“True, it was no longer an empty space… it had become a place of darkness.” (Heart of Darkness) Examine the meaning of 'blank spaces' in THREE 19th and/or early 20th century novels. The ellipsis in the title quote refers to an important omission: "[the empty space] had been filled since childhood with rivers, lakes and names. It had ceased to be an empty space of delightful mystery – a white spot on which a boy can dream gloriously.”1 Conrad's Marlow emphasizes here the main meaning of the 'empty space' at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: that of ignorance, but a stimulating ignorance for the empirical enthusiasts of the Victorian era and beyond. In this essay, the semantic challenge of the term 'blank' will be addressed as the layers of meaning, in a 19th and 20th century context, are relevant and important in the discussion of a topic of this kind: value perception of unexplored territories, the "uncivilized" culture of the native inhabitants, the importance of nature as a barrier to progress and a fighter against technology, and the metaphorical and allegorical treatment of knowledge and ignorance. The books chosen as reference are Erewhon by Samuel Butler2, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad3 and The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle4. Written in 1871, 1902 and 1912 respectively, these books were published at the end of an intense period of exploration "in which Britain, like most of Western Europe, poured in to investigate, explore, colonize and exploit the rest of the world". 5 This resurgence of imperialism, combined with the great scientific and technological advances of the Industrial Revolution a century earlier, drew even more attention to those unknown and unexplored areas of the world whose maps had been purged of fantastic topography, cleaned up and "surrendered to the rigorous demands of "scientific" practice.6 Professor Challenger's first elaboration on his trip to South America conveys the fascination of the unknown: You are aware - or probably, in this educated middle age, you do not know - that the territory around some parts of 'The Amazon is still only partially explored and that a large number of tributaries, some of them completely unexplored, flow into the main river 7The blank spaces on the maps are seen as mysterious and, ultimately, full of riches, be they scientific, economic or spiritual.