Afterimages of the Victorian City

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Afterimages of the Victorian CityDavid L. Pikea

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NEW AGENDA

Afterimages of the Victorian City

David L. Pike

Robert Howlett’s photograph of the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel at the

launching of the leviathan steamship the Great Eastern in 1857 is an iconic image ofthe era. Less iconic, however, is the individual on the right in Figure 1, young

Alexander Stanhope St George. This is because the shadow engineer has been insertedby contemporary artist Paul St George, who used digital imaging technology to

produce the illusion of an excised supplement to the original celebratory photograph.It is an evocative image for me because it plays into the discourse of what is termed

by scholars ‘postmodern Victorianism’: we have an excluded boy, apparently aminority, the unofficial appendage to the official occasion, but St George’s hoax also

complicates the standard critical discourse. As described by Jonathan Loesberg, JohnKucich, Dianne Sadoff, Cora Kaplan and others, postmodern Victorianism – novelsand films such as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), A.S. Byatt’s

Possession (1990; and Neal LaBute’s 2002 film adaptation), Jane Campion’s The Piano(1993) and Portrait of a Lady (1996), and Sarah Waters’s trio Tipping the Velvet

(1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2002), among others – sees itself asoverturning or unearthing the conventions of ‘standard’ or ‘heritage’ Victorianism,

continuing a process begun by Lytton Strachey, extended by Steven Marcus in TheOther Victorians and capped off by Foucault’s History of Sexuality.1 But there is

something in St George’s doctored image that complicates the simple reversal of asimple Victorian ideology. First of all, rather than suffering and miserable, theragamuffin is grinning away, an aspiring engineer excited to be present at the great

occasion. The chains, which certainly still metonymise servitude, slavery, and empire,are also a symbol of technological invention and sheer engineering skill, and they

create a marvelously aesthetic backdrop that must have thrilled Howlett when heposed Brunel in front of them.

Victorianists tend to read the original photograph as an ironic commentary notonly on Brunel’s life, but on the entire imperial project for which he is made to stand.

Famously, the Great Eastern was a commercial disaster, and the shock at the report of

1. See, in particular, Jonathan Loesberg, ‘The Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality: Foucault andNeo-Victorian Historical Fiction’, Cleo, 36.3 (2007), 361–89; Cora Kaplan, Victoriana:Histories, Fictions, Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); John Kucichand Dianne Sadoff, Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Journal of Victorian Culture

Vol. 15, No. 2, August 2010, 254–267

ISSN 1355-5502 print/ISSN 1750-0133 online

� 2010 Leeds Trinity and All Saints College

DOI: 10.1080/13555502.2010.491662

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a fatal accident on her maiden voyage is said to have caused Brunel’s death, but StGeorge’s insertion of a smiling youth into the photo undercuts the dramatic irony we

would otherwise invest in Brunel’s image, and restores a sense of the great optimismand utopianism that went hand in hand with the hubris of heroic engineering. It

equally reminds us of Brunel’s first great engineering achievement: his completion ofthe Thames Tunnel at the youthful age of twenty, when he took over the works begun

by his father twenty years earlier. A symbolic success that failed miserably as acommercial enterprise, the Thames Tunnel has endured nevertheless as the oldeststretch of infrastructure on the London Underground, and it has become a cult

tourist attraction for aficionados of subterranean Victoriana.2 By taking account ofBrunel’s contradictory aspirations and achievements, St George does not write failure

and imperial oppression out of the photograph, but neither does he reduce hisdefinition of the Victorian to their negative limits.

In this essay, I want to explore exactly what is going on in St George’s photo andin the 2007 Telectroscope installation between Brooklyn and London with which it

was associated, and how it relates to the function that Victorian spaces such as theThames Tunnel have in the imagining of London today. This exploration is part of a

broader question I want to pose about what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what

Figure 1. Paul St George, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Alexander Stanhope St George at theLaunching of the Steamship the Great Eastern in 1857 5http://www.talktalk.co.uk/telectroscope/cn/gallery/files.php4 [accessed online 15 May 2010]. Digitally manipulatedversion of Robert Howlett, I.K. Brunel with Chains. Courtesy of Paul St George.

2. See David L. Pike, ‘‘‘The Greatest Wonder of the World’’: Brunel’s Tunnel and theMeanings of Underground London’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 33.2 (September2005), 341–67.

Journal of Victorian Culture 255


http://www.talktalk.co.uk/telectroscope/cn/gallery/files.php


persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. Like the literatureand cinema of Victoriana, both the conventional heritage tour of surviving sites of

Victorian London and its subterranean equivalent involve a promise of unchanginghistorical continuity even as the spaces they visit – be they Big Ben, Tower Bridge,

and Dickens’s House or Camden Market, the Greenwich foot tunnel and thecatacombs at Highgate cemetery – are all in continual use within the lived space of

the contemporary city. In other words, they represent a hypostasized past unaffectedby the countermovement of modernity both located and repressed in the temporal

gap between us and the Victorians. So, in the lived spaces around us there is in factcontinuity, in that the city is a palimpsest and patchwork of Victorian and post-Victorian materials. However, to see those spaces as Victorian is in fact to elide a

historical process of physical accumulation and syncretism.For the modernists, a Victorian institution such as Big Ben was a monument to

the clock time their prose was meant to abolish in reflection of the effect ofmodernity in their lives. The attitude, in fact, reaches back into the nineteenth

century – think of William Morris filling the emptied Houses of Parliament with theDung Market in News from Nowhere or H.G. Wells’s weirdly transformed South

Kensington Museum in The Time Machine – and this suggests that it is a particularstance toward urban space as much as a historical reaction peculiar to our own

moment. Londoners (not to mention Parisians) were as adept at seeing the cityaround them as already an afterimage as they were of seeing it as a timelessmonument to imperial stability. Indeed, Lynda Nead has shown how it was the very

progress wrought by industry in the cityscape – the vast scale of gasometers andexcavations for sewers and underground railways – that introduced the concept of an

urban sublime to the experience of the changing city.3

There is a complex ideology involved in determining what precisely a Victorian

heritage is, especially from a preservation (and thus a legal and economic) point ofview. For the modernists, the nineteenth-century underground was not ‘Victorian’; it

was a counter-space to all that was Victorian (or Edwardian – I am conflating the twoeras, just as the modernists were wont to do, and just as postmodern Victoriana tendsto do). Whether a space of alienation or a space of potential liberation and

revolution, subterranean London, and especially the Tube, was a quintessential spaceof modernity, and it remained ‘modern’, even as, in a material sense, it became more

and more antique. Even in our historicist present, it takes a real effort of will truly toexperience the tunnels and stations of the Tube, or even the cut-and-cover lines just

below the surface, as the nineteenth-century spaces so many of them are – the oldesttunnel on the system, on the East London Line, dates to 1843. This tunnel is also, to

my knowledge, the only part of the actual track system to be listed and preserved as aHeritage site, after heated debate during the 1990s.4 If we stand pat with historical

buildings and the homes of eminent individuals, it is quite easy to preserve the

3. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images of Nineteenth-Century London(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

4. Pike, ‘‘‘The Greatest Wonder of the World’’’, pp. 361–62. There is clearly movement inthe direction of listing Victorian subterranean infrastructure: 46 tube stations are Grade II

256 David L. Pike


conventional sense of Victorian London most iconically familiar from theconventional Victoriana of myriad adaptations of Masterpiece Theatre and their

cinematic cousins. Nevertheless, there is a large degree of historical slippageembedded within that heritage, and to your average location scout and moviegoer,

the Regency London we glimpse in a Jane Austen film does not differ significantly tothe Edwardian London of a Henry James adaptation or the Georgian London lensed

for Virginia Woolf’s or E.M. Forster’s city. The label of ‘Victorian’ covers them allneatly as belonging in that part of the past which is somehow located immediately

prior to the present era, a past nestled between the truly alien Renaissance, medieval,or classical periods, but distinct from the moderns up to the Second World War, withwhose perspective we still tend broadly to identify. Such period slippage is even more

egregious in the more visually anonymous locales of subterranean London: it just sohappens that a good number of Underground scenes, when filmed on ‘location’,

employ the same disused station (Aldwych, on the Strand, opened in 1907; see Figure2). When I toured the station in the mid-1990s, it was littered with traces of period

accoutrements from the early twentieth-century through to the Blitz, and someonehad just finished shooting the electropunk group The Prodigy’s Firestarter video

(1996); during the same period, the station was used for a key early scene in TheWings of the Dove (1997).

That a song controversial for its violent imagery and the stark black and whitefootage of its music video should use the Tube tunnel and elevator shaft of a disusedstation for authentic street cred can tell us something about the counter-cultural

afterimage of the Victorian underground. Where the aboveground heritage ofVictorian London promises an eternal continuity of empire and order by repressing

the dissolutions of modernism, the underground heritage promises an eternal

Figure 2. The media face of the London Tube: the all-purpose platform of the disusedAldwych station with the traces of a recent shoot. Photograph by the author, 1995.

listed buildings; the towers of the 1897 Blackwall tunnel were listed in 2000; and theGreenwich (1907) and Woolwich (1912) Foot tunnels are both listed.



subversion counter to the monolithic structures of modern architecture and thesocial conformity of the postwar era. I want to argue, however, that subversion was

already there in the nineteenth century, for it is a representation of space inheritedfrom the urban mysteries of the 1840s and through detective and social investigator

fiction and reportage of the second half of the century, a view from below thatpromises grit and authenticity.

In the afterimages of the city, what has dropped out are the people, theinhabitants of the Victorian spaces. To the degree that we identify these spaces with

the past, we conceive them for better or worse to be uninhabited. Even the visitor toCamden Market, housed within and around a set of disused railway stables andviaduct arches since the 1970s, does not expect to encounter actual people from the

past, only things, spaces and a certain ‘underground’ ambience. The heritageapproach, cannot, or, perhaps, prefers not, to reanimate the people along with the

lived space. At a stretch, it could be argued that such is the function of heritage roleplaying, or of multimedia historical recreations such as the Imperial War Museum’s

‘Trench Experience’, where the reconstructed space is animated with sound and lighteffects, but these are self-conscious gestures within a museal context, framed like

heritage movies by the knowledge of the representation we are watching rather thanthe promise that we are in the actual space in which the inhabitants of the past lived

and breathed. So how does contemporary Victorianism repopulate the Victorianstreets when, like Eugene Atget’s photographs of Paris, there are no real people in thephotos? How, in other words, can we recover the lived space when the afterimage is

primarily conceived space, to use Henri Lefebvre’s distinction between thefragmented and contradictory spatial meanings derived from everyday use and the

unified meanings relating to ideology and spatial abstractions.5 Why should we wantanything besides the conceived space of conventional representation? I will discuss

two distinct approaches to this question, both embedded within contemporarypopular culture. In the cinema of subterranean Victorianism, we find the Victorians

literally present as spectres of the past, haunting the spaces of the present; in theliterary, cinematic and cultural movement known as steampunk we find the Victorianposited as the point of origin of an alternate future.

***

By the late nineteenth century the city was already frequently conceived in terms of

industrial ruins. As Nead notes, the process of using infrastructure as emblematicruins started with gas explosions and sewage break-ins around the mid-century, but

in the ruins we also find troublesome ghosts. These may be mockingly humorous,such as Morris’s cantankerous old man in the British Museum, pining for the bad old

days when there was conflict in the city, but usually they are dark and sinister, as inWells’s cannibalistic Morlocks, who emerge from the underground to haunt the Time

5. On Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad of perceived, lived, and conceived space, see TheProduction of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; firstpublished 1974), esp. p. 33.

258 David L. Pike


Traveller’s first perception of a surface utopia in the landscape of future London. TheMorlocks are strongly associated not only with the mythic landscape of the night and

the underground, but also with the technological remains of nineteenth-centuryLondon – the machines underground which they maintain and the Museum that

seems to slope down toward the darkness of their realm. However we interpret theorigins and identity of the Morlocks, it is clear that they have a critical function in

Wells’s satirical vision. It is instructive to witness how George Pal’s 1960 Hollywoodfilm transforms that critical function: rather than ghosts, the cinematic Morlocks

have become physical monsters rooted in the future rather than in the past. Contraryto the material relationship between past and future of Wells’s novel, the film posits amythic continuity of space through the concept of home and an eternal feminine

always ready to inhabit that home. We first glimpse her in 1899, the mannequin inFilby’s shop window across the street from the home of George Wells (as the film

renames the protagonist). She accompanies George as he travels through time,changing only her fashions, until she is finally brought to life, Pygmalion-style, in

Yvette Mimieux’s air-headed future-dwelling Eloi woman, Weena. The futurebecomes a projection of George’s fantasy into which, discontented in his own time,

he can travel to attain an idealized image of the same space he inhabited in 1895. In akey scene, George maps out the layout of his house with a stick on the ground around

the campfire he has built to keep himself and Weena safe from the Morlocks (Figure 3).The conceptual space of house and hearth is so strong that he can delineate its contourshundreds of thousands of years in the future as if it were the very same spot.

While Pal’s Time Machine mythologizes Victorian spectres as the malleable stuffof George Wells’s comic book daydreams, we find a very different sort of cannibalistic

descendant of the Victorian underclass in the cult British horror film, Death Line(1972, Gary Sherman), produced amid the winding down of Swinging London and

the early rumblings of steampunk. The lurid and scientifically impossible storyimagines a group of Victorian navvies trapped by a tunnel collapse while building the

British Museum station (now disused, it was open on the Central Line from 1900 to

Figure 3. George Wells (Rod Taylor) and his mannequin Eloi (Yvette Mimieux) reproducehis Victorian hearth atop the subterranean realm of the Morlocks. Frame enlargement fromThe Time Machine, dir. by George Pal (MGM, 2000), DVD.



1933). Sealed off from the world above, the workers rapidly devolve, losing the powerof speech and living off the meat of hapless travellers in the Russell Square tube

station in Bloomsbury, where much of the film is set (most of the interiors were shot,inevitably, in Aldwych). In execution, the film is powerful, especially Hugh

Armstrong’s wordless but sympathetic portrayal of the last feral man, desperatelytrying to keep his pregnant mate alive. The key moment comes with a virtuoso seven-

minute long take as a hand-held camera leads us into their underground lair,exploring it in tight close-up as it moves from the requisite Grand Guignol of the

genre to an unexpected humanization of the monsters at its conclusion.What is especially striking about this shot is the way it uses camera and sound to

imply a complex set of spatial and temporal relations. First, it disrupts narrative

expectations in good Victorian sensation fashion by showing us that the monstershave feelings, too. A trick dissolve then moves us from a shot of the intimate

domestic space into the broader area of a receding tunnel, which eventually leads usto the scene of the original disaster, of which we are informed by a minimalist sound

montage and a skeletal hand emerging from the wreckage (Figure 4). Then a soundmontage smoothly bridges the historical gap back to 1972 and the film’s heroine

sitting on the platform at Russell Square, about to meet the creature face to face.Although the catastrophe suffered by these workers has been lost to history, this

sequence suggests, something of it nevertheless persists, embedded in the very spacesbuilt by them. The shifting point of view establishes the right of the Man and Womanto this space even as it shows us the impossibility of their being able to inhabit it

without preying on the everyday world to which their space has long been invisible.The film is deeply pessimistic in the way of 1970s horror, but that pessimism also

implies a profound critique of the status quo. This critique is especially strong in theunsympathetic depiction of the callow couple who are ostensibly the film’s

protagonists. Fellow travellers of the counter-culture (the young American beauworks in a political bookstore), narcissistic and self-absorbed, they are a more

realistically rendered image of Wells’s Eloi. In this sense, I would argue that the slowtrack down the long tunnel performs a spatial transition from private to public. It

Figure 4. The debris of Victorian scattered around the disused platform of the BritishMuseum station. Frame enlargement from Death Line/Raw Meat, dir. by Gary Sherman(MGM, 2003), DVD.

260 David L. Pike


functions as a submerged afterimage of the Victorian street, a threshold space inwhich the final confrontation between authorities, protagonist and creature will later

take place. As Charlotte Brunsdon puts it, ‘It is not horror, or monsters, but labor . . .[that] lurks in the tunnel’.6 Repressed from the streets above, old working London

huddles below, degenerate, plague-ridden, and deadly but still somehow vital. This isa different kind of Victoriana than the hypostasized spaces of either the conventional

heritage or the conventional subterranean variety of Victoriana discussed above.We find another monster within another quintessentially Victorian space in the

gangster film The Long Good Friday (1980, directed by John Mackenzie, written byplaywright Barrie Keeffe). Recounting the downfall of crime boss Harold Shand (BobHoskins), The Long Good Friday is set primarily along the Thames in the East End of

London just before the Docklands redevelopment scheme. A bit self-consciously butvery effectively, the filmmaker draws out old-school East-Ender Shand as a

personification of old London, doomed by forces beyond his reckoning, both thefanaticism of the IRA he inadvertently crosses and the cold-hearted business acumen of

the American investors he is courting. When Shand makes the pitch for his grand planto a group of local VIPs and a visiting American, he is still unaware of the forces that

have already been set into motion to undermine him. Here, too, the Victorian street isno longer the space of interaction; Shand’s simultaneously public and private dwelling

is the yacht floating east down the Thames. The framing makes clear the figurativeassociation of Shand with the derelict docks, ready for rejuvenation, but not by him,and clearly not in a way that will be beneficial to the city (Figure 5). As Tower Bridge

recedes in the distance, the audience is taken away from the familiar Victoriana of thetourist circuit, and into a space long depicted as a world apart. It is an underworld in

which only someone like Shand would feel comfortable, even as the extreme long shotof the yacht sailing up the empty derrick-lined dock on the Isle of Dogs implies both

the incongruity of Shand’s pretensions in this industrial-scale site and his insignificancein the face of the economic forces around him. Like Death Line, The Long Good Friday

finds in the city’s Victorian infrastructure a cinematic correlative for the historicalprocesses embedded within the spaces in which it was shot.

Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman’s BBC adaptation of his novel Neverwhere (1996)

takes a different approach to the question of marginality and the relationship betweenthe modern city and its hidden past. When average Londoner Richard Mayhew

(doubtless in homage to the Victorian social investigator) helps a homeless girl, hefinds himself thrown out of his former life and trapped in ‘London Below’, a

patchwork combination of Monty Python medievalism, Camden Town counter-culture and gothic horror executed with exuberant attention to the minutiae of

6. Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘‘‘A fine and private place’’: The Cinematic Spaces of the LondonUnderground’, Screen, 47.1 (Spring 2006), 1–17 (p. 7). Nick Freeman connects thechanging status of labour with the dying monsters in ‘‘‘London kills me’’: The EnglishMetropolis in British Horror Films of the 1970s’, in Shocking Cinema of the Seventies, ed.by Xavier Mendik (Hereford: Noir Publishing, 2002), pp. 193–210. See also MarcellePerks’s essay on the film, ‘A Descent into the Underworld: Deathline’, in BritishHorror Cinema, ed. by Steven Chibnall and Julian Petley (London: Routledge, 2002),pp. 145–55.



underground London. Gaiman expands the commonplace that the better-offinhabitants of the city do not even see the misery around them into a spatial

division that uses wordplay to double the entire city, often simply by taking stationnames literally: Down Street is a spiral staircase burrowing vertiginously into theearth; Earl’s Court is the court of a medievalist earl. Gaiman’s film argues that two

Londons inhabit the same material space, one wholly bound to the present moment,the other amalgamated from a medievalist Victorian past. His point is that never the

twain shall meet – this is made especially clear by Richard Mayhew’s harrowing‘ordeal’ as a potential suicide on the platform of the Blackfriars station, which begins

with what looks like Chislehurst Cave in place of the bright, well-ordered lines of theTube. A truthful and complete vision of the city is only possible through a journey

that spatializes time, allowing the viewer to see a side of the city that inheres withinthe very urban spaces whose conventional identity works to occlude that vision.

There are a number of recent films playing on the Victorian associations of

underground London, and the lion’s share of them at least gesture toward anidentification of the past with the marginal peoples and spaces of the city: the feral

serial killer in the bowels of Charing Cross in Creep (2004); Jack the Ripper in FromHell (2001); the title character in Sweeney Todd (2007); the title character V in V for

Vendetta (2005); M’s secret underground library in League of ExtraordinaryGentlemen (2003); and this is just scratching the surface. Most of these films,

however, are more interested in mining the spaces and their spectral resonance fortheir photogenic qualities and suitability for sensation scenes, as in the serial killer

film The Sight (2000), in which an American architect brought to London to renovateSt Pancras begins to have haunted visions of murdered children pleading for justice.They eventually lead him to a traumatic secret about the London blitz and to a killer’s

lair in the Kingsway tram tunnel (opened 1906, closed 1952).So what is the spectre that is haunting modern London in these films, and why

does it dress itself so often in the guise of the Victorian underground? Although it is

Figure 5. Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins), his conveniently named girlfriend Victoria (HelenMirren), and the American associate he is wooing for funds (Eddie Constantine) as Shand’syacht leads us past Tower Bridge and deep into the docklands of the East End. Frameenlargement from The Long Good Friday, dir. by John Mackenzie, Sc. Barrie Keeffe (Criterion,1998), DVD.

262 David L. Pike


clearly identified with the working classes and the margins of society, this should onlyserve to remind us that it is through the margins of society that spatial

representations manifest images and desires for which no place can be found inthe mainstream. So a part of what we are seeing is the Victorian itself, as a space of

the past, taking on a subterranean identity and becoming assimilated inrepresentation as a repository of repressed and outmoded concepts and desires.

Consequently, they are located in the subterranean spaces whose Victorian origin hassomehow, we are told, either been glossed over by modernity, like the Tube tunnels,

or demolished or distorted by redevelopment. That would also explain why thecategory I am calling Victorian has continued to expand forward to include theindustrial detritus of the early twentieth century as well. Factually I know that

Battersea Power Station was not opened until 1938, but intuitively I associate it withthe same pastness of London space as the properly Victorian spaces I have discussed.

Because modernity continues to signify an atemporal present-day, the actualarchitecture of modernism more and more recedes into the category of a past

identified with the ‘Victorian’.

***

The underground was such a powerful paradigm in the nineteenth century becauseit visualized and fixed the meaning of the radical changes being undergone by citiessuch as London and Paris by giving them a spatial function in a broader conceptual

framework of urban space. Those elements of change that were able to bearticulated directly (aboveground) were distinguished spatially from those elements

that were not able to be articulated directly but which held all the answers and allthe alternatives (underground). Finally, the fraught relationship between these two

aspects of change was able to be mapped onto the city streets and other thresholdspaces. In nineteenth-century London, the underground was the problem in that

the sewers, subways, tunnels and slums were a primary physical source of changeand disruption in the city; but it was also not the problem in that the physicalchange and disruption were symptoms rather than causes, phenomena rather than

agents.When twenty- and twenty-first-century Victorianism repeats that same structure

to articulate a historical relationship between the Victorian and the present, it ismaking a valuable argument about the transformation of urban space over time, and

about the human cost of those transformations. When neo-Victorianism simply usesthe nineteenth-century tropes as sensation and spectacle, we have a testament to the

power of the unfulfilled desires embedded within those tropes, but no articulation ofthe historicity of the space containing those desires. The Victorian underworld of,

say, Dr Jekyll’s flaming lair in Van Helsing: The London Assignment (2004), lookspretty cool, but it is mythic and cliched to the point of telling us nothing beyond abaseline assertion that some kind of power still inheres in the images. Compare it

with the intertextual brilliance of a central episode of Salman Rushdie’s novel, TheSatanic Verses (1988). To celebrate the filming of Friend!, a musical adaptation of

Dickens’s dark final novel, a famous entrepreneur has staged a party at Shepperton



film studios. The angel and devil protagonists of the novel, Saladin and Gibreel, meetin a microcosmic recreation of Dickens’s London: ‘Here London has been altered –

no, condensed, – according to the imperatives of film. [B]ehold the dustman’smounds of Boffin’s Bower, supposedly in the near vicinity of Holloway, looming in

the abridged metropolis over Fascination Fledgeby’s rooms in the Albany, the WestEnd’s very heart!’7 The ‘imperatives of film’, for Rushdie, do not simply mean a

postmodern reduction of the original authority to nonsense and gibberish, althoughhe certainly has fun sending up Hollywood travesties of Victorian London such as

Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968) as well as historical recreations that aim at a more soberkind of authenticity. Rushdie is using the film set as an image of the contingent andmalleable nature of the space of the past, and also of the multiple ways in which to

experience a space that is, albeit a film set and a highly artificial one at that, also thereal scene of a number of key events in the plot of his novel, in the same way that J.G.

Ballard’s Shepperton in his 1973 novel Crash is both a science-fiction speculation anda precise rendering of a contemporary London landscape. As the stage for human

interaction, this set is no more nor less real than any other; as a historicalrepresentation, it indicates to us that the characters – Asian as well as European – are

blissfully unaware of the travesty in which they are involved, whatever the narratormay know about it. We as readers are privileged with a dual perspective: we can enjoy

the power of the characters to possess a city that normally would dwarf them, but alsoappreciate the Bollywood aesthetic that would transmute a dark novel into a happymusical and recognize our own investment in the particular Dickensian vision of

London travestied by Rushdie.To question the status of the myriad afterimages of Victorian London, is also to

recall the contingency of an original vision we tend to think of as set in stone. Thisinsight appears to be at the heart of the cultural movement known as steampunk.

Originating in British science fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, steampunk is aversion of alternate history that posits in various ways what would have happened

if twentieth-century technologies had appeared or been invented in the nineteenthcentury, or if technology had halted or taken a different path during the steamage – hence the first half of the appellation. Nearly always set in London, first wave

steampunk was dark and subversive in its approach to history and Victorianheritage, exhibiting a gleeful irreverence that fully merits the term’s suffix. As

Steffen Hantke notes, steampunk is ‘postnostalgic’, uninvested in a conventionalsense of heritage, history, or progress.8 Like contemporary London psychogeo-

graphers such as Iain Sinclair, Patrick Keiller, or Will Self, practitioners ofsteampunk actively pursue alternate routes or possibilities for their cities. Like the

Surrealists and the Situationists, they are also pranksters and black humorists.Wells’s The Time Machine is a touchstone for steampunk writers, spawning a

number of ‘sequels’, including a hallucinatory dime-novel pastiche by Joe Lansdale

7. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 1988), p. 436.8. Steffen Hantke, ‘Difference Engines and Other Infernal Devices: History According to

Steampunk’, Extrapolation, 40.3 (Fall 1999), 244–54 (p. 252).

264 David L. Pike


in which the Time Traveller has ripped holes in the space/time continuum with hismachine, been transformed by his constant travelling into a flesh-eating vampire

and recruited the Morlocks as henchmen in a multi-dimensional rampage. He isfinally ejected into empty space by a giant steam man and an extremely tough red

Indian.9 Simultaneously nightmarish and giddy, Lansdale’s novella enacts theshredding of conventional temporality characteristic of the steampunk aesthetic. He

ransacks the tropes of nineteenth-century pulp, imagines Wells’s proper Victoriangentleman run amuck through time, and concludes by positing the Victorians as

responsible for the destruction of the universe. At the same time, the blatantlytextual nature of this destruction means Lansdale is able to celebrate thesubterranean Victorian as the fount of inspiration for his warped tale. At its best,

steampunk simultaneously critiques ossified attitudes toward the past and pillagesthat same past for alternatives to a present-day status quo to which it is violently

opposed.By combining an imaginative investment in technology with a profound distrust

of conventional order and structures, steampunk manages to recover something ofthe Victorian relationship to engineering and the underground that had been wholly

obscured by the dictates of modernism. Steampunk writing and filmmaking is repletewith subterranean spaces, from hollow earth theories, to mines both active and

exhausted, to all manner of occluded and occult spaces. Because they freely combinemagic with science and extrapolate new technology from outmoded science,steampunk writers present a cityscape rife with ‘infernal machines’ and passages to

other worlds. Often fanciful, puerile, and willfully outrageous, they are seductive intheir naıve insistence on an anti-Whig history, maintaining that the current state of

affairs is neither the best nor the most interesting outcome of the extraordinarypotential presented by the nineteenth century. Steampunk is, in other words, utopian

literature, retrieving the technological and often subterranean utopian visions of thelate Victorian period that lie at the foundation of much of the history of speculative

fiction. Even at its darkest and most nihilistic, the combination of plausibility andimpossibility in steampunk narrative maintains intimate ties with the Victorianswhile at the same time violently unmooring all connections to conventional

Victorianism.The material culture of steampunk is of necessity more mundane than the

literature; nevertheless, its practices do raise essential questions about ourexpectations of technology, commodities and the past. The Internet is bursting with

web pages celebrating the mutation of contemporary technology via the trappings ofVictoriana, producing artifacts that belong to neither world, like Jake van Slatt’s

steampunked computer monitors and keyboards, retrofitted with the salvagedfragments of discarded typewriters as well as with semi-precious stones and gleaming

metals, or his customised iPod, etched with a lady’s portrait like an early

9. Joe R. Lansdale, ‘The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A DimeNovel’, in Steampunk, ed. by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (San Francisco: Tachyon, 2008),pp. 107–45.



daguerreotype.10 The process, the artisanry, and the enthusiasm with whichsteampunk web pages detail each trial-and-error step in the process make these

strange objects something more than commodities, even as the possible sale of theproducts remains part of their story. For one thing, although we can call them

products of subterranean Victorianism, they are not Victoriana, belonging only to theworld of the present even as they propose an entirely different relationship to the

present, its spaces and its objects.I want to conclude by returning to Paul St George and the exuberant but failed

inventions of his great-grandfather Alexander. Like van Slatt’s hybrid machines, StGeorge’s Telectroscope is simultaneously Victorian and twenty-first century. Thestory told on its web page creates an alternative history dating back to the 1850s.

Moreover, St George staged that story as a narrative of heroic engineering in thepresent (Figure 6). A series of photographs documents twin drills ‘emerging’ from the

ground in Brooklyn and South London in the spring of 2008, eventually followed bythe Telectroscope itself, promising instant trans-Atlantic communication between the

two cities.11 St George parodies the naıve rhetoric of heroic engineering and emulatesthe often purposeless nature of its creations. So many now-forgotten Victorian

engineering schemes failed miserably according to the lights of capitalism, includingmany of Brunel’s greatest endeavours, from the Thames Tunnel to the Great Eastern.

St George’s historical gesture figuratively redeems the lost and wasted inventions ofthe Victorians while creating his own version of them for the present as an artinstallation. There was no admission charged to the Telectroscope, there was no

advertising, and there were no sponsors naming the event (there was, naturally, some

Figure 6. Paul St George’s Telectroscope emerges from beneath the riverside in Brooklyn,New York. Photograph by the author, 2008.

10. Jake van Slatt, The Steampunk Workshop 07/20/2007 and 08/30/2007 5http://steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml4 [accessed online 10 March 2009].

11. See Stanhope’s webpage The Telectroscope 5http://www.talktalk.co.uk/telectroscope/cn/gallery/files.php4 [accessed online 10 March 2010] and the page of the NewTelectroscope Company, The Telectroscope – 2009 5http://www.telectroscope.net/#4[accessed online 10 March 2010].

266 David L. Pike


http://steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml

http://steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml



http://www.telectroscope.net/#

degree of self-promotion on the part of the artist). Although the organizers gavepriority to those who had scheduled transcontinental rendezvous in advance, there

was no real purpose to being able to wave at ones’ fellows across the pond.Nevertheless, it was constantly busy. For me, the high point of the website is its

record of the Queen’s visit to the Telectroscope on her birthday. Like everything elseabout St George’s artwork, the visit is an accurate recollection of Victorian practice –

Queen Victoria visited Brunel’s Thames Tunnel (although not on her birthday) – thatalso notes a gap between the eras. That the twenty-first-century visitor is an imposter

beautifully illustrates how times have changed. Back then, the real queen could,would, and did visit new technology as a curious observer; nowadays she neithercould nor would want to do the same, although she has traditionally opened

additions to the Underground.12 In the twenty-first century, the Victorianunderground is no longer fit for a queen.

David L. Pike

American University, Washington [email protected]

12. Because of delays in the construction, there was no official opening to the much-laudedJubilee Line Extension (Bob Mitchell, Jubilee Line Extension: From Conception toCompletion (London: Thomas Telford, 2003), pp. 287–88).



Documents

Afterimages of the Victorian City