Lanterna Rally

Author: Haewon Hwang

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 682

ISBN-13:

This thesis necessarily takes a multi-disciplinary approach, locating itself at the intersection of urban and cultural studies informed by architecture, history, and cultural geography. As London became the first city to experience massive excavation projects to lay down new infrastructure, I examine the extent to which 'underground' consciousness became the definitive 'urban' consciousness in the mid-nineteenth century. My chapters are divided into three main substructures: the sewers, the underground railway and cemeteries. The final chapter on underground revolutions moves away from spatial representations to see how the term 'underground' transformed into a more pervasive metaphor for subversive political movements at the turn of the century. Each chapter raises specific questions about the underground's material representation and its conceptual realisation in the constant production and consumption of subterranean images and metaphors. For example, how did the design of the first interceptory sewers in the 1860s superimpose a new social and sanitary map onto the streets of London? How did the image of tunnels infested with rats become conflated with the image of the lower classes, prostitutes and foreigners? How did such images threaten Victorian categories of order and disorder? In examining these questions, I draw upon a range of theorists and critics, in particular, Freud's representation of the subconscious and Marx's emphasis on the substrata of labour in a capitalist economy. Jacques Derrida's works, especially Specters of Marx, also provide the critical framework through which I argue that the underground haunted the Victorian imagination more through its 'non-presence' than any direct treatment of the spaces beneath the streets. Sources such as Victorian maps, guidebooks and advertisements will be analysed alongside literature, newspapers and art in order to locate the underground as the nexus of aesthetic, social and political discourses.