left into a still narrower street […] between walls overhung with fig-trees and orange-trees and lemon-trees,—and you will reach Casa Rolandi [The Emancipated, London: Hogarth, 1984, p. 74].
Place is an organising principle in Gissing’s prose. What is clear from this passage is that non-visual senses are crucial to his place-making. How might Gissing’s prose challenge the centrality of vison – in realism, in proto-modernism? What new scales, or depths, might emerge from reading for sound, smell, touch or taste?