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

1. Introduction

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land contains a verbless four-word sentence referring to how public transport was transforming his adopted city in the 1910s: “Trams and dusty trees” (Eliot 1963, 64). This dense and enigmatic statement comes as part of a group of internal reflections by a character known as the typist, within “The Fire Sermon,” the poem’s third section. Lawrence Rainey (2005, 63) calls the typist an “unprecedented” poetic protagonist, who anticipates the imaginative writing of women living, walking, working, and dining out alone in 1930s London (cf. Cottrell 2017). In debate with the growing field of mobility humanities and building on my own earlier work on contested spatiality, as conveyed in imaginative writing (e.g. Finch 2016, 2022a), this essay recreates the experiential world of the tram in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century London. The tram, together with spaces around it such as the tram stop and the streets, transformed by its metal rails and soundscape, through which it passed, was a contact zone. It was a medium of connection generating novel experiences.

Like Eliot’s typist, the tram is an unprecedented figure as it emerges in Victorian, Edwardian, and modernist representations of public transport. Existing scholarship presents various routes towards it. Transport researchers using methodologies from literary studies and history have examined travel by horse-drawn coach, the waiting involved in railway journeys, and the train window’s impact on passengers’ perception of landscape as “another world” (Livesey 2016; Kellerman 2019; Schivelbusch [1977] 2014, 41). Additionally, work on transport history and literary mobilities has assessed the role of the horse in the nineteenth-century city and the changes in perception brought about by travel on underground railways (Gavin 2015; McShane and Tarr 2003; Welsh 2010). With trams, initially drawn by horses and then, from the 1880s and 1890s onwards, powered by electricity, rails came to city streets; trams were spaces where people of different social levels could physically meet and appraise one another. As Barbara Schmucki has shown, city-dwellers in Britain and Germany had varying views of and relationships with the horse tram and its electrified successor, sometimes resenting the newcomers with their attendant rails and overhead wires. However, “by the 1910s tramways had been absorbed into daily life” (Schmucki 2012, 1074).

The specific city context matters, too. When Eliot wrote, London extended over a geographical area that was massively greater than half a century earlier. According to the urban historian Jerry White (2001, 30), the “transport revolution of 1900–1914” was driven by “[t]ubes, railways, electric trams and above all the motor bus” and “equipped London with the means of making suburban expansion work.” Increasingly, members of different social classes lived out of sight of one another in different segments of the city. But trams and tramways remain under-examined in research on modern literary London and the city’s urban personality and unique qualities: what Ann Tso calls “London-ness” (2020, 1–29). In fact, they punctuated, and so reinterpreted or repositioned, the writing of London in that period. As demonstrated by big data analysis of locational references, the British imaginative literature of the period tended to over-emphasise zones of the city – itself highly central in Britain and its empire – that were central and fashionable, the sorts of place into which aspiring writers tended to migrate (Heuser, Moretti, and Steiner 2016). Tram writing can be a corrective to overly centre-focused views of urban space.

This essay belongs in a broader discussion of urban public transport as a contested and mobilised sort of public space (Finch 2022b; Tuvikene et al. 2021). Existing trends in the existing literature on the London tramway tend to downplay their affective qualities and their place in the making of civic identities. Such roles for the tram hardly emerge in either histories of transport planning and engineering (e.g., Barker and Robbins 1963, 178–97; Barker and Robbins 1974, 15–34, 164–241; Buckley 1975) or publications driven by nostalgia or a sense of heritage, typically building their narrative descriptions around a presentation of old photographs and depictions of items from museum collections, and setting these into the context of particular towns and tram networks (e.g. Harley 2008; Taylor and Green 2001). In contrast with both of these approaches, the technical and the nostalgia-laden, the present essay offers an account of literary trams as unstable presences. In the representations considered here, trams’ meaning undergoes multiple shifts. From a site for mixing of people from different social classes, in the late-Victorian era of horse-drawn trams, trams become envoys of a new, electrified modernity in the years before the First World War, then swiftly morph into a means of indicating the city’s noisiest and most plebeian inner-city zones. By the 1960s, in a book like Maureen Duffy’s autofiction That’s How It Was, they were being used to establish a setting in the recent urban past, which Duffy portrayed as grim and industrial.

The corpus of writing on the London tramways considered here includes multiple forms variously mediating urban modernity: activist texts, reportage, narration in the flaneur mode, literary impressionism and naturalism, crime fiction, the working-class political novel, documentary autofiction, and manipulations of cultural memory. Writers in the corpus include, in approximate chronological order, George Lovett, George Gissing, Arthur Morrison, Ford Madox Ford, Eliot, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Simon Blumenfeld, F. Tennyson Jesse, Duffy and Michael Moorcock.¹ In relation to the interests of this special issue, sites represented in texts by these authors like the interiors of trams, tram stops and the streets transformed by the presence of trams are alike contact zones and areas of multiple occupancy: they are interstices in the urban fabric. The essay’s main case studies are representations by Morrison, Ford, and Woolf produced between 1894 and 1931.

Aided by techniques from mobility humanities and the study of public transport as a contested kind of public space, the following section sketches London’s complex and rapidly changing transport landscape of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Following a brief note on Gissing’s use of the horse tramway in fiction written between the mid-1880s and 1903, I turn to Morrison and Ford, who crafted short stories and journalistic sketches that captured the transition from horse tramway to electric tramway and narrated journeys across suburban boundaries between different concentric rings of the greatly expanded city in the 1890s and the 1900s. Literary tramways of the period between the First World War and the Great Depression, examined next, were often characterised by their sensory qualities, above all sonic ones. Here, the focus is on the writing of Virginia Woolf, with reference also to Eliot, Bennett, and Blumenfeld. Literary representations of London trams from the 1880s to the 1930s show that trams are mobile not only in the city’s streets but also in their meaning, shifting from being a symbol of social change and modernity to become a means of evoking the urban working-class and their particular spaces, their territories. What is retained throughout is a festive and, curiously, a slightly threatening aspect in a transport mode that in later technological eras is often grasped as slightly twee.

2. Mobilities, contested public space, and the tramways of London

As a street railway, the tramway is inherently interstitial. It is a fixed rail infrastructure that directly interacts with on-street pedestrians and other vehicles, intermediate between the off-road railway and the on-road transport of the bus, which belongs to and is part of ordinary road transport. Tramways in London began with entrepreneurs’ efforts to extend the railway boom of the mid-nineteenth century by establishing on-street track networks. After a legal battle, the 1870 Tramways Act “provided a general legal framework for establishing new lines” (Buckley 1975, 12), but, acting through local government, property owners in central London and wealthier suburbs such as Hampstead managed to exclude them (White 2001, 13). Horse tramways operated in London between 1870 and 1915. Thus, they overlapped with the electric trams which ran from 1901 to 1952 (Barker and Robbins 1963, 178–97; Barker and Robbins 1974, 15–34). Step by step, the electric tram gained working-class associations, becoming “classed as an essentially proletarian form of transport” (White 2001, 13). It was very cheap and reliable, yet noisy and somewhat slow compared with the electric railway and motor bus services that opened either side of 1900. By the 1920s, debate raged over whether tramways, with their higher costs of operation, were “obsolete” in the era of the motor bus, although investment in London’s tramways did not decline until the 1930s (Barker and Robbins 1974, 233–41). Early competition between multiple operators of tramways in London gave way to a gradual process of consolidation. During the period 1901–33, the metropolitan region contained three main tram networks, two operated by private companies and the largest under the control of the London County Council (LCC), with several smaller municipalities’ operations being taken over by the LCC. In 1933, trams were transferred to the control of the partly nationalised London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB), extending the “complex mix of government control and private enterprise” applied to London public transport during World War I (Abernethy 2016, 233). Running this body were managers of the various city railways consolidated as the Underground, London’s metro system. This group moved to replace all of the city’s tramways with trolleybuses (the latter, in turn, were replaced by modernised motor buses in the early 1960s); only World War II’s intervention led to the last night of the London tramways happening in July 1952 rather than earlier. Outside London, there were at least 170 tramways in Britain during the horse and electric eras (Turner 2007a; Turner 2007b; Turner 2009).

The novelty of the tramcar for late-nineteenth-century writers partially rested on the way it made people physically close to others who had earlier been separated from them by economic boundaries and notions of respectability. Richard Dennis (2018, 45) has written of the London bus as “an unlikely architecture of hurry”; in contrast to its later associations with slowness, in its initial phase it was a shockingly speedy mode of transport. Horse-tram writing by Gissing and Morrison parallels accounts of travel on horse-drawn omnibuses, for example by Anthony Trollope in his 1855 novel The Warden or Amy Levy in her 1889 poem “Ballade of an Omnibus”: both modes challenged norms of class and gender separation, making people feel thrown together. White’s view of the tram as an “essentially proletarian” tool for working-class suburbanisation is echoed by transport historians (Taylor and Green 2001, 146), but clashes with the evidence of literary texts which show them to have had a multiple, shifting, and boundary-crossing character. The tram was also a gendered space. During World War I, the need for suitable workers to crew the trams while young men were at war led to the collapse of earlier prohibitions and the hiring of women conductors (Abernethy 2016). Uncertainties and cross-border encounters of social class and gender remain a key feature of the tram’s interstitial space in the modernist writing of Eliot and Woolf after the First World War ended.

Theoretical developments offer new ways of understanding this historical process. The “new mobilities paradigm” identified in the social sciences by Mimi Sheller and John Urry (2006) was adapted and transformed during the 2010s via the encounter with literary studies (e.g. Aguiar, Mathieson and Pearce 2019). Mobilities, as literary and other humanities scholars pointed out, are not necessarily always embodied: they can be “dis-embodied,” for instance when people reflect on their pasts or speculate about their futures whilst on the move (Pearce 2020). Researchers in mobility humanities argue for a “kinaesthetic” approach to humans’ acts of movement, “sensitive to the ways in which movement is enabled, felt, perceived, expressed, metered, choreographed and desired,” ways recorded in literature and the arts among other bodies of data (Merriman and Pearce 2017, 494). Literary scholars influenced by this paradigm explore how aspects of individual subjectivity such as memory and experience in the moment cast light on human mobility (Aguiar, Mathieson and Pearce 2019; Finch 2022b). Within this tradition, at least one essay has touched on the London electric tramway of the earlier twentieth century (Stobbs Wright 2015). Mobility researchers have used diverse categories of literary text from poems to life-writing as sources of data for understanding social phenomena such as individuals’ perceptions of movement or processes of place-making (Eldelin and Nyblom 2021; Pooley 2017). The present essay proposes some overall characteristics of London tram-writing as a body of literature, arguing for literary readings as a key to the mobilities of the London tramway.

In the “new mobilities paradigm,” human subjectivity and the materiality of the “machine ensemble” (Schivelbusch [1977] 2014, 42) meet, and the same is true of spatial literary studies, including literary urban studies in its interdisciplinary overlap with urban history. Methods from spatial literary studies underline the co-existence in produced or experienced spaces of multiple subjective perspectives (Tally 2020). Literary texts are themselves aspects of urban materiality, as well as representing urban materialities: produced in garrets, publishers’ offices and printing houses, and stored in warehouses, they contain ways of framing housing inequalities and transport infrastructures (Ameel et al. 2020). Urban literary texts’ work includes that of “deconstructing conflicting claims when a place is in the middle of a fight for cultural appropriation between two competing factions” (Marilungo 2017, 141). Considering public transport in London, tramways lost such a fight during the twentieth century, with buses and the Underground the victors, marked by their place in later touristic images of London, but this result was not inevitable. As commentaries on urban mobilities, rather than “devices” of urban mobilities as maps or timetables are (Höhne 2015, 95), literary representations are more than just data for historians and sociologists: in common with utopian writing, they indicate models for the future and thus expand what is possible in cities (Pinder 2015).

Public transport is a distinctive kind of public space, mobile, and contested. This is governed by barriers of access, notably the fare and the ticket (Tuvikene et al. 2021). Urban transport may seem like a peripheral concern in literature, to be explicitly discussed only in “short and seemingly marginal” sections of novels and other longer texts (Toivanen 2023, 3), but the articulation of lived experience on modes such as the tramway does function as a kind of substrate in imaginative writing, for example in the writing on Cambridge and Alexandria of E.M. Forster (Finch 2021b). For Forster, trams and other public transport vehicles were the sites par excellence for inter-class encounters between men. In the era of digital humanities and quantitative literary studies (Underwood 2019), the analysis of limited amounts of text via interpretative methods still offers insights that urban researchers need. Morrison, Ford, Bennett, and Woolf were writers who all, in various ways, deployed the realist mode (Bowlby 2007). All were literary professionals who shaped the matter of London public transport in the age of horses’ disappearance from the streets, for consumption by audiences removed in time and place from the environments they were narrating. Literary texts give humanising, more-than-technological insights into public transport experience, casting light on aspects of life including soundscapes and the specifics of inter-class personal encounters which would otherwise remain in darkness.

3. A new mobile public space: the tram of Morrison’s “To Bow Bridge”

In 1880s and 1890s depictions of the newly urbanised zones around London, zones that were connected to the metropolis by railways, the tram emerges as a key marker of contemporary social uncertainty. From the description of plebeian London spaces in his 1880s novels Thyrza (1887) and Demos (1886), to a tramway in a vulgar English seaside resort found in Our Friend the Charlatan (1901), Gissing’s trams function as connecting threads between points in a city massively enlarged beyond that of Charles Dickens (Tambling 2009, 263). Their sounds also characterise a new sort of urban modernity.

Where Gissing wove trams and tram journeys into novelistic portraits of cities and their connections in modernity, Arthur Morrison used the tram as a site for sharp-eyed early-1890s reportage. “To Bow Bridge,” a short piece in his short-story collection Tales of Mean Streets (1894), portrays social divisions within the 1890s horse tram, late on a Saturday evening: “lads and men whooping and flushed” head upstairs, while more sedate travellers including women with children sit below under the conductor’s protection (Morrison 1894, 87). The sketch begins to the east of the line dividing London from the county of Essex, moving westward across it, and ends with the tram disappearing towards central London. Morrison’s tramcar belongs to the North Metropolitan Tramways, a company which operated “a major tramway system” of horse-drawn cars between 1870 and 1908, its Bow to Whitechapel line “hugely popular” with passengers Jerry White labels “new working-class suburbans” (Turner 2007a, 101; White 2007, 93). Such passengers, in Morrison’s treatment, call attention to the tram’s festive aspect. On a Saturday evening, the tram of “To Bow Bridge” crosses the River Lea, a historic borderline dividing the counties of Essex and Middlesex, transporting revellers and other passengers. The story has been used as evidence for the social history of alcohol consumption but not, to my knowledge, as a source for understanding the London tram (Lester 2014). Its setting is north of the Thames and east of central London, due north of what was then London’s main port area. Such geographies matter in a reading of Morrison, whose horse tram across the Essex-London boundary exists in a zone connected to the city’s disposal of waste, down the river to the east, the route historically also taken by ships leaving and arriving in London (Finch 2021a; Finch and Kelly 2021).

Morrison’s text contains details of the horse tram that are clearly derived from lived experience. His narrator, for instance, boards “taking care to sit at the extreme fore-end inside” (Morrison 1894, 96). In this attention to detail, Morrison contrasts with Gissing, who includes trams as an important part of his streetscapes and uses them as narrative connectors, but gives little evidence of having ridden them. Both Gissing and Morrison use the horse tram to encapsulate a vigorous new modernity in the city linked to commercial entertainment. Their fiction shows how the tram challenges earlier more hierarchical and inflexible mobility divisions, in which the poor walked while the wealthier rode or went by carriage, as well as how the tram’s emergence is concurrent with the heyday of the music hall in popular mass entertainment, a space where, according to intellectuals of the period, social hierarchies seemed to collapse (Faulk 2004; Jones 2020). In “To Bow Bridge,” then, Morrison renders the inside of the tram as itself a contested public space (Tuvikene et al. 2021).

Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets contributed to the formation in the 1880s and 1890s of a sense of the East End of London as a unique zone, almost a separate land within London. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, writers in various genres characterised this zone via raucous working-class behaviour but also proud self-reliance (Finch 2016, 153–72). In rendering lower-class London through the medium of the journalistic sketch in prose, Morrison uses a model established by Dickens in his 1830s Sketches by Boz and continued during the 1860s in The Uncommercial Traveller. A staple among writers who portrayed working-class “slum” life in London during the 1880s and 1890s was the scene of Saturday night shopping and carousing in a plebeian neighbourhood. On Saturday evening, artisans were paid for the previous week’s work and Sunday was their only day off; it was on Saturday night street markets that the Sunday cut of meat was bought. 1850s–60s journalism by Henry Mayhew and James Greenwood described such market scenes, in which working-class street life often seemed observable at its most vivid (Jones 2016). In 1880s slum fiction, such scenes appeared in novels of London lowlife, including Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn (1880) and Thyrza, and Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886). “To Bow Bridge” opens with references to “wages” and a “market,” but then moves beyond the mini-genre of the Saturday-night working-class carnival scene (Morrison 1894, 85, 86). Topographically, “To Bow Bridge” is a story of boundary-crossing, linking the “County of London” on the far side of the Lea and the unnamed area “this side of Bow Bridge” (the County Borough of West Ham, in Essex, from 1889 to 1965) where the tram sets out from (Morrison 1894, 85; Powell 1973, 96–112).

Morrison uses pathos, a technique associated with Dickens and other mid-Victorian writers, but juxtaposes it with multiple other sensations and emotions. A drunken woman described as a “bonnetless drab” (i.e. a prostitute) offers a little girl travelling with her mother – “a decent woman with children, a bundle, a basket, and a cabbage” – the chance to sit on her knee and rest rather than stand (Morrison 1894, 89, 87). When this respectable working-class mother with all but two of the tram’s passengers gets off on the west side of Bow Bridge, “[t]he harlot, lingering, lifted the child again – lifted her rather high – and set her on the path with the others” (93). The pathos connected with the “bonnetless drab,” may seem to resemble early and mid-Victorian treatments of the figure of the fallen woman, as for example in Dickens’s 1830s sketch “The Streets – Night.” But in the “passengering” and encountering, to use the terminology of mobility studies (Ashmore 2013), of the “eleven-five tram-car from Stratford” (Morrison 1894, 85), Morrison also manages to convey a sense that metropolis-dwellers are relating to one another more calmly and practically than people in the early to mid-nineteenth century had. This tramcar’s passengering includes coarse ribaldry generated by “a mass of people – howling, struggling, and blaspheming – who stormed and wrangled in at the door and up the stairs” having left a pub on the Essex side of the line aiming to reach one on the County of London side where they will be open for another hour, until midnight (87). Such mayhem coexists with the “decent woman” and her children, and a “quiet mechanic” who remains on the tram (together with the first-person narrator of the story or sketch, presumably) at the end as “the tram-car, quiet and vacant, bumped on westward” (87, 93). As with Virginia Woolf’s later accounts of cross-class and cross-gender encounters on trams and buses, the literary corpus of the London tramway confirms insights from work on public transport as a kind of contested public space. Chiming with video observations made on the commuter railways of the Paris region in the 2020s, “feelings of familiarity” implicity in the scene Morrison presents “coexist with acts of distancing of oneself from social roles, as permitted by the in-between space of public transport” (Tuvikene et al. 2023, 9; Wenglenski 2023).

In line with an angry 1877 account narrated, or claiming to be narrated, by an actual tram conductor who calls the job “modern slavery” (Lovett 1877), Morrison’s conductor is hard-pressed. He has the “plaguy task” (Morrison 1894, 90) of getting all the fares from a very crowded tram, many of the passengers at least half-drunk. Morrison’s account of the tram car is far more precise about the spatial qualities of the tram-ride than Gissing’s in Thyrza (discussed in the next section) is, or indeed than any of the twentieth-century accounts considered here. Morrison, for instance, includes both the appearance of gas lighting in outer urban districts and the city’s internal spatial divisions, including those marked by noise. During the journey, Morrison’s narrator remarks, “a scuffle broke out on the roof” (85). However, readers learn that “this disturbed not the insides” (89–90). The conductor’s “bell-strap” (87) shouts to passengers and “satchel” (92) are all recorded. By the end, the revellers having left for the (real) Bombay Grab pub on the Bow side of the line, the “quiet mechanic” takes “a corner seat near the door” (93). In presenting social mixing as unremarkable, Morrison deals with his audience in the manner of a deadpan comic, undermining notions of respectability based on segregated spaces dividing categories of people. “To Bow Bridge” thus paves the way for early twentieth-century modernist writings of the London tram by presenting it as a key to a vision of modern urban cartographies as class-segmented, but nevertheless available for experience by those from elsewhere in the city.

5. Ford’s rescaled city

In texts published between 1905 and 1931, Ford, Eliot, and Woolf describe trams in ways that variously echo and develop Morrison’s perspective. The next sections concentrate on three aspects of this portrayal. Firstly, the act put into focus by Morrison: that of being a passenger. Secondly, recalling Schmucki’s account of tramways, a vision of the city as something newly or radically different from what it has been earlier, including massively larger than before or characterised by new and undecided social class relations, grasped through the tram and its motion. And thirdly, the soundscapes that trams introduce into the city. Writers of the period from the 1890s to the end of the World War I use the tram as shorthand for bigger changes in the city. From about 1920, the tram becomes a figure for more apparently static social phenomena, notably the idea of a vast and potentially inert working class or plebeian mass in London. From figuring novel mobility, both topographic and social, the tram thus comes to stand for stasis, for a city in which different socio-economic groups are segregated in different sectors. Eliot’s “[t]rams and dusty trees” occupy the border between the era in which the tramway stood for an exciting electrified modernity and that in which it came to seem drably quotidian. The shift in perspective can be seen in different literary modes, poetry and prose, as well as in both elite and popular written forms. Taken together, these tramscapes form a method of commentary that is also a reimagining. In part, this commentary is an act of assimilation of the sort that Schmucki recounts. Equally, it is an act of imaginative rescaling, with which residents’ mental cartographies of the city are transformed.

A newly expanded, class-segregated and segmented city is grasped in Ford Madox Ford’s The Soul of London (1905). Here the tramcar itself, as seen from outside and as quite literally casting the new suburbs of the city into a new light, becomes a vehicle of modernity. Crucially, this is an electric tram with electric lighting inside coming from the same live rails or overhead cables which power the tram forwards. As both Gissing and Morrison had earlier done, Ford develops a perspective on what outer London or Greater London might mean, building such a sense around the environments and infrastructures of public transport. As White has indicated (White 2001, 14–15; White 2007, 93–94), public transport enabled both middle-class and working-class Londoners to live much further from their places of employment than had ever been possible in the earlier, necessarily cramped, urban space. Ford’s suburbs are middle-class and much further from the centre of London than either the Caledonian Road (about two to four miles north of London’s notional centre at Charing Cross), which becomes the setting for an imagined tram ride and gives a visual perspective on the hellish new city in Gissing’s 1887 Thyrza (Gissing, (1887) 1974, 319; see Finch 2019, 177–80), or the setting of Morrison’s “To Bow Bridge,” five to six miles east of Charing Cross.

The Soul of London is not a novel but a work of creative non-fiction. Its subtitle, A Survey of a Modern City, stakes a place for it in a tradition stretching back to the sixteenth-century Survey of London by the antiquary John Stow (1524/5–1605), which came out in a new scholarly edition a couple of years after Ford’s book appeared. Ford situates modernity in a multiplicity of identities and in a geographical extent utterly different from the walkable city in which every building houses tales of the past, as documented by Stow. In 1905, when motor buses and private car ownership were still in their infancy, the city’s geographic extent was inseparable from transport on rails. The multiplicity of Ford’s London is expressed through perspectives which make it look very different: from one side (the east) a working metropolis; from the other (the west) the capital of leisure, both for imperial officials living in the colonies and for those resident in West London suburbs (Ford 1905, 70–71, 34). Ford’s study is a journalistic one, resembling a written-up collection of newspaper columns. And yet the book has speculative aspects, as when Ford considers the possibility of “portable buildings” that might exist in the future, while he also imagines the atmosphere of the distant past in the area now built upon by London (164).

For Ford, describing the electric tram has become a means of apprehending the new, vastly expanded city at its outermost fringes. The book’s second chapter, “Roads into London” (33–62), makes trams into characteristic figures of the modern urban periphery:

At night, too, when the broad flat streets out in the suburbs are deserted, these electric trams appear romantic and rather wonderful. Gongs sound at their approach rather plaintively, headlights blaze out upon the black night, the lights within are a tall, mellow flood, a reflection is cast, dim and flying, upon old black houses behind trees and upon the large, blank windows of the tall pink and terracotta shops that face them. The great rectangular blaze glides along with a heavy, impersonal groan of sound that is like a new form of silence, the figure of the mechanician in front has a backward rake like that of a man in the bows of a boat; as it passes there is the gleam of a long row of pink faces in the heart of the light. (41)

In 1905, then, the tram is linked by Ford to an atmospheric and “mellow” sort of modernity. The perspective is, unlike in Thyrza or “To Bow Bridge,” from outside the tram, and the emphasis is on how the tram changes the suburban street environment. There, “old black houses” and (by implication new) “tall pink and terracotta” shops face one another; prosperity is implied by “the gleam” of the “faces in the heart of the light.” While the prospect is chiefly visual, the tram’s “heavy, impersonal groan of sound that is like a new form of silence” contrasts with the animal labour powering the horse-tram – which in Morrison (1894, 87) had “moved off slowly.” Through Ford’s description of the present, readers glimpse an almost science-fictional future, just as elsewhere in The Soul of London he speculates how transport will change London lives, involving “houses that we shall pack onto motor cars when the fit moves us to go out into the fields for a month or two” (Ford 1905, 165).

Rather than concentrating on the centre, like most of his predecessors among London writers seeking the character or qualities of the city, Ford outlines its perimeter. He claims that “London begins where tree trunks commence to be black,” tens of kilometres from central London (36). These arboreal markers, he claims, render a London “bounded by a line drawn from Leigh, in Essex, half-way through the Epping Forest, to the north of Hendon, to the west of Brentford, the southwest of Barnes, well to the south of Sydenham, well to the east of Bromley, and so up to Leigh again” (36). Ford then asserts that London’s expansion in multiple directions has happened suddenly, in the present moment:

Nowadays we have discovered, as if in the night, a new secret of rapid communication. Whilst the pen is actually on my paper London is spreading itself from Kew towards Hounslow, towards Richmond, and towards Kingston, and on its other bounds towards how many other outlying places? The electric tram is doing all this. (37)

Here, the electric tram reaches its apogee as a figure for metropolitan novelty and expansion. Reread nearly 120 years on, Ford’s handling of the trams suggests an alternative history of modern urbanity in which shared use of electric on-rail conveyances could have kept expanding rather than being supplanted by private vehicles pumping out exhaust fumes from petrol and diesel engines.

6. First World War and after: new rhythms, chimes, and thuds

Between the mid-1910s and the mid-1920s, London’s now-electrified trams were carrying vast numbers of people across an extensive network, yet they faced increasing competition from the motor bus and the expanded underground railways (Barker and Robbins 1974, 233). Smaller municipalities in London’s metropolitan area were finding them increasingly expensive to operate. Following the financial crash of 1929, the formerly private Underground Group of companies was nationalised and the LCC Tramways plus other tram operators in London were merged into it by order of central Government. There was nothing inevitable about this change. In 1925, the LCC tramways had been carrying more people than any other urban public transport network in the world and with the right kind of support London’s tramways could have continued.

The post-war London tramways of the 1920s entered literature as a core element in urban surroundings represented as dissonant and unglamourous. They were part of what the critic I. A. Richards found to be a new, all-encompassing environment, altering literature’s context and by implication its content, with a line to be drawn between horse-drawn and powered transport: “No one at all sensitive to rhythm,” Richards wrote, “will doubt that the new pervasive, almost ceaseless, mutter and roar of modern transport, replacing the rhythm of the footstep or horses’ hoofs, is capable of interfering in many ways with our reading of verse” (quoted in Thacker 2003, 177–78). Virginia Woolf in Night and Day, like Eliot in The Waste Land, alludes to tramways as a core element of present-day urban modernity in London, during the years immediately following World War One. That the London tram was gaining a more settled and, on White’s terms, “proletarian” image during the early 1920s is evident in Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923). Bennett’s novel opens by establishing an urban setting on King’s Cross Road, near one of London’s main railway termini, via the presence of trams as

a hell of noise and dust and dirt, with the County of London tram-cars, and motor-lorries and heavy horse-drawn vans sweeping north and south in a vast clangour of iron thudding and grating on iron and granite, beneath the bedroom windows of a defenceless populace. (Bennett 1923, 2).

Here, trams sum up the grimly urban atmosphere of the neighbourhood: extremely smoky and with residential sections blighted by the proximity of industry and traffic.

The fragmentary London tramscapes of Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) and The Waves (1931) represent sonic qualities of urban tramways that recall at times the more melodious tram of Ford and, at others, the grimly metallic sounds of Bennett’s King’s Cross. The presence of trams in these two novels by Woolf distinguishes them from other London novels of hers which are more focused on the West End (from which trams were largely absent) and largely leave tramways out. This is true of Mrs Dalloway (1925), while street scenes set in the mid-1930s “Present Day” section of The Years (1937) do not feature tramways. The depictions of the urban past from the 1880s onwards in The Years feature the horse-drawn omnibus and the motor-bus, turning these into topics for vigorous, powerful nostalgia, but not the city’s trams. Although Eleanor McNees (2010, 34) calls Night and Day’s handling of urban public transport less “complex” in comparison to that found in Woolf’s fiction from the 1920s and 1930s, the tramway enters Night and Day, if only subtly and briefly. In 1919, when Night and Day was published, the tramway seemed to Woolf a core component of London's modernity. The tram, as Rainey (2005, 28) writes of the typist’s occupation which Eliot remoulded, is “a recognisably modern figure,” a symbol of urban modernity. In Night and Day, Woolf uses journeys on the top decks of open-topped double-decker buses to capture the exhilaration of central London in an era of electric light and powered transport. The first of the two references in Night and Day connects the tram to “horrid slum houses” (Woolf 1919, 215). These words are Mrs Hilbery’s, the mother of protagonist Katherine, in Chapter 17, as she unconsciously indicates the disturbance that the tram brings, thus anticipating a passage in The Years that describes the sight of “an old man,” presumably working-class if not impoverished, eating “something out of a paper bag” on an omnibus (Woolf 1937, 301). The second reference connects the tram to an announcement that the bustle of riverside central London, rather than suburbs or side streets, is being reached by Katherine and Ralph:

They were now within sight of the stream of cabs and omnibuses crossing to and from the Surrey side of the river; the sound of the traffic, the hooting of motor-horns, and the light chime of tram-bells sounded more and more distinctly, and, with the increase of noise, they both became silent. (Woolf 1919, 301)

Public transport, central to Woolf’s perception and experience of London from her childhood onwards, juxtaposes different groups of people. It puts people into physical proximity who would not meet outside that setting, being socially unconnected or of different levels, or who elsewhere would meet in a defined and hierarchical relationship: that of servant and master, boss and employee, or customer and shop assistant. In other words, the tram threatens the class and gender-based separations of people which Victorian domestic architecture, town planning, and policing all set out to enforce.

7. Woolf’s tram visionary

The Waves resembles The Waste Land in that its telling is via multiple voices. Public transport and motorised transport punctuate and order the novel’s modern urban world. Woolf’s character Louis, modelled on Eliot himself, sits at an eating house in the City of London on his lunch hour: “Motor-cars, vans, motor-omnibuses; and again motor-omnibuses, vans, motor-cars – they pass the window” (Woolf 1931, 67). Among public-transport modes, trams have a distinct position in the novel’s infrastructural cityscape. The motor traffic of cars and omnibuses provides the urban backbeat like the rhythm section of a jazz combo: “The omnibuses were clogged; one came up behind another and stopped with a click, like a link added to a stone chain” (198). Trains are places where “we jostled and encountered,” the tube is the point from which one emerges into the city, such as at Piccadilly Circus (185). Trams stand oddly apart from this bustle, themselves spectators on the urban periphery. They become a motif only in the novel’s final section, a symposium involving all the main surviving characters, which takes place at Hampton Court, the site of a Tudor palace on the far south-western edge of London. This section of the novel uses public transport mobilities as one of its recurring figures, alongside mirrors and glasses of wine.

Two characters in The Waves refer to trams and they do so in distinct fashions within the personal idiom and perspective of each. The novel’s novelist character Bernard, firstly, offers a perspective on the tram which segregates it in a drab, industrial portion of the cityscape. As urban commentary, his resembles Bennett and Blumenfeld’s 1920s and 1930s deployment of the tramway in London urban fiction. Bernard aligns the tram with Louis, the novel’s man from the colonies, who hails from Australia rather than Eliot’s America: “He fascinated me with his sordid imagination. His heroes wore bowler-hats and talked about selling pianos for tenners. Through his landscape the tram squealed; the factory poured his acrid fumes” (179). Lines like these use the tram’s unmusical soundscape to help crystallise a connection between the “sordid” side of urbanity and Eliot himself in what was, by the early 1930s, starting to be understood as modernism.

By contrast with Bernard’s perspective on trams and the city, the novel’s tram visionary, or maybe high priestess, is Rhoda. Before the Hampton Court scene, she takes a ride on a tram to Greenwich, a journey into what by the end of the 1930s would become the London tram’s emblematic territory, dockside South-East London. Rhoda gets her visual perspective of London’s port via masts glimpsed through the tram’s window on this ride. For Rhoda, jungle and tram are opposites: “A wind ruffles the topmost leaves of primeval trees (yet here we sit at Hampton Court.) Parrots shrieking break the intense stillness of the jungle (Here the trams start.) This is the circumference that I try to grasp as we sit together” (158). Her perspective resembles that of Forster in Pharos and Pharillon (1923), discussing Alexandria, in which the tramway stands for the modern aspect of an ancient city (Finch 2021b, 84–85). The idea that at Hampton Court “the trams start” recalls once more Ford’s massively expanded London conceptualised not around its centre but its edges. Rhoda’s toponym also reflects the actual operations of the London United in the 1920s and early 1930s running up to its takeover by London Transport in 1933, when London-bound trams in the area were replaced by trolleybuses (Turner 2007a, 116–17).

Transport descriptions are animating and enlightening forces in Woolf’s fictional prose, nowhere more so than in The Waves. Their role for Woolf is that they illuminate plebeian urban places and people, otherwise mysterious urban co-dwellers for someone of her class background. Woolf’s treatment stands in stark contrast to that of a forebear like Gissing, a writer whose intellectualism she admired but whom she criticised as trapped in a “dreary monotony” of squalid urban life (Woolf 1932, 205). Woolf suggests a rich counterpoint of meanings, sometimes double meanings, of urbanity in motion conveyed through public transport as through nothing else. The tram has unique on-street sonic qualities with its squeals, squeaks, and tinkling bells, as well as being part of the pounding rhythm of vehicles perceived by Louis eating his meagre City lunch. The tram is not restricted to being a spatialising class marker in the way Bernard conceives of it, his perspective aligned with that of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Woolf’s novel implies that we need not, as Bernard does, label neighbourhoods and lives as tram neighbourhoods or tram lives, and therefore socially beneath a narrative us, those doing the perceiving.

Beyond a role in marking out the working-class or industrial sections of a city, the tramway for Eliot and Woolf (as for Forster in Alexandria) is shorthand for the whole of modern iron-worked, electrically powered modernity. The core ambivalence of the London tramway in literary modernism is contained in this simultaneous use of it as part and whole. In relation to the whole city, the tram is both a metonymic characteristic of a portion, illustrating the status-divided nature of the city via its incompatible, apart portions, and a metaphor for urban modernity overall.

8. Conclusion

The literary connections between the tram and London’s drabber, more working-class sectors found in Eliot, Bennett, and Woolf recur in explicitly political 1930s writing such as Blumenfeld’s Jew Boy (1935). In that novel, as Jewish protestors march from the East End of London to Hyde Park in the West End, they encounter solidarity from other members of the working class: “Navvies repairing the tramway […] unscrewed a turncock in the road and passed tin tea-mugs of cool water to the perspiring marchers” (Blumenfeld [1935] 2011, 47). Reading Blumenfeld helps in grasping the alternative histories that the act of reincorporating public transport into literary modernism provides.

Literary modernism, taking the tram as an emblem of urban modernity, points to an alternative history. Had the financial crash of 1929 never happened, had the Underground Group not taken over London’s tramways, the tram could have remained central to urban planning directed by civic government. Instead, it was removed by nationalised capitalism, at a time when roads were being altered to suit cars, lorries, and motor buses, on the grounds that it was out of date. Equally, introducing the tram alters our picture of the era’s urban literary representations, which gain qualities of sound, and of the relationship between centre and periphery in a gigantic city poised between the era of horse-drawn transport and the era of the private car. Literary representations can productively disrupt transport history by pointing to routes not taken and by emphasising experiences of modes that vanished. The literary history begun in this essay could be expanded. London’s last surviving tramways – until an entirely separate light rail system named Tramlink opened in suburban South London in 2000 – closed in 1952. But London’s trams had a literary afterlife in novels memorialising mid-century childhoods such as Duffy’s That’s How It Was (1962) and Moorcock’s Mother London (1988). Among later tram representations are books by memoirists and enthusiasts (e.g. Atkins 2013; Buckley 1975; Turner 2007a; Turner 2007b; Harley 2008), which amount to a genre of texts in their own right (see Finch 2022b).

A fully spatialised literary history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century London must draw on written experience of public transport networks to bring into view some of those millions of residents usually marginalised in literary readings focused on famous writers. Conversely, literary readings of canonical authors such as those in focus here contribute to transport and mobilities research. Only by deploying literary representations as materials in writing transport history can a qualitative history of the tramway’s unique being as a mobile interstitial space be written. Such qualities include the sonic and other atmospheres which the presence of a tramway confers on a portion of a city and the spaces of encounter, often socially disruptive and boundary-crossing, within the tram or at a tram stop. An awareness of these connotations rewrites the London electric tramway as a more radical and less simply functional aspect of urban modernity than it appears in views such as White’s. The interstices detectable within London tramscapes, then, extend beyond the fact of a railway in the street, to take in the edges of social classes, where one group meets or gives way to another and, related to this, the edges that can perhaps be best grasped cartographically, between outer and inner London.

Morrison’s exploration of the tram’s interior as a new and mobile public space paves the way for Ford’s suburban eye on the passing “great rectangular blaze” in which “pink faces” are seen. Eliot and Woolf, meanwhile, place London’s trams into an ambivalent zone of social and topographic meaning, rather than solidly linking them to proletarian quarters as done by Bennett and later Blumenfeld. Equally, there are continuities. Gissing’s parodic view of the city from the top-deck of a horse tram in his novels of the 1880s, Ford’s luminous electric tram in the suburbs of 1905, and Woolf’s depiction of the ride on an electric tram to Greenwich in The Waves, published in 1931, all create cityscapes, rather than just documenting what already exists. Such perspectives on London, mobilities, and urban modernity more broadly do not just arise from the use of literary texts which contain transport representations as source material, as recommended by mobility researchers (e.g. Eldelin and Nyblom 2021; Pooley 2017) but from practices of reading alert to genre expectations among readers, from formal aspects of writing, and from textual ambiguities. Trams’ riders in London between the 1890s and the 1940s may have used them to commute, as historians have shown; literary reading reveals that they also took pleasure in – and threatened to take control of – the city. The interstitiality opened up by the London tram was swiftly closed down again, illustrating the rapidity of change in urban modernity.

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).

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.”

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.