Stills from Doctor Who, "Web of Fear" (1968)
Book Details
David Ashford
LONDON UNDERGROUND
A cultural geography
188pp. Liverpool University Press. £70 (US $99.95).
978 1 84631 859 7
Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White, editors
LONDON FICTIONS
283pp. Five Leaves Publications. Paperback, £14.99.
978 1 907869 66 2
Subterranean anxieties, geographical fictions and literary representations of the city abound
ROYCE MAHAWATTE
In February 1968, the children's television programme Doctor Who, in its fifth year of transmission, depicted a London covered in fog that proved fatal for all who entered it. The time and space travellers arrive in the city via a system of tiled tunnels with curved roofs, and on seeing the sign "Covent Garden" by torchlight, the Doctor exclaims: "We're in an underground station!" Nodding to his nineteenth-century companion, he adds: "a little after your time, Victoria", to which she replies: "Is it always as dark as this?"
In fact, London's underground railway lines, the first in the world, had begun to operate from the 1860s onwards, and imaginative use of those tunnels, a century later, was a well-established feature of British popular culture. Only the year before this particular episode of Doctor Who, Quatermass and the Pit (1967) had terrorized cinemagoers – the "pit" of the title lying beneath the Victoria Line. London, the capital, is caught up not only in forces that are external, but forces drawing strength from one of the very things that made it modern.
David Ashford's London Underground: A cultural geography is a rich study of the underground transport system, placing the network in its historical and cultural context. In its methodology and its emphasis on the cultural experience of space, as well as its broad frame of reference (from George Gissing to An American Werewolf in London and China Miéville's King Rat), it represents a significant advance on previous studies of the subject. The first deep-level railway line was completed in 1890, and, for Ashford, the network that grew around it serves as an emblem of post-industrial modernity. Starting from Victorian hopes about technological advancement, the railway was propelled through modernist fantasies and fears about the self. Progressing through world wars and long-term social upheavals, the Underground was both instrumental and metaphorical.
It could also be problematic. Even though, in its early days, passengers were segregated into classes, the dominant impression was that all were dehumanized, reduced to an urban workforce stuffed into a vessel with windows that were often little more than an affectation, as they looked out onto dusty tunnel walls. In the twentieth century, the anxieties produced by such conditions found literary expression. In a reading of the E. M. Forster short story "The Machine Stops" (1909), Ashford presents this prescient work in the light of modernist concerns about technology, and how Edwardian pastoralism sought to modulate the arrival of the future. This subterranean space also offered opportunities, however, to those who were more attuned to the nature of this "nowhere" between locations. Ashford's early chapters deal with writers who grasped that women could be the beneficiaries of this new level of existence. Anthony Trollope, Henry James, H. G. Wells and Vernon Lee, as well as poets such as Alice Meynell, all depict female characters who experience tube travel and the jostling for social position and human connection it involves.
Ashford also looks at Theodore Dreiser's novelistic reimagining of the American transport magnate Charles Tyson Yerks – as Frank Cowperwood in The Financier, The Titan and The Stoic – as a representative of the brash capitalism and "amoral forcefulness" that threatened for a time to take over the underground system. Commentators in The Times were keen to point out that this system was contingent on both American technology (the tunnelling equipment and regrettable open-style "cars") and capital. What is perhaps most interesting in this lively account is the contradictory and vacillating politics of Dreiser and his cautious anglophobia – an intriguing index to Anglo-American relations following the First World War.
In a detailed reading of the journal Blast and contemporary poster campaigns against modern poetry, Ashford connects the movement and the promise of cheap and easy travel with avant-garde art. The British Futurists, and the Vorticists especially, saw something auspicious in this relatively new mode of transport, which imposed an aesthetic order on modern life. Harry Beck's celebrated Tube Map of 1933, meanwhile, compresses geography into an "abstract, rationally organised space". The broader view of the Underground, however, was not so positive. Ashford regards Wells's The Time Machine (1895) as, in part, a speculative "attack" on the garden suburb, with Wells modelling the post-human Eloi community of the future on the Bedford Park suburb in Chiswick, implicitly criticizing the rise of a rootless middle class. Writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, George Orwell and Elizabeth Bowen felt weary in the presence of suburban sprawl because, concerns of class identity aside, the commuter belt was as abstract as the network of tunnels that brought it into being – and not in an avant-garde way.
Though he never makes such a bold claim, Ashford presents the emergence of the London Underground as a paradigm shift. The Tube altered the self; it created a new demographic and an unforeseen cultural synthesis. In later chapters, we see how the Underground, as theorized by the Situationists, formed a crucial part of the mid-1960s immigration experience. From the immigrant fiction of Samuel Selvon to modern graffiti artists, and Banksy's "brandalism" on the Tube, we see that bricolage and London Tube travel complement the idealism – the power, speed and despair – of youth and pop culture.
Edited by Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White, London Fictions has, on the surface, a similar literary and geographical project to that of London Underground. Its contributors were invited to comment on any novel about London published after 1870 (the year that Dickens, the most notable of London novelists, died). In addition, they were asked to consider how the city described in their work differs from the London of today. The result is lively and compelling. If there are gaps in your London reading, this book will help to fill them. Inspired by Betty Miller's Farewell Leicester Square (1941), Susan Alice Fischer writes touchingly on the complexities of assimilated Jewish experience. Miller's upwardly mobile protagonist, Alec, encounters prejudice and the pain of his own self-fashioning as he negotiates city life; the "concentration camp is only spiritual here". Gregory Woods explains the stylized turns of Neil Bartlett's Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall (1990) – explaining why, for instance, the main characters are simply called "O" and "boy" – and places the novel in the context of gay London literature and the institutionalized homophobia of the era. Perhaps the most revealing commentary comes from Sanchita Islam, who writes a rich and fair-minded response to Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003). "It is a shame that Ali's story takes place primarily in a flat . . . . Perhaps Mile End would have been a less misleading title."
London Fictions also exposes a quality of the city that the brief does not seem to anticipate. The comparisons between the fictional and contemporary London, for the most part, lack the energy and commitment found in the discussions of the chosen novels. London Fictions in fact takes an opposite approach to that of London Underground in that it seeks to make the representational geographical, and the result is in places a little flat – more streetmap than guided tour. Andrew Lane's discussion of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890) reveals that you "can read all fifty-six short stories and four novels . . . about Sherlock Holmes without finding out much about the London of the time". It seems that Conan Doyle's London is organized around narrative principles rather than cartographic ones, as Lane acknowledges. Conversely, David Ashford, in London Underground, uses Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" (1908) to show how the "District Railway" (opened in 1868) could raise fears of a foreign invasion.
While it may be misleading of London Fictions to present fictional versions of London as if they were more faithful to geographical principles than to those of genre, the final chapter of London Underground considers the postmodern notion that there are living "ghosts" beneath the feet of every Londoner. Here Ashford draws on the experimental fiction of Conrad Williams and Geoff Ryman – two writers who would not fall into the category of London fiction according to London Fictions. Through their visions of the city, however, both of these books reveal London as a place of the imagination, webbed over by fantastical commonplaces and unpredictable new developments.
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