SUBURBANISM
Of old--that is to say, twenty years ago--the great majority of the
English people suffered from a mental and general disability which was
termed "provincialism." If you hailed from Manchester, or Liverpool,
or Birmingham, or Edinburgh, or Glasgow, the kind gentlemen in London
who size people up and put them in their places assured you that you
were a provincial, and that you would have to rub shoulders a great
deal with the world--by which they meant London--before you could
rightly consider yourself qualified to exist. Against the epithet
"provincial," however, not a few persons rebelled, when it was applied
flatly to themselves. Most men of feeling felt hurt when you called
them provincial. In the world of letters and journalism to call a
man provincial was the last and unkindest cut of all, and it usually
settled him, just as to say that he has no sense of humour settles
him to-day. Then up rose Thomas Carlyle and Robert Buchanan and a few
lesser lights, who said, "You call us provincials: provincials we
undoubtedly are, and we glory in the character." This rather baffled,
not to say amazed, the lily-fingered London assessors, and gradually
the term "provincial," as a term of opprobrium, passed out of use.
It is admitted now on all hands that the provincial is a very useful
kind of fellow; and when the metropolis feels itself running short of
talent and energy, the provincial is invariably invited to look in.
Latterly, however, the Londoner and the dweller in English provincial
cities have begun to exhibit a distinctly modern disorder, which may be
called, for want of a better term, "suburbanism." In London, which may
be taken as the type of all English cities, suburbanism is pretty well
rampant. It has its origin in what the Americans would call "location."
A man's daily work lies, say, in the City or in the central quarters of
London. For various reasons--such, for example, as considerations of
health, expenditure, and custom--it is practically impossible for him
to live near his work. He must live somewhere; so he goes to Balham,
or Tooting, or Clapham, or Brondesbury, or Highgate, or Willesden, or
Finchley, or Crouch End, or Hampstead, or some other suburban retreat.
London is ringed round with these residential quarters, these little
towns outside the walls. A visitor to any one of them is at once struck
with its striking and painful similarity to all the others. There is
a railway station belonging to one of the metropolitan lines; there
is a High Street, fronted with lofty and rather gaudy shops; there is
a reasonable sprinkling of churches and chapels; there is a brand-new
red-brick theatre; and the rest is row on row and row on row of villa
residences, each with its dreary palisading and attenuated grass-plot
in front, and its curious annex of kitchen, or scullery, behind. Miles
and miles of these villas exist in every metropolitan suburb worth the
name; and though the rents and sizes of them may vary, they are all
built to one architectural formula, and all pinchbeck, ostentatious,
and unlovely. No person of judgment, nobody possessed of a ray of the
philosophic spirit, can gaze upon them without concluding at once that
the English do not know how to live. Take a street of these villas, big
or little, and what do you find? You note, first, that nearly every
house, be it occupied by clerk, Jew financier, or professional man,
has got a highfalutin name of its own. The County Council or local
authority has already bestowed upon it a number. But this is not enough
for your suburbanist, who must needs appropriate for his house a name
which will look swagger on his letter-paper. Hence No. 2, Sandringham
Road, Tooting, is not No. 2, Sandringham Road, Tooting, at all; but
The Laurels, if you please. No. 4--not to be outdone--is Holmwood;
No. 6 is Hazledene; No. 8, The Pines; No. 10, Sutherland House; and
so forth. Then, again, if you walk down a street and keep your eye on
the front windows of this thoroughfare of mansions, you will note that
every one of those windows has cheap lace curtains to it, and that
immediately behind the centre of the window there is a little table,
upon which loving hands have placed a green high-art vase, containing a
plant of sorts. And right back in the dimness of the parlour there is a
sideboard with a high mirrored back.
If you made acquaintance with half a dozen of the occupiers of these
houses, and were invited into the half dozen front rooms, you would
find in each, in addition to the sideboard before mentioned, a piano
of questionable manufacture, a brass music-stool with a red velvet
cushion, an over-mantel with mirrored panels, a "saddle-bag suite,"
consisting of lady's and gent's and six ordinary chairs and a couch;
a centre-table with a velvet-pile cloth upon it, a bamboo bookcase
containing a Corelli and a Hall Caine or so, together with some
sixpenny Dickenses picked up at drapers' bargain-sales, Nuttall's
_Dictionary_, _Mrs. Beeton's House Book_, a Bible, a Prayer Book,
some hymn-books, a work-basketful of socks waiting to be darned, and
a little pile of music, chiefly pirated. At night, when Spriggs comes
home to The Laurels, he has an apology for late dinner, gets into
his slippers, and retires with Mrs. Spriggs, and perhaps his elder
daughter, into that parlour. There he reads a halfpenny newspaper till
there is nothing left in it to read; then he talks to Mrs. Spriggs
about that beast So-and-so, his employer; and Mrs. Spriggs tells him
not to grumble so much, and asks the elder daughter why she doesn't
play a chune to 'liven us up a bit. "Yes," says Spriggs, "what is the
good of having a piano, and me buying you music every Saturday, if you
never play?" Whereupon the elder daughter rattles through _Dolly Gray_,
_The Honeysuckle and the Bee_, and _Everybody's Loved by Some One_;
and Spriggs beats time with his foot till he grows weary, and thinks we
had better have supper and get off to bed.
This kind of thing is going on right down both sides of Sandringham
Road--at Holmwood, at Hazledene, at The Pines, and at Sutherland House,
as well as at The Laurels--every week-day evening between the hours of
eight and midnight. In point of fact, it is going on all over Tooting.
It is the suburban notion of an 'appy evening at home; and, hallowed as
it is by wont and custom, everybody in Tooting takes it to be the best
that life can offer after business hours. Perhaps it is. Just before
supper, or haply a little afterwards, however, Spriggs says that he
believes he will take a little stroll "round the houses." He puts on
a straw hat in summer and a tweed cap in winter, and proceeds gravely
down the Sandringham Road until he reaches a break in the long array
of villas, and is aware of a rather flaring public-house. Into the
saloon bar of this hostelry he walks staidly, nods to the company,
and asks the barmaid for a drop of the usual. "Let me see," says that
sweet lady; "Johnny Walker, is n't it?" "Well, you know it is," says
Spriggs, as he hands over threepence. With the glass of whisky in his
hand he retires to the nearest red plush settee, and looks listlessly
at the illustrated papers on the little table in front of him, drinks
somewhat slowly, smokes a pipe, exchanges a word about the weather with
the landlord of the establishment, says there's time for another before
closing time, has another, and at twelve-thirty trots off home.
The seven or eight other men in the saloon bar being respectively the
occupiers of Holmwood, Hazledene, The Pines, Sutherland House, etc.,
have done almost exactly as Spriggs has done in the way of drinks and
nods and illustrated papers and having a final at twenty minutes past
twelve. But during the whole evening they have not exchanged a rational
word with one another. They have nothing to talk about; therefore they
have not talked. They are neighbours, and they know it; but they all
hold themselves to be so much superior to one another that they have
scorned to speak to each other, except in the most cursory and casual
way. Next morning, at a few minutes to nine o'clock, they will all be
scooting anxiously along the Sandringham Road with set faces, damp
brows, and a fear at their hearts that they are going to miss their
train. They will travel in packed carriages, half of them standing up,
while the other half growls, to Ludgate Hill or Moorgate Street, as the
case may be, and then rush off again to their respective offices, in
fear and trembling this time lest they should be three minutes late and
the "governor" might notice it.
This is the life of the males in the Sandringham Road year in and
year out. Through living in the same houses, in the midst of the
same furniture, listening to the same pianos, drinking at the same
public-houses, going to business in the same trains, they become as
like one another as peas. They are all anxious, all dull, all short of
sleep, all short of money. In brief, they have become suburbanized.
The monotony and snobbery and listlessness of their home life are
reflected in their conduct of the working-day's affairs. There is not a
man amongst them who has a soul above his job. Each of them sticks at
business, not because he loves it or likes it, but simply because he
knows that, if he were discovered in a remissness, he would get what he
calls "the sack." Each of them "lunches"--oh, this English lunch!--at
the bar of a public-house on a glass of bitter beer and a penny Welsh
rare-bit. Each of them feels a bit chippy and not a little sleepy of
an afternoon, and each of them races for his train in the evening,
chock-full of worry and bad-temper. You must live in the suburbs if you
are to live in London at all, and there is no escape from it.
The lines of the female suburbians are cast in more or less pleasant
places. They do not need to go to town every day. There are shops
galore, filled with just the goods they want, round the corner; and
there is always the next female on both sides to gossip with. For,
unlike the male suburbian, the female suburbian will talk to her
neighbours. Her conversation is of babes, and butchers' meat, and the
piece at the theatre, and the bargains at the stores in the High Road,
and "him." He, or "him," means the good lady's husband. She never by
any chance refers to him either by his Christian name, or his surname,
or as "my husband." It is always, "He said to me this morning," or, "As
I was saying to him before he went to business,"--which, I take it,
is a peculiarly English habit. The female suburbian goes out to tea
sometimes, usually at the house of some suburban relative. Her dress is
a curious blend of ostentation and economy. She will be in the fashion;
and, being an Englishwoman, "expense is no object," providing she can
get the money. She has no notion of thrift; she is perennially in
arrears with the milk and the insurance man; and when money gets very
tight indeed, she lectures her husband on his wicked inability to make
more than he is getting. The whole life, whether for male or female, is
dreary, harried, unrelieved, and destructive of everything that tends
to make life affable and tolerable.
In view of the obvious evils suburbanism has brought about in the
English metropolis, it might have been expected that the English
provincial cities would have done their best to avoid similar troubles
in their own areas. So far from this being the case, however, the craze
for suburbanism is making itself apparent wherever one turns. City
and borough councils lead the way by erecting, at the public expense,
artisans' and clerks' dwellings well out of the town. They hold that
fresh air, the open country, and cheap railway fares are all that is
wanted to make the English citizen's life a perennial joy to him.
Yet the dwellings they erect are of the shoddiest and least homelike
kind, the fresh-air which is to do the worker and the children so
much good is a doubtful quantity, and the cheap railway fares are
bragged about without regard to the time taken up in travelling and the
hurry and anxiety to catch trains. Suburbanism as a stereotyped and
soul-deadening institution is of purely English origin. In no other
country in the world do convention and what other people will say so
rule the lives of men as they do in England. Suburbanism is in many
ways the most obvious of the many products of English convention. It
is at once an indication of brainlessness, want of intelligence, and
incipient decay. Apparently there is to be no limit to it. Outside
London new suburbs spring up almost weekly. But their newness brings no
changes in its train. Each new suburb is mapped out and built exactly
on the lines of the old ones; each is destined for the reception of
exactly the same kind of stupid people; each will be the living-ground
of generations of people still more stupid.