ABSTRACT
Edwardian London was, in fact, a bewildering sprawl of suburbs. Crippen's suburb was certainly convenient to business in the city, but the 'walking suburbs' had long lost any social cachet that they may have had when they were developed largely in the 1850s, '60s, and '70s. Charles Masterman, a prominent Edwardian voice in debates on the city, was reported to have expressed incredulity at the absurdity of characters in a play debating the relative social merits of Clapham and Herne Hill. The virulent misogyny directed against Cora Crippen was precise and particular; it was not directed against Crippen's typist and lover, Ethel Le Neve, but against the inadequate suburban wife. Simply, the suburbs were perceived as a problem. In their sprawling mass, they signalled a distinct shift in the weight of the class structure, yet their 'ethnography' remained mysteriously unknowable to the cultural critics who would both imagine and pathologise them.
