The ‘wilds of Brompton’: Mapping Nineteenth-Century Women Writers’ Early Careers in the Sociable London Suburbs

Abstract

In this paper, we geocode the residences of nineteenth-century Brompton residents to the level of the building in order to argue that literary sociability and propinquity – leading to face-to-face interaction with writers, editors, artists, actors, and publishers – may have played a more important role in the formation of women’s literary careers than scholars have yet recognized. Taking the popular novelist and poet Dinah Craik as our case study, we argue that the walkability as well as the informal and inexpensive literary sociability of the area made Brompton a fertile ground for the early careers of nineteenth-century women writers. Following Alan Liu’s work in Critical Infrastructure studies, we attempt through mapping to reanimate connections that have been lost to time, establishing the importance of Brompton as a literary, artistic, and intellectual neighbourhood in the nineteenth century, and of propinquity in supporting the careers of women writers. Expanding on Sarah Bilston’s recent work on the suburbs as fertile grounds for the careers of Victorian women writers, we add a spatial dimension to Robert Darnton’s well-known print network, placing the private home, a site of literary sociability, as a central node in public print networks.