Charting an 'aesthetic', post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin's art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth century. With chapters devoted to the ways in which aesthetic and decadent writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde built upon and challenged Ruskin's ideas, the book links the late Dickens to the early modernism of Henry James. The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth Century British Literature gives a vibrant vision of what an aesthetically sensitive treatment of these spaces looked like during the period.