The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

comparison with his being able to sleep in fresh air, to have a game of tennis in summer, or a friendly evening of music, chess, or games in the winter, without expense.’⁵⁴ This idyll was everything: greenery, fresh air away from city smoke, and, most importantly, a sense of privacy – a sense that once over your own doorstep you were in your own kingdom.

It was precisely this idyll, and the consequent rejection of city life, with its allurements but also its dangers – moral as well as physical – that was the impetus for the growth of suburbia. Walter Besant,^† despite his interest in living conditions for the poor, remained an urbanized homme des lettres in his condemnation of this bourgeois development: ‘The men went into town every morning and returned every evening; they had dinner; they talked a little; they went to bed … the case of the women was worse; they lost all the London life – the shops, the animation of the streets, their old circle of friends; in its place they found all the exclusiveness and class feeling of London with none of the advantages of a country town …’ However, the noted urban historian Donald Olsen has argued that Besant had misunderstood the aims and desires of suburbanites: ‘The most successful suburb was the one that possessed the highest concentration of anti-urban qualities: solitude, dullness, uniformity, social homogeneity, barely adequate public transportation, the proximity of similar neighbourhoods – remoteness, both physical and psychological, from what is mistakenly regarded as the Real World.’⁵⁵ W. W. Clarke, the author of Suburban Homes of London, published in 1881, praised districts precisely for their seclusion, their feeling of being cut off from the world.^*57 The Builder, in 1856, suggested that all should live in the suburbs: ‘Railways and omnibuses are plentiful, and it is better, morally and physically, for the Londoner … when he has done his day’s work, to go to the country or the suburbs, where he escapes the noise and crowds and impure air of the town; and it is no small advantage to a man to have his family removed from the immediate neighbourhood of casinos, dancing saloons, and hells upon earth which I will not name.’⁵⁸

      While the fashionable (and wealthy) still colonized parts of central London, some inner neighbourhoods were becoming less desirable, and it was important for the prospective resident to take care in choosing a location. In Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, published in 1864, a couple settled in Westbourne Grove, Bayswater:

      The house was quite new, and … it was acknowledged to be a quite correct locality … We know how vile is the sound of Baker Street, and how absolutely foul to the polite ear is the name of Fitzroy Square. The houses, however, in those purlieus are substantial, warm, and of good size. The house in Princess Royal Crescent was certainly not substantial, for in these days substantially-built houses do not pay. It could hardly have been warm, for, to speak the truth, it was even yet not finished throughout; and as for size, though the drawing room was a noble apartment, consisting of a section of the whole house, with a corner cut out for the staircase, it was very much cramped in its other parts, and was made like a cherub, in this respect, that it had no rear belonging to it. ‘But if you have no private fortune of your own, you cannot have everything,’ as the countess observed when Crosbie objected to the house because a closet under the kitchen stairs was to be assigned to him as his own dressing-room.⁵⁹

      If the family’s status was on display in the choice of the house, then it followed that location and public rooms were more important than comfort and convenience, and certainly more important than the private, family, spaces.

Surrounding London, the choice of suburbs was endless. Because of the railway going into the City, Camberwell and Peckham (that ‘Arcadian vale’, as W. S. Gilbert called it in Trial by Jury in 1875) were home to clerks – Camberwell was home to one in every eight clerks in London by the end of the century;’⁶⁰ Hammersmith, Balham and Leyton, too, were all lower middle class. Penge and Ealing, with no direct railway, were middle class; Hampstead was upper middle. These were not arbitrary designations made after the event. Contemporary guidebooks allocated St John’s Wood to authors, journalists and publishers; Tyburnia (Marble Arch) and Bayswater, Haverstock Hill, Brixton and Clapham, Kennington and Stockwell to ‘City men’ – stockbrokers, merchants and commercial agents. Denmark Hill, where Ruskin had grown up, was ‘the Belgravia of South London’. Sydenham, Highgate, Barnes and Richmond were, simply, for the rich.^*61

      Arthur Munby, an upper-middle-class civil servant, in his journal in 1860 noted the class distinctions of each district as naturally as we note street signs:

      Walked to S. Paul’s Churchyard, and took an omnibus to Brentford … In Fleet St. and the Strand, small tradesmen strolling with wives and children, servant maids with their sweethearts, clerks in gorgeous pairs: westward, ‘genteel’ people, gentry, ‘swells’ & ladies, till the tide of fashionable strollers breaks on Hyde Park Corner: then, beyond Knights-bridge and all the way to Brentford, middle-class men & women staring idly over the blinds of their suburban windows, and slinking back when you look that way: lower class ditto ditto standing & staring at their doors, equally idle, but much more frank and at their ease; staring openly & boldly, having purchased rest and tobacco by a good week’s work.⁶²

      Trollope was one of the finest arbiters of what made one suburb work and another a failure, although he admired, against the trend, the lawyer who was ‘one of those old-fashioned people who think a spacious substantial house in Bloomsbury Square, at a rent of a hundred and twenty pounds a year, is better worth having than a narrow, lath-and-plaster, ill-built tenement at nearly double the price out westward of the parks’.⁶³

      All of these suburbs, however remote, had one focus: the city they surrounded. However segregated, secluded and private, every morning the suburbs emptied as the workers headed off to the city, here watched by the journalist G. A. Sala:

      Nine o’clock … If the morning be fine, the pavement of the Strand and Fleet Street looks quite radiant with the spruce clerks walking down to their offices governmental, financial, and commercial …

… the omnibuses meet at the Bank and disgorge the clerks by hundreds; repeating this operation scores of times between nine and ten o’clock. But you are not to delude yourself, that either by wheeled vehicle or by the humbler conveyances known as ‘Shank’s mare’, and the ‘Marrowbone stage’ – in more refined language, walking – have all those who have business in the city reached their destination. No; the Silent Highway has been their travelling route. On the … bosom of Father Thames, they have been borne in swift, grimy little steamboats, crowded with living freights from Chelsea, and Pimlico, and Vauxhall piers, from Hungerford, Waterloo, Temple, Blackfriars, and Southwark – to the Old Shades Pier, hard by London Bridge. Then for an instant, Thames Street Upper and Lower, is invaded by an ant-hill swarm of spruce clerks, who mingle strangely with the fish-women and the dock-porters. But the insatiable counting-houses^* soon swallow them up …⁶⁴

      The segregation and classification that came so naturally to Munby and Sala permeated every aspect of Victorian life. Suburbs were ranked to keep the classes separate; neighbourhoods without shops or services kept functions – home versus work – apart. Once inside the house, the need to classify and divide did not end: houses were designed to keep the function of any one group of inhabitants from impinging on any other. Home was a private space, guarded watchfully from contamination by the life of the world; but within the home, too, each separate