Why does the picture of this suburban life, presented by however kindly a critic, leave the reader at the end with a sense of dissatisfaction? The query is aroused by examination of its actual condition. It is excited not only by works written in revolt, such as those of Mr. Wells or George Gissing, but also by the writings of Mr. Keble Howard and Mr. Shan Bullock and Mr. Pett Ridge and others, who have attempted, with greater or less success, to exhibit a kindly picture of suburban society. At first this society appeared in literature as depicted by cleverness, delighting in satire at the expense of bourgeois ideals. Its historians were always in protest against its limitations, its complacencies, its standards of social success and intellectual attainment. But in later time this somewhat crude attitude of scornful superiority has passed. Many writers with an intimate knowledge of suburban and English Middle Class provincial life have attempted a sympathetic and truthful description: the sincere representation of a civilisation. But in all their efforts the general effect is of something lacking; not so much in individual happiness, or even in bodily and mental development, as of a certain communal poverty of interest and ideal. The infinite boredom of the horrible women of “The Year of Jubilee”--with its vision of Camberwell villadom as idle and desolate as Flaubert’s vision of French provincial bourgeois life in “Madame Bovary”--has been replaced by a scene of busy activity, with interest in cricket and football results, “book talk,” love-making, croquet and tennis parties for young men and women. And yet at the end, and with the best will in the world, one closes the narrative with a feeling of desolation; a revolt against a life which, with all its energies and satisfactions, has somehow lost from it that zest and sparkle and inner glow of accepted adventure which alone would seem to give human life significance. Civilise the poor, one complains, expand their tiny rubbish yards into green gardens, introduce bow-windows before and verandahs behind; remove them from the actual experience of privation, convert all England into a suburban city--will the completed product be pronounced to be “very good”?