In ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889), Oscar Wilde's character Vivian observes that ‘at present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects’. When these words were written, London was about to pass from one transport era to another as steam power was replaced by electricity. The steam underground railways of the capital had been in existence for 25 years, spreading from their original inner-city Metropolitan Railway as far as Richmond and Wimbledon and across the River Thames to New Cross, to Willesden Green in the north-west and Whitechapel in the East End. The underground had received plentiful coverage in Victorian newspapers and journals but it was only in the 1880s that underground writing emerged. This appeared in the fiction of George Gissing who began to offer a number of perspectives on the emergent underground network. In doing so, he constructed a key thread in the new genre of underground writing: an underworld which, like Wilde's fog, had not existed before. He was the first novelist to engage with the underground railway in a sustained way and his fictional depiction drew on much contemporary literary and sociological commentary. Gissing effectively manufactured a new underground that was able to live on in cultural terms far beyond the last days of underground steam railways.