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Reading London's Suburbs: from Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith

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Reading London's Suburbs: from Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–34245–4 © Ged Pope 2015 Photographs © Salim Hafejee 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–34245–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available froe British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pope, Ged, 1962– Reading London’s suburbs : from Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith / Ged Pope, Visiting Lecturer, London Metropolitan University, UK; with photographs by Salim Hafejee. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–1–137–34245–4 1. English literature—England—London—History and criticism. 2. Authors, English—Homes and haunts—England—London. 3. London (England)—In literature. I. Hafejee, Salim. II. Title. PR8471.P67 2015 820.9'358421—dc23 2015002148 Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–34245–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–34245–4 Contents List of Abbreviations viii Acknowledgements x Introduction: Suburban Realities 1 1 ‘Houseless – Homeless – Hopeless!’: Suburbs, Slums and Ghosts 1830–1870 20 2 ‘A World of Mud and Fog’: The High Victorian and Edwardian Suburb, 1880–1914 53 3 ‘The Third England’: Suburban Fiction and Modernity, 1918–1939 90 4 ‘Your Environment Makes as Little Sense as your Life’: Post-War Suburbia 1945–1980 125 5 ‘I Tried to Work Out Where I Was’: Contemporary Suburbia 161 Conclusion: ‘All Stories are Spatial Stories’ 203 Notes 211 Bibliography 216 Index 232 vii Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–34245–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–34245–4 Introduction: Suburban Realities ‘Where is Clapham? Does Clapham even exist?’: suburban invisibility This book is a reading of London suburban fiction. More exactly it is also a study of the complex connections between fiction and the human need to belong to a particular known habitat, that is, to make a home. In this sense, writing and dwelling are intimately connected. Peter Brooks argues that ‘fictions arise from our need to build a space or even a shelter for ourselves in an alien world’, in a world not our own (Brooks, 2).The art work, the ‘poem’, then, ‘is our attempt to humanize that world’ (2). Cultural work, literature, does not merely reflect our place in the world; it renders an alien, incomprehensible world mean- ingful. It helps bring that world into being. The century and a half of suburban fiction dealing with mass suburbia is really the story of writ- ers struggling with the suburb as a site capable of providing the basic features of what home should be; it is part of that creative struggle to produce what Raymond Williams has called ‘knowable communities’ (Williams, 1985b). The suburb has long been considered, in a dominant strand of fiction and other cultural work, as not all the kind of place that could ever be called home. Suburban-set fiction, in fact, often presents the suburb as the antithesis of the homely. This, in despite of the fact that the suburb’s purpose, of course, was to promote the possibility of controlled homeliness. Mid-twentieth-century urban theorist Lewis Mumford provides a classic example of anti-suburban thought. It is, he reckons, ‘a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age 1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–34245–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–34245–4 2 Reading London’s Suburbs group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers’ (Mumford, 509). This kind of criticism of suburban habitat, rendering it as bleak and unhomely tundra, can be seen right through the 150 years or so of London suburban fiction. Criticism of the suburb, as repetitive and featureless, as standardised and passively consumerist, necessarily renders it as a problem site for representation. As a bewildered Psmith, lost in south London, asks, in P. G. Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City (1910): ‘Where is Clapham? Does Clapham even exist?’ (Wodehouse, 15). The suburb’s ubiquity and per- ceived large-scale uniformity, for many observers, makes the place at the same time both horribly visible and yet disconcertingly illegible. This anxiety, that the suburb is both very much there, and yet, at the same time, weirdly unknowable, both real and yet inchoate, informs much suburban-set fiction. The suburb also, if it is deemed to lack meaningful connection to a locality or landscape and to be devoid of cultural and familial continuity, and furthermore is largely domestic, withdrawn and private, then clearly seem to presents a set of fascinating problems for its fiction rendering. The London suburb, especially around the time of its initial appear- ance as the increasingly dominant form of settled mass civilisation, around 1900, evokes anxiety that this is indeed the place where noth- ing ever happens. Popular Victorian historian of London, Walter Crane, is quite clear on this. ‘The life of the suburb’, he points out, is one ‘without any society; no social gatherings or institutions; as dull a life as any man imagined’ (in Porter, 52). For T. W. H. Crosland, writing in 1905, in The Suburbans, the modern suburb is the natural home of overlooked tedious everday necessity. The ‘whole of the humdrum, platitudinous things of life’ he notes, ‘all matters and apparatus which, by reason of their frequency, have become somewhat of a bore to the superior person, are wholly and unmitigatedly suburban’ (Crosland, 8). Much late nineteenth-century London suburban-set fiction, indeed the fiction that is now perhaps best known, concentrates precisely on the almost imperceptible trivia of this kind of everyday domestic life, focussing as it does on semi-visible suburban ‘Nobodies’. Formulated most clearly, and famously, in the Goldsmith brothers’ Holloway set The Diary of a Nobody (1889), the suburban Nobody is a lowly clerk employed in the burgeoning field of City finance and commerce, a lower-middle class Everyman: home-oriented, downtrodden, dull, con- ventional, trivial and, above all, insignificant. Nobodies are invisible because they are deeply embedded in the dreary quotidian. Along with Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–34245–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–34245–4 Suburban Realities 3 other characters in work by H. G. Wells, by popular Edwardian writers like Shan Bullock, William Pett-Ridge and Jerome K. Jerome, and later influencing Arnold Bennett, E. M. Forster, George Orwell and Stevie Smith, and even post-war writers like V. S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi and John Lanchester, we observe Mr Pooter engaged in numerous minor domestic tasks: tidying, rearranging and ineffectually mending things, arguing with his wife, disputing with tradesmen. These Nobodies are actually submerged in the everyday, smothered in material excess and horribly embroiled in physical detail; they are identical to the stuff of the everyday. They cannot see anything clearly of what is all around them. This perceived suburban banality also means that the suburb may be hard to actually see. The suburbs have long been considered an imper- ceptible and unknowable landscape. Another Edwardian commentator, C. F. G. Masterman, in The Condition of England (1909), worries that the suburb, precisely because it is an unremarkable and predictable space contains elements that can never actually become visible. Here, this ‘homogenous civilisation’ which ‘covers the hills to the north and south of the city’ has provided the long-desired wish to furnish the basics of economic sustenance, only to produce a dulled security: ‘the City civilisation is established. Progress pauses – exhausted, satisfied. Man is made’ (Masterman, 134). The Edwardian suburb here, in a ver- sion of Wellsian entropy, is the placid, sensible site of modern economic and social agreement. Masterman points to a ‘certain communal pov- erty of interest and ideals’ (33). This ‘modern type of all civilisation’, is difficult to know and represent, because most of its ‘activities are dull to the point of invisibility’ (65). There is indeed a literary/sociological tradition of outside visitors to the London suburbs who emphasise the baffling illegibility of what they can see. Roger Silverstone’s influential collection of essays Visions of Suburbia (1996) opens with our editor-guide taking a disorientating walk along an unreal Bromley High Street. Silverstone sees ‘a ravaged shopping precinct’, churches, suburban villas, a 1959 pink Cadillac, and, most revealingly, an eccentric restaurant ‘made to look like a fin de siècle prostitute’s boudoir’, packed with a miscellany of silks, satins, pearls, toys, dead clocks, and ‘misassembled as if in a car boot sale in Marrakesh’ (Silverstone, 2).
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