I’M NOT ENTIRELY CERTAIN if Charles Dickens ever rode the London Underground . . . but, in theory, he could have – and that’s good enough for me.
This thought first occurred to me back in early August. I was in London, and I’d just left the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street. The museum was interesting, but my most persistent fascination throughout the whole of that trip was not any single sight that London had to offer. More than Big Ben or the British Museum, it was the great subterranean network beneath them that most captivated me. The Tube was always on my mind. So many stations, so many lines . . . so many monstrous escalators.
The spectacle of it got me thinking. Where did a subway system this extensive and this renowned fit into the global public transit timeline? That it’s the first system of its kind is not surprising, but I never would have guessed that its oldest line opened on January 10, 1863[i] – more than seven years before Dickens’ death.
I don’t know why this bit of information left such an impression on me. It’s sort of like learning that Mary Pickford died after the release of Apple’s first home computers. Silent movies and personal computing shouldn’t overlap. Neither should Victorian novelists and subway stations. And yet overlap they do.
In 1863, Toronto was just twenty-nine years past incorporation, and still ninety-one years away from having a subway of its own. Visiting London, and coming to appreciate
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Anthony Salvalaggio is one of the editors of Toronto Journal.