Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf (review)

For all its iconic status, the London Underground is not easily demarcated. The oldest parts of the system were steam-operated and promiscuously hybrid, accommodating above-ground suburban trains threading their way through the City's centre. Deep-level tube railways, originating in the 1890s, were more self-contained and properly underground, although they too share some suburban stations and even sections of line with above-ground trains. David Welsh notes that "where Gissing had identified a vertical porousness that was based on the physical proximity of the steam underground and the streets, the tubes were distinctly separate. But the psychological connection between the surface of the city and its subterranean levels could not be severed and became even more important with the building of deep tubes" (138).

This transformation from a physical to a psychological Underground lies at the heart of Underground Writing, but Welsh's message is complicated by this very porosity and connectivity. In places, his survey accommodates writing about mainline railways, too, and occasionally verges on cultural histories of train travel and of underworld imagery in general. Welsh's subtitle, "from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf," indicates the book's focus on imaginative literature, including poetry and drama, but the boundaries are sometimes blurred. As the book moves into the twentieth century, the dialogue with documentary and propaganda seems weighted away from fiction, increasingly read through the lens of or in reaction to what Welsh calls "Tubism" (8), an optimistic marriage of futurism and an aesthetic ideal of "Fitness for Purpose" (9), efficiency, and social engineering. Welsh extends his account beyond Virginia Woolf, even, in a brief coda, into the possible future of Tube writing. George Gissing and Woolf are not so much chronological as stylistic and analytical bookends, interpreted by Welsh as representing very different ways of writing about the Underground.

Within a densely packed survey, Welsh offers an argument about the emergence of "subway consciousness" (63), "Tubism" and its discontents, and the psychology of coming to terms with the Underground. Before about 1890, references to the Underground emphasised the descent into a Dantean underworld where gloom, gas, smoke, and steam more than compensated for the lack of real subterraneanness. H. G. Wells and the propaganda of the London Underground Group take us into an era of efficiency and undeniable modernity, a utopian Underground countered by writers such as T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Graham Greene, who reacted against the overbearing materialism and totalitarian tendencies of a socially engineered Tube. In some respects, Eliot returned to a Dantean view of London in line with early Gissing, while Orwell shared the later Gissing's abhorrence of a destructively capitalist, materialist whirlpool. Woolf less dogmatically invoked a more fluid, uncertain Underground which integrated the city psychologically as much as physically or politically. Through World War II , stories set in stations occupied as air-raid shelters stressed more homely, communal dimensions to the Underground, pointing to an elision of the divide between public and private and a tension between Tube as transportation and as home.

For readers of Victorian Studies, chapters dealing with Gissing, Wells, and their contemporaries will be of most interest. Gissing's predecessors occasionally sent their characters by Underground, but mostly just to move them around the metropolis. Gissing did this himself in his first novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880), where Helen Norman commutes alone, at night, between West End and East End, thereby complicating Welsh's claim that, following his early deployment of an "infernal" underground, Gissing only later switched to an "actual underground" (37) that was "laced with social conflict, human longing and desire," producing "an account of travel that is not principally about specific journeys" (51). But "specific journeys" and locations are more important than Welsh acknowledges. Discussing a scene in New Grub Street (1891) in which Jasper Milvain and Marian Yule watch a London-bound express pass by, Welsh claims...