Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter One The Kingdom of Shadows: the infernal underground of George Gissing
- Chapter Two The Utopian Underground of H. G. Wells
- Chapter Three ‘The Roar of the Underground Railway’: the making of the Tube in the interwar years
- Chapter Four The Kingdom of Individuals: safety and security on the Tube in the Second World War
- Conclusion: From Beck's Tube map to Becks on the Tube
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter One The Kingdom of Shadows: the infernal underground of George Gissing
- Chapter Two The Utopian Underground of H. G. Wells
- Chapter Three ‘The Roar of the Underground Railway’: the making of the Tube in the interwar years
- Chapter Four The Kingdom of Individuals: safety and security on the Tube in the Second World War
- Conclusion: From Beck's Tube map to Becks on the Tube
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I should like to see him clapped down in a third-class carriage on the underground, and asked to give the trades of all his fellow-travellers.
Dr Watson on Sherlock Holmes, ‘A Study in Scarlet’When the novelist George Gissing was lampooned by Punch in 1885 the journal did not know that it had in its sights the man who would become the fictional cartographer of the Metropolitan Railway, the world's first underground system. Two weeks after an article punningly entitled ‘Gissing the Rod’ in which the author was taken to task for his belief in the ‘artistic conscience’, Punch offered a caustic ‘ballade’ called ‘By Underground’ and a cartoon lambasting the Metropolitan Railway, one of its perennial targets. Just under ten years later, Gissing published his novel In the Year of Jubilee, containing an equally scathing account of the underground in which he compared King's Cross underground station to the infernal underworld of Hades. Gissing's topography featured demonic steam engines that pulled untold numbers of ‘lost’ commuters; windswept platforms that seemed to confine his characters; a cacophony of voices, banging doors and screeching wheels; and a pandemonium of advertising posters, steam, smoke and soot that swirled around the station. It was a metaphor for the psychological inferno into which Gissing pitched characters that were condemned to travel in endless circles.
Gissing's observations on King's Cross were a watershed in the development of writing about the subterranean railway. They were one component in a set of fictional perspectives that provided the foundations for underground writing in the years after his death. Gissing wrote a series of novels during the two decades of his residence in the capital, novels consistently highlighting the underground as a combination of steam technology and subterranean power that seemed to erupt from beneath the streets into the lives of his characters.
However, Gissing's attitude towards the underground railway in fiction was ambivalent. In the 1880s, he seems to have regarded it as a mechanical force, an implacable technology that carved the urban landscape into class-segregated enclaves.
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- Underground WritingThe London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf, pp. 1 - 15Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010