ABSTRACT
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 fi gured 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 fi gured as reassuring, a celebration of middle-class achievement?
