Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London
- Uncovers a series of innovative housing designs that emerged in response to London’s rapid growth and expansion throughout the nineteenth century
- Brings together the writing of prominent authors such as Charles Dickens and George Gissing with understudied novels and essays to examine the lively literary engagement with new models of urban housing
- Focuses on the ways that these new homes provided material and creative space for thinking through the relationship between home and identity
- Identifies ways in which we might learn from the creative responses to the nineteenth-century housing crisis
This book brings together a range of new models for modern living that emerged in response to social and economic changes in nineteenth-century London, and the literature that gave expression to their novelty. It examines visual and literary representations to explain how these innovations in housing forged opportunities for refashioning definitions of home and identity. Robertson offers readers a new blueprint for understanding the ways in which novels imaginatively and materially produce the city’s built environment.
Acknowledgements List of Illustrations
1. Housing Crisis: Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London
Part I: Structures of Authority: the Model Dwellings Movement
2. ‘Out of its Torpid Misery’: Plotting Passivity in Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl (1887)3. ‘More Making the Best of It’: Living with Liberalism in Mary Ward’s Marcella (1894)4. Labour Leaders and Socialist Saviours: Individualism and Collectivism in Margaret Harkness’s George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905)
Part II: Chambers, Lodgings, and Flats: Purpose-built Housing for Working Women
5. Irritating Rules and Oppressive Officials: Convention and Innovation in Evelyn Sharp’s The Making of a Prig (1897)6. The Kailyard Comes to London: The Progressive Potential of Romantic Convention in Annie S. Swan’s A Victory Won (1895)7. Fugitive Living: Social Mobility and Domestic Space in Julia Frankau’s The Heart of a Child (1908)
Part III: ‘Thinking Men’ and Thinking Women: Gender, Sexuality and Settlement Housing
8. ‘Vital Friendship’: Sexual and Economic Ambivalence in Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina (1897)9. ‘Twenty Girls in My Attic’: Spatial and Spiritual Conversion in L.T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter (1895)
Part IV: Homes for a New Era: London Housing Past and Present
10. ‘To Make a Garden of the Town’: the Nineteenth-Century Legacy of the Hampstead Garden Suburb
Epilogue Bibliography Index
Lisa Robertson tells a compelling story about the late nineteenth century that still speaks to us today: about the relationship between literary representation, dwelling spaces, the city, women, community and class relations. She breathes new life into forgotten texts and conjures the experiments in living and new architectural models that inspired and were inspired by them.
This impressive and important book makes valuable contributions to our understanding of interrelated developments in architecture, the urban environment, class, and gender in the period. The book will highly impress anyone interested in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century British women's writing, urban space, and the built environment.
This impressive and important book makes valuable contributions to our understanding of interrelated developments in architecture, the urban environment, class, and gender in the period. The book will highly impress anyone interested in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century British women's writing, urban space, and the built environment.
