Great Excavations

摘要

'The people - where will they go?' Ebenezer Howard asked in Garden Cities of To-Mor-row. His question was accompanied by a now-famous diagram with magnets pulling three ways: to the town (yuck!), to the country (bo-o-oring!), and to the town-country of the garden cities. It was a question that had an answer built in. But the diagram should really have had a spectral fourth arrow, the arrow of Victorian fears and nightmares. It would point down, into the earth. As the 19th century wore on, with its mines and cuttings and excavations and tubed railways and general mighty delvings, fears grew that the people - working people in particular - might end up living permanently underground, either by force or, worse, because they preferred it. This is a fear that finds repeated expression in the fantastical literature of the time, most notably in HG Wells' The Time Machine, in which the subterranean, vicious Morlocks run the machinery that supports the idle, decadent Eloi on the surface of a far-future earth. Much the same fear can be seen in Fritz Lang's film Metropolis: toiling subterranean proles, buried engines, periodic eruptions of savagery.