Fun in Victorian London Today

Extract

This essay is devoted to the pair of terms that brackets my subtitle, terms that seem to me both counterintuitive and highly relevant to current academic and non-academic thinking about Victorian London, but especially to the relationship between the two. In particular, I am concerned with the conundrum of ‘fun’ as it relates to the darker elements of the nineteenth-century city in the fluctuating time of the present we refer to somewhat loosely as ‘today’. Within that nebulous and colloquial sense of the present, I will single out two more specific ‘todays’. The first of these is the March 2013 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies conference in Charlottesville, VA, for which I wrote the first version of this essay. The conference topic was ‘Leisure, Enjoyment, and Fun’; the session was entitled‘Networks of Leisure’. The second ‘today’ is January 2013, when I travelled to London to give a paper at a conference convened on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the London Underground. Part of my fascination with the highly publicized 150th anniversary of the London Underground is the way it newly enfolded the Victorian into the present and the future of the region's transportation network. What we could call the Victorianism of Transport for London involves academic pleasure as much as popular pleasure; indeed, the intersection of the two is an important element of its meaning. For example, in the conference's keynote address by geographer and urban historian Richard Dennis, the difficulty in lighting and ventilating the early, steam-driven locomotives of the Metropolitan line from its opening in January 1863 to its electrification at the turn of the century was illustrated by Powerpoint images of ingeniously designed ventilation shafts, cut horizontally and lined with white tiles that reflected downward falling light rays across the dark platforms at the Baker Street Station.¹ Not only had Professor Dennis taken the photos himself, but he reminded the members of his audience that we could do the same simply by riding the Underground to Baker Street and watching out for them. As part of my own explorations of Victorian London since the mid-nineties I have, in fact, thoroughly explored Baker Street Station, the Underground station that has preserved more of its Victorian design than perhaps any other easily or legally accessible part of the network (although purists might argue that the various plaques and signs calling our attention to this fact somewhat detract from the authenticity of the effect). However, if I had attempted to follow Professor Dennis's example during this visit to London, it is likely that I would have found my efforts thwarted by an even more authentic example of fun in Victorian London today: the revival of steam locomotion on the Underground for the first time in over a century. Yes, those Londoners (and intrepid steam enthusiasts from further afield) lucky enough to win the ticketing lottery were able to ride through the tunnels in the coaches of a genuinely antique steam-powered Underground train. Many other individuals made the journey, camped out on the platforms, watched the passing train, filmed it and themselves, and, naturally, posted the results online for the benefit of others who might have missed the event. This brings me to the question that I want to raise about fun in Victorian London today: why does the recreation of what was a highly unpleasant experience – dark, dirty, and suffocatingly hot – in its original incarnation provide so much pleasure today and why do the terms of this question apply especially well to the Victorian city, as opposed to a myriad of other past experiences and historical space-times?