Their attempt to transform urban transit into a metaphor is shown to foreshadow fiction by Victoria Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, as well as the later efforts of English Modernists. Perceiving the Underground was capable of transporting passengers into internal landscapes of their own private stories, certain women poets of the fin de siècle are shown to have forged an aesthetic that might facilitate this process. It is where the psychopathology of the nineteenth-century railway carriage blurs into that heightened state of isolation that remains such a feature of tube-travel in the twenty-first century. The Victorian Underground is the non-place of consumer-capitalism in embryo. In realising the paradigm of circulation the Underground completed that alienation from natural topography initiated by railways and shopping arcades. The freedom of movement in the city that these railways permitted was believed to possess an alarming potential to eliminate social structures that impeded open circulation, no matter how vital these structures might be to the established order. But in newspaper reports, and in fiction by writers such as George Eliot, George Gissing and Arthur Conan Doyle, the completion of the Metropolitan and District is revealed to have had unforeseen and terrifying consequences. The Victorian Underground realised the ideal of an abstract circulatory network vast enough to express the economic might of an imperial capital. ![]() The earliest proposals and blueprints for the Underground are examined, and shown to be physical manifestations of that paradigm of circulation that had obsessed the Victorian Mind. ![]() Chapter One situates the conceptual origins of the London Underground in those industrial spaces of the nineteenth-century railway and shopping arcade examined by Schivelbusch and Walter Benjamin.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |