The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History in Literature and Culture

A study of the fast-growing Victorian suburbs as places of connection, creativity, and professional advance, especially for women

From the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, the suburbs were maligned by the aristocratic elite as dull zones of low cultural ambition and vulgarity, as well as generally female spaces isolated from the consequential male world of commerce. Sarah Bilston argues that these attitudes were forged to undermine the cultural authority of the emerging middle cl...