Brixton is a residential district in south London. Mostly
rural before 1800, the area saw rapid development in the 19th
century as new bridges across the Thames gave southern areas
rapid access to the central city and middle-class homes
replaced country lanes and market gardens. Gifford observes
that Brixton was "regarded at the turn of the century as the
prototype of the drab machine-made life of the
urban-industrial world. George Moore remarked, on England and
her language: 'To begirdle the world with Brixton seems to be
her ultimate destiny. And we, sitting on the last verge, see
into the universal suburb, in which a lean man with glasses on
his nose and a black bag in his hand is always running after
his bus' (quoted in Edward Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the
Irish Revival [London, 1930], pp. 242-43)."
In a page on James Joyce Online Notes, Harald Beck
traces this report back to two primary sources. In “The Irish
Literary Renaissance and the Irish Language,” a talk delivered
to founders of the Irish Literary Theatre in April 1900 and
published in The New Ireland Review in the same month,
Moore declares that "The beautiful world, which was antiquity,
and which the Renaissance revived, and of which some traces
linger down to the present day, is passing away. And the flag
that the new barbarism will follow is more dreadful than that
of Attila or Tamerlane: a flag which Mr. Rhodes has declared
to be 'the most valuable commercial asset in the world'. I
accept his words as oracular. To girdle the world with Brixton
is England's ultimate destiny" (70). The vision of a
"universal suburb" populated by bus-chasing commuters follows
on the next page.
Beck quotes also from a 1901 interview that Moore gave for The
Critic. The interviewer, William Archer, asked him why
he was leaving London, and Moore replied, "I must escape from
the Brixton empire." "British empire, you mean," said
Archer. Moore: "I call it the Brixton Empire... an empire of
vulgarity, and greed, and materialism, and hypocrisy that is
crawling round the whole world, throttling other races and
nationalities––all for their own good, of course!––and
reducing everything to one machine-made Brixton pattern."
Moore moved from London to Dublin in the spring of 1901, a
development that caused a lot of buzz in Dublin. The
interview, Beck concludes, suggests that the great writer's
move was motivated in large measure by his growing
suburbophobia, and he speculates that "this interview would
have made the rounds at the time."
It seems that O'Molloy may know of both the interview (he
identifies a Brixton empire) and the essay (he contrasts it
with the more glorious one of Roman antiquity). But Joyce does
not give Moore the last word on comparing empires. Professor
MacHugh responds to O'Molloy's regard for the "Imperium
romanum" by urging that "We mustn't be led away by
words, by sounds of words. We think of Rome, imperial,
imperious, imperative," but that civilization, while "Vast,"
was "vile." Slandering it as an empire of sewer-builders, he
suggests, via an allusion to H. G. Wells,
that English suburb-builders are cut from the same cloth. Both
powers subdued the planet only to advance bourgeois values.
