When the novelist George Gissing was lampooned by Punch in 1885 the journal did not know that it had in its sights the man who would become the fictional cartographer of the Metropolitan Railway, the world's first underground system. Two weeks after an article punningly entitled ‘Gissing the Rod’ in which the author was taken to task for his belief in the ‘artistic conscience’, Punch offered a caustic ‘ballade’ called ‘By Underground’ and a cartoon lambasting the Metropolitan Railway, one of its perennial targets. Just under ten years later, Gissing published his novel In the Year of Jubilee, containing an equally scathing account of the underground in which he compared King's Cross underground station to the infernal underworld of Hades. Gissing's topography featured demonic steam engines that pulled untold numbers of ‘lost’ commuters; windswept platforms that seemed to confine his characters; a cacophony of voices, banging doors and screeching wheels; and a pandemonium of advertising posters, steam, smoke and soot that swirled around the station. It was a metaphor for the psychological inferno into which Gissing pitched characters that were condemned to travel in endless circles.

Gissing's observations on King's Cross were a watershed in the development of writing about the subterranean railway.