Schivelbusch railway journey commodity
The Pall Mall Gazette of May 1886 called the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, organised that year in South Kensington, “a walk round the ‘colonies’”. 4 While London’s railway network was still expanding at breakneck speed, the traffic of Indian commodities, artworks and exhibits into the imperial metropolis carried on relentlessly. 3 Besides makeshift shops, advertisements, buskers, beggars and delinquents that thronged the Underground, the great imperial cesspool also saw the emergence of a new but not unforeseen diaspora of Indians in Victorian London. Towards the end of the Great War, Londoners had normalised the humdrum of choking and groping across mists on their way to railway stations, enduring journeys in and out a supernatural city. By 1890, as the Metropolitan and District Line and the Circle Line crisscrossed the Thames and Embankment, the City and South London Railway became the world’s first ever electrified deep-level tube station. 2 As a harbinger of modernity, the Underground would dynamically restructure London’s geography and psychogeography for more than a century to come. These “demons” would soon transform the old metrop into a labyrinth of maps, “one laid upon another like a historical palimpsest”. 6 Nagendra Nath Ghose, The Effect of Observation of England upon Indian Ideas and Institutions, Calc (.)ġOn January 10, 1863, Farringdon Street Station saw a large crowd awaiting the pantomime of Britain’s subterranean steam railways.
5 “A walk round the ‘Colonies’: A show and revelation”, Pall Mall Gazette: An Evening Newspaper and (.).4 The British Indian diaspora has grown manifold since Victorian times.Corton, London Fog: The Biography, Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 234. 2 Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography, London, Anchor Books, 2003, p. 110.