Victorian Environments

Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture

Grace Moore, Michelle J. Smith, Grace Moore, Michelle J. Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781137573377
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection will draw attention to new ideas in both Victorian studies and in the emerging area ofliterature and the environment. Adopting a broad interpretation of the term 'environment' the work aimsto draw together new approaches to Victorian texts and cultures that conceptualise and are influenced byenvironments ranging from rural to urban, British to Antipodean, and from the terrestrial to the aquatic.With the pressures of industrialism and the clustering of workers in urban centres, the Victorians were acutely aware that their environment was changing. Torn between nostalgia for a countryside that was in jeopardy and exhilaration at the rapidity with which their surroundings altered, the literature and culture produced by the Victorians reflects a world undergoing radical change. Colonization and assisted emigration schemes expanded the scope of the environment still further, pushing the boundaries of the 'home' on an unprecedented scale and introducing strange new worlds. These untamed physical environments enabled new freedoms, but also posed challenges that invited attempts to control, taxonomize and harness the natural world. Victorian Environments draws together leading and emerging international scholars for an examination of how various kinds of environments were constructed, redefined, and transformed, in British and colonial texts and cultures, with particular attention to the relationship between Australia and Britain.

© The Author(s) 2018

Grace Moore and Michelle J. Smith (eds.)Victorian EnvironmentsPalgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Victorian Environments

Grace Moore¹ and Michelle J. Smith²

(1)

University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

(2)

Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Grace Moore (Corresponding author)

Michelle J. Smith

Keywords

EnvironmentAnthropoceneIndustrialismPollutionEmigrationSettlementColonizationTravelNatureAcclimatization

End Abstract

Writing in 1877 of how human beings imprint their presence on the natural world, the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy remarked, “an object or mark raised or made by man on a scene is worth ten times any such formed by unconscious Nature . Hence clouds, mists, and mountains are unimportant beside the wear on a threshold, or the print of a hand.”¹ From a twenty-first century perspective, these words seem to encapsulate the anthropocentricity which has led the world to the brink of environmental disaster. Yet for Hardy in context, the dynamic between humans and nature was one of reciprocity and co-dependence. This notion of exchange and mutual reliance was characteristic of how the Victorians viewed their world, with human agency representing a force for resistance to the ferocious ravages of an untamed nature , as well as one of improvement.

Hardy’s works belong to a much broader discussion of the changes (and damage) that the Victorians wrought upon the land, at home and across the globe, in the country and in the city. While not all Victorians sought actively to chart environmental change, the rich body of realist writing they have left behind inevitably chronicled how industrialism reshaped both their physical and social environments. Underpinned by Roy Porter’s assertion that “[e]nvironments … are imagined landscapes; ecology lies in the eyes of the beholder,” this collection examines a range of Victorian responses to differing habitats, some of which hark back to Romantic perceptions of nature , while others look forward to the Modern.² What unifies the chapters in this book is the sense of wonder with which the Victorians engaged with the worlds around them, along with the physical and imaginative mobility which allowed them to revel in the exotic novelty of colonial settings, while at the same time enabling them to find adventure and newness on their own doorsteps.

Some chapters in this collection examine environmental damage and disaster, while others address ecological resourcefulness and human adaptability. Each author explores how the Victorians put their environments to work, whether through the collecting of seaweed for decorative purposes or through the benefits of relocation to new climes. Acutely self-aware, the Victorians were conscious that they lived in a transitional moment, although they could not have foreseen the extent to which technological developments and exploration would—sometimes irrevocably—reshape the natural environment.

* * *

The Victorians were not the first to chart environmental change: the early modern writer and gardener, John Evelyn , attempted to raise awareness of the dangers of smoke pollution in his Fumifugium of 1661, and he was not alone in his understanding of the damage that humans were already inflicting upon the world. What was alarming for the Victorians, however, was the rapidity with which their surroundings were altering, and the fact that there were no precedents to look to for guidance. As the first advanced industrial nation, Britain reaped the financial rewards of a manufacturing economy. However, the nation also paid a severe ecological and social penalty, as urban over-crowding, widespread pollution and dangerous sanitary conditions were among the many intolerable side effects of national prosperity.³

Many Victorians knew that their vast manufacturing and trade networks were changing the shape of the world. This awareness made them deeply conscious, not only of their immediate environs, but also of the colonial holdings beyond Britain, which provided commodities from tea and coffee to silk and cotton along with, by the end of the century, refrigerated meat.⁴ James Winter has helpfully drawn attention to the connectedness of Victorian notions of habitat, noting that

[W]hen Victorians used the word environment (and this would have been rare), they would probably not have had in mind a general setting to which all the world’s inhabitants must adjust. Neither would they be thinking of an interacting global system where every human intervention must have some wide-ranging consequence. In the nineteenth century, connotations would have been closer to the etymological roots of environment: the country around, the neighborhood, the environs, the stretch of topography that gave definition to a place, one’s own surroundings.⁵

Importantly, the term “environment” shifted its meaning in the 1820s so that, in addition to its French connotation of “surrounding” or “encompassing” it moved, as Hayley Rudkin notes in her chapter in this volume, from signifying, passive, unchanging spatial surroundings, and came to describe the product of evolving historical circumstances. This change perhaps registers the distinction between pre- and post-industrial society, and the increased human intervention in the harnessing and management of the natural world. Through bringing together work on mapping and space, acclimatization, hunger, food distribution, risk and collecting, the chapters gathered here highlight the accelerated environmental and historical evolution that characterized the Victorian period, and follow Winter’s lead in demonstrating the “interconnectedness” of contemporary environmental concerns. Furthermore, our authors take up the challenge laid down by the critic John Parham when he declared that “the utility of ‘Victorian ecology’ resides in considering the multiplicity of ways—effective or otherwise—in which Victorian literary figures negotiated … dichotomies and, in turn, the complexity intrinsic to ecological thought.”⁶ Adopting a materialist approach to the plurality of environments under discussion, the contributors to this volume examine the interplay between people and place, sometimes through travel and exploration and at others through notions of “mastery” or “improvement.” Many of the chapters deal with the idea of Nature as a “resource,” and all of them chart the curiosity with which the Victorians interacted with their surroundings—often, as Dominic Head expresses it, causing “indelible” change as they moved through the world.⁷

The nineteenth century is today seen as a point of origin for today’s environmental problems, and it is perhaps too easy to cast the Victorians in the role of profligate villains, squandering resources, generating garbage, and thoughtlessly exploiting the world around them. There has been much debate about when the human race entered the Anthropocene , the era of human-generated climate change in which we live. The Nobel prize-winning Atmospheric Chemist, Paul Crutzen famously identified its onset with the invention of the steam engine in 1784, while the rapid acceleration of technological progress between 1837 and 1901 is also cited regularly as evidence of Victorian culpability. Ecological damage most certainly increased during the Victorian period, but at the same time, interest in heritage and conservation was heightened. Moreover, the period is notable for its clearly expressed love of nature , as is evidenced through the large readerships of romanticized works of natural history such as Louisa Anne Meredith’s The Romance of Nature ; or the Flower Seasons Illustrated (1836) or Philip Henry Gosse’s The Romance of Natural History (1860). Brian Moore has commented that what he terms “intuited ecological thought” had existed long before the Industrial Revolution , and that it was the Romantic poets who first employed ecological personification to mediate and humanize their relationship with the changing natural and metropolitan environments.⁸ The Victorians were inheritors of this tradition and were extremely environmentally conscious, as is evidenced by scenes like the famous “Fog everywhere” opening of Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) or John Ruskin’s reflections on the sublime beauty of a mountain in volume four of Modern Painters (1856). Harriet Ritvo uses the example of public opposition to plans to dam Thirlmere in the Lake District to suggest that “almost all the components of a modern environmentalist position were in place by the 1870s,” as well as to exemplify environmental activism at this time.⁹ As our authors demonstrate, ecological thinking developed in a variety of complex ways, permeating the language of social and political reform, while at the same time infusing literary expression and the decorative arts.

* * *

Allen MacDuffie has helpfully outlined the competition for resources that punctuated life in the industrial city in Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (2014). He comments that “The idea of the city as an organism that must feed continually on its external environment was a familiar one to the Victorians” and reminds us that London was often represented as “an immense open-mouthed body.”¹⁰ While MacDuffie is primarily concerned with representations of energy and consumerism, his view of the city of London as an “‘open-mouthed’ consumer of energy resources—a fog-enclosed world of dust heaps, river sludge and spent fuel; a world groaning under the pressures of population and its demands”—is important when we consider the polarization of Victorian responses to the metropolis.¹¹ Nevertheless, the city could not exclude the wild, and the overlap and interrelationships between the two persisted regardless of the scale of urban transformation.

Cautioning against reducing the nineteenth-century envi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Victorian Environments
• Part I. Acclimatization
• Part II. Mapping
• Part III. Environmental Aesthetics
• Part IV. Food, Hunger, and Contamination
• Back Matter