While literary critics have become increasingly engaged by the impact of suburbanization on the literary landscape, most scholarship has focused on texts from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The belief that suburbia appeared only occasionally in literature before this period is commonplace: as Gail Cunningham observes: “Although the term ‘suburb’ was used from Shakespeare and Milton onwards . . . it was not until the final decades of the nineteenth century that writers turned to suburban life as a subject of imaginative investigation” (Cunningham, “Riddle” 51).Footnote 1 Cunningham's important work on suburban narrative positions authors of the late nineteenth century as architects of “the new imaginative category suburban,” one that was substantially shaped by the experience of observing and living amongst “newly massed middle classes” (Cunningham, “Riddle” 52). “[F]or many writers . . . the prime response to the new suburbia was one of anxiety and disorientation,” she argues. “How were they to conceptualize the sudden appearance of the new spatial environment?” (Cunningham, “Houses” 423). Yet Cunningham's emphasis on the newness of both the category and the lived experience underestimates the impact of suburbanization on the totality of the period. Suburbanization was a phenomenon that Victorian society had been experiencing, and responding to, for at least eight decades by the time of Victoria's death. Literary narratives engaging suburbia from these eight decades undoubtedly exist: they have received scant critical attention, yet they constitute a crucial tradition without which the most famous late-nineteenth-century texts of suburbia cannot be adequately understood.
What Cunningham and others find in texts of the fin de siècle is a deep unease about the suburbs. Texts like George Gissing's The Whirpool (1897), Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee (1896), and Thomas William Hodgson Crosland's later, vituperative non-fiction study The Suburbans (1905) famously evoke the suburban landscape as an anonymous dystopia, a place where the values of mass culture and women predominate, where professional men lack community and are forced into the uncongenial practice of commuting through a fundamentally atomized space whose landscape signifies wider social disintegration. This unease, read without reference to earlier literature on suburbanization, is typically characterized as the product of a fundamentally proto-modernist – or at least anti-Victorian – sensibility. When writers like Gissing and Wells evoke the suburban landscape as stultifying and boring, critics tend to view such characterizations as grounded in a “critique of modern urban society and [a] rejection of Victorian values at the end of the nineteenth century,” as A. James Hammerton puts it (169). Critical interpretations of such texts thereby situate dissatisfactions with the shape and characteristics of the landscape within a crucially fin-de-siècle battle, stressing that the “long, unlovely rows of semi-detached villas” became a crucial image for emerging modernists of the worst the previous era's industrializing, democratizing zeal had to offer (Cunningham, “Riddle” 54).
Yet almost a century before Eliot's Prufrock described the long terraces as “streets that follow like a tedious argument,” ninety years before E. M. Forster's novel of suburban cultural aridity, Howard's End, the idea of suburbia as deadening, culturally sterile, petit bourgeois “Dulham” was a literary commonplace.Footnote 2 Dating at least as far back as the 1820s, in the work of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, suburbia is evoked as a cultural wasteland dominated by the values of women and the bourgeois; by the 1840s and 1850s, notions of suburbia as boring, aesthetically sterile, populated by the masses, and hence dull, were so familiar as to be a stereotype – a word whose contemporary use was emerging at just the same time. Indeed, as this article will demonstrate, the relationship between the meaning of the word “suburb” and the newly metaphorical use of the term “stereotyping” was an intimate one, for it was precisely through a new awareness of the processes of commercialism and mass production that the modern meaning of stereotyping gained currency. Victorian writers, disturbed at the promises of suburbia stamped out tirelessly in the print press and in auctioneer's pamphlets, used the language of a mechanized process to describe what they saw, calling the age-old puffery surrounding commodification “stereotyping.” However, writers sought to rebut the commercially-produced stereotypes of utopian suburbia with stereotypes of deadening suburbia in a process of replacement that intriguingly replicated the two-step mechanics of stereotype production itself. To talk about the “suburb” in the first half of the century, then, was to talk about a word whose meaning the elite was struggling to wrest back from the forces of commercialization by actually engaging the language and the tools of industrial modernity.
This article aims to refresh the scholarly conversation about nineteenth-century suburbia by situating discussions of suburban dullness in an early- to mid-Victorian context and by showing, moreover, that these discussions were from the start framed as a response to suburbia's commodification and commercialization. The act of descrying suburbia at the fin de siècle placed the speaker in a long, deeply familiar tradition; Gissing, Wells, Eliot, and Forster inherited images and terms of culturally and aesthetically arid, bourgeois suburbia that had been in circulation for many decades. Rather than emerging as a proto-modernist reaction against Victorian middle-class ideals of domesticity, then, or even as a response to the rapid development of lower-middle-class suburban housing from the 1870s onwards, we shall see here that the language of suburban aridity was produced in the first place to overset and repudiate the auctioneer's stereotype.Footnote 3 Indeed, it is quite literally in the mechanized presses of the 1820s that the narrative of suburbia begins.
The Construction of the Suburbs and the Suburban Stereotype
As F. M. L. Thompson argued in his foundational work on “The Rise of Suburbia,” “the great suburban sea-change” began in the middle of the eighteenth century, but it was only in “the years after Waterloo” that “modern suburban development got properly under way on a significant scale.” The population of England and Wales swelled from about 9 million in 1801 to nearly 18 million in 1851, and this population growth may partly explain the rapid expansion of the suburbs; other precipitating factors include “plentiful supplies of cheap finance for builders” (which may, Thompson theorizes, be responsible for “an initial impulse to suburban building in the 1820s” specifically), and the development of omnibus routes, followed later by tram and rail (Thompson 2, 10).Footnote 4 (It should be noted that while transportation links fuelled growth, routes opened up once the need for them was clearly established. In the case of Camberwell, for instance, H. J. Dyos observes that because of the difficulty early rail companies experienced in generating good returns, “[t]he locomotive was in truth practically middle-aged before it appeared” (70).Footnote 5 A final important factor in the growth of the suburbs was emerging group demand – which become particularly powerful from the 1820s and ‘30s onwards – for single-class areas and homes with gardens. Ideology and economics subsequently came to reinforce one another, as a growing cultural preference for quiet, homogenous houses in areas with clear class markers was partially enabled by the fact that straight roads of uniform homes were quicker and cheaper to construct than detached houses and varied architecture.Footnote 6 The more demand increased for suburban homes, in other words, the more reason developers had to produce standardized, architecturally uniform terraces.Footnote 7
The mass construction of homes was, of course, only one of many forms of mass production emerging in the 1820s and 30s. Printing was another, and discussions of both new print practices and suburban building coincide along the axis of industrial unease. Standardization, the loss of old skills (whether in type-setting or construction), and the tastes and demands of the masses emerge as common concerns. Moreover, mass-produced printing was felt dangerously to enable the business of speedy suburban construction: critics of suburban development repeatedly descried the standardized texts stamped out by land developers, speculators, and auctioneers for aiding in the commodification – and hence debasement – of the home. Indeed, intriguingly, discussions of suburbia were one place where the word “stereotype” made the jump from its literal to its metaphorical meaning, as authors searched for a term to describe the proliferation of idealized descriptions of middle-class homes produced for commercial gain.Footnote 8 In “The Art of Puffing,” an article on the characteristics of modern advertising in the Dublin Review (1849), for instance, the author skates the edges of the two meanings of “stereotype” (as an industrial-era printing phenomenon and an excessively repeated phrase or idea) to describe the frequent appearance of the supposedly ideal middle-class home in contemporary newspaper advertisements:
[A] man who advertises a house to let, does not even tell us that it had “a dining-room and drawing-room, and four best bed-rooms, besides servants’ ditto, and excellent offices,” all which we suppose the “Times” keeps stereotyped, for its advertisements of semi-detached villas, at Clapham or Croydon.” (“The Art of Puffing” 159)
The OED dates the first appearance of the metaphorical meaning of “stereotyping” to the 1840s; I have not found it in common use in this manner before the early 1850s.Footnote 9 The Dublin Review article captures the word in transition. Thus while suburbia was obviously not the only industrial artifact to produce a shift in the meaning of “stereotype,” it was in the room at the birth, for a number of reasons. “The Art of Puffing” suggests that the home advertisement – particularly the Times’ infamous “houses to let” section – was one place where readers saw on a daily basis the commercial enterprise of selling and renting homes rendered in print form, and where the unvarying nature of the advertisements’ prose seemingly duplicated the unvarying nature of the suburban homes themselves. Describing the first as “stereotyped” eased the passage into describing the second as stereotyped also, not least because the worries surrounding the two industries corresponded so closely. “Stereotyping” was not just an industrially-produced word, then, but one whose shifting meaning spoke to its ability to capture discomfort with the fundamental shape and directions of industrial modernity.
“Rus in Urbe”
The stereotypes of inimical, dull suburbia that were to become so pervasive in the period moreover possess the striking feature that, from the earliest years, the form of their construction mimicked the mechanical process of print stereotyping. Stereotypes of enervating suburbia were almost always framed by an expression of concern about the commercialized image of delightful suburbia found in the auctioneer's pamphlet or the newspaper advertisement. Rather as the print stereotyping process was a two-step process, in which a metal cast was created from a papier-mâché mould, so the literary stereotyping of deadening suburbia itself engaged two steps, with a final shape created as the inverse of a pre-existing form. This is not to say that writers always or necessarily termed their own portraits of suburbia “stereotypes.” But from the very first, the images of suburbia that were to become commonplace in literary texts – of suburbia as dreary, dull, poorly built, packed with crooks and sharks – were presented as alternatives to the stamped-out images of ideal gentlemen's residences propagated by speculators, developers, and other capitalist entrepreneurs.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton's anger against the pettiness and materialism of the aristocracy, his conviction that class warfare was not only inevitable but sanctionable between the haves and have-nots (terms Bulwer Lytton famously coined in Lucretia), did not result in sympathetic representations of what one might call the democratizing impulse of suburbia.Footnote 10 Instead Bulwer-Lytton's fictions treat the suburbs as a deeply unpleasant product of what he termed “our sickly civilisation” in an 1845 preface to Night and Morning (first published 1841), a place where exploitation of and crime against the virtuous was rampant (vii). Bulwer-Lytton's fictions regularly ridicule and reject the near-utopian claims made for middle-class suburbia, especially in advertisements – its putative opportunities for peace and quiet, retired living, and limited encounters with others of a similar class and sensibility. Indeed, characters who speak of these idyllic qualities are virtually always criminal. Bulwer-Lytton was one of the very first writers to note and seek to combat idealized images of suburbia propagated to sell houses en masse, and his distaste at the increasing cultural force of the tastes and aesthetics of the “new” middle classes in the 1820s, 30s and 40s anticipates by decades plots and preoccupations of fin-de-siècle narratives of suburbia. In particular, Bulwer-Lytton's evocation of the spider-like woman lurking within the suburban villa, waiting to lure in the passing unwary young man, was to become a literary commonplace. However in this, its earliest form, the woman's villainy lies less in her sexual predations than in her distasteful willingness to commodify her home.
In The Disowned (1829), the young hero (who, in his disowned state, goes by the name Clarence Linden) is repeatedly tricked on his arrival in London by a dubious character named Morris Brown who attempts to sell any number of useless goods – mustard, a green parrot – in order to part Linden from his money. After failing to stick Linden with a hefty bill for unnecessary perishable items, the entrepreneurial Mr. Brown's next step is to lure Linden with promises of a suburban lodging – “a charming little abode, sir, situated in the suburbs of London, quite rus in urbe as the scholars say; you can have a delightful little back parlour, looking out upon the garden, and all to yourself, I dare say” (Disowned 62). The suburban home is thus one more commodity that Brown tries to foist on Linden, properly-packaged – and at last his point finds its mark. The friendless Linden, looking to find his way to climb “a high step in the world's ladder,” imagines that the modern suburbs offer the best possible residence for one lacking patronage, one who must therefore turn to “irregular methods of adventure and enterprise” to establish himself (Disowned 63).Footnote 11
The joke underlying Brown's claim of “rus in urbe” is of course that the Latinate phrase is far from confined to scholars – that it is, in fact, the cornerstone of the commercialized appeal of the suburbs (Thomas Gray used the phrase wryly in a letter to describe the area of Hampstead and Highgate as early as 1759, as “rus-in-urbe-ish”; Gray 223). The suburban lodging to which Linden is introduced immediately gives the lie to Mr. Brown's inflated claims and, by expansion, those made for suburbia itself:
at the suburbs towards Paddington, Mr. Brown stopped at a very small house; it stood rather retired from its surrounding neighbours, which were of a loftier and more pretending aspect than itself, and, in its awkward shape and pitiful bashfulness, looked exceedingly like a schoolboy . . . shrinking with all possible expedition into the obscurest corner he can discover. Passing through a sort of garden, in which a spot of grass lay in the embraces of a stripe of gravel, Mr. Brown knocked upon a very bright knocker at a very new door. (Disowned 66)
The dream of rus in urbe is shown here in debased form, as “a sort of garden” with “a spot of grass,” the hope for respite from urban pollution reduced to nothing more than a selling point. The very grass seems to suffer the “embraces” of the faddish gravel; Bulwer-Lytton's description of the home and its miserable environs conveys a sense of deep unease at exposure to the modern world. The “shrinking” schoolboy Bulwer-Lytton conjures suffers “pitiful bashfulness,” and even struggles to hide himself in an obscure corner, all terms that evoke intense social awkwardness in a situation full of threat. The home seems to loathe what it has become, the space it is forced to inhabit, the neighboring buildings to which it is exposed. In characterizing the house in this way, Bulwer-Lytton implicitly sketches the situation of all males in the suburban landscape – as not only awkward, but diminished. For here, as in many later Victorian texts, suburbia is evoked as a world where men are, as Hammerton argues, “emasculated and ridiculous” (171).Footnote 12 (Apart from Forster's tragic Leonard Bast, one thinks of Mr. Morgan in Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee, Ella D'Arcy's hectored and dying Catterson in “A Marriage,” or even – from rather earlier – the prodigiously deceived hero of Wilkie Collins's Basil [1852].) Linden should learn from the home's own emotions of pathetic self-loathing, the narrative implies, and get out of suburbia as quickly as possible, or he too will become not only unhappy but unmanned.
The hero's moment of standing by the door, then of “symbolic threshold-crossing” into a sinister space dominated by a bourgeois woman's values and aesthetics, is also one that was oft-repeated at the fin de siècle. “As men pass from the free, masculine space of town and street, through the transitional front garden and into the domestic interior they enter a world alien to their nature,” Cunningham observes: the moment of passing through the front door is a moment of entering into a world where women's concerns – which seem fundamentally the overthrow of men's traditional privileges – predominate (Cunningham, “Riddle” 60–61).Footnote 13 For suburban women here, as in late-Victorian texts, invariably have both secret plans and bad taste, which somehow become so fused that possession of one seems virtually to guarantee the existence of the other. The act of passing inside the door, then, necessarily entails exposure to a strangely decorated space: threat is typically “signaled through images of darkness and gloomy interiors revealing small but potentially malignant female figures,” Cunningham continues (“Riddle” 60).Footnote 14 And indeed, this is exactly what happens to Bulwer-Lytton's 1829 hero: “Up a singularly narrow staircase, into a singularly diminutive drawing-room, Clarence and his guide [Mr. Brown] were ushered. There, seated on a little chair by a little work-table, with one foot on a little stool, and one hand on a little book, was a little – very little lady” (Disowned 67). This extraordinary little lady, Mrs. Copperas, is every bit as spider-like as Ella D'Arcy's odd, colorless Nettie Hooper in “A Marriage,” and just as set on luring in her prey. But there is a crucial difference: Bulwer-Lytton's villainess sets her lures with offers of gentility and not, like Nettie – or Wilkie Collins's Margaret Sherwin – with sexual promise.
Living in a suburban home in the nineteenth century was, Kate Flint has argued, theoretically a sign of “one's ability to purchase leisure,” and thus potentially a way to buy “at least in the imagination, into the tradition and culture of the aristocracy” (114). Bulwer-Lytton makes clear the commercial underpinnings of Mrs. Copperas's aspirations by endowing her descriptions of her house from the first with advertiser jargon. Thus, for instance, she displays a land-developer or real estate agent's generous notions of geography: “We possess accommodations of a most elegant description; – accustomed to the genteelest circles – enjoying the pure breezes of the Highgate hills . . . you will find our retreat no less eligible than unique,” she informs Linden, who is then introduced to two rooms each the size of a box (Disowned 67). Needless to say, the Paddington home has little in common with the more elegant hills of north London. And, as the text progresses, every interaction between Linden and his host is a further opportunity for the narrator to reveal similar “truths.” The tea is heavily watered down; the Butler “de Warens” is really a footboy; the “company” Mrs. Copperas flaunts is “chiefly in commercial life” (Disowned 82); Mr. Copperas himself is, for all Mrs. Copperas's cooings, a vulgar “stock-jobber”; and Mrs. Copperas is constantly betraying herself (by publically admonishing her son, for instance) in ways that reveal she is no “lady.”
Indeed, while Mrs. Copperas does not have a sexual interest in Linden, for Bulwer-Lytton her willingness to open up her home, and commercialize it, is functionally akin to a debased sexual exchange. “You are desirous, sir, of entering into the bosom of my family,” the lady declares effusively on first meeting Linden: the language of intimacy and sentiment fits uncomfortably with the fact that Mrs. Copperas is simultaneously observing the new lodger to determine how much he can afford to pay (in the end she is, the narrator observes coolly, “not above three times as extortionate as she ought to have been” [Disowned 67, 68]). In this novel, and in other Bulwer-Lytton texts, the sense of threat introduced by such corrupted suburban fraudsters is further heightened by images of sexual danger in the suburban landscape – which is, as we have already seen, closely associated with the alien feminine. Thus in Night and Morning, for example, published in the early 1840s, a suburban lodging room is rendered all the more disturbing through an image of sexual control: “There was an air of heated discomfort in the thick, solid moreen curtains, in the gaudy paper, in the bright-staring carpet, in the very looking-glass over the chimney piece, where a strip of mirror lay imprisoned in an embrace of frame covered with yellow muslin” (Night and Morning 37–38). Rather like the gravel outside Mrs. Copperas’ house, here the “embrace” of the mirror's frame confines. It is surely not accidental that the embracing frame is attired in flaunting, brightly-colored muslin (“a bit of muslin” being a common synonym for prostitute), and the passage begins with an image of a fly paper hanging from the ceiling “swarmed with flies” (Night and Morning 37), to further hint at the dangers of temptation. The language of disgust and repulsion that Bulwer-Lytton's narrator employs is not only disgust at middle-class tastes, then (at the “bright-staring carpet” and “gaudy paper” that have not had time to fade, at the lack of a long-established garden to offer shade and sanctuary). The values of the middle classes are also aligned in this novel, as in The Disowned, with the very worst commercial exchanges, so that renting out a house becomes perilously close to renting out the body, with the prostituting woman possessing near-lethal power.
Bulwer-Lytton's gentlemen inevitably respond to suburbia with disgust (Paul Clifford, who becomes a highwayman, is the exception that proves the rule). In Night and Morning, which begins with the widowhood of a lady unable to prove the lawful nature of her marriage, the narrative concentrates on the hardship experienced by the lady's proud sixteen-year-old son, Philip, in loathsome suburbia. The boy escapes the suburban house as much as he possibly can, wandering the streets listlessly (but admirably) in search of opportunities for restoring the family fortunes. Linden, meanwhile, is conveniently relieved from further suburban horrors by an encounter with a wealthy gentleman: having saved the gentleman's life from dangerous burglars, he is now led into a more “honest” life of affluence and aristocratic patronage, where claims of elegance are backed up by fact and where commercial inducements hold less sway. Uncovering the “truth” of bourgeois suburbia – as tasteless, vulgar, and commercialized – is a process that ultimately resituates it as reliably, reassuringly beneath the aristocratic in the social and cultural hierarchy; the hero's own sterling qualities make the restoration of him and his values a foregone conclusion. Linden is so deeply conscious of good taste that he never seems seriously in doubt of becoming the pitiful schoolboy-figure: he sees easily through the Copperas’ stratagems from the first. He is also immediately recognized by real gentlemen for the man of taste he is and, through a combination of good luck and bravery, achieves his right rewards. The lot of the bourgeois men in the novel is rather different: they are either fraudsters or dupes or both, either in cahoots with or manipulated by women, so that their very weakness becomes a further mechanism through which the values and tastes of the aristocratic male are inexorably restored.
Yet the experience of threat to those values and tastes is an originary point to which the novels repeatedly return. The Disowned begins with a fierce and impassioned diatribe on the need to escape the encroaching ravages of the suburban landscape, imagining the parceling up of land into plots as a sort of invasion, a direct assault. The tale is set in the later years of the eighteenth century, and asks the reader to hearken back to the days when areas now developed were peaceful fields: standing in a patch of countryside on the very edge of the city, Clarence Linden inveighs against what will happen next. He blames all those he believes are involved in chopping up England's ground – and “feelings” – into a world of terraces:
Is it the puny and spiritless artizan, or the debased and crippled slave of the counter and the till, or the sallow speculator on morals, who would mete us out our liberty, our happiness, our very feelings, by the yard and inch and fraction? No, no, let them follow what the books and precepts of their own wisdom teach them; let them cultivate more highly the lands they have already parcelled out by dykes and fences, and leave, though at scanty intervals, some green patches of unpolluted land for the poor man's beast and the free man's foot. (Disowned 9–10)
This passage obviously reveals that Linden is no friend to “the debased and crippled slave of the counter and the till . . . the sallow speculator on morals,” or to any other entity engaged in the process of suburbanizing the nation. But he also explicitly connects commercial and entrepeneurial activities with a loss to him of the rights of the “the free man's foot”: “our liberty, our happiness, our very feelings” are attacked, be believes, by the processes of land subdivision and suburbanization. Notably, Linden and the novel highly value the city, which is described as a world of zesty, interesting civilization, of culture and society, of “all genial companionship” (Disowned 139); the text is no enemy to the urban itself, perceiving the city as a space of exciting freedom (for men).Footnote 15 The countryside meanwhile occupies an equivocal position both here and in other Bulwer-Lytton novels for, while explicitly hymned, rural past-times are evoked as painfully – indeed, in Night and Morning, even fatally – boring.Footnote 16 The defense of the freedom to ramble in The Disowned is less about sniffing country air than it is about a world whose spatial order is changing in ways that point to deeper, more structural shifts.
For at this point, around the years of Victoria's accession, the assaults Bulwer-Lytton identifies do not stem from reasons common in later texts – the uncongenial practice of commuting, for example. Bulwer-Lytton's image of disgusting suburbia is nested instead in a rejection of its emerging presentation as a modern-day ideal, which is to say a rejection of the practices of commercialism and the shift in class power that undergird this increasingly potent force. Linden's concern with the invading suburban is underwritten by a libertarianism that really aims to maintain “freedoms” only an aristocratic male can properly enjoy. His nebulous association of the suburban with the alien or prostituting woman is ultimately a way of first characterizing, and then unmanning, the encroaching middle-classes, in an effort to reinforce their subservient position in the deferential order.
Letting and Leaving the Suburban Home
Thirty years after the publication of The Disowned, George Augustus Sala produced a satirical take on modern London entitled Gaslight and Daylight: With Some London Scenes They Shine Upon (1859). Sala's examination of the “Houses to Let” pages in the Times is another response to the commodification of suburbia: the parceling up of land into plots, the parceling up of homes into goods, and the absolute necessity of becoming an informed consumer in a modern world. Like Bulwer-Lytton, Sala frames his stereotypes of deadening suburbia with reference to texts that advertise its supposedly utopian promise. But Sala is no aristocrat, and here and in other middle-class texts of the period, the middle-class man stages his own bewilderment in the face of sharp practices, characterizing himself repeatedly as victim, and not perpetuator, of suburban growth.
In general Victorians did not own their houses, but took short leases and moved as their own financial circumstances – and the class affiliation of their street – changed.Footnote 17 This practice of constant moving, and all that moving involves – advertising, dealing with agents, hiring movers, selling and buying new furnishings – fit oddly with the emerging ideology of the home as an almost church-like space, removed from the world of commerce, dedicated to preserving the sanctity of the family.Footnote 18 (John Tosh has argued in his study of middle-class masculinity that the practice of constant moving may ultimately have reinforced men's “nostalgia for the home of their dreams” and “sentimental attraction to childhood, when home was imagined to have been as a ‘real’ home should be” (Tosh 25). Sala makes the strangely commercial realities of home-life in the modern era quite clear by comparing houses to other consumable goods in a passage of intense Victorian self-mockery:
We change our dresses, our servants, our friends and foes – how can our houses expect to be exempt from the mutabilities of life? We tire of the old friend, and incline to the new; the old baby is deposed in favour of the new baby; the fat, turnip silver watch our father gave us, gives place to a gold Geneva – we change, and swop, and barter, and give up, and take back, and long for, and get tired of, all and everything in life – why not of houses too? So the Supplement of the ‘Times’ can always offer Houses to Let; and we are continually running mad to let or hire them, as vice versa six months hence, perhaps we shall be as maniacally eager to hire or to let. (Sala 218)
Sala never uses the term stereotype but here, as in the Dublin Review article of a decade earlier, we see contemplation of newspaper advertisements prompting observations on the practices and the character of industrial modernity, particularly the use of repetition and puffery in advertisements. “A spade isn't a spade in 1859, but something else,” asserts Sala, “and with our house-agents, a house is not only a house but a great many things besides”:
A House to Let may be a mansion, a noble mansion, a family mansion, a residence, a desirable residence, a genteel residence, a family residence, a bachelor's residence, a distinguished residence, an elegant house, a substantial house, a detached house, a desirable villa, a semi-detached villa, a villa standing in its own grounds, an Italian villa, a villa-residence, a small villa, a compact detached cottage, a cottage ornee, and so on, almost ad infinitum. . . . (Sala 219)
Criticism of advertisers’ duplicitous use of language precedes discussion of suburbia's supposed “reality” – which, as in Bulwer-Lytton's novels, is forged in the shape of yet more stereotypes. The characters Sala creates – bored bachelors sucking on meerschaums, maiden ladies twittering in crumbling homes, criminally-inclined fraudsters like “the Earl of Elbowsout” (Sala 222) – are designed to point to the distance between elevated language and a debased reality. Yet Sala's images of loathsome suburbia and its residents hearken back to texts of a full three decades ago:
First, of the Mansion. What manner of house would you imagine that to be? I take it to be situate at Kew, possibly at Chiswick, peradventure at Putney. Red brick, stone window casings, a great many chimney-pots, a steep flight of steps before the door. Perhaps the advertisement says that it is ‘approached by a carriage drive.’ I can see that carriage drive, the mangy gravel, weeds and grass springing up between; the brown ragged lawn in the middle; the choked-up flower-beds, with pieces of broken bottles and fractured tobacco-pipes . . . (Sala 220)
As in earlier texts, Sala stresses the socially distant environs of the suburban home, then turns our attention to the poor exterior (the “mangy gravel,” the sad-looking lawn), before moving inside the front door to discuss characters who are essentially blood relations of Mr. and Mrs. Copperas. In a long line of scoundrel tenants, he imagines “Captain Vere de Vere Delamere, and his family, who paid nobody,” and “the celebrated Mr. Nix, who said he belonged to the Stock Exchange, and removed in the midst of winter, and at the dead of night, taking with him, over and above his own furniture, a few marble mantel-pieces, register stoves, and other trifles in the way of fixtures” (Sala 222). Stock-brokers are in fact particularly likely to live in suburbia, he observes, because of their constitutional desire to impress and their deep vulgarity: “The ‘villa standing in its own ground’ is generally suggestive of stock-brokers. Great people are these stock-brokers for villas; for driving mail-phaetons, or wide-awake looking dog carts . . .” (Sala 227). Sala's study concentrates in the first place on “uncovering” the underpinnings of the home advertisement – the ways in which both the original developer and the advertiser or auctioneer conspire to produce false images of the homes, then the proliferation of these textual images on page after page, edition after edition of the newspaper – before turning to the complicity of the fraudsters who actually live in the homes. His method of combating these images is to stamp out familiar replacement images of suburban aesthetic aridity, cultural debasement, and white-collar criminality, centering his critique of suburbia on the fact that it is both inhabited, and commercialized, by the tasteless and aspirational.
But notably, while Bulwer-Lytton's well-born heroes move through suburbia with distaste, but comparative ease, Sala returns repeatedly to stories of his own hapless failures. “Start not, reader, while I whisper in your ear,” he murmurs at one point: “The Italian villa is a shabby little domicile, only Italian in so much as it possesses Venetian blinds. I know it; for I, who speak, have been egregiously sold, lamentably taken in, by this mendacious villa” (Sala 228). If suburbia is a criminal enterprise, Sala implies, he has fallen a victim to it himself: in a tacit reply to observers of Bulwer-Lytton's ilk, Sala firmly situates responsibility for all such crimes elsewhere. Admitting his own social aspirations (he was, after all, tempted by the Italian villa), Sala stresses that he is guilty neither for the physical development of suburbia nor, for that matter, the crime of bad taste (he does not admire Venetian blinds): others, of a criminal – mostly lower-middle or working – class are guilty of both. Resisting Bulwer-Lytton's broad characterization of the suburban middle-class as either duplicitous or failed, then, Sala gives voice to a positive middle-class male identity fundamentally grounded in experience. Exposed regularly to the realities – the depredations – of a commercial age, Sala suggests that such exposure ultimately produces an informed participant. His use of suburban stereotypes thus stages both his familiarity with the commercial practices of the age and the fact that, through experience, he has learned to use them appropriately himself. Aligning himself with aristocratic stereotypes is a way of signaling his connectedness to traditional elite, aristocratic values while also demonstrating his ability to function in the modern world, because he has participated in it and learned its ways.
Other middle-class writers at the mid-century employed similar strategies, characterizing the middle-class man as one who makes mistakes – who falls for all the suburban ruses – and then learns from his errors. Charles Whitehead's “The Suburban Retreat” (1847), a short story from Bentley's Miscellany, is a case in point, a cautionary tale about a middle-class academic husband who allows himself to be enticed from his city lodging into the suburbs by a foolish – and ultimately chastened – wife. Mrs. Rushworth is convinced by all the specious arguments in favour of suburban residence: the suburbs, unlike the city, are healthy, she declares. When Mr. Rushworth points out they haven't caught Typhus (or been stifled, or poisoned) in twenty years of city living, his wife insists he's looking dreadfully – perhaps even fatally – ill. Then an interfering friend dwells on the extra space and domestic facilities they will enjoy in suburbia: “[s]ix rooms, such rooms, and a lean-to kitchen. A copper in it? Bless you, yes. All the washing can be done at home. I should call it a long garden.” Ease of public transportation and accessibility to London are also touted: there are “[o]mnibuses passing every minute at less than a stone's throw,” continues Mrs. Rushworth's friend (Whitehead 119). Rushworth's wife adds some further whispers of her own about the unhealthy looks of the forty-seven-year-old narrator, and the fish swallows the bait.
But as night follows day, the Suburban Retreat is anything but; Mrs. Rushworth's friend's use of advertising jargon necessarily precedes disillusionment. As soon as Mrs. Rushworth gets better acquainted with her new house, her language begins subtly to change, and the smallness of the accommodation is an immediate sign of the joke that must inevitably unfold. “She reported that the rooms were certainly not large, but they were so snug; that the kitchen was a perfect culinary love, and that the house was so openly situated, back and front, that if we didn't get air enough there, we should be suffocated in a windmill” (Whitehead 121): the comedy here depends on the reader's understanding that “snug” is a developer's synonym for “tiny,” of course, that a “culinary love” means minute, and that the whole place is most appallingly draughty. To make the point even clearer, Rushworth piteously makes us feel what he is losing:
Never shall I forget the feeling that came upon me when everything was cleared out, and I paced alone over the ribbed dust on the floor of my empty sitting-room. . . . Why not have rested contented here! It was an ample, cheerful, bustling street, full of life and gaiety from seven in the evening till midnight. Neither was the bed-room so close as my wife had pronounced it, and as I, like a fool, had been persuaded to believe it. There was a good, honest, brick-and-mortar look-out from the window. (Whitehead 121–22)
Rushworth here reframes the image of the city for the reader as “good, honest”: the urban street is not a place where Fagins prey but rather “ample, cheerful, bustling,” “full of life and gaity.” Washing the city free from the kinds of associations common from the early novels of Dickens (Whitehead and Dickens, incidentally, were friends), reconnecting with Bulwer-Lytton's love of the urban streets, Rushworth relocates crime and dishonesty firmly into the suburbs.
The rooms turn out to be so small Rushworth is constantly banging himself on the furniture: the home is overrun with pests and poorly built, so that there is “a great stain of damp, like a map of Lincolnshire” on the wall of their bedroom (Whitehead 124). Within hours of Rushworth's arrival he finds himself harangued by itinerant salesmen and dunned for the previous inhabitant's taxes, and soon his only entertainment is trying to put off the dubious characters who daily assault his home. These assaults are, he assures his reader, infinitely more alarming than those in the city, and certainly much more disturbing:
What a wretched mistake, or a base calumny it is to call London a noisy place, if by that be meant anything in its disparagement. There is a vast quantity of sound going forward, I admit; but it is a fine blended harmonious clamour and chatter, if I may so express myself; a sort of homogeneous hubbub which offers an admirable substitute for silence. But your vile suburbs can offer nothing but the deadness of the grave, or the rude raw bellowings of a cattle-market, or a raree-show, except at nine o'clock at night . . . no utterance in nature is so terribly mournful as the cry of the suburban pot-boy. (Whitehead 124)
Both husband and wife become faintly unhinged in the face of all this – as does Sarah, their domestic, who can't stop counting cats. Mrs. Rushworth's own serious decline is signaled by her willingness to talk over the wall to the large family next door and her sage contemplation of a mangle purchase. Rushworth's life only takes a turn for the better when he and his wife return, intensely relieved, to their former urban home: significantly, it is only on his resumption of life in his old lodgings that the narrator is finally able to finish his great book, a history of the Pyramids of Egypt. (If only Mr. Casaubon's problems were so easily resolved.)
“The early years of Victoria's reign were widely thought at the time to be bringing about the triumph of the middle classes,” observed Martin J. Wiener is in his foundational work English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: “Marx and Engels went so far as to assert in 1850 that ‘the only remaining aristocracy is the bourgeoisie.’” Yet as Wiener notes, while in broad terms this shift was clearly well underway, it happened “not before the aristocracy had succeeded in both prolonging its reign and educating its successors in its world view” (Wiener 12). Texts like Whitehead's and Sala's draw on and reproduce not only Bulwer-Lytton's stereotypes of tedious or criminal suburbia but also the shape of their construction – that is to say, like Bulwer-Lytton, these mid-century stories of suburbia trace an arc of hope to disillusionment, where hope is exploited and manipulated by advertisers and developers, where a “true” stereotype (of suburban criminality and dullness) emerges latterly to dispel a “false” one (of suburban promise). The discovery that homes are fundamentally commodities in the modern world becomes a fact the stories strain to uncover, a passage through which order, peace, and productivity are finally restored. Rejecting suburbia entirely, or living within it as a sadder and wiser man, seem the only available options. To be a middle-class man of “taste” was to adopt the world-view of the aristocrat about this astonishingly fast-paced modern phenomenon.
Recasting Suburban Stereotypes: Reapproaching the Semi-Detached House
The visions of suburbia discussed thus far shaped literary representations of the suburbs for decades. The experience of unease in a suburban landscape, distaste at suburban aesthetics, and the idea of suburbia as inimical to creativity are widespread, almost ubiquitous, fin-de-siècle literary themes. The association of the suburban domestic with the feminine became particularly familiar, and particularly significant, in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the world of suburban living was felt to be dominated – in the day-time particularly – by women and women's work. As the rhythms and patterns of commuting apparently reinforced the feminization of suburbia, many authors built on Linden's and Rushworth's mistrust of suburban women. When the men go to work, the world of suburbia goes under “the unquestioned rule of woman,” T. H. Crosland argued in The Suburbans – adding sourly, “which is not good” (21. Crosland hints that wives do nothing but laze around all day, until the hour before the master is due home). A number of writers argued that suburbia, so carefully detached from the world of work and business, was therefore both a scene of and a force in the separateness, anonymity, and isolation of humans in an age of machines and disrupted birth networks (Gissing argues in The Whirlpool that commuting has produced a generation of men who know almost nothing of their supposed home [327]).Footnote 19 Sir Walter Besant, walking the streets of suburbia at the beginning of the twentieth century, remarked that one of the most striking features of the suburban arrangement was the lack of human interaction, and crucially he argued that this was true not just for men, but also women:
they lost all the London life – the shops, the animation of the streets, their old circle of friends; in its place they found all the exclusiveness and class feeling of London with none of the advantages of a country town. . . . in the new suburb of Stockwell there were no interests [in common]; the wife of the small wholesale merchant would not call on the wife of the retail dealer; the wife of the barrister would not call on either; there was no society, and so for fifty years the massive dulness [sic] of the London suburb continued. (Besant 17)Footnote 20
Thus far we have seen the ways in which familiar tropes of suburban dullness may be traced back to early Victorian stereotypes that emerged in an effort to defuse the cultural and commercial power of the middle classes. Yet those tropes of suburban dullness were not universally endorsed in either the early decades of Victoria's reign or at the fin de siècle. Annette R. Federico, discussing Marie Corelli's popular fiction, argues that the privileging of the city at the turn of the century by male writers was effectively a privileging of the male sphere of action, in which the denigration of suburbia was a trivializing of the world “associated with feminine domesticity, homogeneity, and the delights of nature (or at least of a small garden)” (66–67). This pertinent observation may fruitfully be applied to texts written much earlier too, for indeed, even in the early decades of suburbanization, women engaged suburbia in potentially surprising ways. Emily Eden's The Semi-Detached House, from the late 1850s, is an important case in point: Eden evokes the domestic suburban space as a site that crucially facilitates and sustains new connections among women. Yet before these connections can take place, her characters first need to discover, and then overset, their stereotypes of suburbia. The critical significance of this process in the novel points not only to Eden's consciousness of the pervasiveness of the stereotypes but also the gender politics that already underpinned them.
Eden indicates that no resident can even think about living in an 1850s suburban home without navigating prejudices born of stereotype. The aristocratic heroine's ideas about suburbia are so shaped by what she has heard and read, she is hardly willing to move there at all. “I should hate my semi-detachment, or whatever the occupants of the other half of the house may call themselves,” Lady Blanche Chester declares roguishly on the novel's first page, when the plan of residing in suburbia is first raised, and she repeatedly jokes about what her neighbors will look like (“fat”) and wear (“thick, heavy mittens”) (Eden 13, 15; ch. 1).Footnote 21 Recently married, Blanche is pregnant; her diplomat husband Arthur is about to embark on a vaguely outlined “special mission” to Berlin for three months. A semi-detached house is chosen as the best housing option because her doctor wishes her to be out of unhealthy London during her husband's absence yet “within reach of [the doctor's] surveillance” (Eden 19; ch. 1). A home entitled “Pleasance” in the dreadful-sounding “Dulham” is, her husband assures her, the natural choice (Balham and Fulham, both old settlements, became resolutely suburban areas of London in the nineteenth century); Eden begins, in other words, by raising and engaging the most familiar stereotypes of suburbia. If the house's moniker is, like “Copperas Bower,” a sign of middle-class pretensions to aristocratic elegance, the bathetic contrast offered by the suburb's name seems to point out the contrast between advertiser-hype and deadening reality.
Indeed, the narrator explicitly draws attention to the inflated language used by those who deal in homes for commercial purposes. “Now it is a remarkable fact in natural history that in all the suburbs of London, consisting of detached houses, called by auctioneers ‘small and elegant,’ or on Terraces described as first-rate dwellings, there is always an invisible macaw, whose screaming keeps the hamlet or terrace in a constant state of irritation,” she remarks early in the novel. The narrator goes on to present the undiscoverable but ever-present macaw as a comical symbol of all that is worst about suburbia:
Nobody at Dulham owned to having one, and detection was impossible, for there, as at all the suburban villages, the inhabitants lived by, and for, and with London. The men went daily to their offices or counting-houses, and the women depended for society on long morning visits from London friends and relations; and they did not, as they observed with much pride, ‘visit at Dulham.’ So the Macaw screeched on, and as his noise seemed to come from fifty houses at once, everybody suspected everybody of keeping this plumed atrocity. No. 3 sent to No. 5 to beg that the bird might be shut up for a few days, as No. 3's baby did nothing but start, and would not wean. No. 3's messenger met No. 5's maid-of-all-work, coming with a bold request that the macaw might be sent away, as “Missus's mother-in-law was subject to bad headaches, and was driv half mad.” As neither of the parties owned even a linnet, in the way of bird, the nuisance was not abated by this negotiation. (Eden 25–26; ch. 2)Footnote 22
The invisible macaw's incessant screech reminds us of the “stereotyped” home advertisements in the pages of the Times, or even the homes themselves – the endless, meaningless, repetitive rows that seemed not only a product but a visual illustration of the mechanical processes of industry. Suburbia appears at this point in Eden's text to be Dulham indeed, a place remarkable for its lack of culture and real human interactions: the men all leave for work in the daytime, while the women who remain refuse to visit each other and simply twitch curtains.
Yet Blanche's middle-class neighbors resist her expectations in surprising ways. Mrs. Hopkinson, the resident of the other half of the semi-detached house, may be something of a curtain-twitcher herself (she is first seen in a “commanding position in the window” [Eden 21; ch. 2],) and she needs an aristocrat to point out to her the value and aesthetic of her own porcelain, but the relationship that evolves between the two women is structured to deflate many of the aristocrat's stereotypes. Blanche is repeatedly forced to acknowledge the utility of the sturdiness and practicality she initially disdained. After an evening lingering by the river at dusk, for instance, the nervy Blanche's health deteriorates: “stretched on the sofa, pale and shrunk, with red eyes and hot hands, a feeble attempt at a cap at the very back of her head,” she feels actually ill (Eden 48; ch. 5). To add insult to injury, at this moment something goes “radically wrong with the kitchen flue” (Eden 54–55; ch. 5), filling the place with smoke and expelling the home's residents into the garden. The person who saves the day and revives Blanche is the practical Mrs. Hopkinson, who, finding Blanche on a chilly bench, takes charge, inviting them into her side of the house before demonstrating her knowledge of the errant kitchen flue – for after all, her own is exactly the same. (At last we see some value in the repetitive architectural features of terraced and semi-detached homes).Footnote 23 The relationship between the women proves more than just one of utility, or of middle-class facility with kitchens, for once the initial contact is made the two heroines come to realize they are in the same marital boat. Just as Blanche feels abandoned by her husband in pregnancy, so, Mrs. Hopkinson admits, she too has been left by her husband John for more than half of every year since their marriage, including after her confinements (Eden 61; ch. 6). Cementing the connection, Eden goes on to reveal that the two husbands knew each other in the past: Mrs. Hopkinson's husband saved Arthur's life by nursing him during a fever. The discovery increases the debt that the aristocratic pairing owes their solidly practical middle-class neighbors while reinforcing the novel's evolving commitment to bourgeois domestic skills. Aristocratic social isolation and romantic self-indulgence are shown to be dangerous: Blanche's endless fantasies about her health and the possibility her husband's love might wane leave her prey to actual ill-health. Mrs. Hopkinson's no-nonsense attitude, her knowledge of the workings of the suburban domestic interior, and her engagement in distinctively feminine networks (she quickly gets Blanche involved in the daily concerns of the people in her own life) all prove crucial, stabilizing Blanche psychologically and healing her physically while preparing her for happy, productive motherhood.
Mrs. Hopkinsons's skills acquire particular significance when she assists Blanche in her labor: indeed, the middle-class woman is ultimately given the credit for the continuity of the aristocratic family in a sequence of scenes in which the upper-class characters seem barely able to function in the face of a genuine, if everyday, crisis. With the family doctor and the hired nurse both away, and a newly-returned Arthur reduced to wringing his hands in despair, one knock at the door stirs up Mrs. Hopkinson, who, declaring herself “as good a month nurse as any in the kingdom,” springs into action (Eden 194; ch. 18). Eden makes it quite clear that the replacement doctor corralled into attending the birth does more harm than good in the hours that follow, whispering “horrible surgical anecdote[s]” to an aghast Arthur; it is Mrs. Hopkinson, who has just time for a “brusque word or two,” who seems actually to deliver the boy, a son and heir for the Chesters (Eden 195, 196; ch. 18).Footnote 24 Mrs. Hopkinson's skills as midwife and nurse clearly outstrip those of the professionals Arthur engages, and her presence conveniently next door makes her far more useful, because more available, than they. The proximities of suburbia thus prove peculiarly advantageous to the young aristocratic family. Arthur and Blanche both view Mrs. Hopkinson as a life-saver, and from now on she is described explicitly as a “friend” (Eden 223; ch. 21).
This is not, of course, a friendship of the streets or of the shops; it is a new kind of friendship that is specific to the suburban home arrangement. The friendship that grows within the semi-detached house brings together women who would not ordinarily meet socially, and shows them through the very similarity of the homes they inhabit that they indeed have something in common. Discovering a shared chimney flue leads to a discovery of shared marital burdens and even an unlikely shared history; the parallels are reinforced daily through conversations about decorative objects, servants, room arrangement, children. And intriguingly, in this new friendship, the normative class hierarchy is unsettled as the aristocratic heroine comes to recognize the superior domestic management skills of her middle-class neighbor – a point made most obviously when the baby's safe arrival, and thus the continuation of the family name, is brought quite literally to Mrs. Hopkinson's door.Footnote 25 Women who know what to do with a smoky flue, women who understand basic obstetrics, women who can manage their own children, are the women who will prosper in suburbia, Eden's novel suggests. The stereotype of suburbia as a deadening space seems finally overturned in a novel that describes it instead as a place of friendship and new birth, for women and families especially.
Yet there is a price to pay for this friendship: Eden's novel does not, as Monica F. Cohen has pointed out, paint an uncomplicated vision of inter-class community. Cohen rightly observes that the aristocrats’ attraction to their middle-class neighbors depends upon the fact that the latter “do not scrimp and save, start businesses or invest in industry. Although they have serious concerns about how to marry off their fortuneless daughters, they seem utterly uninterested in money” (Cohen 38). Mrs. Hopkinson never asks for Blanche's friendship – is in fact deeply unwilling to thrust herself on Blanche socially because of Blanche's elevated position. And when social mobility happens late in the novel, it is through the auspices of the generous aristocrats, who confer (as in Bulwer-Lytton's novels) social advancement to those they admire. The relationship Blanche imagines with Mrs. Hopkinson going forwards is one that looks dangerously feudal: “I should like her to be near baby, she understands him so thoroughly; and if she would take care of him, I could take care of her,” she observes (Eden 223; ch. 21). Middle-class social mobility is therefore put squarely into the control of the upper-classes, and the Hopkinsons’ acceptance of this is a condition of the friendship that subsequently flourishes.
To ground the point, Eden includes another family in the novel that does not accept upper-class control of the social hierarchy; that family fails to achieve the Chesters’ friendship and support and, after financial disaster strikes, must leave Dulham and the country. Eden's vicious portraits of the Jewish speculator Baron Samson and his thrusting wife are shaped by another set of contemporary stereotypes, ones that are emphatically not defused.Footnote 26 Patterns of immigration may have given extra impetus to anti-Semitism around the time Eden was writing: Geoffrey C. Field observes that “[r]oughly speaking . . . the Jewish population in Britain grew from about 35,000 in 1850 to 243,000 in 1910” (295). Moreover, Jewish men were playing an increasingly prominent part in public and political life at the time, and Eden (an aristocrat and Whig hostess herself) makes explicit, bitter reference to the Jewish Disabilities Bill that had finally cleared the way for Jewish men to sit in the House of Commons the year before.Footnote 27 Struggling to achieve social position and wealth by any means – and repeatedly descried for their “yellow” skin and strange inability to look people squarely in the eye – the Samsons’ pushing behavior precludes the kind of friendship Eden valorizes between the compliant Mrs. Hopkinson and Blanche. Only the Samsons’ much-put-upon niece Rachel, a victimized figure they attempt to exploit, is left in England at the end of the novel, when the couple absconds to escape criminal charges for the Baron's financial wrong-doings. Rachel's marriage to a relative of Mrs. Hopkinson plays out the possibility of Jewish acculturation and assimilation that was itself a stereotype in nineteenth-century literature.Footnote 28
Eden's novel is perhaps best understood, then, as an effort to siphon off pressure in the face of increasing social plurality. Her text works to create a type of suburbanite who is most consistent with traditional English aristocratic values and then marks her out quite carefully from the suburbanite who is not. If Bulwer-Lytton, Sala, and Whitehead center their attention on the commercialization of the suburban home, Eden's text seems more preoccupied by the question of how to cope in an era of increased social mixing. The aristocratic Blanche is willing to communicate and interact with a stout woman who is not well-dressed and does not understand porcelain as long as she does not undermine upper-class social privileges – and is not Jewish. Pushing at the stereotype of suburbia as deadening “Dulham,” Eden unseats some of the most common preconceptions about the new areas, suggesting that women's experiences of suburbia may be especially full of life. But she does not dispense with stereotypes entirely for, like her predecessors, Eden finds stereotyping a powerful tool for both expressing and managing the challenges and threats of suburban modernity.
Conclusions
Stereotyping is an effort to neutralize and control, to restore legibility. At a historical moment in which individuals were increasingly resisting the totemic denominations of self conferred by the class system (Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self, identifies “recognized particularity” as one of three key facets of modern individualism), stereotyping, with its apparent claim to reduce personality back to groups and types, seems to restore social legibility (Taylor 185).Footnote 29 The stereotyping of suburbia in the early- to mid-Victorian years was one way of attempting to limit the increasing cultural force of the middle classes: the stultifying suburb was a stereotype employed in the service of an aristocratic ideology that emerged at a time of palpable upper-class retreat. In that the English middle classes came substantially to adopt the aesthetics of the aristocracy, in that purchasing gentility was, somewhat paradoxically, at the forefront of Victorian mass consumer culture, it is perhaps not surprising that middle-class texts regularly signed up to the aristocracy's freighted loathing of the new suburban homes. Of course, the slippage between what was said and what was practiced must not be underestimated. Middle-class Victorians criticized the values of commercialism, and of commodifying houses especially, but they bought, let, and sold their homes on an astonishing scale.
The indisputably commercial realities of suburban living inevitably complicated for the Victorians, and complicate for us, any notion of the space as separated from the practices and values of the public sphere. Sharon Marcus insists, in her study of Victorian apartment living, that we must “question the hegemony of separate spheres ideology not only because it applied to only one class, the bourgeoisie, but because it may not even have applied to that class” (7). Representations of suburbia as dull, deadening, confining, and arid may seem to us a reasonable response to a world of enforced domesticity and starkly separated roles – which is to say, to the vision of the Victorian domestic environment we continue to espouse. Yet as Marcus points out, gender roles may not have been as fixed or profoundly different as we like to think, and the spaces of home and city, city and suburb were only unevenly demarcated along the lines of separate spheres. Certainly, the literature discussed here shows just how profoundly involved suburbia was in the battles of industrial modernity – how particularly engaged suburbia was, and was felt to be, in the practices and discourses surrounding commercialism and the values of mass production. Indeed, the writers discussed in this article were not critiquing suburbia for the rigid separation it enforced between the domestic sphere and the place of work. On the contrary, they were responding to the fact that the boundaries between public and private, commercial and domestic were, in the suburban landscape, unsettlingly fluid.
