Powered modernity, contested space: literary modernism and the London tram

ABSTRACT

A literary history of London’s tramways spans the period between late-Victorian and High Modernism, encompassing naturalist fiction, reportage, creative non-fiction, modernist poetry, and the psychological novel. The same timespan saw the horse tram give way to the electric tram, which itself faced replacement by motor buses and trolleybuses during the 1930s. This essay intersects these two narratives, of literary history and of transport history, as a contribution to mobility humanities focused on the city. Trams and tramways had a peculiarly in-between identity as vehicles and environments emerging from powered modernity but associated with the proletariat, as well as the urban districts where they lived. Reading literary texts by Arthur Morrison, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, spotlighted here as part of a broader corpus extending from the 1880s to the 1980s, brings the tramways’ interstitiality to life. Trams, the literary readings demonstrate, were a contact zone that threatened to overturn separations of class and gender, as well as presaging an expanded future in which the city would be built around the industrial working class. The curtailment of tram operations in 1930s London meant that such a future never came to pass, but literary texts are windows onto its possibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility humanities
• public transport as public space
• tram
• tramway
• literary urban studies
• London
• modernism
• Virginia Woolf

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of some sections were presented at the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and the Ancient World at the University of Padua (September 2019), the Transport and Mobility Seminar of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London School of Advanced Study (June 2022), and the Finnish Society for the Study of English conference at Jyväskylä University (August 2022). I am grateful to everyone who heard and commented on those presentations. Additionally, many thanks are due to the editors of the “Interstitial Spaces” special issue for their extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. George Lovett, Modern Slavery: Life on the London Railway Cars (1877); Gissing, Thyrza (1887); Arthur Morrison, “To Bow Bridge” (1894); Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London (1905); T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922); Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps (1923); Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931); F. Tennyson Jesse, A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934); Simon Blumenfeld, Jew Boy (1935); Maureen Duffy, That’s How It Was (1962) and Michael Moorcock, Mother London (1988). Lovett, Jesse, Duffy, and Moorcock do not figure in the present article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities in the European Research Area [649307]. This article was written as part of the PUTSPACE project, which is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme, co-funded by AKA, BMBF via DLRPT, ETAg, and the European Commission through Horizon 2020. My work on it was also supported by the H.W. Donner Fund administered by the Åbo Akademi Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Jason Finch

Jason Finch is Professor of English at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. A spatial and urban literary scholar who takes a comparative view of cities, his most recent book is Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It (Routledge, 2022). He is also a co-editor of 2023 special features in Urban Studies and the Journal of Urban History. Earlier books include Deep Locational Criticism (Benjamins, 2016) and, as co-editor, Literary Second Cities (Palgrave, 2017). From 2019 until 2022, Jason was one of four principal investigators on the European Research Council-funded project “‘Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting.”