The Nether World of the Uncanny City of Dreadful Night

Abstract

For some late-nineteenth-century writers, such as Engels, Gissing, London and Thomson, the modern city has a dark underside figured as stagnant pool, bottomless abyss, nether world or dreadful night. The commonplace responses of dread and horror that were projected onto the native quaking zone were displaced onto the industrial quaking zone of the urban underside. This chapter argues that these writers are ‘placist’ in that they ascribe characteristics to a (man-made) place (the city) that were previously ascribed to a place not made with human hands (the jungle, abyss, nether land of swamps and so on). The negative connotations that attach initially to the native quaking zone are attached subsequently to the feral quaking zone.