7 - William Cowper and Suburban Environmental Aesthetics

Summary

Robert Lloyd's ‘The Cit's Country Box’ (1754) is one of the earliest satires on the middle-class penchant for suburban living. In the poem, a rich merchant is persuaded by his wife to leave behind their London townhouse for a home in the suburbs after learning from her that a business rival has already done so. The wife's remarks also contain the primary reason motivating such a migration: to gain a healthier environment in which one might enjoy the ‘country air’ (26).

What signify the loads of wealth,

Without that richest jewel, health?

Excuse the fondness of a wife,

Who doats upon your precious life!

Such ceaseless toil, such constant care,

Is more than human strength can bear. (ll. 17–22)

For Lloyd, suburban taste represented bourgeois snobbism and vulgarity: merchants, traders and bankers were keen to distance themselves from the world of dirt and toil in the city, but could not quite afford to fully retire to the countryside like the gentry or the aristocracy. The merchant and his wife move to a villa, mocked as ‘a country box’, whose lawn they furbish with modish chinoiserie and show off as a ‘paradise’ (l. 62).

Lloyd's caricature is interesting principally for what it reveals about the hygienic, social and aesthetic values of middle-class aspirational culture. Taking two poems by William Cowper, The Task (1785) and ‘Retirement’ (1782), this chapter situates their increasing awareness of the relationship between human well-being and the living environment in the context of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century suburbanisation. Especially following his traumatic liaison with the Calvinist Evangelical John Newton, Cowper became painfully perceptive to the beneficent influence of natural surroundings upon the suffering human mind and body. He thought the suburbs could provide bodily as well as spiritual relief, despite them being less green and blissful than the countryside. Fundamentally, suburbs were secular human habitations, and yet still they contained a trace of Edenic felicity. Clapham in south London epitomised such a bourgeois suburb. It was a hub for Evangelicals, who, while prioritising a pious and peaceful life away from what they saw as a morally corrupt metropolitan centre, yet remained deeply committed to it politically and commercially. I will argue that this position of theirs and their environmental sensibility were shared by and large by urban middle-class people during the Romantic period.