The Promise of the Suburbs : A Victorian History in Literature and Culture

When did the suburbs gain their reputation as places of dullness and sterility? This book traces the origins of such suburban stereotypes back to the 1820s, the earliest decade of suburban growth, and argues that those stereotypes were forged from the first to denigrate women and the new middle classes. Disdain for the suburbs blazed especially hotly at the fin de siècle. Writers like George Gissing and H. G. Wells famously presented the suburbs as dull and tedious places, inimical to creativity, and these are the images of the Victorian suburbs scholars know best to this day. This book traces a long-forgotten counter discourse back into the early decades of the century, showing that in women’s fiction especially, the suburbs functioned narratively as places of opportunity and new beginnings. The very existence of suburban problems, meanwhile, offered women a vocation, with professional work in and around the suburban home offered tentatively as the answer, the solution, the future. Drawing on a broad range of Victorian literature, from Charles Dickens and Mary Elizabeth Braddon to less well-known writers like John Claudius Loudon, Emily Eden, Bertha Buxton, Julia Frankau, and Jane Ellen Panton, this book bring forgotten voices back into the conversation about the growth of a new landscape, a new way of life. A study of the fast-growing Victorian suburbs as places of connection, creativity, and professional advance, especially for women

From the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, the suburbs were maligned by the aristocratic elite as dull zones of low cultural ambition and vulgarity, as well as generally female spaces isolated from the consequential male world of commerce. Sarah Bilston argues that these attitudes were forged to undermine the cultural authority of the emerging middle class and to reinforce patriarchy by trivializing women’s work. Resisting these stereotypes, Bilston reveals how suburban life offered ambitious women, especially women writers, access to supportive communities and opportunities for literary and artistic experimentation as well as professional advancement. From more familiar figures such as the sensation author Mary Elizabeth Braddon to interior design journalist Jane Ellen Panton and garden writer Jane Loudon, this work presents a more complicated portrait of how women and English society at large navigated a fast-growing, rapidly changing landscape. A study of the fast-growing Victorian suburbs as places of connection, creativity, and professional advance, especially for women Literature has, from the start of the nineteenth century, cast the suburbs as dull, vulgar, and unimaginative margins where, by definition, nothing important takes place. Sarah Bilston argues that such attitudes were forged to undermine the cultural authority of the emerging middle class and to reinforce patriarchy by trivializing women's work. Resisting these stereotypes, Bilston reveals that suburban life offered ambitious women, especially writers, access to supportive communities and opportunities for literary and artistic experimentation as well as professional advancement. Bilston interprets both familiar figures (sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon) and less well-known writers (including interior design journalist Jane Ellen Panton and garden writer Jane Loudon) to reveal how women and society at large navigated a fast†'growing, rapidly changing landscape. Far from being a cultural dead end, the new suburbs promised women access to the exciting opportunities of modernity. Contents 5 Acknowledgments 7 Introduction: The “Horror” of Suburbia 11 1. John Claudius Loudon and the New Suburban Landscape 30 2. Setting Suburban Stereotypes: 1820s–1850s 47 3. Plotting the Suburbs: Popular Fiction and Common Knowledge, 1850s–1870s 63 4. “Art at Home”: Women and the Suburban Interior 84 5. Women and the Suburban Garden 124 6. Suburban Opportunity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Fiction 149 7. “The Quintessence of the Suburban”: Jane Ellen Panton and Julia Frankau Speak of Suburbia 188 Conclusions: Stepping off the Threshold 219 Notes 229 Bibliography 261 Index 277