Ecology in Victorian Literature

Ecology, as a topic in studies of Victorian literature, is both longstanding and new. As recently as 2015, scholars were lamenting the field’s seemingly belated turn to ecocritical methods that had become commonplace in studies of romanticism and 19th-century US literature (Taylor 2015). Since then, as the scope of this article suggests, the prevalence of ecological approaches to Victorian literature has expanded greatly. Important forerunners tend to be premised on different assumptions than the newer studies, and, though the emerging field encompasses a variety of interests and approaches, it can be said to exhibit three overall defining characteristics that distinguish it from the ecocritical traditions of other fields: (1) a focus on social and anthropogenic natures; (2) a global, imperial, and systematic framework; and 3) an ethical investment in revealing the connections between 19th-century environmental transformations and environmental crises today. This last quality, above all, separates recent work from essential precursors, such as Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973) and Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983), both of which remain dazzlingly insightful. Perhaps it is unsurprising that literature of the Victorian period, written in the immediate aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, would focus less on the disappearing pastoral of romantic literature and more on the nature-culture formations and anthropogenic assemblages of the modern world, making Victorian ecocriticism less immediately visible as a separate school of interpretation. The fog of Victorian London is one of the most iconic natural images of the era, for example, but only recently has ecocritical scholarship fully conveyed its roots in coal smoke pollution. Similarly, while we have long understood that the literature of the British Empire is formally as well as thematically attuned to interconnection, we have not always appreciated how this capacity also extends to its environmental understanding. The Victorian shockwave of Darwinian theory, which revealed the endless mutability and profound interrelation of species, together with new communication and transportation networks enabled by steam power, integrated the world into a continuous epistemological whole and simultaneously integrated humans into a natural world from which they had long held themselves apart. These new ecological understandings inspired thinkers like John Ruskin and William Morris to develop an environmentalist politics premised on averting the worst excesses of industrial capitalism, but such resistance could, arguably, only soften the blows. Taken together, Victorian literature bears witness, then, to the strange twin birth of “ecology,” a word coined in 1866, and global environmental crisis.