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115 The folly of modern imperialism would not come home to many Britons until the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). Thanks to its incursions in South Africa, Britain entered the twentieth century victorious—though far from triumphant . In exchange for the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, the British suffered a host of devastating blows.These included unexpected military defeats during “Black Week” late in 1899, reports of physically unfit volunteers by the inspector general of recruiting in 1900, the Prince of Wales’s desperate plea— “Wake Up, England!”—in 1901, and a stubborn Boer guerrilla campaign that held out until 1902. By war’s end the greatest empire on earth had expended over two hundred million pounds and twenty-two thousand lives on an enemy whose entire population numbered less than a fifth of all British forces in South Africa. Following the war, a series of inquiries into government preparedness and military conduct revealed “official ineptitude and administrative chaos” at all levels (Searle 44). Meanwhile, publicized accounts of sickly recruits led to an Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, which rejected fears of widespread degeneracy but called for serious improvements in working-class conditions. A cult of national efficiency ensued, as Britain’s poor showing in the war provoked a “demand for fundamental reforms in all branches of public life” (Searle 44). Liberals triumphed at the polls in 1906 on a platform of muchneeded reform in the war’s aftermath, but voices across the political spectrum clamored for vital changes—in hygiene and medical standards, in education and public administration, in working and living conditions—at the heart of the empire. While a major target of reform was the urban slum, “the abyss,” as Edwardians called it, suburbia became increasingly central to debates about national health following the Boer War. On the one hand, the suburb’s low population 5 Beyond the Abyss Degeneracy and Death in the Edwardian Suburb 116 Façades and proximity to nature were touted as obvious remedies for urban blight, overcrowding , and physical deterioration. On the other hand, unchecked sprawl in the preceding decades led to rural despoliation—and, as many believed, national degeneration—on a massive scale. Seeking an orderly alternative to the ad hoc incongruity of suburban speculative building that had run rampant in the 1880s and 1890s, the London County Council, empowered by the 1900 Housing of the Working Classes Act, purchased land beyond its boundaries for a series of planned cottage estates. Though well-intentioned, the LCC only served to replicate the high density and perpendicular uniformity of that dreary inner-suburban grid, the bye-law street (Tarn 87). To some extent these estates even replaced the East End as a primary locus of national degeneracy. “Who and Where are the Unemployed?” asked the author of Blackwood’s lead article in April 1905. He answered by pointing to those “workmen’s colonies erected during the past few years” in the north and east of London, which he dubbed “the new suburban slums” (“Who” 453–54). “Any one who has a lingering doubt as to the physical degeneration of the British workman,” he suggested, “may have it dispelled by a brief visit to a labour-yard in a London suburb. Men of all trades, all ages, and all sizes are to be seen there. Not one in ten is fit for heavy work. Very few of them take kindly to labour of any kind” (“Who” 455). Such working-class suburbs were not the only sign of the nation’s waning health. Even the more respectable suburbs seemed to have a debilitating effect on an already sedentary middle class. “The conditions of life among clerks and business men generally are most unwholesome,”wrote one journalist at the turn of the century, who claimed that “a large mass of them, instead of even getting such exercise as would be gained by walking to and from their homes, take considerable daily journeys in trains, or avail themselves of tramcars” (Almond 668). Likewise, a contributor to C. F. G. Masterman’s collection The Heart of the Empire (1901) wrote of clerks that “the portion of daylight not allotted to the far from healthy occupations of their calling is consumed in the inevitable journeys to and from the suburbs in which their houses are situated” (F. W. Lawrence 63). Even so, the same author concluded by defending the suburb as a last bastion of racial renewal: “The Housing Problem is not to...

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