| This thesis examines the conceptual impact of garden imagery in late Victorian reform leading up to the early Garden Cities movement. In so doing, it speculates on the way social and aesthetic reform ideals were transformed into material practices. Yet gardens were barely mentioned in Ebenezer Howard's original Garden City programme To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898). What then was the role of the garden in the Garden City? The model villages at Port Sunlight (1888), Bournville (1895), and Letchworth Garden City (1903) functioned as object lessons for national urban reform. In the broader Victorian discourse, gardens functioned simultaneously as a critique of capitalism and the city, a metaphor for social progress, and a wishful image representing an upward lifestyle. Thus, popular images of domestic gardens helped to "educate desire" and direct the transformation of the city.;Iconological analysis of a range of primary sources shows how landscape themes were consolidated by Victorian reformers. Their major objectives focused on Englishness: renaissance of English culture, revitalization of English countryside, regeneration of English race, and reunification of English society. Text and imagery produced by Walter Crane (1845--1915) exemplify the values of his textual community, and illustrate how designer/reformers created allegorical figures based on "invented traditions." Thus the horrors of the industrial city were mediated by the enchanted garden, the dissipation of the working class was reversed in the Georgic cottage garden, and class tensions were ameliorated by the "organic" community of the picturesque hamlet. The model villages exhibited corresponding aspects in their building and behavioral codes. Allegorical residues were thus embedded in the design and maintenance of the Garden Cities while reformers restructured their urban environment. The thesis concludes that garden images functioned in terms of myth (Barthes 1972) and mediation (Williams 1978), and considers whether the Garden City represented a concrete utopia or a variant of the "wish-landscape." (Bloch 1959). |
