Suburban Opportunity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Fiction

Sensation writer Mary Elizabeth Braddon makes plenty of jokes at the expense of the suburbanites reading her novels, poking fun at the interests they shared, the ambitions they nursed. Yet the suburbs function narratively in her works as places of movement, opportunity, and change. Braddon deploys the plot arc of the suburban popular novel (first discussed in chapter 3) to lift worthy heroines out of the lives into which they were born. Striving heroines begin in dusty, down-at-heel Camberwell; if they work hard, and are lucky, they are rewarded with the pleasures of upper-middle-class Richmond.

John Claudius Loudon and the New Suburban Landscape

John Claudius Loudon was an early proponent of the suburbs. His work represented the new spaces as places of meeting, community, modernity, and middle-class happiness. Loudon suggested that women were especially likely to benefit from, and contribute successfully to, this new landscape.

Introduction

Jokes about dull, identikit suburbs sound modern, but they are as old as the suburbs themselves. My introduction discusses the origins of the stereotype and sketches a counter narrative, of the suburbs as places of new beginnings for residents leaving the countryside in search of economic opportunities.

“Art at Home”

Later Victorian interior design manuals presented design as a way of rescuing home life and, by extension, society and the nation, from the forces of capitalism and commodity culture. They treat the suburban home, not as a terrible modern malaise, but rather the solution to a national problem, so long as a reading, thinking, and vigorously practicing female interior decorator is present to work, decorate, and design. A surprising number of texts argue explicitly that for women’s decorating to have its full moral and social regenerative effect, women need to become professional, paid interior designers.

Conclusions

It is not accidental that the first exhibition of women’s professional work in England was housed not in a quaint cottage or (for that matter) a purpose-built exhibition hall, but in a suburban villa. The villa was not only consistent with women’s professional work, it helped produce it.

“The Quintessence of the Suburban”

Jane Ellen Panton and Julia Frankau made their careers writing—and fighting—about the suburbs. Chapter 7 explores the literary relationship between Frankau and Panton and the communities of which both were a part. Suburban communities played important parts in both their careers, albeit in quite different ways: Frankau made her reputation with a novel about Jewish life in Maida Vale, while Panton rose to prominence writing about home decoration and the suburbs to the south of London. Frankau finally sought to distance herself from her Anglo-Jewish suburban beginnings and enter the ranks of the English cosmopolitan elite; Panton, born Frith, detached herself from her great father and forged a new identity for herself as “Mrs. Panton,” discovering in suburban Shortlands in Bromley a community of writers who helped her transition. The two writers viewed the different suburban communities they encountered quite differently. Yet the two were united by a refusal to view their birth identities as defining their life course, pursing lives and professional careers shaped by the suburb’s thematic of mobility, new starts, and self-recreation.

Plotting the Suburbs

Novels set in suburban locales represent a world in flux. Beneath the shifting sands of social mobility run thick strands of apparently common knowledge that reassure readers of continuity with the past and the existence of enduring values. These values—such as suspicion of suburban homes’ commodity status, the charge of vulgar furnishing—undoubtedly express suspicion of the new masses. But they also form a means of fostering connections, shared perspectives, in a time of dizzying change.

Women and the Suburban Garden

Gardening advice texts evoked women gardeners as active laborers, aesthetically informed designers, participants in the marketplace, and, toward the end of the century, even professional business partners. Reframing women’s relationship to the garden—and to society itself—across the course of Victoria’s reign, such texts do not just imagine feminine power, they hand power over to reading and gardening women. Suburban gardens become, together with the suburban interior, spaces of aesthetic experimentation, apprenticeship, and finally professional practice.

Setting Suburban Stereotypes 1820s–1850s

Decrying suburbia at the fin de siècle placed a speaker in a long literary and cultural tradition; Gissing, Wells, Bennett, and Forster inherited images and terms of culturally and aesthetically arid, bourgeois suburbia that had been in circulation for decades. The stereotyping of suburbia in the early to mid-Victorian years was one way of attempting to limit the increasing cultural force of the middle classes: the image of the dull, identikit suburb was a stereotype employed in the service of an aristocratic ideology that emerged at a time of upper-class retreat.