This paper examines the widely used two-way metaphor of the 'jungle' i
n its back-and-forth movement between imperial travel writing of the l
ate Victorian period and early urban sociology and social reform. The
analysis has two aspects: first, technologies of knowledge production
such as mapping are shown to provide a common epistemological base for
imperial and urban knowledges, secondly, the imagery of 'the jungle'
is analysed. It is shown that the images produced in the writings of e
xplorers such as Henry Stanley relied at least to some extent on analo
gies to everyday problems of urban poverty and overcrowding, as well a
s, more implicitly, on European masculine sexual fears about reproduct
ion, growth and decay. This particular image of 'the African jungle' w
as then re-imported into the discourse of urban social poverty and vic
e, most memorably in the Salvation Army's In Darkest England and the W
ay Out. The process analysed in this paper is not a unique discursive
dynamic, it is argued, but is rather an instance of a common manoeuvre
of cultural hegemony that can be called 'the dialectic of the familia
r and the unfamiliar'.