Dark deeds on the District Line

In 1863, the London underworld was revolutionised — not the crime statistics, but the literal underworld, when the first underground railway opened, with trains running, unimaginably, beneath the surface of the earth. This was, as the Times had pointed out when plans were first mooted, as silly as thinking of machines that could fly through the air, or of battles that could be fought in the sky, or trains running in tunnels under the Channel.

By 1865, it was possible to travel between Farringdon Street and Padding- ton without seeing daylight; within a decade areas as far north as Swiss Cottage, as far west as Kensington and Hammersmith, as far east as Liverpool Street, all had the new ‘Underground Railway’, and, from being unimaginable, underground travel was a daily method of transport for thousands of commuters and housewives, who made their decisions to travel based solely on the congestion of the London streets, and their ability to tolerate tunnels filled with coal-smoke and gas-fumes from the engines and carriage-lights.

With mass transit underground, though, came the sort of dangers that lurked above ground too: fire, theft, even murder. (The Fenians were quick to understand the possibilities for spreading terror in enclosed spaces: they exploded nitroglycerine in the tunnel of the District Railway soon after it opened, with three further explosions in the two decades that followed. We must hope that al-Qa’eda are not students of Victoriana.)

The same cannot be said of Lee Jackson, who in his second foray into Victorian death brings Inspector Decimus Webb, the velocipede-riding detective, to solve a brutal ‘Railway Murder’. Jackson runs the wonderful www.victorianlondon.org website, which is a cornucopia of little-known Victorian texts highlighting aspects of daily life in the 19th century, and it is clear from A Metropolitan Murder that he has studied them to good effect.