In this guest lecture the English Department’s Ben Moore will launch his new book, Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity (2024). The book presents a novel approach to reading urban modernity in nineteenth-century literature, by bringing together hidden, mobile and transparent features of city space as part of a single system Moore calls ‘invisible architecture’. Resisting narratives of the nineteenth-century as progressing from concealment to transparency, it instead argues for a dynamic interaction between these tendencies. The first part of the talk will lay out the key features of invisible architecture, with reference to writings by George Gissing, Nikolay Chernychevsky and others that respond to the Crystal Palace after its removal to Sydenham in 1854. The second part presents examples of readings from the book informed by this approach, taking in Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Gothic cathedrals.