“YOUR VILE SUBURBS CAN OFFER NOTHING BUT THE DEADNESS OF THE GRAVE”: THE STEREOTYPING OF EARLY VICTORIAN SUBURBIA

Abstract

While literary critics have becomeincreasingly 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). 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.