Undogmatic Manto

Undogmatic Manto

Bombay, 1955

Book Details

Saadat Hasan Manto

BOMBAY STORIES

Translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad

336pp. Vintage Books. Paperback, £8.99.

978 0 099 58289 2

The Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto's stories of empowered and oppressed women – and the tragedies of Partition

HIRSH SAWHNEY

The Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto wrote penetrative short stories about India's tragic Partition in 1947, an event defined by mass murder, rape and forced migration. Though Manto was born a Muslim, these stories are distinctly non-partisan, indicting individuals from all of South Asia's political groups and religious communities, and also British imperialists, whose hasty flight from the subcontinent had cataclysmic consequences. Some of these tales, such as the well-known "Toba Tek Singh", use satire to convey the political absurdity of Partition, which turned friends and neighbours into enemies overnight, whereas stories such as "Cold Meat" tackle the brutality head-on. In this latter tale, which prompted the postcolonial Pakistani government to prosecute Manto for obscenity, a Sikh man returns home after several days of looting and murdering. The sight of his voluptuous wife arouses him, and he tries to make love to her. But he can't get an erection. His sexually frustrated wife grows suspicious that he's been cheating, and stabs him. While the man bleeds to death, he admits to having raped a girl during the chaos, but his confession doesn't end there: it transpires that this beautiful girl was actually a corpse and that the man inadvertently committed an act of necrophilia.

Though Manto's stark Partition stories are his most celebrated and frequently anthologized, he wrote prolifically and worked in a variety of genres during his short life. Between his birth in undivided India in 1912 and his death in 1955 in Pakistan, he churned out hundreds of short stories, radio plays and screenplays, and translated various European authors, including Victor Hugo, into Urdu. Towards the end of his life, disillusioned with Partition and in and out of a mental asylum for his alcoholism, he wrote a series of "Letters to Uncle Sam", farcical yet astute essays about international politics and post-war neo-imperialism.

Manto grew up in Amritsar and was a boy during the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, when hundreds of non-violent protesters against the colonial government were murdered – an event that had a huge impact on him. He was deeply anti-colonial as a young writer, and his experiences with censorship doubtless hardened these sentiments. The British Indian government threw him in jail for his allegedly incendiary translation of an Oscar Wilde play, and later prosecuted him for obscenity because of his bold sexual aesthetics. In Bombay Stories, the newly translated anthology of Manto's short fiction, the author's resentment of colonial rule is discernible in the background. The protagonist of "Smell" laments being barred from British-only brothels because of his skin colour, and in "Janaki", the narrator deplores the paucity of penicillin in India compared to its abundance in England and America. But what is more apparent in this collection is Manto's distaste for dogmas of any kind. He tells the tale of a strait-laced middle-class Muslim who reviles prostitution but then impregnates a prostitute and contemplates murdering their child. He depicts a Marxist feminist succumbing to her own lascivious desires even though she has recently uttered a moralistic diatribe against sex workers.

These tales were written over the course of more than a decade, both before and after Partition, and are collected here, newly translated, in a single volume for the first time. Not all of them are perfectly crafted. Manto rarely edited his work and his writing sometimes suffers for it. But these stories contain memorable characters and plots, and they unveil difficult social and psychological truths about life in the modern world. Manto casts a spotlight on Bombay's darker corners, neighbourhoods "dotted with garbage heaps that served as an open toilet". His Bombay is highly cosmopolitan, inhabited by individuals who revere Marlene Dietrich's Hollywood beauty as well as the great Urdu poet Ghalib. Some are boozehound writers trying to make their way in the city's nascent film industry, and a fictionalized version of Manto himself makes several cameo appearances. In such first-person narratives, the author lapses into playful, self-referential musings on the art of storytelling.

Most of the characters here are in some way connected to prostitution, a profession that proliferated in the lawless, ramshackle slums around Bombay's textile factories at the time. The eponymous protagonist of "Khushiya", for example, is a pimp who spends his evenings chewing paan near an auto supply shop. One night, he is perturbed after an interaction with Kanta, one of his prostitutes. When he went to check on Kanta earlier in the day, she answered the door naked and blithely invited him in for tea ("What's the big deal? It's just my Khushiya"). Mulling it over, Khushiya is unnerved by this brazen display, not least because she felt she could make it without eliciting a reaction from him. "She should have been a little ashamed!" he thinks. "She should have blushed a little!" He comes to the conclusion that "his masculine dignity had been affronted", and rushes away from his street corner to put Kanta in her place.

"Khushiya" is emblematic of Manto's work in that it is an anecdotal and ruminative character-driven sketch that gives rise to an unexpected and suspenseful climax. It demonstrates how repressed feelings of desire and culpability can drive individuals to viciousness. And it gives a good example of Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad's dynamic translations. Throughout this collection, the pair preserve Manto's quirks, and even his flaws. In some cases, they imbue his descriptive imagery with a gracefulness that is absent from some previous translations: Kanta's body "was as tight as hide stretched taut across a drumhead" (formerly, "Her skin was taut like skin over a drum"). Dialogue and interior thoughts are rendered into a contemporary idiomatic English. For example, the Urdu expression "Isme harz hi kya hai"– literally, "what is the problem with that?" – becomes "What's the big deal?" In a previous translation, the phrase, "par uska ek roan bhi na kampkampaya tha" – literally, "that not a single one of her hairs quivered" – appeared as "but [Kanta] had not shown the least nervousness". Reeck and Ahmad give it a sleeker and more colloquial edge: "but she didn't so much as bat an eyelash".

Like "Khushiya", the atmospheric story "Smell" explores the impact of lust and longing on a person's psyche. The protagonist here, the upper-class Randhir, can't get over a passionate tryst he once had with a worker from a nearby rope factory. He remains beguiled by the scent of this woman's body, which was "like the pleasing aroma that dirt gives off after you sprinkle it with water" and "as real and old as the story of men and women itself". Such descriptions have prompted some critics to label Manto an exoticizer of poverty and women, or a misogynist, and a few of his stories certainly contain simplistic or stereotypical descriptions of women. His female characters nag, or play the coquette, and they are often dependent on men for their redemption. But Manto is just as mocking of men. Though he undoubtedly internalized some of the prejudices of his era, his work seeks to expose society's rigid gender and class boundaries, and his female characters are often empowered and transgressive. Some of his women drink and smoke pot while others vocalize their sexual needs. In "Mozelle", a sexually voracious Jewish woman is a vamp. But she is also courageous, and it is her rejection of traditional values that enables her to protect a conservative Sikh couple from deadly communal violence. Manto's forward-looking views on gender are evident in this book's appendix, which contains some of his polemical non-fiction essays. In one of these, he objects to the fact that "men control society and take advantage of their power". A woman, on the other hand, "no longer remains a woman if she succumbs even once to a youthful desire or some other impulse . . . . She's viewed with contempt and hatred, and doors close for her that would remain open for men".

Saugandhi from "The Insult" is one of this collection's most fully realized female characters. She is a prostitute who lives in a room with a parrot and a dog and sleeps with mid-level Indian officials employed by the colonial government. She is friendly and generous, using her earnings to aid a recently widowed neighbour. Her favourite customer is Madho, a police constable whose dreamy ideas brighten up her days. But Madho is a fraud. He extracts money from Saugandhi instead of paying for her services. One night, Saugandhi gets dolled up to meet a rich client who sizes her up and rejects her: "She felt as though someone was pressing his thumb against her ribs, as you press your thumb into a sheep or goat to see if there is any meat beneath the hair". Saugandhi's distress pushes her to end things with Madho, a seemingly empowering action, but at the end of the story, she remains isolated and trapped. There can be no easy redemption for this poverty-stricken character in such a stratified and oppressive world.

Stories like this offer an unflinching look at the disparities that defined Manto's India. Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad's inspired new translations reaffirm the timelessness of Manto's prose and revitalize it for a new generation of English-language readers.

Gandhi and Socrates

Gandhi and Socrates

W. V. HARRIS

Phiroze Vasunia

THE CLASSICS AND COLONIAL INDIA

416pp. Oxford University Press. £85.
978 0 19 920323 9

"They fatten on the exploitation of the many. But there is one other strong resemblance between the Romans and the English people – they are both singularly devoid of imagination!" So wrote Jawaharlal Nehru (educated at Harrow, Cambridge and the Inner Temple) while in prison in 1934. Yet it depends what you mean by imagination; it might be argued, for example, that there can be no empire-building without imagination. And two immense imperial conquests from prior ages took hold of the imagination of the more educated among the British rulers of India, and made an impression on educated Indians, too – the eastern excursions of Alexander of Macedon and, more importantly, the imperialism of Rome.

How the classical works that discuss these two empires resonated with, and served the interests of, the British imperial rulers – but also sometimes of their opponents, both domestic and Indian – is the subject of Phiroze Vasunia's enjoyably informative book, The Classics and Colonial India. As an Indian with a doctorate in classics, who has now been resident in Britain for several years, he is admirably equipped to write it. But what raises it to a high level is the author's fine sense of historical context and his ability to summon up the right degree of detachment. The book ends with a proud chapter about Gandhi and Nehru (both of whom were, as it happens, knowledgeable about Roman history), but at the same time he recognizes, for instance, Gandhi's "excess of national self-pride". And the British, even when expressing a sense of ineffable superiority over their Indian subjects, are treated with forbearance.

From John Seeley to James Bryce and Evelyn Baring, the moulders of Victorian and Edwardian opinion about the British Empire harped on the Roman imperial precedent. Partly, one may suppose, this was to soothe the uneasy feelings that sometimes accompanied their sense of mission. Vasunia quotes the famous words of Charles Napier: "We have no right to seize Scinde, yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality it will be". In the same spirit Bryce wrote that "the government of India by the English resembles that of her provinces by Rome in being thoroughly despotic", and though he claimed that it was a justified and benevolent despotism, the word, or rather the fact, certainly generated unease. The correlate of the ancient despotes, as Bryce knew very well, is the slave.

But that saying of Napier's points to a serious obstacle in the way of Vasunia's project: the Britons who conquered and ruled India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had other aims in mind a great deal more urgent than emulating the Romans. Most obviously, they sought profits and jobs – still a consideration when Cyril Fielding is explaining his presence in India to Dr Aziz and his friends in A Passage to India. And – to a degree that is now hard to imagine – many also wanted to spread Christianity. Even the radical Shelley thought that the missionaries could be the source of "beneficial innovations" in India, as Vasunia points out. And some think that it was militarism itself that drove the British forward.

Such topics are not to Vasunia's taste – he is above all a scholar of literature, Greek, Latin, Gujarati, Bengali. But the virtual absence from The Classics and Colonial India of the real motive forces of British rule produces a certain imbalance. To understand Seeley, Bryce and Baring, and also the avant-la-lettre nationalists, it is essential to study the soldiers, too, a number of whom wrote revealing memoirs. Vasunia does not mention "Roberts of Kandahar", but Roberts's long-winded book Forty-One Years in India: From subaltern to commander-in-chief is a valuable counterweight to the effusions of Seeley, who never left Europe.

There is, however, much for a British reader to learn from Vasunia's discussion of nineteenth-century Gujarati and Bengali writers who were enthralled by the Greek and Roman classics. The most extraordinary of these figures was perhaps the precocious Calcutta poet Henry Derozio (partly Indian, partly Portuguese and partly English), who, before dying of cholera at the age of twenty-two in 1831, showed what might happen when a patriotic Indian – for that was his identity – was swept off his feet by the Greco-Orientalism of Byron and Shelley. Derozio was prolific and polished and an inspiration to Bengalis who came afterwards; and he equated the Persians defeated at Marathon with the hated Muslims.

A large part of the trouble, from the point of view of British power, was that the acculturation of Indians inevitably brought with it a wider idea of freedom than the Romans ever preached or practised. In addition, the rulers would probably have been well advised to imitate the Romans by bringing Indians into the real circles of power faster than they did (only twentyseven of the 528 men who entered the Indian Civil between 1904 and 1913 were Indian); but it is hardly surprising, given the racism then prevalent in Europe, that it did not happen. George Nathaniel Curzon – admittedly not a representative Briton or the most intelligent of viceroys – was horrified that "the superior wits of the Native" were allowing Indians to gain a foothold in government.

Later, the Government of India Act of 1919 introduced a system of "dyarchy", much talked of (at least by the British) for the next twenty years. Here Vasunia might have detected a genuine echo of Roman history, since it was in effect Theodor Mommsen's famous history of Rome that had introduced the concept of dyarchy, applying it to the supposed division of power between the emperor Augustus and the Senate.

Vasunia does not deal systematically with the way in which the ideology of empire coloured scholarly interpretations of ancient history. He sees that the long-authoritative view of Alexander of Macedon taken by W. W. Tarn (1869–1957) was partly inspired by his perception of contemporary imperialism, but that is a familiar tale. Idealizing, disingenuous and downright blinkered claims about what the nineteenth-century British were up to in India and elsewhere (Seeley is one of the main culprits) had a much deeper and more long-lasting effect on the historiography of Roman imperialism, and it can still be felt. This is no simple story, since some of the most influential historians in question were, or are, not British but German, French or American; but it is a certainly a classic case of history, ideology and intellectual fashion interacting, and worthy of attention.

The main impact of the classics on Gandhi might be said to be moral: he took Socrates as an exemplar of fortitude in the face of oppression, depicting him as a satyagrahi who undertook the improvement of his own people. Nehru's respect for the Greek classics was a more complex affair, embracing Attic tragedy and anti-democratic Plato. As for the ICS administrators who had read Greats, how did the classics really affect them, how did studying Greece and Rome really impinge on their gentlemanly upbringing? Were the effects on them mainly moral rather than intellectual in any strict sense? Vasunia leaves the question open, understandably.

Orwell’s rebellious patriotism

Orwell's rebellious patriotism

CALUM MECHIE

Robert Colls

GEORGE ORWELL

English rebel
356pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $34.95).
978 0 19 968080 1

George Orwell loved things. He had "a sort of belly-to-earth attitude" and believed in "the surface of the earth". He loved tools. From the old .44 Winchester with which he shot the elephant, to the bayonet issued him by the Home Guard and the spade with which he dug his potatoes, Orwell was always putting things to use. He also loved his country. "I am a patriot after all"; "I believe in England". These are facts about Orwell (he loved facts too) and they are related: Englishness, Robert Colls writes at the start of George Orwell: English rebel, "was something that he thought with". After decades of what John Rodden has called "the making and claiming of Saint George Orwell", Colls's intervention – where Orwell's Englishness is an activity, a process – is welcome.

Orwell has become a stable symbol of a certain type of Englishness. In 1992, John Major declared himself Prime Minister of a nation of "long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and – as George Orwell said – old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist". But Orwell's England was never stable. His "old maid" appears in The Lion and the Unicorn as "a characteristic fragment of the English scene" alongside, for example, "the queues outside the Labour Exchanges". The essay, a patriotic paean to Socialism and the English Genius, ends with the declaration that "patriotism has nothing to do with Conservativism. It is actually the opposite of Conservativism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same". Major kept quiet about that. His stable national identity has no room for Orwell's fluidity; Colls, who wants to understand Orwell through "Englishness" rather than define England through "Orwell", embraces it. Colls's Orwell is not a saint; he is "the best and worst political commentator on the scene".

Colls argues that Orwell's employment of "the dialectics of England-changed and England-still-the-same" is typically English, a critical practice rooted in Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867). The identification of this convention and its nineteenth-century origin is canny. Orwell identifies England by its past, and by its people. He thinks that a nation's history happens at different rates for its different people. "The common man is still living in the mental world of Dickens, but nearly every modern intellectual has gone over to some or other form of totalitarianism", he wrote in "Charles Dickens": England has changed, and stayed the same. Orwell's essay on Dickens is, with its amateurish tone, evidence of his nineteenth-century sensibility. Orwell reads Dickens like his first readers did, compelled by his personality. He insists that he, too, is part of that mental world. He is with the common people and, since he is "a degenerate modern semi-intellectual", this is a form of rebellion – English rebellion.

Some of Colls's conclusions are suspect. His claim that "Orwell found an England to believe in" while "down the mine" in Wigan seems too neat. The suggestion that, after "converting" to his country, Orwell learned "to take things as he found them – the good and the bad, the past and the present, the left and the right" seems too generous. This account is perhaps over-influenced by the Orwell/Blair dichotomy, a convention of Orwell criticism made orthodox by Raymond Williams. All public intellectuals create their identities, just as they create their publics, or their nations.

Insisting on the interrelation of Englishness and rebelliousness within the Orwell persona, however, Colls is spot on. Rebelliousness was a mark of authenticity for Orwell. It suggested honesty; it often signified style. It even meant Englishness. "My Country Right or Left", the essay in which he first declared for England, is also a call for armed revolution: "when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago for such different reasons is somehow persisting". Orwell thought the war could be won by bloody revolution. "Preposterous", Robert Colls rightly remarks; but patriotic, too. In a time where, under a lion and a unicorn of its own, the Daily Mail can accuse a man of hating Britain because he once called "the Englishman" a nationalist, an elegant and eloquent reminder that George Orwell loved his country rebelliously is both timely and necessary.

The Wordsworth women

The Wordsworth women

NICHOLAS ROE

Lucy Newlyn

WILLIAM AND DOROTHY WORDSWORTH

All in each other
386pp. Oxford University Press. £19.99 (US $34.95).
978 0 19 969639 0

Katie Waldegrave

THE POETS' DAUGHTERS

Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge
416pp. Hutchinson. £25.
978 0 09 193112 4

Ten years after the publication of Lyrical Ballads, all was not well in the "demi-paradise" of Grasmere. Coleridge occupied a solitary room in William and Mary Wordsworth's house, Allan Bank. Sarah, his wife, lived with their children at Greta Hall, Keswick, the home of Robert Southey and his wife Edith (Sarah's sister). At Greta Hall, there were sunny outlooks, books, cats, food and a welcome for visitors; in this hospitable house Coleridge's daughter, Sara, grew up. Over at Allan Bank, the Wordsworths endured chimneys that smoked into the rooms and soot-blackened walls. Their unvarying diet of porridge had already driven visitors such as Walter Scott to the village inn, where Coleridge bought the brandy he needed to make laudanum. Obsessively in love with Mary Wordsworth's sister, Coleridge was overweight, demanding, quarrelsome, drunk or stupefied. In short, no longer fun. While the poets' friendship disintegrated, Wordsworth's four-year-old daughter Dora and her brother John came under the eye of another resident at Allan Bank. This was Wordsworth's sister, the children's "Aunt Dorothy". To Aunt Dorothy, Dora appeared too "wild" and in need of "taming"; little John, who had learning difficulties, Aunt Dorothy described as "the greatest Dunce in England".

In William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in each other, Lucy Newlyn acknowledges "emotional tensions" at Allan Bank, and considers the impact of the deaths of the Wordsworths' two youngest children, Catharine and Thomas. William got through this crisis, Newlyn tells us, thanks to the "tireless sympathy" with which sister Dorothy fulfilled her role as his nurturer. It was in April 1794 that William and Dorothy had been reunited after years of separation following their mother's death (1778) and the demise of their father (1783). In June 1778, Dorothy, aged six, was sent to be fostered by kindly Unitarian relatives in Halifax: Newlyn conjectures that this family may have been a source for her brother's poetic ideas of "One Life", and also alerts us to Dorothy's early relationship with the abolitionist William Wilberforce. The following May, her brothers William and Richard went to board at Hawkshead School.

Ousted from their family home at Cockermouth, then parted for sixteen years, William and Dorothy would grow together again through collaborative creative writings that, Newlyn claims, "were part of [their] joint work of rebuilding a family, a settled home, and a communal identity". In Newlyn's story, writing for these two resilient survivors was a form of "therapy", although William's singular, punishing struggle with his never completed philosophical poem The Recluse, and the painful physical symptoms he experienced when composing poetry, might at times have felt otherwise.

Newlyn brings formidable academic resources to her task, recalling her ground-breaking study of poetic dialogue in Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion (1986). Almost thirty years on, All in each other's decisive critical move is to place Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, letters and poems in the foreground alongside her brother's writings so as to demonstrate the intricately interwoven nature of their creativity. Newlyn has an extensive scholarly knowledge of William and Dorothy's manuscripts and published texts, and her own insights are flanked by Gaston Bachelard on spaces, Freud on mourning, Heidegger and James Lovelock on ecology, Lewis Hyde and Marcel Mauss on gifts, and Oliver Sacks on therapy. William and Dorothy are able to see "more clearly what John Barrell has called 'the dark side of the landscape'". The book's most impressive aspect is Newlyn's close reading of the verbal textures of their poetry and prose. William's tactful use of the word "transplanted", for instance, is expressive of his empathy for Dorothy "who had been more suddenly uprooted"; Dorothy "peppers her prose with local usages" – "lass", "baird", "gang" – while the lyrical rhythms and "inner vision" of her journals – "hovering on the edge of verse" – might have helped her admirer, Virginia Woolf, to create "moments of being".

So thoroughgoing is Newlyn's creative intertwining of William and Dorothy, one senses it is with some reluctance she concedes that they might, at times, have been not quite so much "all-in-each-other". Towards the end of her book, awkward questions start to emerge. "Were there rivalries in the family? . . . life was not always easy in the Wordsworth household . . . inevitably, the siblings had occasional disagreements". Newlyn tells us that Dorothy "repeatedly nagged" her brother for postponing The Recluse. So, too, one suspects, little Dora had been monitored before Aunt Dorothy packed her off to Miss Weir's boarding school at Appleby.

On a hot day in August 1811, Dora was taken to the coach at Ambleside, and hoisted up to her seat. "Her heart was full at the very last moment", Dorothy wrote to another abolitionist, Catherine Clarkson, "and when two rough sailors got up and seated themselves opposite to her, she looked very much frightened". Now less than sympathetic, Dorothy called out, "Do not fear they will take care of you", and the coach rumbled away. "We were quite easy", Dora's aunt assured her correspondent, "There never was a Girl in the world who would be so easily led to industry by following others". As Katie Waldegrave notes, in early August 1811, Dora was the same age as Dorothy when she was sent away to Halifax.

If Newlyn's study offers a finely recuperative analysis, Waldegrave's brilliant biography of Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge traces the fractured lives of two young women struggling with their fathers' shadows. Anorexia, depression, insomnia and drug dependency were their legacies – and so, too, was their long friendship. The Poets' Daughters begins with a brisk comparison of the women's early lives at Keswick and Grasmere: at Greta Hall, Dora enjoyed music and drawing; the more studious Sara was already a skilled classicist. Then, in April 1816, the Southeys' son died; his mother began a protracted decline, and her grief-stricken husband – now Poet Laureate – retreated to his study. Suddenly, the Keswick/Grasmere polarity was reversed. The road to Grasmere no longer led to gloomy Allan Bank but to a new Wordsworthian idyll, Rydal Mount, where both Sara and Dora, "like sisters sometimes . . . chose to become friends".

By 1821, Dora (seventeen) and Sara (nineteen) had grown into very different individuals. Sara was an acknowledged "true beauty" who had translated Martin Dobrizzhofer's Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, a five-volume page-turner written in Latin. Dora, by contrast, had apparently failed to blossom. At the Christmas dance in Ambleside, where Dora was chaperoned by Rydal matrons and "Mrs STC . . . waddling like a stuffed turkey" (Mary Wordsworth's observation), it was clear that her childhood was long past. Sensing, perhaps, that she was required to fall in with the others, she seemed already to have joined her father's "fireside divan" (John Keats's term for the poet's female attendants). Whereas Newlyn sees Dora's role at Rydal Mount as continuing "cooperative labour", Waldegrave takes a different view. Her account – it is both sensitive and unflinching – has the poet's wife and daughter slaving, year after year, at transcriptions of his poetry with Dora, trapped in an "almost impossibly stifling triangle", prevented by her obdurate father from marrying the hapless Edward Quillinan. As Waldegrave puts it, Dora seemed to be "fading out of her own story", sickly, frail, depressed, "acting as supportive bystander whilst others lived their lives". When she was finally permitted to marry Quillinan, Dora came briefly into her own as the successful author of Journals of a few Months' Residence in Portugal (1847).

Sara Coleridge had no shortage of admirers, and when "The Flower of the Lakes" visited London, she caused a sensation. It might have led to escape and a different future, but she was soon absorbed back into the family by her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge. Waldegrave's lively prose recreates their wedding with a bustle of silk, satin and hatboxes, Southey in a gloom, and everyone relieved that the bride's father would not be there. The marriage service was led by "England's dunce", now the Revd John Wordsworth, and everyone danced until four the next morning.

The newly weds moved to 21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead – just around the corner from Keats's Wentworth Place – and here, after the births of their first two children and the death of her father, Sara collapsed into opiated despair. Aged thirty-one, the same age at which her hopelessly addicted father had fled to Malta, she found herself, like him, "utterly trapped" by the drug. It took De Quincey's damaging biography of Coleridge (1834) and James Ferrier's article on his plagiarisms (1840) to rouse her. From then on, Waldegrave shows, "Sara began to engage honestly with the real Coleridge", finding her life's work in a vindication of her father and discovering a kind of freedom through her own poetry. What followed was Sara's extraordinary edition of her father's Biographia Literaria, published, like Dora's Journals, in 1847; it is, as Waldegrave observes, "a breathtakingly accomplished" piece of editorial scholarship, and The Poets' Daughters traces Sara's long journey towards the year when both women emerged as writers. In contrast to Newlyn's idea of collaboration in the Lakes, Waldegrave emphasizes Sara Coleridge's labour of solitary mourning – for her father, and for her husband who had died, suddenly, in January 1843, leaving her to grieve over "his cold remains in their double coffin". "I am resigned to the blackness and desolation of feeling I must go through", Sara wrote in her diary. "I must finish my journey alone."

What comes over most compellingly in The Poets' Daughters are the terrible odds that confronted Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge: dysfunctional families, haphazard education, limited life options and endless oppressive illnesses – boils, chickenpox, whooping cough, convulsions, measles, rheumatism, insomnia, miscarriages, drug addiction, Pott's disease (endured by Dora) and breast cancer (suffered by Sara). "Dora's dying was an exhausting struggle" until, after making a stoical joke about her "fatness", she succumbed on July 9, 1847. Sara survived her for a further five years. Shortly before she died, she composed a brave and witty charm, "To a little lump of malignity, on being medically assured that it was not a fresh growth, but an old growth splitting: Split away, split away, / split away, split!". Life had not been easy for either of the poets' daughters. Unlike their famous fathers, aunts and uncles, however, both women strove to be fun to the end.

Under the mind of London

Under the mind of London

Stills from Doctor Who, "Web of Fear" (1968)

Book Details

David Ashford

LONDON UNDERGROUND

A cultural geography
188pp. Liverpool University Press. £70 (US $99.95).
978 1 84631 859 7

Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White, editors

LONDON FICTIONS

283pp. Five Leaves Publications. Paperback, £14.99.
978 1 907869 66 2

Subterranean anxieties, geographical fictions and literary representations of the city abound

ROYCE MAHAWATTE

In February 1968, the children's television programme Doctor Who, in its fifth year of transmission, depicted a London covered in fog that proved fatal for all who entered it. The time and space travellers arrive in the city via a system of tiled tunnels with curved roofs, and on seeing the sign "Covent Garden" by torchlight, the Doctor exclaims: "We're in an underground station!" Nodding to his nineteenth-century companion, he adds: "a little after your time, Victoria", to which she replies: "Is it always as dark as this?"

In fact, London's underground railway lines, the first in the world, had begun to operate from the 1860s onwards, and imaginative use of those tunnels, a century later, was a well-established feature of British popular culture. Only the year before this particular episode of Doctor Who, Quatermass and the Pit (1967) had terrorized cinemagoers – the "pit" of the title lying beneath the Victoria Line. London, the capital, is caught up not only in forces that are external, but forces drawing strength from one of the very things that made it modern.

David Ashford's London Underground: A cultural geography is a rich study of the underground transport system, placing the network in its historical and cultural context. In its methodology and its emphasis on the cultural experience of space, as well as its broad frame of reference (from George Gissing to An American Werewolf in London and China Miéville's King Rat), it represents a significant advance on previous studies of the subject. The first deep-level railway line was completed in 1890, and, for Ashford, the network that grew around it serves as an emblem of post-industrial modernity. Starting from Victorian hopes about technological advancement, the railway was propelled through modernist fantasies and fears about the self. Progressing through world wars and long-term social upheavals, the Underground was both instrumental and metaphorical.

It could also be problematic. Even though, in its early days, passengers were segregated into classes, the dominant impression was that all were dehumanized, reduced to an urban workforce stuffed into a vessel with windows that were often little more than an affectation, as they looked out onto dusty tunnel walls. In the twentieth century, the anxieties produced by such conditions found literary expression. In a reading of the E. M. Forster short story "The Machine Stops" (1909), Ashford presents this prescient work in the light of modernist concerns about technology, and how Edwardian pastoralism sought to modulate the arrival of the future. This subterranean space also offered opportunities, however, to those who were more attuned to the nature of this "nowhere" between locations. Ashford's early chapters deal with writers who grasped that women could be the beneficiaries of this new level of existence. Anthony Trollope, Henry James, H. G. Wells and Vernon Lee, as well as poets such as Alice Meynell, all depict female characters who experience tube travel and the jostling for social position and human connection it involves.

Ashford also looks at Theodore Dreiser's novelistic reimagining of the American transport magnate Charles Tyson Yerks – as Frank Cowperwood in The Financier, The Titan and The Stoic – as a representative of the brash capitalism and "amoral forcefulness" that threatened for a time to take over the underground system. Commentators in The Times were keen to point out that this system was contingent on both American technology (the tunnelling equipment and regrettable open-style "cars") and capital. What is perhaps most interesting in this lively account is the contradictory and vacillating politics of Dreiser and his cautious anglophobia – an intriguing index to Anglo-American relations following the First World War.

In a detailed reading of the journal Blast and contemporary poster campaigns against modern poetry, Ashford connects the movement and the promise of cheap and easy travel with avant-garde art. The British Futurists, and the Vorticists especially, saw something auspicious in this relatively new mode of transport, which imposed an aesthetic order on modern life. Harry Beck's celebrated Tube Map of 1933, meanwhile, compresses geography into an "abstract, rationally organised space". The broader view of the Underground, however, was not so positive. Ashford regards Wells's The Time Machine (1895) as, in part, a speculative "attack" on the garden suburb, with Wells modelling the post-human Eloi community of the future on the Bedford Park suburb in Chiswick, implicitly criticizing the rise of a rootless middle class. Writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, George Orwell and Elizabeth Bowen felt weary in the presence of suburban sprawl because, concerns of class identity aside, the commuter belt was as abstract as the network of tunnels that brought it into being – and not in an avant-garde way.

Though he never makes such a bold claim, Ashford presents the emergence of the London Underground as a paradigm shift. The Tube altered the self; it created a new demographic and an unforeseen cultural synthesis. In later chapters, we see how the Underground, as theorized by the Situationists, formed a crucial part of the mid-1960s immigration experience. From the immigrant fiction of Samuel Selvon to modern graffiti artists, and Banksy's "brandalism" on the Tube, we see that bricolage and London Tube travel complement the idealism – the power, speed and despair – of youth and pop culture.

Edited by Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White, London Fictions has, on the surface, a similar literary and geographical project to that of London Underground. Its contributors were invited to comment on any novel about London published after 1870 (the year that Dickens, the most notable of London novelists, died). In addition, they were asked to consider how the city described in their work differs from the London of today. The result is lively and compelling. If there are gaps in your London reading, this book will help to fill them. Inspired by Betty Miller's Farewell Leicester Square (1941), Susan Alice Fischer writes touchingly on the complexities of assimilated Jewish experience. Miller's upwardly mobile protagonist, Alec, encounters prejudice and the pain of his own self-fashioning as he negotiates city life; the "concentration camp is only spiritual here". Gregory Woods explains the stylized turns of Neil Bartlett's Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall (1990) – explaining why, for instance, the main characters are simply called "O" and "boy" – and places the novel in the context of gay London literature and the institutionalized homophobia of the era. Perhaps the most revealing commentary comes from Sanchita Islam, who writes a rich and fair-minded response to Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003). "It is a shame that Ali's story takes place primarily in a flat . . . . Perhaps Mile End would have been a less misleading title."

London Fictions also exposes a quality of the city that the brief does not seem to anticipate. The comparisons between the fictional and contemporary London, for the most part, lack the energy and commitment found in the discussions of the chosen novels. London Fictions in fact takes an opposite approach to that of London Underground in that it seeks to make the representational geographical, and the result is in places a little flat – more streetmap than guided tour. Andrew Lane's discussion of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890) reveals that you "can read all fifty-six short stories and four novels . . . about Sherlock Holmes without finding out much about the London of the time". It seems that Conan Doyle's London is organized around narrative principles rather than cartographic ones, as Lane acknowledges. Conversely, David Ashford, in London Underground, uses Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" (1908) to show how the "District Railway" (opened in 1868) could raise fears of a foreign invasion.

While it may be misleading of London Fictions to present fictional versions of London as if they were more faithful to geographical principles than to those of genre, the final chapter of London Underground considers the postmodern notion that there are living "ghosts" beneath the feet of every Londoner. Here Ashford draws on the experimental fiction of Conrad Williams and Geoff Ryman – two writers who would not fall into the category of London fiction according to London Fictions. Through their visions of the city, however, both of these books reveal London as a place of the imagination, webbed over by fantastical commonplaces and unpredictable new developments.