Socialist Schemes and Suburban Dreams

Socialist reform schemes served as the dominant venue for utopian dreaming in the first half of the 1800s. Proposals for radical shifts away from urban life emerged from the minds of famous figures such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, whose faith in scientific progress was matched only by their hatred of the miserable industrial slum. In addition to socialist visionaries, well-meaning politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, and architects exhausted much labor, most of it futile, in their attempts to ameliorate the conditions of the rookeries of London and other cities, either by bringing parks into the city or by dispersing working-class residents into the meadows with railroads. Their goals were only realized on paper, where the futuristic terms of utopian architecture were also being set: glass, metal, mechanization, and the use of cosmopolitan ornamentation were placed before the reading public as the building forms of the great, green age to come.

Gardening in the Apocalypse

The “White City” of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago struck many Americans as a hopeful glimmer of the happy cities to come, but soon, visions of even happier utopian suburbs reclaimed dominance, asserting the need for “A Cityless and Countryless World.” When Bellamy produced his sequel to Looking Backward, it promised a future of commuting by motorcar and personal aircraft to and from cottages in garden suburbs. In different ways, influential reformers and architects such as Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright fed their readings of utopian literature into influential designs for destroying old cities and achieving suburban bliss. The last great nineteenth-century utopian visionary was also the greatest science-fiction author of the early twentieth century: H. G. Wells. He, perhaps more than any other writer, carried forward the Victorian call to abandon Babylon to new heights and fresh audiences, prophesying dreadful apocalypse, and luminously modern gardens to follow.

Architecture Under Nationalism

The international smash Looking Backward 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy, represents the peak of nineteenth-century utopian literature. As the troubles of American industrial cities reached a boiling point, this novel offered a seductive vision of universal prosperity under industrial socialism. Its urban design content was somewhat vague, but Bellamy quickly published an essay clarifying his commitment to the principles of urban decentralization, and a number of his fans wrote sequels driving this point home. As a major political movement called “Nationalism” rose to carry out Bellamy’s vision, William Morris roused his pen in London to rebut Looking Backward with an anti-industrial counter-utopia of pastoral peace: News from Nowhere. The suburban Morris had more in common with Bellamy, however, than he realized. At the same time, the architect John Pickering Putnam called for garden apartments to define the coming Nationalist utopia, testing his ideas with several prominent projects in Boston’s Back Bay.

“God Made the Country, Man Made the Town”

Victorian utopian visionaries were deeply indebted to biblical, classical, and Renaissance concepts of ideal life and prophecies for the future. This chapter analyzes the key ideas about urbanism imbedded within venerable and influential texts, such as those by Plato, Thomas More, and Francis Bacon, all while making regular references to Victorian understandings and representations of them. This chapter also accounts for the rise of several habits of mind that proved influential to Victorian utopian visionaries: the development of the theory of scientific and technological progress, and the belief that the rapidly growing city of London was a chaotic Babel and a foul Babylon worthy of scorn. These notions were brought together in the most influential utopian vision of the 1700s, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, which offered a prophecy of urban redemption while drawing a vociferous expression of contempt for cities from the mouth of a hypothetical progressive Englishman.

Conclusion

The diverse horde of nineteenth-century utopian visions was united by a consistent call to abolish urbanism and replace it with a future in gardens. A short discussion of the consequences of these visions in real landscapes of the twentieth century is presented in this conclusion: the suburban revolution has evolved in ways that would probably have prompted ambivalence in the minds of many Victorians, had they lived to see their dreams come true in some ways, and fail in others. Their longing for reform was often motivated by genuine desires to improve the lives of their fellow beings, although it is also a tragic fact that their altruism was often tarnished by bigotry, arrogance, simplistic thinking, and other corrupting influences. In the end, perhaps the most valuable legacy of the Victorian utopian visionaries is their demonstration of the incredible power of human dreams to change our world—and the need for humans to continue dreaming, with compassion and humility, to make the world better, in part by undoing the damage of old dreams that have become modern nightmares.

Urban Non-Fiction and Suburban Science Fiction

Intimately detailed, non-fiction accounts of the horrors of British cities proliferated in the mid-1800s, casting critical light on the slums. New sanitation laws were passed and philanthropic interventions were staged, but they barely made a dent in the problem. Then, in 1871, the utopian science-fiction novel exploded onto the scene, offering radical imaginary solutions to the seemingly intractable problems of industrial urban life. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race offered readers a vision of tidy garden villages built by a highly advanced branch of humanity who have rejected cities. A Dutch author imagined a radiantly futuristic, enormous, dense, bustling London and was rejected by English-speaking critics, while other British writers developed the more popular theme of dispersal in different ways, always with imaginary mechanized transport at the ready to facilitate life amid the cottages, villas, and towers of the glassy, metallic garden future. Increasingly, they also turned to catastrophic urban destruction as the solution to London.

The Republic of the Future

The United States produced a number of early utopian visions of suburban dispersal, demonstrating that Americans had inherited some of the anti-urban tendencies of their British forebears. An early feminist science-fiction novel by Mary Griffith insisted that cities could be great, but she was decidedly in the minority. After consuming British science fiction in the 1870s, American authors dominated utopian literature in the 1880s, many providing it with new urgency by engaging head-on with the rise of the industrial corporation. These writers were a heterogeneous bunch—ranging from math teachers to Spiritualist bohemians—but while they were often politically opposed to one another, they were consistent in their concept of utopia: life in large, complex cities such as New York or Boston was maddening, and a new world of glass, metal, synthetic stone, whirring machines, and, most importantly, endless greenery, needed to rise in place of the terrible city.

Empires of Hygiene and Horror

With the popular utopian novel well established by 1875, a growing number of writers entered the scene, each offering their take on the problems of the city and the promises of high-tech suburban life. Benjamin Ward Richardson, a famous physician, made an international splash with his vision of Hygeia, a City of Health, promising to deploy green spaces and leverage new building materials to create modern, happy communities. Critics and designers responded in droves, with several rejecting Richardson’s reformed urbanism as too dense, while others committed to actually building Hygeia-inspired suburbs. The first science-fiction dystopian novels were also published in these years, prophesying monstrous, swarming metropolises where human life would be devalued by rampant materialism and pervasive artificiality. Thus, the ideal future of the happy, healthy suburb received its literary foil: the megacity of inhuman density and anonymity. The cumulative message was clear: a life in gardens is the only hope.

Introduction

Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon offers a prehistory of the suburban dream—or, in other words, a history of the nineteenth-century desires that fueled the suburban revolution of the twentieth century. It also offers a history of Victorian criticisms of urban life and an account of nineteenth-century discourse on urban reform. Here in the introduction, the main argument of this “dream before the dream” is outlined, key terms such as “suburbia” and “utopia” are defined, and the relationships between this book and the existing body of scholarship are explained. The literary venues and socio-political nature of Victorian utopian dreaming are also briefly outlined, helping readers to appreciate the gravity of this realm of discourse, and prepare them to analyze how and why utopian science fiction of the nineteenth century achieved sufficient power to shape the world in which we live today.