C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England

From The Condition of England. London: Methuen 1909.

[The Condition of England is Masterman’s most important book. It offers a political and social overview of Edwardian England. Its patronising tone will alienate many readers today. But though Masterman found distasteful many of the social changes he had seen in his lifetime, he was perceptive when it came to grasping what they portended. In this chapter Masterman analyses the suburban way of life at a slightly later stage than the Diary, showing among other things the new self-assurance of the following generation of suburbanites: the Lupin Pooter generation, one might say.]

[From Chapter III “The Suburbans”]

They are easily forgotten: for they do not strive or cry; and for the most part only ask to be left alone. … They are the creations not of the industrial, but of the commercial and business activities of London. They form an homogenous civilization—detached, self-centred, unostentatious—covering the hills along the northern and southern boundaries of the city, and spreading their conquests over the quiet fields beyond. They are the peculiar product of England and America; of the nations which have pre-eminently added commerce, business and finance to the work of manufacture and agriculture. It is a life of Security; a life of Sedentary occupation; a life of Respectability; and these three qualities give the key to its special characteristics. Its male population is engaged in all its working hours in small, crowded offices, under artificial light, doing immense sums, adding up other men’s accounts, writing other men’s letters. It is sucked into the City at daybreak, and scattered again as darkness falls. It finds itself towards evening in its own territory in the miles and miles of little red houses in little silent streets, in number defying imagination. Each boasts its pleasant drawing-room, its bow-window, its little front garden, its high-sounding title—”Acacia Villa” or “Camperdown Lodge”—attesting unconquered human aspiration. There are many interests beyond the working hours: here a greenhouse filled with chrysanthemums, there a tiny green patch with bordering flowers; a chicken-house, a bicycle shed, a tennis lawn. The women, with their single domestic servants, now so difficult to get, and so exacting when found, find time hang rather heavy on their hands. But there are excursions to shopping centres in the West End, and pious sociabilities, and occasional theatre visits, and the interests of home. …

Why does the picture of this suburban life, presented by however kindly a critic, leave the reader at the end with a sense of dissatisfaction? The query is aroused by examination of its actual condition. It is excited not only by works written in revolt, such as those of Mr Wells or George Gissing, but also by the writings of Mr Keble Howard[1] and Mr Shan Bullock[2] and Mr Pett Ridge[3] and others, who have attempted, with greater or less success, to exhibit a kindly picture of suburban society. At first this society appeared in literature as depicted by cleverness, delighting in satire at the expense of bourgeois ideals. Its historians were always in protest against its limitations, its complacencies, its standards of social success and intellectual attainment. But in later time this somewhat crude attitude of scornful superiority has passed. Many writers with an intimate knowledge of suburban and English Middle Class provincial life have attempted a sympathetic and truthful description: the sincere representation of a civilization. But in all their efforts the general effect is of something lacking; not so much in individual happiness, or even in bodily and mental development, as of a certain communal poverty of interest and ideal. The infinite boredom of the horrible women of The Year of Jubilee[4]—with its vision of Camberwell villadom as idle and desolate as Flaubert’s vision of French provincial bourgeois life in Madame Bovary—has been replaced by a scene of busy activity, with interest in cricket and football results, “book talk,” love-making, croquet and tennis parties for young men and women. And yet at the end, with the best will in the world, one closes the narrative with a feeling of desolation; a revolt against a life which, with all its energies and satisfactions, has somehow lost from it that zest and sparkle and inner glow of accepted adventure which alone would seem to give human life significance. …

Listen to the conversation in the second-class carriages of a suburban railway train, or examine the literature and journalism specially constructed for the suburban mind: you will often find endless chatter about the King, the Court, and the doings of a designated “Society”; personal paragraphs, descriptions of clothes, smile, or manner; a vision of life in which the trivial and heroic things are alike exhibited, but in which there is no adequate test or judgement, which are the heroic, which the trivial. Liberated from the devils of poverty, the soul is still empty, swept and garnished; waiting for other occupants. That is the explanation of the so-called “snobbery” of the suburbs. Here is curiosity, but curiosity about lesser occupations; energies,—for the suburbs in their healthy human life, the swarms of happy, physically efficient children, are a storehouse of the nation’s energy,—but energies which tend to scatter and degrade themselves in aimless activities; “random and meaningless sociabilities”[5] which neither hearten, stimulate, nor inspire. So into a feud with a neighbour over a disputed garden fence, or a bustling and breezy church or chapel’s mundane entertainment, or a criticism of manners and fashion, dress and deportment, will be thrown force and determination which might have been directed to effort of permanent worth, in devotion to one of the great causes of the world. (68-80)

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[1] The pseudonym of John Keble Bell (1875-1928).

[2] Shan Bullock (1865-1935), author of many novels, and himself a government clerk.

[3] William Pett Ridge (1857-1930), novelist associated with the New Humorists.

[4] In the Year of Jubilee (1895) is a novel by George Gissing; the “horrible women” are the three French sisters, all realistic studies of types of middle-class vulgarity.

[5] This quotation has not been traced.