The underground has been a dominant image of modern life since the late
eighteenth century. A site of crisis, fascination, and hidden truth, the
underground is a space at once more immediate and more threatening than
the ordinary world above. In Subterranean Cities, David L. Pike
explores the representation of underground space in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, a period during which technology and heavy
industry transformed urban life.The metropolis had long been considered
a moral underworld of iniquity and dissolution. As the complex drainage
systems, underground railways, utility tunnels, and storage vaults of
the modern cityscape superseded the countryside of caverns and mines as
the principal location of actual subterranean spaces, ancient and modern
converged in a mythic space that was nevertheless rooted in the everyday
life of the contemporary city. Writers and artists from Felix Nadar and
Charles Baudelaire to Charles Dickens and Alice Meynell, Gustave Doré
and Victor Hugo, George Gissing and Emile Zola, and Jules Verne and H.
G. Wells integrated images of the urban underworld into their portrayals
of the anatomy of modern society. Illustrated with photographs, movie
stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of
actual and imagined urban spaces, Subterranean Cities documents the
emergence of a novel space in the subterranean obsessions and anxieties
within nineteenth-century urban culture. Chapters on the subways,
sewers, and cemeteries of Paris and London provide a detailed analysis
of these competing centers of urban modernity. A concluding chapter
considers the enduring influence of these spaces on urban culture at the
turn of the twenty-first century.
