Post-Victorian Tremors: Urban Mobilities in Virginia Woolf’s The Years

This chapter reads selected presences of metropolitan public transport in Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years. In line with the overall aims of the present volume, it investigates how the stresses undergone by real cities in times of crisis emerge in texts we call literary. Their emergence in The Years could be understood via a notion I label as tremors. By this I mean that in metropolitan daily life at identifiable historical moments as described by Woolf, fault lines emerge indicating disturbances in the underlying structure of the city. These are accompanied by premonitions of events such as the First World War and the break-up of the United Kingdom caused by Irish independence. Through descriptions of urban mobilities which could seem repetitive, small scale and historically insignificant—bus rides; the pedestrianism of commuters heading for railway stations—Woolf alludes to the situation of imperial London within a corrupt or ill-founded overall structure.