'Houseless – Homeless – Hopeless!': Suburbs, Slums and Ghosts 1830
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Notes 1 ‘Houseless – Homeless – Hopeless!’: Suburbs, Slums and Ghosts 1830–1870 1. John Summerson, in Georgian London (1991) in fact describes a fourfold originary suburban typology: i) overgrowth of existing villages; ii) building of remote villas; iii) roadside developments along key routes; iv) development of self-standing estates. 2. The Crystal Palace was of course of crucial architectural significance; the first iron and glass structure in the world, strong, durable, light, adaptable and moveable. It was also immensely popular and, despite its official role show- casing British scientific and imperial achievement, was actually dedicated to amusements, spectacles, games and sports. 3. See also Sanitary Ramblings, Being Sketches and Illustrations of Bethnal Green by Hector Gavin (London: Frank Cass, 1971), 1872’s London: a Pilgrimage by Jerrold and Dore ( Jerrold and Dore, 2004), In the Slums by the Rev. D. Rice- Jones (London: Dodo Press, 2009). 4. See http://booth.lse.ac.uk for reproductions of Booth’s maps. 5. Ironically, this prestigious lineage serves to further undermine Sparkin’s authenticity. Originally, the suffix ‘Fitz’ indicated that the person named was illegitimate, was in fact of Royal bastard lineage. 6. This lack of suburban individual substance reaches a comic, even uncanny, extreme in Great Expectations Here, Wemmick’s intended wife, at home in his Walworth ‘castle’, is portrayed as wind-up automaton, made from wood. Wemmick himself is a robotic commuter lacking free will. 7. First recorded, incidentally, in the 1860s, and according to one source: ‘The cheap, flimsy constructs of Jerry Brothers – a Liverpool building firm.’ See http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/211600.html. 8. Compare this with the London suburb in Wilkie Collins’ Basil (1852); it barely exists, with ‘unfinished streets, unfinished crescents, unfinished squares, unfinished shops, unfinished gardens’ (Collins, 2000: 32). For Basil, proud of his ancient Norman lineage, it was the ‘newness and desolateness of appear- ance that revolted me’ (Collins, 2000: 32). The place ‘was silent; desolately silent as only a suburban square can be’ (Collins, 2000: 34) 2 ‘A World of Mud and Fog’: The High Victorian and Edwardian Suburb, 1880–1914 1. The suburbs were becoming a concern. Tristram Hunt has argued that by the end of the nineteenth century suburbia and suburban man were consid- ered the root causes of many of the country’s national problems: ‘The great achievements of the Victorian civic spirit were progressively undermined by a string of outwardly innocuous green suburbs . Commuting between city 211 212 Notes and suburb, spending the day in crowded offices, reading the sensational press, avidly following professional sport, and happy to live in a state of blissful political and social ignorance, the modern suburban man was as much a threat to British civilisation and Empire as the lowliest Whitechapel slum dweller’ (Hunt, 2004: 306–7). 2. Norwood appears in the 1890 novella The Sign of the Four. Doyle himself lived, happily enough, it seems, in South Norwood, from 1891 to 1894. 3. Conan Doyle and Wilde actually met in summer 1889, with the editor of Lippincott’s magazine, and received commissions to write The Sign of Four (the second Holmes story) and Dorian Gray, respectively. 4. Or, they can be ignored. Jonathan Rose, in his exhaustive study The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes argues the curious invisibility of this new socio-economic group. One response to the ‘growing numbers of self-educated workers’, he argues, ‘was to ignore their existence’ (Rose, 398). ‘No such characters’, he argues ‘appear in any English novel before 1880, except Felix Holt and [Charles Reade’s] Alton Locke’ (Rose, 398). 5. In the spirit of George Borrow, Richard Jeffries and W. H. Hudson. Hence Margaret Schelgel’s comment: ‘Borrow was imminent after Jeffries – Borrow, Thoreau and sorrow’ (Forster, 2000: 84). 6. This malicious waywardness of everyday domestic objects and activities is wittily described by humorist Paul Jennings’ theory of ‘Resistentialism’. Jennings humorously contends that the condition of bodily ‘being-in-the- world’ is more contentious than even Sartrean existentialism ever imagined, and this is because of things. Being, for Jennings, has to contend, not with contingency, with the universal indifference of world, but with that world’s active malignancy, with things. For Resistentialism it’s a gruesome battle out there, as Jennings’ catchy slogan emphasises: ‘Les choses sont contre nous’ – (Things are against us) (Jennings, 1963). 7. Shan Bullock’s titular clerk in Robert Thorne: A Story of a London Clerk (1907) is an antidote to these accounts of ‘thingly’ humour. The capable and resourceful Thorne is angered by his economic entrapment, both sickened by the dull unrewarding routine of clerkly life – ‘I’m about sick of mucky offices’ – and aware that he can never progress – ‘a man gets no chance. We’re not good enough. We aren’t class enough. Look at us, a hundred and twenty Men-clerks like sheep in a pen.’ The novel also depicts scenes of domestic happiness quite unlike Pooter’s absurd mishaps and discomfort. 8. Jeffries wrote Nature Near London in 1888, a series of explorations of the edge zone around Surbiton where suburb dissolves into countryside, and where a spectacularly diverse and rich population of wild plants and animals persist, if you know where to look. What connects this vision of the suburbs from Jefferies vision of a possible future is the ineradicable aspect of ‘wild nature’; it persists, returns, mutates, but never entirely disappears. 9. Again, we notice the continuing theme, as with Pooter, of lower middle-class suburbanites aping upper class mannerisms. 10. Importantly, we can argue, however, that Holmes’s ‘method’ is in fact, rather than an outstanding example of scientific certainty, a response to a particu- lar crisis of knowledge at the end of the century. For all its self-confidence, Victorian positivist science generates doubt. Moretti points out, at the end of the nineteenth century ‘high bourgeois culture wavers in its conviction Notes 213 that it is possible to set the functioning of society into the framework of scientific, objective, laws’ (Moretti, 2005: 247). More exactly, science cannot produce a synthesis of causal factors to explain all observable events. More precisely Holmes’s famed modern scientific investigative ‘method’ is not what it seems. It is not technically ‘deductive’ at all, but, rather, has better been described, by semiotician Thomas Sebeok, as ‘abductive’. What Sebeok calls the ‘detectival method of abduction’, is in fact a mix of ‘logical deduc- tion, intuition and inspired guesswork’ (Sebeok, 1994: 86). In addition Holmes’s method, employing imagination and play, as well as coolly ‘scientific’ deduction, can usefully be seen, in fact, as dramatising an anxiety over Victorian material conceptions of reality. Objects of knowledge here, the material world of the suburb itself, are slippery and contingent. Holmes uses other methods, not just scientific materialism, to decode the truth. 11. Wells’ series of serio-comic novels concerning lower-middle class Edwardian ‘clerk’ figures and their gradual search for some kind of individual identity – Mr Polly, Kipps, Mr Lewisham – all show the journey of social nonentities toward some kind of individualism. The suburb does not help here. Our anti- hero, at the end of Love and Mr Lewisham, is trapped in Clapham, finding some personal meaning in fatherhood, but dispiritedly ripping up his writ- ten grand ‘schema’ of youthful life projects: Mr Polly, escapes the suburb. Polly, a Pooteresque shopkeeper suffering from dyspepsia, bad teeth and a terrible sense of foreboding, nethertheless we are told, is constantly aware of ‘life dancing all around him’, and possesses a ‘capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine’ (Wells, 2005a: 23). Trapped, Polly has a revelation: ‘If you don’t like this life you can clear out’ (21). Polly manages to ‘look through the paper walls of everyday existence’. He even manages to find a kind of utopia, working in an Inn along the river: ‘At the Potswell Inn he had found his place in the world’ (201). This is the anti- suburb, full of good cheer, hearty food, ale, sunshine and bodily health (he is ‘plumper, browner, healthier’). Unlike the Polly’s previous existence (‘getting obstreperous things around corners’) the inn was ‘full of the militant possi- bilities of pacific things – pokers, copper sticks, garden implements, kitchen knives, garden nets, oars, blankets . ’ (189). 3 ‘The Third England’: Suburban Fiction and Modernity, 1918–1939 1. This perception of the contemporary suburb as strange, illegible and false is interestingly challenged in a very influential work from 1946, J. M. Richards’ The Castles on the Ground (with woodcut illustrations by John Piper). This work, written peripatetically during World War Two, ponders the significance of home in the context of a global struggle over the meaning of home and nationality, with compulsory migrations, mass evictions and movements, and offers a rare, sympathetic and serious account of suburban demands. The suburban villa, the fantasy of security that the home-as-castle offers, may, Richards suggests, be the ‘despair of people of taste’ but what must be taken into account is ‘the appeal it has for 90% of the population’ (Richards, 1946: 30). ‘The times we live in’, Richards notes, ‘do not provide much sense 214 Notes of security’, and the ‘individual is increasingly the victim of circumstances beyond his control’ (Richards, 1946: 30). 2. This debate starts with Arnold Bennett’s negative criticism of Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, in his provocatively titled 1923 essay ‘Is the Novel Decaying?’, published in Cassell’s Weekly (Bennett, 1923). The fundamental point of disagreement here is over the notion of character. Woolf’s ‘characters do not vitally survive in the mind’, Bennett argues, ‘because the author is ‘obsessed by details of originality and cleverness’ (Bennett, 1923: n.p.).