The London Encyclopaedia, edited by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert (London: Macmillan, 1983).
As Jenni Calder explained in The Victorian Home (London: Batsford, 1977), by the 1880s ‘vast tracts of London’s suburbs were created for the growing army of clerks who were needed to maintain the running of business’.
Quoted by F. M. L. Thompson in The Rise of Suburbia, 1982.
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1997), Book The First, Chapter 4.
Walter Besant, London in the 19th Century (London: A&C Black, 1909).
Weedon Grossmith, From Studio to Stage (London: John Lane, 1913).
In Pooter’s day suburbs like Holloway may have been mocked as parvenus but within such places many of the most influential new movements, such as women’s rights, germinated, as T. W. H. Crosland identified in The Suburbans (London: John Lane, 1905). This well of new ideas evaporated when suburbia was forced out to the London fringes in the 1930s. Since then suburbia has become associated with a dearth of ideas and a particularly reactionary lifestyle as captured in countless television sitcoms.
which runs down to the railway: Which railway line lies at the bottom of the Pooters’ garden? As there would have been no terrace of houses by the main King’s Cross line which runs through southern Holloway it is far more likely that the Laurels is situated alongside the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction spur of the North London Line in Upper Holloway. This spur is barely used now and even then was far from rich in passenger traffic. But it has always been used for freight, especially after dark, which must have caused the Pooters a few sleepless nights, although only Lupin (in Chapter VI) admits as much. Ironically, Pooter could have taken a property only half a mile away in Drayton Park for a similar rent, without any loss of social standing and lived by a railway line which would have afforded him a quicker connection to the City than the horse-drawn omnibus he takes daily. Only a Pooter would be so badly prepared in choosing a new address.
and took ?2 off the rent: The Pooters are happy to rent. The idea of owning one’s own home did not apply so widely then. See Jenni Calder, The Victorian Home (London: Batsford, 1977). Nor was renting confined to the lower-middle classes. Charles Dickens, for instance, rented nearly all his London addresses.
