Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon by Nathaniel Robert Walker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon by Nathaniel Robert Walker Willa Granger Nathaniel Robert Walker. Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780198861447 Hardcover: 557 pages The coronavirus pandemic—which initially found footing in the US in the dense urbanism of New York City—has galvanized commentary on the imperiled future of cities. With affluent urbanites migrating from borough to hinterland, some have wondered about the spatial remapping of the national economy and how the endurance of virtual work will hollow out the American downtown.1 In this sense author Nathaniel Robert Walker stumbled upon a fitting moment for the 2020 release of Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon. Indeed, Walker’s study is as much a genealogy of urban unease among English-speaking authors and critics of the nineteenth century as it is an exploration of suburbanism in utopian science fiction. In Walker’s own summation, Victorian Visions is a “pre-history of the modern suburb,” and he painstakingly catalogues how a preference for dispersed, green, and anti-urban settlements came to define a growing body of utopian literature throughout the nineteenth century.2 In this prodigious book, architectural historians and urbanists alike will find a familiar cast of characters such as Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Jacob Riis. Yet Walker’s contribution lies in his efforts to recontextualize these figures alongside utopian science fiction of that period, including names both big and small: from Edward Bellamy to the obscure Alvarado Mortimer Fuller, whose novel A. D. 2000 conjures a Midwest submerged beneath an inland sea.3 Admittedly, much of the fun in Victorian Visions is simply getting to sample a range of sci-fi fantasies. Shared among the texts Walker discusses is a preference for verdant garden suburbs, yet their authors find diverse formal expression, from picturesque cottages to scattered towers.4 This trend typifies dystopian literature of the time as well.5 Always, Walker situates these writings and their authors within cities themselves, locating a suburban yearning within the dense squalor of places such as London, Manchester, and New York. Victorian Visions operates at the intersection of Victorian literary history and architectural history. Walker treats his evidence, which ranges from romance novels to political essays, as a form of architectural documentation, deploying the spatial and material tools of built environment scholars to understand the physical implications of science-fiction texts. In so doing, Walker excavates how this literature was received by both the reading public and by building professionals. The strongest part of Walker’s argument is where he demonstrates a causal relationship between ideas in sci-fi novels and the political, social, and architectural thinkers who put these ideas into play. One such figure was architect John Pickering Putnam, who designed and largely funded the Charlesgate Apartment Hotel, an eclectic co-operative structure perched above Boston’s Emerald Necklace and intended as a physical interpretation of Edward Bellamy’s socialist vision.6 Walker’s study describes not only these piecemeal moments of rus in urbe but also the failed utopian projects that these texts inspired such as Robert Owen’s frustrated community of New Harmony and less-known examples like the planned cottage community of Topolobampo in Sinaloa, Mexico.7 Victorian Visions positions utopian suburbanism as a transatlantic phenomenon of English-speaking worlds. As Walker’s subtitle suggests, Babylon—often analogized through the urban chaos of London itself—formed the foil against which [End Page 72] Victorian utopian authors crafted the vision of a rationalized suburban dream. It is for this reason that Walker begins in chapter one by lineaging the tropes of Victorian science fiction, charting their foundations from antiquity to the Renaissance. Victorian authors trafficked in the earlier utopias of Eden and New Jerusalem, in the sins of Babel and the anti-urbanism of Augustine of Hippo, and inevitably in the writings of Sir Thomas More, the inventor of utopia as a concept. Apart from this first chapter, Victorian Visions proceeds chronologically through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In chapters two through four, Walker moves from the 1830s to the 1870s, focusing on the early socialist schemes of British figures such...