Expressing the Rapidity of Life

The relationships between cultural modernism and aircraft, and the airspace they inhabit, and the cultural vortices of 'airmindness' they brought in their wake, have been plotted well over the last few decades. Critics such as David Pascoe and Kitty Hauser have brought back into focus the vapour trails of fascism and machine idolatry, and also the imaginative possibilities gifted by aerial photography to archaeologists and filmmakers. But now David Welsh has attempted to investigate systematically another perspective that is intrinsically modern — that of the subterranean world of London's underground railway. This is a useful, dense, and perceptive book; it takes a thematic subject and successfully moves beyond listing and annotation to grapple with questions of why there were so many modes of writing about the network beneath the streets. Indeed, Underground Writing broadens beyond literature to become a cultural history of both the network, with its attendant posters, publicity campaigns, and progressively more bearable trains, and also of what was representable of the inchoate fears and desires brought to visibility, if not to the literal surface, by these railways.

London's Underground has never had one literary work of totemic centrality, a counterpart to Ezra Pound's Parisian imagist reverie 'In a Station in the Metro'. But a slew of disparate and esoteric texts reveals that going deeper beneath the city might have implications for politics, psychology, and narrative form, as well as bringing — for starters — the lurid hazards of sexual licence and claustrophobia (some of the first trains were known as 'padded cells'). Underground Writing is arranged in broadly chronological chapters, moving from late Victorian fears, through interwar ideological battles, then on to a meditation on shelter politics in the Blitz. But such a progression is complicated by the repeated motifs and tropes to which writers from very different eras all return — and how they are used to dissimilar effect. This intermeshing network becomes incrementally apparent throughout Welsh's work. It emerges despite this being — rather than because it is — a survey thick with details and facts, such as the increase in the number of power stations needed when the Underground switched to electrical power (the first sections, in sub-surface cut-and-cover tunnels, were powered by steam engines, and horrifically unpleasant).

The particularly London-specific nightmarish space of being underground begins, as Welsh plausibly argues, in the 1880s with the novels of George Gissing, notably Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889). All these refer overtly to Dante — and all place their working-class protagonists in various circles of hell. The almost compulsory reference to underworlds — classical or Christian or Norse — for any writer of the Underground was only partly due to the steam and smoke the first trains generated; it was also an atavistic recognition of the strangeness in willingly 'burrowing' or 'sinking' or 'going to ground'. Yet the underground railways in Gissing's works are merely part of a cat's cradle of systems — along with overground lines, canals, hydraulic power ducts, telephone cables — that made the modern city possible as a commercial and dehumanising space.

But with other writers the mythic shades into the supernatural. Welsh has assembled a plethora of vivid moments, such as this from Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors (1885), where the restive earth — enraged through tunnelling — attempts to escape: 'the very fume of the pit steams up through the flagstones, the ground glows, red-hot beneath his feet, and he seems to hear the hiss of the infernal cauldron' (p. 94). The work of H. G. Wells does, however, bring complications, as both his fiction and non-fiction pull on the different strands of modernity. The futuristic spaces of The Time Machine (1885) are troglodyte tunnels — home to fears about racial degeneration and industrial fervour; while Wells's sardonic short story 'The Lord of the Dynamos' (1894), set in a power station supplying power to the new trains, gets the detailed analysis it deserves — for how often does a cult of...