DAVID WELSH. Underground Writing: the London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf.

Abstract

It is getting rather crowded down there in the field of what might be called ‘subterranean cultural studies’. Rosalind Williams’ Notes on the Underground (1990) was the first book to consider the trope of the underground in the nineteenth century, while David L. Pike’s Subterranean Cities (2005) explored forms of underground life in London and Paris such as catacombs and drains. Such works heralded the start of a number of studies by literary critics and cultural historians into the cultural meanings of subterranean life in the modern world. The London Underground, the subject of Welsh’s informative study, has often acted as the principal focus in such works, pioneered by Michael Saler’s The Avant-Garde in Interwar London (1999), which brilliantly analysed the notion of an Arts and Crafts influenced ‘medieval modernism’ in the style and design of the Underground in the 1920s and 1930s. Analyses of the London Underground, the first in the world, in themselves form a subset of cultural accounts of the railways more widely, in books such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s classic phenomenological study, The Railway Journey (1977), Michael Freeman’s Railways and the Victorian Imagination (1999), and the edited collection by Freeman and Matthew Beaumont, The Railway and Modernity (2007). Such studies can be located at a junction between urban studies, the history of technology, and the cultural study of modernism and modernism.