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Subversive Performances, Masculine Pleasures
of the city center, authors and publishers were expending a great deal of print and
energy in ensuring the provision of a literature which set such lives under
unprecedented scrutiny.
In ironic tones of mock concern, Thomas Burke portrayed a Surbiton whist drive
as the place where the spontaneous wickedness of West End gambling was watered
down to an overstructured opportunity for the testing of local rivalries, hosted
under the weak pretence of a little organized decadence. In a more direct appraisal
of the suburban condition, C.F.G. Masterman echoed the sentiment when he stated
in 1909 that
no one . . . fears the suburbans, and perhaps for that reason no one respects them. They
only appear articulate in comedy, to be made the butt of a more nimble witted company
outside: like . . . the queer people who dispute – in another recent London play –
concerning the respective social advantages of Clapham and Herne Hill. Strong in
numbers and in possession of a vigorous and even tyrannical convention of manners,
they lack organization, energy and ideas. 5
Masterman overlooked the contradiction lurking in his assessment, for far from
lacking any coherent sense of social direction, suburban tastes and cultural inclinations
so far as they existed in the prejudiced opinions of professional observers,
were underpinned and defined by a ferocious attention to propriety and good form,
and by extension an attention to the nature of fashion itself. While this resulted in
an undeniable conformity to rigid social rules concerning display and behavior, it
also placed the material culture of life on the peripheries of metropolitan experience
in a direct relationship to that enjoyed by those at the center. Its forms were
as reliant on the inner city as a focus for both disapproval and emulation, as those
sophisticates who defined the meaning of fashion at its supposed core were reliant
on the “dull” censure or adherence of suburbia to set off their “brilliance” all the
more brightly. These permeable boundaries and a sense of mutual existence underscored
Masterman’s more dismissive assumptions:
They are the creations not of the industrial, but of the commercial and business activities
of London. They form a homogenous civilization – detached, self centred, unostentatious
– covering the hills along the northern and southern boundaries of the city . . . It is a life
of security; a life of sedentary occupation, a life of respectability . . . 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 high sounding
title – “Acacia Villa” or “Camperdown Lodge” – attesting unconquered human aspiration.
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