ABSTRACT
In this invitation, Christopher North – the literary persona of the nineteenth-century writer and critic, John Wilson – conjures up some of the possible encounters with the Edinburgh into which visitors could find themselves drawn. North’s invitation is echoed, to some extent, by the ambition of Palimpsest – a digital literary mapping project.1 Palimpsest seeks to model Edinburgh’s literary cityscape on a much larger scale than has hitherto been accomplished, including both its ‘unforgotten tales’ and its ‘lowliest joys and obscurest griefs’. In doing so, the project aims to make an innovative contribution to the geocritical exploration of the mutual implication of space, place and literature.
