Epilogue

This short section establishes the consonances between the representation of London’s nineteenth-century housing crisis, and its modern-day housing crisis. It emphasises the shared use of language in journalistic representations of urban poverty, but also attends to key differences: while the modern-day housing crisis is preoccupied with the number of homes available and their value as a market commodity, the nineteenth-century housing crisis focused on what new forms of housing could address urgent social need.

‘Twenty girls in my attic’: Spatial and Spiritual Conversion in L. T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter

This chapter examines L.T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter (1895). This novel integrates generic conventions of romance and realism in order to engage in contemporary debates about the settlement movement for its juvenile audience. In its representation of the protagonist’s experience living and working in various forms of settlement housing in London’s East End, the novel explores the degree to which a commitment to religious philosophy was necessary to effect meaningful social change.

The Kailyard Comes to London: The Progressive Potential of Romantic Convention in Annie S. Swan’s A Victory Won

This chapter examines Annie S. Swan’s novel A Victory Won (1895) in the context of the generic conventions of the kailyard genre. Despite the novel’s romantic representation of the fictional ‘Barker Street Chambers’, which is based on the Chenies Street Chambers, it explores the value of the new social relationships that could emerge in such spaces. The novel focuses on a mutually supportive and egalitarian relationship between two women who share domestic space, and in so doing elaborates on the possibilities – rather than the drawbacks – of gender-segregated housing.

Fugitive Living: Social Mobility and Domestic Space in Julia Frankau’s The Heart of a Child

This chapter examines Julia Frankau’s The Heart of a Child (1908) a novel that documents a poor orphan’s social ascent. Despite the protagonist’s experience of a range of new models of domestic life – including model dwellings, a ‘home for working girls’, and an apartment (based on the Artillery Mansions in Victoria) – she remains circumscribed at each stage by her status as an unmarried woman. This novel’s satirical engagement with slum fiction reveals that all women’s lives are shaped by domestic insecurity – even if they are shaped differently.

‘Vital friendship’: Sexual and Economic Ambivalence in Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina

This chapter examines Rhoda Broughton’s novel Dear Faustina (1879), which engages with the conventions of the New Woman novel for the purpose of commenting on the difficult social position of independent women. The novel’s representation of two key forms of new housing, women’ residences (or ladies’ chambers) and settlement housing, uncovers the way that these new domestic spaces made legible the relationship between economic and sexual power. While this novel has often been interpreted as a narrative of inversion or exchange between homosocial and heterosexual relationships, this chapter focuses on the ways that the novel is instead characterised by ambivalence in both form and theme.

Housing Crisis: Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London

This chapter describes the historical and social context in which new architectural designs, and new social relationships, for domestic spaces emerged. It describes the books key terms, and establishes the parameters of its argument. This chapter explores the literary representation of domestic space, and its connection to written explorations of individual and collective identities.

‘To make a garden of the town’: The Nineteenth-Century Legacy of the Hampstead Garden Suburb

This chapter explores the architectural and social origins of the Hampstead Garden Suburb. Initiated by Henrietta Barnett, Hampstead Garden Suburb was radical departure from nineteenth-century town planning in its emphasis on a variety of housing types, integrated green spaces, and various community and social services. Yet its design was not only a clear response to the social problems presented by the nineteenth-century city, but also a synthesis of several models of new domestic architecture that existed in the city itself including model dwellings, women’s residences, and settlement housing. This chapter engages with both visual and literary representations of the Hampstead Garden Suburb to establish its nineteenth-century legacy.

‘Out of its torpid misery’: Plotting Passivity in Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl

This chapter examines Margaret Harkness’s novel A City Girl (1887). It describes the emergence of the Model Dwellings Movement, and considers Harkness’s time living in a model dwelling in London’s East End: Katharine Buildings. This chapter studies the fictional representation of Katharine Buildings in A City Girl to engage with questions about the social effectiveness of model dwellings movement and its program of ‘capitalist philanthropy.’

‘More making the best of it’: Living with Liberalism in Mary Ward’s Marcella

This chapter examines Mary Ward’s novel Marcella (1894). It explores the ways that Ward’s representation of the titular protagonist Marcella Boyce’s experience of domestic space offers its readers an exercise in liberal cognition. It focuses specifically on the novel’s portrait of the Herbrand Street Peabody Buildings in Bloomsbury, fictionalised as the Brown’s Buildings, and the ways this space is used to facilitate the protagonist’s intellectual development.

Labour Leaders and Socialist Saviours: Individualism and Collectivism in Margaret Harkness’s George Eastmont, Wanderer

This chapter examines Margaret Harkness’s novel George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905). It focuses on the tensions between individualism and collectivism in the novel’s representation of the late nineteenth-century socialist and trades union movements. It demonstrates how such tensions are evident in the novel’s representation of the City of London Corporation Buildings, and explores how the novel’s radical departure from generic conventions offers a suggestion of ways to address such tensions.