Underground Writing

de David Welsh

This fascinating book explores the ways in which the London Underground was ̀mapped' by writers from George Gissing and H.G. Wells to Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. From late Victorian times to the end of the Second World War, ̀underground writing' created an imaginative world beneath the streets of London, revisioning the Tube in a wide variety of ways - as Dantean underworld, as gateway to a utopian future, as psychological looking-glass or as place of safety and security. The book travels chronologically from the opening of London's Metropolitan Railway in 1863 to the role played by the Underground during the Second World War. Beginning with portrayals of the Tube in the writing of George Gissing in the 1880s, it moves through the work of H.G. Wells and into the writing of the 1920s and 1930s, including that of Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. It concludes with portrayals of the Underground in the fiction, poetry and art of the Second World War, most notably in the Shelter Sketchbooks of Henry Moore. Drawing mainly on literary fiction, but also on poetry, journals, postcards, posters and visual art, Underground Writing traverses the boundaries of literary criticism, transport history and urban studies. It represents a groundbreaking study of the London Underground as a central cultural metaphor for modern (and postmodern) urban life. --Book Jacket.