Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era, and: Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present (review)

For over half a century, led by such scholars as A. J. Dyos, British urban history has enlarged its scope to include British suburban history, particularly by charting-to borrow from the title of Donald J. Olsen's classic study-the "Growth of Victorian London" in developments around the shifting margins of the expanding city. [...] Dombey and Son (1846-48) is read in relation to developments in and around Camden Town, episodes like Florence's encounter with Good Mrs. Brown in the context of Victorian anxieties about a migrating "residuum" that found its way into respectable suburbs (45).