Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture

Wendy Parkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317002109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From a growing awareness of the depletion of energy resources and the perils of environmental degradation to the founding of self-sufficient communities and the establishment of the National Trust, the concept of sustainability began to take on a new importance in the Victorian period. An emerging sense of the fragility and instability of human and natural resources, and the deeply complex interweaving of the two, led many Victorians to consider how to preserve or protect what they valued, and how individuals, communities (or even nations) could survive and flourish in a world of finite resources. This collection explores not only nascent understandings of sustainability in ecological or environmental contexts but also encompasses consideration of the problem of psychological sustainability and emotional wellbeing in response to the upheavals of modernity. With chapters by scholars working in literary studies, history, cultural studies, and sustainability studies, the volume encompasses a wide diversity of topics, objects, and authors ranging from the 1850s to the early twentieth century. Victorian Sustainability offers new perspectives on debates about sustainability in the present by showing how our current concerns derive from an earlier historical context.

1 A not so “stationary state”

John Stuart Mill’s sustainable imagination

John Parham

Major cultural histories of environmentalism or ecology have overlooked ‘sustainability,’ seeming to regard it as a concept of contemporary application only. Yet two more recent analyses have historicised sustainability while also placing nineteenth-century philosophical, scientific, literary and political contexts at the centre of that history. Chapter 8 of Ulrich Grober’s Sustainability: A Cultural History (2010), ‘The Birth of Ecology,’ looks predominantly at Northern European traditions. In the UK, Simon Dresner’s The Principles of Sustainability (2008) locates the evolution of the concept largely in nineteenth-century natural and political philosophy—Malthus, Marx and Engels, and John Stuart Mill.

Mill’s short chapter ‘Of the Stationary State’ in his Principles of Political Economy (first published 1848) has long been regarded as a key text in the Western historical development of ecology (see Goodin 1992; Dobson 2007; Parham 2007; Dresner 2008). Yet it was written relatively early on in his career. This essay will examine the subsequent development of the concept of the ‘Stationary State’ in published work, correspondence and practical activism. I will consider how Mill refined his ideas of it, how that thinking coincides with a trajectory set out by Grober and, consequently, how Mill’s reflections and elaborations on the ‘Stationary State’ speak to, as I will first describe, a growing preoccupation with sustainability in the environmental humanities, social sciences and literary studies.¹

A sustainable discourse

Recent critical discussions about sustainability have critiqued its dubious co-option into a ‘business-as-usual’ framework and explored the rhetorical possibilities of the term. Stacey Alaimo, for example, regards sustainability as a conservative discourse, a ‘plastic but potent signifier’ which justifies continuing economic development ‘despite the economic and environmental crises’ (2012: 559). For Vin Nardizzi, this concept, generated by capitalism ‘to sustain its own development and to safeguard its own hegemony,’ might actually trigger ‘ecological catastrophe’ (2013: 148; see also LeMenager and Foote 2012: 572; Bloomfield 2015: 22–3). The primary reason for sustainability’s ideological co-option, as Mandy Bloomfield has articulated, is that ‘complacent,’ ecologically erroneous assumptions of a ‘fairly stable ecological state’ suggest the idea that ‘nature’s balance’ could be maintained merely by acting more responsibly and by ‘careful management or ethical adjustments’ (2015: 23). And yet, as Dresner argues, since no one now could really admit to acting ‘unsustainably,’ the term is ‘much more powerful rhetorically’ than (say) ‘environmentally friendly’ and, so, can function as a foundation or point of reference for ecological living (see 2008: 1). Moreover, precisely because it’s a ‘contestable concept’ (Dresner 2008: 7), ‘sustainability’ offers a valuable and richly discursive starting point for this consideration of what ecological living really means.

We can illustrate these productive possibilities by considering how the so-called ‘three pillars’ of sustainability have been contested and reconfigured. At the UN General Assembly’s 2005 World Summit, sustainability was formulated as three ‘interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars’: economic development, social development and environmental protection (2005: 12). Such equity between the three ‘pillars’ has bestowed, however, the ideological conservatism of which sustainability is often accused. Nevertheless, in arguing that ‘economics can only flourish within a functioning social system with effective institutions and governance structures’ and, furthermore, that ‘Societies cannot exist without a functioning life-support system’ (2007: 622), Fischer et al. have reconceptualised the three ‘pillars’ hierarchically, with ecological sustainability enveloping the other categories. Akin to Margrit Eichler’s earlier graphical conception of sustainability as a ‘series of smaller overlapping circles (the human sub-systems) within a larger circle (the biosphere)’ (1999: 201), further researchers, led by Dave Griggs, have conceptualised this paradigm both poetically, as a ‘nested concept’ (Griggs 2013: 306), and pragmatically, in suggesting that the primacy of ecological over social leads us towards six overarching goals determined by ecological principles: thriving lives and livelihoods; sustainable food security; sustainable water security; universal clean energy; healthy and productive ecosystems; and the governance of sustainable societies.

Even reconfigured ecologically, sustainability has its blind spots. For instance, the habitual focus on human survival, wellbeing, even (in more visionary conceptualisations) flourishing, often overlooks the survival (or flourishing) of other species with which we share this planet (Alaimo 2012: 562–4). Yet, understood as a puzzle of contested priorities operating, nevertheless, in the larger circle of the biosphere, sustainability—whether basic human subsistence or the more expansive vision of human and non-human well-being and flourishing (see Rigby 2017)—can be seen as an ongoing project demanding constant vigilance, reflection and (sometimes) radical adjustment to ensure that we can subsist within nature’s parameters. That complexity is why literary critics have also been attracted to the term. Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote argue that we should explore the intersection of ‘literary forms and social affiliation’ because literature can ‘prompt us to imagine, as communities, a world otherwise’ (2012: 575). Likewise, for Lynn Keller narrative and poetic language can facilitate ‘serious imaginative exploration of what constitutes a desirable future’ (2012: 581–2), a ‘literature not of but pointing toward sustainability’ (2012: 582).

In his study of sustainability, Dresner suggests that ‘Many of the themes that are debated today around the issue of the environment would be recognizable to a Victorian intellectual’ (2008: 19). He laments, however, both that we don’t share the Victorians’ optimism about building a future (2008: 19) and that, in

an irony of history, the rhetoric of sustainability was adopted onto the political agenda in the 1990s at precisely the same time that the classical political philosophies that could most readily support its concerns (democratic socialism and social democracy) were being abandoned.

(2008: 4)

Mill was a central figure in advancing those ‘classical political philosophies.’ He was not an especially literary writer, but his critical examination of philosophy, economics, politics and ‘nature’ was, famously, coloured by the influence of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Consequently, he too explored the complex interconnections arising from the dual recognition that humans are ‘nested’ in the natural economy, and that that dependence on natural resources has fundamental ramifications for social structures and political economics. Such complex puzzles generated an ongoing intellectual project. As richly diverse as any literary equivalent, Mill engaged in a ‘serious imaginative exploration’ of what sustainability might look like, founded, initially, on his conception of the ‘Stationary State.’

‘On the stationary state’

Three concerns underlay Mill’s formulation of ‘The Stationary State’: Malthus’ comprehension of natural limits to growth; social justice and equity; and human ‘quality of life.’ Mindful of Malthus’ warning about exponential population growth outstripping natural resources, this materialist imperative in Mill was augmented by a more qualitative preoccupation (influenced by Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarian philosophy) with maximising human happiness. Accordingly, while Mill seemed to anticipate that the threat to resources could be mitigated by technological improvements to production, his enthusiasm for stationary-state economics nevertheless rested upon an encouragement to consume less. This would preserve resources but also reduce labour to manageable dimensions allowing people, in turn, ‘sufficient leisure […] to cultivate freely the graces of life’ (1998: 128). Mill questioned why it should be a ‘matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as representative of wealth?’ (127). The social justice emanated from the suggestion that ‘abridging labour’ would allow ‘a much larger body of persons than at present’ to be freed from the ‘coarser toils’ and from ‘the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life’ (126).

There is little of nature per se in ‘The Stationary State’ chapter until Mill introduces a poetic flourish near the end, where, notionally, his ‘stationary’ economics gradually reaches beyond the human alone:

A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

(128–9)

The value Mill attaches to unspoiled nature remains largely couched in terms of its benefit to humans. In the final lines of the chapter, he conjectures that ‘the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, [can] become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot’ (130). Yet any apparent grandiloquence in this claim is qualified by Mill’s intimations towards Romanticism. As Nadia Urbinati argues, the ‘Stationary State’ chapter ‘is methodologically very courageous, innovative, and radical because it questions not simply the notion of economic progress but also the role of political economy as a science’ (2011: 242). This is not ‘business-as-usual’ and Mill is not simply celebrating industry or commerce. Indeed, the claim itself is balanced both elsewhere, when Mill himself protests (as we shall see) against the ‘conquest’ of nature being the sole end of humankind, and here, by the warning immediately above that we must leave room for ‘the spontaneous activity of nature’ and encourage the ‘Stationary State’ before ‘necessity compels […] it.’ As I have suggested elsewhere (Parham 2007), these competing priorities—human improvement and a spontaneous nature—were delicately held in poise in his essay, ‘Nature’ (published 1874, but probably written in the 1850s), where Mill developed the notion of ‘intelligent action.’ This posited that human modifications to an ecosystem, made in our own interests, must be balanced against an understanding that ‘Phenomena produced by human agency, no less than those which as far as we are concerned are spontaneous, depend upon the properties of the elementary forces, or of the elementary substances and their compounds’ (CW, X: 375).² This led to the profound understanding that ‘by every choice which we make […] we place ourselves to a greater or less extent under one set of laws of nature instead of another’ (CW, X: 379–80), not least of which is an imperative to consume resources sustainably before we are compelled to. We are at the mercy, that is, of the spontaneous force of ‘Nature.’

As implied by the insights from the essay on ‘Nature,’ we can appreciate the ‘Stationary State’ chapter even better by looking at other later sources in Mill. Given that fact, I agree with Frederick Rosen’s statement that, for Mill, conceptualising the ‘stationary state’ was ‘not an end but […] a beginning’ in that it offered merely ‘a starting point for major improvement in existing conditions’ (2013 [Mill: Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought]: 169). That beginning, for a radical imagining of sustainable societies, was forged in much the same historical trajectory as Grober traces.

Mill and the nineteenth-century context

Grober suggests that the idea of sustainability emerged out of changing conceptions of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ in nineteenth-century European intellectual culture. In particular, he traces a line of influence through Linnaeus, Goethe, Herder and von Humboldt, key scientific and philosophical thinkers, most of whom Mill was familiar with. Grober’s argument that ‘The Birth of Ecology’ arose in this context can be reduced down to three key points (see Parham 2017). Firstly, that sustainability was initiated by a philosophical paradigm that, contrary to the Enlightenment narrative of a ‘death of nature’ (see also Dresner 2008: 4–5), emphasised the energy, vitality, complexity and autonomy (from humans) of nature. Secondly, that sustainability also derived from a subsequent deliberation as to how human activity—land use, industry, development, social structures, politics—should answer to this independent and unceasingly dynamic nature. Finally, that the idea of sustainability germinated in the exploration of practical and emancipatory solutions to the problem of how humans could sustain themselves as the project of modernity continued on its relentless way.

British equivalents to Grober’s trajectory exist in what Eric Wilson (2000) has called the ‘turbulent’ Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge (see Mill, CW, X: 141) and in subsequent attempts by (for example) Carlyle and Ruskin to apply a more complex, dialectical romanticism to social, economic or environmental ends. The existence of crosscurrents between these European and British traditions was encapsulated when the word ‘environment’ first appeared in English in a translation of Goethe by Carlyle (Grober: 109). Mill corresponded extensively with Carlyle in the 1830s, and thereafter intermittently, not least about Goethe. Significantly, the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (1873) details an alteration in Mill’s world view that questioned and qualified the rigid Utilitarianism he had inherited from his father, James Mill, and from Bentham (Parham 2007: 41). This altered perspective came from reading Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe and Carlyle.

Also citing Herder and Coleridge, Mill affirmed that he had derived from ‘the Goethian period of German literature’ a new ‘fabric of thought’ (CW, I, 161; and see CW, X: 141). Central to this, as is clear from Mill’s Autobiography, was a new historicist and dialectical foundation to his thinking. Meeting Wordsworth, what impressed Mill was nothing poetic but, rather, the complexity and ‘manysidedness’ of Wordsworth’s opinions (20/10/31, CW, XII, 80–1). The latter term was also applied to Goethe (CW, I: 170). From this, there emerged a view that society and ‘political institutions’ evolve and adapt to the circumstances of the historical moment: prevailing philosophies; the pressures exerted by people’s opinions and material needs or demands; and the physical environment (CW, I: 169). Fashioning, Frederick Rosen writes, what was in fact a ‘half-way house’ (Rosen 2013: 110) between historicism and empiricism, Mill proposed that a recognition of the dialectical and contingent nature of reality ought, nevertheless, to be balanced by ‘convictions as to what is right and wrong,’ convictions ‘firmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life’ (CW, I: 173). In our context, this ‘half-way house’ meant that, as Mill slowly formed ideas that reinforced his advocacy of ‘Stationary State’ economics, he anticipated a profoundly dialectical notion of ‘sustainability’ that embraced both the fundamental truth that we are ‘nested’ in nature and a more radical realisation that living within nature—in ways that might sustain resources and wildness and human quality of life—demands an agile, reflexive ability to respond to ever-changing circumstances and ever-deve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Sustainability and the Victorian Anthropocene
• 1 A not so “stationary state”: John Stuart Mill’s sustainable imagination
• 2 Sustaining The Earthly Paradise
• 3 Transatlantic dialogues in sustainability: Edward Carpenter, Henry David Thoreau and the literature of simplification
• 4 ‘Whales and all that move in the waters’: Christina Rossetti’s ecology of grace
• 5 Mindfulness in early Victorian travel writing
• 6 The country in the city: Dickens and the idyllic river
• 7 Guano, science and Victorian high farming: An agro-ecological perspective
• 8 ‘Human language can make a shift’: Late-Victorian tentacular cities and the genealogy of ‘sprawl’
• 9 Aestheticism and decadence in Patrick Geddes’s socioeconomics
• 10 The Land that England lost: W.H. Hudson’s The Purple Land, Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company, and the romance of the outlands
• 11 The queer ecology of George Egerton’s neo-paganism
• Afterword: Interglacial Victorians
• Notes on contributors
• Index