When Virginia Woolf said that human character changed ‘in or about December, 1910’ she was probably not thinking of the London Tube. Woolf appears to have taken the date from the year of the art exhibition ‘Manet and Post-Impressionism’ in her essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924) and it seems a far cry from the subterranean world of the London underground. In the 1930s, however, Woolf might have added that the Tube had as much of an effect on perception as Post-Impressionism but this would have been at least in part due to her own writing. Woolf's writing changed the way we think about the underground system and she was the literary inventor of the Tube after 1910, laying down a blueprint that would mark out new boundaries as a subject for writing. Her essay asserted a major shift in human relations that was based on her perception of changes in society, a view that could equally well have been applied to the writing of the new electric tubular railway. Woolf's essay suggested a move beyond fictional realism towards more expressive forms of art and the Tube offered many new possibilities.