Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon

Many years before it was possible for a family to buy a suburban house with a garden and a car for driving to work, school, and big-box shopping centres, Victorians dreamt of such a world. Dozens of British and American visionaries in the 1800s published visions of a future when chaotic, slum cities were destroyed and replaced with suburban utopias, describing blissful country drives with automobiles or aircraft commutes long before such machines had been invented. They stirred generations of readers to work for the day when Babylon, Boston, and Birmingham could be abandoned for a high-tech, mechanized, glass-and-metal life in cottages and flowers.