The New Man of the House

Book excerpt: The modern-day suburb began, and began booming, in 19th-century Britain. As suburbia spread, the New Woman arose and fin-de-siecle concerns grew, suburban men felt more besieged. Anxieties about hygiene, pollution, purity, the home, class, gender roles, patrilineal power and the state of the Empire rippled through British fiction. The new man of the house was trying, often desperately, to hold onto the old order, changing even more rapidly as the 20th century and modernist fiction arrived. This study traces suburban masculinities in popular genres--speculative fiction, comic fiction and detective fiction--and in literary works from the late-Victorian era to the start of the First World War.