Nineteenth-Century Literature and Histories of Environmental Crisis

Abstract

Victorian writers were acutely aware of the ways in which British industrialization and empire wrought unprecedented devastation on the natural environment, yet for much of the nineteenth century, environmental crisis was not understood primarily in scientific or ecological terms. Instead, Victorian critiques of industrialism’s effects on the natural world took place in large part separately from the life sciences’ growing interest in the ecological relationships between organisms and environments. The first half of this chapter traces this divergence, elucidating, on the one hand, the increasingly urgent consciousness of anthropogenic environmental crisis in Victorian critiques of industrialism, and, on the other, nineteenth-century biological writers’ new fascination with living organisms’ intimate dependence on, and dynamic relationship with, their environmental surroundings. The second half turns to the emerging fin-de-siècle genre of science fiction to argue that this experimental mode was among the first forms of writing to connect these two discourses, and to represent environmental devastation as a scientific problem. Focusing on the planetary apocalypse novels of M. P. Shiel and Richard Jefferies, this chapter shows how these early SF writers drew on the new ecological concept of organism-environment interaction to reimagine literary setting as a means of grappling with anthropogenic environmental crisis on a global scale.