Atdtda22: [42.2i] Big-city melancholia, 609-611 #2

[Paul Nightingale]

And then:

In England during the 1900s, three of every four people were living in towns
or cities. The rural population was much smaller than in the United States.
More significantly, suburbanization was more advanced in England than in the
United States. Widespread middle-class suburban living had been established
longer in England than in the United States, a function of the earlier
arrival of the industrial revolution during the later eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. As the proletarian and factory districts of towns and
cities spread rapidly through the land, many in the English middle classes
reacted with horror to what they perceived as the overcrowded, polluted and
dangerous city, and removed themselves to the countrified suburbs.
Suburbanization expanded remarkably between 1900 and 1939. London, for
example, tripled in size during this period.

[...]

By 1914, Britain possessed over 20,000 miles of railway track. [...]
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and into the early
decades of the twentieth ... overground and underground rail brought once
small independent market towns and villages within the suburban ambit of the
growing metropolis. 

[...]

Working-class suburban areas were usually located closer to the centres than
were middle-class suburbs, in areas where both fares and accommodation costs
were cheaper. Some of the least expensive inner-suburban housing was often a
consequence of excessive speculative building activities. This led to gluts
of housing which were let at reduced rents in order to recoup at least some
initial outlay costs. Class segregation continued, however. The suburban
middle classes were largely ensconced in superior residential developments,
while the lowliest sections of the working classes continued to inhabit
slums and areas of inadequate housing. Furthermore, most Jewish immigrants
from Eastern Europe settled in the poorest housing areas of London and other
large cities, as they did in the American metropolis, during the late
nineteenth century.

From: Mark Clapson, Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in
England and the USA, Berg, 2003, 1-2, 23-24.

Cf. the earlier description of Nochecita, the small town in transition
(200-201).

See also: Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the
Politics of Community, Cambridge University Press, 2001, 2-3.

The demise of the knowable community, the explosion of shared experiences of
the past, the disruption of the meaning of old stories and of the
possibility of new communicable experience, become not only reflected but
contested in the works of writers such as Henry James, Marcel Proust,
Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. These writers engage directly with early
twentieth-century historical and political transformations of community,
transformations that occasioned on the one hand an almost desperate effort
to recoup community in the form of nationalism and fascism, and on the other
hand an insistence on deepening cosmopolitanism.

Cf. Lew's epiphany on 50: "But here was this hall full of Americans, no
question, even the foreign-born ..." etc.

Or Yashmeen and Times 3 "at the top of the enormous Earl's Court Wheel"
(503). Cf. this view of what "appeared to be British holidaymakers" to the
tourism evident in Venice, Ch40.