Underground Writing
Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf
DAVID WELSH
Copyright Date: 2010
Edition: 1
Published by: Liverpool University Press
Pages: 256
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjcxq
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Book Info
Underground Writing
Book Description:

The purpose of this book is to explore the ways in which the London Underground/ Tube was ‘mapped’ by a number of writers from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf. From late Victorian London to the end of the World War II, ‘underground writing’ created an imaginative world beneath the streets of London. The real subterranean railway was therefore re-enacted in number of ways in writing, including as Dantean Underworld or hell, as gateway to a utopian future, as psychological looking- glass or as place of safety and security. The book is a chronological study from the opening of the first underground in the 1860s to its role in WW2. Each chapter explores perspectives on the underground in a number of writers, starting with George Gissing in the 1880s, moving through the work of H. G. Wells and into the writing of the 1920s & 1930s including Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. It concludes with its portrayal in the fiction, poetry and art (including Henry Moore) of WW2. The approach takes a broadly cultural studies perspective, crossing the boundaries of transport history, literature and London/ urban studies. It draws mainly on fiction but also uses poetry, art, journals, postcards and posters to illustrate. It links the actual underground trains, tracks and stations to the metaphorical world of ‘underground writing’ and places the writing in a social/ political context.

eISBN: 978-1-84631-597-8
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-viii)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. ix-ix)
  3. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (pp. x-x)
  4. INTRODUCTION
    INTRODUCTION (pp. 1-15)

    When the novelist George Gissing was lampooned byPunchin 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’,²Punchoffered a caustic ‘ballade’ called ‘By Underground’ and a cartoon lambasting the Metropolitan Railway, one of its perennial targets.³ Just under ten years later, Gissing published his novelIn the Year of Jubilee,⁴ containing an...

  5. Chapter One THE KINGDOM OF SHADOWS: THE INFERNAL UNDERGROUND OF GEORGE GISSING
    Chapter One THE KINGDOM OF SHADOWS: THE INFERNAL UNDERGROUND OF GEORGE GISSING (pp. 16-78)

    In ‘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’.² 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...

  6. Chapter Two THE UTOPIAN UNDERGROUND OF H. G. WELLS
    Chapter Two THE UTOPIAN UNDERGROUND OF H. G. WELLS (pp. 79-141)

    In his 1902 bookAnticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, H. G. Wells declared that the ‘People of today take the railways for granted as they take the sea and sky; they were born into a railway world, and they expect to die in one.’² For Wells, the underground was the epitome of this railway world as it brought together all the components of his reforming vision. George Gissing’s visionary underground was anchored in a securely realistic setting, developing a number of literary perspectives for an entirely new mode of travel in...

  7. Chapter Three ‘THE ROAR OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY’: THE MAKING OF THE TUBE IN THE INTERWAR YEARS
    Chapter Three ‘THE ROAR OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY’: THE MAKING OF THE TUBE IN THE INTERWAR YEARS (pp. 142-220)

    When Virginia Woolf said that human character changed ‘in or about December, 1910’ she was probably not thinking of the London Tube.² Woolf appears to have taken the date from the year of the art exhibition ‘Manet and Post-Impressionism’ in her essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924) and it seems a far cry from the subterranean world of the London underground. In the 1930s, however, Woolf might have added that the Tube had as much of an effect on perception as Post-Impressionism but this would have been at least in part due to her own writing. Woolf’s writingchanged...

  8. Chapter Four THE KINGDOM OF INDIVIDUALS: SAFETY AND SECURITY ON THE TUBE IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
    Chapter Four THE KINGDOM OF INDIVIDUALS: SAFETY AND SECURITY ON THE TUBE IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR (pp. 221-267)

    When Henry Moore completed hisShelter Sketchbooksin 1940–41, he had created a vision of the capital—unparalleled in underground writing—that unified the subterranean world and the streets. His work echoes the prints and photographs of the building of the Metropolitan Railway in the Victorian period by showing people on Tube platforms, but now the people of the city are no longer just spectators. The trains have disappeared completely from Moore’s drawings, leaving the people centre stage. Moore was not alone in his creation of what has been called an ‘abiding city’ in wartime. Many of the parallels...

  9. Conclusion: FROM BECK’S TUBE MAP TO BECKS ON THE TUBE
    Conclusion: FROM BECK’S TUBE MAP TO BECKS ON THE TUBE (pp. 268-273)

    Underground writing did not end in 1945. George Gissing’s King’s Cross has moved westwards and been altered by new Tube intersections. It has recently undergone redevelopment and is no longer the smoky underworld of steam engines that characterized his fiction, even if the horrors of the King’s Cross fire in 1987 remain a watershed in the history of the whole underground system. If writers from Gissing to Woolf were the first to integrate the underground into fiction as a metaphor for modern urban life, then later writing has transformed this vocabulary into an entire language. The Tube is a pervasive...

  10. BIBLIOGRAPHY
    BIBLIOGRAPHY (pp. 274-293)
  11. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 294-310)
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