Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Incontinent City: Sewers, Disgust and Liminality
- 2 Tubing It: Speeding Through Modernity in the London Underground
- 3 The (Un)Buried Life: Death in the Modern Necropolis
- 4 Underground Revolutions: Invisible Networks of Terror in Fin-de-Siècle London
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The (Un)Buried Life: Death in the Modern Necropolis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Incontinent City: Sewers, Disgust and Liminality
- 2 Tubing It: Speeding Through Modernity in the London Underground
- 3 The (Un)Buried Life: Death in the Modern Necropolis
- 4 Underground Revolutions: Invisible Networks of Terror in Fin-de-Siècle London
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead becomes unrecognizable. And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead. So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy. They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)The haunting image of ‘twin cities’ in all its destabilising connotations, from the Gothic sense of doubling to the image of the World Trade Center, reveals how death permeates the urban landscape with the sense of the unknown, the unexpected and the unseen. In antiquity, the underground as a burial space for the dead, from Egyptian tombs to the Roman Catacombs, was predicated on the sacred belief that the afterlife below was just as important, if not more crucial, than the lived experience above. Indeed, the elaborate architecture of underground altars and temples in these civilisations attests to the power of the belief that the house of the living is but a ‘temporary abode’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- London's Underground SpacesRepresenting the Victorian City, 1840-1915, pp. 116 - 158Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013