In many ways, this book attempts to uncover the paradoxes of the underground that complicated its spatial, linguistic and metaphorical representations in the modern metropolis. While the overarching significance of subterranean infrastructure and its impact on the city cannot be overemphasised, the unseen, invisible aspects of the space and the tensions this absence signified also attest to its ghostly presence in the urban literary landscape. In examining the subterranean space through various frameworks, from a Foucauldian and Freudian to a Marxist and Derridean lens, the ultimate picture of the underground that emerges is a fragmented one, a spatial heuristic through which critical discourses of the time were reflected and refracted. Although newspapers and journals often mapped a teleological journey of engineering triumph, literary endeavours elided the space for a more oblique and disjointed response to the vast changes occurring underfoot. If the ultimate goal of the sewers, underground railways and cemeteries was to be a civilising agent in the goal towards creating a New Jerusalem, the undercurrent of degeneration and devolution also flowed along the same lines to articulate a Modern Babylon.

As an alternative space for the poor, women and the dispossessed, the underground appeared as a shadowy but powerful backdrop for illicit and transgressive moments that correlated with a powerful awakening of feelings and memories beyond individual consciousness. The Thames that snakes like a sewer through London, both defiling and purifying people in its path, evokes a sinister subterranean aura that lingers over the entire city. The passing glimpses into the underground train connect individual itineraries into a larger network of social relations that often threatens to shatter the surface of everyday lives.