ABSTRACT
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 insignifi cant 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 specifi cally 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 specifi cally 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.
