The nineteenth century was an era of enormous changes in garden design and garden practice. A wealth of new and exotic plants, located and shipped back by adventurous plant hunters from southern Europe and other, warmer continents, changed the look and character of the garden beyond recognition. The repeal of the glass tax and advances in iron and glass production initiated the craze of the glass house. “Bedding out” consequently became popular, a system in which delicate plants grown under glass could be planted straight outside in warmer months, producing instant colour and ending the frustrating months of bare beds during which gardeners waited for native perennials to bloom. And there were many other important technological advances to ease the lot of the Victorian gardener, such as the patenting of the first lawn mower in 1830 and improvements in tool design. Moreover, with huge advances in printing press technology and distribution, a slew of gardening magazines and gardening manuals sprang up to educate and aid the amateur gardener. The rise of the middle class, housed in suburban terraces and villas with small gardens front and back, produced a ready market for such texts.

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When did the suburbs gain their reputation as places of dullness and sterility? This book traces the origins of such suburban stereotypes back to the 1820s, the earliest decade of suburban growth, and argues that those stereotypes were forged from the first to denigrate women and the new middle classes. Disdain for the suburbs blazed especially hotly at the fin de siècle. Writers like George Gissing and H. G. Wells famously presented the suburbs as dull and tedious places, inimical to creativity, and these are the images of the Victorian suburbs scholars know best to this day. This book traces a long-forgotten counter discourse back into the early decades of the century, showing that in women’s fiction especially, the suburbs functioned narratively as places of opportunity and new beginnings. The very existence of suburban problems, meanwhile, offered women a vocation, with professional work in and around the suburban home offered tentatively as the answer, the solution, the future. Drawing on a broad range of Victorian literature, from Charles Dickens and Mary Elizabeth Braddon to less well-known writers like John Claudius Loudon, Emily Eden, Bertha Buxton, Julia Frankau, and Jane Ellen Panton, this book bring forgotten voices back into the conversation about the growth of a new landscape, a new way of life.

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This article both uncovers a forgotten genre of women's writing and intervenes into recent critical debates about the status of the actress in Victorian literature and culture. In the 1870s and early 1880s a number of women's novels were published that presented acting as a noble and ennobling profession. Such texts didactically engaged with traditional portrayals of theatrical life as dissolute and depraved and described it instead as a profession requiring all a woman's powers of endurance and self-sacrifice. The novels appear, therefore, to incorporate rather than challenge conservative mythologies of womanhood; the article argues, however, that the challenge to those mythologies comes precisely from the texts' refusal to accept that public life taints a woman. The novels compound their attack on ideals of domestic, compliant femininity through sympathetically evoked scenes of self-directed acting: authentic female performance emerges as the self-governed expression of the insurgent impulse to act. Such texts therefore represent an intriguingly nuanced contribution to Victorian debates about the "essential" nature and appropriate sphere of women.