Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945

Starting with a consideration of the "New Life Underground," Pike charts how the London underground railway developed from being seen as "a descent into Hades" by one of its earliest passengers, to a middle-class, rational, sanitized space acting as a popularly-used conduit between the city and the suburban countryside. Skillfully using an array of sources from great works of art and writing to popular literature, films, cartoons, and diagrams, Pike reveals how our modern representation of the underworld as an imagined space has, often uncertainly, emerged from the medieval vision of the underworld as the lair of the infernal, the social outcast, the morally degenerate and filthy.