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London’s Underground Spaces Representing
the Victorian City, 1840-1915
Haewon Hwang
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Edinburgh:
University Press, 2013 Hardback.
264 pages. ISBN 978- 0748676071. £70
Reviewed
by Deborah Mutch De
Montfort University, Leicester
Mythological stories of
underground worlds have been an integral part of human culture for millennia. The
Norse myths of Odin and Valhalla, the Greek myths of Hades and Persephone, and
the Roman myths of the Inferno, particularly the use of the underworld by Dante
in his Divine Comedy, will be
familiar underground territories to the Western reader. But subterranean
mythology is not restricted to Europe and the underworld is an important part
of ancient human culture globally, from the Maori Hawaiki to the Inuit Adlivun,
from the Shinto Yomi to the Inca Ukhu pacha. Haewon Hwang’s fascinating study
of the spaces beneath Victorian London demonstrates the continuing interest in
(and repulsion by) the ground beneath our feet in the modern world, even for
those industrial, scientific, rational Victorians. Hwang divides her analysis
of the Victorian underground into four spaces: the network of sewers, the
underground rail system, cemeteries and – in a more abstract form of
‘underground’ space – the resistant, left-wing political movements of the late
nineteenth century. Each space is investigated through the lenses of history,
politics, art and literature, and discussed in some depth (pun intended) to
consider the visibility of power and resistance in these underground spaces. Hwang
draws on the theories of space and power by philosophers such as Henri Lefebvre
and Michel Foucault to make visible the tensions between ‘upper’ and ‘lower’,
whether that is the opposition of physical spaces or relations in a power struggle,
and the Derridian notions of ‘spectrality’ and ‘non-presence’ to consider the
‘haunting’ of the surface by the spaces of the underground. The author opens the book
with the statement that this is not simply a history of the underground or a
mapping of subterranean spaces, but a consideration of the underground on the
imagination. But for this reviewer, the book is strongest when dealing with the
historical attitudes to and uses of the underground spaces. The chapter dealing
with the massive undertaking of building the London sewerage system sets out
both the logic and rationality of the engineering feat bringing a new hygiene
to the festering city as well as the effect this project had on the social
divide between rich and poor, high and low, clean and unclean. While the
sewerage project brought – or at least attempted to bring – order and
cleanliness to London as a whole, it also had the effect of bringing into
visibility the city’s ‘low life’ as slum areas were ripped apart to lay the
drainage system. The development of the underground transport system similarly
broke through not only to the physical depths beneath London but also to the
‘depths’ of the previously invisible habitations and habits of the metropolitan
working class. These projects, and the relocation of the cemeteries to the
outer limits of the city, brought ‘the underground, previously unseen and
ungoverned’ into physical and psychological visibility, which then turns it
into a ‘site of discipline and rationalisation as the space becomes co-opted by
… authorities and capitalist enterprises’ [9]. Movements designed (and desired)
to bring cleanliness and to ease congestion simultaneously broke down spatial
barriers of gender and class as workers and women also moved more freely and
were less easily contained within designated spaces. Although these changes
raised fears of moral infection and temptation, the desire for financial profit
trumped these concerns as even the graveyards generated interest by and for the
joint-stock companies. As Hwang states: ‘The correlation of death and illness
then aligned the corpse with diseases and pestilence, placing cemeteries in the
same medical discourse as the sewers in the secularisation of burial practices.
This correlation inevitably took the subject of death from the religious realm
to a political one in the eradication of graveyards and cemeteries from the
city centre’ [117]. The difficulties of
imposing bourgeois order on the subterranean movement of waste and the movement
or stasis of bodies (living and dead) are not only evident in historical
records but also in the literary works of authors including Charles Dickens and
George Gissing as well as sociological investigators like Henry Mayhew and Friedrich
Engels. However, it is in the literary analyses that the study loses some of
its clear focus and intellectual depth. While the author acknowledges the
metaphorical use of the sewers in, for instance, Dickens’s presentation of the
human waste inhabiting Tom-All-Alone’s in Bleak
House or the freedom grasped by Gissing’s female characters’ use of the
underground railway in The Odd Women
there is little interpretation of the ideological underpinning of these
literary spaces. For example, the author notes that Gissing’s novel, The Nether World, presents a ‘cyclical
if not static’ plotline and claims that Gissing’s characters ‘choose of their
own will to live a subterranean existence without any hope for mobility or
salvation’ [36-37] without considering the criticism of Gissing’s naturalism
presenting a restrictive image of working-class life. If this book had been
simply a historical account of the Victorian ordering of the underground space
then the presentation of the literary text as a form of historical document
would have been fine but as it is described as an analysis of the Victorian
imagination as well as the physical space then a more detailed examination of
literary representations is necessary. In fact, it is when the
book moves into the literary analysis of the cemetery in Victorian literature
that it begins to lose focus – in both argument and space. After the discussion
on the relocation of burial grounds from the centre to the outskirts of the
city, the chapter moves on to consider East End poverty as a secular version of
Hell and the analysis of literary burials takes us away from London to the
Essex countryside of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, through the Yorkshire moors of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights (with only a
tenuous link to London through Lockwood) and out to Austria’s Styria in
Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla. I would
at least have expected to see some detailed analysis of Stoker’s presentation
of Highgate cemetery in Dracula and
the final scene of Gissing’s The Nether
World in Abney Park cemetery considering both of these novels had already
been discussed in earlier chapters. The final chapter on
underground political movements in London is a fascinating concept but one
which would have benefited from reordering and expansion. Hwang recognises the
importance of the political threat in novels by Henry James, Joseph Conrad,
Walter Besant and George Gissing but fails to consider the political ideologies
of the authors through which these threats are projected. At one point Besant’s
sympathetic liberalism is likened to George Bernard Shaw’s Fabian socialism, a
pairing at which both men would have bridled. The fears of small-c conservative
and anti-socialist authors do have a place in this chapter but their attitudes
are not given enough attention, their differences are not emphasised nor are
the images of political revolt acknowledged as attempting to reinforce the status quo. There is also a complete
absence of the literature of the political ‘underground’ itself: literary
representations of London abounded in the fiction of both the Chartist and
socialist movements and there ought to have been space found in this chapter to
consider the other side of this political coin. Nonetheless, this is an
engaging study of the Victorian attitudes towards and fears of the invisibility
and disorder of the ground below. At its best, this book is an interesting,
informative and thoughtful work, which brings the depths of the metropolitan
underground spaces into the light of intellectual enquiry.
N.B. Illustrated version on the Victorian Web: http://www.victorianweb.org/history/reviews/hwang.html
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