Reading London's Suburbs

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. Introduction: Suburban Realities

   • Ged Pope

   Pages 1-19

3. ‘Houseless — Homeless — Hopeless!’: Suburbs, Slums and Ghosts: 1830–1870

   • Ged Pope

   Pages 20-52

4. ‘A World of Mud and Fog’: The High Victorian and Edwardian Suburb, 1880–1914

   • Ged Pope

   Pages 53-89

5. ‘The Third England’: Suburban Fiction and Modernity, 1918–1939

   • Ged Pope

   Pages 90-124

6. ‘Your Environment Makes as Little Sense as your Life’: Post-War Suburbia 1945–1980

   • Ged Pope

   Pages 125-160

7. ‘I Tried to Work Out Where I Was’: Contemporary Suburbia

   • Ged Pope

   Pages 161-202

8. Conclusion: ‘All Stories are Spatial Stories’

   • Ged Pope

   Pages 203-210

9. Back Matter

   Pages 211-239

   PDF

A study of London suburban-set writing, exploring the links between place and fiction. This book charts a picture of evolving themes and concerns around the legibility and meaning of habitat and home for the individual, and the serious challenges that suburbia sets for literature.

• London
• suburbs
• writing
• place and fiction
• domesticity
• habitat
• identity
• knowledge
• reality
• uncanny
• class
• semiotics
• Charles Dickens
• English literature
• environment
• fiction
• Victorian era
• British and Irish Literature

“Despite the countless studies that have been published on London and its geographical and cultural make-up, Ged Pope is clearly correct in identifying the city's suburbs as an as yet under-researched area. His volume sets out to address this gap by adopting a very broad perspective, both in terms of the time frame (as indicated in the volume's subtitle) and with regard to the kinds of texts selected.” (Merle Tönnies, Anglistik, Vol. 28 (1), 2017)

• London Metropolitan University, UK

  Ged Pope

Ged Pope teaches on the English Literature degree course at London Metropolitan University.

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