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
Chapter One - The Kingdom of Shadows: the infernal underground of George Gissing
- 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
As always, it is the platform of the Terminus which seems alone real, and all behind it a mere dream.
George Gissing, Collected LettersIn ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889), Oscar Wilde's character Vivian observes that ‘at present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects’. When these words were written, London was about to pass from one transport era to another as steam power was replaced by electricity. The steam underground railways of the capital had been in existence for 25 years, spreading from their original inner-city Metropolitan Railway as far as Richmond and Wimbledon and across the River Thames to New Cross, to Willesden Green in the north-west and Whitechapel in the East End. The underground had received plentiful coverage in Victorian newspapers and journals but it was only in the 1880s that underground writing emerged. This appeared in the fiction of George Gissing who began to offer a number of perspectives on the emergent underground network. In doing so, he constructed a key thread in the new genre of underground writing: an underworld which, like Wilde's fog, had not existed before. He was the first novelist to engage with the underground railway in a sustained way and his fictional depiction drew on much contemporary literary and sociological commentary. Gissing effectively manufactured a new underground that was able to live on in cultural terms far beyond the last days of underground steam railways.
This chapter explores the ways in which Gissing constructed key cultural perspectives for the underground railway that begin as a infernal visionary underworld in his 1880s novels such as Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Nether World (1889). This underworld stretches across London and encompasses a vast urban wasteland criss-crossed by railway lines, embankments, underground cuttings and canals all linked by the powerful mechanical forces of steam power and the steam locomotive. But Gissing's fiction of the 1890s such as New Grub Street (1891), The Odd Women (1893), In the Year of Jubilee (1894), Eve's Ransom (1895) and The Whirlpool (1897), marks a major break with this approach.
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- Information
- Underground WritingThe London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf, pp. 16 - 78Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010