While watching Giles and Sue Live the Good Life, a hilarious, reality-TV take on a British sitcom, I was struck by the similarities between today, the 1970s, and the Edwardian period. All three time periods had come after long periods of extensive growth, consumerism, and amazing technological advances, and while many people were prosperous, society was experiencing a bout of uncertainty and instability. To focus on the Edwardian era specifically (since that is the topic of this blog, natch), the lives of the professional and middle-classes were both comfortable and unsettled.

The boom years of the Victorian era opened up so many fields for men and women, and now that they’d worked, worked, worked to attain a prosperous life, the fashionably appointed home, fully-stocked larder, luxurious clothing, the servants, and extended holidays at the sea or even abroad appeared a bit overdone. Adding to the ennui was the hustle and bustle of city life, where a person found it difficult to relax with carriages and motorcars clattering down the streets, construction of new buildings filling the days and nights, and the people walking, riding, talking, cycling, playing, entertaining, etc, never let up.

The backlash against this was understandable, and the anxious middle-class took to the Arts and Crafts movement, an art, architecture, and lifestyle philosophy that grew out of the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1860s and attained recognition in the 1880s and 1890s. With an emphasis on clean lines, natural decoration, and organic design, as well as an “advocacy of economic and social reform”, this was essentially an anti-industrial movement desiring to move away from the arrogant, the fussy, and the self-satisfied. The philosophy bore fruit mostly in architecture and interior design, but from it also sprang the Garden city movement initiated in 1899 by Sir Ebenezer Howard, who proposed suburban cities “planned, self-contained, communities surrounded by ‘greenbelts’ (parks), containing proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture.”

Howard was inspired by Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, and wrote To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform (reprinted in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow), which offered “a vision of a town free of slums and enjoying the benefits of both town (such as opportunity, amusement and high wages) and country (such as beauty, fresh air and low rents).” An ideal garden city would “would house 32,000 people on a site of 6000 acres (2400 ha), planned on a concentric pattern with open spaces, public parks and six radial boulevards, 120 ft (37 m) wide, extending from the centre. The garden city would be self-sufficient and when it had full population, another garden city would be developed nearby.” He further “envisaged a cluster of several garden cities as satellites of a central city of 50,000 people, linked by road and rail.” Only two garden cities were created–Letchworth and Welwyn–and of the two, Letchworth, Hertfordshire, was the most famous.

A 1911 article in La Follette’s Weekly Magazine gushed over Letchworth:

Letchworth is a town made to order. You realize this the moment yon step off at the station after the rapid run of thirty-four miles from London. You see immediately that Letchworth is made of a single plan. Its factories are shut off in one corner of the city, at a spot adjoining the railroad, and in the direction opposite to that of the prevailing wind. The workingmen’s cottages, splendidly built and with a’ maximum of light and air, are within a few hundred yards of the factories, but are separated by a wide boundary of grass. The other houses are not cramped or huddled, nor are they built with a complete independence of one another, but are arranged in clusters and groups, with an infinite variety, but with an attempt at harmony. The shops, the batiks, the schools, the public buildings, the churches, the parks, the play-grounds, the open squares, all have suitable and defined locations. The roads, streets and avenues are laid out in advance, each being given a width adapted to its probable needs. The gas mains, wires, pipes and other underground connections, are put in before (and not after) the street is paved. The city is planned as a house is planned. Everything to the last detail is foreseen. It is intended to make as few changes as possible in the years to come.

Letchworth…is never to exceed a population of thirty-five thousand. Of the six square miles of Letchworth only two are to be built upon. These two square miles will very comfortably house thirty-five thousand people in detached dwellings, with gardens, and public play-grounds, parks and other open spaces. But this urban part of Letchworth is always to be surrounded by a belt of twenty-five hundred acres of land. For all time Letchworth is to have the country at its doors. It is to have the vivifying touch of the open land. It is to be saved from contact with the slums and evil tenements which would surely spring up around it, if it were to grow to the very limits of its land. In its turn the agricultural belt should prosper by the rise within its centre of a city with thirty-five thousand consumers. The farmer situated on the Letchworth belt can daily drive to town with eggs and milk and butter and vegetables and the proximity of the city will give a money value to the land, just as the proximity of the land will give a healthy value to the city.

Garden city residents were no doubt encouraged to take advantage of growing and raising their own vegetables and fruits and livestock, respectively, and with the passing of the Small Holdings Act of 1892, one could yield a satisfactory income from market gardening, bees, poultry, pigs, cut flowers, fruit culture, etc etc. Add to this the leisure time and entertaining, and sporting events (cricket, lawn tennis, bowls, golf, rugby, swimming, etc), and the garden city was the Edwardian’s vision of paradise. Of course the reality was not as shiny as Howard’s ideals, but the garden city movement–and the quest for a simple, organic life–has obviously never left us!

Do you “live green” (in 21st century speak)? Any experience gardening or raising livestock? Would you ever chuck it all to live in the country and grow your vegetables and fruit?

Further Reading:
Visit Letchworth’s official website
Letchworth: The First Garden City by Mervyn Miller US | UK
Giles and Sue Live the Good Life (video – clear your schedule to watch this–and make sure you’re not eating or drinking anything, lol)

For the unmarried gentleman of high society, the world was his oyster. At no other time in history was bachelordom such a widespread, and pleasurable, pursuit. As the turn of the century dawned, the “Marriage Question” began to shift from the issue of surplus women, but on why men refused to marry! Certainly England’s system of primogeniture pushed penniless second, third, fourth, and beyond sons out into the far and wide outreaches of the British Empire, but that failed to explain why eligible men who remained at home were content to dash from cricket match to club to house party to hunting grounds with nary a thought to acquire a spouse.

In his text, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture, Howard P. Chudacoff argues that the bachelor subculture grew from the growing spaces created specifically for the consumption and entertainment of men–bars, taverns, barber shops, clubs, et al. I would add that men became more entrenched in their bachelordom in reaction to the increasing independence of women (the Bachelor Girls of next week’s post), which poked holes in the “normal” gender interaction of previous generations. The more women moved into traditionally masculine spheres, such as higher education, medicine, law, and other white-collar positions, which also thrust these marriageable women beneath their noses, the more men retreated behind barriers which would relieve the pressure of buckling gender barriers. Now men had to navigate social interactions with intelligent, independent and unmarried (and ostensibly unprotected females who would have formerly been considered fair game) women, yet social norms maintained the thought that women needed the protection and security a husband would provide. With a female coworker of marriageable age and reasonable attractiveness at the next desk, males no longer had the buffer of “work” to separate them from the proscribed times for courtship.

Out of this desire for a purely masculine domain first came the bachelor apartment. Prior to the 1880s, bachelorhood was regarded as “a mere temporary condition [...] a sort of interregnum between youth and sober, well-ordered manhood.” Unmarried men lived frequently in boarding houses, and not infrequently married the land lady’s daughter or the widow who sat across from him at meals. As concepts of the unmarried state changed by the end of the nineteenth century, the pressure for apartment houses built expressly for the residence of a bachelor grew, and the most luxurious apartment homes sprang up across New York practically overnight. These ran from fifteen hundred dollars per year for the most up-to-date plumbing, large rooms and meals delivered by a housemaid, to modest affairs of eight hundred to one thousand dollars (but always with plumbing!). London also joined the bachelor apartment, though on a more subtle scale, as the apartment blocks were built near or around Westminster, which was a typically masculine area of the Town. Ironically enough, the rise of the bachelor apartment ushered in a fad for dinner parties where unmarried men and women could mingle in a manner quite independent of chaperons or one’s parents.

However, the bastion of bachelordom–perhaps man in general–was the club. English clubs of course dated from the 17th and 18th centuries, but the late nineteenth century saw an explosion of gentleman’s clubs on both sides of the Atlantic (and the Channel) formed by all manners of men and groups. First and foremost were the political clubs of London: Brooks (Liberal/Whig), Carlton (premier Conservative club), Junior Carlton, and the Reform. The military, which had clubs for every branch and rank (Guards’, Army and Navy, East India United Service, etc), the artistic (Athenaeum for the literati; Garrick for actors; Authors for authors, et al), the sporting (Automobile, Royal Thames, Hurlingham, etc), and social/general clubs, the most famous being White’s, Boodle’s the Junior Athenaeum, the Marlborough (formed by Edward VII when Prince of Wales), and Travellers’.

In New York, under the aegis of J.P. Morgan, the city’s most powerful and most prominent men formed the exclusive Metropolitan Club, which, along with the Knickerbocker Club and the Union Club, were the most luxurious and coveted clubs in America. Here clubs were formed along interest lines, but unlike London society, the literati and the theater world did not mingle with the wealthy society men, and bachelors were less likely to use the men’s club as an escape from women (though this attitude declined as more English traits were adopted).

The bachelor life was most amenable to the fast-paced world centered around the theater. Gaiety girls, showgirls, chorus girls, and spectacles galore, tempted the bachelor with deep pockets and even deeper cups. In London, young bachelors–most of them military men–didn’t consider themselves men if they weren’t chucked from the Empire Theatre on Leicester Square at least once in their lifetime. Broadway was a bit more seductive, as the theater district abounded with naughty music halls and even naughtier cabarets. Here, the lobster palace society, the venue of the “butter-and-egg man” reigned supreme, and where luscious, giggling chorus girls, primadonnas, and grande dames of the stage, were wined and dined all night long. One cannot deny, however, that Paris was the destination for the bachelor who wanted to have fun with adventurous women, and among other places, such as the high-class brothels which catered to every taste, Maxim’s was the center around which Paris’s le high life formed. The food was excellent, but the service was even better, with the staff prepared for any activity in which its patrons could get into–even when Russian Grand Dukes doused the lights and began playing Russian roulette. Unlike the restaurants catering to the faster sets, Maxim’s was strictly for courtesans and gentlemen, and no respectable woman would dare enter its portals, much less recognize its existence.

The bachelor life was dangerous though, and the married men who indulged in its excesses were apt to find themselves on the receiving end of public outrage–as with the infamous Pie Girl Dinner–or, well, dead (Stanford White!). Ultimately, the life of the bachelor was so utterly sublime–girls, champagne, sports–it was a wonder why any gentleman of wealth and rank married at all! However, as worrisome as the growing numbers of bachelors were to society, the most worry was saved for that frightening, independent, “masculine” entity: the Bachelor Girl.

Further Reading:
Belle Epoque: Paris in the Nineties by Raymond Rudorff
Edward and the Edwardians by Phillip Julian
The Pursuit of Pleasure by Keith Middlemas
American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White The Birth of the ‘It’ Girl, and the ‘Crime of the Century’ by Paula Uruburu
Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York by M.H. Dunlop