Urban Transportation and London's Imagined Infrastructure

Historians and literary critics often observe that Victorian London had no Baron Haussmann to impose a rational, legible order on its tangle of streets. But the itineraries traced by early forms of public transportation—omnibuses, hackney cabs, and railways—nonetheless invited a reimagining and remapping of the city. Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz (1836), midcentury encyclopedic cab fare guides, and the debates that preceded the building of the 1863 Metropolitan Underground Railway overwrote the existing geography of the city with a cartographic infrastructure tactically organized into routes, nodes, intervals, and destinations.