This study examines the origins, growth and subsequent character of the Victorian suburbs of Oxford, a small provincial city with no industrial base. Major sources include newspapers, census enumerators' returns, deposited plans, and plan registers, rate books, the records of leasehold estates and deeds of properties acquired by the City Council. Chapters are devoted to:- The Creation of the Suburbs; Development Control; the House-Building Industry; Suburban Houses; House-Ownership; Residents of the Suburbs and Life in the Suburbs. Victorian Oxford grew steadily, attracting local migration because of the varied job opportunities. Suburban development was profoundly influenced by topography and the decisions taken by landowners. Corporate landowners preferred leasehold development to outright sale and their concern for reversionary value encouraged the building of high-cost, low-density housing. On freehold estates, too, standards were raised by the social and financial preferences of developers and builders, the introduction of building byelaws and the rising real incomes of potential investors and tenants. Access to cheap freehold plots prolonged the fragmentation of a building industry which depended heavily upon loans and credit. The suburbs were the product of innumerable local and personal decisions, providing a safe income for many private landlords and larger, more sanitary homes for better-off tenants. The new suburbs required many services and facilities, but the provision of these owed much to their social status. With an increasing number of resident councillors, leasehold, middle-class North Oxford had the political and economic power to maintain and enhance its character. Elsewhere, market forces prevailed over amenity, public utilities were grudgingly provided and the limited nature of municipal intervention was most seriously felt. Conditions were ameliorated, however, by those people and organisations who, for various reasons, provided churches, schools and recreational facilities.

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This study seeks to identify the contribution of Julia Kavanagh within early and mid-Victorian literature and as a contributor to the concept of the contribution of a women's tradition to the developemnt of French and English arts and culture. It examines her progress as a popular novelist to changing tastes during her working career and her reputation among her contemporaries, including the niche she created for novels with a French background, based on her early life in, and later return to France. Her principal non-fiction works Woman In France in the 18th Century, Women of Christianity and French and English Women of Letters are considered as evidence of a developing thesis on the contribution of a distinct female contribution in these areas, with some discussion on the relationship between these ideas and Kavanagh's practice as a novelist. Four of Kavanagh's novels are discussed in detail; Madeleine (1848) and Rachel Gray (1856) are atypical and demonstrate a more personal interest in the lives of poor single women, and reflect the author's strong Catholic faith; Nathalie (1850) and Adèle (1858) on the other hand, demonstrate the impact and influence of Brontë's Jane Eyre on Kavanagh's output. The study seeks to identify the influence on Kavanagh's work of her French upbringing, and particularly of the abandonment of herself and her blind mother by her father, leaving Kavanagh to support them by her writings, with particular reference to Rachel Gray. The study also includes a close study of a portion of Adèle, and a review of characteristic themes in Kavanagh's fiction and non-fiction. The bibliography of Kavanagh's works is the most complete to date

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