Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature)

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature

1. Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion ‘Our Feverish Contact’ Allan Conrad Christensen 2. Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politcs of Literacy Jean Fernandez 3. Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry F. Elizabeth Gray 4. Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era Lara Baker Whelan

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

Lara Baker Whelan

New York

London

First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Whelan, Lara Baker, 1966– Class, culture and suburban anxieties in the Victorian era / by Lara Baker Whelan. p. cm.—(Routledge studies in nineteenth-century literature ; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Middle class in literature. 3. Suburbs in literature. 4. Suburban life in literature. 5. Middle class— Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. Suburbs—Great Britain—History—19th century. 7. Suburban life—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. PR878.M53W47 2009 823'.8093552—dc22 2009024921 ISBN 0-203-86402-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-80217-2 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-86402-6 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-80217-8 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-86402-9 (ebk)

To Paul, who was there in the beginning, and to John Raymond and Bonnie Victoria, who helped see it to the end.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments 1

2

Introduction: “Scenes of Peace and Quietude,” or Victorian Fantasies of Suburban Utopia

ix xi

1

Dying of One’s Neighbors: Victorian Suburban Literature and Its Deconstruction of the Suburban Ideal

24

Where There Is No Profligacy, Drunkenness or Crime: Representations of the Working Class and Origins of Suburban Anxieties

40

Cracks in the Façade: Looking Behind the Cult of the Picturesque in Victorian Suburban Fiction

59

Controlling “That Region of Irregular Bodies”: The Uninhabitable House and the Suburban Ghost Story

75

6

Gothic Terrors: The Suburban Ruin and Sensation Fiction

99

7

Sublime Suburbs

120

8

Conclusion: The Death of the Suburban Ideal and the Rise of the “New” Suburban, 1880–1914

140

3

4

5

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

159 161 167 175

Figures

1.1

Nineteenth-century London expansion.

1.2

Ealing, 1881: an example of an ideal suburb.

15

2.1

The vision of the City from which suburbanites wanted to escape.

25

The crowds in Regent’s Park, bordering the northern suburbs.

36

2.3

The crowds on Hampstead Heath.

37

3.1

Umbrella mender and ginger-beer sellers on Clapham Common, 1877.

44

2.2

4

6.1

Gustave Doré’s view of London from a train, 1872.

109

A.1

Outline Map of Greater London.

159

Acknowledgments

This work could not have been fi nished, or even begun, without the help of the following people: Dr. Barbara Gates, whose support, constructive criticism and timely suggestions helped me take this work further than I ever foresaw; Dr. Michael Cotsell, whose ability to suggest entirely new vistas of significance with a single comment gave me the insight I needed to pull all the various threads into a coherent whole; Dr. Carl Dawson, whose unwillingness to be easily convinced encouraged me to always think of the audience beyond myself; Dr. Julie Early, whose work and collegial support inspired me to keep on, knowing I was not the only one who found the suburbs a fascinating subject; and all those friends and colleagues who so generously invested time and effort in critiquing the many incarnations of this work. Also to Dr. John Spiers, whose positive response to portions of this work helped sustain its growth. Thanks also to the University of Delaware Memorial Library staff, Berry College and the Interlibrary Loan staff, without whom this project would not have been possible. Finally, parts of the Introduction and Chapter 5 were fi rst published as “Between Worlds: Class Identity and Suburban Ghost Stories, 1850– 1880” in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 35.1 (March 2002): 133–148 and are reprinted with permission; parts of Chapter 8 were fi rst published as “The Clash of Space and Culture: Gissing and the Rise of the ‘New’ Suburban” in Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England, ed. John Spiers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and are reprinted with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

1

Introduction “Scenes of Peace and Quietude,” or Victorian Fantasies of Suburban Utopia

Imagine yourself walking down a street in the London metropolitan area, circa 1860. Mud sucks at your feet as you walk; the straw that has been put down to absorb moisture has long since outlasted its usefulness and merely gets in your way, releasing a faint whiff of mildew at every step. When the breeze picks up, you get pungent reminders that there is an open sewer or a multitude of bad drains, or both, somewhere nearby, and you begin to wonder just what, exactly, has made the streets so muddy. As you pick your way carefully down the street, trash whirls around your legs and ankles, and occasionally you see what you believe to be half a plate or a bit of teacup scudding across one of the many empty lots. Broken bricks, bottles and a variety of discarded building materials lie in abandoned heaps at street corners and in side yards, and although you cannot see them, you get the distinct impression that someone in the area is raising pigs. Having reached your destination, a small semi-detached brick house with a paved garden, you follow the gravel path to the front door and knock. Upon entering you immediately sense, both by feel and by smell, the damp that pervades the house. While you wait to be announced, you nudge the hall carpet with your foot; immediately a bevy of black beetles and centipedes scurries for cover. You shiver as a draft of cold air blows across your neck, and you wonder how anyone could be expected to stay healthy living in a home, and a neighborhood, such as this. Where are you? Seven Dials? Shoreditch? Some run-down lane in the East End? Might it surprise you to fi nd that you have been visiting one of the newest suburban developments in Shepherd’s Bush, or Belsize Park, or Tooting Bec? It certainly surprised many of those middle-class families who moved to the suburbs in the second half of the nineteenth century, looking for peace, quiet, privacy and an alternative to the unhealthy atmosphere of the City. Instead of a green suburban idyll, what they found, in many cases, was a repetition of the evils of urban living they had been trying to escape: bad drains, little public sanitation, poorly constructed houses that were as damp as any lower-class hovel in the city, and less privacy than they had been led to expect. Certainly, there was no guarantee that the neighbors were as respectable as they might have wished. Of course, it is not

2

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

unreasonable to fi nd that space on the boundary between urban and rural would include many of the qualities of both. If we subtract the garbage and building debris, the preceding description of a typical suburban house could as easily be of a cottage in a sleepy agricultural village as an urban two-up two-down. However, the Victorian middle class expected more of their suburbs—and suburban space was very much considered “theirs.” That the middle class came into its own in Britain in the nineteenth century is well documented, but despite its continued consolidation of power and cultural dominance throughout the century, the issue of class identification—who was in, who was out and how one was to know—remained a contested issue, primarily among those who considered themselves “in.” As membership in the middle class grew throughout the century, and as members of that class tried to fi nd ways both to defi ne themselves in contrast to other classes and to solidify their power base, the suburb and its attendant lifestyle came to represent everything that was vital to the middle class’s perception of itself. Cultural, social and literary critics have investigated the ways in which middle-class identity is constructed in Victorian texts for many decades, but very little has been written about the suburbs as a site of the struggle to defi ne and codify class identification in the so-called High Victorian period. Supposedly, the suburb engendered domesticity, provided privacy and protection from the masses, promoted respectability and simulated the country-house lifestyle on a scale that was less grand, less wasteful and altogether more in line with middle-class values of prudence, propriety and comfort than actual country-house living. Presumably, only those who had achieved middle-class status, as defi ned by salary and occupation, could afford to live there, and, as there was nothing there but street upon street of houses, no one but those in the middle class would want to go there. This was the theory; the reality turned out to be quite different. The notion that the nineteenth-century suburbs might have something interesting to tell us about the development of Victorian culture remained relatively uninvestigated until the last third of the twentieth century. In the 1970s, several geographers and sociologists, led by H. J. Dyos, became interested in the Victorian suburb as a historical artifact and studied exactly who moved into and out of the suburbs, what kinds of businesses were established, what rents were charged, how many families lived in each house, how long houses remained unlet and other minutiae of Victorian suburban life. What they found was surprising, to say the least. Rather than a vast band of quiet middle-class households, what these scholars found was a constantly shifting, economically unstable, socially heterogeneous space where once-respectable middle-class neighborhoods could become working-class refuges within ten years, and full-blown slums within forty. Knowing what suburban realities were, where and, perhaps more importantly, what was the Victorian response to suburban living? We should expect to see this response emerge in a variety of mid-century texts, given that the Victorian middle class had invested heavily in suburbia1 (in every

Introduction

3

sense) based on an idealized notion of suburban living that was not always manifested in reality. In truth, we do not have to look very hard to fi nd the response—writing about the suburbs abounds in a wide variety of texts, both fictional and not, throughout the Victorian period. The London suburb came into its own in the last third of the nineteenth century, and not coincidentally the number of literary works that take the suburb as their subject increases dramatically during this same period. This project is an attempt to resurrect at least part of the discourse of the suburb as a space of cultural contention by examining the literature produced around and about the subject. At the same time, this work aims to recontextualize Victorian fiction for modern readers within the framework of middle-class anxieties about suburban space and what it signified. Although suburbs developed around every major city in England and most cities in Ireland, Scotland and Wales during the nineteenth century, my own study focuses primarily, although not exclusively, on portrayals of the London suburbs. Other urban centers certainly played an important role in the development of the Victorian city, but London has a special connection to the whole idea of the suburbs. There, the meaning of suburban space continued in flux much longer than it did around any other English urban center, such as Leeds or Manchester, where most development had stopped by 1850 (Burnett 56). In contrast to northern cities, the London suburbs grew fi fty percent per decade between the years 1861 and 1891 (Dyos 19), and Figure 1.1 reflects this growth. According to Gareth Stedman Jones, “the greatest growth in the county of London . . . occurred in the decade 1871–81” (324), with building cycles peaking in 1868 and 1881 (Thompson, Introduction 13). In fact, the suburbs of London were the fastest-growing areas in all of England in the 1870s (Briggs, Victorian 324). This study focuses on literary constructions of the suburb that flourished from immediately before the fi rst boom in the 1850s through about 1880, at the crest of the third boom cycle; it is my argument that during this period writing about the suburbs maintains a fairly consistent confidence that the space can be controlled and/or reclaimed by the middle class. After that period, as I explain in the fi nal chapter, writing about the suburbs, and the people who live there, shifts its tone significantly. The explosive nature of London’s growth is clearly visible when viewed via a succession of detailed street maps published throughout the period. An 1837 map, Environs of London, by Thomas Moule shows a pre-boom London that is clearly contained. A developed area north of the Thames, represented by dark grey blocks, is labeled LONDON in large letters; Regent’s Park sits neatly on its northwest border. Hyde Park marks the western boundary. On this map, developed London does not extend eastward past Limehouse. South of the Thames, a much smaller developed area is indicated as SOUTHWARK, almost as if it were a separate city. The surrounding area appears to be primarily open fields and green spaces— commons and large parks, such as Richmond, Wimbledon and Wembly,

4

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

Figure 1.1 Nineteenth-century London expansion. Source: Hugh Clout, “Prologue to the Present,” London: Problems of Change, ed. Hugh Clout and Peter Wood (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1986) 34. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education Limited.

to the south and west; marshes and forests, such as Hackney, West Ham and Epping Low, to the east. There is some evidence of the beginnings of ribbon development, indicated by small black squares along major routes; these are most evident westward through Hammersmith toward Brentford, southward through Clapham toward Balham and Tooting Bec, northward toward Stoke Newington and southeastward through Camberwell and down toward Lewisham. But this development does not appear to be making much of an impact on the open spaces beyond the main routes. Cross’s London Guide of 1851 shows how London has crept outward in the intervening fi fteen years since the publication of Moule’s map. As on Moule’s map, “developed” London is indicated by dark-grey boxes indicating blocks of buildings (rather than individual houses). Both Regent’s Park and Hyde Park are now about halfway surrounded by building; Brompton

Introduction

5

and Chelsea are clearly visible as well, whereas on Moule’s map there were only a few dots in this area south of Hyde Park near the river. Northward, Islington and Camden Town, which on Moule’s map were outside the developed area, are now part of it, although just on the northern edge. On the south side of the Thames, Cross’s map also indicates some significant growth south and west; eastward, there appears to be very little change— there is only slightly more grey space east of Limehouse Basin. By the next decade, Stanford’s Library Map of 1862 indicates that Hyde Park has been completely enveloped, while Regent’s Park retains a bit of space to its north, mainly thanks to the Primrose Hill park and cricket grounds. The area between Chelsea and Millbank along the Thames has been completely fi lled in. Highbury is now on the northern edge of expansion, along with Stoke Newington. Eastward, development has edged toward Hackney Common and beyond Mile End. South of the Thames, the leading edge of expansion has come as far south as Streatham and Tooting Bec. Eastward, south of the Thames, there is a line of almost continuous building from Walworth, through Peckham to Greenwich. By the end of the century, as indicated in Stanford’s Map of Central London, 1897, the grey areas extend in an almost continuous mass westward to Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith. The area northwest of Hyde Park— Notting Hill and Kilburn—has been completely fi lled in. Eastward, the areas around London Fields, Hackney and Bethnal Green are also almost entirely grey. Tellingly, the 1897 Stanford map has shifted its center point westward—this Map of Central London puts the junction between Green Park and Hyde Park in the center, while most earlier maps had the junction between the City and Westminster (around where the Strand meets Fleet Street) as their center point. This shift in focus cuts out a good deal of south (Balham, Tooting), north (Stoke Newington) and east (Greenwich) London areas. These changes, both in the physical construction of London and in mapping it, reflect the ways in which the whole idea of what constitutes “London” was in flux throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The unprecedented and uncontrolled growth of London meant that, during the period I investigate, the “limits” of what was urban and what was ex-urban were constantly shifting around London, more than any other city in Great Britain, which engendered real concern about the scope of the change that was being inflicted on London and the surrounding countryside, including whether it would ever stop, or could ever be stopped. This does not exclude other cities from consideration in this work, of course, and I also discuss stories set in the suburbs of Edinburgh, Manchester and Dublin. However, it is worth noting that the authors of those particular works, including Sheridan Le Fanu and Harriet Martineau, either lived permanently or spent significant amounts of time in London during their careers, and so it could be argued that the zeitgeist of that city’s growth influenced their perceptions of suburban growth in other, less volatile, cities.

6

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

But how are we to defi ne what constitutes a “suburb,” precisely? As Gail Cunningham has pointed out, the defi nition may lie largely in perception or attitude, rather than in specific locations (e.g., Islington or Camberwell) or a specific distance from the city center (424). This difficulty is largely the result of the expansion of the city’s boundaries over time; for example, there was a time when Westminster was a village set apart from London proper, but very few Victorians would have seriously considered Westminster a suburb by 1850—it had been fully incorporated into London’s urban space. On the other hand, early in the nineteenth century areas like Herne Hill or Hampstead were considered villages rather than suburbs, but by 1880 their classification had clearly shifted—they are not, like Westminster, part of the City of London, but they are definitely suburbs of it rather than neighboring rural enclaves. Even within the thirty-year period under consideration here, an area like Islington (a village itself in the early part of the century) would have experienced enough growth, especially to its north and east, to make it a question as to whether it was still suburban rather than fully urban. The Victorians themselves defi ned what constituted a “suburb” quite broadly. Some sources, such as London City Suburbs as They Are Today (1893), actually do include Westminster, defi ning “suburb” as anything outside the City proper. Others, such as James Thorpe’s Handbook to the Environs of London (1873) ranged as far afield as Brighton and Cambridge. These authors may have had ideological or practical reasons for the breadth of their defi nitions; the creator of London City Suburbs, Percy Fitzgerald, wanted to insist that a certain rural quality still pervaded much of London, for reasons I discuss in a later chapter, while Thorpe’s defi nition depended mainly on the extent to which a town was easily accessible from London by rail. Indeed, in writing of this period the use of the term “suburb” is somewhat idiosyncratic and possibly generational. When Collins describes an area west of Regent’s Park, east of Edgeware Road and south of St. John’s Wood as a suburb in Hide and Seek (1854), this is clearly based on the area’s having been considered a suburb ten or fi fteen years prior, rather than on its built-up condition at the time of the novel. Similarly, Mrs. Riddell’s designation of the Chelsea area near the Thames as suburban in The Uninhabited House (1875) might not coincide with a younger person’s view of the space, when newer suburbs were being developed as far west as Fulham. How, then, can we use the term usefully, for the very liminality of suburban space is key to its significance in much of the writing about it. If a space is too clearly rural or urban, reading it as suburban may very likely lead to stretching a point or misinterpreting the significance of a scene or setting. If an author himself or herself designates a space as suburban, should we take that at face value? Perhaps, but to do so may lead us to miss nuances or outright contention that would have been more obvious to contemporary readers. Fortunately, there are some common threads in

Introduction

7

many descriptions of suburban space that may lead us to a working (or workable) defi nition. First, many suburban spaces are characterized by evidence of physical, man-made changes to the landscape—this is very often represented as the residue of building, such as scaffolding, half-constructed housing, half-built new roads, “To Let” signs and the typical debris of construction. Sometimes, the changes are wrought not only by new housing developments but also, significantly, by railway construction, which was the single-biggest contributor to the scope of suburban growth in this period. These areas may be experiencing entirely new construction, or they may be pre-existing settlements that are preparing (or being prepared) for growth. So, one criterion for a working defi nition of “suburb” would be that there is new building activity that, to the observer, appears to be transforming the space from what it was to what it is yet to be; in other words, the suburbs are typically physically transitional spaces. What differentiates suburban space from other transitional spaces, such as those constructions sites wonderfully documented by Lynda Nead in Victorian Babylon? As Nead so clearly demonstrates, construction was an unavoidable fact of London life due to the nearly simultaneous civic projects of sewers and underground rail, which entailed physical disruption of urban space on a truly monumental scale. Add this to the slum clearance practiced regularly throughout the period and it could be legitimately argued that all of greater London was more or less under construction. Clearly, new construction alone cannot signify suburban space. Two other considerations come into play: what is being built and for whom. Suburban space is determined primarily by the inhabitants its construction was meant to attract. In the suburbs, both new residences and new train routes were targeted to the middle-class family whose primary bread-winner worked regular hours in an office or shop in London, who all needed reasonably convenient access to the city for work or shopping, and who expected a certain degree of privacy and domestic space. Thus, the new building would have been primarily residential, as opposed to commercial, public or monumental (with the exception of new train stations), and would have been designed for single-family residence. This excludes newly constructed spaces within the city, then, that were intended to provide public services, tenement housing or commercial space. It also excludes areas of development intended for “fashionable” society, who had different expectations of and made different demands on their domestic spaces. For example, the living spaces of the fashionable set had to provide for more servants than the typical middle-class family would have had. Another important aspect of suburban space is multiplicity. One or two new houses, or a sixty-acre fashionable estate, going up in a nearby village would not necessarily constitute a “suburb” as the term was used mid-century. Typically, the new building would consist of ten or more new houses intended for single-family occupancy (not necessarily all built by the same

8

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

builder, however). This building in multiples signifies an expectation of a fairly significant shift in the population of the space in transition. But, we might well ask, what happens when the space has been transformed, when it has become what it was in the process of becoming: the roads are laid, the houses are fi nished, the new occupants have moved in, the trains stop regularly and all signs of construction have been cleared away? Can suburbs only exist in transition from rural to urban? Indeed, this is a difficult question, and the one that caused the most anxiety for contemporary observers of suburban development—for when one suburb had been completed, a new one, just a little farther on, was begun. And, as the middle-class population continued to move farther out, the issue of what happened to the spaces they left behind lay heavy on the minds of many. As suburbs aged, and as their newness wore off, they developed their own characters, which were often quite different from the original intent of the developers. Many lost their middle-class status without necessarily losing their suburban status, while others became more and more clearly urban even when the inhabitants remained largely middle class. And so, fi nally, we come to the intangible aspects of the suburb, those that are most reliant on perception: aesthetics and symbolic distance from the city. Symbolic distance from the city is perhaps the most difficult to quantify, but it is an incontrovertible aspect of suburban-ness that one must feel some sense of separation from urban space. This cannot always be measured in miles or time required to travel between the two. Very often, this aspect is signified by the presence of green space and the absence of noise and traffic, either commercial or residential. As long as a space remained relatively quiet, especially during business hours, and as long as inhabitants of that space retained some access to green spaces in the form of their own gardens as well as public parks, it was likely, if it fit most of the other criteria as well, to be considered suburban. By aesthetics I mean the actual look of suburban space—detached or semi-detached single-family homes with front gardens separating the house from the street, arranged in long rows of streets rather than around squares or plazas. Assuming that a particular space remained a predominantly residential space laid out and used in this way, and assuming that it also retained most of the other characteristics of suburban space discussed here, then it was very likely to retain its suburban designation, even if the inhabitants were not homogenously middle class. In fact, the aesthetics of suburban space play an important role in the middle-class’s conception of the suburb as class marker. This study looks closely at how aesthetic categories from the eighteenth century, such as the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime, continued to impact Victorians’ thinking about space and its putative influence on morals and intellect. A primary means by which these categories fi ltered into Victorian culture was through Ruskin’s numerous attempts to defi ne them in reference to nineteenth-century art and architecture. But Ruskin’s ideas about these categories were based on eighteenth-century philosophies about the opposition of

Introduction

9

the beautiful and the sublime originated by Edmund Burke in 1756. While these theories, and Ruskin’s attempts to work with them or around them, are discussed at length in later chapters, some broad distinctions between categories can usefully be drawn here. Burke’s original opposition between the beautiful and the sublime posited that inherently beautiful objects or vistas made perceivers feel peaceful, calm and at rest, while those that were sublime awakened feelings of awe, discomfort and even terror that were simultaneously somewhat pleasurable. Realizing that there is a broad range of visual stimuli that do not fit comfortably into either of these categories, later-century writers such as William Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Payne Knight formulated a third category: the picturesque. Generally speaking, the picturesque bridges the two other categories, as it focuses on that which is “pretty” in a “rough” way. An example of the difference between the beautiful and the picturesque would be the difference between a Greek temple and a ruin of that same temple, where the original is beautiful in its simplicity of line and form, while the ruin maintains some of that beauty but adds the ruggedness of broken lines and disrupted form (Landow 230). The difference between the picturesque and the sublime, on the other hand, could be said to be primarily one of familiarity. The sublime object shocks and surprises the observer; once the shock has worn off, the irregularity of line and form become “merely” picturesque (Hussey 56). 2 The impact of these categories on the development of the suburban ideal was twofold. In the fi rst place, the beautiful embodied restfulness, and the ideal suburb was supposed to be, above all things, a haven from urban chaos. Representations of the suburban ideal as beautiful cemented the connection of rest from labor (as a privilege of class) with an exclusively middle-class space. Secondly, both the beautiful and the picturesque were categories associated with Taste and Culture (Hussey 28), traits of the moneyed and landed classes that early suburban estates strove to emulate on a smaller, more modest and therefore more moral (because less extravagant and ostentatious) scale. As such, the presentation of the ideal suburb as either beautiful or, more typically, picturesque connected it directly to both the moral and intellectual, as well as the fi nancial, status of the inhabitants. As an example of how the beautiful was used to defi ne a space aesthetically and morally, in Oliver Twist (1837), Dickens draws on these distinctions when creating his two parallel worlds: the city of Sikes and Fagin versus the rural idyll of Mr. Brownlow and the Maylies. Oliver’s experience of the city, especially in his journey across it with Sikes, consists of “fi lth,” “mire” and fog (155). The city is a “mass” of “countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low description . . . unwashed, unshaven, squalid and dirty” (156). Space outside the city, however, is associated with rest and health. Dickens is enthusiastic regarding

10

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft tranquillity . . . felt in the balmy air, and among the green hills and rich woods . . . Who can tell how scenes of peace and quietude sink into the minds of painworn dwellers in close and noisy places, and carry their own freshness, deep into their jaded hearts! (238–9)

This generalized word-picture of a classically beautiful landscape echoes elements of earlier-century Romantic poetry or landscape painting and emphasizes the qualities of peace and tranquillity that were supposed to be found in suburban retreats from the city. It is in spaces like these that Oliver, and later Smike in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), can at last fi nd peace and sound the depths of their innate goodness. It is that connection to “goodness” that completes the template of the idealized spaced, in the sense that the space actually configures those who inhabit it. This idea had its origins in representations of the restorative powers of a quiet life away from the city. For example, the language Dickens uses to describe the process of Oliver Twist’s recovery at the Maylies’ cottage retreat would have been seductive to middle-class readers: It was a happy time. The days were peaceful and serene; the nights brought with them neither fear nor care; . . . [Oliver] would walk with Mrs. Maylie and Rose, and hear them talk of books; . . . he would work hard, in a little room which looked into the garden. . . . And when Sunday came, . . . there was the little church, in the morning, with the . . . sweet-smelling air stealing in at the low porch. . . . The poor people were so neat and clean. . . . Then there were the walks, as usual, and many calls at the clean houses of the labouring men. . . . There was fresh grounsel, too, for Miss Maylie’s birds . . . there was rare cricket-playing, sometimes on the green; or failing that, there was always something to do in the garden, or about the plants. . . . It is no wonder that, by the end of that short time, Oliver Twist had become completely domesticated. . . . (239–41) The domesticating atmosphere of a lifestyle which included gardening, fresh air, exercise and time for intellectual improvement was a great enticement to those families who had, or thought they had, achieved middle-class status to get as close as they could to this world. The beautiful is also the most moral of the aesthetic categories, because it is based on reason and intellect rather than emotion, and also because it is the most “pure” in terms of its “simplicity.” Thus, the ideal suburb, which was built on this model, was perceived as capable of exerting a moral influence on its inhabitants. The suburb, as middle-class property, came to stand for middle-class propriety. The moments where the idealized picturesque or beautiful representations of the suburb met and clashed with the lived experience of suburban

Introduction

11

space drives this study. My primary objective is to show how a thematic developed, in many different kinds of literature, in which the suburb was figured as a site of terror as middle-class anxiety about the lack of social homogeneity in the suburbs grew. At the same time, as the suburb became gothic (arguably a category that borrows from both the picturesque and the sublime) or even sublime territory, literary constructions of suburban space use a variety of techniques to reassure readers that the suburb was, in fact, a place where outsiders could be controlled and where middle-class values could be established and enforced. Much of how we perceive the suburb as it is presented to us in Victorian writing depends on a thorough understanding of two things: fi rst, the dichotomy between the suburban ideal and suburban realities and second, the persistence of that ideal in the face of abundant evidence that it could hardly be said to have really existed. This study, therefore, falls into two parts. The fi rst discusses evidence that comes to us through periodicals, pamphlets and other sources about suburban living and perceptions. This section (which includes this introduction and Chapters 2 and 3) shows what it meant to live in a “real” Victorian suburb. It also demonstrates how the elements of the suburban ideal (privacy, cleanliness, greenery, respectability), in their relation to culturally embedded ideas about the beautiful and picturesque, gained so strong a foothold in the Victorian middle class that contemplating its failure caused intense anxiety. As the fi nal part of the fi rst section, Chapter 4 looks at the literary representations of suburban façades, particularly in the work of Wilkie Collins, as one example of the ways anxieties about suburban failure to ensure middle-class morals and behavior could be portrayed in literature of this period. To provide further context for the impact of suburbia on Victorian fiction, the Appendix contains a map indicating the key locations discussed throughout the book. The second part of the study (Chapters 5, 6 and 7) traces other ways this anxiety is represented in literature. In this section, I show that in the period of greatest suburban growth we see the appearance of what I call the suburban ghost story, which exists in part to reinscribe middle-class norms of behavior and lifestyle on suburban space. While the chapter on ghost stories (Chapter 5) focuses on a wide variety of both canonical and lesserknown authors, most of whom published their ghost stories in periodicals like Household Words, All the Year Round and Bentley’s Miscellany during the period under investigation, special attention is paid to the work of a lesser-known writer, Charlotte Riddell, and to two of the ghost stories of Sheridan Le Fanu (“Green Tea” and “The Familiar”). Riddell and Le Fanu, both Dublin natives who become Londoners, construct narratives of the suburb that illustrate the ways middle-class anxieties about “otherness” translated into ghost stories during this period. In these stories, ghosts are created by or depict suburban interlopers; to rid the house, and the neighborhood, of such interlopers, an upwardly mobile middle-class male exorcises the ghost and restores the space to its ideal state.

12

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

Chapter 6 shows how the thematic of the suburban ghost story resonates in sensation fiction, primarily Dickens’s and Collins’s later novels where narratives take place entirely or partly in suburbia. These writers, in addition to other figures such as poet James Thomson and essayist George Sala, develop the “gothic” elements of the suburban ghost story with more complexity. In these longer works, for example, the ability of the middle-class male to domesticate or order suburban space is called into question (to a greater extent by Collins than by Dickens), and although in the end the hero and/or the narrative structure expel the invaders, one is less certain that the neighborhood has been restored to what it was “supposed” to be. Overall, the sixth chapter investigates how the gothic tradition of the earlier part of the century merges into the concerns of sensation fiction at mid- to late-century, centering on the question of middle-class identity. In effect, the sensation novel worked in tandem with the more “realistic” domestic novel to establish middle-class norms of behavior; domestic fiction gave a straightforward behavioral model, while sensation fiction helped readers identify that which did not belong in middle-class spaces. The suburbs come into play here because, as an embodiment of middleclass identity, they could easily be threatened, in the eyes of middle-class readers, by transgressive figures, such as Bradley Headstone in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend or Lydia Gwilt in Collins’s Armadale. The threat of this Other defi nes the gothic as a genre and illuminates the motivation for sensation fiction’s use of the gothic mode to describe suburban space. Next, I argue that the contention over the cultural significance of suburban space touched such a deep vein of anxiety for both middle-class writers and readers that the suburb became, in some forms of fiction, a mode of the sublime, combining a terror of the unknown with anxiety about how and where to establish limits on suburban habitation. As a major figure of aesthetic theory throughout the period, Ruskin’s ideas about the sublime, the picturesque and the gothic offer insight into how the sublime suburb functions as a cultural moment in the period under discussion. Having established Ruskin’s impact on the Victorian sense of aesthetic categories, Chapter 7 then focuses almost entirely on the work of Dickens and Collins and how these authors emphasized aspects of dissonance between suburban expectations and the figures that inhabit their suburban spaces. This dissonance is at the heart of the sublime experience, and I argue that it was this kind of sublimity, aimed at middle-class conceptions of culture and identity, that typifies Victorian understanding of the sublime and puts it entirely at odds with more idealized visions of the beautiful or even picturesque suburb. Sensation fiction is “sensational” in part because it provides criticism of suburban culture and expectations. Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, one of the centerpieces of Chapter 7, represents perhaps the first great novel of the suburbs. I will examine Dickens’s use of figures that disrupt middle-class propriety as peculiarly suburban in nature, such as Bradley Headstone and,

Introduction

13

in a different sense, Lizzie Hexam, and the ways these figures help correct suburban problems of displacement. On the other hand, the failure of the suburban ideal as portrayed in Collins’s novels raises the specter of the abyss in several senses: fi rst, that those who have already plunged into the abyss and become lower class may invade the suburb at will; second, that there may already be members of those lower classes living among “us”; third, that it may be easier than one wants to imagine to fall into that abyss; and fi nally, in all cases, that no one has control over what happens in or to suburbs as they rise and fall. Finally, I will argue that the use of the suburban ideal as an effective or realistic way of marking class boundaries was such an obvious failure that the very grounds by which one measured class shifted from location to culture after 1880. Education and aesthetic sensibility received renewed emphasis as class markers, a move that recalls in part the previous century’s defi nitions of what constituted membership in the upper classes. In fact, by the mid-1880s, the culturally elite began to move back into the urban centers and to establish literary and intellectual circles, such as the Bloomsbury Group, in a trend that paved the way for Modernism’s emphasis on art as a product meant for the enlightened mind. As this shift occurred, the suburb becomes not an escape but a wasteland of petty bourgeoisie who had neither the money nor the education to break into the upper circles. Examples of this kind of writing about the suburbs abound, but we can look in particular to E. M. Forster’s Howards End and George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee as touchstones of the dominant culture’s change in attitude toward the suburb. In these works, those who wish to move upward socially struggle with issues of intellect and aesthetic education rather than of location and income.3 We can also note the almost total disappearance of the suburban ghost-story structure I outline in this work; ghost stories continue to appear in popular periodicals and even to be set in the suburbs, but the focus is no longer on establishing the security of suburban space. This, along with the decline in the popularity of sensation fiction, could be seen as indicators that the issue of invaders in suburban space had been resolved at least in part by moving the goalposts, so to speak, or shifting the grounds on and by which cultural dominance was enacted.

DEFINING THE SUBURBAN IDEAL Of course, the suburb was not by any means a Victorian creation. Up until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, however, the word suburb signified “a place of inferior, debased and especially licentious habits” (OED). At least through the middle of the eighteenth century, for example, the suburbs of London housed the theater district and the red-light district and were the haunts of prostitutes, actors, sailors, thieves and those of the lower classes without any particular occupation. Outside the safety of the walls, beyond

14

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

the security of the gates, the suburbs were by defi nition an uncontrolled and uncontrollable space. To go “slumming” was to visit the area outside the City proper.4 In fact, prior to the eighteenth century, the suburbs were the most lawless districts (Dyos 34). But as English cities became more densely crowded, especially with skilled and casual laborers, and as the limits of the city became less well defi ned due to the pressure of overpopulation, the city itself began to be seen as a breeding ground of “debased habits” and other contagions, both moral and physical. As F. M. L. Thompson puts it in The Rise of Suburbia, from the middle of the eighteenth century, the great suburban seachange had started in London, the decisive social upgrading which made places distanced from the city centre desirable residential areas for those who could afford it rather than mere dumping grounds for the unfortunates unable to live in town houses. (2) In other words, a shift in perceptions about space had happened: urban space in London ceased to be considered ordered, safe and civilized—it was, instead, disordered by the masses of people pouring into it from the country, unsafe in terms of both property and bodily health, and uncivilized. Instead, the green spaces outside London were seen to provide the literal breathing room that would allow order, safety and, most of all, control of one’s personal space. There were four basic types of suburban development during this period: built-up villages such as Hampstead, Richmond, Greenwich and Battersea; “ribbon” development along main roads that created enclaves like Islington and Fulham; estate development, which fi lled in areas behind the “ribbon” developments—Camden Town and Kensington New Town are examples of this kind of development; and country villa building farther away from the city (Burnett 108). At the beginning of the great suburban shift, those who could afford to move away from the city (i.e., those who could keep a horse and carriage and had steady and certain income) moved to country towns within a reasonable driving or riding distance of the metropolis. Others, slightly less wealthy, removed to within walking distance of their jobs, to areas where there was just enough “nature” to maintain the fiction of country living if the windows of the house were positioned strategically. Later, however, with the expansion of the commuter rail system, suburban living became accessible to many, many more urban inhabitants, and speculative builders were taking full advantage of this growing market. By mid-century, the Victorian suburbs had become associated with an escape from the worst of the city: the noise, dirt and disease of the urban vision made most familiar to us by Dickens. Of course, the fartherflung suburbs had always been the retreat of city dwellers when sickness threatened, but now people took up permanent residence there as a kind of preventative remedy against disease, which was now seen as a constant

Introduction

15

presence in urban air. The Victorian suburbs were also associated with the middle class’s efforts to defi ne itself as a separate sector of Victorian society. Hence, the Victorian suburbs were conceived and designed as spaces the poor would never inhabit. The suburb was imagined as a space that enabled its inhabitants to walk the narrow line between constant and uncontrolled contact with the urban “residuum” and rural isolation from the sources of capital. Based on the purported success of this balancing act, the middle class invested heavily in suburban building and in the social ideology of the suburbs. Three interdependent elements made up the scaffolding on which the suburban mythology was based: physical environment, structural environment and social environment.

SUBURBAN IDEAL: PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT The middle-class sense of respectability depended on privacy; in part this was a result of defi ning domestic space as single-family space against the lower class’s tendency to live in rooms or subdivided housing. Privacy was also a way of not being seen, or not putting oneself in a position to be

Figure 1.2 Ealing, 1881: an example of an ideal suburb. Note the fencing and shrubbery for privacy and the focus on this street as a quiet family environment. Reproduced with permission of the London Borough of Ealing Arts, Heritage and Library Service.

16

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

noticed by “the public,” which, especially for women, could be one way to lose one’s character. Finally, privacy had been, until the turn of the century, a privilege of the rich and, as such, it was a privilege with which the middle class wanted to be associated. Yet, not everyone could afford to surround a house with acres of parkland. Instead, the highest ideal of suburban space was a garden suburb of semi-detached or detached villas and cottages with grounds. Each house would have been surrounded by a wall to keep out the sight of neighbors, with the goal of forging an illusion of country living. The epitome of the suburban ideal is presented at the end of The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), when Mr. Pickwick retires to Dulwich, a spacious southern suburb that even by 1897 still retained much of its green space. Of Pickwick’s new house, Dickens writes, Everything was so beautiful! The lawn in front, the garden behind, the miniature conservatory, the dining-room, and above all the study with its pictures and easy chairs, and odd cabinets, and queer tables, and books out of number, with a large cheerful window opening upon a pleasant lawn and commanding a pretty landscape, dotted here and there with little houses almost hidden by the trees. . . . Everything was so beautiful, so compact, so neat, and in such exquisite taste . . . (895) What is described here is country living on an appropriately modest scale— “compact,” screened, green, comfortable and, as Dickens emphasizes not once but twice, beautiful. Molly Hughes, who grew up in North London in the 1870s, describes the suburban ideal as “some spot that was ‘country’ and yet provided with a few fast trains to town” (216). Sir Charles Eastlake (a.k.a. Jack Easel) describes another version of this ideal, apparently without any intentional irony, in his autobiography, Our Circle and Square (1895): I feel thankful that . . . I am able to live [relatively cheaply] in a light, well-ventilated home [5]. . . . In our little domicile there is, at least, plenty of light from the staircase window, and if the dining-room door is open, you look right through the windows . . . on to the garden, giving the uninitiated visitor a transient impression that the house stands in its own grounds [18]. . . . A sort of rus in urbe character still clings to [the main shopping street]. It is like a street in some lazy country town. . . . If you live in Dexter Square and present your card, they nod with deference and say it is all right. You belong to the neighbourhood and the neighbourhood is respectable. (Easel 233–3) The atmosphere here tallies closely with the rural idyll sought by so many. Eastlake calls it a “sylvan paradise, lying in the midst of noisy, smoky London.” There he extols the virtues of sitting “under the shade of a fine

Introduction

17

chestnut tree laden with blossom” and hearing “the notes of a real thrush or blackbird” (Easel 240). The connection here between “paradise” and the picturesque grounds of this suburban home (no longer beautiful because the aspect is narrow and the line of sight broken) reflects eighteenth-century standards of taste in domestic architecture, albeit on a less aristocratic scale. In fact, it is in part the illusion of a wider prospect and a more rural setting that makes Eastlake’s representation of his home ideally picturesque because it is constructed. The delight Eastlake takes in this illusion and his complacency about its appropriateness to a suburban setting coincide with middle-class attempts to engender an upper-class aesthetic sensibility in their domestic environment. Thompson argues that there can be “no doubt that detached and semidetached houses built for single-family occupation are of the suburban essence, and that such houses did not exist before the nineteenth century” (8). The fi rst housing of this type was planned in the 1790s for St. John’s Wood, but was not built until 1815. Thompson adds, It is arguable, also, that it was only in the setting of this kind of house, where the family could distance itself from the outside world in its own private fortress behind its own garden fence and privet hedge and yet could make a show of outward appearances that was sure to be noticed by the neighbours, that the suburban lifestyle of individual domesticity and group-monitored respectability could take hold. (8) Indeed, it was the combined emphasis on privacy and wanting observers to notice one’s respectability that caused so many confl icts in the suburban environment and made the issue of neighbors one of the most troubling to suburbanites.

SUBURBAN IDEAL: STRUCTURAL ENVIRONMENT The ideal suburban home was a kind of country estate in miniature, as Pickwick’s Dulwich home demonstrates. The diminutiveness of suburban living had actually become a standing joke as the century drew to a close. For example, about fi fteen years after Eastlake published his paean to suburban living, Howard Keble invented the fictional family, the Smiths of Surbiton, whose “ideal” suburban life was fondly satirized in a 1906 novel of the same name. He describes their house, The Pleasance, in South London, as having “[a] little garden in the front, . . . and [a] rather larger garden at the back. There was the pretty little drawing-room, with the little French windows opening on to the tiny balcony. There were the airy kitchen, the five bedrooms, and the dainty little bathroom” (15). Yes, the homes were small, but they included all the elements of larger country estates, including rooms for ladies (drawing rooms and morning rooms), rooms for men

18 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era (libraries and studies), rooms for children and even rooms, squeezed under the eaves, for servants. But the “little-ness” of this arrangement could be considered picturesque if represented in the right attitude, and certainly this model emphasized privacy within doors as much as the wall surrounding the bit of garden enforced privacy without. Floor plans were designed to offer family members protection from encounters with servants, the nursery and the kitchen. As Leonore Davidoff notes, Servants were separated behind soundproofed baize doors in the back regions of the house and children were confi ned to the nurseries (even if this was no more than one small upstairs room). . . . In larger houses this took the form of male study or smoking-rooms for men, a ladies’ boudoir, [and] separate staircases and water closets. . . . (51)5 All of this privacy and separation, both within doors and without, meant that Victorian suburbs would not have engendered the same kind of “neighborhood community” that we might expect from modern suburbs today. Yet there is no question that Victorian suburbs contained a good many people living in very close proximity. To become too intimate with one’s community would endanger one’s sense of privacy, but, on the other hand, one must know who one’s neighbors are in order to feel that true separation from contact with urban “contamination” has been achieved. How to strike a balance?

SUBURBAN IDEAL: SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT For the Victorian suburbanite, the more private the neighborhood, the better. The most desirable course of action, according to one contemporary expert on the suburbs, was “to treat his neighbor as himself in the matter of conduct, but not to know him personally if he can in any way decently avoid doing so” (Panton 17). Ruskin’s family, according to one modern commentator, “saw almost nothing” of their neighbors when living in their “three-storey [sic] semi-detached house at Herne Hill” (Sheppard 107). The Smiths of Surbiton are described as “on nodding terms with fifty people, on visiting terms with twenty, and on ‘dropping in’ terms with two,” their immediate neighbors (Keble 34). All accounts seem to confi rm that this pattern was fairly typical. Suburbanites wanted to be seen by all as respectable and did not want to risk endangering this image by too-close familiarity with “outsiders” who might be quick to pass judgment. Overall, then, the suburban ideal encouraged a kind of domestic isolation that deviated in almost every conceivable way from the urban world of business. It contrasted the soothing elements of the beautiful and the sophisticated charm of the picturesque with the chaos and “commonness”

Introduction

19

of the cities. The suburban ideal became, therefore, one of the touchstones of Victorian middle-class culture, and we can see its importance in works of non-fiction that attempt to evaluate the relative merits of Victorian suburbs at mid- to late century.

DECODING THE VICTORIAN SUBURB This triumvirate of ideal elements—physical, structural and social—had a direct effect on how the suburb was portrayed throughout the century, on what was emphasized and what was ignored. Guides to the suburbs published from about 1850 on, some general and some quite specific, can give us an excellent sense of how aspiring suburbanites may have “decoded” writing about the suburbs in order to fi nd the perfect home. Alfred Cox’s 1853 The Landlord and Tenant’s Guide: A Compendium of Information upon the Procuring, Occupying and Disposing of Estates and Houses does not mention the suburbs specifically in its title, but it has a section of alphabetical listings of suburbs, with brief commentary on location, nearest rail station (if any), local churches and population. Cox also emphasizes elevation and soil, not only because the information would be useful to builders, but also because potential suburbanites focused intensely on air and aridity—they wanted dry homes caressed by breezes that would repel any diseased air wafting in from London. This information helped middle-class families establish to what extent the suburban ideal was possible in any of the areas listed. For example, Cox’s listing for Clapham tells us that Clapham Common contains 202 acres and is “well planted with trees and furze [which is] highly advantageous to the health of the inhabitants.” We also learn that there are “many desirable mansions on the roads leading to Richmond . . .” and that “Clapham has long enjoyed the reputation of being the residence of many wealthy families, retired merchants, &c., whose abodes form numerous villas, detached, with extensive pleasure-grounds.” The water is of “superior quality,” “the places of worship are four, connected with the Establishment, and six for the various denominations of Dissenters; those for the Independents and Roman Catholics being recently erected, and extremely handsome buildings” (220). Cox also notes that omnibuses run every ten minutes, the railway is two miles from the Common, and the population is 16,288 which was assessed Income Taxes of £70,211 (221). Readers can elicit a great deal of information about the desirability of establishing residence in Clapham from Cox’s prose. He tells us that there is the requisite green open space, represented by the Common and by the “extensive pleasure-grounds” of the mansions. For the water to be “superior,” it could not have been drawn from the Thames, another plus. (In an earlier chapter, Cox goes into great detail about which areas draw their water from the Thames and which do not.) There are four C. of E. churches

20 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era compared to eight individual Protestant establishments, which could indicate a predominance of correct religious principle to some, while the number of dissenting places of worship might signify reassuring progress to others. At any rate, Cox makes clear that Catholics and extreme dissenters are newcomers. The frequency of omnibuses throughout the day indicates there are plenty of ladies with the leisure time to run up to London for a day of shopping, since men of the house would only need omnibuses in the mornings and evenings. The income-tax figures tell us both the average income level in the district and, by comparing to other districts, the rate of taxation as well. This figure could vary from district to district depending on the poor rates. Much of the concern with the relative “health” of a district was a result of a series of commissioned studies on death rates in various districts of London. An 1850 issue of Household Words published the results of one of these studies, which tied the mortality rates of any district to its elevation above the Thames (higher is better), its population (lower is better), the size of the houses (bigger is better), the state of the sewers, the state of the water and the number of paupers (fewer is better) (Hunt). Hence the concern, as we have seen in Cox’s guide, with population and population density, types of housing, water sources and poor rates in suburban districts. One did not want to escape the contagion of London to end up in an even more deadly district. According to this article, the “least deadly areas” were as follows: Lewisham (“a green suburban parish” south of the Thames), Hanover Square (an urban area made up mostly of retired servants), Hampstead (high elevation northwest of the City), Hackney (northeast of the City, 13 people to an acre compared to Holborn’s 237), Camberwell (an area south of the Thames whose “neighbourhood to green fields compensates for many sanitary evils”), Wandsworth (south), Islington (north), Kensington (west of the City, good water and wealthy inhabitants), the City of London (hardly anyone actually lived there) and St. James’s (an urban area, but one that had its own water) (Hunt 331). Most of the seventeen districts listed as “healthy” in the article are suburbs; not surprisingly, none of the fi fteen least healthy districts were suburban (333). Cox also listed his top ten residential areas, but the details on which Cox concentrates in his Landlord and Tennants Guide show that he writes mainly for the upper tiers of the middle class who were not exclusively concerned with health. After all, they could afford, as the Registrar-General pointed out, to have excellent medical attention. Cox declines to mention any suburbs south of the Thames in his list of top ten districts in which to live, and he does not recommend many northern suburbs. He entirely ignores Camberwell, despite its growth and popularity. Instead, Cox’s list of top ten districts is presented “in order of the social average rank of their respective inhabitants” as determined by the homes and the number of families which live therein (211). Number ten on the list is Lincoln’s Inn Fields, defi nitely an urban area but surrounding a very large park, whose

Introduction

21

residents “still enjoy the benefits of an open situation, and the comfort arising from their substantial construction and handsome dimensions” (213– 4). Throughout his guide, Cox does his best to present the suburbs—with a fairly wide definition of which towns fell into that category—as a solidly middle-class space that fulfi lls the desire for privacy, health and assurance about the status of one’s neighbors. Twenty-three years after Cox’s guide appeared, James Thorne published his Handbook to the Environs of London (1876). Thorne gives a bit more of each area’s history than did Cox, concentrating less on the mansions of the currently wealthy and more on the remnants of aristocracy and other evidence of the town’s existence before the advent of suburbia. He talks about what a town looked like before the influx of villas, and in many cases regrets that what there is to be “seen . . . is ruined by building” (4). For purposes of comparison, we can look at his entry for Clapham, where he remarks that Clapham is “really too close [to London] to be included” as a suburb, but that it is not “completely London-ized yet” (110). Clapham’s population is now 27,347, and the newly established estates of Clapham Park and The Cedars could be considered “Clapham’s Belgravia” (112). As for the history of the area, Thorne remarks that the abolitionists and Bible Society founders built their houses around the Common in the early part of the century, which may have engendered a certain earnestness in the population. He comments that pleasure fairs on the Common had been recently abolished (1873) and that the new parish church is “very ugly” (113). Again, Thorne’s description of Clapham is coded—the suburb is so thoroughly connected to London that it no longer seems to be a retreat from it; the active residents are of a religious and perhaps even puritanical bent, and yet people continue to move there and prosper, as their support of expensive housing like The Cedars shows. As in Cox’s guide, Camberwell does not merit a mention, although by the 1870s it was a thoroughly established suburb—known mainly for its high concentration of clerks. Thorne’s concern with “good residences,” social institutions like schools and philanthropic associations, and the suburban binary of privacy and greenery shows that his readers are also, like Cox’s, of the upper and middle tiers of the middle classes. This explains the omission of Camberwell, which did not fit the social ideal of the middle-class suburb with which both Thorne’s and Cox’s guides concern themselves, for although it was indeed composed of singlefamily homes laid out in rows, and was some distance from the City, it would have been primarily inhabited by clerks; that is, we can imagine Thorne and Cox assuming, the employees of their intended readers rather than their peers. A chatty suburban guide written by Clark William Spencer appeared in 1881, entitled The Suburban Homes of London. Spencer is concerned not only with the economic and social aspects of suburban residences but also with “their society, celebrities, and associations.” The genesis of the guide, Spencer says, was a letter from Sir Robert Peel asking why there was

22

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

not “a good book . . . on celebrated villas in the neighbourhood of London.” But Spencer adds to this a concern for “the stream of arrivals from the country and from all parts of the world who are seeking a home near London” (vi). For this broad group, Spencer hopes his book will provide “hints social, religious, sanitary, and fi nancial, in such a manner as to help the stranger to choose a position suitable to his means and to his taste . . .” (vii). Therefore, Spencer’s book is a combination of a history of suburban space in the manner of Thorne and sanitary and economic information in the manner of Cox. Written only five years after Thorne’s, Spencer’s chapter on Clapham does not make the suburb sound prepossessing. He writes that Clapham is not as “new” as Brixton and that it is quite built up, especially southward, but that the houses are “poor.” Spencer’s guide for judging these matters is the rents; rents in these parts of Clapham ran £10–12 or less per year, which would be considered only by those lowest on the middle-class scale (£100–120 per year income). He remarks that the rail, bus and tram services are excellent and frequent, but that Clapham has high poor rates. He sums up the district by remarking that Clapham would be “excellent for establishing a business” (52–62). Upper levels of the middle classes, looking for that elusive ideal, would dismiss Clapham from their consideration instantly; any space that was moving more toward commercial than residential development would have fallen far from the ideal. Spencer does include a chapter on Camberwell, but he is unstinting in highlighting its drawbacks as a residence. He notes that it used to be “really in the country,” a “city tradesman’s beau ideal of a suburban retreat” but is now (by 1881) almost entirely built up, “due in part to house clearing in the City” (74). This is key information, for if Camberwell has been fi lled up by refugees from slum clearance, then it was exactly the kind of suburb that the middle class had feared.6 To be fair, Spencer describes Camberwell as “healthy, with good roads,” with “pretty walks and a rustic air,” although the rail stations are inconvenient and “ill-placed” (76). Overall, the impression left on the reader is that Camberwell is best left alone in favor of the nearby Denmark Hill, where Ruskin once had his own suburban establishment. In time, the middle class took it for granted that the “villa-suburb” environment promoted middle-class values and norms in and of itself (Olsen, “Victorian” 273). The suburb became “not only the seat of respectability but . . . a world of fantasy in which dreams of self-importance and fulfilment could become tangible in the management of some doll’s house estate and in the occupation of a unique social niche” (Dyos 23). Nevertheless, the average suburb bore little resemblance to this fantasy of middle-class bliss. In fact, Dickens struggled with the difference between the ideal and suburban experience throughout his career, and thus he is a major figure in this study. He begins, as in The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, blithely confident about the suburb’s ability to fulfi l its ideal, but ends, in later

Introduction

23

novels like Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, by raising serious doubts about the suburbs’ redemptive power. In an attempt to highlight some of these disruptions between expectations and experience for a majority of Victorian suburbanites, my next chapter details what the suburbs were really like for many who chose to reside there.

2

Dying of One’s Neighbors Victorian Suburban Literature and Its Deconstruction of the Suburban Ideal

The suburb became truly sub-urban rather than sub-rural in the second half of the century. Prior to 1850, the ideal of isolation from the city was still possible. The fi rst middle-class suburbs were actually small, pre-existing villages, like Richmond, Stoke Newington or Herne Hill. These havens had long been valued as an escape from those problems peculiar to city living, which included deadly communicable diseases. London was also thought to carry various “miasmas” and consumptions in its damp, stale air and smutty fogs. For example, Victorian London experienced several cholera epidemics before 1875, when the Public Health Act was passed, and none were limited to poverty-stricken districts—everyone in London’s urban environment was at risk, rich or poor. It seemed advisable, then, to get as far as possible from the city when epidemics struck to avoid contagion. As long as one could escape to a place with plenty of space, air and light, one was safe. As I showed in the last chapter, suburban space in its idealized form (figured in literature as beautiful early in the period, when the suburbs were more truly rural, as in Pickwick’s retreat in The Pickwick Papers, and picturesque later, as space became more cramped) eventually embodied the middle-class concept of itself in terms of morals, values and goals. The problem was that the ideal of privacy, quiet, respectability and social homogeneity was, in fact, only a figure in most cases. Like a treacherous bog, the Victorian suburb shifted constantly, not only in its value as “property” or physical space on the ground, but also in its significance as a class marker. Individual neighborhoods often morphed from uppermiddle to middle to working class, but rarely the reverse. Even in enclaves that were solidly middle class, the physical environment was often dismal, if not downright unhealthy. Public sanitation codes were rarely enforced; drains and sewers were poorly built and sometimes backed up into living spaces and gardens. The homes themselves were shoddily constructed and poorly planned. Furthermore, the privacy offered by the suburban estate, and built into the suburban villa, was constantly violated by a variety of “interlopers” who threatened the security and stability of what was constructed, both literally and figuratively, as solely middle-class space.

Dying of One’s Neighbors 25

Figure 2.1 The vision of the City from which suburbanites wanted to escape. Illustration by Gustave Doré, from Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (1872).

Thus, more often than not, the suburban ideals for physical, structural and social environment failed to materialize, leaving suburbanites frustrated or disappointed. This chapter offers the evidence we have for the failure of the suburban ideal and examines representations of this failure in contemporaneous literature.

26

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

SUBURBAN REALITIES: PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT Household guides, often written by the women who had to maintain the suburban home, give a picture of suburban living that barely resembles the country estate ideal we saw represented in Pickwick Papers. The very title of Jane Elizabeth Panton’s Suburban Residences and How to Circumvent Them (1896) shows how little the average suburb lived up to its image. Although Panton wrote near the end of the century, she draws on her experience of twenty years of living in the suburbs. She offers an extensive list of things that can and often do make suburban living unpleasant: tramps, barking dogs, banging gates, neighbors who raise livestock, servants who “hang out the clothes and themselves at the same time” and shrieking children. In the introduction to her guide, Panton’s main subject is the impossibility of avoiding any or all of these “horrors,” even in the best estates. She describes a poor choice of suburban quarters as capable of driving one “wild”—”there are . . . suburban terrors which are to be dreaded . . . as no one knows what torture can be given one by apparently innocent means” (4–5). As for privacy, “unless one has a really large place, one must be so close to one’s neighbours owing to the way the ground is arranged for building, that one nearly dies of them” (9). Attempts to imitate the country-house ideal on those quarter acres of ground could verge on the ridiculous when lower-middle- and workingclass suburbanites tried too hard to achieve the right “look.” “What shall I say for another suburb,” asks Panton, “where toy houses stand on quarter acres of ground, enclosed by breast-high fences?” (5). Augustus Mayhew, brother of the more famous Henry, describes such a house, inhabited by a donkey driver and his family, in his 1858 novel Paved with Gold, or the Romance and Reality of the London Streets: An Unfashionable Novel: [Mr. Sparkler’s] cottage [at Hampstead]—which was about as large as a hayrick . . .—was ornamented in front by a small one-two-threeand-jump garden, intersected with gravel paths not broader than deal boards. . . . The beds were not larger than mattresses, but no lodginghouse couch was ever more crowded. . . . In one corner stood the summer house, where of an evening Sparkler [the donkey-driver] smoked his pipe; . . . Adorning its summit was an arm-crossed statuette of Bonaparte, and china dogs and plaster images decked the roof like a mantlepiece. (133) Hampstead, at this period, still retained much of its village character; almost entirely surrounded by heath and farmland, many of the houses had extensive grounds, although some of them were indeed, according to period maps, quite small. Sparkler, with his tiny cottage on the Lower Heath, attempts to cram all the signifiers of the beautiful suburban retreat into his space—formal gardens, a summer house and statuary—but rather than

Dying of One’s Neighbors 27 blending in, these features make Sparkler’s home stand out, not as beautiful or picturesque but merely as silly. Not only is he clearly trying too hard; the jumble of items intended to signify upward class movement produces an unintended aesthetic disaster and reveals that Sparkler does not truly belong in the space because he does not know how to arrange it properly. Such aesthetic atrocities aside, the suburban estates could be downright unhealthy places to live. Indeed, quality of life in the suburbs was generally poor until after 1875, when the comprehensive Public Health Act divided the country into urban and rural sanitary districts with clearly defi ned duties (Briggs, Victorian 19). Previous to that, the 1858, 1863, 1868, and 1870 attempts at reform of housing regulations and sanitary supervision had all failed (Briggs, Victorian 342). One medical historian, M. W. Flinn, reports that by 1858, [f]ew [local boards] had actually appointed Medical Officers of Health, and, even where sewerage schemes were undertaken, they were largely systems for canalising the flow of sewage untreated into the nearest rivers . . . [7]. . . . [T]o make matters worse there was a persistent move at this period to substitute the water closet for the privies which had formerly constituted the principal means of disposing of domestic sewage. The water closet solved the domestic problem of sewerage, but enormously magnified the public problem [8]. . . . Without a comprehensive system of sewers and a reasonably advanced technology of sewage purification and disposal there was bound to be a major problem of nuisance removal. . . . [14] Streets might remain unpaved and, more importantly, undrained for years while speculative builders waited for the capital to fi nish a development or went bankrupt and abandoned it. Sewage problems could be compounded when one considers that many homes lacked indoor plumbing entirely, despite the slow move toward water closets. Molly Hughes, author of A Victorian Family, 1870–1900 (1934), remembers that in her childhood and adolescence in the northern suburbs of London in the 1870s and 1880s, she had “never seen a bathroom” (77). “The Builder’s House, and the Bricklayer’s Garden, by an Eye-Witness and Sufferer,” published in Household Words in 1851, gives a horrifying personal account of the sewage situation in the suburbs.1 The author, Richard H. Horne, describes the construction of a new suburban estate being erected directly across the street from his own house and notes that the sewage pipes laid in and around the new houses were square and on a level, rather than round and on a downward slope. This means that “the whole of the sewage having no downward pressure from its own weight, will inevitably flow back to the house and deluge the cellars and ground floors most odoriferously.” Further, he watches aghast as the builders put a brick “dust-hole” or drain outfall “under the kitchen window and

28 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era in a line beneath the dining-room window” (514), meaning that food in these homes will be both prepared and eaten in the presence of kitchen and other household waste. Reading this, one might think that moving to the suburbs would actually bring one closer to cholera and various other supposedly “urban” plagues. The Lancet published an article in 1874 arguing that much suburban housing was unfit “even” for the working class (Burnett 157). In addition to sewage problems, many suburbs were often fi lled with garbage, not to mention the “dust heaps” for which some districts were famous and which Dickens immortalized in Our Mutual Friend (1864– 1865). An essay published in Household Words in 1850 described one specimen as “a large hill, and being in the vicinity of small suburb cottages, it rose above them like a great black mountain” (Horne, “Dust” 380). Very often a suburban estate, like those in mid-century Camden and Kentish Town, looked out on waste fields or brickyards rather than on “the country.” Tonier suburbs like Kensington and Earl’s Court, while surrounded by market gardens, also contained a coal depot and a piano factory. And as for healthy air, many suburban residents had to deal not with fresh country breezes but with neighborhood piggeries, tanneries or other foul-smelling industries that moved into the area because of cheap land and cheap rents (Dyos 111). The area between Islington, Camden and Pentonville was blessed with two prisons and the Metropolitan Cattle Market. According to 1862 maps, the peacefully named Elysium Cottage in Fulham was directly across the street from a female prison and within sight of a brewery, while across the river in Wandsworth, the inhabitants rejoiced in a multitude of market gardens (which are not always pleasant-smelling themselves) in addition to another brewery, a malt house, a chemical works and a gas works.

SUBURBAN REALITIES: STRUCTURAL ENVIRONMENT In addition to the unhealthy physical environment, many observers commented on the shoddy construction of the houses themselves. As early as 1859, George Godwin was outraged that thousands of houses in the suburbs . . . are commenced . . . without any excavation; the basement floor of thin, gaping boards placed within six inches of the damp ground; with slight walls of ill-burnt bricks and muddy mortar, sucking up the moisture and giving it out in the apartments. . . . (qtd. in Burnett 88) Sir Charles Eastlake, the owner of the delightful residence described in the previous chapter, had his own troubles with his suburban paradise. He remarks that

Dying of One’s Neighbors 29 [i]t is in my “sanctum” that I interview my builders: I use the plural number, not because I employ more than one at a time, but because I have had so many—about seven, I think—since I fi rst became a tenant of this house, which costs me about 50l. a year in repairs [on a house that rents for £150 per annum]. (Easel 123–4) Even in a “respectable” neighborhood, then, repairs could add as much as one-third to the cost of living in a suburb. Horne’s article “The Builder’s House,” in addition to discussing the drainage problem, describes the author’s experience with the shoddy construction of the typical suburb. Watching the erection of houses across the street, he reports that although “the damp clay land will need a pretty good foundation for the houses, . . . we look in vain for the depositing and arrangement of anything of this kind” (514). As for his own house, he tells us, I live in a damp house. Nothing can cure it. The form and the outline of my house is in the usual bad modern taste, or rather the usual notaste of the great mass of trading builders of the day; and at the back there is a bit of garden, enclosed by three walls, and ‘laid out’ for me in the usual no-taste of hard straight lines. My second floor back window commands a view of a long row of new houses, which will inevitably be as damp as my own. (513) Note Horne’s commentary on the lack of taste, the absence of beauty in form or in line, in this new suburb. Further, far from picturesque, Horne’s view of suburban space raises a train of unpleasant associations. This way of presenting the suburb approaches a form of sublimity that not only opposes the classical category of the beautiful, but also negates it (an idea I discuss more fully in Chapter 7). Horne considers himself lucky, nevertheless, that “by dint of fi res in almost every room” he can live in his house throughout the year, for one man of his acquaintance was forced to give up his damp suburban house for the winter. When he returned in the spring, “mosses and fungus had grown from the ceilings on the ground-floor, and a colony of toadstools had risen up in the dining-room corners.” Horne goes on to catalog the problems he encounters with his own home: wallpaper will not stay on the walls, the rooms are actually foggy, all the carpets and mats mold in a week and are “covered over with red worms, and slugs, or other creatures” (“Builder’s” 513). The earth in his garden is full of broken bricks, stone, bits of wood, mortar, “road drift,” horse hair and straw, not to mention old clothes, shoes, broken crockery and an old hat (“a very difficult thing, indeed, for a spade to deal with, at twelve or thirteen inches below the surface” [514]). The structural problems with suburban homes and their gardens stemmed from the methods that evolved for developing land outside London. Most suburban developments were not planned as coherent neighborhoods; land

30

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

was bought piecemeal by individuals or small building companies and developed according to whatever fancy took the builder. Sometimes, a builder might buy only one lot; very rarely did one builder buy large numbers of lots at one time. Stylistically, suburban streets were a hodge-podge of Gothic, post-Gothic and Georgian, or anything in between. Many builders, knowing their market, incorporated external features of the more expensive villas and country houses into their plans in order to mark their houses as suitable middle-class residences from the street (Burnett 115, 125). These decorations took up materials and costs that should have been devoted to the structures themselves. Many suburban houses did not last more than forty years before falling down or becoming uninhabitable due to drafts, bad drainage and rising damp (156). Most blamed the evils of suburban architecture on speculative builders and their cousins, the jerry-builders. As Donald Olsen notes, “entry into the [building] business required no specialized skills and little or no capital” (“House” 334). To their contemporaries, speculative builders (those who built homes without having secured any actual residents for the houses) were objects of contempt, their “business careers . . . a history of bad workmanship and bad debts” (Dyos 85). Furthermore, they were not of the class of respectable architects, but “labourers and mechanics, servants and publicans, shopkeepers and merchants” who saw an opportunity to invest their small capital for the chance of steady return (123). In confi rmation of the low esteem in which speculative builders were held, Horne, describing the disaster that was his suburban home, prefaces his remarks by saying that by the term of “builder,” I do not so much refer to the regularly trained master of the craft . . . as to that very large class, who, having risen by their industry and skill as master bricklayers, ought to have remained in that position, and not to have started forward as the builders of heaps of houses and innumerable streets, fi lling our extensive suburbs with ill-drained, incommodious, damp, and shapeless abodes. (“Builder’s” 513) People with few building skills and little capital created Victorian suburbia—it is a wonder any houses were built at all, much less the vast numbers that sprang up all over London in the last half of the century. But the middle class saw building as one of the safest possible investments—hence the cliché sometimes still heard in Britain that an investment scheme is “safe as houses.” Lawyers and bankers encouraged clients to put trust funds, marriage settlements and inheritances into housing (Rodger 24), which usually guaranteed a steady five percent return. Why it was considered so safe is something of a mystery, since the middle class, while it might have controlled many facets of the culture, represented “no more than five to fifteen percent of the total population of England and Wales” in the Victorian period (Alexander, “Loss” 294), and it was on this five to

Dying of One’s Neighbors 31 fifteen percent that investors and builders speculated. Nevertheless, Francis Sheppard reports the astonishing statistic that “in 1851 there were over 66,500 people engaged in building in London. Building was, in fact, London’s biggest single industry” (101). Still, the abundance of willing investors for shaky building fi rms had a devastating effect on suburban housing itself because more building was commenced than was ever fi nished. Indeed, as Dyos and Reeder have argued, the prevalence of speculative building added to the slum potential of some suburban districts: “[I]t was sometimes possible to run through the whole gamut from meadow to slum in a single generation, or even less” (364).

SUBURBAN REALITIES: SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT The degeneration of the physical condition of a suburban area translated directly to its social condition. Because a particular development could deteriorate rapidly into a physically uncomfortable mess, suburbanites were usually on the lookout for a “better” situation, while those looking to make their way into the middle class often moved into “deteriorating” neighborhoods as the rents became more affordable. An aspiring suburbanite was very likely to be surprised by the lack of social homogeneity to be found in supposedly solid middle-class territory. F. M. L. Thompson puts it succinctly when he says that “the nineteenth-century suburban dream was a middle-class dream; the nineteenth-century suburban reality was a social patchwork” (20). Depending on the proximity of the area to London, the greatest influx of residents in a suburban area might be working-class artisans “in fl ight” from inner-city overcrowding. Or, they might be rural laborers attracted to the city by greater opportunities for work but unwilling to give up the idea of the country altogether. These “immigrants” found lodgings in houses that had once been middle-class residences. 2 As Martin Gaskell explains in “Housing and the Lower Middle Class, 1870–1914,” As a mass of newcomers sought to enjoy those facilities which had formerly been reserved for the few, the original inhabitants found that the exclusive nature of the suburb could not be maintained and houses began to be let for professional purposes—schools or private asylums—and adjoining meadow land appeared on the market for the purpose of building smaller properties. Gradually the area would be transformed. . . . As the plots were taken up here and there at random by men of small means . . . the neighbourhood sank to the level of the lowest class that fi rst erected houses there, whatever might have been its natural advantages. (161–2) A middle-class family had to be constantly vigilant regarding the social status of the suburban area in which they lived. Signing long leases was

32

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

tricky—it might only take one year for a formerly fashionable address to become déclassé, and then the lessee would be stuck in a socially disastrous contract. In a perfect example of what could happen to a family as the neighborhood deteriorated around them, Alfred Grosch describes the Kentish Town suburb in which he grew up in the 1880s: Kentish Town in those days possessed an unenviable number of slum streets down which policemen went as seldom as possible, never if they could avoid them. I could name a dozen such streets within a stone’s throw of our house. Streets in which lived the poorer members of the community whose wages were too low to permit of them renting decent quarters. . . . If the streets in which these people were compelled to live were unsavoury, the houses they occupied were more like dens than human dwellings. They had once been houses, but landlords, concerned only with what could be obtained from them by way of rent, had long ceased to spend money on them, and in consequence, brickwork and woodwork rotted for want of paint, while vermin had rendered internal decoration a sheer waste of money. (12–3) Yet Kentish Town, in the 1850s, was a green-space suburb, made up mostly of ribbon development beyond which was farmland, garden and park— not the entirely built-over crowded space it had become by 1880. As Dyos notes, “such social transformations were the visible products of innumerable uncharted migrations of families on the move to tap fresh credit, or to find cheaper rooms, or simply to ‘get a bit decent’“ (59). Kentish Town in 1880 was hardly the Victorian middle-class ideal of suburban respectability. Guides to “circumventing” the suburbs, like Panton’s, confi rm not only that a suburb’s social character did change over time, but also that it often did so dramatically and quickly. As a result, the rising middle class expected to move as often as their income increased, so that families could take advantage of the opportunity of keeping up with the times, identifying the best possible suburb for their income. Panton suggests that prospective suburbanites “take in the local newspaper [of the area they are considering], for at least a month, and see what manner of conduct is reported there” (22). In A Social History of Housing 1815–1985 (1986), John Burnett reconstructs a typical example of the upward mobility a middle-class male could expect, based on household management guides of the time: The husband, a young professional or business man, has prudently delayed marriage until the required age of thirty and an income of £300 a year have been attained. He rents his fi rst house at £25 a year, a sixroomed terraced house with small drawing and dining-rooms and three bedrooms, the smallest of which is occupied by the single maid. In five years’ time they move to a semi-detached house in the suburbs, with four bedrooms so that the two children may normally have separate

Dying of One’s Neighbors 33 rooms, and with a somewhat larger dining-room which does not disgrace the monthly dinner-party. In another five years, by which time the husband is forty and his income has expanded to £750 a year, the important move is made to a newly-built, detached villa, perhaps in another town, at a rent of £75 a year. It is a house of ‘character’ in the fashionable ‘Gothic’ style, with ten rooms—not counting the spacious hall. . . . (103) Given this constant movement, middle-class suburbanites were cautioned not to take a lease for more than three years because by that time they should be ready to move to better accommodations (Burnett 199). To prevent this kind of shifting, so antithetical to the peaceful and exclusive suburban ideal, some building companies, like the Goldsmiths’ Company in Acton (in the outlying western regions of London), tried “to control the character of [their] estate” by prohibiting terraces and setting minimum house values at between £600–800 (Thompson 106), but these attempts were often unsuccessful. In the case of another Goldsmiths’ Company site at Churchfield, near Acton, such control had been attempted, but only six houses had been built between 1868 and 1871, and subsequently the company leased the remaining land to brickmakers. In 1884, this same property was sold for the construction of an isolation hospital (107), a fi nal irony in which this suburban space, once intended for wealthy families seeking retreat from urban dangers, became instead a site in which waste, debris and infectious disease were not repelled but invited. The lack of social stability in the suburbs contributed to the anxiety of their middle-class residents, but there were other factors which combined to make the stronghold of middle-class culture and values an unsettling place. One is the wide span of income that could qualify a person as “middle class.” Anyone earning from £100 to £1,000 a year could consider that he had “arrived” and was entitled to suburban residence. The population that qualified as middle class increased dramatically in the second half of the century—between 1850 and 1914 overall real wages increased 75–80% while per capita income rose an incredible 107% between 1860 and 1895 (Rodger 10, 63). This rise did in fact result in a greater number of families attempting to imitate the middle-class lifestyle—increased sales during this period “of pianos, linoleum, curtains, wallpaper, cabinets and a deluge of bric-a-brac were demonstrations of this increased purchasing power” (63) and of a desire for the middle-class lifestyle. The problem was that the lifestyle attainable at £100 a year was nothing whatsoever like that attainable at £500 or even £250 a year. J. H. Walsh, a Victorian domestic economist, devotes an entire chapter of his household guide to budgeting, going into great detail over food. Families (defined as four children, two parents and “an appropriate number of servants”) with incomes of £100 per annum could not expect to see fish, poultry or “Italian goods” on their tables in the course of a year (606). In fact, at this income

34

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

level, “unless, by good fortune, there is a garden to supply potatoes, or they can be purchased at a low rate, it is impossible to effect a full diet on this scale” (608). A “full diet” at £100 a year would consist of one pound of potatoes per person per day, one-half pound of bread per person per day, one-quarter pound salt butter for the whole family per day and one quart of milk (no cheese), along with eleven pounds of meat or bacon and 1s 10d worth of beer per week (608). Clerks and other office workers, who usually fell within or below this income bracket, considered themselves part of the middle class, even though, according to Walsh’s guide, they had a standard of living more comparable to that of an artisan or highly skilled worker. Those in higher income brackets were more than aware that through the rising of the “clerk class,” the line between what was and what was not middle class was becoming impossibly blurred. The rising artisan class further blurred this line. Because suburban rents were significantly lower than rents “in town,” many of the upper tiers of the working class could afford suburban houses that were not necessarily in “working-class” districts. Middle- and lower-middle-class districts, the most vulnerable to working-class influences, were thereby slowly but surely “infi ltrated” by the working-class families who could afford, and preferred, to live there, and these neighborhoods were thus made heterogeneous, not the suburban ideal by any means.3 Another crack in the façade of the suburban social ideal was the sheer unattractiveness of many suburban estates and the dullness of the people who lived there. As Panton points out in her guide, “the majority of suburban residents is made up from young married folk, and dreary commonplace, middle-aged ones” (11). They are, as she describes them, “folk whose best days are over” (8). “Improving” society was not to be thought of, “for, remember, if really intellectual or interesting people are found in the suburbs, they are . . . too tired from the day’s work to be available for society” (11). Note that an aspiring suburbanite is not assumed to be intellectual or interesting herself. With few local social outlets, the monotony of the suburban lifestyle echoed the monotony of suburban architecture; Sir Walter Besant described these areas as “endless streets of undistinguished houses, undistinguished industries, shabby families, second-rate shops, [and] inexplicable people who . . . do not exist [socially]” (30).

LITERATURE OF SUBURBAN FAILURE The dissonance between what people expected and what they got from suburban living generated a sub-genre of writing that details the failure of the suburban ideal to manifest itself in experience (see Figures 2.2 and 2.3 for Gustave Doré’s perspective on the lack of isolation in suburban life). For example, in Panton’s introduction to her guide, the best that she can say for the suburbs is this:

Dying of One’s Neighbors 35 I have tried life, more or less, for about twelve years in the suburbs of London, both north and south, and I have come to the conclusion that if we have a carriage and can therefore live a certain distance from the rail, and if we can put at least three acres of ground round our house, and pass moreover a series of regulations, via the new Parish Councils perhaps, for suburban etiquette . . . the southern and south-western suburbs of London are the best places in the world to be in, for ordinary middle-class folk whose best days are over and who yet must be within touch of town for business purposes. (7–8) Although Panton is pessimistic, she admits that if one does not expect too much and has the means, it is still possible, theoretically, to come close to the suburban ideal. Realistically, however, few “ordinary middle-class folk” had the means to maintain a carriage or meet the rents that would be demanded by the amount of space Panton describes. Other writers were less sanguine about the suburb as a whole than was Panton. An essay published in Household Words in 1851 speaks much more negatively about the difference between the expectations about the idealized suburb and what could often be the disappointing reality. T. M. Thomas’s “A Suburban Connemara” tells the story of a young man who seeks to establish his family in the suburbs of London. He has “a favourable impression of the northern side of London, from the pretty villas and cottages which I had remarked on each side of the [rail] line. . . .” He buys a map, measures off a semi-circle the desired distance from his office and looks for “all the Victoria Crescents and Albert Terraces thereabouts” (562). A district called Agar Town seems to fit the bill, and the young man is especially attracted by the street names: Salisbury Crescent, Oxford Crescent, Cambridge Crescent and the like. He is even concerned, from this evidence, that “the houses in that neighbourhood might be of too expensive a class for a man of moderate means.” Looking at an 1851 map of London, it is possible to see why this area might look attractive—it is surrounded by a surprising amount of open space considering that it is bordered by Camden Town, Sommers Town and Pentonville. Regent’s Canal runs just to the south of the settlement, and just to its west is a little park. The map indicates some warning signs as well, however. Upon arriving in Agar Town, the fi rst thing the narrator sees is the St. Pancras workhouse, which is clearly marked on the map as directly across the canal. Outside the workhouse, a woman and “a number of ragged children” appear to be relocating from there to a residence in this “desirable district” (563). The roads in Agar Town are “a complete bog of mud and filth, with deep cart-ruts.” The promisingly named Salisbury Crescent turns out to be “several wretched hovels, ranged in a slight curve, that formed some excuse for the name. The doors were blocked up with mud, heaps of ashes, oyster-shells, and decayed vegetables.” An inhabitant of the district informs the young man that there are no sewers and that “the stench of a rainy morning is enough fur to

36

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

knock down a bullock. It’s all very well for them as is lucky enough to have a ditch afore their doors; but, in gen’ral, everybody chucks everythink out in front and there it stays” (563). In addition, Agar Town is host to dust-heaps, houses with water “a flowin’ in at the back doors,” dung-heaps, cinder-heaps, piles of whelk and periwinkle shells and a donkey.

Figure 2.2 The crowds in Regent’s Park, bordering the northern suburbs. Note the predominance of women and girl children, who have leisure during the day to visit “attractions” in the city. Illustration by Gustave Doré, from Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (1872).

Dying of One’s Neighbors 37

Figure 2.3 The crowds on Hampstead Heath. Illustration by Gustave Doré, from Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (1872).

Some areas of Agar Town are even worse than Salisbury Crescent, and the dustman informs the narrator that [w]hen people began to build on [this ground], they run up a couple o’ rows o’ houses oppersite one another and then the road was left fur to make itself. Then the rain come down, and people chucked their rubbidge out; and the ground bein’ nat’raly soft, the carts from the brickfields worked it all up into paste. (563) Indeed, the narrator says, “the place, in its present state, is a disgrace to the metropolis,” and he uses the example of Agar Town to call for improved dwellings for the respectable poor. He argues that “no spot could be better adapted for the erection of small tenements for labouring men and mechanics” since “no respectable tenant could be induced to take the land for so short a term upon a building lease” (565). In other words, since the owner of the land did not manage his property in a way that profited the middle class, the land could at least have been put to the use of building tenements for the upper reaches of the working class. Certainly, it is implied, the current state of Agar Town, “a perfect reproduction of one of the worst towns in Ireland,” is not a suitable one for such serviceable land.4 George Sala, author of “Dumbledowndeary” (1852), further describes the general discontent with the effects of suburbia on the London area by

38 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era documenting the problems engendered by the rush to build. The Kentish town of the title, set in a landscape of “luscious orchards of pears and cherries, . . . fat little meadows . . . intersected by those green lanes so pleasant to the English eye, . . . with the river Thames, innocent of dead dogs hereabout, running through the midst” (312), suddenly gets “a mission”: bricks. The Dumbledowndereans threw themselves upon bricks with an ardour and an intensity of purpose really surprising; and it is doubtless due to their extensive operations and speculations in bricks that there are so many brick-fields and so many brick-barges . . . so many brickmakers, bricklayers, and bargees . . . and more especially, that Dumbledowndeary may be called without much exaggeration a Town to Let [312]. . . . I don’t mean the bricks in the brickfield, exactly. . . . For with the aid of mortar, “compo,” and cement, lath and plaster, carpenter and joiner’s work, rule, bevel, and square, they have become Houses. Scarcely have you escaped from the old fashioned little village . . . ere a little Babylon of bricks stares you in the face. Streets, terraces, rows, gardens (brick ones), crescents, lodges, villas, squares, groves, cottages, all in brick. [314] Unfortunately, “nobody lives in these pretty little houses” (315). As the author assesses the desolation of this wasteland of never-lived-in houses, he remarks, [T]he good people of Dumbledowndeary have, in the articles of bricks, houses, and tenants to inhabit them, occupied themselves rather too much with the question of supply, without quite enough regarding the question of demand. . . . There is not a door-knocker in this wo-begone little town to let, but what seems to me muffled in bank-notes. . . . The whole town seems to me one grim brick mausoleum of dead capital. (315) The connection of this wasteland to a mausoleum or a ghost town is at the heart of a parallel mode of writing about the suburbs, where the picturesque is subverted by the suggestion of hidden horrors and becomes gothic or even sublime, an idea explored in more detail in the fi nal chapters of this study. It cannot be denied that the “cultural elite” of the nineteenth century worried about suburban development. Around mid-century, Ruskin noted, I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only. . . . And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital—upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered wood and imitated stone—upon those gloomy rows of formalised minuteness, alike without difference

Dying of One’s Neighbors 39 and without fellowship, as solitary as similar—not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent; that they mark the time when every man’s aim is to be in some more elevated sphere than his natural one, and every man’s past life is his habitual scorn; when men build in the hope of leaving the places they have built, and live in the hope of forgetting the years that they have lived. . . . (Seven 135–6) Ruskin anticipates the concerns of many during the last half of the century, when a new domestic ideal which did not venerate the house as home appeared to be in danger of eroding the values the middle class had fought so hard to maintain and cultivate in Victorian England. 5 But despite Ruskin’s and others’ concerns, the suburban migration showed no signs of stopping. With the taxes on building materials such as windows, bricks, glass and timber abolished by 1866 (Rodger 51), the suburbs pushed the boundaries of the city ever farther outward, appearing to contemporaries as the “leading edge of an unstoppable lava flow” (Dyos and Reeder 376). Any surprise at the true state of the emerging nineteenth-century suburban culture, so contrary to many of our assumptions, echoes the middle-class Victorians’ surprise. Those who decamped to or invested in the suburbs felt their very lives, or at least their way of life, threatened by the conditions that encouraged “invasion” of their territory by the urban underclass. Understanding this anxiety provides us with a new way of contextualizing the explosion of literature about the urban poor, against whom the middle class erected the suburbs as ideological rather than purely physical barriers, although that was partially the intent as well. This ideological motivation produced and/or influenced writing about the suburbs, including the suburban ghost stories and suburban themes in sensation fiction on which this project focuses. The next chapter puts mid-century concerns with urban poverty and housing into a suburban context, explaining in more detail how the “barrier” mentality affected the perception of suburbia.

3

Where There Is No Profligacy, Drunkeness or Crime Representations of the Working Class and Origins of Suburban Anxieties

But who knows the East End? . . . one will say [it is] a shocking place, where he once went with a curate; an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things; where fi lthy men and women live on penn’orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair. The East End is a place, says another, which is given over to the Unemployed. And the Unemployed is a race whose token is a clay pipe, and whose enemy is soap: now and again it migrates bodily to Hyde Park with banners, and furnishes adjacent police courts with disorderly drunks. (Morrison, Tales 19)

Arthur Morrison, writing late in the nineteenth century, derides the typical middle-class responses to poverty he outlines here in the introduction to Tales of Mean Streets (1894). Having lived in the East End, Morrison writes in part to correct similar pronouncements about London’s poor by middle-class writers with questionable experience of their subject. What does poverty have to do with the middle-class suburb? The average resident of the Victorian suburb might have insisted there was no connection whatsoever, but in fact the suburbs’ reason for being sprang directly from the East End and other areas of urban poverty. For if the suburb was, in its ideal form, an escape, it was also a defense. Morrison’s characterizations of middle-class perceptions of the poor point directly at many middle-class fears: uncleanliness, violence, drunkenness, pauperism and mendicancy. The appearance of any one of these traits in a suburban neighborhood signaled a breech of the barrier, an invasion not only by the poor, but also by poor morals. Any suggestion of such an event sent respectable suburban residents fleeing to “higher ground” (usually literally) even farther away from the city. I am in no way arguing that middle-class fears of a wholesale invasion of the suburbs by the very poorest ranks of London citizenry had any basis in fact. Rather, my point is that the ways in which the urban poor were characterized drove the ideology behind the suburban ideal and the migration of the middle class out of the city. The extent to

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which the urban poor were demonized as everything the middle class was not is directly linked to the idea of the suburbs as a safe haven, even when the actual suburban experience failed to live up to its billing. In this chapter, I show that the anxiety about the safety and respectability of suburban space encountered in Victorian literature stemmed directly from the ways in which the urban poor were constructed in middle-class literature by the middle classes themselves.

INTERLOPERS AND INVASIONS Outsiders in the suburbs threatened the middle class’s ability to escape urban problems, hence the anxiety surrounding both the invaders themselves and the security of suburban boundaries. Yet, as I showed in the last chapter, social homogeneity was almost impossible to attain in most suburban developments, even while suburbanites struggled to maintain the illusion that everyone in the suburb belonged there. One of the problems with maintaining social homogeneity, even in the “best” suburbs, was the need for goods and services. A residential area in which all the inhabitants made their livings from professional jobs in the city could not survive. Middle-class homes needed servants, grocers, butchers, “nuisance removal” men who cleaned the privvies and many other products and services simply to function. As F. M. L. Thompson writes in The Rise of Suburbia, “The pure case [of a wholly middle-class suburb], uncluttered by other businesses and occupations inherited from a presuburban economy, probably did not exist in practice” (21). The providers of the necessary goods and services had to come from somewhere, and most often they came from the city. This is not to say that the entrepreneurial shopkeepers who arrived in a new suburb ready to serve the commuter families were poor. Yet when tradesmen became permanent residents in suburban space, social homogeneity was one step closer to being lost. Similarly, development in extant presuburban towns could lower, rather than raise, the town’s socio-economic standard because new building always brought with it an influx of working men in the form of brick-makers, brick-layers, builders, plumbers and navvies, plus the small businessmen eager to serve them. We see this kind of intermingling between residents and workers in a variety of Victorian sources. In Ford Maddox Brown’s painting Work, for example, a group of construction workers takes center stage while both “hangers on” (the street vendor and the homeless) and residents (the figures on horseback and the well-dressed pedestrians) skirt the construction project uncomfortably, represented as literally liminal. A similar motif is represented fictionally in Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848). The description of Staggs’s Garden, a northern suburb near Camden Town, shows what Dickens saw happening to villages around London with the advent of the commuter railway. He

42

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describes how a proposed railway station encouraged the speculative spirit among Staggs’s Garden’s long-established businessmen: One or two bold speculators had projected streets; and one had built a little, but had stopped among the mud and ashes to consider farther of it. A bran-new Tavern . . . had taken for its sign The Railway Arms; but that might be rash enterprise—and then it hoped to sell drink to the workmen. . . . [T]he old-established Ham and Beef Shop had become the Railway Eating House . . . through interested motives of a similar immediate and popular description. Lodging-house keepers were favourable in like manner; and for the like reasons were not to be trusted. (121–2) Here, the railway may bring new business, but that business is set up primarily to serve workmen, at least in the short term. Serving the new suburban families attracted by the railway would come later, but by then the neighborhood would already have been “sullied” by an influx of laborers, which, Dickens intimates, makes these newer suburban business establishments suspect in the eyes of more respectable inhabitants. This attitude was not merely a Dickensian exaggeration; one councilor in Ealing in the 1860s commented that “Ealing was ‘not responsible for the housing of London’s workmen; we don’t want to attract them here,’ although he acknowledged that a certain working-class population was necessary ‘for the comfort of villadom’” (Thompson 14). In addition to laborers outside, the suburban household contained within itself servants who might very well have come from poor urban families. No matter how much care middle-class women took to teach their servants respectable ways and isolate them from their own, poorer, homes “for their own good,” servants often kept in contact with those homes on their days off. Thus, eliminating the influence of non-middle-class values and habits from suburban homes was nearly impossible. This was perhaps less of a problem in relation to the servant ranks who were rarely seen by the family, or anyone else, such as scullery maids, but would have been a significant concern in regard to nannies and housemaids, for example—those who came in constant contact with the families, especially children, as well as with the outside world when their duties required them to cross the threshold of the house. Not only were servants in the middle-class home perceived as a problem, but also large groups of servants and working-class families often invaded suburban gardens and public spaces on their holidays. James Thomson, in his 1863 poem “Sunday at Hampstead,” describes the unruly behavior of these groups, who literally frolicked: On Sunday we’re Lord and Lady, With ten times the love and glee Of those pale and languid rich ones Who are always and never free. . . .

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We can laugh out loud when merry, We can romp at kiss-in-the-ring, We can take our beer at a public, We can loll on the grass and sing. . . . (79–80)

Thomson is sympathetic to these working class escapees from “skyless gloom” in a “dark and dreary” city (81–2), but his poem contrasts the speaker, a member of the working class but one whose “soul’s not dead” (80), to his companions. The speaker’s poetic fl ights of fancy in making love to his girl or in telling stories to the rest of their company are the exception; the rest of his company “grandly parade suburban streets” (83) concerned only with “Hot-cross-bun day . . . polkas, waltzes, quadrilles” (84) and issues of fashion in a shabby imitation of their “superiors.” But even the speaker, in imagining the scene at Hampstead ten thousand years before, and another ten thousand years before that, and so on, likens his peer group of serving maids and clerks to “four naked squaws . . . [and] . . . four tall naked wild men” (87), encamped gypsies, antediluvian giants and fi nally, half-human mermaids and mermen. The holidaymaking of the working classes perturbed suburbanites. Essay after essay was published decrying market days and the use of public spaces for fairs in the environs of London. As Theodore Buckley put it in an 1851 essay in Household Words, “Sunday evenings are, perhaps, the worst for Hampstead Fields. . . . [T]here are always a large stock of the real riff-raff about. . . . Besides these, a troop of half-drunken fellows . . . run tumbling along, knocking each other over, rolling insanely on the grass and shouting more insanely still” (“Hampstead” 15). Suburban fairs held in waste ground also attracted a “rough” population, as condemned by George Sala, who writes in “Open Air Entertainments” (1852), Imagine in this broken, dusty, confi ned patch of building-ground, a compact, wedged-in, fighting, screeching, yelling, blaspheming crowd. All manner of human rubbish licensed to be shot [i.e., dumped] there. There was more crime, more depravity, more drunkenness and blasphemy; more sweltering, raging, and struggling in the dusty, mangy backyard of a place, than in a whole German principality. There were more wild beasts in it . . . than Mr. Gordon Cumming would light upon in a summer’s day, and a South African forest. (166) Household servants came from this population, and so, although having at least one maid was a necessity to the middle-class household, there was always fear that the men or children of the family might be corrupted by the poor moral example of these invited “invaders” and their associates. The middle class might be prepared to accept such breaches of the barrier by servants and shopkeepers, however, and to perceive them as controllable. After all, an unsavory shop man could be put out of business and a

44

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

Figure 3.1 Umbrella mender and ginger-beer sellers on Clapham Common, 1877. From John Betjeman, Victorian and Edwardian London (New York: Viking Press, 1969) 111. Reprinted by permission of Batsford, an imprint of Anova Books Company Ltd.

servant could always be dismissed. The more serious threats to the sanctity of the suburb, from a middle-class perspective, came directly from those very urban haunts where disease was known, in the popular imagination, to lurk, and they came uninvited. The fi rst of these were the street folk: the costermongers and pitchmen who had been represented (repackaged?) to a growing middle-class audience through Henry Mayhew’s sketches for the Morning Chronicle in the 1840s (see Figure 3.1), which were republished in the 1850s and 1860s in several editions. Mayhew’s objective was to inform middle-class readers about the “real lives” of the street people they saw every day in the city, and his assumption is always that his readers know little or nothing about the populations he describes. But evidence shows that suburbanites themselves were as aware as anyone of the existence of all kinds of street traffickers. Alfred Bennett’s autobiography lingers for three chapters on the street people he met regularly

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while growing up in the southern suburb of Camberwell in the 1860s and 1870s. He was quite familiar with the “old clothes” man, “ill-kempt, sallow, black-bearded, large-mouthed and yellow-toothed . . .”; a seller of hare and rabbit skins; milkmen; potmen (sellers of cans of ale); “white-aproned” muffin and crumpet men; chimney sweeps; girls selling water-cress; cat’s meat men; “bawling costermongers selling fruit and vegetables”; crossing-sweepers and any number of street-corner stalls (43–58). There were also, of necessity, “gangs of labouring men, bricklayers, navvies, . . . tradesmen, painters, plumbers, [and] plasterers,” who, Bennett notes, made use of the services of the street vendors and thus perhaps increased their traffic through the area (43–4). Molly Hughes, writing of her life in the suburbs in the 1870s, remarks on “the hawkers of various goods, each with an appropriate cry: ‘Flowers all a-blowing and a-growing,’ ‘Ornaments for your fire-stove’ (unbelievably hideous streamers of coloured paper), ‘A pair of fine soles,’ bird-cages, ironholders, brooms, brushes and baskets” (9). These catalogs of street traffickers make it hard to believe that the suburban atmosphere even approached tranquility. Bennett also reflects on what he (and others) perceived as a slightly more sinister element of suburban street life, the gypsies. As he says, “Gipsies must not be overlooked. They hawked . . . odds and ends from carts and baskets, and pitched primitive swings and round-abouts on plots of spare ground”(49). Fair enough, one might think, but Bennett goes on to say that “perhaps not foreign to gipsies were the various kinds of swindlers who made their prey of the unwary and self-confident” (50). Gypsies have always had an unsavory reputation in England, and suburbanites must have been discomfited to fi nd that the gypsy population in the south of England depended on the London suburbs for livelihood and shelter. Sir Charles Eastlake certainly was surprised to fi nd his suburban retreat invaded by the itinerant chair-mender . . . uttering incessantly about the most dismal wail that ever issued from a human throat. . . . I have sometimes been uncharitable enough to imagine that the whole thing is a sham, that they are area-sneaks in disguise, or are in collusion with professional burglars. It is certain that most of them are gipsies, who we know have the credit of never losing an opportunity. (Easel 230–1) These gypsy populations were not urban, but, as Eastlake implies, they were thought to attract other undesirables, the “residuum,” a popular term in the nineteenth century for criminals, prostitutes and casual poor “on the tramp.” This “residuum” also claimed suburban waste ground as stopping places during their annual migrations to and from the city.1 Dickens refers pointedly to the anxiety attached to these deserted suburban spaces in Dombey and Son (1846–1848) when he describes Florence’s adventure

46

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

in the pre-railway Staggs’s Garden. After becoming separated from her nurse, Florence is approached by an old woman who, in essence, kidnaps her. Dickens writes that “[t]hey had not gone far, but had gone by some very uncomfortable places, such as brick-fields and tile-yards, when the old woman turned down a dirty lane, where the mud lay in deep black ruts in the middle of the road” (129). This atmosphere, as we have seen, was fairly typical for the average still-growing suburb. The old woman, uncannily witchlike, proceeds to steal Florence’s clothes and only just stops herself from mutilating Florence (by cutting off her hair). Florence’s experience with this woman, who makes a living by alternately thieving and picking up whatever sale-able items fall in her way, echoes the anxiety surrounding the industrial spaces and abandoned sites attendant on suburban development. Dickens seems to imply here that suburban space was in transition and not at all a stable or safe place for middle-class women, children or property. The “residuum” on the move through suburban space terrified members of the middle class; it could so easily be imagined that what were perceived as the lowest of the low brought their diseases and miasmas with them in their clothes or, in the case of prostitutes, out of them. Mendicancy was one of the main concerns of the suburbanite. Francis Peek’s 1888 pamphlet The Workless, the Thriftless and the Worthless includes mendicants and tramps in the category of the “worthless.” Peek characterized this class as consisting of . . . various divisions; there are vagrants who periodically tramp the country, and are a terror to the cottagers in lonely places: there are the mendicants who map out the suburbs into districts for begging purposes and go backwards and forwards as regularly as any man of business to his office. . . . When on the tramp they generally make some pretence of occupation, under cover of which they get access to houses, where they beg, or steal, or bully unprotected women. . . . Neither men nor women have the smallest regard for decency; they are fi lthy in their persons and their habits, and are no better than savages, the very pariahs of society. (19–20) Descriptions like this added urgency to middle-class fears about their safety and the integrity of their domestic havens. George Sims, writing for the National Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences, said in 1867 that “no-one who lived in the suburbs could help feeling that they were in circumstances of considerable peril” thanks to mendicancy (qtd. in Jones 247). The movement of these populations put a perceived stress on personal health and safety and on personal property, as well as putting a fi nancial stress on the parishes who took the mendicants into Casual Wards as they moved through in the fall and spring. Augustus Mayhew’s novel Paved

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with Gold, or the Romance and Reality of the London Streets: An Unfashionable Novel (1858) follows the career of one of these starving poor, a workhouse boy who becomes, in turn, a vagrant, a thief and a con man and eventually, with the help of his nefarious father, mixes with the middle class in order to cheat them of their money and their pride. Although Mayhew does critique the social institutions that fail to help his young hero become a respectable member of society, he also implies throughout the novel that the greater part of the boy’s bad ways are inherited from his rogue of a father—a patrimony of mendicant tendencies. By the end of the novel, both father and son have emigrated to France with the money they have cheated, swindled, bribed and in some cases outright burgled from the middle class and are living richly on their “earnings.” The novel plays on all the middleclass fears about a mendicant population: the dishonesty of the poor, the possibility of fi nancial ruin by mistaking a lower-class person for middle class and the tension between wanting to help the less fortunate and wanting, understandably given the tenor of the novel, to run away.

WORKING CLASSES AND THE SUBURBS There was one other population that seemed to threaten the suburban barricade, and that was the working class, which of course included skilled laborers and artisans. These latter groups may not have had incomes that would gain them entrée into the middle class, but they were also far from the demoralized batch of humanity described as “worthless” by Peek. Yet opposition to the working class in suburbia was fierce. The Victorian middle class wanted the poor and working classes respectably and safely housed, but not at their expense. This section looks at some sources of middle-class fear of the working classes and examines the impact of that fear on suburban ideology. The association of “laborer” or “working class” with the extremes of poverty in many published accounts of the urban scene throughout the second half of the century meant that any social group below the level of lower-middle class raised the specter of the urban “residuum” for those in the mainstream culture. This conflation of working class and the impoverished happened in part because until mid-century those who worked with their hands to eke out a living shared space with the unemployed, the destitute and the criminal in central urban areas. For example, as Henry Mayhew describes the neighborhoods he investigates, it is clear that they are not homogeneous; although he makes constant generalizations about the people he writes of, he is always careful to say that there are more than a few exceptions to whatever rule his examples supposedly illustrate. In Mayhew’s city, there are some thieves, some very poor but honest folk and some fairly well-off tradesmen or skilled workers. Yet the images the reader carries away are those of the very poorest, the very dirtiest, the

48 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era most ignorant and the most dishonest, and those images become attached to everyone living in these poor districts, including the upper levels of the working class. 2 There were many writers besides Henry Mayhew who helped to promulgate this “idea of poverty,” as Gertrude Himmelfarb calls it (723). The genre starts with Charles Knight’s London (1841) and moves through Chadwick’s sanitary report (1842), Hector Gavin’s Sanitary Ramblings (1848), R. Vandekiske’s Notes and Narratives of a Six-Year Mission among the Dens of London (1852), John Garwood’s The Million-Peopled City (1853), George Godwin’s London Shadows (1854), John Hollingshead’s Ragged London in 1861 (1861), Thomas Beggs’s “The Dwelling of the People in the Metropolis” (1866), Thomas Wright’s The Great Unwashed (1868), J. S. Storr’s “The Anarchy of London” (1873), Henry Brand’s “The Dwellings of the Poor in London” (1881), Andrew Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), F. Peck’s “Lazarus at the Gate” (1884) and many, many others. These were “true accounts,” meant to draw their middle-class readers’ attention to the dreadful state of the urban poor in a supposedly developed and humane, if no longer certainly Christian, country. 3 There were also innumerable fictional portrayals of this class in popular works by Dickens, Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell and others throughout the Victorian period. That Victorians read these works and could be relied upon to be familiar with general representations of urban poverty is shown in William Booth’s 1890 In Darkest England and the Way Out. Here, Booth implies that what he has to describe is very old news to his readers: “For years past the Press has been fi lled with echoes of the ‘Bitter Cry of Outcast London,’ with pictures of ‘Horrible Glasgow,’ and the like. . . . I may therefore assume that all my readers are more or less cognizant of the main outlines of ‘Darkest England’” (40). Despite great differences of opinion on the way to alleviate the misery of the urban poor, these “urban investigators,” for the most part, meant well. But they all failed to make clear distinctions when giving examples of extreme cases of both the degraded and the admirable poor. For example, several of these investigators give an example very much like this one: a four-year-old girl is left alone all day in a hot attic apartment with little or no food to watch her baby brother while her mother is out turning tricks. This anecdote might be followed in the text by a counter-example of a family that demonstrates “true Christian forbearance” in the face of devastating poverty (this forbearance is usually evidenced by extremely clean floors). Yet, readers are left with the sense that these two families are of equal social status, separated only slightly by degrees of cleanliness, because their stories are surrounded by the same aura of awe (from a middle-class perspective) that attached itself to all writing on this subject—a sort of “can you believe people can live like this?” attitude toward the lower classes. Further, Jones notes that

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[a]lthough [Mayhew’s] work always appeared on the recommended reading lists of the Charity Organization Society in the 1870s, the passages cited were not those which examined the causes and structures of poverty, but rather those dealing with the elaborate frauds and deceits employed by beggars and vagrants. (10 n. 33) In other words, it was not Mayhew’s representative passages, which show his care and concern for this population, but his most titillating sketches that were used to prepare those who wanted to help for interaction with “the poor.” Even Octavia Hill, a woman truly concerned with the welfare of the poor, manages to denigrate those she wants others to help by commenting that “[t]he people’s homes are bad, partly because they are badly built and arranged; they are tenfold worse because the tenants’ habits and lives are what they are. Transplant them to-morrow to healthy and commodious homes, and they would pollute and destroy them” (10). Similarly, Himmelfarb notes that the great Victorian philanthropist, the Earl of Shaftesbury, “found it easy [in his philanthropic writings] to make the transition from the part to the whole—from the ‘thousands’ of heathenvagabonds . . . to the ‘large mass of the people of these realms’ . . . to the ‘labouring classes’ whose ‘social condition’ he was ostensibly describing” (717). Octavia Hill writes in much the same way about the populations she works so hard to help. Of the effects of the Artisans’ Dwelling Act of 1875, she comments, I found that the new dwellings for the poor, which the demolition of their old quarters had rendered necessary, had for the most part been built, not on the old sites but in the suburbs. . . . These new dwellings were of a type superior to those previously inhabited by artisans in the city, and they have accordingly largely resorted there. . . . (85, emphasis added) It is astounding how quickly “the poor” for whom the new dwellings were built, and whom she has been describing as generally careless, dishonest and dirty, turn into “artisans” now living in the suburbs. Her conclusions about the success of the dwellings are arguable, but her writing shows exactly how the confusion between generally respectable artisans and “the poor” was often made. The many accounts of the urban poor reinforced each other with similar language about living conditions and habits, with the difference between poor and “worker” almost completely elided. Further, the supposed traits of the “working class” were constantly reinforced by the latest accounts of this urban population; many authors began from the assumption that this class was ignorant, drunken, improvident, idle, rootless, users of bad language, keepers of fi lthy habits, gamblers and so on. One parliamentary report on the “Physical Causes of Fever” “divided the causes of fever among

50 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era the poor into two categories, those ‘arising independently of their habits’ and those ‘originating to a considerable extent in their habits’” (Sheppard 252). Fevers caused by inherent qualities of the poor, according to this report, could be attributed to “dirtiness of person, intemperance and the neglect of vaccination” (qtd. in Sheppard 252). Another report, this one from a landlord, appeared in the November 1, 1883 Pall Mall: The vicious, dirty and destructive habits of the lowest strata have obliged me at last to decline them as tenants. These are the people that are the despair of small property owners, and drive even the most considerate of them to regard expenditure on repairs and health appliances as money thrown away. (qtd. in Jones 196) The Reverend Solly makes these attributes less threatening when he says that “[s]peaking of them as a class, I should say (and I say it with all respect), that they are often singularly childlike . . .” (11). But more threatening descriptions usually held sway in texts purporting to be sympathetic to this class. The Countess Spencer writes, . . . it must be admitted that this wretchedness is much increased by the faults of the poor. Too often they are actually extravagant—“a feast today and a fast to-morrow” is their principle of action; they are without forethought; they make no effort after cleanliness or tidiness of any kind; they will let their unbaptized children grow up playing in the gutters, without caring to send them even to the ragged school to give them a chance in the future; they will let their girls grow up in absolute ignorance of what is meant by right and wrong, vice and virtue, and will even hire them out as servants to women whose miserable subsistence is earned by sin; they have no thought of another life, and their only solace in this is the gin-shop. But all are not of this character. (3) That fi nal qualification, not uncommon to descriptions of this nature, seems too little, too late. The constant reiteration of the fi lthiness of this class resulted in the honest laborer slowly becoming inextricably bound up with dirt, disease and contagion, the very thing the suburb was supposed to protect the middle class against. Only the brave outsider could be expected to enter these neighborhoods of “human creeping things.” Even they were in danger, as Andrew Mearns details, [t]he missionaries who labour here, are constantly being attacked by some malady or other resulting from blood poisoning. . . . In going about these alleys and courts no stranger is safe if alone. Not long ago a doctor on his rounds was waylaid by a number of women, who would

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not let him pass to see his patient until he had given them money; and a bible-woman . . . was robbed of most of her clothing. (23) Not only are the neighborhoods pools of miasma and disease, but also personal safety cannot be counted upon, even by those on Christian missions. Peter Keating notes that the editor of the Morning Post referred to one journalist’s adventure in spending a night in a workhouse “as an act of bravery . . . which ought to entitle him to the VC” (15). These passages, and many more like them, weave a spell of disgust and anxiety around the lower classes. I am not suggesting that their chroniclers did not correctly represent the conditions of the destitute in Victorian cities. I am arguing that the constant repetition of such scenes and their concurrent attachment to the “working class” as a whole bred a kind of freefloating anxiety in middle-class suburbanites whenever they experienced a brush with the lower classes that was too close to home. Dickens frets about the contagious properties of the poorer areas of London in a long passage in Dombey and Son in which he asks what would happen if “the moral pestilence that rises with [the diseased air in poorer parts of London], and in the eternal laws of outraged Nature, is inseparable from [it], could be made discernible.” He writes that [t]hen should we see depravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft, murder, and a long train of nameless sins against the natural affections and repulsions of mankind, overhanging the devoted spots, and creeping on, to blight the innocent and spread contagion among the pure. (738) Dickens clearly makes a distinction between the inner-city populations and the “innocent” and “pure” who do not normally have contact with these zones. He also characterizes the behavior of the urban poor as unnatural both by contrasting their “sins” to the “natural affections” of those not affected by “blight” and by suggesting that, although moral pestilence is “inseparable” from poverty, nature is “outraged” by their behavior. (One wonders, if this is true, whether Dickens would consider poverty itself unnatural.) No wonder the middle-class suburbanite, tucked up in his green, airy retreat, wanted assurance that this population could not reach out and touch him, his family or his values in any way.

SAFETY V. SUCCOR The catalogs of human vice contained in texts that were meant to solicit aid from the middle class demonstrate one of the confl icts inherent in the suburban ideal. The middle class was not necessarily unaware of the implications of the suburban ideal for itself and society as a whole. This section provides evidence of the friction between the emerging middle-class

52 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era value of Christian duty to others and the simultaneous emergence of the middle-class desire to isolate itself from anything that threatened its sense of identity. In the fi rst place, there was a fi rm conviction among middle-class philanthropists that the poor could only learn acceptable standards of behavior by being in daily contact with their “betters.” The middle class was meant to “set a good example,” but they could not do it from afar. The Charity Organization Society (COS), the main legislator of public policy on alms giving in the 1860s through the 1880s, chided middle-class suburbanites: They have retreated before the advance of the poorer classes, abandoning in their fl ight, their houses, their influence, and any social rule over their neighbours that they might have been found competent to hold. Their isolation in suburban comfort is a sign of defeat, not of success in life, if its higher aims be understood. (qtd. in Jones 257) Yet we have already seen what many read and believed about what happened to those who went out into the poor districts—how could they do charity work among the poor and then come home to their own families carrying fi lth and disease in their hair and garments? Wanting to help and being afraid of those who needed help—these two impulses could not be reconciled for the majority of the middle class. Augustus Mayhew outlines the tension between the impulse to help and the impulse to hide when a middle-class observer is confronted by a mass of the very poor in an early section of Paved with Gold: The sight [of crowds of paupers] set the mind speculating on the beggars’ and the outcasts’ dreams. . . . The next moment the thoughts shifted, and the heart was overcome with a sense of the heap of social refuse—the mere human street-sweepings—this great living mixen, that was destined, as soon as the spring returned, to be strewn far and near over the land, and serve as manure to the future crime crops of the country. (20) Mayhew here demonstrates the conflict between the middle class’s problematic duty to alleviate suffering and the horror elicited when contemplating the sheer numbers of the urban poor and what they represented—refuse, manure and future criminal threat. Faced with the overwhelming magnitude of urban poverty, both in sheer numbers of the poor and in the myriad physical, social and moral “failings” attendant on Victorian poverty, how could any one individual be expected to make a significant difference? And how, too, was the average middle-class Victorian to overcome the fear of this population evoked by journalists, investigators and novelists at every turn? The tension between fear of the poor and compassion for them is expressed quite clearly in two periodical essays published almost fifteen

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years apart. The fi rst, an essay by Henry Morley called “The Quiet Poor” (1854), focuses on the figures of the poor themselves: When May comes round the poor creatures of this district, pent up as they are, feel the spring blood leaping faintly within them, and are not to be restrained from pressing out in crowds towards the green fields and the hawthorn blossoms. They may be found dancing in the tea-gardens of suburban public-houses, rambling together in suburban meadows, or crawling out to the Essex marshes. (201, emphasis added) In one paragraph, even in one sentence, the “quiet poor” are both creatures faintly crawling from their dungeons and crowds pressing outward, rambling in the suburbs, not to be restrained. These two impressions, one pathetic and one disturbing, co-existed in the middle-class suburban mind. The second essay, “Lights and Shadows of London Life” (1867), published in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s journal Meloria, focuses not on the poor but on the role the middle class was playing in perpetuating poverty in its escape from the city: The rich, the refined, the educated and the religious are leaving the centre of London (the poorer parts of London) and going, through the medium of railways and steamers, to the beautiful suburbs, to live in the midst of green fields and under the shade of charming trees, where they can breathe the perfume of flowers, where there is no profligacy, drunkenness or crime. They are leaving the poor, and the working class to fester together in filth, ignorance, misery and crime. (270, emphasis added) Here we see not only the cultural ideal of the suburb explicitly evoked, but also the understanding of how that ideal affected the lower classes and the conflation of the “left-behind” poor and working classes into one “festering” mass of degeneracy. The implication of this passage is that the middle class was failing not only its duty but also its nation by its fl ight to suburban bliss—that is, class separation was not the answer. Instead, guide after guide to helping the working class help themselves, from Countess Spencer’s to Octavia Hill’s, emphasized the importance of each middle-class reader’s individual responsibility for his or her parish and, ultimately, responsibility for one or two individual lower-class families. Those in need of good example, not aid, were to be actively sought out, brought into the system of help and supervised constantly by “Guardians.” Hill, in particular, lays a great stress on personal supervision: I feel most deeply that the disciplining of our immense poor population must be effected by individual influence; and that this power can change it from a mob of paupers and semi-paupers into a body of selfdependent workers [25]. . . . And why should there not be some way of

54

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era registering such supervision, so that . . . the whole metropolis might be mapped out . . . [35]. They [clergymen] count their flock by thousands, and these people want watching one by one. [39]

Texts like Hill’s, which exposed working-class life and suggested how to improve it, assumed a working-class or poor “space,” an identifiable congregation of poor people which could be mapped. This was all well and good in the poor districts of London, identifiable areas of poverty such as the East End, Whitechapel or Bethnal Green. However, Charles Booth’s work in the 1880s and 1890s, mapping the economic status of the various “rings” of London, shows that the idea of an observable congregation of poor or working-class people was less possible in suburbs of mixed social standing, those in transition from middle-class strongholds, or those on the fringe of manageable distance from the city and places of work. These “mixed” areas were under particular stress because they were, as Steven Marcus has argued, “where the two extremes approach each other, . . . where the middle-middle and lowermiddle classes come in. . . . They are acting as buffers between the antagonistic extremes [of established middle class and working class]” (261). Another option was to educate the working class “upwards” so that they could join the middle class, as Peter Gaskell suggests in his Artisans and Machinery (1836): . . . the rehabilitated man is now stationary, has lost his predatory habits, and has assumed his rank as a social and moral being; that in his further advances he still improves his habitation, builds his house in a more durable manner, and with better materials; divides it into distinct compartments, and separates the sexes . . . and . . . thus, step after step, he goes on to the maximum of civilization. . . . (107) In Gaskell’s model, the working class becomes a version of the middle class, no longer to be feared, and thus perhaps no longer a threat. The key to Gaskell’s theory is the division of the home into compartments, the establishment of boundaries in which the middle class has always had an investment. But Gaskell’s ideas take time to implement. For a quicker fi x, middle-class philanthropists seized on the idea of containing and improving the working class by controlling its whereabouts. One popular way of “improving” the working classes was to improve their housing. The easiest way to do this, according to some, was to tear it all down. Ironically, slum clearance, practiced widely between 1859 and 1879, often drove the poor/working class right into the suburbs, especially suburbs at the edge of the City (Jones 162, 176). Many recognized the implications of relying on slum clearance to “clean up” working-class homes and saw, as Godwin did, that “ . . . the ‘poor will not cease to be in the land,’ . . . the effect of this will be to burden the surrounding parishes with the pauperism which they have turned from their own doors” (46).

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In view of this eventuality, non-profit organizations began to construct model dwellings, some in the suburbs, for the working class. The driving force behind this endeavor was to “mold” the inhabitants into adopting middle-class values and behavior through a bevy of restrictions on how the space could be used and by whom. This effort was based on a pervasive ideology about identity so clearly demonstrated by Ian Baucom in Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity—that space, place and/or physical location had the power to transform the inhabitants and cause them to conform with the dominant culture. On the one hand, Baucom notes, Ruskin fi rmly believed that “vast numbers of the nation’s urban inhabitants, exposed to the baleful influence of ‘crowded tenements,’ had become more like ‘Arab[s]’ or ‘Gypsy[s]’ than Englishmen” (20). On the other, the redemptive power of properly configured space was broadly assumed in the nineteenth century, and even into the twentieth. Baucom quotes Ford Madox Ford, in his 1907 essay on the “English Mind,” who claimed, “a touch of English soil was sufficient to do as much for William the Norman, who, though we call him a Conqueror, seems to most English boys eminently more English than the Anglo-Saxon . . .” (18). Just as English soil itself will transform the foreign Other, so too could suburban soil (and domestic structures literal and figurative) transform the native Other into a “good” Englishman. In essence, the organizations that conceived of and funded model housing in the suburbs for the urban working classes attempted to ensure that any “invaders” who did cross over into the suburbs lost their power to threaten that space. Unfortunately for those who thought they had found the solution to the problem of suburban invasion, the targeted groups were not attracted to model housing. As Geoffrey Crossick has shown, “skilled workers who could afford the rents were clearly more attracted by poorly built houses” in more respectable neighborhoods (“Labour” 314). Model dwellings such as the Peabody Buildings, built all over suburban London, “had rules which were quite unsuited to the situation and tastes of the London working class” (Jones 184). Rents had to be paid on time, employers’ references were required, no trades could be performed at home if they were “offensive” (match making, gluing, fur dressing, etc.), no washing could be hung out, children were not allowed to play in the halls and residents were not allowed to paint, paper or put pictures on the walls (Jones 186–7). These rules were aimed at instilling middle-class values in the working class, but instead they attracted lower-middle-class families who could better adapt to the strict asceticism of model-dwelling life. Model housing, meant to contain and control the working class, also failed in part due to the lack of inexpensive and convenient transportation to and from the City. Cheap workmen’s fares could have solved this problem, but many communities fought workmen’s fares on “their” lines. (Indeed, most rail companies did not institute these fares until forced by law in 1883). The development of trams was also resisted by many suburban

56

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

neighborhoods “because it threatened to bring in a lower class of people and bring on social deterioration” (Thompson 20). Further, the arrival of model working-class housing in a middle-class neighborhood was thought to drive away many of the more respectable inhabitants, leaving the area declining into “shabby gentility,” where the necessity of sub-dividing and then renting out rooms in the larger houses in order to create affordable housing meant a return to the crowded conditions the respectable working class was trying to escape.

BLURRED BOUNDARIES: THE REAL THREAT TO THE SUBURBAN IDEAL Why such strenuous middle-class resistance to a social group that, while it might not keep servants, was certainly clean, tidy and quiet—the opposite of middle-class stereotypes about “brawling East Enders”? One reason was the almost impossible task of delineating class lines once neighborhoods became heterogeneous. This was especially the case in lower-middle-class neighborhoods, where, as Martin Gaskell has pointed out, the inhabitants were “almost by defi nition . . . people who had risen from the ranks of the working class” (159). This population, seen as eager to adopt the trappings of a suburban lifestyle while carrying with them the legacy of a workingclass “taint” in habits and morals, disturbed suburbanites perhaps most of all. In fact, we can trace the origin of characters such as Bradley Headstone and Charley Hexam from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865) to this source. Although I discuss these figures at greater length in Chapter 7, it is worth noting at this point that both of these characters are portrayed as grasping after a respectability that they must labor mightily to maintain, and which neither deserves in the world of the text due to innate character flaws. Headstone is both too violent, too “animalistic” in his passions (supposedly a lower-class trait), and too mentally unstable to survive the struggle his bid for status has caused him, and his resentment of those to whom membership in the middle class comes easily drives him mad. Hexam, on the other hand, is intellectually capable enough to earn a place among the respectable, but his behavior to his sister and his repudiation of his mentor demonstrate his misunderstanding of the values that shore up respectability. This lack of understanding presumably originates in his heritage as a river worker from the urban underclass. Geoffrey Crossick argues that most of the new suburbs in the second half of the century were lower middle class, and, like Headstone and Hexam, and even the Wilfers of that same novel, this population was perilously close to taking a dramatic fall down the Victorian social scale at any time (“Emergence” 23). G. L. Anderson concurs, writing that “in terms of income and career prospects, at least the lower clerks were not very distinguishable from many working men . . . though the so-called ‘intellectual’ quality of their

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work and their own pretensions separated them socially from that class” (114). Lower-middle-class clerks and other marginal “white collar” workers, like Dickens’s Mr. Wilfer, could go from middle class directly to pauper status with the loss of their position if they could not quickly find another. Living in proximity to those who had similar incomes but different class identification was especially stressful for newcomers to the middle class. Morrison describes just such an unstable neighborhood in the preface to Tales of Mean Streets: At the opposite end [of a representative street], turnings lead to streets less rigidly respectable: some where “Mangling done here” stares from windows, and where doors are left carelessly open; others where squalid women sit on doorsteps, and girls go to factories in white aprons. Many such turnings, of as many grades of decency, are set between this [respectable lower-middle-class neighborhood] and the nearest slum. (20) Morrison points here to ways in which the class values of the two groups were also quite different. The lower-middle-class family identified with middle-class values of privacy and individualism, while the working-class family “spilled into the street, the public house, the external entertainment” (Crossick, “Emergence” 27). Anything that characterized disorder was a threat to the maintenance of the suburban ideal. Hill gives her landladies the responsibility of “ . . . us[ing] the power given her by her position to bring order into the lives of her tenants” (38). Otherwise, these unregulated behaviors “spilled into the street,” making them observable. From simply being loud, on one end of the scale, to public brawling and thieving born of idleness, on the other, the perceived character traits of the working-class household in its “natural” state did not lend themselves to a life lived indoors. But being respectable meant keeping indoors. Only lower-class women sat on their front steps, gossiped across back fences or allowed the neighbors to hear them fighting. Ena Chamberlain, in her autobiography dealing mainly with her childhood in a late Victorian southern suburb of London, describes her mother “shaking her duster down at the ‘Gas Bags’ [gossiping women] where they gathered on the pavement, their hands folded under sacking aprons” (112). There was also a perceived danger to middle-class children in a suburban neighborhood on the border between middle and working class, especially for those families in the lower ranks who were trying especially hard to establish themselves as middle class. Chamberlain describes her childhood envy of her lower-class neighbors: “It wasn’t much fun being rich, to judge by the glad old times which the poorer folk seemed to enjoy. . . . All I wanted from clothes was to be dressed like the others, to be as threadbare as them, to be as dirty as they were . . .” (5–8). Working-class children got shop-bought food, but

58

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era instead of shop cakes she [Ena’s mother] gave me watercress and homebaked bread. She gave me cod-liver oil and malt which I tried to claw from the roof of my mouth. She made me sit up straight for a soldier and not take sweets from anyone unless I knew the person and unless I was asked twice. (10–1)

Her mother’s strict adherence to middle-class standards of behavior annoys Ena, and she gives the distinct impression that, given the choice, she would have opted to unleash her desires and to hell with respectability. For this very reason, middle-class children at all levels were very often “Kept-In.” Chamberlain explains, “The term . . . was applied to nicely brought up children. For example, there was a ‘Kept-In’ child who lived in Dingwall Road; when we ran round the block we saw her, peeping out of her lace curtains. I was to play with her, it was to be an honour bestowed . . .” (15). The “kept-in”-ness of the children upheld the insistence on privacy and isolation in the middle-class suburb. Geoffrey Crossick relates the story of a young lower-middle-class girl of the suburbs “who was eight years old before allowed to enter the house of a neighbour” (“Emergence” 27). The fewer children, servants, family members or even pets seen out of the house, the more respectable that family could be. The middle-class emphasis on not being seen, however, implies a spectator who is constantly on the watch.4 Middle-class women were aware of the scrutiny of their neighbors; most were wary of it. Molly Hughes’s mother appears to have been an anomaly in this respect, for “although Mother had curtains (for respectability, I suppose) she never drew them. ‘If people like to look in,’ she would say to visitors who remarked on the fact, ‘they are quite welcome. I am not engaged in murder or coining, or anything that calls for reserve’” (50). Nevertheless, she, like every other middle-class matron, was aware that one great occupation of suburban living was watching “the doings of the neighbours” (9). Obviously, in “mixed” suburban areas, observable class cues such as curtains in the windows may not have been reliable indicators of the state of the family inside. Observation of the unknown was absolutely essential, but suburban architecture made this impossible unless the inhabitants themselves “showed their colors,” so to speak. Thus the suburban landscape became full of uncertainty, rife with anxious questioning about who lived there and, more importantly, how.5 These questions, raised by the guides and social analysts, were enticing to other writers who, in a variety of ways, problematize the idea of scrutiny and what was possible to know about one’s neighbors. The anxiety surrounding the “unknowability” of suburban space results in an emphasis on the issue of suburban façades, particularly in the work of Wilkie Collins, which I outline in the next chapter.

4

Cracks in the Façade Looking Behind the Cult of the Picturesque in Victorian Suburban Fiction

The way space is arranged can have a significant impact on the way a society and culture evolve, and, by extension, the way narratives about that culture develop. In particular, the way living spaces are designed and articulated in material goods can both reflect and affect societal attitudes about the way life is “supposed” to be. One way of examining the middleclass perception of suburbia is to look at the physical features of the houses and to connect those features to concurrent writing about the suburbs. Scholars of Victorian architecture have noted that parallel to the explosion in suburban building we fi nd evidence of a so-called “Domestic Revival” in architectural style. This revival, championed in the 1860s and 1870s by Richard Norman Shaw, among others, featured “vernacular” elements of construction such as “mullions and transoms, timber-framed gables and other details” that contrasted with High Gothic’s “violently vigorous, often raspingly harsh, strongly coloured” style which was popular, particularly in church architecture, from 1850 to 1875 (Curl 116, 103).1 This is not to say that vernacular architecture replaced gothic trends in suburban building. Instead, elements from both styles were combined, copied from country villas and public buildings and incorporated into suburban homes. The appeal of both gothic and vernacular features inhered in their emphasis on exterior detail that created interesting shadows and irregular lines. The word that architects, both Victorian and modern, use to describe these features most consistently is picturesque and, indeed, suburban architecture catered quite blatantly, as we might expect, to what James Stevens Curl calls “the cult of the picturesque” (24). Domestic Revival, Gothic Revival, and the later combination of the two styles, often referred to as Queen Anne Revival, evoke the picturesque because they offer artfully constructed suggestions of rural villages and an earlier, non-urban way of life so important to the suburban ideal. Perhaps the pinnacle of architects’ efforts to achieve a picturesque effect in a suburban community is Bedford Park in Chiswick, begun in 1875. Here we see many of those elements that would, indeed, appeal to the painter’s eye, as well as the suburbanite’s: gables, mullioned windows and brick or half-timbered fronts (Curl 123). As this kind of building became widely

60

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era

popular for domestic architecture, the façades of suburban homes gained increasing importance in determining the desirability of a particular estate or development, based on what was in fashion at that particular moment. It is those fronts that concern us here, façades that supposedly equated directly to the class identification of the inhabitants. The exterior appearance of a suburban home, particularly in relation to fashionable details such as cornices, brick facing and transoms, was of such importance that “a development that exhibited unfashionable architectural features could be difficult to let, so it was often necessary for landlords to conform to current taste, even if it meant altering the façades of perfectly sound houses” (Curl 178). But this dependence on a home’s exterior as a sign of its desirability as a residence could hide problems lurking deeper within the structure of the home and in the social structure of the suburb itself. In the fi rst place, as we have seen, many suburban houses were not “perfectly sound” and so an up-to-date façade might conceal a multitude of structural sins. Second, and equally problematic for the Victorian middle class, depending on the façade of a suburban home for any guarantee about the status of the residents within could lead to embarrassing or even dangerous mistakes in assessing newcomers to suburban space. The problematic suburban façade and the middle class’s dependence on it as a status indicator seem to have been an attractive trope for many novelists of the period, and this chapter investigates a variety of responses to this issue, particularly those evident in some of the lesser-known works of Wilkie Collins. One reason novelists focused on this issue may have simply been the potential for poking fun at those who depended too heavily on those façades—a caution against taking form for function. But the caution would have been serious. Taking the state of a house, or a neighborhood, or the suburbs in general as a sure sign of what lay within was the primary source of suburban anxieties for the dominant culture in the second half of the century. In fiction, the problem of interlopers in the suburbs generally lies with middle-class observers’ failure to understand what it is they are seeing, rather than in some supposed inherent weakness in the lower classes themselves. The Nicklebys’ suburban experience in Dickens’s 1838–1839 novel Nicholas Nickleby provides a prime example of the farcical possibilities of too great a faith in the suburban façade. In this novel, the Cheeryble brothers provide the Nicklebys with a cottage in the suburb of Bow, northeast of the City. It is a charming retreat, although it is not entirely isolated. The occupants of the cottage that adjoins theirs via the back garden turn out to be rather odd. Yet, the Nicklebys would never have known that the resident of their neighboring cottage was an insane old reprobate unless he had, of his own volition, popped his head over the garden wall and made it obvious, fi rst, by throwing cucumbers and vegetable marrows at Mrs. Nickleby and, later, by proposing marriage without even the benefit of an introduction. A fi rm believer in the alliance between suburban space and social class, Mrs.

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Nickleby refuses to believe the gentleman is not respectable, despite the evidence of her own eyes, until he actually invades the house by coming down the chimney. When fi rst confessing her interactions with the new neighbor to Nicholas, Mrs. Nickleby insists, There can be no doubt . . . that he IS a gentleman, and has the manners of a gentleman, and the appearance of a gentleman, although he does wear smalls and grey worsted stockings. That may be eccentricity, or he may be proud of his legs. I don’t see why he shouldn’t be. The Prince Regent was proud of his legs. . . . (481) She simply cannot comprehend the fact that living in a suburban cottage does not guarantee anything about the inhabitants of the neighborhood. (In fact, there had long been a pauper’s lunatic asylum in Bow—perhaps Dickens drew his inspiration from that circumstance.) As the century progresses, the issue of mistaken appearances can take on a more sombre tone. As suburban space continued in flux, describing the disastrous results of giving the suburban façade too much weight serves as another way of cautioning readers about the dangers of depending on “signs,” as Arthur Morrison puts it, in determining the status of a family. In “Squire Napper,” one of Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894), the head of the Napper family quits his job as a navvy when he inherits the immense sum of £300 and becomes a gentleman of leisure. While this text’s date of publication is somewhat beyond the scope of my study, and although this is not technically a story about suburban space, “Squire Napper” illustrates the ways in which the “signs” of middle-class life could be acquired by anyone with the means to do so, even if those signs were not always employed as they were meant to be: Thus far the outward and visible signs of the Napper wealth were these: the separate house; the barrel of beer; a piano—not bought as a musical instrument, but as one of the visible signs; a daily paper, also primarily a sign; the bonnets and dresses of the missis; and the perpetual possession of Bill Napper by a varying degree of fuddlement. (134) All but one of the “signs” indicate the trappings of middle-class life, although they are clearly unsuited to the Napper family, which does not make appropriate use of them; note especially the separate house, the piano and the newspaper. These signs are unreliable, and Bill gives himself away by appearing in public “fuddled.” It seems that Morrison includes this detail to further signify the Napper’s displacement—the space of the detached single-family house in a “better” neighborhood than their previous one fails to regulate or significantly alter the behavior of those who inhabit it. The class identification of the people in Morrison’s tales is right on the border between artisan and lower-middle class. Most of the men work at

62 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era the docks, or in factories or gas works. In the introduction to his collection, Morrison writes that “[t]wo families in a house is the general rule,” but also notes that for the women in these neighborhoods, “domestic service is a social descent, and little under millinery and dress making is compatible with self respect” (Tales xv). Neither are the behaviors of the inhabitants compatible with the common depiction of the working classes as noisy, dirty and riotous. During the day, Morrison asserts, little is to be heard besides the sound of scrubbing; further, “nobody laughs here—life is too serious a thing; nobody sings. There was once a woman who sung—a young wife from the country. . . . The other women did not think much of her. She was ‘helpless’” (xx). Given the work ethic here described, Squire Napper’s social displacement is doubled—not only is he unable to make his middle-class “signs” work, but his lack of adherence to the value of work and a quiet, serious life also displaces him from the space of his origin. In a more tragic tale, Morrison’s “Behind the Shade,” two lower-middle-class and very respectable women starve to death in their own homes despite intense scrutiny, without any of the neighbors knowing: Now, when people keep a house to themselves, and keep it clean; when they neither stand at the doors nor gossip across back-fences; when, moreover, they have a well-dusted shade of fruit in the front window; and, especially, when they are two women who tell nobody their business they are known at once for well-to-do. . . . They are also watched. (Tales 75) The primacy of both privacy and surveillance in these women’s lives indicates a neighborhood that has adopted at least some of the suburban/middle-class attitudes toward domestic and community space as described at the end of the previous chapter. The women are suspected of doing some outside sewing, but only when the house is broken open after the women fail to appear for some time do the neighbors discover that behind the fruit shade the mother and daughter have sold every stick of furniture in the house without anyone being the wiser. They also discover two corpses lying on boxes that Morrison suggests are rude coffi ns, paid for with the last of the women’s money. We see here that it is not only the middle class that looked to appearances for information about the nature of a home’s inhabitants; the “signs” of class are recognized across class boundaries as a transitional working class examined itself and its neighbors, with tragic results. What kind of society is it, Morrison seems to be asking, in which it is less embarrassing to starve to death than to lack window curtains, and just what is the presence of those curtains supposed to tell us about what happens behind them? The anxiety surrounding the dichotomy between appearance and reality in the suburbs was as much an issue at the beginning of the suburban boom as it was near the end. Wilkie Collins was one of the fi rst sensation novelists to begin to explore this anxiety. His novels Basil (1852) and Hide and

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Seek (1854) address the problem of trusting to a particular kind of space to defi ne the character and morality of an individual. Collins’s Basil illustrates a dramatic failing of the suburban connection to respectability. Basil is not really middle class; his family has a country estate, keeps a whole stable of horses and can trace their ancestry back to William the Conqueror. Yet Basil does represent an accessible ideal for middle class emulation—he is neither a dandy nor a reprobate. As a younger son, he has taken up an occupation common to men of his class—the law—but he also aspires to a literary career. He is serious and earnest, and, in the fi rst chapter, he rejects the privileges associated with his “rank.” He is, in other words, an ideal(ized) middle-class hero. By contrast, Basil’s older brother, and the heir to the estate, has disgraced himself in his family’s eyes by forming an “attachment to a woman older than himself, who was living separated from her husband, when he met with her.” That his brother has benefited materially from this alliance, becoming “economical” and devoting himself “to collecting snuff-boxes and learning the violin” in a quiet suburb of London rather than carousing at all hours with his bachelor friends, seems to be beside the point (17). What is perhaps more to the point in terms of the novel is that this heir to a great estate has taken up a quiet and to all outward appearances respectable residence with a married woman and moved to the only place where such a thing was possible: the suburbs (namely, Brompton). That Basil’s brother is able to set up such an establishment in the suburbs, pointedly mentioned early in the novel, should have been a warning regarding his own, more disastrous, suburban adventure. Basil has the misfortune to fall in love at fi rst sight with a woman on an omnibus. He has boarded the bus in order to study “the eccentricities of human nature” for which he considers an omnibus to be “a perambulatory exhibition-room” (27). Basil, as narrator, sets up the omnibus as a vehicle which represents all levels of the middle class: upper, represented by two ladies “trying to look as if they occupied [the omnibus] under protest”; middle, represented by a “pompous” man well accustomed to omnibus strategy; and lower, represented by an old man dressed in black without teeth or hair (28). The omnibus, then, reads almost as a suburb on wheels, and not the reassuring kind, fi rst, because it represents travel from the city center outward and, second, because on it many social strata are mixed together in a way that the inhabitants/passengers cannot control. When Basil’s love fi rst enters the omnibus, how is he to tell to which stratum she belongs? He cannot really look at her, for she resists his surveillance: Her veil was down when I fi rst saw her. Her features and her expression were but indistinctly visible to me. I could just vaguely perceive that she was young and beautiful; but, beyond this, though I might imagine much, I could see little. (28–9)

64 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era Unable to see through her “curtain” to get a sense of who she really is, Basil assumes that her façade represents respectability. When he fi nally sees beyond her veil and beholds her face, he ignores clues that his assumptions about her may be faulty: she is “darker than usual,” with an “appearance of maturity . . . in the shape of her features” that did not compliment her youth; her expression is “unformed, unsettled,” and the “languor” of her eyes is “still fugitive and unsteady” (29). Although he hopes that she will “shine forth” on further acquaintance, the more he fi nds out about her character, the more he is disappointed. He follows her to her home, “a suburb of new houses [north of Regent’s Park, most likely in or near Belsize Park—see Appendix], intermingled with wretched patches of waste land, half built over” (31–2). Even less promising, she enters a new house, North Villa, which is only partly detached. Basil bribes a servant to fi nd out more about the girl and discovers that she is the daughter of a draper who owns a shop in a London street (bad) and that her name is Margaret (worse): A linen-draper’s shop—a linen-draper’s daughter! Was I still in love?—I thought of my father; I thought of the name I bore; and this time, though I might have answered the question, I dared not. . . . Margaret!—I had heard her name, too. Margaret!—it had never hitherto been a favourite name with me. Now I felt a sort of terror as I detected myself repeating it, and fi nding a new, unimagined poetry in the sound. (35–6) Basil practically forces himself to love Margaret with no provocation, and because he ignores even these early but obvious “ill omens,” the novel seems to imply that he deserves his fate. The family’s large, new but only partly detached suburban house makes it possible, although not necessarily rational, for Basil to assume that the woman who has rather easily won his affections comes from a family that respects and upholds middle-class values. But as his acquaintance with her family improves, the more he sees that her father is concerned solely gaining fi nancial and social advantage through a family alliance with Basil, while the mother is a nonentity, failing to fulfill her role as moral center of the domestic hearth. After convincing himself that he is in love with the woman, Basil marries her but promises to keep the marriage a secret for one year, during which he comes to know his wife better. He learns that Margaret, having learned her values from her father rather than her mother, has only married for social and economic advantage, neither of which is likely to manifest since Basil’s father, who is not fooled by new suburban houses, refuses to hear anything about the girl. Basil’s last embarrassment comes when, on the night he is finally able to take Margaret home as his wife, he discovers her in a suburban hotel room—set in “a colony of half-finished streets, and half-inhabited houses”—with another man, confessing her love and, it is implied, giving up her virginity. Too late for Basil—he is already married

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to her. Her beauty, her hauteur and her respectable façade took him in; he seems unable to realize that this façade was not a guarantee of anything real or valuable, just as her family’s home, of the latest fashion, does not guarantee that her family can afford the rent there. In Collins’s next novel, Hide and Seek, the suburbs help to cloak the true nature of two key figures. The fi rst, the hero’s father Mr. Thorpe, is presented as the epitome of Victorian respectability. His extremely strict attitudes toward acceptable behavior, Collins implies, are in line with those of the stifling atmosphere of the western London suburb in which the family resides. In the fi rst chapter, Collins connects the rainy, deserted suburb of Baregrove Square (see Appendix) and its “vacant beds” and “withered young trees” (9) to Mr. Thorpe’s ideas of discipline and child rearing. Collins describes the Thorpe’s main living room as a room that seemed as if it had never been convivial, never uproarious, never anything but sternly comfortable and serenely dull—a room which appeared to be as unconscious of acts of mercy, and easy unreasoning over-affectionate forgiveness to offenders of any kind . . . as if it had been a cell in Newgate. (12) Mr. Thorpe adheres with the strictest principles to the conventions of Sunday behavior, disallowing picture books and games; he even disapproves of looking out the window. What a shock, then, to discover, two-thirds of the way through the novel, that Mr. Thorpe has a guilty secret, a child from a youthful affair with an unmarried girl. In the suburbs, Mr. Thorpe has been able to use a strict adherence to the code of respectability to mask his failure to actually be respectable. The second suburban mystery figure is the adopted daughter of an eccentric artist, resident in the same suburban neighborhood. When Collins introduces us to her adoptive father, Valentine Blyth, however, it is fi fteen years on from the opening chapter and Baregrove Square has undergone some changes against which Collins rails for fully half of the second chapter. He writes that “Baregrove Square had lost its distinctive character altogether; other squares had filched from it those last remnants of healthy rustic flavour from which its good name had been derived; other streets, crescents, rows, and villa-residences had forced themselves pitilessly between the old suburb and the country . . .” (26). The fi fteen-year interval between the introduction of Mr. Thorpe and the introduction of Mr. Blyth and Collins’s almost excessive vituperation against suburban development serve two purposes in the novel. First, the distinction between Baregrove Square as it was then and as it is “now,” in 1851, lets the reader know that the old Baregrove Square was a more isolated and homogeneous settlement. This underscores the imprimatur of suburban respectability from which Mr. Thorpe, the long-time resident, benefits. Second, the “progress” of the suburb over time allows Collins

66 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era to explain how Mr. Blyth, the artist “whose life offered as strong a practical contradiction as it is possible to imagine to the lives of his neighbours” (31), came to be tolerated as a resident of Baregrove Square and as an acquaintance of Mr. Thorpe’s son, Zack. It also explains why Blyth’s adopted daughter Madonna, despite her suspicious origins, can be part of this suburban society which is no longer dependable or homogeneous. Madonna is deaf and dumb, and cannot tell her history. Neither do her adoptive parents ever mention her origins. As she came to the artist’s household as an older child, the neighbors assume, because of Blyth’s eccentricity, that the girl is his “natural” child. Zack, through his relationship with Blyth, becomes friends with Madonna, and this friendship ignites a series of accidents that reveal that the much-loved but once-abused and -abandoned Madonna is the forgotten love child of Mr. Thorpe. In this novel, as in Basil, Collins is clear that a respectable address and domestic habits do not make the man, or the girl. The girl, though born out of wedlock, has perfectly respectable origins in terms of genealogy and has “inherited” the middle-class values of her parents despite her early childhood as a circus performer, which earns her a happy ending. On the other hand, the presumably proper Mr. Thorpe is banished to a rural town at the end of the novel to die of shame. Aside from the lesson the plot teaches the reader about trusting to appearances, Collins also undercuts his earlier negative attitude toward suburban development. He criticizes Mr. Thorpe’s suburban respectability, rooted as it is in culturally codified standards which, while rigid, are easily replicated, rather than in values, which can be more flexible and human. In other words, the novel makes an argument for adhering to the spirit rather than the letter of the law when it comes to middle-class respectability, which would seem to imply that suburban residents might do better to pay more attention to the inside, rather than the outside, of their own (and their neighbors’) dwellings. Collins makes it clear that Zack, a naturally intelligent and spirited boy, is almost ruined by his father’s strict adherence to middle-class standards, and indeed Mr. Thorpe apologizes to Zack at the end of the novel for his overly severe parenting. It is Mr. Thorpe’s attempted repression of Zack’s human nature that causes Zack to err, even if Zack’s errors are, for the most part, minor: smoking, attending the theater despite parental disapproval and, once, coming home intoxicated. Zack, however, is in danger at the end of the novel of committing more serious lapses and has to be sent off to roam the American West in order to be purged of the damage bourgeois society, personified by his father, has done him. On the other hand, Collins’s portrayal of Blyth’s and other characters’ “natural” goodness (in spite of suburban influences) is associated with values that could be described as Christian: generosity, forgiveness, true love and a concern with culture as an expression of creativity and humanity rather than a concern with culture as a repressive schema. Although the mid-century suburbs contained both Mr. Thorpes and Mr. Blyths, Collins

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implies that the appearance of the latter type of middle-class suburbanite is an anomaly and that the Mr. Thorpe type of suburbanite is much more common and more problematic for the survival of Victorian society.

FAÇADES AND THE FALLEN WOMAN Suspicion of the respectable façade, uncomfortable as the idea might have been to suburban denizens, also raised the unwelcome specter of the reformed prostitute or “fallen woman.” Already a threat to the suburban idyll in terms of physical and moral contagion, the prostitute doubled the anxiety factor when she attempted to become respectable. William Acton played on this fear in his 1857 Prostitution when he argued that prostitution “might simply be a stage in a woman’s life” (73). He writes that incumbrances rarely attend the prostitute who fl ies from the horrors of her position. We must recollect that she has a healthy frame, an excellent constitution, and is in the vigour of life. . . . Her return to the hearth of her infancy is for obvious reasons a very rare occurrence. Is it surprising, then, that she should look to the chance of amalgamating with society at large, and make a dash at respectability by a marriage? Thus, to a most surprising, and year by year increasing extent, the better inclined class of prostitutes become the wedded wives of men in every grade of society, from the peerage to the stable. . . . [T]here is reason to believe they often live in ease unknown to many women who have never strayed, and on whose unvitiated organization matrimony has entailed the burden of families. (64) Acton does not emphasize the popularity of suburban sites for Homes for Fallen Women, as if fearing to cause too much of a panic in his readers. But Dickens, in his “Appeal to Fallen Women” (1849), paints a lovely picture of possibilities for the reformed sinner if she would only go to Angela Burdett Coutts’s institution in Shepherd’s Bush (west of Kensington): In this home, which stands in a pleasant country lane and where each may have her little flower-garden if she pleases, they . . . will learn many things it is profitable and good to know, and being entirely removed from all who have any knowledge of their past career will begin life afresh and be able to win a good name and character. (42–3) Dickens reflects these sentiments in his portrait of the home to which the fallen Alice is sent for her fi nal illness in Dombey and Son (1846–1848) and, even earlier, in the sanctuary proposed to Nancy in Oliver Twist (1838), where “you shall be placed as entirely beyond the reach of your former associates, and leave as utter an absence of all trace behind you, as

68

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if you were to disappear from the earth this moment” (357). Wonderful for the prostitute, disastrous for the suburbanite in whose proximity this home was going to be established. When, and if, prostitutes learned how to act like respectable middle-class women, the space of the prostitute in the suburbs was no longer observable or separable. She might even marry well. Indeed, as Acton says, “never a one of them but may herself, when the shadow is past, become the wife of an Englishman and the mother of his offspring” (73). The reformed prostitute was a worst-case scenario of invasion—a respectable façade enabling the dirt (moral and physical) of the urban street to enter respectable homes. Collins’s Armadale (1864) is largely taken up with the problem of the unreformed and unrepentant woman, and for much of the novel, this woman, in the figure of Lydia Gwilt, uses the respectability of the suburb as an escape and as a mask for her dangerous and immoral game. Lyn Pykett argues that, in fact, the fragmentation of the narrative in this novel and the unreliability of the narrator are a result of “what Raymond Williams has called the disappearance of the ‘knowable community’” (38); the suburbs reflect this disappearance in their ability to hide and disguise those who live there. Already convicted (under another name) of murdering her husband, Lydia Gwilt sets her sights on marriage with the heir of the Armadale fortune. But some of Armadale’s associates are suspicious of her and set a private detective on her trail. Much of the novel revolves around her desperate machinations to keep the fiction of her respectability alive just long enough to achieve her goal. In one case, Armadale’s friend Midwinter asks an old friend who happens to be in London to look up Lydia’s “respectable” reference, who is in reality a cosmetician and sometime abortionist. Tracked to iffy lodgings in town at an address different than that supplied by Lydia, Old Mother Oldershaw is trapped by the “spy,” who moves into the house opposite so he can continue his surveillance. But Lydia has taken suburban lodgings under another name for her “respectable” friend, if only she can escape and get to them unseen. She says, What do you think of those Furnished Apartments now, you obstinate old woman? Here we are, with discovery threatening us at our very door, and with no hope of escape unless we can contrive to disappear from the parson in the dark. And there are the lodgings in Bayswater [a very fashionable area just south of Hyde Park], to which no inquisitive strangers have traced either you or me, ready and waiting to swallow us up—the lodging in which we can escape all further molestation, and answer the major’s inquiries at our ease. . . . Is there anything in the world to prevent your safe disappearance from Pimlico [a seedier but not altogether unacceptable neighborhood near Millbank penitentiary] to-night, and your safe establishment at the new lodgings, in the character of my respectable reference, half-an-hour afterwards? (258–9)

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This scene reflects middle-class fears about the suburbs—that their very anonymity ensures that any person can establish a respectable façade under any name they choose and no one is ever, or at least not at fi rst, the wiser. People could change their social “face” in the suburbs as easily as landlords could change the physical “face” of a suburban home to make it more desirable. Here, Collins echoes some of his other novels where the inherent respectability of the suburb is called into question, but in Armadale, he looks at the situation from the other side, showing exactly how nefarious characters used respectable suburbanites’ trust in suburban space to create havoc in the class system. Later in the novel, Lydia makes use of assumptions about suburban space once again to enlist popular opinion on her side. She takes respectable lodgings on the outskirts of the town near Armadale’s estate and is very careful to be observed leading an exemplary lifestyle, acting the part of a wronged but resigned woman. Acton comments that this kind of establishment was quite common: “ . . . depending on respectable demeanour, [the ‘fallen’ woman] avoids vulgarity, evil company, and the attentions of strange men, and falls back, if childless, upon the domestic pursuits of gardening, needlework, cookery, and scrupulous housewifery” (65) to win the respect of her neighbors. Certainly Lydia’s neighbors place so much faith in her appearance of respectability and her ability to maintain a respectable suburban abode that they eventually come to believe that she is the innocent woman she pretends to be. As Pykett has argued, Lydia “is . . . at the centre (as both victim and instigator) of that network of surveillance and spying which the novel represents as the characteristic form of modern life” (28). She uses her neighbors’ surveillance to her advantage. At night however, and behind drawn shades, Lydia indulges in plotting and scheming with Mother Oldershaw by mail, only resting occasionally with the aid of her laudanum bottle. The novel evokes anxiety about what was really happening behind the front doors of those miles upon miles of suburban houses. Armadale never quite puts this anxiety to rest because although Lydia “does the right thing” and makes away with herself, her friend, the ex-abortionist doctor, and his seemingly respectable suburban asylum for the mentally ill (located in Hampstead) continue on profitably, sans divine retribution for imposing himself on suburban respectability. Once again we can see evidence of Collins’s ambivalence about the suburb and what kinds of things were made possible in suburban space thanks to the middle class’s unthinking dependence on space and appearances as class markers.

DEFENSE AGAINST DE-EVOLUTION Despite the warnings of narratives like these, the middle class continued to put an almost excessive emphasis on appearances. Why? Early in the twentieth

70 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era century, C. F. G. Masterman described the typical suburban attitude toward the working classes as fearful and “feverish”; the “suburban,” he claims, “is dimly distrustful of the forces fermenting in this uncouth laboratory. Every hour he anticipates the boiling over of the cauldron . . . the ‘letting in of the jungle’ upon the patch of fertile ground which has been redeemed for the wilderness” (72). This echoes Sir Leicester Dedlock, in Bleak House (1852–1853), who refers to “the confusion into which the present age has fallen; of the obliteration of landmarks, the opening of floodgates, and the uprooting of distinctions . . .” by which Dickens parodies middle- and upper-class fears about the “floods” of working class in urban centers (449). One underlying source of the fear of a working-class invasion was derived from the larger middle-class concern about “degradation” or, later in the century, “de-evolution.” Speaking directly to his readers in his preface to Paved with Gold (1858), Augustus Mayhew says of the criminal poor that “crime has now become a trade. Cunning is the only capital needed. The youths who take to this desperate calling are of such a nature that they are beyond a sense of danger. . . . They are insensible to the fear of the law” (i). This population is a “new breed,” both “unnatural” and too “natural” to be contained by civilization as represented by both rule of law and culture. Contributing to this anxiety, the unsettledness of the suburb left no room for continuation over time, which is the essential component of paternalistic rule, the hallmark of Victorian middle-class culture and, as Ian Baucom has demonstrated, the essence of English national identity in the eyes of many, including Ruskin. To the middle class, the situation was critical—the entire culture was at risk. Specifically, middle-class commentators feared the demoralization, dehumanization and dissolution of the lower classes would spread its contamination upward. Augustus Mayhew addresses this fear when, discussing his main character, he writes, Phil, from living among these boys, had picked up their slang, and forgotten the ‘good words’ taught him at his school as completely as a child sent to a foreign land loses its native language. His mind, too, had taken their stamp—the one that often seals a destiny—and his morality had become as muddy as his rags. (119) Fear of degeneration prompted many a panicked article or oration. Rather than “simply” dirty or immoral, the lower classes were often portrayed as a force of nature, threatening to overwhelm English society and culture. In one of the most famous examples, W. Cooke Taylor wrote in 1841 of “the slow swellings of an ocean [of working-class people] which must, at some future and no distant time, bear all the elements of society aloft upon its bosom, and float them—heaven knows wither” (qtd. in Armstrong 169). 2 The specific threat was that, as Taylor suggests, all society would be “floated together” into some new form in which working-class traits would be dominant. J. M. Ludlow, a contemporary of Dickens, is handwringingly

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anxious about the possibility of good society’s de-evolution in the face of a working-class “flood”: But what if they be the characteristics of a daily-increasing class?—if the fallen condition of the Spitalfields weaver be only the full-developed type of what is everywhere taking place? . . . So that, whilst the poor are getting poorer, the comparatively well-off are either sinking into poverty or becoming the mere parasites of labour. . . . (qtd. in Himmelfarb 728) For Ludlow, the threat is imminent—there is no equal and opposite rise of deserving members of the working and lower-middle classes. Hard work and devotion have no power in his vision. He is one who fears an “avalanche,” as Himmelfarb calls it, where those who fell over the “abyss” into poverty might begin a trend that took all of society with it (729). Ruskin saw London as “the space in which, as many of these English migrants descended into poverty, they transformed themselves into local allegories of the empire’s distant ‘savages’” (Baucom 57). He took issue with Dickens’s fictionalized accounts of London, which, as Baucom points out, Ruskin read as fictions of “decomposition.” Carlyle, too, in the 1860s, equated the urban working classes with Britain’s colonial laboring classes, figured as “savages” or “brutes,” and in doing so “discerns a bestialization of England, a descent into half-brutishness that will make . . . [a] breeding ground of deformed Englishness” (Baucom 47). Yet Dickens was equally concerned about this problem. In 1851, at about the time he was composing Bleak House, Dickens makes a speech in which he warns his listeners, That no one can estimate the amount of mischief which is grown in dirt; that no one can say, here it stops, or there it stops, either in its physical or moral results, when both begin in the cradle and are not at rest in the obscene grave, is now as certain as it is that the air from Gin Lane will be carried, when the wind is Easterly, into May Fair, and that if you once have a vigorous pestilence raging furiously in Saint Giles’s, no mortal list of Lady patronesses can keep it out of Almack’s. (qtd. in Flint 157) In Dickens’s mind, the ill wind of contamination from the East End will override a West End zephyr of good influences any day. One way to counteract this potential contamination was to insist on standards of appearance and behavior that underscored middle-class values, even to depend on those standards to modify lower-class behavior and thus nullify the threat of degradation.

CLEANING UP THE SUBURBS In some respects, the middle-class suburbanite had reason to be worried about degeneration. After all, many aspects of suburban life were very little

72 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era different from working-class housing conditions. Considering the chaotic atmosphere of the suburb in the later part of the nineteenth century, the term “nuisance removal” seems to take on a double meaning. As the suburbs become less stable, not only did this term refer to the necessary removal of offensive materials from dustbins and cesspools, but it also seems to have come to mean a concern with the removal of social “nuisances” like the brawling communities described in the previous chapter, impinging on suburban space. I suspect that very few suburban residents would agree with Mr. Boffi n, from Our Mutual Friend, when he says of his dust mounds, “I may sell them, though I should be sorry to see the neighborhood deprived of ’em too. It’ll look but a poor dead flat without the Mounds” (212). Yet, given the dirtiness of suburban space, middle-class suburbanites generally focused on keeping lower-class “dirt” out of their space rather than concentrating on cleaning up that space to make the suburban ideal fit a little more comfortably with the reality. There are two possible reasons why the middle-class focused on social “debris” rather than their own waste production. One is Mary Douglas’s theory that in order to control disorder, which represents a weakened social border, the intrusive elements are labeled by the dominant culture as dirty (Schoenwald 673). Thus the whole idea of “dirt,” which represents chaos and degeneration, gets thrust upon the “intruding” and seemingly uncontrolled population. This also explains why the appearance of cleanliness and quiet respectability had such influence in middle-class perceptions of what the suburb should be. On the other hand, Thomas Boyle, in his study Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead, postulates another reason why the suburb could be seen both as a representation of social prosperity and as a site of potential social de-evolution. He writes, . . . the inspiration for the two apparently contradictory images—of the happily toiling laborers [in Ford Maddox Brown’s painting Work ] and the ominous grunting swine [of the titular urban legend]—is identical. . . . [T]he very activity to which Ford . . . attribute[s] spiritually edifying qualities was perceived by others—with considerable justification—as basically threatening; threatening, that is, to both the memory . . . of the blissful rustic past and the ‘vast and undiscovered ocean’ of the future. . . . In this sense, the painter’s explication of what everything . . . means in his work can be seen not as an act of confidence or professional thoroughness, but as an obsessive nervous fidget . . . ; a neurotic attempt to control an environment which is rapidly getting out of control. (215–6) In other words, Ford’s portrayal of Victorian suburban society as a happy harmony of productive workers, no matter what social class, was in fact an attempt to whitewash fears about the two most prominent classes in

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the painting—the casual laborer and the mendicant—and what they represented as a vision of the future of suburbia: uncontrolled contact with the residuum. The anxiety about the interconnections between classes in suburban space is highlighted in Richard H. Horne’s article “Dust, or Ugliness Redeemed,” published in Household Words in 1850. As the title suggests, the article focuses on shifting readers’ perceptions of the “ugly” dust heaps by describing at length how what seems to be hideously dirty and vile actually contributes materially to the economy and the production of urban/suburban life. For example, near the beginning of the article, Horne describes the heaps in rather unsavory terms: The present [heap] was . . . in fact a large hill, and being in the vicinity of small suburb cottages, it rose above them like a great black mountain. Thistles, groundsel, and rank grass grew in knots on small parts which had remained for a long time undisturbed; crows often alighted on its top, and seemed to put on their spectacles and become very busy and serious; flocks of sparrows often made predatory descents upon it; an old goose and gander might sometimes be seen following each other up its side, nearly midway; pigs routed round its base,—and now and then, one bolder than the rest would venture some way up, attracted by the mixed odours of some hidden marrow-bone enveloped in decayed cabbage-leaf. (379) However, Horne prefaces this passage by remarking, “A Dust-heap of this kind is often worth thousands of pounds,” in an attempt to prepare his readers for his explanation of the mystery of how all this “dust” turns into money. The following several paragraphs of the essay describe exactly how this happens; interestingly, much of what is extracted from these dust heaps goes right back into the materials of suburban building. One kind of cinder, “called the breeze, because it is left after the wind has blown the fi ner cinders through an upright sieve, is sold to the brickmakers.” The non-biodegradable items, or “hard-ware,” which “includes all broken pottery, pans, crockery, earthenware, oyster-shells, &c.” are sold to those who make new roads (380). This frank and open discussion of the benefits of the garbage piling up in some suburban neighborhoods contrasts pointedly with the story that Horne constructs around this dust heap. In the rest of the essay, Horne describes three dust-pickers, an old man and woman and a younger boy. The two older figures, similar to the lowerclass urban figures from Our Mutual Friend, are described not as whole human beings, but as twisted or maimed creatures (one is bent much like Jenny Wren, the other has a wooden leg like Wegg). At the crux of the story is a missing will buried in one of the mounds. This will, when discovered, reveals the youngest dust-picker to be the rightful inheritor of a

74 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era large fortune, enabling him to raise both himself and the others out of their lives of “misery” and, notably, out of the dust yard, which remains stolidly where it has always been. What Horne has done, apropos the suburban space he describes in this article, is focus the narrative not on cleaning up the garbage, which is, after all, contributing something material to the economy, but on “cleaning up” the lower class figures therein. By locating the anxiety in the people and not in the “dirt,” Horne helps reinforce the idea that removing the people “invading” suburban space was of greater urgency than improving its actual physical condition. William Booth addressed the conflation of a “residual” population and sewage when he proposed, in 1890, “to establish in every large town . . . ‘A Household Salvage Brigade’” to employ the out-of-work laborers. This “civil force of organised collectors” would have the duty of “collecting the waste of the houses in their circuit.” Thus, by controlling both the worker and the waste, Victorians could “restore . . . to the over-grown, and, therefore, uninformed masses of population in our towns the same intelligence and co-operation as the mutual wants of each and all, that prevails in your small town or village” (115) (as if somehow coming in contact with other people’s waste products would engender civic pride and improved intelligence in the lower classes). The need to stabilize suburban space, to soothe anxieties and reassert the middle-class right to the suburban ideal in the face of increasing evidence that it very often simply did not exist, increased in the 1860s and 1870s. During this period, suburban building peaked and then crashed, only to rise again, creating rapid changes in the conditions of neighborhoods. The following chapters investigate how Victorian writers attempted to assuage their readers’ fears, offering narratives that either neutralize or highlight the working-class threat to suburban space. It is ultimately my argument that the figure of the suburb served as a potent trope which enabled writers to probe the limits of what it meant to be middle class in the Victorian period and how the practical and universal application of middle-class standards might affect the future of the nation itself.

5

Controlling “That Region of Irregular Bodies” The Uninhabitable House and the Suburban Ghost Story

At the most basic level, the middle class was concerned with marking its space to reinforce class boundaries. An observer should have been able to identify the social position of any individual by the space that individual occupied. However, the middle-class concern that outward appearances reflect something true about the people within gave greater urgency to an overriding concern with “normality.” As Foucault points out in Discipline and Punish, “normalization [became] one of the great instruments of power at the end of the classical age” (184), and throughout the nineteenth century, “normality,” as defi ned by middle-class values, was the mark of social identification. Homogeneity was key; difference was redefi ned as illness and domesticated in various institutions, from prison to workhouse to hospital. As part of this process of normalizing middle-class behaviors, Nancy Armstrong argues that Victorian fiction in general “helped to formulate the ordered space we now recognize as the household . . . and used it as the context for representing normal behavior” (23). According to her, domestic fiction took on the task of taming “new domains of aberrance” which were beyond or above the law (163). Another kind of fiction, the suburban ghost story on which this chapter focuses, contributes to this cultural movement by giving the middle-class male hero of its narrative the opportunity to order the space inside the house, which has been disrupted by the ghost, and to “normalize” those connected with it. In many ways, the epitome of the suburban ghost story is Mrs. J. H. Riddell’s novella The Uninhabited House (1875). Here the ghost is (or was) a private investor in speculative building who haunts his own suburban home, fi nanced on the proceeds of suburban building. His ghostly presence makes this house literally uninhabitable. In this narrative, Mrs. Riddell combines many details of suburban life, including the financial benefits of suburban investment, the instability of those investments, the type of person associated in the Victorian mind with suburban development, the concern over the location and reputation of suburban housing and the mutability of suburban neighborhoods. But Mrs. Riddell was not alone in addressing these troubling themes. Throughout the period 1850–1880, many ghost stories were published which take place partly or entirely in the suburbs.

76 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era In this chapter, I analyze five main themes of suburban ghost literature in the middle third of the Victorian period: the unsettling physical space of suburban neighborhoods, the ghost figure as threat to middle-class culture, the undomesticated woman in suburban space, the rising male middle-class hero who nullifies the threat of both the supernatural and the undomesticated, and the uncertain future of the suburbs as a suitable middle-class stronghold.

UNSETTLED AND UNSETTLING SPACES The suburb of Riddell’s The Uninhabited House is an area west of London on the banks of the Thames (see Appendix). Dismal and grey, the neighborhood has seen better days; its tendency to flood seasonally has driven many of the more upscale residents to seek higher ground. But the area still has enough tone to be considered “suitable in every respect for a family of position” (3) owing to the division it marks between isolation from urban concerns and reasonable proximity to the city. Still, the status of this borderline space is indeterminate. If “good” tenants can be found for it, the area may remain suitable in the future; if not, the abandoned home will signal to potential residents that the neighborhood is no longer a good place in which to invest one’s reputation. And, since the middle-class heroine of the story depends on the rental of the house for her income, any threat to the neighborhood is a threat to her survival as respectable woman. For Victorian ghost stories set in suburban space, the “borderline” status of a neighborhood is a common trope. Take, for example, the suburb of Margaret Oliphant’s “The Open Door” (c. 1860). In this story, a recently built villa on the outskirts of Edinburgh is disturbed by a disembodied moaning near the ruins of an older estate. Due to its isolation and its connection with the older and more “aristocratic” structure, the house at fi rst seems to be more of a country estate than a suburban villa. But telling details such as the industrially polluted river running through the property and the convenient number of trains into town indicate the villa’s suburban status and its precarious position on the margin between urban and rural.1 “Tale of a Gas-Light Ghost,” published anonymously in the same decade as Oliphant’s “Open Door,” also incorporates quintessentially liminal suburban space as the primary setting. “Tale of a Gas-Light Ghost” takes place in a town near London that is about to become suburban thanks to the imminent arrival of the railroad. Located on the outskirts of this village, the haunted house in “Gas-Light Ghost” thus becomes doubly liminal—a suburb of a suburb. In all three stories, the haunted houses are ones that leasing agents fi nd difficult to rent. The suburban ghost story often raises the specter of the abandoned and uninhabitable suburban house before any actual ghosts are introduced, a vision frightening in and of itself. Arthur Morrison plays on

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this trope—abandoned suburban homes as the potentially undefended border—in A Child of the Jago (1896). In one segment of the novel, a desperate thief takes a train from East London to Canonbury, just east of Islington, where he is, fortunately for the suburbanites, unlucky: He tramped the northern suburb from three o’clock till dark, but touched for nothing. . . . He peeped in at the gates of quiet gardens, in the hope of garden-hose left unwatched, or tennis-rackets lying in a handy summer house. . . . He inspected quiet areas and kitchen entrances in search of unguarded spoons. . . . He tramped one quiet road after another on the look out for a dead ‘un—a house furnished, but untenanted. (107, emphasis added) Here, the presence of a “dead” uninhabited house is what draws the attention of thieves to suburban neighborhoods, inviting invasion. But the suburb itself is also dead, in a way, unpeopled and deathly quiet, with no signs of the activities associated with suburban living, while the vagabond thief is a little too “alive” for the taste of suburban property owners. Not only do individual empty houses weaken the suburban boundaries; the very quiet of the suburb, its daytime uninhabitedness, underscores its vulnerability and makes the possibility of invasion all too real. And once the suburb as middle-class safe haven is compromised, it becomes, in the middle-class mind, uninhabitable, much like the haunted homes of the suburban ghost story. Mrs. Riddell, as the most prolific writer of suburban ghost stories, was famous for her uninhabitable suburban houses. Written between 1860 and 1890, her stories are concerned with both kinds of suburb—the ideal garden variety and the suburb on the decline—both of which she knew intimately. In Riddell’s work, the latter kind of suburb typically contains a haunted house that was once inhabited by a single middle-class family but which is, at the time of the story, either divided into lodgings or looked after by a caretaker. Both “Old Mrs. Jones” and “The Old House in Vauxhall-Walk,” published by Riddell in her 1882 collection Weird Stories, are set in neighborhoods on the decline. In “Old Mrs. Jones,” the haunted house is in a suburban area south of the Thames that had been respectable in the recent past, but which is slowly slipping into working-class hands, as evidenced by the current inhabitants, a cabman’s family. To make matters worse, from the middle-class narrator’s point of view, the house is let by the cab driver with the express purpose of dividing it up into lodgings. If the ghost herself were not so unsavory, the narrator implies, she would be almost welcome as the mechanism for driving the cabman’s family away, thus staving off the neighborhood’s decline. “Vauxhall-Walk,” on the other hand, is set in a neighborhood clearly unreclaimable for the middle classes. The haunted house in this story is in Lambeth, a “dreary district” where “the fumes of the gas works seemed to fall with the rain” (85). The state of the house mirrors the state of the neighborhood in general, which, “once inhabited by well-to-do citizens [is] now

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let out for the most part in floors to weekly tenants” (86). Note the shift here from “citizens” to “tenants,” more significant given that the residents of this particular haunted house are servants. Whether it is the location or the inhabitants of the haunted house (or both) that contribute to its borderline status within the suburb, that status is essential to the suburban ghost story. It is the instability of the suburban space that makes the supernatural elements of the story possible and meaningful to the middle-class reader.

INVADERS FROM THE NETHERWORLD In the suburban ghost story, a ghost is rarely just a ghost. Instead, the ghost is figured as a threat to the middle-class conception of order, either as a criminal or as an unstable element in suburban space. Deborah Epstein Nord points out that “middle-class observers recorded the descent into the netherworld of poverty not as a journey into unknown territory . . . but as a fall into a gaping hole at the edge of society” (321) which could be likened to a grave. In the same way, it might be argued, middle-class writers figured what emerged from that grave/hole as creatures of the netherworld. For example, one proponent of emigration schemes lamented that “it is melancholy to reflect that thousands of British subjects should wander about, more like spectres than flesh and blood” (Dickens and Chisholm 19). Here, the poverty-stricken are figured as ghosts partly because of their appearance, starving in their shoes, but also because they are frightening, and the implications of their presence in such great numbers is terrifying. The reader is asked to imagine, in this one sentence, what it would be like to live in a country inhabited by “thousands” of the walking dead, and to take action to prevent the realization of that vision, even if the action is simply to remove the figures so that one no longer has to look at them. But the presence of the urban poor could be figured in other “ghostly” ways. In “The Death of a Goblin” (1850) by Henry Morley, a long-standing urban home is haunted by the ghost of a murdered ancestor who visits the inhabitants at night, holding a cup of poison to the lips of the next person to die. And, in fact, no one who comes to live in the house prospers; all die young or become invalids. Eventually, however, the ghost is identified as “a smell” or, more specifically, the effluvia of the sewage that has been backing up into the house due to bad drains. Although the sewage that is killing the family might not necessarily be directly connected to the urban poor (what backs up into one’s drains is usually one’s own), the fact that London’s drainage system was no longer able to handle the amount of sewage produced by the masses and the fact that close contact with such substances was associated with urban poverty strengthen the connection here between the ghost figure and the urban disease and fi lth from which the suburban middle class was trying to escape.

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Nord argues that “[t]he disconcerting invisibility, the undetectability, of this process of invasion and infiltration might inspire the reformer’s audience to attack social problems at hand before they overran the boundaries of the netherworld” (84, emphasis added). Certainly, “The Death of a Goblin,” along with the emigration pusher, urge readers to reform some aspect of their society, but they also make a connection between the poor and creatures of the “netherworld” in both senses. Hence, dirt and disease are associated in the middle-class mind with both the urban underworld and the supernatural otherworld. In the metaphor of the ghost-invader, both the ghost and the underclass invader are invisible, undetectable and transgressive of every boundary the suburbanite tried so carefully to erect between himself and the Other. We can see this connection made explicit to the suburbs in much literature of the period; turning again to Augustus Mayhew’s Paved with Gold (1858), for example, we fi nd a young woman spooked by a figure she sees standing in her suburban garden one evening. She alerts the household with her cries, but they fi nd nothing and her father berates her: Even if you did see some one in the garden, is it so difficult to enter from the road? . . . What is there so dreadful in it that you must rush up and down the house like a banshee, frightening everybody out of their night’s repose? . . . I should not wonder if some report were spread about that the house is haunted, or something of the kind, and not only will the domestics refuse to stop with us, but the value of the property will be considerably depreciated. . . . (383) The father’s concern that the respectability of the house will be tarnished if it is associated with ghosts is telling, especially as he seems more concerned with rumors of ghosts than that the house’s boundaries are essentially open to anyone passing on the road. This concern is unfortunate for the father, for his daughter did see someone in the garden, an old enemy who eventually gets into the house and holds up the family at gunpoint, subtly emphasizing the relationship between ghost and invader. In another fascinating story, published in Household Words in 1850, Harriet Martineau describes the unfortunate situation of one Mrs. Wharton, an eminently respectable matron living in a suburb of a northern manufacturing town. Mrs. Wharton is troubled by the appearance of “a most hideous—a most detestable face—gibbering and making mouths” at the foot of her bed in the middle of the night (“Ghost” 140). The ghostly figure even goes so far as to occasionally intone, “I come to see you whenever I please” (142). Martineau insists on Mrs. Wharton’s respectability from the fi rst paragraph of the story, and as Mrs. Wharton is so very respectable, she wishes to keep her visitations a secret because she “could not keep [her] servants a week, if it got out” (141). As the hauntings continue, Mrs. Wharton actually learns to live with her ghost and is eventually able to sleep right

80 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era through its visits. When, after several years, she is invited to tour the local glass works with the vicar, she recognizes her ghost in the face of one of the workers, a “half-wit” glass blower. The man confesses that he discovered a secret passage from one of the lower rooms of the glass works to Mrs. Wharton’s cellar, and he visited her whenever her supply of coals was low enough to enable him to get through the opening. If his appearance and demeanor were not frightening enough, the intruder “posing” as a ghost evokes several of the themes regarding intruders in suburban space. First, the anxiety surrounding the man’s spectral appearances is intensified by his vaguely threatening “I come to see you whenever I please,” which implies the failure of middle-class domestic space to keep working-class populations at bay. Second, that Mrs. Wharton could become so accustomed to these invasions that she no longer took notice of them has disturbing ramifications for the middle-class suburbanite striving for social homogeneity. After all, if Mrs. Wharton can become inured to a working-class man having unlimited access to her very bedroom, then readers might easily envision a day when they would not be bothered by working or even underclass neighbors all around them. The very notion represents a failure of the middle-class struggle for social order. In this way, the suburban house in supernatural fiction becomes the locus of a struggle for dominance between the lower class or class-less and a middle class interested in solidifying its position within the Victorian social structure. Other suburban ghost stories of the period make less of an effort than “Death of a Goblin” and “The Ghost that Appeared to Mrs. Wharton” to give a “natural” explanation for the invasive supernatural elements of the narrative. Even so, readers can trace the connection between ghost and lower-class invader quite easily. In Margaret Oliphant’s “The Open Door,” the ghost is real, although not everyone believes in it. Here, it is not the suburban villa itself that is haunted, but the ruins of the old estate nearby. At fi rst, the renter of the villa, a colonel recently returned from India with his family, blames the disturbances on a tramp, but he is indignant about the invasion. When he fi rst hears the ghost, he complains, Why had the fool of woman at the gate allowed anyone to come in and disturb the quiet of the place? If I had not been in such hot haste to get home, I think I should have stopped the carriage and got out to see what tramp it was that had made an entrance and chosen my grounds, of all places in the world—when my boy was ill!—to grumble and groan in. (37, emphasis added) Note how the colonel assumes that there is some universally understood mandate that his grounds would be the least appropriate place for a tramp to visit. However, when the colonel later experiences the ghostly manifestation face to face, as it were, realizing that the thing could not possibly be of human origin, he is even more horrified. He wants to ignore the entire

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situation but cannot; his invalid son insists that the ghost must be put to rest. In an ironic twist, the ghost of “The Open Door” turns out to have been, in real life, a tramp who returned to the old estate just as his mother, the cook, had died. For his son’s sake, the colonel is thus forced to take a kindly interest in the fate of a lower-class-turned-underclass figure in order to eradicate it. Yet once the figure has been laid to rest, the space is tainted in the colonel’s eyes. He reluctantly stays out his lease and then leaves the premises forever. In the meantime, the area’s doctor continues to insist that the ghost was actually a tramp hiding in the ruins, as if this fact would be of any comfort to the colonel. Although the invasion of his (rented) space may have infuriated the colonel, the ghost figure in Oliphant’s “The Open Door” is harmless in itself in that it represents no real threat to the upper orders. Its greatest desire is simply to be let into the kitchen so that it might see its mother. Once the local vicar makes the ghost understand that it should seek its mother in heaven, the ghost disappears. It had no real wish to cross boundaries; being in a liminal state itself, between material and spiritual, it merely sought its own kind in the wrong place. Other ghost stories of the period have less accommodating spirits, and the ghosts in stories later than Oliphant’s are invested with more sinister social implications that threaten the entire fabric of the Victorian social order. In Riddell’s The Uninhabited House, for example, both the ghost and the murderer are, in a sense, social impostors. Despite his grand home, built on the profits from all those poorly built new houses, the murdered-manbecome-ghost is of decidedly inferior origins. The son of a small builder, he was, in life, unable to pronounce his H’s correctly and had a less than imposing physical presence: “ . . . bluff in manner, short in person, red in the face, cumbersome in figure, addicted to naughty words, not nice about driving fearfully hard bargains, [he was] a man whom men hated, not undeservedly . . .” (11). The key to his social position could also be read from his occupation; middle-class readers knew that “most [builders] lived an almost hand-to-mouth existence, . . . the usual practice being to raise a mortgage on one floor of a house to fi nance the next stage” (Burnett 24). Indeed, as Dyos points out, “ . . . speculating builder . . . [was] frequently used as [a term] of abuse” (89). However, the man who turned this undesirable figure into a ghost is not figured as a hero in the narrative as one might expect. Not only is the murderer also a speculative builder, he is “by day” a low-level clerk with a small family who is unable to live within his means. Neither the murderer nor the murdered in “The Uninhabited House” ideally belong in a suburban setting because of their problematic relationship to the cash nexus, a relationship which to a great extent defi ned who “belonged” in the middle class. The ghost, in life, was not only nouveau riche, but had made his new riches off the middle class, which invested in suburban building more than any other industry. The murderer, on the other hand, is carefully characterized by Mrs. Riddell as the type of person

82 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era without middle-class values of self-help and hard work, who tries to leapfrog into the middle class by a shortcut (speculation) which ultimately fails. When the ghost succeeds in confronting and “removing” his murderer by causing his death, both pretenders to the middle class are removed from suburban space. This allows the heiress to the property to destroy the house, which represents misappropriated social worth, and replace it with a suburban estate which is, presumably, responsibly planned and represents a good middle-class investment opportunity. As a member of the “wrong crowd,” the ghost in suburban ghost stories is often charged with attracting other unsavory elements to middleclass space. In “Tale of a Gas-Light Ghost,” the security of the new and potentially prosperous suburb is threatened by the arrival of a murderer as tenant of a new but abandoned villa. This wealthy and reclusive man comes there to escape a ghost which haunts his person rather than his home. When a corpse is discovered by navvies digging the embankment for the nearby railway line, the haunted man dies suddenly and the haunting ceases. The implication that a crime has been committed in this emerging border between the new economy and the old emphasizes the ultimate unknowability of suburban existence; one cannot depend on the physical space to provide the measure of the people living within it. In this story, readers can make out the seemingly close connections between the failure of suburban development (figured in the abandoned villas), the arrival of the Other within a supposedly closed border (murderers were not supposed to be able to live “among us”) and violent death on the margin that divides past and future. Alternatively, another of Mrs. Riddell’s stories focuses on ways ghosts can keep the respectable inhabitants of a neighborhood away, ruining it. In her story, also titled “The Open Door,” the ghost of a murdered member of the aristocracy seems to haunt the upscale suburban dwelling in which he was killed. Within the narrative it is difficult to determine which facets of the haunting (the perpetual opening of one particular door) are ghostly and which are carried out by a human hand. For it becomes clear that part of the haunting can be directly attributed to the murdered man’s wife, who wants to keep people away from the house so she can search for and destroy the will that would disinherit her. This woman is patently not a member of the middle class; rather, she is portrayed as an animalistic opportunist who will stop short of nothing to have her money. Early in the story she is discovered “running through the bushes” in the evening; later, at the climax of the tale, she fights like a cornered animal against the hero, “shifting her body as though she had not a bone in it” (66). It is she, rather than the ghost, who is the invader, both physically and socially. There is, in fact, a ghost in this narrative, but he is benign; the most frightening elements of the haunting—those that kept respectable tenants away—can be directly attributed to the young widow, who is forthwith sent off to the Continent to live out the rest of her life in exile.

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Stories like these alternately agitate and relieve their middle-class readers; after all, at the end of the stories the ghosts are laid to rest or removed from suburban space and the threat, although concretely evoked, is nullified. In some cases, however, it is not enough simply to remove the ghost to undo the effect hauntings have on middle-class space. Sometimes, it requires direct human action on the part of those left alive to remove the threat to the social order represented by the ghost. For example, in Mrs. Riddell’s “The Old House in Vauxhall-Walk,” the ghost who haunts the old, rundown suburban home had been immensely wealthy in life. However, she was also a miser and therefore abused the “trust” of her wealth. She was in no way respectable; when alive, her only visitors were her impoverished debtors. Murdered by thieves, the woman haunts her home, counting her money and shivering by the fi re. Scrooge-like, she is herself haunted by the “pale, sad shapes” of those unfortunates whom she refused to aid. When her hidden wealth is discovered by the young man attempting to rid the house of her visitations, her ghostly presence is eradicated. However, in order to redeem the space, to reclaim it as far as possible for respectability, the money must be used to make restitution for her greed. Part of this restitution is to return a large portion of the money to her brother, so that he may claim his patrimony and take his rightful place in society. Another large sum is given to the hero as reward so that he also may rejoin his family, redeemed and independently wealthy. Thus the old miser’s money is returned to its proper circulation, within the middle class where it will be used “properly,” including for a respectable level of charitable donation, eradicating all traces of the woman and her unseemly spirit.

WOMEN OUT OF ORDER Indeed, in “The Old House in Vauxhall Walk” it is the woman’s spirit that is the problem, for she is both unrespectable and unrepentant about preferring property to propriety. In this sense she is ironically undomesticated in the eyes of a culture that defi ned domesticity largely in terms of propriety in addition to connection with the actual domestic space. For example, a middle-class woman down on her luck maintained a basic level of respectability, even in reduced circumstances, as long as she maintained behaviors associated with respectability (i.e., observed the proprieties), whatever the cost to her physical comfort. Those behaviors are primarily domestic tasks— a particular way of running a household and relating to those within its domain, however small. At the same time, a blatantly unrespectable person could acquire all the trappings of middle-class culture, including suburban property, and still remain outside the stronghold of middle-class culture if she could not sufficiently demonstrate mastery of domestic behavior. An undomesticated woman in suburban space, whether beyond the bounds of property or propriety, was a dangerous thing in middle-class eyes. This is

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especially so since suburban space was often considered feminized space— due to the absence of the men during the workday, most suburban activity was conducted by women. To have an undomesticated woman in this space would violate the middle class’s belief that location constructed identity. Not surprisingly, then, many suburban ghost stories of the period include a wild or weird woman in connection with the invasive ghost. In “Old Mrs. Jones,” for example, Riddell creates a ghost who was as frightening in life as she is in death. Mrs. Jones was a dark-skinned “foreign” woman who was married for her wealth by a penurious doctor. On her arrival in a reasonably respectable suburban area south of the Thames, the neighbors discover that she speaks with an accent, has “a face the colour of mahogany” (180) and is extremely unsociable. Although the neighborhood had prepared to welcome her as a new bride, once she is seen she is quickly dropped from the social rounds, presumed by her neighbors to have “her own set of friends.” In fact, her neighbors felt that “it would be most undesirable to introduce foreigners of no respectable colour into the bosom of British families who had made their money in the City” (191). Her obvious failure to “fit in” to her suburban neighborhood, and her further refusal to bow to propriety, leaves no one surprised that she disappears under most mysterious circumstances. In death, Mrs. Jones continues to aggravate the residents of the district by her spectral tappings, knockings and occasional appearances, as if trying to draw attention to herself. In fact, this seems to be the most annoying thing about her ghost—she refuses, even unto death—to recede quietly into any form of domestic tranquility. Further, she ruins the reputation of one young servant girl by leading her, dressed only in a nightdress, out into the city in the dead of night. In this way, Mrs. Jones transfers her lack of domesticity to others in the house. Mrs. Jones is a ghost figure who disturbs the order of the suburb no matter what form she takes; the only way to “control” her is to discover her murdered body and bring her murderer (her husband) to justice. Until that happens, she refuses to “behave,” and this refusal brings with it all manner of chaos. In another story by Mrs. Riddell, “Nut Bush Farm,” also reprinted in Weird Stories, the hero leases his haunted suburban cottage from a woman who drinks brandy in the morning, eats steak and eggs for breakfast, wears men’s shirts and is not above tying her hair up in a red cloth and doing some carpentry. Her home does not “contain a single feminine belonging—not even a thimble” (8). Indeed, she seems to the narrator/hero “some monstrous figure in a story of giants and hobgoblins. The man’s coat, the woman’s skirt, the hobnailed shoes, the grisly hair, the old straw hat, the bare, unfurnished room” all give a sense of unreality to the scene (9). Although not directly involved in the haunting of Nut Bush Farm, this strange landlord figure poses a problem just as knotty for the hero—what is he to do with her or about her? He dreads to think of introducing his wife and son into her society and eventually refuses to do so by giving up

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the lease, thus protecting his impressionable family from her contaminating influences. The Uninhabited House contains an equally eccentric specimen in the form of Miss Blake, the Irish aunt of the heroine. Although she puts on airs and believes herself above conversation with clerks, she is described by one of those clerks as an object of wonder: Her face was a pure, rich red, from temple to chin; . . . Her bonnet was crooked beyond even the ordinary capacity of Miss Blake’s head-gear; the strings were rolled up till they looked like ropes which had been knotted under her chin . . . Her shawl was at sixes and sevens; one side of her dress had got torn from the bodice and trailed on the ground leaving a broadly-marked line of dust on the carpet. She looked as if she had no petticoats on; and her boots . . . were one laced unevenly, and the other tied on with a piece of ribbon. As for her gloves . . . we were perfectly familiar with Miss Blake’s nails. (23) It is this aunt who continues to insist that the uninhabited house be leased, no matter what, lest she and her ward, the heir to the income from the house, be left destitute. She also continues to insist on her respectability and sees any form of clerk as a person too “low” for association with her family. Yet all the characters in the novel, including, to a certain extent, her young niece, make fun of her. Her appearance, and her Irishness, put her outside the bounds of respect upon which the quality of respectability was founded. In this case, as in all of the preceding stories with weird women, the solution to the haunting, and the reordering of the suburban space, cannot occur until the women, as well as the ghosts, are put to rest or in some other way disposed of. This reflects a concern, in these works, about disorder of all kinds within suburban domestic space. If the ghost represents invaders from outside, the undomesticated women in these stories figure the threat to suburban order from the inside, much as middle-class perceptions of “uncontrolled” elements in the working-class home (for which the woman was supposedly responsible) represented a presumed threat to the social homogeneity of suburban space.

PUTTING THINGS TO RIGHTS There was so much at stake in the suburbs that the middle classes were in part justified in their broad-based anxiety regarding “intrusion” and “dissolution.” The overcrowded rooms revealed by Mayhew and others as the conditions of poor urban living, where both sexes slept and dressed together, were evidence of a further dissolution of boundaries that was unacceptable to the middle-class moral world. Between the ghosts and the weird women, these stories seem to emphasize the rogue elements of middle-class

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suburban culture that most suburbanites did not want to face. Thus, one could read these stories as subversive of the middle-class quest for homogeneity and privacy in the suburbs, were it not for one feature: the upwardly mobile male hero who, in almost all of these stories, nullifies the threat of the invasive ghost and domesticates those women who have, in one way or another, transgressed the boundaries of propriety. These men are generally either clerks who have fallen on hard times or members of the middle class who have otherwise been displaced. The solution to the ghostly puzzle tends to secure them a foothold in the middle or upper-middle classes. The appearance of the ghost enables the middle-class male to defend his space, to say, “This is mine and not yours; I belong here and you don’t—get out!” The male hero’s actions may also be read as a way of reclaiming dominion over feminized suburban space. The specter, once avenged, disappears and leaves the male in possession of the house; the boundaries are again defi ned and closed; and the male is rewarded with money, a wife, or both. In The Uninhabited House the hero is a clerk in a law office who undertakes the eviction of the ghost in return for money and the possibility of marriage to the daughter of the speculative builder. The perceived danger of his task does indeed win the notice and eventual admiration of the daughter, and when the ghost has been removed and justice has been done, the hero marries the young lady. The implications for the middle class are complex; as a clerk, the hero is in the lower levels of the middle class, and as the daughter of a speculative builder, the heroine’s class status could be problematic. However, the clerk’s victory wins him not only the substantial reward of £25 but also a raise in position, with the potential for continued success. The daughter, now dissociated from her father by a long period of suffering while his ghost haunted “her” house, has an inherited income that is embellished by her profit on the new estate; thus, as an heiress and landlord she is fi rmly established in the middle class as well. Furthermore, it is revealed at the end of the story that the clerk and the niece take Miss Blake, the eccentric aunt, to live with them. There, she is slowly reformed into the “proper” image of an older woman, dressed mainly in black frocks with white lace caps, reasserting the power of suburban space to reform and reclaim those who otherwise belong outside of it. In Riddell’s “The Open Door,” the hero is once again a clerk who also undertakes the job of laying the ghost in return for a reward and the admiration of his paramour, Patty, who has a little too much of the housemaid about her to qualify as genteel middle class. However, the text implies that she is the proper wife for a lower-level clerk with few prospects of rising in the world: “[T]he blithest, prettiest, most useful, most sensible girl that ever made sunshine in a poor man’s house” (43). Here propriety is emphasized over property. The clerk is rewarded when he solves the ghostly mystery, and he promptly takes a job away from London as the manager of a farm. He feels this work is more suited to his inclinations and cannot deny it is also a great rise in position and prospects; as he says, “I . . . make both ends meet

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comfortably” (67), something his own family never managed, which reflected a low level of both propriety and property. Thus, the hero aligns himself with middle-class values both by choosing a wife who will help him “make ends meet” and by taking a position suited to his class but also representative of property. If that were not enough, the narrative removes all anxiety about what the somewhat problematic couple will become once it has aligned itself with middle-class values by removing the pair to the country. “The Old House in Vauxhall Walk” also concerns itself with the trope of the upwardly mobile male. The underlying disturbing element in this story is the displacement, however temporary, of the middle class. After a dreadful row with his father, the young hero is on the verge of becoming like Mayhew’s street folk—”Houseless—homeless—hopeless!” (85)— while the family’s former servants are living in luxury in large houses in an older suburb. However, in this case, two young middle-class men profit by the ghostly activities in the suburban house. The proper heir to the old miser’s fortune is restored to his position, while the young hero, previously in disgrace with his father, receives a handsome reward which enables him to get his own start in life. The narrative further implies that in seeing the misery resulting from the ghost-woman’s pride and greed, the young hero is more amenable to reconciliation with his father, ensuring a further domestication or normalization of family relations. As he himself tells his father, “ . . . I mean to strive to make a better thing of my life than I should ever have done had I not gone to the Old House in Vauxhall Walk” (101). The trope of the rising middle-class male hero who serves an ordering and domesticating function is not limited to short stories or Mrs. Riddell’s works. Take Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865). If one will accept the premise that this novel could be considered a ghost story, since the main character is presumed dead, then the function of the domesticating middleclass male can be seen at work here as well. The novel ranges all over suburban London, from Greenwich to Chelsea. John Rokesmith/Harmon, a poor cast-off orphan who suddenly comes into a fortune, takes a chance opportunity to fake his own death in order that he may quietly observe both the wife that the will stipulated he take and his old caretakers, to whom the fortune reverted when he “died.” In this novel John acts as both the ghost and the hero. His “intended,” Bella Wilfer, is a spoiled young woman who lives with her parents in genteel squalor in Holloway, an area described as “a tract of suburban Sahara, where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by contractor”(50)—rather the opposite of the ideal suburb, despite the fact that, at the time, Holloway was mostly ribbon development, with a great deal of open space around it. (It may have been this open space that also attracted a smallpox hospital, a coal depot, a tin foil factory and a good few brickfields.) Bella is neither domestic nor domesticated; there is neither property nor propriety about her. In fact, the household is entirely disordered, and Bella

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is quite unable to rule her own passions when John fi rst encounters her. The night of their fi rst meeting, Bella, irritated by losing at checkers, “jerk[ed] the draught board and pieces off the table: which her sister went down on her knees to pick up” (52). Further, John overhears her lamenting that . . . it’s a very hard case indeed, and I am a most unfortunate girl. The idea of being a kind of widow, and never having been married! And the idea of being as poor as ever after all, and going into black, besides, for a man I never saw, and should have hated . . . if I had seen! (55) She is continually described early in the novel as coquettish, bold and pert—not particularly genteel or ladylike qualities. John pretends to be a clerk in need of lodgings and successfully engages the Wilfers’ second floor, where he can continue to watch Bella without attracting comment. He also manages to engage himself as secretary to the unsophisticated but kindhearted Boffi ns, where he can watch the effect that wealth has on these formerly working-class people who lived all their lives in a northern suburb of London. John has two major tasks in the novel: first, to turn Bella into the domestic and self-contained woman who could take her place with impunity as a woman of fortune; and second, to put Mr. Boffin’s affairs in order and to roust out the inappropriate elements with which he has associated himself, namely, one Silas Wegg. His success at both tasks is the focus of the last third of the novel. His efforts to transform Bella into a deserving vessel of his love are successful, first, because he convinces the Boffins to invite Bella to live with them and thus removes her from the bad influences of her home, and, second, because he pretends, by prior arrangement with Mr. Boffin, to be misused and undeservingly displaced, which brings out Bella’s “better” nature. John’s elimination of Wegg from suburban space is more technically ghostly, as John apparently spends time “haunting” the Boffi n’s old suburban house—up Maiden Lane in an area bounded by Agar Town, the Metropolitan Cattle Market and Pentonville Prison—where Wegg has managed to install himself, spying on Wegg until he has the opportunity to remove him by means of another elaborate ruse. “Boffin’s Bower” is a particularly good setting for a suburban haunting, described as “an enclosed space where certain tall dark mounds rose high against the sky, and where the pathway to the Bower was indicated, as the moonlight showed, between two lines of broken crockery set in ashes.” In fact, early in the novel Dickens describes Boffi n’s appearance within this space as “a white figure advancing along this path” which “proved to be nothing more ghostly than Mr. Boffin, easily attired for the pursuit of knowledge” (73), playing on the association between the unsettling setting and the figures that inhabit it. By the end of the novel, Bella has become the perfect middle-class matron: generous, obedient, trusting to a fault. After their marriage, the pair moves to Blackheath, a south-eastern suburb, to “a modest little cottage, but a

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bright and a fresh” where the maid gives Bella “a bunch of keys, commanding treasures in the way of dry-saltery, groceries, jams and pickles” (730). The spoiled and pettish Bella of the early novel transforms into a neat and quiet matron who makes frequent reference to domesticating household guides: . . . John gone to business and Bella returned home, the dress would be laid aside, trim little wrappers and aprons would be substituted, and Bella, putting back her hair with both hands, as if she were making the most businesslike arrangements for going dramatically distracted, would enter on the household affairs of the day. Such weighing and mixing and chopping and grating, such dusting and washing and polishing, such snipping and weeding and trowelling and other small-gardening, such making and mending and folding and airing, such diverse arrangements, and above all such severe study! For Mrs. J.R., who had never been wont to do too much at home as Miss B.W., was under the constant necessity of referring for advice and support to a sage volume entitled The Complete British Family Housewife. . . . (746) And while the Boffi ns are not quite transformed, they are certainly more in line with middle-class standards in regard to behavior and appearance, relying quite a bit on their native sensitivity and generosity (propriety). Not all elements of the lower classes are removed from the Rokesmith/ Harmon sphere, of course; the impoverished orphan Sloppy, as the adopted son of the Boffi ns, is apprenticed to a carpenter, but every attempt is made to transform him into the semblance of a gentlemanly figure. Mr. Venus, articulator of bones and successful businessman, marries and establishes a lower-middle-class family on the coattails of Rokesmith/Harmon’s success. But both of these men deserve their good fortune thanks to their honest service to the Boffi n/Harmon interests. Indeed, John’s ordering and domesticating influence seems to radiate beyond his immediate family by the end of the novel to touch all those deserving middle-class persons with whom he has come in contact. Eugene Wrayburn, the cynical and dissolute bachelor, marries his true love and becomes a devoted and industrious laborer who contributes to the cash nexus. His associate, Mortimer Lightwood, is kept so busy by Boffi n/Harmon business that his law practice is firmly established for the foreseeable future, and both men leave off their dissolute ways. Wrayburn’s wife, Lizzie Hexam, is also rewarded, despite her low birth, for displaying middle-class traits of respectability, sensitivity, loyalty and earnestness with which she was apparently innately endowed and with which Bella’s innate characteristics are contrasted. Lizzie not only wins a husband of the upper-middle class, but she is rewarded with the respect and esteem of all that know her and by the gift of a portion of the Harmon fortune. Thus John, as the rising middle-class male hero, lays waste to disorder and solidifies middle-class boundaries by fi rmly ensconcing those who have

90 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era deserved his recognition within his social sphere and banishing those who clearly have no place in the middle-class world back into the lower depths of London life. As ghost figure he reveals the problems within this world, and as middle-class male hero he solves them. The suburban ghost story, then, reassures its middle-class readers on a number of fronts by giving the hero a chance to reinforce middle-class codes of behavior and values. As John Burnett points out, the middle class was still insecure in its position, even though it seemed to have taken control of Victorian social structure. It needed a code which could “defi ne status: it would serve as a unifying force to combat the enemies without and protect the members within, affording a private retreat behind which the strains and stresses of business life could be washed away” (99). The code, with its basis in security and privacy, is entirely wrapped up in the middleclass suburban ideal. Disorder, within the home or outside it, was a threat to the code and therefore had to be controlled whenever encountered. To the middle class, the working class represented the greatest external threat to order, and with the Hyde Park disturbances in 1867 and the increase in “combination” and working men’s clubs and organizations, this threat seemed to loom larger on the horizon than ever before. Furthermore, a decline in the importance of religion and the church’s refraction into so many non-conforming sects damaged social hierarchy and “placement” in suburban settings (Briggs, Victorian 60), supplying a further threat to clearly defi ned social structures. Armstrong argues that domestic fiction provides representations that reject the “carnival” element and thus shore up middle-class control (17). Although she refers to domestic fiction and the power it gave women as constructors of domestic order, the ghost story transfers this power, for the most part, to men, as the women are not usually up to confronting either ghosts or lower-class invaders. The suburban ghost story allows the middle-class male to fantasize about the restoration of order and control in his home and neighborhood at a time when he felt under attack from many directions.

DISCIPLINARY IMAGINATION The suburbs needed to be controlled. As Foucault explains in Discipline and Punish, anyone subject to discipline must be seen in order to be brought under control. Spatial placement and distribution according to rank are both necessary, according to Foucault, to the successful establishment of social control, and the suburbs were meant to fulfill both these functions in the nineteenth century. Yet not only was a homogeneous distribution according to rank threatened by the working-class descent on the suburbs; the working class’s very acceptance of the suburban ideal of privacy, a natural result of living in homes originally built to uphold that ideal, endangered the security of middle-class cultural power. Octavia Hill evokes this

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anxiety in her Homes of the London Poor (1875) when she writes, “Should [well-to-do people] look down [one lane occupied primarily by poor people], they would little divine its inner life. Seen from the outside, and in the daytime, it is a quiet-looking place, the houses a moderate size, and the space between them moderately wide” (40). In these kinds of spaces the subject could no longer be seen and identified. The fronts of the houses, old and new, all at least pretended to middle-class aesthetics in detail and design. The suburban home is the opposite of the Panopticon, where everything is visible and anyone can be the “spy.” The shift to private homes meant that observation and control of the working class was in jeopardy as the working-class population in the suburbs continued to rise. And it was not just the working classes that needed watching. If privacy was to be so vital to middle-class life, then it was crucial that those with a middle-class position be trusted to behave at all times in a way that upheld middle-class morality. Yet, as everyone knew, some members of the middle class did commit crimes and/or live disreputable lifestyles (cf. Mr. Thorpe in Collins’s Hide and Seek). Thomas Boyle records that after about 1850, “barbarous behaviour among the buttoned-up and respectable was generally reported” in the newspapers (35). These newspaper reports were “largely hostile to complacency—and the facts in the stories tend more and more to suggest that deterioration in the social fiber often occurs where things have the greatest appearance of propriety” (40). Apparently middleclass women could not always manage or be trusted with what Armstrong calls “the power of domestic surveillance” despite their models in domestic fiction (19). From the middle-class perspective, then, the ghost story is an ideal disciplinary fable because it is very much about seeing and controlling. Suburban ghost stories help reassert moral boundaries by revealing those seemingly respectable middle-class characters who have in fact “let the side down” by committing some outrageous crime. Without the ghost, every single murderer or wrongdoer in these stories stands in a fair way of getting away with it and, therefore, of letting the “disease” of moral depravity hide out in the suburbs. The ghost, with the help of the middleclass male hero, exposes the criminal and expels him or her from a previously safe social position. This is the case even when the ghost, in life, was a “bad” character; Armstrong points out that in Oliver Twist, Nancy’s ghost comes back to “work on the side of legitimate authority” (184), no matter how much she resisted its hold on her in life. The same can be said for suburban ghosts: the apparition always appears to reinforce cultural codes and provide a moral lesson for the living, even while it represents an invasion of middle-class space. These ghost stories may offer further assurance that middle-class standards can be instituted universally and enforced—crime and all manner of disreputable goings-on will eventually be revealed and exorcised. The middle class’s wholehearted endorsement of the primacy of privacy eventually backfi red because the suburban lifestyle and the loss of

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local communities made it impossible to observe, know or hear “through the grapevine” what transpired behind the neighbors’ closed doors. At the same time it created a space where, as Armstrong puts it, “the state could not intervene” (18), at least not effectively. This contrast, between the desire for privacy and the desire to know, defi nitely, about the status of one’s neighbors leads to one unique feature of suburban ghost fiction: the use of the ghost both as invader and as disciplinary figure. Foucault argues, “In a society in which the principal elements are no longer the community and public life, but, on the one hand, private individuals and, on the other, the state, relations can be regulated only in a form that is the exact reverse of spectacle” (216). A ghost, invisible, watching, accomplishes this new form of regulation because it can know what goes on inside the private home and reveal it (with help, as always, from the middle-class male hero) to a select group. This group, usually made up of members of the dominant class, can then choose whether or not to broadcast the situation for general consumption. For the ghost, the house does function as the Panopticon, for it and it alone knows the “true” story of whatever happens inside the house. It can watch, and through it, the subject can be seen and disciplined, for as Foucault wrote, “[T]he domain of panopticism is . . . that whole lower region, that region of irregular bodies, with their details, their multiple movements, their heterogeneous forces, their spatial relations . . .” (208). And what could be more comforting to the middle-class reader than to be told that all suspect persons can be kept under surveillance despite the privacy of the suburban home? In these ways the suburban ghost story can be seen to play an important role in buttressing the middle-class code and reassuring nervous suburbanites that intruders of any sort are, in fact, subject to discipline. Take, for example, the subplot of Riddell’s “Old Mrs. Jones.” After Mrs. Jones and her husband disappear, a cabman and his family, with the intention of renting out most of the rooms to lodgers, take the now slightly seedy suburban house on a three-year lease. However, the family is bothered by the presence of the ghost of Old Mrs. Jones, who knocks into people and drags things about until no tenants will stay in their rented rooms more than two weeks, resulting in the imminent ruin of the cabman’s family. When the mystery of Mrs. Jones’s dreadful end is fi nally solved, her husband is brought to justice, but this justice is at great cost to the working class inhabitants of the neighborhood. As the narrator makes clear, the working class is misplaced in this neighborhood, and they are ruining themselves in attempting to acquire a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. The narrator of this story comes down very hard upon Dick Tippens, the cabman, who “was not laying by a farthing but spending such of his superfluous cash as did not go in the best of good eating . . . in the purchase of useless articles of various kinds . . . each and all destined eventually to fi nd their way to the pawnbroker as surely and infallibly as the sparks fly upwards” (175). Of Mrs. Tippens the narrator remarks, “I do not think

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she was a good manager, for she spent up to the hilt of her income. . . . She was always considering how to increase her ‘gettings,’ but she never gave a thought as to how she might save them” (178). Throughout the narrative, the omniscient voice of the narrator makes dreadful predictions about the fate of the Tippens family: “ . . . no-one . . . could possibly have thought evil days were looming in the distance for both husband and wife” (179); “ . . . she had only to say what she wanted, and he would be quite at her service—a promise he found it convenient to forget when evil days fell upon Dick and his wife” (184). What is worse, Tippens brings an old drunkard, an ex-stable boy, into the house to make repairs, but “old Mickey” manages to install himself as a permanent fi xture at the local pub, bringing the tone of the neighborhood even lower. Once the ghost is laid, the house mysteriously catches fi re and the cabman-landlord and his family are forced to move to another, more “suitable,” neighborhood. In this story, then, a woman who never belonged in a middle-class environment is the catalyst for a situation through which more people who are unsuited to the suburban lifestyle “invade” the neighborhood. However, in drawing attention to the crime committed in house, and the subsequent fi re which eradicates all traces of herself and precludes any further misplaced residents, Riddell’s ghost makes amends for her intrusion by warding off the prospect of suburban degeneration. The figure of John Rokesmith/Harmon in Our Mutual Friend works as a “ghostly” surveyor of domestic discipline in just this way. If he were not able to observe his own affairs and those of his associates without being watched himself then his domesticating tasks as hero could never be accomplished. As John Harmon, he could never have met and conquered Bella, but as the unknown John Rokesmith, he can, and does, watch her carefully to fi nd her faults and determine a way to correct them. Second, as John Harmon he could not have helped the Boffins order their world; had they known him, they would have returned the money to him immediately, and thus Silas Wegg would have remained ensconced in the bosom of a family with whom he had no business connecting his disreputable self. But as John Rokesmith, John can not only sort out Boffi ns’s, and by association his own, affairs, but he also has the opportunity to watch Wegg and impart his secret knowledge to others directly concerned with Wegg’s treachery.

GUILTY SECRETS I would argue, however, that with the comforting reassertion of social, moral and disciplinary boundaries provided by these fictions comes an undercurrent of middle-class guilt upon which the supernatural story also plays. Despite their conflation of dirt and disease with immorality, the middle class also believed that the working class could be reformed. Closing off boundaries and retreating behind secure social and cultural lines without

94 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era leaving any room for social mixing contradicted the almost equally strong middle-class urge toward reforming the less fortunate and their belief in the power of “self-help.” How could the “deserving” poor rise if they were not given an example at which to aim? The more aware members of the middle class, moreover, knew that money was being diverted out of the inner cities into suburban building, and that completely turning their backs on the poor left behind was a dereliction of their duty. We see a register of that guilt in many of the suburban ghost stories discussed here. Oliphant’s “Open Door” gets its urgency from a little boy who becomes so frantic to help the poor lost soul in the ruins that he becomes dangerously ill. He is most anxious that the ghostly voice gets its heart’s desire, which is simply to be “let in.” The boy assumes that his father will “know what to do” and sends him out to make amends. The father undertakes this task without question, although he does wonder what he is supposed to do to help a ghost enter a house that no longer exists. He does, however, succeed in laying the ghost of the lower-class prodigal son to rest, and his boy immediately recovers when he learns his father has “helped” the poor man. According to the text, what makes this ghost particularly awful is the overwhelming pity that the narrator says he (and every other middle-class male) feels when he hears its voice on “his” grounds, a pity that is humbling. In Mrs. Riddell’s “Vauxhall-Walk,” the miserly old woman/ghost is haunted by the spirits of the poor she refused to help and by an “ancestor” who hangs his head in shame at the use to which his house had been put. As a wealthy woman, the miser had the social obligation to help her petitioners in some way and certainly had no business leaving them to starve. Riddell plays up this element in the short story, describing the ghost’s ghosts at length: “[T]he aged of days, the infant of hours, the sobbing outcast, honest poverty, repentant vice; but one low cry proceeded from those pale lips—a cry for help she might have given, but which she withheld” (92). Riddell goes on to describe the woman as “possessed of so pitiful a soul, contaminated with the most despicable and insidious vice poor humanity knows” (93), a moral to the reader. Similarly, the starved and ragged little boy ghost in Mrs. Riddell’s “Walnut-Tree House” succeeds in driving his original guardian mad by his constant appearance, an unendurable reminder of the guardian’s miserliness which starved the boy to death. When the new owner of the house, another upwardly mobile young man, sees the child ghost, he is filled with pity and immediately devotes all his resources to righting the “wrong” his ancestor perpetrated, redeeming both the house and the middle class in general. As a reward for fi nding the “rightful” heir to the house and estate, the hero/ detective gets to marry the heiress (the sister of the boy ghost). The two live in the house with the ghost of the little boy, who is now at peace but remains as a constant reminder of the duties attendant on middle-class wealth; the implication is that by carefully attending to these duties one can avoid scandal and “invasion” of domestic space by those unworthy of it. Mrs. Riddell

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also seems in these stories to be emphasizing the risk in taking the middleclass ideal of privacy to the extreme. One can, in fact, be too private, and, of course, the more money one had, the more private one could be. Privacy, she seems to be warning, should not entirely exclude one’s neighbors (as long as they are respectable), one’s family or the “deserving” poor. Guilt, for sins of both commission and omission, plays a large role in the suburban ghost story of this period. Certainly, Sheridan Le Fanu features guilt as a vital part of the ghost stories he wrote during this time. Three of the five stories published in In a Glass Darkly (1872) deal specifically with middle-class guilt, and the focus of that guilt in two of them is the mistreatment of the lower classes. Not coincidentally, two of the stories also include suburban settings; indeed, that is where the ghosts fi rst appear. These two stories in particular, “The Familiar” and “Green Tea,” adhere to the general outline of the suburban ghost story. The ghosts in these stories are consummate intruders, their appearance most unwished for by their targets. Further, the ghosts are both of a lower class than the haunted: in “The Familiar” the ghost is a rough and violent ship’s mate; in “Green Tea” the spirit is actually a monkey-demon, the lowest possible representation of a human and one reminiscent of contemporary caricatures of the urban Irish poor, the most often evoked image of the horrifyingly poor immigrant population of British cities. The haunted men are both solidly middle class and both have arguably committed acts that merit retribution. However, in Le Fanu’s stories, the importance of exposing middle-class guilt overrides the need to reassert boundaries within the suburban setting itself. Middle-class standards are upheld only with the triumph of the ghost and the death/suicide of the haunted men—in these stories there is no rising middle-class “hero” who rights past wrongs with his investigations. “The Familiar” is perhaps the more straightforward story. In it, a wealthy sea captain is haunted by one of his crew members—a nasty, brutish man but one who died of tetanus inflicted, it is implied, by inappropriate punishment at the captain’s hand. He is also the father of a girl with whom the captain had a “guilty” affair. The ghost that comes back to haunt the captain not only retains the bad temper of the man in life, but has also become “abnormal”—short, squat, almost ape-like in appearance. Significantly, the fi rst appearance of the ghost takes place in a wasteland of suburban construction; in fact, the narrative implies that the ghost has taken up temporary residence there. The area is described as “a lonely road, with its unfi nished dwarf walls tracing the foundations of the projected row of houses on either side”; the ghost fi rst follows the captain as he moves through this space which is “dreary” and so silent that it “had in it something indefi nably exciting” (45). The captain receives a letter from this ghost, which warns him to avoid that area, for “if he walks there as usual he will meet with something unlucky—let him take warning, once for all, for he has reason to dread” (47). When the captain does attempt to walk through the area again, something attempts to shoot him, and the

96 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era necessary conclusion is that the ghost has claimed this suburban territory as his exclusive province. The captain tries avoiding the suburb, then stops going out, then goes to a private home where he is allowed no visual contact with the outside world. He is deliberately placed in “apartments whose situation protected him against the intrusions from which he shrank” (71). He is spared sight of the demon until fi nally, through the unwitting assistance of two servants, the spirit manages to show himself to the captain. Finally the captain barricades himself in his room, in a parody of the middle-class desire for domestic privacy. Yet, the evil spirit succeeds in gaining access to the captain and presumably frightening him to death. Although earlier in the story it is only at the suburban construction site, where the captain has no control over the space or what it might become, that the ghost can approach the captain, later, as he comes to accept his guilt, he is more vulnerable to invasion in his own domestic space. In a similar vein, the ghost in “Green Tea,” which immediately precedes “The Familiar,” makes its fi rst appearance on an omnibus running out to Richmond. This particular spirit manifestation has never even been human but comes, supposedly, straight from hell in the shape of a small black monkey. Why would it choose to attach itself to a quiet, well-mannered vicar? The reason for the haunting is never expressly stated, but it is implied that the demon brings some kind of punishment for the vicar’s having spent so much time studying pagan religions. Indeed, it seems that the vicar is rarely in attendance at his church and, even before the time of the haunting, spent more time in studying than in fulfi lling his duties. Further, the vicar has the tenancy of three houses: one in his parish, one off Piccadilly Circus and the one in Richmond—rather an abundance of riches which he seems reluctant to share in his reclusiveness. The narrator notices that the “old-fashioned” Richmond house is unnaturally silent: “[N]ot a distant wheel, or bark, or whistle from without; and within the depressing stillness of an invalid bachelor’s house” (21). Here, however, the suburban house certainly offers no retreat from the demon; the quiet of this suburb is like the quiet of Arthur Morrison’s Canonbury haunted by the thief: dead, deserted, ghostly. One could argue that these ghosts represent Le Fanu’s own experience of the working-class Irish; as a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy that was actually in a decline, he had witnessed “bloody fights . . . , peasant riots, and angry language” that threatened the security of his family’s social position (Orel 65). He saw evidence of the decline all around him in the deterioration of parts of Dublin that had once been middle-class strongholds. His ghosts, at least in these stories, threaten the same kind of violence and social decline that he and his peers faced in real life. The fact that these ghosts succeed in their destruction of the middleclass male, however, shows Le Fanu concerned with more than the struggle for cultural space and power. The houses in these stories are invaded by

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blatant representations of guilt, despite any barrier the house can provide. The middle-class characters instead struggle primarily with, as Harold Orel has argued, “the potentialities for evil within man’s being” (70). In Le Fanu’s stories, discipline and order cannot save the individual who fails in this struggle; as Orel points out, neither the law, nor medicine nor the military, represented in various characters in both stories, can save the haunted men (74). In a sense, this is an extended and deepened representation of the danger to the middle class from within itself, a warning about pride and hypocrisy, about trusting to appearances and façades. It is because there is so much at risk in the private household that Le Fanu’s ghosts invade the suburbs. He saw, perhaps, that in the middle class’s enormous investment in the safety and privacy of the suburban home, it was setting itself up for a fall bigger than any that could be brought about by working-class invasion. In making this argument, I have concentrated on ghost stories and novels because they show authors dealing with all that was at stake in the suburbs in clear and fairly basic symbolic terms. The lines between what is and is not normal are easily drawn in ghost stories, as we are dealing with supernatural beings, and the hauntings take place for a defi nite and identifiable reason. With the removal of the intruder also comes the removal of guilt from the arena of the middle-class household. However, this is not to say that only the ghost story can investigate the issues of social control and secure cultural space so vital to the middle-class conception of itself. For example, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) connects its suburban scenes with three key elements: a rising, young middle-class hero; a ghost figure from the working or lower classes; and a significant concern with maintaining the integrity of respectable people, be they upper or middle class, by exposing and eliminating the façades concealing corrupt uses of domestic space. Hartright, the rising young male with the potential to make his own way, is confronted by the ghostly apparition of Anne Catherick in a desolate suburban space. Collins describes this space as mysterious and menacing in its removal both from the familiar lights of London and the homey, unspoiled atmosphere of the Hartright family cottage in Hampstead (a home more sub-rural than sub-urban). In his journey through London’s environs, Hartright moves from a heath “wild enough in the mysterious light to be hundreds of miles away from the great city” to the city’s “most open suburb” (17). As he wanders “the lonely high-road” of this suburban space, near a point where several roads connected to other suburbs meet (see Appendix), he gets the shock of his life: “There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven— stood the figure of a solitary Woman . . . her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London” (18). Both horrified and thoroughly puzzled by the figure, Hartright wonders “how she came to be out alone in the high-road, an hour after midnight,” and, more suspiciously, why she found it necessary to touch him rather than call out to get his attention (19). Anne’s positioning

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in the novel, as virtuous but nevertheless questionably respectable, grows out of this scene, where her appearance in a quiet suburb in intimate contact with an unknown man is at odds with everything the suburban landscape supposedly represented; hence, Hartright’s constant characterization of Anne as “strange.” The discovery that she has escaped from a mental institution only underscores her misplacement in the setting. Later in the novel, Hartright devotes himself to exposing the evil that threatens Laura, the heiress of the house with which the novel’s mystery is associated. As part of this quest, Hartright forces Anne’s mother, a former servant, to reveal that Anne is Laura’s illegitimate half-sister. Anne’s mother, Mrs. Catherick, has endangered both Anne’s and Laura’s lives to keep her secret safe because she is bent on being recognized as a respectable matron by her small suburb-like town, and in order to do this she must keep up appearances at all costs. In fact, Mrs. Catherick is the fictionalized version of Acton’s fallen woman who lands on her feet in the suburbs; exposure of her secret risks everything she has worked for. The secret’s exposure not only comes close to destroying all that Mrs. Catherick now values; it also leads to the destruction of the evil Sir Percival Glyde and puts an end to the danger threatening Laura’s happiness (and inheritance)—danger that involves, as usual in suburban-style tales, greed and a desperate desire to maintain appearances. As in the ghost narratives, we see how the discovery of a secret, hidden in the suburbs, destroys those who have behaved dishonorably and permanently displaces them. Also, Hartright, after his confrontations with danger, is rewarded with a marriage to the heiress of the property. At the end of the novel, the two establish a new family space in which middle-class values prevail. Thus, this novel, too, focuses on figures in suburban space who threaten both property and propriety, and ultimately shows how, through careful observation and persistence, honest middle-class men can eradicate those figures. Other kinds of mid- to late-Victorian writing also address these issues, and while the authors’ responses to these questions of invasion and disciplinary control may not be quite as formulaic, the suburb has a significant role in the “abnormal” or “undomesticated” aspects of sensation fiction. The suburb’s connection to the eerie and grotesque, especially in the fiction of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, remained strong throughout the second half of the century, and their use of both gothic and sublime visions of the suburb is investigated in the next chapters.

6

Gothic Terrors The Suburban Ruin and Sensation Fiction

For many readers, the ghost story genre is partially or wholly synonymous with the gothic tradition. The traditional image of such supernatural narratives, where disembodied spirits haunt crumbling ruins, seems strangely at odds with the modernity of the Victorian suburb and the spirit of the nineteenth century in general.1 And yet, because of its concern with the threat of otherness, the gothic mode is peculiarly appropriate to certain approaches to the suburban “problem.” This chapter traces some of the connections between gothic modes and Victorian writing about the suburbs, highlighting how the symbol of the ruin shifts its significance from representing an aristocratic past to signifying an uncertain and frightening future. Building on that argument, the next chapter discusses how the future, figured in the suburb, engenders sublime moments in writing about it. The irony of this metaphorical moment lies in the opposition of the sublime and the beautiful; whereas the suburb was supposed to embody the clean, simple purity of the beautiful, instead in sensation fiction it becomes surprising, disturbing and even terrifying. How does the gothic differ from the sublime? It could be argued that the gothic is really a specialized sub-genre of the sublime, one that has its power in its connection to the picturesque. In effect, the gothic is a distortion of a picturesque scene or situation. The aesthetic category of the picturesque was originated by William Gilpin (1768) to deal with things that were pleasing to the eye, but which did not strictly fit Burke’s defi nition of the beautiful as “pleasing, attractive, smooth and gentle” (Hussey 12). It may be enjoyable, even breathtaking, to look at a ruin, but according to this defi nition it cannot be beautiful because it is rough and signifies ungentleness in its lack of integrity. Gilpin added another category, that which has “roughness and sudden variation joined to irregularity”(qtd. in Hussey 14). Such things are picturesque primarily because they are well suited to painting; they present a variety of shadow, color and depth of field which is attractive to the artist’s eye. According to Lynda Nead, in Victorian Babylon (2000), “[I]n the eighteenth century the picturesque was a way of aestheticising complex historical and social changes in the landscape, a calming resolution of antagonisms within the frame of a picture” (32).

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However, she argues, “[T]he picturesque changed when it crossed from the connoisseurship of the landscape to the representation of the city. Although it retained a number of its eighteenth-century features . . . it came also to represent progress and change, the last traces of the past in the present” (32). By this logic, the picturesque, as a mode of suburban aesthetics, is understandable as a sign of modernity in these new urban (or sub-urban) ways of living and being. But the shadow and depth that was an important component of the picturesque can hide as well as reveal, and when the emphasis shifts from what can be seen (and painted) to what cannot be seen, we move into the gothic. And as we have seen, the suburbs could hide quite a bit, making their depths more gothic than picturesque, despite the picturesque ideal for which the suburban architect aimed. At about the same time that the picturesque was gaining ground in aesthetic theory, gothic novels made their own sensation in popular fiction. Although the picturesque as an aesthetic category continued to be discussed well into the nineteenth century, thanks to Ruskin, 2 there is some disagreement about whether the gothic trend in fiction continued in different forms or died with the emergence of Romanticism. Most early theorists of the novel denied that the gothic mode was a legitimate form of fiction; others classed it as primarily a sub-genre or orphaned child of the Romance novel. However, later critics, beginning with some early feminist theorists, recognized that the gothic thematic carried through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth through forms that concern themselves with the threat of the Other.3 Indeed, some would argue that the sensationalists were heirs of the gothic form earlier established by Anne Radcliffe and others. Specifically, when feminist critics speak of the “feminine” characteristics of the gothic, they refer not only to women in particular but also more generally to those elements that oppose the dominant, patriarchal culture in a way that can be perceived as threatening or dangerous.4 Summarizing this school of thought, Anne Williams notes that “ . . . the Gothic tradition as a whole . . . expresses the dangerous, the awe-full power of the ‘female.’ All Gothic trappings—ruins, graves, dark enclosures, madness, even the sublime—signify the presence of this ‘other’“ (xi). Citing Aristotle’s claims from his Metaphysics about cultural dichotomies, Williams further argues that “this Gothic ‘other’ is broadly consistent with some of the most ancient categories of otherness in Western culture,” such as “unlimited” (as opposed to limited or bounded), “moving” (as opposed to still or stable), “dark,” and “evil” (18–9). The ideal suburb was intended to be bounded, stable, light (airy) and good (for one’s moral development), which places it in direct opposition to many characteristics of the Gothic mode. Thus, the figure of the Other, in the form of the transgressor that erases boundaries, stability, light and morality, figures most prominently in the nineteenth-century suburban gothic mode. The threat of the Other speaks to the threat of the liminal, or that which is poised on a boundary or abyss. Most critics agree that the primary

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characteristic of the gothic is that it is “pervasively organized around anxieties about boundaries (and boundary transgressions)” (Williams 15). These boundaries particularly have to do with identity and can be cultural, familial or psychological. Or they can be all three, as William Patrick Day explains in his 1985 book In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy: If the central emotion of the Gothic is fear, the source of that fear is anxiety and terror over the experience of the family and the ideals of masculine and feminine identity that hold the family together. The Gothic fantasy is in part an attempt by nineteenth-century culture to both express and relieve its fears about its own concepts of identity. (5) Although there are supernatural elements or, as Day tellingly terms them, elements from the “underworld” in gothic fiction, the thematic structure of the gothic addresses ways in which “nineteenth-century readers came face to face with the very thing from which they were trying to escape” (Day 5). As Marilyn Gaull argues, The terrors that once lurked in the ruins and the landscape were now found lurking in the mind, just as mysterious, inescapable, and isolating. The countryside, the cottages, the factories, the urban chapels, slums, schools, poorhouses, orphanages, the kitchens, sitting rooms, and bedrooms of the working and middle classes held greater and more authentic terror than the monasteries and haunted palaces of the eighteenth century which they replaced on the stage and in the novel. (255) Not only were they more terrifying, but encounters between the inhabitants of these spaces also resulted in portrayals of the Other that align closely with Aristotle’s dichotomies (e.g., dark v. light) that exemplify gothic constructions. This concern with the Other and with transgressions of cultural and psychological boundaries illuminates ways in which the suburban ghost story belongs in the gothic mode. This is particularly the case when we see, in the nineteenth century, a shift toward incorporating the everyday object or institution into a gothic setting. In fact, most suburban ghost stories seem to go out of their way to eliminate eighteenth-century gothic set pieces, such as ancient stone ruins and decaying family mausoleums, in order to highlight the ghost as being “out of place” in every way. Yet, this is not to say that the trope of the ruin disappears in the Victorian suburban gothic. Alison Millbank writes that “in Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century, the landscape is littered like a surrealist canvas with broken pillars and buildings which, isolated in time and space, have lost any relation to the world around them” (9, emphasis added). Taking the ruin as the main feature of the suburban gothic that lingers from its

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eighteenth-century origins, we fi nd many texts that investigate a ruined suburban landscape as a space completely divorced from the cultural ideal it was supposed to represent. One prime example of the “modernized” suburban gothic is James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” (1870). In Thomson’s vision of a dark and hopeless city, the suburbs are compared to a variety of “gothic” natural landscapes: A trackless wilderness rolls north and west, Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains, Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains; And eastward rolls the shipless sea’s unrest. (5)

Here north and west, two rapidly expanding areas around London, are represented as a wilderness, a savanna or a bleak upland, reminiscent of Hampstead Heath, north of London. Savage woods correlate to London’s suburban parks, enormous mountains to dust heaps, a suburban fi xture. The sea to the east of London was also, in fact, relatively shipless thanks to a decrease in shipbuilding in the years previous to the publication of this poem. With these figures, Thomson evokes the London he knew, while at the same time rendering it wild and bleak and foreign. Later in the same canto, Thomson says, “The city is not ruinous, although/Great ruins of an unremembered past,/With others of a few short years ago/More sad, are found within its precincts vast . . .” (5, emphasis added). Here a city built on top of a forgotten settlement contains within itself more recent ruins, much like the ruinous landscapes of the suburban building sites. 5 Further, Thomson’s description of the city as a “necropolis” echoes the contemporary explosion in suburban cemetery construction, where the hulks of unfi nished monuments to the dead must have competed for visual attention with the hulks of abandoned homes for the living. In Canto 18, Thomson describes a “suburb of the north” where he discovers “something crawling in the lane below; / It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there . . . / But coming level with it I discerned / That it had been a man” (44). This man is crawling back to his home to “die in [his] own den” (44), worn out from grasping after gold and fame in the City. Here, in a terrifying image, the suburban lanes are marked with blood, as the man searches for a way back “to Eden innocence in Eden’s clime” through “deserts which have else no track, / And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time . . .” (45). The man searches for a way back to the innocence of his own childhood and at the same time represents mankind looking, after its encounters with the City, in all the wrong places, including the suburbs, for a way back to paradise. But both the man and the suburb are now things of “abhorrence,” “loathsome” and near death, ruins of what could have been.

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That similar visions of the suburban ruin played a major role in sensation fiction of this period is undeniable. Echoing Thomson, Collins calls Hampstead Heath “wild” in The Woman in White, while Dickens describes Holloway as a “tract of . . . Sahara” in Our Mutual Friend. Dickens plays on the distortion of the suburban picturesque in Our Mutual Friend when presenting readers with their fi rst view of Boffi n’s Bower: Pushing the gate, which stood ajar, Wegg looked into an enclosed space where certain tall dark mounds rose high against the sky, and where the pathway to the Bower was indicated, as the moonlight showed, between two lines of broken crockery set in ashes. (73) Although the Boffi ns are essentially comic figures, this fi rst view of the Bower evokes the typical suburban features of rustic pathways set in small gardens, backed by hills that might be lovely if they were not composed entirely of garbage. Instead, all is ugly and broken, and the mounds may or may not hide secrets. This scene also highlights the fragility of the lines that separated suburb, wasteland and ruin. Collins, too, evokes the ruin of suburban space by focusing on suburban building in many of his novels. Two passages, one from Armadale (1866) and one from The Law and the Lady (1875), demonstrate Collins’s pessimistic vision of the suburb: The streets dwindled feebly as they receded from the centre of town, into smaller and smaller houses, and died away on the barren open ground into an atrophy of skeleton cottages. Builders hereabouts appeared to have universally abandoned their work in the fi rst stage of its creation. Landholders set up poles on lost patches of ground; and, plaintively advertising that they were to let for building, raised sickly little crops meanwhile, in despair of fi nding a purchaser to deal with them. All the waste paper of the town seemed to float congenially to this neglected spot; and all the fretful children came and cried here. . . . No growth flourished in these desert regions, but the arid growth of rubbish; and no creatures rejoiced but the creatures of the night. . . . (Armadale 453–4, emphasis added) Here, Collins explicitly links those from the underclass, or the abyss, with the suburbs, a chilling vision of middle-class loss of control of its space. This suburb described here is, in effect, a modern ruin—it is atrophied, skeletal, abandoned, lost, a space suited only for despair. Nearly ten years later, Collins’s concern about the suburb had not diminished, as evidenced in this passage from The Law and the Lady: For more than an hour the carriage threaded its way through a dingy brick labyrinth of streets, growing smaller and smaller, and dirtier and

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Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era dirtier, the further we went. Emerging from the labyrinth, I noticed in the gathering darkness dismal patches of waste ground. . . . We had got out of the carriage, and we were standing on a rough half-made gravel path. Right and left of me, in the dim light, I saw the half-completed foundations of new houses in their fi rst stage of existence. Boards and bricks were scattered about us. At places, gaunt scaffolding-poles rose like the branchless trees of the brick desert. Behind us, on the other side of the high road, stretched another plot of waste ground, as yet not built on. . . . The footman led the way towards the paling, through the boards and the bricks, the oyster-shells and the broken crockery. (1013, emphasis added)

In this case, the speaker is visiting a long-established house owned by the descendant of a respectable family. Yet the passage makes it clear that even though the owner of the existing house refuses to participate in the move toward suburbanization, the decay of the suburb cannot be kept from his own front door. Yet the decay in this passage is more Frankenstein’s monster than rotting corpse; in other words, while in the Armadale passage, the suburban space has stopped developing and is in a state of decay, this space is still being constructed—it is in its “fi rst stage of existence.” Instead of optimism toward its progress, however, seeing it in the midst of its creation is akin to seeing Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory when his creature is only half complete. When he took up the suburban subject in his 1872 story “The Familiar,” Le Fanu created a landscape closer to the fi rst example, traced with the shadows of ruined/unfi nished suburban homes, but completely abandoned: It was considerably past midnight when Mr Barton took his leave, and set out upon his solitary walk homeward. He had now reached the lonely road, with its unfinished dwarf walls tracing the foundations of the projected row of houses on either side—the moon was shining mistily, and its imperfect light made the road he trod but additionally dreary—that utter silence which has in it something indefi nably exciting, reigned there. . . . (45) Of course, as we saw in Chapter 5, what “reigned there” was supernatural rather than material—a space seemingly fit only for the disembodied. In this case, the suburban ruin has much in common with eighteenthcentury gothic tropes of approaching a haunted castle by night, a castle of which only the foundations remain. Yet, there is something exciting about the space—the observer in the space knows that anything might happen there. This scene is akin to Foucault’s heterotopian (as opposed to utopian) spaces, “phantasmatic spaces; spaces that are both mythic and contested . . . that resist social ordering and that obey their own rules and logics” (Nead 7).

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Ian Baucom’s excellent Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity outlines the impact of the urban/suburban ruin on the psyche of the dominant culture. In his chapter on Ruskin, Baucom shows that the social critic was deeply distressed by the ruin he encountered in revisiting his own childhood suburb years later. In a passage reminiscent of many we have already seen in contemporary fiction, Ruskin writes, The fields on each side of [the neighborhood’s central lane] are now mostly dug up for building. . . . Half a dozen handfuls of new cottages, with Doric doors, are dropped about here and there among the gashed ground; the lane itself . . . is a deep-rutted . . . cart-road, diverging gatelessly into various brickfields or pieces of waste: and bordered on each side by heaps of—Hades only knows what!—mixed dust of every unclean thing that can crumble in drought, and mildew of everything that can rot or rust in damp; ashes and rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery, shreds of nameless clothes, door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen garbage, back-garden sewage, old-iron, rotten timber . . . cigar ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones and ordure, indescribable. . . . (qtd. in Baucom 56) In this vision of the ruin of what was once pristine and, more importantly, what signified Englishness, Ruskin fears for the future of his nation. As Baucom notes, “Ruskin, in turning his eye on this [suburban decay] . . . could perceive only a metropolitan principle of decomposition capable of fracturing the nation’s spaces of belonging and of erasing the nation’s memories of the past and its anticipations of the future” (59), a trope I discuss more fully in the next chapter. The suburban ruin presented as a gothic motif, rather than as a celebration of long-anticipated progress and improvement, represented fears about the future of suburban space and of those who built their domestic worlds there. If the space was, indeed, heterotopian, then it was uncontrollable. And if the suburb, built with middle-class money for middle-class families, failed to thrive, then so too might the middle class fail to establish and maintain its dominance in Britain’s culture. The ruin of the suburb represented the possibility of the wreck of Victorian Britain itself, a result figured in Thomson’s poem as a wilderness fi lled with deformed and twisted creatures. Ruinous suburbanization presented as something that opened a gateway to “other worlds” seems to have captured the imagination of Victorian writers; in addition to the suburban ruin, I have identified three variations on the suburban gothic which appeared regularly in many different kinds of writing in the period 1850–1880: the “railroad gothic” based on the chaos of construction on the outskirts of urban areas; castle imagery, which plays on the idea that “an Englishman’s home is his castle”; and the importation

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of ghost metaphors into writing that was essentially non-fiction to describe a variety of threats to middle-class culture.

RAILROAD GOTHIC F. M. L. Thompson compares the activity of suburban building to “a machine [that] had escaped from its makers and was careering wildly out of control” (3). This description is especially apt for those suburban areas under the additional stress of railroad construction. Dickens makes use of this form of the gothic suburb in Dombey and Son (1846–1848) and Bleak House (1852–1853). Dickens’s description of railroad building in Bleak House echoes other images of the suburban ruin in its emphasis on abandoned structures: Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers desolately look at one another over roads and streams, like brick and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up, and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hilltops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic, and abandoned in full hopelessness. (801) In this passage Dickens links images of activity, like “thrown up” and “tumbling,” with more potent images of inertia where everything is undone, unfi nished, rusting and hopeless. The sense of abandonment here carries as much potential for fearful anxiety as the abandoned mansion of more traditional Gothic tales does. Things here have simply ceased to move, as if they were frozen in time and threaten an eternal state of chaos. Dickens treats the railroad gothic somewhat differently in Dombey and Son in his description of the railroad’s approach to Staggs’s Gardens (see Appendix): The fi rst shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the

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most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfi nished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of fl ames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood. (120–1, emphasis added) Although Staggs’s Gardens could be exchanged for the site in Bleak House in the sense that they share carts, ditches, rust and unfinished structures, the representation in this case is of an unnatural, but disturbingly lively, landscape. In both texts, there is a sense of abandonment, but here there is also a sense of elemental or otherworldly life among the ruin. Houses “were knocked down” by an unseen hand, the building debris has been mingled by some outsized force and hot water and intermittent “fiery eruptions” indicate a kind of hellish existence down below. Dickens emphasizes the “shapes and substances of incompleteness”—everything is out of place, out of custom, unnatural, empty and wild. He evokes a notion of the suburb undergoing not construction, but deconstruction, where nothing will be as it was. In fact, later in the novel, all recognizable signs of the neighborhood have completely disappeared as the railroad transforms the space. The scene here is gothic primarily because it emphasizes the ways in which the old forms of life in this space are still struggling with the new, and that struggle is obviously futile. Like the traditional gothic, what is frightening about the suburban gothic is witnessing the death throes of an older form of culture resisting its ultimate irrelevance. George Sala highlights this motif in his 1852 article “The Great Invasion.” In an essay that compares suburban development to an invading army’s assault on London, Sala recommends riding one of the new railways through the suburbs it now traverses: In no part of London is the invasion of bricks and mortar so perceptible as on the line of railway which, commencing at Camden Town (they are about to extend it to Kilburn, I think), runs through Islington, Hackney, Bow, Stratford, Old Ford, Stepney, and Limehouse to Blackwell. . . . Anon, the train rushes through mangy, brown-turfed fields, where the invasion has just begun; where rubbish may be shot; where poles, with placards affi xed to them, denote the various “lots” which are “To be Sold or Let, on Building Leases.” (72)

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Here the railway is in partnership with, and a contributing factor to, the development of a larger vision of the suburban gothic, where what existed before is slowly and ruinously destroyed. The figure of the passenger observing a ruin while travelling through the countryside is a common one in Gothic fiction, and Sala mirrors that figure here by asking readers to place themselves within the (railway) carriage and observe, with trepidation and a sense of foreboding, the ruin that mid-century England seemed to have become and the threat suburban building, as a ruin in progress, posed to the “old” way of life. Gustave Doré illustrated a similar scene in London: A Pilgrimage (1872), where the perspective is that of the train passenger looking out on endless back gardens of terraced homes, with arching railroad bridges overlooking the scene in the distance (Figure 6.1). Here the suburb is no longer in progress; it is complete but what has its completion wrought? Smoky, crowded, fi lled with people thronging back gardens, repeated over and over with no end in sight—this is more like a vision of hell than a sign of enlightened progress. As Asa Briggs noted in Victorian Cities, “If railways were symbols of progress, all too often the railway embankment became a symbol of the ruthless terror of the midVictorian city” (15).

AN ENGLISHMAN’S HOME IS HIS (RUINED) CASTLE Perhaps the primary image of the Gothic is the castle in ruins; one of the common motifs of literature of the suburb is the metaphorically ruined castle of the middle class. The idea of the suburban home as castle is somewhat fondly satirized in Great Expectations (1860–1861) by Wemmick’s suburban stronghold, “the top of [which] was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.” Pip describes “the smallest house I ever saw; with the queerest Gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham), and a Gothic door, almost too small to get in at.” This suburban fortress includes “a real flagstaff,” a bridge with a moat “about four feet wide and two deep” and a gun “mounted in a separate fortress, constructed of lattice work.” All non-castle elements are “out of sight, so as not to impede the idea of fortifications.” As Wemmick himself notes, with pride, “smiling again, but seriously too . . . ‘if you can suppose the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions’” (229).6 Yet this comforting image of suburban isolation has no ultimate validity, as many writers were quick to point out. In Hide and Seek (1854), Wilkie Collins equates the approach of the suburb to an army laying siege to nature, where the landscape of the suburb becomes a ruin devastated by the advancing armies of bricks and mortar: Alexander’s armies were great makers of conquests; and Napoleon’s armies were great makers of conquests; but the modern Guerilla

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Figure 6.1 Gustave Doré’s view of London from a train, 1872. From Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (1872).

regiments of the hod, the trowel, and the brick-kiln, are the greatest conquerors of all; for they hold the longest the soil that they have once possessed. How mighty the devastation which follows in the wake of these tremendous aggressors, as they march through the kingdom of nature, triumphantly bricklaying beauty wherever they go! What dismantled castle, with the enemy’s fl ag flying over its crumbling walls, ever looked so utterly forlorn as a poor fi eld fortress of nature, imprisoned on all sides by the walled camp of the enemy, and degraded by a hostile banner of pole and board, with the conqueror’s device inscribed on it—”THIS GROUND TO BE LET ON BUILDING LEASES”? (26, emphasis added) In the context of Collins’s novel, this assault on nature is also an assault on those earlier, and more idyllic, suburbs where it was still possible to walk in fields and forests near at hand. Thus, the early arrivals, and their castles, are subsumed under the general ruin of the advance of suburban building in another contest between past and present. George Sala chooses a similar metaphor in “The Great Invasion” (1852), but in this piece the suburbs, figured as preternaturally active bits of brick

110 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era and mortar, become the aggressor against the “castle” of established culture. The reader is called both to defend the castle (which here is neither “rural England” nor any one particular house, but the culture of the established middle class) and to fear the ruin’s approach, as one would expect when the suburb becomes gothic: We are [sic] invaded; root and branch. . . . The insidious enemy, burrowing like a mole underground, has sapped our foundations; has undermined our institutions. An unscrupulous army of mercenaries (principally Irish) have carried out his iniquitous behests. We are compassed round about, hemmed in, surrounded by his fortalices. . . . Great and getting greater day by day is the invasion of London. We are beleaguered by Brigadier Bricks and Field-Marshal Mortar. . . . Bricks and mortar invade market gardens; they elbow green-houses; they jostle conservatories; they thrust summer-houses away. . . . do we see streets upon streets growing up in commons, and what were once shady lanes; filling up ditches; tumbling down hedges everywhere; crushing up the country in its concrete grasp. . . . Try to get out of town any way, and the bricks drive you back, the mortar hangs on your skirts, and harasses you fiercely. . . . Will the whole island be covered with houses? (69, 73, emphasis added) As more (and less wealthy) people could afford suburban houses thanks to the greater number of homes built on smaller lots, both the privacy and the exclusivity of the middle-class retreat was threatened. The reader is “hemmed in,” “surrounded,” “harassed.” Invaders, “principally Irish,” transgress the once secure boundaries of suburban space. Thus, “our foundations” are “sapped”; the stability of the suburban ideal is in question (Sala 73). Sala ties these threats to an attack on “our institutions” and the country itself, represented in the text by commons, lanes and hedges rather than more rural images of farms and cottages—evidence of the intense identification between the dominant culture and middle-class space in the second half of the nineteenth century. Literally under siege, the castle invoked here will fall, without doubt, for what recourse is there? And the suburb, once thought to be a safe retreat like the one represented by the Pickwick’s cottage in Dickens’s earlier Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), has in the end turned on those who created it. If we add to these images of destroyed or besieged castles the fact that suburban homes often attempted to imitate a castle in miniature, we begin to see how the image of the ruined suburban castle comes to be included in the suburban gothic. From about 1820 until the near the end of the century, “Gothic” or at least a “Gothic revival” style of architecture by far surpassed any other mode of structural detail on the British home (Burnett 115) (see Chapter 4). Of course, what “Gothic architecture” meant to the speculative builder was something far different from what it meant to Ruskin and other influential arbiters of taste. According to Burnett,

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[I]n the middle decades of the century the advantage [for builders who wanted to sell their product] generally lay with the Gothic. In the 1860s a few speculative builders still had regard for order and symmetry in street elevations and continued to build plain, well-proportioned terraces in an essentially classical style, but in the following decades the terrace often degenerated into a mass of projecting porches, baywindows, and heavy ornamental details such as keystones, cappings, coloured brickwork, and ornamental tiling. . . . On the small plots of suburban streets the effects of such idiosyncrasies were often grotesque. (204–5) The result was one of “gloomy clutter” on street after street of crowded suburban houses (204), a clutter which was not enhanced by “the ‘better’ sorts of houses imitating ‘as pompously as they could’ the architectural grandeur of the mansions owned by the large incomes” (25). But try as they could, the middle class could not depend on architecture imitative of the castle to protect them from the insidious invasions, on all fronts, into their territory. As Jane Panton commented in 1896, “There is nothing much of the castle about a suburban residence, and the sooner this fact is realised the better for those who dwell therein and on both sides” (33).

GHOST TOWNS From the middle of the century, ghosts continued to be associated figuratively with threats to the middle-class way of life. At the same time, and with the same insidiousness, similar imagery fi nds its way into non-fiction, where elements that endanger middle-class culture are paired with the supernatural. When a suburb, or potential suburb, had become a ruin, metaphorical ghost figures could inhabit that space with impunity, as we see in writing about abandoned suburban sites. In “Dumbledowndeary,” written later in the same year as “The Great Invasion,” George Sala makes this connection in a particularly interesting way. After detailing the devastation of his hometown by speculative building, he moves, quite abruptly, into a discussion of the ghost stories and legends of the area. The problem in Dumbledowndeary (alias Erith, Kent— see Appendix) is that the local population, made up mostly of laborers, decided to build a fashionable middle-class suburb to improve their economy. Unfortunately, the rows and rows of new brick homes stand empty; Sala describes Dumbledowndeary as “a town to let”: If the Dumbledowndeareans had looked at home, they would have built one-storey cottages, or large houses, if you will, divided into little tenements fit for the occupancy of the poor brick-makers, and bargees, and labourers who swelter in crowded kennels in the back lanes and narrow

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In the paragraph immediately following, Sala’s narrative moves out of Dumbledowndeary on an expedition to “see the lion of Dumbledowndeary. . . . We are bound on a voyage of discovery to a haunted house”: Now, if you be anything of an amateur in haunted houses, a connoisseur in domestic ghosts, you will, doubtless, begin to form in imagination some very charming pictures of Elizabethan chambers, mouldy tapestry, and a stain of blood on the oak flooring which all the scrubbing and washing, the scouring, scraping and planing in the universe will not efface. You will be disappointed. . . . Passing through a beautiful park, and over what was once a lawn . . . you come suddenly on a substantial brick mansion, so fresh, so neat, so comfortable in appearance, that . . . you would take it to be in full occupancy now. (316) But, when Sala, tongue fi rmly in cheek, attempts to discover details about the ghost inhabiting this lovely home, he fi nds “there is no authenticated legend of a spectre in a white sheet, of an apparition carrying its head under its arm—no death’s-heads, no cross-bones, no blood, no bones”; there have only been “noises.” The only specific answer he can get to his queries about the origins of these noises is “poachers”—this from the gamekeeper. Indeed, poachers seem to be a valid explanation, as a search of the inside of the house yields little besides “the gay paper torn [not falling] from the walls” and “a decapitated rabbit at the stair-head.” Sala connects the unwillingness of the town “capitalists” to take care of the impoverished citizens with the invasion of the best home in the town by poachers (i.e., criminals) who have no place else to go thanks to the lack of suitable housing in town. That these invaders are figured as ghosts, and that the “ghost story” would follow a passage berating the capitalists for not “looking at home,” seems less of a non sequitur in this light. Situations like Dumbledowndeary’s invite an invasion of middle-class space, as the poorly housed majority pass and repass empty homes full of living space going to waste. The implication of Sala’s article echoes Marx and Engels’s statement that “what the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers” (57), here and elsewhere figured in the form of ghosts, or the already dead.

DECONSTRUCTING THE RUIN: LE FANU’S THE HOUSE BY THE CHURCHYARD The gothic genre carries over into the nineteenth century through suburban literature by a transformation of its primary symbol, the ruined

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castle or estate, into the figure of the ruined middle-class suburban home. However, the haunted landscape of the suburban ghost story outlined in Chapter 5, while evocative of the gothic, is not necessarily the most closely related to the traditional gothic mode; its movement toward resolution is too facile. Most ghost stories discussed in the previous chapter, in fact, are more closely linked to Romantic narratives, where the hero transfigures his space and creates a new, safe haven. In the gothic, according to Day, “there is no ascent from the underworld, nor is a new Eden established there” (7). Sheridan Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard (1861–1863), on the other hand, shows how the suburban ghost story structure can be manipulated to achieve a more problematic gothic moment. In this novel, Le Fanu argues against the efficacy of surveillance to control suburban space by undermining the conventions of the suburban ghost narrative. In refusing to provide an ending that shores up readers’ expectations about the possibility of maintaining a homogeneous and moral suburban space, Le Fanu forces readers to question the connections between propriety and respectability. Specifically, without ever allowing any supernatural figures to appear, Le Fanu uses the popular conventions of gothic tales in conjunction with the elements of the suburban ghost narrative: unstable space, intruder figures, weird women and surveillance. This effect highlights rather than diminishes the concrete, material connections between suburban space and danger. In other words, in this novel the suburbs and their inhabitants are frightening in and of themselves—there is no need for a ghost. The Other walks among “regular” men (and women) undetected. The fear that this engenders is not put to rest at the end of the novel, resulting in a narrative that taps more deeply and disturbingly into middle-class anxieties about place and space. As a suburban ghost story, this novel presents us with an uninhabitable house rumored to be haunted. A young hero, down on his luck but of good family, moves into the house and attempts to solve a mystery about his father’s alleged criminal activities, which have a slight connection to the house. And, in the end, the puzzle is solved; he marries the young heiress, and the couple begins a new life in a frenzy of idealized images of rural bliss which do not quite succeed in countering the novel’s evidence that such bliss is blatantly impossible. Le Fanu makes two major changes to the suburban ghost story structure that undermines its easy morality. First, despite much teeth-clenching, mooning about and hair-pulling, Mervyn, the young hero, has no role whatsoever in bringing about the solution to the mystery or in expelling the “ghosts”—he is a completely passive hero who has a fortune essentially dropped into his lap. Second, Le Fanu splits the “ghost role” in two; both ghost figures are members of the lower classes, but they do not need “exorcising”—they successfully, through bad faith and bad luck, exorcise themselves. Thus, the role of the rising young male is eliminated, and the “cleansing” of suburban space is left entirely to a

114 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era series of unlikely coincidences rather than any useful action on the part of the middle-class residents. Set back a hundred years in the suburban village of Chapelizod, west of Dublin, the novel begins with a description of an Oliver Twist-like suburban picturesque landscape, where the poplars which stood . . . here and there . . . just showed a glimpse of formality among the orchards and old timber that lined the banks of the river and the valley of the Liffey. . . . The broad old street looked hospitable and merry. . . . The jolly old inn, just beyond the turnpike at the sweep of the road, leading over the buttressed bridge by the mill, was fi rst to welcome the excursionist from Dublin. . . . (1) However, the narrator alternates between evoking this ideal and subverting it by immediately drawing attention to the fact that this Eden no longer exists. He describes “modern” Chapelizod of 1863 as a product of “improving proprietors with a taste for accurate parallelograms and pale new brick,” all under the shadow of “that grim giant factory, which is now the grand feature and centre of Chapelizod, throbbing all over with steam, and whizzing with shells, and vomiting pitchy smoke.” It has become, at the time of the narrator’s writing, “a melancholy and mangled old town, with a canopy of factory soot . . . joyless, busy, transformed Chapelizod” (2). Here, the very idea of the suburban ideal is pushed back far into the previous century, a thing unrecoverable in modern culture. As a further subversion of the suburban ideal, old-time Chapelizod, idyllic suburb that it was, in no way fosters the moral quality of life readers would expect from its quiet and retired atmosphere. The narrator describes the past life of the town as having a kind of “barbaric splendour,” implying that the current state of Chapelizod, factories and all, is much more civilized than the suburban ideal was (3). In fact, the surprising behavior of the denizens of Chapelizod generates this narratorial intrusion: All this only shows what every man who has ruralised a little in his lifetime knows, more than in theory, that the golden age lingers in no corner of the earth, but is really quite gone and over everywhere, and that peace [has] not fled to the nooks and shadows of deep valleys and bowery brooks, but flown once, and away to heaven again, and left the round world to its general curse. So it is even in pretty old villages, embowered in orchards, with hollyhocks and jessamine in front of the houses, and primeval cocks and hens pecking and scraping in the street and the modest river dimpling and simpering among osiers and apple trees, and old ivied walls close by—you sometimes hear other things than lowing herds, and small birds singing, and purling streams; and shrill accents and voluble rhetoric will now and then trouble the fragrant air, and wake up the dim old river-god from his nap. (91)

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Here the picturesque becomes the gothic explicitly. Although charming, Chapelizod’s suburban landscape hid, and, by implication, hides, “other things” that awake sinister forces. To cement the connection to the gothic, Le Fanu liberally sprinkles the narrative of The House by the Churchyard with evocations of the traditional gothic, which he then undercuts by refusing to produce any “real” ghosts. Beyond the suggestive title, Le Fanu provides a landscape of “rotten” houses, graveyards, dark and dangerous forests, violent storms and dark burial scenes—elements not necessarily associated with the family-oriented suburb. However, given the perfectly natural (as opposed to supernatural) horrors that arise in this particular suburb, Le Fanu’s strategy merely serves to highlight the anxieties surrounding the “repressed” elements in a thoroughly suburban landscape. For example, the narrative originates in the discovery of “an old coffi n” which disintegrates when the sexton disturbs it. Within it, the sexton and the local boys, who “liked the churchyard, and deciphering tombstones,” discover a “good store of dust and grimy bones, and the yellow skull itself” (3–4). The skull belongs to Sturk, and thus the story begins with a Frankenstein-like reanimation as the explanation of the holes in Sturk’s skull evolves into a long and complex narrative. The narrator, De Cresseron, takes up the tale with that gothic cliché, the dark and stormy night: There was a little of that sheet-lightning early in the evening. . . . The clouds, column after column, came up sullenly over the Dublin mountains, rolling themselves from one horizon to the other into one black dome of vapour, their slow but steady motion contrasting with the awful stillness in the air. There was a weight in the atmosphere, and a sort of undefined menace brooding over the little town, as if unseen crime or danger—some mystery of iniquity—was stealing into the heart of it, and the disapproving heavens scowled a melancholy warning. (8, emphasis added) With these details, Le Fanu aims to evoke the atmosphere of such early gothic novels as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. However, each time Le Fanu shows readers a corpse or a flash of lightning, he immediately switches gears by making the scene ridiculous. For example, before the tale can get well underway, Sturk’s skull gets tossed around and then “dropt like a hot potato” (5) by the boys and the sexton. Similarly, on the dark and stormy night in question, the narrator also hears the “solemn royal ditty, piped by the tuneful Aldermen of Skinner’s Alley” from the pub (9), a sound hardly evocative of castles and plots. The “ghost” figures of The House by the Churchyard, however, do bear close investigation, for they pose the most serious threat to suburban space of any of the intruder figures we have seen so far. Zekiel Irons, the parish clerk, is the fi rst half of the ghost-figure pairing. This former inn-yard stable

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boy twice invades the house by the churchyard, at night, to bring vital and unexpected information to Mervyn. The fi rst incident occurs in a chapter entitled “Of a Messenger from Chapelizod Vault Who Waited in the Tyled House for Mr. Mervyn” (158), the sinister implications of which heighten the reader’s expectations of supernatural encounter. Mervyn, returning late from a tryst with the heiress Gertrude, decides to brave “the stories about the place” and goes, without a candle, into the parlor “that looked out, through its great bow window, upon the haunted orchard”: With an unpleasant expectation he threw back the shutters, and unquestionably he did see, very unmistakably, a dark figure in a chair; so dark, indeed, that he could not discern more of it than the rude but undoubted outline of a human shape; . . . A slim, tall shape, in dark clothing, and, as it seemed, a countenance he had never beheld before—black hair, pale features, with a sinister-smiling character, and a very blue chin, and closed eyes. (158–9) Instead of a messenger from beyond the grave, however, this mysterious figure turns out to be Irons, who has fallen asleep in the chair waiting for Mervyn to return. Later in the novel, Irons returns on another wildly stormy night to tell more of what he knows. This time, Mervyn is already in the house when he is disturbed by “a sharp, distinct knocking on the window-pane. He remember[s] with a thrill the old story of the supernatural hand which had troubled that house, and began its pranks at this very window” (270). Of course, the hand belongs not to a ghost but to Irons, who comes to tell Mervyn that the key to the mystery is forcing a man named Charles Archer to tell the truth about his role in Mervyn’s father’s death. Irons indicates that Mr. Dangerfield, Lord Castlemallard’s land agent, might know where to fi nd Archer. Archer is the other half of the ghost-figure pair. He is clearly the prime mover in the mystery at the center of the novel and is perceived as a disembodied intelligence by Irons, who describes Archer as one who “ . . . can see in the clouds, or the running waters, what you’re thinking of a mile away, that can move as soft as ghosts, and can gripe as hard as hell, when need is” (161). On Irons’s advice, Mervyn immediately approaches Dangerfield for help in locating Archer, and it is here that the plot takes an interesting turn. For although Dangerfield becomes furious with Mervyn for suggesting that a respectable man like himself would be in contact with someone like Archer, it soon becomes clear that he knows Archer quite well. After his encounter with Mervyn, Dangerfield can be heard muttering, Charles Archer living—Charles Archer dead—or, as I sometimes think, neither one nor t’other quite—half man, half corpse—a vampire— there is no rest for thee: no sabbath in the days of thy week. Blood,

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blood—blood—’tis tiresome. Why should I be a slave to these d—d secrets? (293) As the narrative progresses from this point, the formerly admirable Dangerfield takes on a more and more sinister aspect; at one point Le Fanu gives us the image of Dangerfield wickedly smiling while “the black monkey behind him grinned and hugged himself like his familiar” (anticipating “Green Tea” [1869]). At the same time, Dangerfield becomes quite active in village charity, and is particularly interested in reviving Dr. Sturk (he of the holey skull), who lies in a fatal coma from a murderous attack in a nearby wood. When Sturk unexpectedly regains consciousness, he names his murderer: Charles Archer. At this point in the narrative, the reader is almost prepared for the arrest of Dangerfield, who is really Archer in disguise. Thus (much like Harmon/Rokesmith in Our Mutual Friend), Dangerfield acts as the “ghost” of his other persona, Charles Archer, whom he had gone to great lengths to kill off. Unfortunately, he had the bad luck to come to a town in which he was recognized not only by Irons, but also by Sturk, who witnessed the original murder but had temporarily forgotten thanks to an opium-induced daze (hence Archer/Dangerfield’s attempt on Sturk’s life). This is sensation fiction plotting at its most self-conscious. In the gothic tradition, Le Fanu directly associates both of these intruders from the underclass with ghost images: Irons is twice mistaken for a ghost, and Dangerfield himself calls Archer a zombie/vampire. Earlier in the narrative, Dr. Sturk, the military doctor, has a meeting with Mr. Dangerfield and emerges “looking, as [his] good lady afterwards said, for all the world as if he had seen a ghost” (179). Later, in a meeting with Zekiel Irons, Dangerfield is described as “a white figure . . . gliding without noise swiftly after him. . . . If any of the honest townsfolk had accidentally lighted upon that muffled, glaring image under the dark old elm, I think he would have mistaken it for a ghost, or something worse” (336, 341). In some ways these figures behave as expected in a suburban ghost narrative. Both “ghosts” haunt those inhabitants of the suburban Chapelizod most invested with secrets, thus serving the function of disciplinary as well as invasive figures and providing a means for individuals’ secrets to be made known to the community. Further, the ghost figures are expelled permanently, Archer to hang and Irons to a criminal career in England, which should leave the suburban community restored to peaceful hegemony. However, Le Fanu constructs the presentation of the fate of the criminals so that the threat to suburban space lingers beyond the end of the narrative. In a typical suburban ghost story, once the ghosts are expelled, the neighborhood is cleared of disreputable behavior and can return to normalcy in the assurance that all moral danger is past. Yet the recurring message of The House by the Churchyard is that the danger of infi ltrators in the suburban idyll originates in secrets. Although the town prides itself

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on its ability to ferret out all secrets, not one of the town gossips ever gets to the truth about those secrets. In fact, the entire text is presented as one long gossip. Dr. Toole, the town physician, complains somewhat bitterly that . . . there’s no such thing as a secret here. . . . The whole town knows when I’ve tripe for dinner, and where I have a patch or darn. And when I got the fourteen pigeons at Darkey’s-bridge, the birds were not ten minutes on my kitchen table when old Widow Foote, sends her maid and her compliments, as she knew my pie-dish only held a dozen, to beg the two odd birds. Secret, indeed! (96) But, ironically, no one who is not personally involved with the secret of Mervyn’s heritage ever guesses who he is—or, more to the point, whose son he is. Similarly, the townspeople, who once worshipped at the shrine of the respectable and popular Mr. Dangerfield, are shocked and horrified when they discover that they have been fooled: They had been bringing into their homes and families an undivulged and terrible monster. The wher-wolf had walked the homely streets of their village. The ghoul, unrecognised, had prowled among the graves of their churchyard. One of their fairest princesses, the lady of Belmont, had been on the point of being sacrificed to a vampire. Horror, curiosity and amazement were everywhere. (380) The rhetoric of the graveyard in this passage is not accidental; as a figure of the underworld, Mr. Dangerfield/Archer does in fact step from the abyss directly into the bosoms of respectable middle-class homes. Further, Mr. Dangerfield, as ghost figure, is not expunged by surveillance; the community is singularly incapable of discovering the rot within their midst. In fact, this particular idyllic suburban community of gossips and watchers is singularly incapable of discovering any secrets presented in the novel, from the serious to the mundane: no one knows or guesses, for example, that Gertrude is engaged to Mervyn, that her elderly Aunt Rebecca is secretly in love with Lieutenant Puddock, that Mr. Nutter has a previous wife still living and is thus a bigamist, that Dr. Sturk is near bankruptcy or that Captain Cluffe wears a toupee. Thus Le Fanu shows that the suburban ideal was not even close to capable of exerting the disciplinary function with which it was invested—a problematic contention for middle-class suburbanites. By constantly thwarting the readers’ expectations that The House by the Churchyard will frighten them with otherworldly elements, Le Fanu highlights the ways in which the suburban community could destroy itself without spectral help. As Matthew Brennan argues in The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, “[I]t is when readers ignore the Gothic’s images of the monstrous and the abyss that they risk replicating the nightmarish fates of Victor Frankenstein

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and Henry Jekyll [and] the images turn negative and destructive” (6, 9). In a sense, The House by the Churchyard suggests that the “traditional” suburban ghost story (from which this novel distances itself) endangered middle-class domesticity by placing the source of the fear of invasion elsewhere. When the danger was placed outside the suburb, it could, in a sense, be ignored, with disastrous results. Instead, Le Fanu turns readers’ attention to the material world where the real danger to suburban homogeneity, and the values represented by the suburban ideal, lay. Between fear of the outsider coming into the suburb and a growing awareness that a particular neighborhood or house rent does not guarantee freedom from terror, the suburb could become populated with specters of all kinds in the minds of its inhabitants, an imaginative trend of which midand late-century writers took advantage. But the move toward a gothic suburb brought with it a concurrent move toward a psychologically more troubling image of suburban space, in which the suburb becomes associated with real fear, both within and outside the text. This psychological aspect of the gothic suburb, centering on the dissonance between expectation and reality, generates a certain kind of sublimity around the presentation of suburban space, the implications of which are discussed in the next chapter.

7

Sublime Suburbs

For the middle-class writer and reader, the Victorian suburb could represent not just a threat to person or property at the hands of the dispossessed (although this threat was never so often fulfi lled as it was invoked), but also ruin, chaos or ultimately the end of civilization as they knew it. Yet the fact remains that any given suburb was likely to be fairly quiet and regulated on most days of the year. This raises a nagging question about why the suburbs would be figured so negatively in Victorian literature. Why, for example, was the gothicized suburb prevalent in so many kinds of writing, and how could this trope develop simultaneously in such a wide variety of literature? Given the tenacity of the suburban ideal, why were the suburbs not primarily figured as reassuring, a celebration of middle-class achievement? In part, the movement toward a suburban gothic stems from a resurgent interest in the sublime as a way of coping with some of the ideological problems elicited by the disjunction between expectations about the suburb and lived experience of it. This chapter makes the case that evoking the sublime with regard to the suburb served much the same cultural task as “realistic” fiction, but from a different perspective. Where realistic fiction held up a looking glass to the middle-class reader to give him/her models for acting within the culture, the fiction that evokes the sublimity of the suburb allowed the reader to figure himself/herself in Victorian culture only with discomfort. The trope of the sublime suburb asked the reader to imagine any number of distressing personal and/or cultural futures, some very near to hand, which must be faced and prevented if middle-class culture were to remain dominant. Sublimity in the urban setting, while it clearly existed, cannot fulfill this task, for though a Victorian city may have been sublime, by mid-century this space, as a site of culture, belonged primarily to working and upper classes. Rural space could also be sublime in any number of ways, but again, the countryside was not typical middle-class space—it was not the scene, generally, of average middle-class concerns. Only on the border between city and country could the lesson of the suburb’s threat to the survival of the dominant culture (and thus the middle class’s threat to itself) be read and taken to heart. What does it mean to say that suburban space is or could be sublime? Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful opposes the sublime and the beautiful as two equal

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but opposing reactions to visual stimuli. Sublimity presumably connotes “greatness” and “magnitude”; Burke’s most familiar examples are a storm at sea or a wild mountain vista. How, then, could a suburb—man-made, domestic, oriented to the “everyday-ness” of life—be considered sublime? To answer these questions, we must consider two things: fi rst, eighteenthcentury defi nitions of sublimity, upon which most later aesthetic theory was based, and, second, the nineteenth-century perception of what constituted the sublime.

THE SUBLIME AS AN AESTHETIC CATEGORY In eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse, the concept of the sublime began as an attempt to explain sensations we feel when we face something that is both terrifying and pleasurable because of the terror.1 Sublimity is thus subtly distinct from horror, which is entirely negative. In general, it was thought, there are three kinds of experiences that produce the sublime. The fi rst is a result of the human mind’s inability to comprehend limitless objects or concepts. Hence, when a subject is presented with a scene or object that suggests or actually represents the infinite or unbounded, such as the ocean or the night sky, the subject may experience the sublime. A second mode of the sublime is the sensation produced in situations that require an individual to consider self-preservation, or where the subject is forced to consider maintaining his/her personal limits against an unbounded other. This sensation is distinct, however, from actual fear for one’s safety. To experience sublimity, the subject must actually be safe and only perceive a representative threat to selfhood for himself or others. This sensation might be evoked by witnessing a storm at sea from a position of safety. A third mode of the sublime, closely related to the last, is the idea of death, either for the subject or represented in the sublime object. After all, death is the ultimate threat to one’s limits, the ultimate unbounded other. Burke lists thirteen ways that objects that can produce the sublime, all of which reflect the observer’s inability to see, comprehend or engage with the object on a “human” level. The fi rst is astonishment, followed by terror, especially when terror is connected to “things of great dimensions” (55). Obscurity, power and privation are included as terrible in general; under privation Burke includes “Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence” (60). Vastness and infi nity are sublime because of their connection to “the eye not being able to perceive the bounds” of an object (61). For a similar reason, objects that present succession and/or uniformity to the eye are sublime, as is magnitude in building (the fi rst specifically non-natural characteristic of the sublime mentioned by Burke). Finally, Burke includes difficulty (as “when any work seems to have required immense force and labour to effect it” [62]), magnificence, light and color as elements of the

122 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era sublime. In terms of color, Burke specifically mentions that “in buildings, when the highest degree of the sublime is intended, the materials and ornaments ought . . . to be . . . of sad and fuscous colours, as black, or brown, or deep purple, and the like” (64). For Burke, sublimity is an objective quality. Burke assumes that uniformity, for example, will produce a sublime reaction in all observers who encounter it. Immanuel Kant, however, in both Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) and his Critique of Judgment (1790), insists that the sublime is essentially subjective rather objective experience. In the fi rst place, because the sublime has an element of enjoyment, it is by defi nition subjective. Yet Kant posited that it was possible for a person to see a mountain range, an earthquake or a storm at sea without experiencing sublimity. For Kant, the sublime was a product of “reflective judgment” or reason—a cognitive effort or ability that defi ned one’s “sensibility.” Only those with highly developed “fi ner feelings” could appreciate Kant’s sublime, making the sublime an aesthetic of the elite. Although the sublime experience always implies a sense of discomfort or dissociation from the “everyday” self, we have, in essence, two ways of understanding the idea of the sublime. The fi rst, which Kant called the noble sublime, originates in the awesome grandeur of an object. Our sense of that object uplifts us because of our inability to fully grasp it; this sensation is generally related to objects or scenes that remind us of a higher power. The second, which Kant called the terrifying sublime, comes from the object or vista that overwhelms us, jarring our sense of everyday reality because it either seems misplaced or makes us, as observers, feel misplaced in some way. Burke, Kant and most other eighteenth-century theorists based their original conception of the sublime on natural phenomena, like storms or earthquakes, where a man could observe immensity, vastness and power beyond his ability to control it. However, Burke admits the possibility that man-made structures could evoke the sublime, paving the way for Ruskin’s later discussions about the existence of sublime architecture.

RUSKIN AND THE SUBLIME Ruskin struggled with the opposition between the noble and terrifying forms of the sublime throughout his career. In The Aesthetic Theories of John Ruskin (1971), George Landow charts the development of Ruskin’s attitude toward the sublime as an aesthetic category. Landow notes that in Ruskin’s early work, such as the fi rst volume of Modern Painters, he rejects the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, at least in architecture and art (183); Ruskin believed that the noble sublime was more properly termed beauty because of its uplifting impact, while the terrifying sublime was not an aesthetic category at all.

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Ruskin’s early notion of the beautiful/sublime meshes with Burke’s implication that sublimity is inherent in an object, rather than part of an observer’s reaction to the object. But what Ruskin found increasingly difficult to ignore was exactly that—humans’ emotional reactions to the things they see. There was “passion and violence” in works that lacked symmetry (Modern 127); for Ruskin this was a lesser quality than beauty, but it was an aesthetic reaction that he could not ignore, and which he eventually termed “sublime.” Ruskin’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, then, becomes one primarily of emotional response. As Landow points out, whenever Ruskin discusses the beautiful, “he concentrate[s] almost entirely upon elements in the beautiful that lay outside the mind of man” (212), but when attempting to defi ne sublimity, “he is more concerned with the emotional effects . . . create[d] in the observer” (209). This reaction to art “occur[s] deep within the mind and rise[s] slowly into consciousness, bypassing the judgment” (213), unlike Kant’s sublime, which is based on reason or judgment. We cannot say that Ruskin ignores or denies the terrifying sublime; Loesberg shows how Ruskin renames or redefi nes the terrifying sublime as “grotesque” and notes that Ruskin’s explanation of the grotesque as a sensation “arising from the confusion of the imagination by the presence of truths which it cannot wholly grasp” fits more accurately with Burkean sublime.2 Ruskin specifically includes man-made objects in his discussion of aesthetics. In Ruskin’s mind, the reason for building in the sublime mode was to mark man’s “relations with the mightiest, as well as the fairest, works of God,” an example of the noble sublime. He maintains that those works of God, represented in building, “receive an added glory from their association with the earnest efforts of human thought.” Thus, for Ruskin, the positive mode of sublimity was a kind of worship—a worship of which, at the time of his writing The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), he had “never seen any aim at the expression” (129). The suburbs, on the other hand, were a horror plain and simple—not sublime because not grand or worshipful. They were rather the opposite, in fact, a paean to materiality in its grossest form and thus threatening to culture. Ruskin complains, in Seven Lamps, about contemporary domestic architecture, calling even the best of it “small, . . . cramped, . . . miserable in its petty neatness” (136). Yet at the same time, he sees the possibilities in the gothic trends in architecture, where “decoration by shadow” creates a “broad, dark and simple effect” that Ruskin admires, although it is not beautiful by his standards. He even applauds the “sloping roof, jutting porch, projecting balcony, hollow niche, massy gargoyle, frowning parapet”—anything which creates “weight and shadow” (135). As I showed in Chapter 4, many of these architectural features were being incorporated into suburban architecture at the time Ruskin was writing, and yet he does not seem to make any direct connection between the

124 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era suburbs and the kind of sublimity he espouses in other sections of Seven Lamps, mostly because the sublimity of suburban architecture is not of the worshipful or positive kind. Still, the connection between the suburban and the sublime flickers around the edges of Ruskin’s numerous attempts to discuss what he means when he distinguishes between the beautiful, the gothic and the sublime. For example, Ruskin does allow for a vision of suburban space as sublime when he discusses the effects of accumulation on the experience of the sublime. He writes, In the separate picture, it is rare that there exists any very high source of sublime emotion; but the great concerted music of the streets of the city, when turret rises over turret, and casement frowns beyond casement, and tower succeeds to tower along the farthest ridges of the inhabited hills,—this is a sublimity of which you can at present form no conception; and capable, I believe, of exciting almost the deepest emotion that art can ever strike from the bosoms of men. (Lectures, emphasis added) We see here Ruskin’s emphasis on emotion as a function of sublimity, where the awe inspired by the city as a great work of man reflects God’s achievement in bringing so many men together. For Ruskin this is an imaginary and almost impossible vision, inconceivable because in 1854 suburban building was just entering the fi rst of many boom cycles that would eventually cover “the farthest ridges of the inhabited hills” with red tile roofs, if not with turrets. However, later readers must have immediately thought of the great number of casements currently frowning over the suburban landscape and had a different response to this vision. The lived experience of a landscape covered with houses elicits a more uncomfortable feeling for many Victorians than Ruskin allowed, but that is not to say the experience was not sublime. It is simply sublime in a different mode—the “terrifying” mode of a fear-tinged awe at what man had wrought and the multiple implications of a city growing seemingly out of control. In his widely read Stones of Venice (1851), Ruskin makes a more sinister connection between the sublime and the materiality of the suburb, although that connection is veiled and perhaps even subconscious. In the section on the nature of the gothic, Ruskin outlines the problem faced by the middle class’s emphasis on the production and consumption of material goods. For Ruskin, the gothic, although rude and imperfect, is of a higher and more moral aesthetic value because it depended on the individual craftsman’s mind and abilities. Ruskin places this in opposition to mechanized production of goods which is, essentially, soulless. In arguing for a social revolution in the way work is assigned and produced, Ruskin paints a picture of an unintelligent and dissatisfied mass of ignorant laborers. Significantly, he paints them as broken, sunken, of

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the abyss. In “Dickensian Deformed Children and the Hegelian Sublime,” Jonathan Loesberg argues that it is this kind of rhetorical shift that is at the heart of the concept of the sublime, for it points at something which should be—the proud worker connected to his labor—and is not (634). In respect to this dichotomy between what Ruskin means to do for the working classes and what he actually does—contribute to the middle-class fear of the working class—we might have yet another clue to what makes a connection between the Victorian suburb and the sublime possible for nineteenth-century readers: the terror of the over-produced, soulless and unaesthetic, even ugly, physical space of the suburb which is dependent on a de-humanized workforce for existence. Although Ruskin does not term it such, this vision of the suburb is sublime because material objects of the suburb, as representations of dominant culture, work against that dominance by oppressing a larger and potentially dangerous underclass. The dominant culture, in turn, works to control the danger that that underclass represents but cannot successfully do so, as figures from that underclass refuse to stay in “their” space and move out to the suburbs. The suburbs, in other words, represent the means of their own potential destruction and are an example of Kant’s terrifying sublime.

THE TERRIFYING SUBLIME AND THE VICTORIAN SUBURBS Rhetorically, the power of the sublime is in the signifying object’s inability to completely represent its meaning (Loesberg 628). When a thing stands for more than we can see or understand, or something other than it should, and when we, as observers, recognize this state of affairs, we experience the sublime and are uncomfortable in a more or less pleasurable way. If we think of sublimity primarily in terms of disjunction—we are anxious because we cannot understand how or why what we see does not quite make sense—then we can see how the sublime represents a danger to the dominant culture. After all, one privilege of cultural dominance is the ability to set the boundaries of signification, outlining which symbols stand for what ideals. When those symbols fail, their cultural significance shifts slightly away from the dominant one. Focusing on the loci of these points of dissonance is a way to highlight cultural threats. The word sublime is derived from the Latin for “up to the limit,” and suburban development pushed the limits of the cities, both architecturally and ideologically, in all kinds of uncomfortable ways. In his article “The Awful Sublimity of the Victorian City,” Nicholas Taylor explains that industrial objects such as warehouses were a wonderfully explicit example of the way in which new functions demanded new architectural responses, neither beautifully Palladian nor picturesquely Gothick but sublimely abstract. . . . It is only in terms of

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Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era the sublime that the thrill of these buildings, so inexplicable to those who merely find them “ugly,” can be understood. (442–3)

Yet he notes that “the most spectacular example [of sublime architecture] in London was not an office building but . . . a square of fashionable suburban houses: Milner Square in Islington” (440). Taylor seems to be arguing that the sublimity of the “infi nite” suburb—and its uniformity, color and privation—was an experiment in a new aesthetic demanded by the industrial age—something that would not be served by a beauty associated with landed aristocracy, or by a picturesque which was too easily imitated by lower classes. Taking Taylor’s argument to its logical end, then, the middle class, in attempting to differentiate itself from other social classes, signified this difference aesthetically by “rediscovering” the sublime and using it to mark its territory. This theory may help support Donald Olsen’s claim that “the suburbs that proved most successful were the ones that were most suburban, that is to say the most dull, the most uniform . . .” (“Victorian” 274), for these would also be the ones that were most sublime, and therefore most distinctly middle class. From another perspective, the inability to fi x a border or limit to the urban experience because of expansive suburban growth would, in and of itself, makes the suburb sublime in the sense that the city would cease to have, or to represent, a limit or boundary. Further, the constantly shifting suburb could also lead to an association with ideas of death through the change, and particularly the “death,” economically speaking, of certain suburban neighborhoods. In this sense, the suburb can be seen as doubly sublime, both resisting (in its inability to limit the city) and at the same time reemphasizing (in its association with death) borders of perception and experience. The suburban problem with boundaries was compounded by the inability of an observer to look into the space, a feature built into suburban design. The design was meant to individuate space, but as “others” began to move into suburban space, the security that borders would be maintained was, as I have argued, threatened. Authors could write about these interior spaces and could make a window into a space that otherwise their readers would not be able to see. But what did readers see when they looked inside? Because the house, as a social structure, contains a number of individuals living in close proximity, writing about suburban interiors could raise questions about the house/home’s ability to resist limits and therefore resist order, in direct contradiction to the cult of domesticity’s claims that suburban homes engendered order. Imagining thousands of these interiors, closely packed, suggests an unstable space around the city, sublime in its ultimate impenetrability and potential for cultural resistance. The sublimity of the Victorian suburbs is revealed in works describing the suburban landscape. In 1909, C. F. G. Masterman characterized the late-century suburb as “miles and miles of little red houses in little silent

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streets, in number defying imagination” (70, emphasis added)—a kind of inconceivable vastness that is characteristic of the classical sublime. Social historian John Burnett, in describing the structural characteristics of suburban housing, gives us a sense of other ways in which the suburb could have been perceived as classically sublime. In the fi rst place, the general use of slate for roofi ng “gave to English domestic architecture a uniformity and monotony of appearance” (28, emphasis added). Further, “the starkness of [the streets] was often shrouded by grey, smoke-laden skies” (172), lending an obscurity to the scene. Finally, Burnett remarks that “the general effect of gloomy clutter was enhanced by the large areas of plate glass, which in many lights showed up as empty black or grey space” (204), lending that much more “fuscous” color to the suburban atmosphere. And it was not just houses that could lend the suburb its sublime air. As Asa Briggs points out, “within a few yards of the [rail] station, you might fi nd yourself among workshops and warehouses. . . . For miles beyond there might stretch more workshops and more warehouses . . .” (Victorian 25). Indeed, it was the succession of buildings in long rows, the uniformity of that building in style and color, the seeming endlessness of repetitively similar streets and the continued expansion of this monotony that lent the physical space of the suburbs a sublime air. In many senses, the suburbs presented the observer with the kind of limitless and frighteningly monotonous vistas that Burke and Kant attribute primarily to natural scenes. However, the man-made vistas of suburban space still had the power to call to the subject’s mind a dissonance between what was within and what was outside of the subject’s control. Panton draws a similar connection in her introduction to Suburban Residences where she notes that . . . the majority of suburban residents is made up from young married folk, and dreary, commonplace, middle-aged ones, made dreary by their surroundings, and by their enforced severance from their more fortunate fellow-creatures. . . . there is literally nothing to keep them alert and alive. (11, emphasis added) For Panton, the unrelieved uniformity draws us back to the verge of the gothic, with the terrifying suggestion of street after street of homes fi lled with the living dead. It is in fiction, however, that we most often see the sublime in connection with the suburbs. The sublime suburb in fiction, as representative of failed cultural space, takes those values to their logical conclusions and then offers cautions and possibly solutions for reestablishing control. In “Dumbledowndeary,” for example, George Sala employs the sublime mode in just this way, describing the town’s “long avenues of tubes of greyish clay” which compete for space with “smoking kilns . . . whose caloric is gradually doing the bricks to a turn, giving them . . . a thousand rainbow

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hues of crimson, and chrome, and purple” (314)—all colors Burke classifies as sublime. Sala continues, Scarcely have you escaped from the old fashioned little village with its lean-to roofs, its thatch and lead-paned casements, ere a little Babylon of bricks stares you in the face. Streets, terraces, rows, gardens (brick ones), crescents, lodges, villas, squares, groves, cottages, all in brick. . . . Nobody lives, alas, in these pretty little houses; there is no population for these cleanly, fresh-coloured, airy little streets and terraces. . . . nobody comes to hire or to purchase them. The cosy little windows are besmeared with the dread announcement in whitewash; rude bills to the same effect are posted on the street doors; tall posts with placards, like gibbets, rear their ugly heads where rose-trees and laburnum ought to grow. (314–315) Imagine walking through these streets. Here the connections between the privation, vastness, uniformity and difficulty of this suburban wasteland evoke the horrifying aspects of the sublime directly. They suggest the terrifying image not only of all this uninhabited space, but also of gibbets, which calls up associations of crime and punishment not generally associated with the suburban ideal described at length by Sala in the paragraphs preceding this passage. The sense of disjunction between what is “supposed” to be and what actually exists highlights the problems Sala sees in the rush to profit from the suburbanization of London at the risk of destroying extant communities and economies. In “The Great Invasion,” Sala emphasizes this disjunction more intensely, writing that the suburbs have “swollen with frightful, alarming, supernatural rapidity. [They have] taken you unawares; [they have] dropped upon you without warning; [they have] started up with out notice; [they have] grown with stealthy rapidity . . .” (70, emphasis added). These are sublime suburbs indeed, eliciting terror from their perceivers and threatening both bodily danger (the idea of the necessity for self-preservation) and “supernatural” encounters. Here a succession of objects is presented to the reader/subject in such a way calculated, by knowing how the reader/subject will respond, to elicit terror simply through the power of suggesting the unnamable to human imagination. The human imagination in question is a middle-class one, primed to be disturbed by the implications of a space so completely beyond the control of its creator—one that has actually turned on its creators, “dropping upon” them, “supernaturally,” like Frankenstein’s monster. To pursue the implications of this trope in Victorian fiction, an examination of the works of two major novelists of the period, Dickens and Collins, may reveal some of the ways sensation fiction works to contain and reestablish traditional limits for its readers. Dickens and Collins each locate the threat represented by the suburban sublime slightly differently.

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For Dickens, the danger is material, located in physical space. The extent to which characters reflect or resist their space gives his narratives momentum; the moment at which characters take possession of spaces appropriate to them, and are thus no longer out of place, signals the end of the narrative. Space may degenerate, but once characters are safe from the taint of that space, the space ceases to be presented as sublime—it becomes merely ugly, occupied by the culturally insignificant. Collins, on the other hand, locates the sublimity of suburban landscapes in the inhabitants. His suburbs are not nearly as degenerate as those who reside in them, particularly those who use the space to disrupt dominant culture. Removing these figures from the space, therefore, does not remove the threat, because the space retains its ability to host misplaced figures.

DICKENS AND THE TERRIFYING SUBLIME In Great Expectations (1860–1861), Wemmick’s Walworth exemplifies the ideological problem that the suburb posed for Victorian culture. Pip describes Walworth as “a collection of back lanes, ditches, and little gardens” which “present the aspect of a rather dull retirement” (229); this suburb pretends to be neither picturesque nor beautiful. It is here that we fi nd Wemmick’s Castle, erected as a kind of paranoid barrier marking the break between Wemmick’s domestic life and his professional one. The ability to achieve such a complete separation of labor and rest was one element of the suburban ideal. The castle has more sinister implications, however, when Wemmick himself suggests, half seriously, the possibility of a siege. From whom or from what, we might wonder, would this threat come? One possibility is suggested by Pip’s description of Wemmick’s “collection of curiosities”: They were mostly of a felonious character; comprising the pen with which a celebrated forgery had been committed, a distinguished razor or two, some locks of hair, and several manuscript confessions written under condemnation—upon which Mr. Wemmick set particular value as being, to use his own words, “every one of ’em Lies, sir.” (231) The one reminder of his professional life that Wemmick allows through his domestic barrier is the collection of relics of criminals who, significantly, have been caught and convicted. Wemmick, as the clerk for a defense lawyer, comes into daily contact with the “residuum” of England, and so we understand his desire to separate his home and working lives. Yet Wemmick’s castle, erected to withstand a siege, represents more than the ideal of suburban privacy writ large. It also draws readers’ attention to the necessity of defending against invasion of that privacy. The invaders, figured by Wemmick’s talismans, are also signified by the castle, and

130 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era so the castle, as representative of the suburban ideal, fails to fully realize that which it was meant to signify—it undercuts the desired reflection on privacy by its evocation of the danger of invasion. This kind of ideological disjunction is the epitome of the function of the suburban sublime in sensation fiction. It is also particular to Dickens’s idea of the suburb as a defensible space—the danger is located in the figure of the castle, not in the inhabitants of the suburb. In Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), Dickens once again creates suburbs that depend on the dissociation between what they should be and what they are for their rhetorical power. Typically, however, the novel ends by asserting that middle-class domestic space, configured correctly, will only be available to those with “correct” middle-class values. Dickens does not question the idea that the ideal suburb signifies everything that it should; he merely illustrates what can happen when individuals move outside that symbol system by figuring that misplacement as suburban sublimity. Dickens constructs a narrative that ultimately eliminates sublimity, and its worrisome implications, from the world of the novel. Yes, dirty suburbs containing odd figures continue to exist, but by the end of the novel those figures no longer have any power to influence the lives of the main characters. The suburbs of Our Mutual Friend are full of Dickensian oddities and examples of bizarre behavior, which, although not supernatural, complement the physical atmosphere of his sublime suburbs much as the spirits do in the suburban ghost stories of the period. The shrewish Mrs. Wilfer, with her tendency to tie up her face whenever she is upset as if she were ready to be laid out, is the least odd of the suburban characters we fi nd. There is Silas Wegg living out in Maiden Lane, with his wooden leg and stunted body which bring to mind the apparition in Le Fanu’s “The Familiar.” Even more bizarre is the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren, with her bad back and “queer” legs, established in Millbank beyond Westminster in a dreary little community near the river. And of course, there is Mr. Venus’s “shop of horrors” in Clerkenwell. These figures contribute to the atmosphere of fear and anxiety associated with the suburban setting, but there is more to the sublimity of Dickens’s suburbs than caricatures that might ultimately make the suburb ridiculous rather than threatening. The sublimity of the suburb in which Dickens locates Bradley Headstone cannot be read as ridiculous in any sense and is only neutralized by Headstone’s violent death and hence his uncompromising removal from the world of the novel. We fi rst see Headstone’s southern suburb (see Appendix) as a chaotic space that is, simultaneously, dull: They were in a neighbourhood which looked like a toy neighbourhood taken in blocks out of a box by a child of particularly incoherent mind and set up anyhow; . . . there a dilapidated old country villa; then, a medley of black ditch, sparkling cucumber-frame, rank field, richly cultivated kitchen-garden, brick viaduct, arch-spanned canal, and disorder

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of frowziness and fog . . . all according to pattern and all engendered in the light of the latest Gospel according to Monotony. . . . (247) Dickens anchors Headstone in this space; he is so strongly identified with the neighborhood and the school that several of the characters refer to him only as “the schoolmaster.” The monotony of the space reflects Headstone’s unimaginative engagement with education, where he struggles to retain every bit of information he acquires without understanding the value of education itself. For him, the title of “schoolmaster” entitles him to membership in the middle class, and his determination to achieve that success at any cost distorts the values that originally made such a position “respectable.” Yet at the same time, that suburban space cannot contain him; Dickens makes a point of describing Headstone’s long walks to and from the city to visit Lizzie or to follow his rival for her affections. The worst aspects of quiet retirement and vitality are combined in Headstone’s suburb, foreshadowing the confl ict in Headstone’s own nature. Indeed, Headstone’s presence in the novel provides a parody of almost every middle-class value, as he takes each one to an extreme that ends in disaster. Headstone and his protégé Charley Hexam pursue “respectability” with a mindless determination that eventually renders them almost inhuman. Their inability to identify with or appreciate the values that underlie respectability renders them incapable of evaluating Lizzie Hexam’s true worth as a figure who embodies all middle-class values despite her class status. Instead, Headstone and Charley see Lizzie as an uncontrolled and possibly intrusive figure whom they must “domesticate,” much as Rokesmith/Harmon had to domesticate Bella. Headstone is concerned that [s]ome man who had worked his way might come to admire—your sister—and might even in time bring himself to think of marrying—your sister—and it would be a sad drawback and a heavy penalty upon him if, overcoming in his mind other inequalities of condition and other considerations against it, this inequality and this consideration [her lack of education] remained in full force. . . . [A]n admirer, a husband, would form the connexion voluntarily, besides being obliged to proclaim it—which a brother is not. After all, you know, it must be said of you that you couldn’t help yourself, while it would be said of him, with equal reason, that he could. (261) Both Headstone and Charley feel that since Lizzie is uneducated, because of the way she works for her living and especially because she lives in lowerclass suburban lodgings with a deformed child, she is in no way fit for association with themselves. Headstone and Charley’s anxiety about Lizzie stems from Headstone’s sense that she would be misplaced in middle-class life—that in her domestication, she will become sublime because she would represent something

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(respectable middle-class matron) other than what she is (lower-class river girl). In other words, Charley and Headstone represent the growing segment of the population who have in many ways entirely missed the point about what it means to be middle class, locating class in space rather than behavior.3 Headstone, as headmaster of a “ragged” school for boys, is barely entitled to middle-class social status either by profession or by income; Charley, as charity pupil, has even farther to go. Charley is not the rising clerk of the ghost stories; he is instead the figure of the rising “street folk” who, in his eagerness to achieve middle-class respectability, has severed all ties with his past and succumbed to Headstone’s insistence on the importance of appearances over substance. At the same time, Headstone is so afraid of what “society” will think of Lizzie that, despite his admiration for her, he can barely speak to her. Neither will achieve middle-class status; they are merely intruders who aspire to the accouterments of respectability without understanding the internal virtues that were supposed to accompany it and which gave it its value in the fi rst place. Their misunderstanding of how Lizzie does or does not fit into any given space leads to their downfall. As the narrative progresses, Headstone himself becomes sublime. His struggle for control over his “animal” passions (anger, jealousy and lust) highlights the disjunction between his true self and his appearance. To the observer, Headstone presents a respectable façade in much the same way suburban homes did, where the interiors did not necessarily mirror their pleasant outward appearance. As he chases his rival through the eastern suburbs, Headstone (whose name is suggestive in itself) appears as a disembodied head, expressing all the worst of human emotions: Baffled, worn, with the exhaustion of deferred hope and consuming hate and anger in his face, white-lipped, wild-eyed, draggle-haired, seamed with jealousy and anger, and torturing himself with the conviction that he showed it all and they exulted in it, he went by them in the dark, like a haggard head suspended in the air: so completely did the force of his expression cancel his figure. (600) Seeing him, Mortimer Lightwood is impressed and frightened by Headstone’s appearance; his surprise at the difference between what he expected of a schoolmaster and what he sees illustrates the sublimity of Headstone’s figure in the novel. As he loses his battle for self-control, Headstone’s façade continues to crack until eventually he finds himself dressing as a member of the “residual” class of the urban poor in order to indulge his desire to kill Lizzie’s other suitor. Headstone is the ultimate figure of the suburban sublime, embodying as he does the disaster implicit in adopting behaviors without also adopting the value system behind them. The lesson of Bradley Headstone seems to be that if one is “faking” one’s class association, destruction is sure to

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follow. As part of that lesson, Dickens also uses Headstone as a symbol of the suburban façade at its most dangerous. As a man not naturally entitled to middle-class respectability, Headstone’s struggle to maintain his appearance costs him more, physically and mentally, than he is ultimately able to afford. In this novel, then, the suburbs Dickens renders as sublime exist as a marker of both physical and ideological “space” that is to be avoided.

COLLINS AND THE TERRIFYING SUBLIME Dickens’s concern is in emphasizing the ideality of the “good” suburb and in abandoning the problematic implications of the “bad” suburbs, those that are incapable of controlling their inhabitants. Inhabitants of the “bad” suburbs die or disappear in Dickens’s narratives, rendering the space with which they were associated irrelevant. Collins, on the other hand, structures his novels of the suburban sublime so that all suburbs are potentially “bad.” More correctly, they are unable to adequately signify what they are supposed to represent. The reason for their sublimity is twofold: fi rst, the suburbs hide too many secrets and, second, the inhabitants’ dependence on appearances rather than substance impedes the revelation of these secrets. Wilkie Collins describes a Burkean sublimity in the fi rst chapter of Hide and Seek (1854). The space is grey, obscured by fog, vacant, withered and uniform: The morning had been fi ne for November; but before midday the clouds had gathered, the rain had begun, and the inveterate fog of the season had closed dingily over the wet streets, far and near. The garden in the middle of Baregrove Square—with its close-cut turf, its vacant beds, its bran-new rustic seats, its withered young trees that had not yet grown as high as the railings around them—seemed to be absolutely rotting away in yellow mist and softly-steady rain, and was deserted even by the cats. All blinds were drawn down for the most part over all windows; what light came from the sky came like light seen through dusty glass; the grim brown hue of the brick houses looked more dirtily mournful than ever; the smoke from the chimney-pots was lost mysteriously in the deepening superincumbent fog; the muddy gutters gurgled; the heavy rain-drops dripped into empty areas audibly. No object great or small, no out-of-door litter whatever appeared anywhere, to break the dismal uniformity of line and substance in the perspective of the square. (9, emphasis added) Collins presents the uniformity of Baregrove Square as vaguely threatening, representative of something unspoken but provoking in its insidiousness. In the next chapter, set fourteen years later, this space has completed the transition and become totally monotonous. By then,

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Here, the threat presented in the fi rst instance is fulfilled in the second, where uniformity of one particular area has been superseded by uniformity of an entire section of London. This text gives readers the distinct impression that suburban uniformity also translates into infi nity and vastness, as if “suburbanness” were a selfreplicating agent capable of regenerating itself unceasingly until all of Britain is swallowed up. What is more, Collins connects the uniformity of the suburb to its inhabitants: “As for the great central portion of the suburb— or in other words, the locality of the moderate incomes—it reflected exactly the lives of those who inhabited it, by presenting no distinction of character of its own at all” (31). Here, the inhabitants become part of the landscape, fi xed figures drearily and motionlessly peopling a stagnant space. Unlike Dickens’s characters, the figures Collins places in his suburb are not transitional in any way—they are fi xed in their social position and are generally beyond redemption. The Law and the Lady’s (1875) northern suburb, for example, is host to a mad aristocratic monster. Not only is the scenery presented as threatening in the extreme—“dismal patches of waste ground,” “disfigured and smoke-dried,” with “scaffolding-poles . . . like the branchless trees of the brick-desert” (1013)—but the reader is also already apprehensive about the inhabitant of this space, Miserrimus Dexter. The heroine of the novel, Valeria, is repeatedly warned not to have any association with this person, who is literally half a man. The description of Dexter’s dismal and nearly empty home in the middle of a suburban wasteland reinforces the sense of danger—a danger that is never explicitly stated. What is it that Dexter threatens? He poses no physical threat, for he has no lower body and is limited in movement; even an elderly woman could run away from him if need be. He poses no sexual threat either; aside from his physical debilitation, his “deformity” renders him undesirable to Valeria’s class of womankind. The narrative nullifies the idea that he could seduce a young lady; we discover later that he had once proposed marriage to a young woman and was met with horror and disgust. Rather, it seems that Dexter’s threat to Valeria and others like her lies in his eccentricity, born of a superior intellect coupled with bodily disfigurement that curbs his ability to achieve what the “whole” man might have. What he threatens is the middle-class sense of normal, sane, respectable behavior. That a “creature” like this can exist in suburban space is distressing enough; that he cannot be controlled or tamed either by that space or by his class association makes him truly fearsome. He suggests that middleclass values do not necessarily provide any assurances about the behavior

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of those who inhabited middle-class space. Other characters’ reactions to Dexter illustrate the nature of the fear he generates within the world of the novel and, by extension, for the reader who identifies with those characters. When Valeria enters Dexter’s home, she is greeted by a strange note: My immense imagination is at work. Visions of heroes unroll themselves before me. I re-animate in myself the spirits of the departed great. My brains are boiling in my head. Any persons who disturb me, under existing circumstances, will do it at the peril of their lives. (1015) Having read the note, Valeria’s mother-in-law, who had warned her repeatedly to avoid Dexter, turns on her with an air of triumph and asks, “Do you still persist in wanting to be introduced to him?” Although the note may be somewhat odd, the treatment of Dexter’s words as perfect evidence of his threatening nature does not necessarily follow, unless we read Dexter’s threat as the seductive powers of the “abnormal” or eccentric. Indeed, once she gets used to Dexter’s mannerisms, Valeria fi nds Dexter to be an interesting and even delightful, if odd, companion despite his tendency to hop around upside-down on his hands. Having met and liked Dexter, Valeria has trouble identifying the reasons behind her elders’ warnings about him; she is seduced, not sexually but morally, by his strangeness, a strangeness that is clearly presented in the text as sublime because it cannot be assimilated into a middle-class conception of “respectability” exemplified by the building going on around Dexter’s estate. If Dickens had written this novel, Dexter’s threat to middle-class respectability might have been eliminated by his transformation; he would fi nd love in a woman ideally suited to domesticate him, move away from his “brickdesert” home and live happily ever after, albeit sheepishly apologetic for his earlier carrying-on. But Collins does not eliminate Dexter’s threatening presence in the narrative. Dexter never transforms; instead, he goes completely insane in a chilling scene that takes place in a darkened room in that lonely suburban mansion. Dexter’s descent into madness does not redeem the suburban space; his removal to a mental hospital does not eliminate his threat from the narrative. All characters are deeply saddened and troubled by his fate, and his removal brings them into forced contact with his mentally incapacitated female relative/servant, who no longer has a sanctuary in his suburban mansion. Even in death, a death described as lingering and miserable, Dexter’s presence does not disappear from the text, and he is certainly not domesticated. Although his breakdown, by exposing his secret, leaves the way clear for the heroine and her husband to be restored to the social position that is rightfully theirs, Dexter has no control over this ending; he does not “confess,” but is tricked into revealing his secrets. He does not “repent,” because he never intended to be found out. Neither is the suburb in which Dexter lived redeemed; the fate of the property is never mentioned, but Collins implies that builders have been waiting years to get

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their hands on Dexter’s land, so one could imagine that the triumph of the sublime “brick-desert” to the north of London is complete. In Collins’s Armadale (1864), when Lydia Gwilt is in danger of exposure, rather than leave the field altogether she retreats to the suburbs, a suburb presented in sublime terms: Here, Nature was uninviting; . . . The streets dwindled feebly as they receded from the centre of the town . . . and died away on the barren open ground into an atrophy of skeleton cottages. Builders hereabouts appeared to have universally abandoned their work in the fi rst stage of its creation. . . . All the waste paper of the town seemed to float congenially to this neglected spot; . . . No growth flourished in these desert regions, but the arid growth of rubbish; and no creatures rejoiced but the creatures of the night. (453–4) In this setting, Collins reveals the “real” Gwilt to the reader through her diaries and letters; we see her behavior and disreputable machinations clearly when Gwilt thinks herself least observed in her suburban retirement. The fi rst event in this suburb is a secret meeting between Gwilt and her spy, Mr. Bashwood. The setting is eerie: “The sun had set, . . . the cats waited stealthily in corners for the coming night.” Children are crying, and animals destined for the slaughterhouse are standing about forlornly. As Mr. Bashwood approaches the meeting place, he is described as “moving slowly past the heaps of bricks rising at intervals . . . ; coasting carefully round the old iron, and the broken tiles scattered here and there” (454). The threat of this particular scene is also heightened by its purpose: the “hideous and slimy” Bashwood has been spying on his betters and is going to report what he knows to Gwilt, so that she can use the information to continue her assault on the barriers of wealth. Gwilt herself is intensely aware of how appearances count in suburban life and how best to manipulate what she seems to signify. To her meeting with Bashwood she wears “the plainest straw bonnet procurable.” Her ensemble is “modest and tasteful . . . expressed . . . in the speckless cleanliness and the modestly-proportioned skirts of her light ‘print’ gown, and in the scanty little mantilla of cheap black silk which she wore over it, edged with a simple frilling of the same material.” Here, the cheapness of her clothing does not make her “slimy” as it does in Bashwood’s case; instead, she becomes a model of prudence and economy. Her approach, in contrast to Bashwood’s, is refi ned: One hand lifted her dress daintily above the impurities of the road; the other held a little nosegay of the commonest garden flowers. Noiselessly and smoothly she came on, with a gentle and regular undulation of the print gown; with the lovelock softly lifted from moment to moment in the evening breeze; with her head a little drooped, and her eyes

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on the ground—in walk, and look and manner, . . . expressing that subtle mixture of the voluptuous and the modest. . . . (455) Here Gwilt, as literary construction, figures the sublime, for the reader knows that her physical appearance is a front. Collins constructs her in such a way that she is able to use the conventions of middle-class suburbia against the denizens of that respectable space. In this scene, more than any other, Gwilt embodies a threat that terrifies Collins’s middle-class readers the most: the threat of the undetectable invasion of suburban space. Thus, in this scene Bashwood and Gwilt represent almost the entire spectrum of lower-class threat to middle-class space: surveillance turned against the respectable and immorality disguised as “prudence and economy.” What do we do, however, with the ending of the novel, in which Gwilt sacrifices her life to save those of both Allan Armadales? Her action at the end of the novel would seem to redeem her; as in Dickens’s writing, here Collins would seem to show that what is threatening can either be domesticated or be redeemed and eliminated. This reading is impossible, however, when we consider that Gwilt’s act of sacrifice happens in another sublime suburban space, a sanatorium, or mental home for wealthy clients, situated in Hampstead. The sanatorium is not necessarily sublime in itself, except for the generalized threat represented to middle-class culture by the insane,4 but the doctor running this particular establishment is terrifying. An abortionist in hiding, this doctor bought his credentials as a doctor for the insane along with the suburban property. And although at the end of the novel Gwilt is dead, the doctor is left to run his business in peace and with the sanction and respect of his neighbors under cover of suburban respectability, despite his terrible antecedents. Thus the threat to middleclass suburbia represented by Gwilt is continued by transference in the figures of the doctor and the sanatorium. For Collins, the suburbs are a space where nothing is assured. In fact, what Collins seems most often to show his readers is that there is scant possibility for redemption in the suburbs. Social boundaries may eventually be closed and made secure by the end of Collins’s novels, but the reader can never be certain that that closure is fi nal. Collins offers little reassurance about the future of suburban space; in his texts, the suburbs and what they were supposed to represent are already lost, brought down by their tooheavy dependence on appearances and outward show. No wonder Collins declines to present the suburb as anything but ambivalent and troubling— sublime in every sense. Both Collins and Dickens take on the myth of the suburban ideal: Dickens places outsiders in the suburbs but then reasserts suburban boundaries by eliminating or domesticating those figures; Collins denies that the suburban ideal can ever be realized and illustrates this by placing outsiders in suburban space and leaving them there to disturb it. These two authors are but the most prominent of the many authors of sensation fiction who

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grappled with the problem of the suburb at mid-century. Not surprisingly, in the minds of many critics, sensation fiction itself was connected with the threat of social and cultural degeneration, which the suburb implied in its many failures—Ruskin himself decried sensation fiction as “literatures of the ‘prison house’ or the ‘railroad’” that were threatening the stability of English identity (Baucom 56–9). Nicholas Rance contends that sensation fiction was possible in part because the 1850s and 1860s were decades in which social transformation was felt to be on the horizon (9); the novelists were then free to provide their own visions of this future. But others were not interested in the sensational view of the future of England, especially the one represented by Collins’s work. There was a current in middle-class thinking which espoused the idea that morality was “sufficiently powerful, while it has power, to keep down [class] hostility, and to maintain the order of society; but take morality away, and there is no human power of avail to guard against the boundless depredation that is let loose upon it” (22). Collins’s and other sensation novelists’ attempts to show that morality as an institution, otherwise known as respectability, was no longer sufficiently powerful to maintain social, moral or cultural boundaries were figured powerfully in the suburban ruin, which represented the threat of social ambivalence directly related to the disintegration of boundaries. As Lyn Pykett has argued, “The sensation novel was held to be yet further evidence of [the] emotional and spiritual degeneracy of modern urban-industrial culture . . .” (5). It is important to remember that the second half of the nineteenth century, with the dawn of evolutionary thinking and the birth of anthropology, brought with it a deepening concern about the future of the British people as a “breed.” As more and more information became available about British subjects surviving in what seemed unsurvivable conditions, such as some of the more remote colonies, and about the behavioral adaptations that came along with those conditions (crime, vice, a turn away from religion, etc.), the nation (defi ned as the middle class) worried intensely about what might happen if middle-class values and standards failed to maintain their stronghold in British culture. Boyle notes that “the crime columns [of the newspapers] provided sufficient evidence . . . that there were two Englands, but also that poverty and passion revealed a brutal strain in the English people of all classes which was at odds with the notion of a superior Anglo-Saxon breed” (34). It was not only that the lower classes were surviving and reproducing, but also that the middle class had ample evidence that “it [had] already assimilated into its ranks ‘perversions of nature’ of all kinds” (Nord 94). This fear was amplified by the actual degeneration of middle-class space. As Gareth Stedman Jones has noted, “[M]ost areas originally containing (or at least said to have contained) one family per house situated on all but the western perimeter of the central area [of London] became predominantly poor areas in the 1870s and 1880s” (176). Of course, this particular

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“degeneration” can be attributed to the outward push of the middle classes, but the fact remains that space originally meant to support the middle-class lifestyle had become, in the course of a generation, subverted to suit the purposes of a lower class. The “moral influence” of middle-class space, therefore, was obviously not as potent as some had wanted to believe. As the suburban sublime is linked through language and imagery to the lower classes, “the spread of poverty is metaphorical: no longer confined to the economic conditions of the nether world, it inhabits the sites and conditions of culture” (Bernstein 126). As a result, the nineteenth-century ruin of suburban building, as depicted by sensation fiction, functioned as a signal that the old, comfortable and prosperous British world might be coming to an end.

8

Conclusion The Death of the Suburban Ideal and the Rise of the “New” Suburban, 1880–1914

The sublimity of the Victorian suburb, generated from its devastating implications for the middle class’s cultural dominance, meant that the suburb of the mid- to the late century had more impact on Victorian culture than modern readers have generally acknowledged.1 Far from insignificant sidelines of an urban landscape, suburban spaces have their own place in the body of criticism dedicated to the impact of nineteenth-century urbanization on literature and culture. And far from disappearing when London growth had peaked at the turn of the century, the suburb continued to trouble the consciousness of British philosophers, historians and novelists. Books specifically about the suburb were published through the end of the First World War, such as George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody (1888–1889), two sections of the fi rst volume of Charles Booth’s landmark work, Life and Labour of the People in London (1892), Percy Fitzgerald’s London City Suburbs as They Are Today (1893), Panton’s Suburban Residences and How to Circumvent Them (1896), T. W. H. Crosland’s The Suburbans (1905), Howard Keble’s The Smiths of Surbiton (1906) and C. F. G. Masterman’s The Condition of England (1909) which dedicates an entire chapter to “The Suburbans.” Beyond these specifically suburban works, there are also many novels that take the suburban phenomenon at least partially as their subject, such as E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910) and George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee (1894), to name just a few. But after about 1880, writing about the suburbs is different from that of the previous thirty years. Overall, the picture of the suburbs that emerges from 1880 through the First World War is the image with which modern readers are more familiar—the suburb as trivial, dull, bourgeois, pretentious without reason, an object of mockery by those who considered themselves above the petty concerns of the world of mid-level clerks and accountants. This concluding chapter briefly investigates how images of the suburb changed after 1880, what precipitated those changes, and the impact they had on middle-class culture. With the middle class’s failure to maintain the suburbs as their exclusive territory, the suburban ideal also failed, and with it, the ability to use location as a marker of class. From this point, there is a general shift toward emphasizing education and culture

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(science, art, music, literature—what Matthew Arnold would have classified as “sweetness and light”) as ways of recognizing and dividing the upper and lower classes. This shift, I further argue, prepares the way for both late-century aestheticism and, later, Modernism, with their turn away from art produced for the “masses” to art produced for those who are properly attuned to appreciate it. 2

THE FAILURE OF THE SUBURBAN IDEAL In later-century portrayals of the suburb, the middle class’s worst fears about what would happen to suburban space have been realized. The ideal of quiet, respectable privacy in a small plot of green had been supplanted by a suburban atmosphere that was a mix of what were seen as working- and lower-middle-class traits. In the fi rst place, suburban space is recognized as essentially heterogeneous, as Charles Booth’s investigations in South London and his associate Jesse Argyle’s research in North London demonstrate. Booth fi nds it difficult to fi nd words to generalize about South London, “so immense is it in size, so invertebrate in character” (261). As an example, he cites an area west of Camberwell Road which “stands alone in an otherwise well-to-do district, acting as a moral cesspool towards which poverty and vice flow in the persons of those who can do no better, mixed with those who fi nd such surroundings convenient or congenial” (273). The situation is much the same in the north, where “[a] glance at our poverty map shows the general prevalence here of fairly comfortable circumstances, rising occasionally to affluence, but there are nevertheless several dark patches” (Argyle 291) which refer to areas of extreme poverty. No matter how exclusive the neighborhood, it seems that it was impossible to completely exclude those elements of urban life that the middle class had earlier been trying to escape. Further, even though the suburbs are socially mixed at this point, the lower-middle classes, rather than the middle or upper-middle class of earlier century, now make up the majority of suburbanites. Argyle touches on this when he writes, of an area near Camden Town, that [i]t will be seen from the figures that this district is not at all bad, nor is there much destitution; but of poverty in a more moderate form there is an enormous proportion, no less than 58 per cent. falling under C and D.3 The peculiarity of the district lies in the evident ‘unexpectedness’ of its poverty. There was no thought of it when the houses were built, and we see poverty in all the discomfort of ‘the cast-off clothes of the rich.’ (288–9) The “unexpectedness” of the poverty (which is really not so much poverty as skilled artisan or lower-middle-class wages) there and in other places

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described by both Argyle and Booth acknowledges the disjunction between the way the suburb was “supposed” to be and the actuality of suburban space as it developed throughout the second half of the century. After all, if the presence of the impoverished or near-impoverished in the suburb were expected, it would not be mentioned so often and with such surprise by those investigating the space. There were those who found the “new” suburb worth page upon page of comment. One such writer was T. W. H. Crosland, who published a vicious condemnation of turn-of-the-century suburbia in The Suburbans (1905). The primary problem Crosland has with the suburbs was the class affiliation of those who lived there and their impact on suburban space. He characterizes the typical suburb as a place . . . where everybody’s portion is soot and grime and slush; where the only streams are sewers, and the gardens are all black, and the principal population appears to consist of milkmen, postmen, busguards, scavengers, butchers’ boys, nursemaids, drapers’ assistants (male and female), policemen, railway-porters, Methodist ministers, and sluttish little girls who clean doorsteps. (16) This image of suburban space is familiar to us from earlier-century descriptions, but the tone here is different. Crosland speaks not of one particular instance, but of the whole of suburbia. The image of the suburb that made earlier-century readers anxious about suburban space, with the dirt and the working-class “invaders,” has here become the norm, not the exception. With regard to the “degradation” of middle-class culture that was supposed to be epitomized by suburban space, Crosland claims that “[t]he real reason why servants are so dreadful in Suburbia is because, nine times out of ten, they belong to the same class as their mistresses, who, not to put too fi ne a point upon it, were born to wrestle, not to reign” (151–2). He further complains of “ . . . the squads of dilapidated ‘family residences’ that have never been inhabited by a single family any time these fi fty years . . .” (18), echoing earlier-century concerns about the uses to which suburban building might be put if the “lower classes” were to “take over,” as, from Crosland’s description, they appear to have done. Twentieth-century historians provide corroborating evidence that the suburb as it existed at the end of the century was no longer a solely or even primarily middle-class territory. In the fi rst place, as H. J. Dyos explains, the deterioration of neighborhoods that was seen in the 1860s and 1870s as a result of changing fashion and poor construction had a snowball effect: The satisfying of the large new demand for houses in the suburbs from the 1870s inevitably meant the abandonment of former social standards and a more intensive use of the land, which completely changed both the superficial appearance and the human content of the suburb. (191)

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That change in “human content” is exactly what Crosland, and others, objected to. Geoffrey Crossick, commenting on The Suburbans from a modern perspective, notes that “[d]islike of the self-righteous superiority that pervades Crosland’s book can not prevent agreement that mass suburbia was a creation of the lower middle class” (“Emergence” 33, emphasis added). The suburb as a “creation of the lower middle class” represents a considerable shift from the original conception of the suburb as a retreat from urban living for the respectable high-wage-earning individuals from the worlds of finance and business. Not only were the suburbs now widely acknowledged to be the habitat of a variety of class affiliations; descriptions of suburban populations later in the century often echo earlier descriptions of the exclusively urban poor. In fact, these passages are so similar to earlier writing about the “residuum” that authors often have to remind us that they are no longer describing Seven Dials or the East End, and drop names like Streatham, Clapham and Camberwell as they construct their scenes. Just as Mayhew had equated inner-city poor with savages in the 1840s, Crosland compares the typical suburbanite to “uncivilized” Native Americans: “ . . . when it comes to speech and manners, one is constrained to admit that the young of the suburbans are but slightly differentiated from the young of the Kickapoo tribe of Indians” (63). And it was not only Crosland who made this connection. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in “The Sign of Four” (1890), describes Watson and Holmes’s journey through South London in this way: We had during this time been following the guidance of Toby down the half-rural villa-lined roads which lead to the metropolis. Now, however, we were beginning to come among continuous streets, where labourers and dockmen were already astir, and slatternly women were taking down shutters and brushing doorsteps. At the square-topped corner public-houses business was just beginning, and rough-looking men were emerging, rubbing their sleeves across their beards after their morning wet. Strange dogs sauntered up and stared wonderingly at us as we passed. . . . (1.153) Reading this for the fi rst time, one might think that by “continuous streets” Doyle is referring to areas near the City proper, such as the Borough in Southwark or one of the other notoriously “run-down” districts on the south side of the Thames. This puts the “slatternly women,” the earlymorning drinking and the “rough-looking men” in the context of urban figures, typical of, for example, Dickens’s or Mayhew’s portraits of working-class London life. But the next paragraph gives us a new context for these behaviors—a specific location for the scene: “We had traversed Streatham, Brixton, Camberwell, and now found ourselves in Kennington Lane, having borne away through the side streets to the east of the Oval.” It is not in Borough High Street that we fi nd the slatternly women and rough men, but in the mid-range southern suburbs, including Camberwell,

144 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era the epitome of the “new” suburb of lower-middle-class clerks and low-level officer workers. Indeed, it seems this new suburb, inhabited by the “lower” classes, became a force to contend with as the century drew to its close. As Gareth Stedman Jones explains, “Working-class London now stretched from West Ham to Notting Hill, from Tottenham to Wandsworth” (326); it was inescapable and difficult to ignore. Rather than ignore the newest incarnation of suburbia, authors at the end of the century look directly at the clash between earlier century expectations about suburban space and the way its development actually transpired. In one particularly poignant example of the recognition of the failure of the suburban ideal, Margaret Schlegel, E. M. Forster’s heroine from Howards End, compares herself to the suburb in which she lives: “Oniton, like herself, was imperfect. Its apple trees were stunted, its castle ruinous. It, too, had suffered in the border warfare between the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt, between things as they are and as they ought to be” (203). The imperfection of her suburban retreat, its stunted trees and ruined house, resonates in the next scene, in which Margaret descends to her garden to find a decidedly lower-class woman drunk in her garden. This woman, an ex-prostitute, subsequently recognizes Margaret’s husband as one of her former clients, illustrating the tenuous boundaries between classes and between expectations of what urban and suburban space were supposed to mean. As might be expected, then, these later writers often mock the suburban ideal and all it stood for. We have seen Crosland’s derision of what he sees as the “typical” suburbanite of late century, but sometimes the mockery of the suburban ideal takes a different form. Many recognized that those who could afford that earlier-century ideal, and who had incomes that placed them squarely in the upper reaches of the middle class, had become crass or even heartless in their pursuit of the trappings associated with suburban bliss. Forster, for example, takes up this theme in Howards End with the Wilcoxes, who are respectable and yet emotionally dead. They live in idealized suburban splendor but have no interior life. Charles Wilcox lectures his wife upon hearing that his father is to be married to one of the Schlegels: “As long as they’re on their best behaviour—Dolly, are you listening?— we’ll behave, too. But if I fi nd them giving themselves airs, or monopolizing my father, or at all ill-treating him, or worrying him with their artistic beastliness, I intend to put my foot down, yes, fi rmly. . . .” The interlude closes. It has taken place in Charles’s garden at Hilton. He and Dolly are sitting in deckchairs, and their motor is regarding them placidly from its garage across the lawn. A short-frocked edition of Charles also regards them placidly; a perambulator edition is squeaking and a third edition is expected shortly. Nature is turning out Wilcoxes in the peaceful abode, so that they may inherit the earth. (167) Here, the Wilcoxes seem like rodents or cockroaches, unstoppable and undesirable in large numbers. Charles’s inability to be happy for his

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father, and his fear of the Schlegels’ “artistic” tendencies, demonstrate his shallow qualities. He is not a character one wants to emulate, and yet, in Forster’s novel he is presented as a product of “good” suburban living. As we might expect, Crosland has his own feelings about how the suburban ideal has been realized. In one particularly irritating chapter, “Tooting the Blest,” in which his primary complaint seems to be that Tooting is a silly name, Crosland compares suburban expectations to fact: Tooting! It is as though the mellifluous [stream] should babble to one of tussocked meads, and April lambkins, and piping shepherds, and snug homesteads, and cream and honey, and custards, and boiled beef and suet dumplings. Tooting! A land, you feel sure, flowing with beer and skittles, and full of placid, comfortable, mouth-wiping persons who have retired from the fret and fever of the world with a reasonable competence, and are husbanding out life’s taper to the close in the most leisurely, pleasant and reposeful fashion. (86–7) Granted, this vision of the typical Tooting lifestyle is peaceful, but Crosland’s juxtaposition of piping shepherds with boiled beef and skittles satirizes both the beautiful ideal and the less beautiful reality of middle-class suburban living. In fact, Crosland often satirizes the suburban ideal in a manner that demonstrates his familiarity with the way the suburbs were supposed to have been. In another passage he describes the formation of the suburbs in a manner that is technically correct but which is laced with a cynicism about the suburban project rarely seen earlier in the century: The prosperous urban who had lived over his shop for years fi nds himself, after much grubbing, so encumbered with superfluous wealth that he determines to acquire “a sweetly pretty place a mile or two out.” To and from this rural retreat he drives daily in a gig. His wife and daughters learn to forget that they ever resided over a place of business. They wax stiff and exclusive, and the fresh air improves their complexions, taking the grease and the pallor from it. Other prosperous urbans note the change with envy and aspiration. They, too, will compass sweetly pretty places a mile or two out; they, too, will keep gigs; they, too, will improve the complexion, and incidentally the social status of their wives and daughters by such a migration. . . . Clapham was started that way, so were Camden Town, Hampstead, Walthamstow, Highbury, Battersea, Tooting, and even that paradise of all that is suburban—Surbiton. (10–11) Crosland recognizes here the origin of the suburban ideal, the desire for respectability and escape that drove it, but he declines to respect those

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desires. Like Ruskin before him, Crosland sees the ideal to be antithetical to domesticity and to what he calls decency. He argues that “the baywindowed villa of six rooms and a bathroom, with a sort of lean-to annexe at the back, and the scrubbiest and least ample piece of palisaded garden in front . . . is subversive of the best interests of domesticity” (137–8) because, he claims, they are constructed specifically so that they can be divided into two spaces and sublet. He goes on to say that “[t]here can be no real domesticity, no real domestic hearth, no sufficient domestic government, no adequate domestic seclusion and independence, where you have two or more families under one roof” (138–9). Note that in this passage, the ideals that the suburb originally implied are not at issue— Crosland values domesticity, family, seclusion and privacy. His objection is that these values cannot, in fact, be achieved in suburban space. Crosland was not the only one to deny that ideal or idealized suburban space was able to achieve any of the goals with which it was originally invested. C. F. G. Masterman, author of The Condition of England (1909), questions the ability of the typical suburban home to have a positive effect on the inhabitants: “Civilise the poor, . . . expand their tiny rubbish yards into green gardens, introduce bow-windows before and verandahs behind; remove them from the actual experience of privation, convert all England into a suburban city—will the completed product be pronounced to be ‘very good’?” (77). The implied answer is, “No.” And in part the answer is no because the suburb itself is no longer seen as “very good”; the suburban ideal has become an empty promise. At this point in the urbanization of Britain, the suburbs were most often portrayed as a lesser form of existence—less chaotic than other modes of existence but less vital and less interesting. For example, Booth worries that “there seems to be a lack of spontaneous social life among the people, perhaps due to the want of local industries. There is altogether less going on” (“South” 275). And in the introduction to The Smiths of Surbition, Howard Keble acknowledges that the ultimate suburban narrative (of which his book is one of the fi nest late-century examples) has no people of title in this story; no epigrams; no deeds of heroism; no strangely beautiful women; no extraordinarily handsome men; no hairbreadth escapes; no theological, sociological or tautological discussions; no frantically clever children; no fi nancial or social sensation; no battle, murder or sudden death. (i) For some authors, the sheer numbers of people living this “lesser” life and its apparent attractiveness was threatening in a different way than the loss of a proprietary interest in suburban space had been just a decade or two earlier. In an observation directly connected to the lack of vitality that seemed to be inherent in late-century suburban living, Margaret Schlegel/ Wilcox comments on the suburban sprawl headed toward her cherished farm in Howards End:

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“All the same, London’s creeping.” She pointed over the meadow—over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust. “You can see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now,’ she continued. ‘I can see it from the Purbeck downs. And London is only part of something else, I’m afraid. Life’s going to be melted down, all over the world.” (Forster 288) The fear that “life’s going to be melted down” on a global scale, the sense that people were somehow losing their vital essence by choosing the suburban lifestyle, was echoed by many other writers and is most succinctly put by C. F. G. Masterman in The Condition of England: It is no despicable life which has thus silently developed in suburban London. Family affection is there, cheerfulness, an almost unlimited patience. . . . Is this to be the type of all civilisations, when the whole Western world is to become comfortable and tranquil, and progress fi nd its grave in a universal suburb? (74) Masterman is not threatened by the lifestyle of the “suburbans” as Crosland and others are; he acknowledges that there are many appealing features of suburban living and certainly many suburban values worth developing. His fear is that the very nature of the suburban lifestyle means an end to “progress” as an entire population finds itself too comfortable to struggle, fight or show some spark of life at a time when the British Empire was noticeably failing to maintain its superiority worldwide. This is not to say that the suburban ideal died a quick or easy death. It hung on in the imagination of writers and builders for a long time, and some would argue it is still with us today. Percy Fitzgerald’s London City Suburbs as They Are Today (1893) exists primarily to convince readers that the suburban ideal still flourished in turn-of-the-century London. In colorful prose accompanied by strange but beautiful illustrations of country heaths, wild deer and main streets that look like they belong to country villages, Fitzgerald struggles to demonstrate that there is aesthetic value in the suburbs of London. He writes fi rst of [t]he more “official” suburbs, such as Chelsea and Kensington, or St. John’s Wood, [which] still retain, in spite of the efforts of the builder, a kind of rural air: in Buckingham Palace Road, close to Victoria Station, there is still to be seen the survival of gardens in front of the houses; while in a street within view of Sloane Square only a year or two ago were to be found the green roadside wooden palings, stunted trees, with public-house signs suspended from posts. (5) Here, readers are supposed to applaud the front gardens, “stunted trees” and public houses as evidence of “a rural air” fulfilling the desire for

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picturesque living space. Londoners must have been astonished to read Fitzgerald’s claim that “[a] walk through the High Street of Southwark or Bishopsgate Street suggests a prosperous country town” (5), as two less appealing areas of London could probably be found only with difficulty. In Marylebone Street, Fitzgerald celebrates the presence of “villas walled round, such as Dickens’s house, presenting large gardens, and a sort of ‘high-road,’ with trees, and other rural accompaniments” (9). It is as if, for Fitzgerald, “rural” has been redefi ned as suburban, where any bit of greenery is as much as one can expect. Fitzgerald’s suburb, as he writes it, fulfi lls the picturesque ideal in almost every way, but his attempt to resurrect that ideal at this point in London’s development is almost laughable; even the rosiest glasses cannot convincingly depict the suburb as either picturesque or beautiful, although Fitzgerald tries desperately hard. The reason he fails is that the shape of London had changed significantly since the fi rst stirrings of nineteenth-century suburban development, when it was still possible to combine a fairly large portion of space and privacy with reasonable rents. But the growth of London in the second half of the century was phenomenal, and this placed space, and the demand for housing, at a premium. The last thirty years of the nineteenth century saw some of the highest growth rates for London; London expanded “faster than . . . any of the provincial conurbations and far faster than . . . the national population as a whole” (Briggs 324). But this growth was not constant. The biggest boom in suburban building happened after 1875, when a new rash of homes and suburban railway lines began to spring up (Jones 207). Furthermore, Jones notes, “[H]ouse building in the 1870s was mainly designed to attract the lower-middle-class and respectable working-class outflow from more central districts” (207). This new building, marketed specifically for the lower classes, was significantly less expensive than what had previously been available. Martin Gaskell estimates that “new property within a mile of a suburban railway station offered accommodation in different proportions and patterns within the rental range of 35 pounds to 120 pounds,” as opposed to the previous standard of approximately 100 pounds per year (166). The houses got even cheaper after 1881, when speculative builders discovered they had built more houses than anyone seemed to want (Jahn 126). Additionally, wages continued to increase, although this rate of growth slowed to about 7 percent in 1895, down from 107 percent in the thirty years prior to that (Rodger 63). Taken together, this set of circumstances meant that after 1875, there was more housing available to people with wider ranges of income than had previously existed. The steady wage increases also meant that anyone earning a regular paycheck could afford “more house” than someone in a parallel position thirty years earlier. Hence, there were more people in the lower income brackets who could afford to become suburbanites, and there were plenty of suburban homes and trains to town to accommodate them. There was simply no way

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to keep suburban space the exclusive territory of the upper reaches of the middle class. For better or worse, the suburb had triumphed over the landscape of London, and that triumph was neither beautiful nor picturesque. Of course entirely ideal suburbs had never really existed, but it was generally acknowledged at this point that the ideal had failed even though suburbia was a grand success. Judging by its numerous staring roles in turn-of-the-century literature, the “new class” inhabiting these suburbs was problematic for those who watched it develop. In fact, many were at a loss to describe it at all. Crossick notes one contributor to the Spectator who was puzzled by this “stratum,” which, in the matter of physical comfort, approximates to the caste above it, and in its lack of the delicate requirement of life has something in common with the caste below it, but which is, nevertheless, so recognizably differentiated from both, that confused classification is impossible even to the most superficial observer. (“Emergence” 13) Similarly, Booth’s late-century description of what he calls “the ideal of South London” sounds amazingly like an earlier century description of the East End: Near [a church in Tabard Street] is a labyrinth of streets and courts, more wholesome than many such, the inhabitants of which seem not so very poor nor at all bad, struggling happy-go-lucky people, whose standard is neither too high nor too low to admit of their being fairly comfortable in their surroundings; habit and environment having reached a kind of stable equilibrium which, however unsatisfactory in the eyes of the world, it is not easy to upset. These streets are typical of much in South London. (“South” 266) Note that although Booth acknowledges that this group is happy, it is also “unsatisfactory in the eyes of the [middle-class] world.” Unfortunately for that middle-class perspective, this kind of neighborhood, with this class of inhabitants, was so widespread by the end of the century that Albert Grosch, writing his autobiography in the twentieth century, argued that this “new” suburb represented the Victorian era more than anything else. He writes, They [these suburban neighborhoods] have to be seen to be believed, and though jerry-building in the main was responsible for their existence they remain as a symbol of their age. . . . This peculiar atmosphere is reflected in the houses and the streets of lesser grandeur in which resided the chief clerks, the managers, and the smaller fry of the prosperity of the Victorian era. . . . It is not Dickens, it is not Galsworthy,

150

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era indeed I know of only one writer who put Victorianism absolutely and completely in print, and that was George Gissing. (5–6)

Grosch is right about Gissing; Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), The Odd Women (1893) and In the Year of Jubilee (1894) all focus on the plight of the suburban family aiming for a lifestyle beyond their income and social position. These families struggle and scrape, spending money they do not have on keeping up appearances for which they no longer understand the real reason, beyond that “it’s expected.” They are colorless, dull and in many cases pathetic. For example, In the Year of Jubilee follows the fortunes of several suburban families, including the Morgans. The Morgans are misplaced in the suburbs for a variety of reasons, but they have no other choice, for Mr. Morgan’s work as a debt collector requires proximity to London neighborhoods very similar to the Morgan’s own. Mrs. Morgan keeps Mr. Morgan’s work from the neighbors, concerned about its effect on their “gentility,” a word Gissing uses with irony in regard to the Morgans and others like them. Mrs. Morgan focuses on her children’s prospects instead of her husband’s; she brags about her son “in an office,” her elder daughter who writes fiction and her second daughter trying to pass an exam for which she has no aptitude and the family no funds. That having a son in an office can be considered “genteel” shows how cultural signification has shifted; “genteel” as it is used by Mrs. Morgan now means essentially the same thing as “respectable,” although the two words do not have identical meanings and were not used interchangeably earlier in the century, when “genteel” had to do with one’s genealogy (“well-born”) as much as one’s behavior. In an attempt to cope with this seemingly new social group, a new standard image of the suburb begins to emerge after 1880, one far less flattering to its inhabitants than the beautiful/picturesque ideal or even the Gothic/sublime, with its investment in the positive aspects of middle-class respectability and culture. The new image is of a bourgeois and grasping population inhabiting a cultural wasteland. In fiction of the period, characters who attempt to transcend their “natural” abilities by acquiring the trappings of middle-class identity are placed in the suburbs, which come to represent not the earlier-century ideal of privacy, quiet and respectability, but social climbing, camouflaged poverty (of mind and pocket) and sexual impropriety.

CLASS AND CULTURE Despite the lower class’s appropriation of the suburban dream, the upper reaches of the Victorian middle class continued to hold on to their position as the dominant form of culture. This segment of society set the standard for what was considered a morally and socially “decent” lifestyle. The

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physical embodiment of those values in the suburban ideal had failed; a suburban residence and a “respectable” façade no longer guaranteed anything in particular about the inhabitants of that space. As the suburb’s usefulness for distinguishing among classes faded, an individual’s degree of culture took over. No longer focused on physical space, class markers at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth shift to intellectual “space,” which was thought to be less subject to misuse or appropriation by lower class groups. Along with culture came a new perspective on the urban lifestyle, and an opposition develops in literature of this period between the cultured city dweller and the suburban Philistine. Matthew Arnold’s terminology—Philistine, Culture (with a capital C) and “Sweetness and Light”—had a significant influence on the way latecentury commentators framed the discussion surrounding culture and the suburbs. Arnold fi rst published his influential Culture and Anarchy as a series of articles in 1867 and 1868 in an early attempt to address the impact of the “new” class of suburbans on Victorian society, and to defi ne some of the problems he foresaw in the overemphasis on the “forms” of class. In the preface, he defi nes “Culture” as “the best which has been thought and said in the world” (5). The opposite of culture is what he calls “our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically” (5). This opposition, between an emphasis on “the best” thoughts (resulting in vitality and new ideas) and “mechanical” habit (resulting in unthinking imitation and stagnation), impacted much of the writing about class and the suburbs for the next thirty years. Jones notes that in the 1870s many of those in “professional” careers were aware that it was not their income but their education that gave them prestige (269) and that “[Canon Samuel] Barnett had already begun preaching ‘the duty of the cultured to the poor and degraded’ at Oxford by 1875” (259). Another modern commentator remarks that “an interest in art was by [the 1870s] a great leveller, an instrument of a new kind of class fusion; the professional house decorator was no longer a mere tradesman, the architect and artists were socially not only acceptable but interesting” (Metcalf 129). A primary example of this shift is the late-century attitude toward Hampstead. It is one of only three suburbs that Crosland fi nds acceptable and is mentioned by several other commentators on the suburbs as a highlight of the middle-class lifestyle. Hampstead’s desirability originates in what Crosland calls its emphasis on “taste”: Over above its gates you shall read, “Please refrain from entering unless you are possessed of some taste and at least five hundred a year.” You may be a stockbroker, or a lawyer, or an editor, or a dentist, or something in Mincing Lane, or a minister of religion, or a retired blacking manufacturer, but we shall insist upon your being in receipt of a decent

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Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era income, and upon your possession of sufficient taste to know the difference between Shakespeare and the musical glasses. (104)

Jesse Argyle, in recommending Hampstead, notes that the region gains its desirability from its “influential colony of workers in art, science and literature” (295). Note that here the potential suburbanite’s profession no longer matters; lawyers may mix with retired tradesmen as long as their income is high and, most importantly, their education has been sufficient to develop a taste for “the best which has been thought and said in the world.” The presence of “artistic types” is no longer worrisome; instead, those who pursue culture add that which distinguishes Hamstead from the dreary regions of the Philistine, a term which Arnold uses to designate both the middle classes and those members of the working class who “[look] forward to the happy day when it will sit on thrones with commercial members of Parliament and other middle-class potentates” (68). As this emphasis on culture as a class marker develops, we begin to see some authors positing the existence of two distinct classes, one “naturally” inferior to the other intellectually, designed for physical activity rather than thinking. This “other” class, which has much in common with what I have called the “new suburbans” and what Arnold calls the Philistines, are represented as unfit for the mental activity that the rush to universal education had thrust upon those “unsuited” for it. In characterizations of this nature, the authors seem to argue that the one sure way to determine a person’s class is his or her ability to “take to” culture without destroying his or her health. Both Gissing and Forster depict the lower classes in this way. In Howards End, for example, Leonard Bast, as seen through Margaret’s eyes, has been rendered a mere shadow of his potential self through “civilization”: . . . a young man, colourless, toneless, who had already the mournful eyes above a drooping moustache that are so common in London, and that haunt some streets of the city like accusing presences. One guessed him as the third generation, grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into the town; as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit. Hints of robustness survived in him, more than a hint of primitive good looks, and Margaret, noting the spine that might have been straight, and the chest that might have broadened, wondered whether it paid to give up the glory of the animal for a tailcoat and a couple of ideas. Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it. She knew this type very well—the vague aspirations, the mental dishonesty, the familiarity with the outsides of books. (111)

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Note the implication that Leonard’s “true” place, as rural laborer, would have fulfilled his “natural” potential, but his attempts to acquire culture had ruined him, physically and mentally. Note also Margaret’s sense that “culture” was appropriate in her own case; she has benefited from it materially, in fact without really thinking about it, but she begins to see that culture, otherwise termed civilization, may not be appropriate for everyone. Characters in Gissing’s novels make similar observations about the effects of education and culture on the lower classes. In New Grub Street (1891), one character remarks, Do you call it civilising men to make them weak, flabby creatures, with ruined eyes and dyspepsic stomachs? Who is it that reads most of the stuff that’s poured out daily by the ton from the printing-press? Just the men and women who ought to spend their leisure hours in open-air exercise; the people who earn their bread by sedentary pursuits, and who need to live as soon as they are free from desk or counter, not to moon over small print. Your board schools, your popular press, your spread of education! Machinery for ruining the country, that’s what I call it. (24) The implication here, as in Forster, is that there are certain levels of human society that are better off left to their “natural” pursuits than in trying to acquire a civilized aspect. Again, the speaker here does not include himself in the group that needs to “live” in the open air; he is of a different quality, and he can stand the “strain” of intellectual pursuits. In the same novel, a rather more cynical young man proposes to take advantage of this “natural” difference by exploiting the lower classes’ inability to really appreciate culture, here in the form of good literature. He argues for a paper that address[es] itself to the quarter-educated, that is to say, the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy them in trains and on ’buses and trams. As a rule they care for no information—bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. . . . Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches. (460, emphasis added) His listeners at fi rst object to this idea, feeling that this kind of material would not do the target audience any “good,” or that it would encourage “bad habits” in them, but they are all eventually brought round to his way of thinking by the argument that the only time “these people” really read anything is on trains when one cannot concentrate very well anyway. In fact, Gissing’s argument throughout this novel seems to be that it is nearly

154 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era impossible to acquire the trappings of “class,” either in manner or education, although he then goes on to question the value of such distinctions in a culture that values money and material success over all else. He explicitly states, for example, that “[t]he London work-girl is rarely capable of raising herself, or being raised, to a place in life above that to which she was born; she cannot learn how to stand and sit and move like a woman bred to refinement, any more than she can fashion her tongue to graceful speech” (85). Gissing, like Forster, also depicts those in the lower class brackets struggling to attain education and culture at great expense both to their health and to their bankbook, a struggle that is ultimately futile. Jessica Morgan, for example, in In the Year of Jubilee, works herself almost to death to pass an examination she is apparently simply not smart enough to pass. Forster echoes these concerns in Howards End in the character of Leonard Bast, who has bought into the idea that “books, literature, clever conversation, culture” (119) are the keys to advancement. At an early point in the novel, we see Bast at home reading Ruskin: And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard’s life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are. (59, emphasis added) Later in the novel, of course, both his own and the Schlegels’ illusions about culture destroy Bast by encouraging him to disrupt his life for the sake of an ideal he is not really equipped to achieve. In fact, the attitude of both these authors, and many others, toward education for the lower classes is that overall it damaged their prospects for a happy life. Gissing remarks with all apparent sincerity that [h]ad they been born twenty years earlier, the children of that veterinary surgeon would have grown up to a very different, and in all probability a much happier existence, for their education would have been limited to the strictly needful, and—certainly in the case of the girls—nothing would have encouraged them to look beyond the simple life possible to a poor man’s offspring. . . . To the relatively poor . . . education is in most cases a mocking cruelty. (Gissing, New 40)

THE “CULTURE” OF THE NEW SUBURBANS AND THE RETURN OF THE URBAN ELITE Around the same time that authors begin to wonder whether all humans are equally suited to the pursuit of culture (a question very likely driven by the dominant culture’s desire to say, defi nitively, “Here lies the mark of class”),

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a problem also arises regarding the “culture of the suburbs.” Here I refer not to the working and lower-middle classes characterized as unsuited to a higher position by Forster and Gissing, but to the group defi ned by Arnold’s Philistine, who focused on material success. This group was opposed to those who had a sense of what Arnold calls “sweetness and light,” a focus on art, music and literature as essential to the human condition and in opposition to the values of “success” as practiced by the materialists. The “right kind” of person had culture; the “jumped-up” middle and lowermiddle classes had the suburbs and material goods. Descriptions of the suburban landscape as a cultural wasteland abound. The Philistines, otherwise called the “suburbans,” have no taste and no sense of propriety when it comes to education. Crosland, of course, has much to say about the suburbans’ lack of any redeeming qualities in the matter of culture. Of their taste in music he declares, “Suburban music, of course, is principally of one kind—that is to say, it is piano music. The pianos from which it is extorted are also of one kind—namely, cheap and tinkly” (168). Of their taste in art he remarks, “[Suburbia] is a born hanger of pictures, provided they have gilt frames round them” (177). Of their taste in literature he notes, “[A] prominent manufacturer of cheap classics lately hit the right nail on the head by advertising his wares under the caption of ‘Books as Furniture.’ This, in a phrase, has always been the suburban idea of books, and always will be” (189). His estimation of the suburban idea of education, in the voice of a typical suburbanite, is as follows: I have sons and daughters, cheeky little snobs all, but they shall have education, education, education, and starts in life. . . . Furthermore, Johnny does me immense credit in his Eton suit and his real four-andsixpenny college cap, and Gertrude is getting on admirably with her fiddling. . . . (46–7) This low opinion of the quality of suburban intellectual life is echoed by many others, including Masterman, who characterizes the suburban vision as a vision of life in which the trivial and heroic things are alike exhibited, but in which there is no adequate test or judgment, which are the heroic, which the trivial. Liberated from the devils of poverty, the soul is still empty, swept and garnished; waiting for other occupants. (80) This view of the emotional and intellectual wasteland of the new suburb is at the heart of Forster’s Howards End, with the Schlegels standing as corrections to both the Bast and the Wilcox idea of what it means to be middle class. We have already seen how Margaret imagines herself as cut from wholly different cloth than the Basts of the world. As the novel develops, Margaret’s sensitivity to her environment also contrasts with her husband’s vision of the world as a business proposition:

156 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era When Henry lived in Ducie Street he remembered the mews; when he tried to let he forgot it; and if anyone had remarked that the mews must be either there or not he would have felt annoyed and afterwards have found some opportunity of stigmatizing the speaker as academic. . . . It is a flaw inherent in the business mind, and Margaret may do well to be tender to it, considering all that the business mind has done for England. “Yes, in summer especially, the mews is a serious nuisance. . . . The house opposite has been taken by operatic people. Ducie Street’s going down, it’s my private opinion.” “How sad! It’s only a few years since they built those pretty little houses.” “Shows things are moving. Good for trade.” “I hate this continual flux of London. It is an epitome of us at our worst—eternal formlessness; all the qualities, good, bad and indifferent, streaming away. . . .” (164–5) Margaret is uncomfortable with the “movement” of London, echoing her later sentiment that life is being “melted down” in the “continual flux” of the city. Much of her discomfort with the constant change comes from her sense that “[w]e are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may fi nd in this the secret of their imaginative poverty” (139). But Henry can see only from the perspective of business— what is good for trade is good for him, and movement means opportunity. In fact, he is practically the “epitome” of “imaginative poverty.” Henry is uncomfortable with the “operatic people,” a sign of his lack of appreciation for culture. Both the Basts and the Wilcoxes are Philistines, on opposite ends of the scale. Literature of the period locates the Philistine unquestionably in the suburb. For this reason, urban space begins to take on a new glamour at this period. It is chaotic, but it is also alive and full of energy, a place where ideas can thrive. Where there had been almost no growth or even a decline in population of inner-city spaces at mid-century, by the turn of the century, people were moving back into the city to escape the taint of the suburbs.4 As Forster notes, To speak against London is no longer fashionable. . . . One visualizes it as a tract of quivering gray, intelligent without purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered before it can be chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with no pulsation of humanity. . . . A friend of mine explains himself; the earth is explicable—from her we came, and we must return to her. But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning—the city inhaling—or the same thoroughfares in the evening—the city exhaling her exhausted air? (105)

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Here, the mystery of the city calls to the curious intelligence. It may not be picturesque or beautiful—indeed it is almost certainly sublime—but its sublimity comes not from its perceived threat to the dominant culture but from its potential to help that culture evolve. The struggle to explain the city will generate a new art and a new literature, according to Forster (105). In much literature, in fact, the threat inherent in the urban atmosphere has disappeared. Where earlier in the century the alleyways and slums of urban space had held a kind of horrible fascination for readers, now the city landscape is the norm, and rural lifestyles seem foreign and even dangerous. For example, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” (1892), Sherlock Holmes warns Watson against the apparent beauty of a rural scene, saying, “You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.” “Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?” “They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.” “You horrify me!” “But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.” (1.438–9) Here, the desire for isolation that drove the flight to the suburbs in the desire for protection from urban dangers is now the suburbanites’ greatest liability. Instead of privacy, one must have near neighbors, and lots of them, to ensure one’s safety. At the same time that the desire for urban life begins to revive, we also see a newfound admiration for the working-class figures emerging. The “natural” child of the city, the Cockney or factory boy, if left to his own devices, can now be depicted with a sense of admiration. Doyle, in “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk” (1892–1893), celebrates the “smart young City man, of the class who have been labeled cockneys, but who give us our crack

158 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era volunteer regiments, and who turn out more fi ne athletes and sportsmen than any body of men in these islands.” This particular specimen is a “well-built, fresh-complexioned young fellow, with a frank, honest face and a slight, crisp, yellow moustache” (1.496), a far cry from the Cockneys described by Mayhew or Dickens at mid-century. Masterman also celebrates this class, or, in his terms, this “new race” as a product of the city and of Victorian progress: Cellars have vanished into homes, wages have risen, hours of labour diminished, temperance and thrift increased, manners improved. The new civilisation of the Crowd has become possible, with some capacity of endurance, instead of (as before) an offence which was rank and smelling to heaven. (133) This description of the urban working class contrasts in almost every significant detail with Engels’s portrait of the same class fi fty years earlier in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1847). Indeed, Masterman is optimistic about the future for this class, “small, wiry, incredibly nimble and agile in splicing thread or adjusting machinery, earning high wages in the factories, slowly advancing (one may justly hope) in intelligence and sobriety, and the qualities which go to make the good citizen.” Masterman ties this “new race” directly to urban culture, arguing that in their ultimate fulfi llment of their potential, “[t]he ‘Crowd’ is then complete. The City civilisation is established. Progress pauses—exhausted, satisfied” (134). The City as the pinnacle of civilization—this sentiment would have been unthinkable even twenty years earlier. And yet, as the urban lifestyle became more appealing and as the emphasis on culture and education as a class marker became more entrenched, London became the lodestone for artists and writers from all over the British Isles, not only because one could make money there, but also because “things” were happening. New intellectual movements and cultural projects such as those carried out by the Bloomsbury Group owe their genesis to the city in general, where little can be considered prosaic or colorless. Modernism was, in fact, an urban phenomenon, one that also emphasized the ability of the perceiver to appreciate the value of the end product—if one did not like Joyce’s work, for example, the fault lay in one’s lack of the proper frame through which to see it and not in Joyce’s prose. In other words, Modernist works were created for those who were properly educated to appreciate them. Could Modernism have existed without the Victorian suburb and all it engendered? Impossible to say, but the fact is that the middle class’s embrace of the suburban ideal in the 1850s and 1860s, and that ideal’s failure in the 1870s and 1880s, contributed significantly to cultural trends that paved the way for Modernism’s emphasis on culture and the interior life over the Victorian emphasis on propriety and the material reality of physical space.

Figure A.1 Outline Map of Greater London. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

Appendix

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Appendix

MAP KEY A. City of London

Key Texts Published Pre-1850 Oliver Twist (1837–1830), Dickens 1. Pentonville, Brownlow’s house

Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), Dickens 2. Bow, Mrs. Nickleby’s cottage

Dombey and Son (1846–1848), Dickens 3. Camden Town, location of Staggs’s Gardens

Key Texts Published in the 1850s Basil (1852), Collins 4. Belsize Park, likely setting of Margaret Sherwin’s home “Dumbledowndeary” (1852), Sala 5. Erith, Kent; site of Dumbledowndeary

Hide and Seek (1854), Collins 6. Probable location of Baregrove Square, in the area bounded by St. John’s Woods to the north and Maryleborne to the southeast

The Woman in White (1859–1860), Collins 7. Hampstead, Hartwright’s mother’s cottage 8. Place where Hartwright encounters Anne Catherick (a.k.a. the woman in white)

Key Texts Published in the 1860s Great Expectations (1860–1861), Dickens 9. Walworth, site of Wemmick’s castle

Armadale (1864), Collins 10. Bayswater, site of new lodgings where Mrs. Oldershaw can pass herself off as Lydia’s respectable reference 11. Pimlico, site of Mrs. Oldershaw’s lodgings 12. Hampstead (see 6 on the map), site of Dr. Downward’s new asylum

Our Mutual Friend (1865), Dickens 13. Holloway, home of the Wilfers 14. Pentonville, location of Boffi n’s Bower (see 1 on the map) 15. Clerkenwell, Mr. Venus’s shop 16. Millbank, Jenny Wren’s home 17. Blackheath, site of the Harmons’ fi rst cottage 18. Lewisham, likely site of Rokesmith’s school

Key Texts Published in the 1870s “Green Tea” (1872), LeFanu 19. Richmond, site of haunting

“The Uninhabited House” (1875), Riddell 20. Chelsea area, most likely location for haunted house

The Law and the Lady (1875), Collins 21. Kentish Town, one likely site for Miserrimus Dexter’s home (the other being Belsize Park, see 4 on the map)

Key Texts Published 1880 and after “The Old House in Vauxhall Walk” (1882), Riddell 22. Lambeth, site of haunting

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. As Gail Cunningham points out, the term “suburbia” was not used by Victorians themselves until the 1890s (433), at which point the phenomenon had become so remarkable that it needed its own nomenclature. 2. These very broad generalizations are drawn from a variety of texts, but primarily from Christopher Hussey’s The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (1967), Walter Hipple’s The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (1957) and George Landow’s The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (1971). 3. This is not to say that money ceased to be a factor in social classification. Money is always a factor; at issue is how the money is spent in marking social status. In the previous century, it was essentially land and the construction of an aesthetically pleasing home and grounds that marked one’s social situation. When the middle class flocked to the suburbs, they spent their money on rents in the “best” areas they could afford on their income, and on certain material goods as reflective of their ability to afford the rent they paid. It is my argument that in the period following 1880, one’s education and ability to appreciate culture (however defi ned) represented the amount one’s parents were able to spend on ensuring one’s entrée into society via education and exposure to art and aesthetics. 4. When they took up the pen, these “slummers” became what we now think of as fl aneurs, or wandering observers of urban life. Their chronicles of nineteenth-century London, for example, are some of the fi rst examples of urban investigation literature, a genre that had a tremendous influence on the development of the suburban ideal as a contrast to the urban, an idea that will be pursued at greater length in Chapter 3. 5. For more on the cultural significance of middle-class domestic architecture, see Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) and Leonore Davidoff’s World’s Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (1995). 6. In Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (1973), H. J. Dyos notes that “suburbs within walking distance of the river, especially if . . . like Camberwell [they] had continued to give outdoor poor relief while some other parishes relied solely on the Workhouse, tended to become reception areas for part of the population which had been displaced” (59).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. Essays from Household Words provide a great deal of source material in this work. I draw from this source for several reasons. First, Household Words

162

2.

3.

4.

5.

Notes contains more articles on urban and suburban living by a wider variety of authors than any other equivalent source and so is simply an excellent mine of information. Second, as one of the most popular journals among the segment of Victorian society most concerned with suburban issues, an examination of the way in which the suburbs are presented to this audience can give us clues to nodes of anxiety that might not be apparent in other kinds of writing. Finally, non-fiction articles by those in Dickens’s circle, such as George Sala, provide some evidence that there was an entire group of authors writing about suburban issues in a variety of forms, and it is useful, in my later chapters on sensation fiction’s relation to the suburbs, to note which positions Dickens endorsed by his willingness to pay for their publication. According to Dyos, “the sources of this migration to . . . London between 1841 and 1881 were: nearly 40 per cent . . . from the adjacent areas of metropolitan Middlesex and extra-metropolitan Surrey and Kent, about 28 per cent. from the . . . south-eastern counties of Sussex, Hampshire, Berkshire, Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk; and most of the rest . . . from an area south of a line between the Severn and the Wash, though an increasing proportion was arriving from the industrial north towards the end of the century” (58). Donald Olsen argues that “the nineteenth century saw the systematic sorting out of London into single-purpose, homogeneous, specialized neighbourhoods” (“Victorian” 267), but the evidence does not bear this out. For more on the heterogeneity of the Victorian suburb, see Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (1963); Dyos and Reeder’s “Slums and Suburbs” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities (1973); B. I. Coleman’s The Idea of the City in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1973); and H. J. Dyos’s Victorian Suburb (1973). George Godwin, writing in 1854, described Agar Town as follows: “This large tract of land was granted on lease to a gentleman connected with the law, Mr. Agar, after whom the district was named. Mr. Agar died, leaving his property to some very young children. At that time the large residence near Pratt-Street was in the fields, and no houses had been built on the estate. Indeed, so retired was this place that within the last fi fteen or sixteen years nightingales have been heard near a clump of trees at short distance from Mr. Agar’s house. The land was, however, soon let out into small strips, on leases for thirty years. No systematic plan of drainage was laid out: in fact, the houses were planted down very much in the same manner as the wooden huts and tents at the gold diggings: each man suited his means or fancy in the erection of an edifice on the land which for a few years was, on certain conditions, his own” (7). Although Ruskin may have abominated the trend toward constant movement in the suburban population, he and his family moved outward and “upward” over the course of their residence in Greater London. For example, in 1871 Ruskin moved his family out of Denmark Hill in South London because it was too crowded (Sheppard 109).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. For an excellent discussion of how these “residual” populations impacted suburban life, see Raphael Samuel’s “Comers and Goers” in Dyos and Wolff’s The Victorian City: Images and Realities (1973). 2. Gertrude Himmelfarb makes this argument in her essay “The Culture of Poverty,” where she claims that thanks in the main to Mayhew’s extremely popular essays, Victorian poverty took on a particular set of characteristics which did not necessarily reflect reality.

Notes

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3. The overwhelming evidence of these texts contradicts Gareth Stedman Jones’s contention that “scarcely any systematic interest was shown in the problem [of poverty]” in the 1870s and early 1880s. Jones also claims that during this period the poor were “subject[s] for low-life journalism rather than urgent social investigations” (282), but this is patently not the case. 4. This section is informed, in part, by Michel Foucault’s theory about the role of surveillance in controlling populations, outlined in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979). He writes, for example, that “in the perfect camp, all power would be exercised solely through exact observation; each gaze would form a part of the overall functioning of power (171). . . . In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of constantly being seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection” (187). 5. Of course, suburban privacy did not guarantee propriety. St. John’s Woods was well known as the district where gentlemen kept their mistresses in “respectable” establishments, as reflected in the denouement of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and in the Pre-Raphaelite painting The Awakening Conscience by Holman Hunt.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. These brief comments on Victorian architecture are summarized from James Stevens Curl’s Victorian Architecture (1990) and Priscilla Metcalf’s Victorian London (1972). 2. Gareth Stedman Jones argues that from the end of the 1860s through 1873 “fears of an insurgent working class receded as skilled and ‘respectable’ working men got swept up in the tail of the Gladstonian Liberal party; fears about the triumph of ignorance were mollified by the 1870 education act” (5). He goes on to say that “the most characteristic image of the working class was that of increasingly prosperous and cohesive communities bound together by the chapel, the friendly society, and the co-op” (10–1). I fi nd little evidence of this, at least not as regards an increased optimism about the working class. In fact, Crossick’s more recent work on the working-class communities of this period would show that the optimism was really coming from the lower-middle classes, who were taking over the co-ops and societies and pushing the working class out.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. These details resonate with the changing descriptions of suburbs like Clapham in housing guides of the times, discussed in the Introduction to this work.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. Interestingly, Lynda Nead’s discussion of modernity in Victorian Babylon cites just such disjunction as a sign of modernity: “The simplest understanding of modernity is in terms of that which is new or contemporary and represents a distinct temporal break with the past” (4). She also cites Benjamin

164 Notes

2. 3.

4.

5.

6

as identifying this moment where the ruined past confronts the present (and, presumably, the unknown future) “as moments, when the spectral past enters the spaces of the present” (6, emphasis added). She further argues that “London in the 1860s . . . was a present haunted by the image of ruin” (10). Ruskin’s contributions to the defi nition of the sublime, the picturesque and the gothic are discussed at length in Chapter 7. I take this broad summary of criticism on the gothic from Anne Williams’s The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, William Patrick Day’s In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy, Matthew Brennan’s The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in Nineteenth-Century English Literature and George E. Haggerty’s Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form. See, for example, Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, Kate Ellis’s The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology, Juliann Fleenor’s The Female Gothic, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Coherence of Gothic Conventions and Eugenia DeLamotte’s Perils of the Night. This description resonates with Nead’s accounts of urban building during this period, where new co-existed with the old, and with an awareness that there was even older material underneath, which generated a renewed interest in the ancient history of London. She writes, “The conventions of the picturesque were reinvented to represent the contingencies of the modern metropolis, and through these cultural forms London produced a pictorial lexicon of modernity based on a conjunction of the old and the new; destruction and construction; antiquarianism and technology” (6). The significance of Wemmick’s castle as a defense against the disintegration of the suburb is discussed at greater length in Chapter 7.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 1. My sources for these generalizations about the sublime include Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Judgement (1790), John Hipple Jr.’s The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth Century British Aesthetic Theory (1957), Samuel Monk’s The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (1960), Nicholas Taylor’s “The Awful Sublimity of the Victorian City” (1973), Carol Bernstein’s The Celebration of Scandal: Toward the Sublime in Victorian Urban Fiction (1991), Tom Furniss’s Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology (1993), Vijay Mishra’s The Gothic Sublime (1994) and Walter Jonathan Loesberg’s “Dickensian Deformed Children and the Hegelian Sublime” (1997). 2. Loesberg is careful to note that the Victorian sense of the grotesque is not a simple renaming of the sublime, for Ruskin looks down his nose at the grotesque for the most part (634). 3. This use of space as a way of defi ning identity, or “localism,” dovetails with Ian Baucom’s excellent discussion of the ways in which not just middle-class identity but also English identity itself was often grounded (no pun intended) in the place where one lived. 4. This issue—the potential sublimity of the suburban mental institution— deserves further investigation. Many nineteenth-century sanitariums were constructed in the suburbs primarily because the atmosphere of the suburb and the model of the middle-class home were thought to have a beneficial influence on the disturbed—that the patients would in fact be domesticated

Notes

165

in a suburban space. However, certainly it is possible that these institutions, modelled after suburban homes, failed to fully signify all that they represented, or signified it in problematic ways, which would render these institutions sublime as well.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8 1. Notable exceptions include Gail Cunningham’s “Houses in Between: Navigating Suburbia in Late Victorian Writing” (2004) and Lynne Hapgood’s “The Literature of the Suburbs: Versions of Repression in the Novels of George Gissing, Arthur Conan Doyle and William Pett Ridge, 1890–1899” (2000) and “The Unwritten Suburb: Defi ning Spaces in John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property” (2000). 2. For an excellent discussion of the ways in which the emerging dominant culture of the “intellectual elites” constructed and then defi ned itself against these “masses,” see John Carey’s 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. 3. C is Booth’s classification for “Intermittent” earnings; D is “Small Regular” earnings. Together, Booth classes these as “the poor.” 4. In fact, one modern commentator claims that the suburbs are necessary to the vitality of the city: “May not suburbs at their most dull and monotonous be necessary to make possible the more lively and creative segments of the metropolis? That is to say, by drawing off the deadening mass, they leave the central areas to be enjoyed by those who remain, undiluted by the mediocrity of the majority” (Olsen, “Victorian” 277).

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Index

A Aesthetic categories. See Beautiful, Picturesque and Sublime Armadale. See Collins, Wilkie Arnold, Matthew: Culture and Anarchy, 151–152, 155

B Basil. See Collins, Wilkie Beautiful, as an aesthetic category, 9–12, 16–18, 26–27, 29, 99, 120, 122–125, 145, 148–149 Bleak House. See Dickens, Charles Booth, Charles, 54, 140, 141–142, 146, 149 Brown, Ford Maddox: Work, 41, 72–73 Burke, Edmund, and aesthetic categories, 9, 99, 120–123, 128, 133

C Child of the Jago, A. See Morrison, Arthur Collins, Wilkie: Armadale, 12, 68–69, 103–104, 136–137, 160 (map); Basil, 62–65, 160 (map); Hide and Seek, 6, 65–67, 108–109, 133–134, 160 (map); The Law and the Lady, 103–104, 134– 136, 160 (map); The Woman in White, 97–98, 103, 160 (map) Crosland, T.W.H.: The Suburbans, 142–143, 145–146, 151–152, 155 Culture and Anarchy. See Arnold, Matthew

D Dickens, Charles: Bleak House, 70, 106; Dombey and Son, 41–42,

45–46, 51, 67, 106–107, 160 (map); Great Expectations, 108, 129–130, 160 (map); Nicholas Nickleby, 10, 60–61, 169 (map); Oliver Twist, 9–10, 22, 67, 91, 160 (map); Our Mutual Friend, 12–13, 28, 56, 72–74, 87–90, 93, 103, 117, 130–133, 160 (map); Pickwick Papers, 16–17, 24, 26, 110 Dombey and Son. See Dickens, Charles Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Sherlock Holmes stories: “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” 157; “The Stock Broker’s Clerk,” 157–158 Dublin suburbs, in ghost narratives, 96, 112–119

E Easel, Jack. See Eastlake, Sir Charles Eastlake, Sir Charles, 16–17, 28–29, 45 Edinburgh suburbs, in ghost narratives, 76, 80–81, 94

F “Familiar, The”. See Le Fanu, Sheridan Forster, E.M.: Howards End, 13, 144–145, 146–147, 152–154, 155–156 Foucault, Michel, 75, 90–92, 104, 163

G Gissing, George: In the Year of Jubilee, 13, 140, 150, 154; New Grub Street, 153–154 Gothic, as an aesthetic category, 12, 38, 99–119, 123, 124–125, 127 Great Expectations. See Dickens, Charles

176 Index “Green Tea.” See Le Fanu, Sheridan

P

In the Year of Jubilee. See Gissing, George

Panton, Jane Elizabeth, 18, 26, 32, 34–35, 111, 127, 140 Pickwick Papers. See Dickens, Charles Picturesque, as an aesthetic category, 9–12, 17–18, 27, 59, 99–103, 114–115, 148–150, 164 privacy, as a suburban ideal, 2, 7, 11, 15–18, 21, 24, 26, 57–58, 62, 86, 90–92, 95–97, 110, 126, 129–130, 141, 146, 150, 157, 163 prostitutes in the suburbs, 45–46, 67–68

J

R

jerry builders. See speculative builders

railroad development in the suburbs, 7, 41–42, 53, 76, 82, 106–108, 148 Regent’s Park, 3–6, 36, 64 Riddell, Charlotte (Mrs. J.H.): “Nut Bush Farm,” 84–85; “The Old House in Vauxhall Walk,” 77–78, 83, 87, 94, 160 (map); “Old Mrs. Jones,” 77, 84, 92–93; “The Open Door,” 82, 86–87; The Uninhabited House, 6, 75–76, 81–82, 86, 160 (map); “Walnut Tree House,” 94–95 Ruskin, John, 8–9, 18, 22, 38–39, 55, 70–71, 105, 110, 122–125, 138, 146, 154, 164

H Hide and Seek. See Collins, Wilkie Holmes, Sherlock. See Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan Household Words, 11, 20, 27–28, 35, 43, 73, 79, 161 Howards End. See Forster, E.M. Hyde Park, 3–5, 68,

I

K Kant, Immanuel, and the sublime, 122, 125 Keble, Howard: The Smiths of Surbiton, 17–18, 140

L Law and the Lady, The. See Collins, Wilkie Le Fanu, Sheridan: “The Familiar,” 94–97, 104, 130; “Green Tea,” 11, 96; The House by the Churchyard, 112–119 London suburbs. See suburbs of London

M Martineau, Harriet, 5, 79–80 Mayhew, Augustus: Paved with Gold, 26–27, 46–47, 52, 70, 79 Mayhew, Henry, 44, 47–49, 85, 143, 162 Modernism, 13, 141, 158 Morrison, Arthur: A Child of the Jago, 77, 96; Tales of Mean Streets, 40, 57, 61–62

N New Grub Street. See Gissing, George Nicholas Nickleby. See Dickens, Charles

O Oliver Twist. See Dickens, Charles Our Mutual Friend. See Dickens, Charles

S Sala, George: “Dumbledowndeary,” 37–38, 111–112, 127–128, 160 (map); “The Great Invasion,” 107–108, 109–110, 128; “Open Air Entertainments,” 43 Smiths of Surbiton, The. See Keble, Howard speculative builders, 14, 27, 30–31, 42, 75, 81–82, 86, 110–111, 148 Sublime, as an aesthetic category, 9–12, 99–100, 120–139, 157, 164, 165 Suburbans, The. See Crosland, T.W.H. suburb, definition of, 6–8, 15–19 suburbs, domestic economy of, 32–34 suburbs of London: Agar Town, 35–37, 88, 162; Brompton, 4, 63; Camberwell, 4, 20–22, 45, 141, 143, 161; Camden Town, 5, 14, 28, 35, 41, 107, 141, 145, 160 (map); Chelsea, 5, 87, 147, 160 (map); Clapham, 4, 19–22, 44, 143, 145;

Index Dulwich, 16–17; Ealing, 15, 42; Greenwich, 5, 14, 87; Hackney, 4–5, 20, 107; Hampstead, 6, 14, 20, 26, 37, 42–43, 69, 97, 102– 103, 137, 145, 151–152, 160 (map); Islington, 5–6, 14, 20, 28, 77, 107, 126; Kentish Town, 28, 32, 160 (map); Lewisham, 4, 20, 160 (map); Millbank, 5, 68, 130, 160 (map); Richmond, 3, 14, 19, 24, 96, 160 (map); St. John’s Wood, 6, 17, 147, 163; Shepherd’s Bush, 5, 67; Southwark, 3, 143, 148; Stoke Newington, 4–5, 24; Streatham, 5, 143; Surbiton, 17–18, 140, 145; Tooting, 1, 4–5, 145; Walworth, 5, 129, 160 (map); Wandsworth, 20, 28, 144; West Ham, 4, 144 suburban architecture, 17–18, 29–30, 34, 58, 59–60, 110–111, 123–124, 126–127, 161 suburban development, 4, 29–31, 39, 148

177

suburban growth, London, 3–5, 14, 148

T Tales of Mean Streets. See Morrison, Arthur Thomson, James: “The City of Dreadful Night,” 102, 105; “Sunday at Hampstead,” 42–43

U urban poor, in the suburbs, 44–47, 54, 80–81, 138–139, 143

W Woman in White, The. See Collins, Wilkie women, in the suburbs, 26, 36, 46, 58, 83–85, 90–91, 100 Work. See Brown, Ford Maddox working class, in the suburbs, 31, 34, 42–43, 47, 54, 55–57, 77–78, 80, 81–82, 92–93, 142–144, 148