Edmund Gosse's witticism about the ‘literary atmosphere’ existing exclusively within a tight circle focused on Charing Cross might seem the quintessence of metropolitan complacency: an outrageously confident assertion that where one stands is the centre of the artistic world. In context, Gosse's gesture is one of imperial – and not simply literary – mapping: Gosse writes to ask Armour his impressions of Robert Louis Stevenson's journalistic ‘letters’ from the South Seas, which Gosse himself finds disappointing. ‘The fact seems to be that it is very nice to live in Samoa, but not healthy to write there’ (p. 223). Gosse's remark thus renders in shorthand, in its crudest form, the geographical imagination of imperialism, which sees the imperial metropole as the centre of power, progress and value and envisions the rest of the world as existing in expanding, concentric circles around it. Gosse was not alone in worrying that Stevenson's sojourn on the global margin was affecting his value. Within the next few years Stevenson's residency in Samoa, and his insistence on writing about it, would become one of literary London's leading celebrity scandals, prompting friends and critics to assert that Stevenson needed to return to more wonted subjects and locales or risk losing his marketability as a writer. ‘There is a danger that the finest-flavoured writer among our younger men may lose touch with English thought and English feeling,’ Grant Allen wrote on 17 September 1892 in the Illustrated London News. ‘Even a Stevenson can hardly afford to run that risk.’ In Gosse's letter and in articles like Allen's, we can see the articulation of a geography of value that simultaneously maps the world of English letters and the actual world in terms of valued centres and de-valued peripheries.

At this time, the Illustrated London News was performing on a weekly basis the function of mapping the world in value-marked ways for its readers. At a point when imperialism was fundamental to the episteme of English readers, this newspaper's representation of the world drew upon and iterated imperial rhetoric and conceptions of value, including a centre/periphery model of geographic space and its associated economic and racial assumptions.