Life must be filled up

I’d always thought it was George III who said ‘Another damn’d thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr Gibbon?’, on being presented with the first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It seems that it was more likely the Duke of Gloucester. I also thought it was ‘demn’d’, which seems right for the period but I could have been wrong for years. My damn’d thick book is Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens. I had nothing new to read and was looking for something meaty. I thought, ‘Dickens!’ then realised I’d perhaps re-read my favourites too recently, whereas I hadn’t read Ackroyd for a long time (the book came out in 1990). Most of my books have to live in a chalet in the garden, which is not good for them. I went out, looking for the enormous paperback I knew I had. What I found instead was a hardback first edition with a signed bookplate inside. I have absolutely no recollection of ever buying this book; it must have been one of my market bargains.

I wrote here when reviewing Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens, that I preferred Ackroyd’s and why, so I don’t have much to say about the book, which I’m about a fifth of the way through. More to say on physically reading it. At over 1,000 pages, it is indeed a ‘damn’d thick book’ and hard to manage. My best effort is to be semi-recumbent on the sofa with the book propped on a cushion. Reading should be easier than this! The book, by the way, is absolutely brilliant and makes you want to re-read the whole of Dickens immediately.

Has anyone else been following the BBC 2 series The Tube? I saw the first three episodes and found it fascinating, if something of a PR job. My interest in what goes on underground started years ago when I saw a Look at Life film about ‘People who work when we’re asleep’. The tube, sewers, tunnels carrying cables, all caught my imagination. Later, I read Peter Laurie’s classic Beneath the City Streets and learned about the secret underground places. All this explains why I grabbed Peter Ackroyd’s London Under when I saw it at the library. Compared with his mighty tomes, London, the Biography and Thames, Sacred River, this book is novella-length at 182 pages but boy, is it dense.

There are a lot of facts in London Under but, this being Ackroyd, all are subject to imaginative interpretation. It’s always thrilled me to think of the thousands of years of history under your feet as you pace the streets of London. Each stratum below has a secret to reveal, with many more still to come. If you believe Ackroyd, most secrets are dark ones. The ground below us is described frequently as ‘the underworld’ and there are references throughout the book to Hades, the Styx, Pluto. Tunnel entrances are seldom called doors; rather, they are portals, immediately summoning up the image of moving into another world. Below ground it is literally dark, ‘pitched past pitch of black.’ as Ackroyd writes, channelling G M Hopkins. Dark also in its history of fear and death.

The dead, of course, are buried below ground and so in a sense always with us. Ackroyd quotes a passage from Night Walks in which Dickens imagined ‘how, if they were raised while the living slept … the vast armies of the dead would overflow the hills and valleys beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it, God knows how far.’ There are records of Roman deaths, plague pits (more fear and horror), bodies mutilated in apparent human sacrifice. The deeper you dig, the hotter it gets; no wonder so many writers have described these dark regions as ‘hellish’. Not just bodies but whole streets have been uncovered wherever excavation has taken place. When the Jubilee line was built, the architect said, ‘It’s chaotic down there, you just can’t believe what’s going on.’

The gods of the underworld seem very demanding types, always requiring sacrifice and propitiation. The places where now-hidden waters run may be sacred sites, or they may be destroyers, drowning the innocent and engulfing the streets imposed above them. Counters Creek passes the cemeteries of Kensal Green, Hammersmith, Brompton and Fulham, ‘perhaps out of atavistic attraction to the buried dead.’ Marc Isambard Brunel’s tunnel under the Thames is described as one of several attempts ‘to stay or undermine the deity of the river.’ The Thames exacted its toll of dead workmen as did the sewers when they were built, and the underground railway. The early locomotives had names, one of which was Pluto. This is the kind of thing Ackroyd finds significant, just as he sees connections which wouldn’t be obvious to other people. For example, a mausoleum and a temple were found underground at Southwark. ‘The buildings had been painted with red ochre, pre-dating the ox-blood tiles of the London Underground stations.’ Referring later to these tiles, Ackroyd says, ‘The association between the underworld and animal sacrifice has been maintained.’

My admiration for Peter Ackroyd should be well known but goodness, what a dark mind. He’s a man you somehow can’t imagine sitting peacefully in a garden but, like Dickens, endlessly tramping the streets of London and feeding off them. He ends here with ‘London is built on darkness.’ And by the way, don’t read this remarkable book if you suffer from coprophobia.

Today's book I would most like to read is this one. How my wish list grows.
I've been a huge admirer of Peter Ackroyd ever since Hawksmoor first knocked me for six. I haven't enjoyed all his books equally but I love London, a Biography so much that vast as it is, I've read it twice. I also love his biography of Dickens, even though I think that Claire Tomalin is right and he is wrong about Ellen Ternan.