Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture

244 Pages·2017·3.716 MB·English

by  Wendy Parkins (editor)

Victorian Sustainability
in Literature and Culture
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 val-
ued, 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 environ-
mental 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 show-
ing how our current concerns derive from an earlier historical context.
Wendy Parkins is Professor of Victorian Literature and the Director of
the Centre for Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Kent,
UK. She has published widely on William Morris, Charles Dickens,
gender, and Victorian modernity and is the author of Jane Morris: The
Burden of History (2013).
Among the Victorians and Modernists
Edited by Dennis Denisoff
This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature,
art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, so-
cial, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the
Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited
to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and
communities; and agitations and developments regarding subjects such
as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire,
ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art,
sex, socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies
that address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are
welcome. Work on recent responses to the periods such as Neo- Victorian
novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered.
1 Arthur O’Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum
Jordan Kistler
2 Dialectics of Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction
Leila May
3 Louise Jopling
Patricia de Montfort
4 Gender and the Intersubjective Sublime in Faulkner,
Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf
Erin K. Johns Speese
5 Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture
Edited by Wendy Parkins
Victorian Sustainability
in Literature and Culture
Edited by
Wendy Parkins
First published 2018
by Routledge
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© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Wendy Parkins;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Wendy Parkins to be identified as the author of
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Contents
Introduction: Sustainability and the
Victorian Anthropocene 1
Wendy Parkins
1 A not so “stationary state”: John Stuart Mill’s
sustainable imagination 14
John Parham
2 Sustaining The Earthly Paradise 32
John holmes
3 Transatlantic dialogues in sustainability: Edward
Carpenter, Henry David Thoreau and the literature
of simplification 51
Peter adkins
4 ‘Whales and all that move in the waters’: Christina
Rossetti’s ecology of grace 69
emma mason
5 Mindfulness in early Victorian travel writing 85
roslyn Jolly
6 The country in the city: Dickens and the idyllic river 105
mary l. shannon
7 Guano, science and Victorian high farming:
An agro-ecological perspective 126
lesley kinsley
vi Contents
8 ‘Human language can make a shift’: Late-Victorian
tentacular cities and the genealogy of ‘sprawl’ 146
MATThEW INgLEBY
9 Aestheticism and decadence in Patrick Geddes’s
socioeconomics 165
MIChAEL ShAW
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 180
PAUL YOUNg
11 The queer ecology of George Egerton’s neo-paganism 204
DENNIS DENISOFF
Afterword: Interglacial Victorians 220
gILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
Notes on contributors 227
Index 229
Introduction
Sustainability and the Victorian
Anthropocene
Wendy Parkins
The usage of the term ‘sustainability’ in an environmental sense only
dates from the 1980s (according to the OED). In the same decade, the
UN’s Report of the World Commission on Environment and Develop-
ment defined the concept of ‘sustainable development’ as ‘development
that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their own needs.’ At first glance, then, it
might seem anachronistic to propose the idea of Victorian sustainabil-
ity. how—or, indeed, why—might we associate Victorian literature and
culture with a current understanding of sustainability?
To begin to answer this question, Jesse Oak Taylor’s recent defence of
what he calls ‘strategic presentism’ provides a productive starting point.
If ‘done with careful attention to both the historical archive and the con-
temporary moment,’ Taylor argues, ‘strategic presentism defamiliarizes
the present by way of the alterity of the past […] with great potential to
enrich both’ (2015: 878). It is not simply a case of ‘mapping present terms
backwards’; rather, it is possible for scholars to make powerful ‘inter-
ventions in terms of contemporary ecological crisis and environmental
debate’ if they use the past ‘as a vantage point from which to understand
the present’ (Taylor 2015: 892). In a similar vein, gillen D’Arcy Wood,
noting firstly that ‘To be sustainable is, by definition, to be attentive to
the future,’ continues: ‘sustainability studies is also a profoundly histor-
ical mode, committed to a critical history of environmental discourse,
to reconstruction of the long, nonlinear evolutions of our dominant ex-
tractivist and instrumentalist views of the natural world’ (2011: 14).
With these claims in mind, then, what might a turn to the Victorians
illuminate about our own challenges and debates in response to pro-
found ecological crisis in the twenty-first century? It was the Victorians
who first contemplated the widespread environmental despoliation
brought by industrialisation and—thanks to the new technologies of
media, communication and transport—followed the impact of impe-
rial or commercial enterprises (from war to famine) around the globe
in a more immediate sense than ever before. Victorians were forced to
confront a previously unimagined scale of human endeavour and its con-
sequences around the planet. Such a confrontation had a paradoxical
2 Wendy Parkins
effect: it emphasised the reach and agency of human intervention while,
at the same time, it enabled a new awareness of the vulnerability of each
individual when faced with the global impact of the forces of modernity.
As early as the 1840s, in fact, an anxiety about environmental limits or
the risk of resource depletion as a result of energy-intensive practices was
already being articulated in Britain (McDuffie 2014: 10–11).
This collection of essays is, in part, offered in response to Wood’s
call for a critical history of environmental discourse. Challenges to an
‘instrumentalist view of the natural world’ were articulated, developed
and debated in the Victorian period across a range of literary genres—
fiction, poetry, essays—as well as in the fields of politics, economics,
philosophy and agriculture. As Allen McDuffie has recently argued,
while the Victorians did not use the term ‘sustainable’ in considering
‘the conflict between environmental conditions and rates of growth,’ it
is at times possible to see our modern understanding of the term ‘lurking
around the edges’ of Victorian discourse (McDuffie 2014: 102–3). The
work of McDuffie (2014) and Taylor (2016) exemplifies a growing field
of scholarship, developing from earlier work in ecocriticism and the
emerging field of Anthropocene studies, which explores the formation
of what McDuffie calls the ‘ecological imagination’ in the nineteenth
century and to which this volume also contributes—notably, in chap-
ters examining everything from whales to guano and stretching in scope
from the Thames to the Uruguayan pampa.
The Anthropocene denotes a new geological epoch in which ‘the human
imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active
that it rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the func-
tioning of the Earth system’ (Steffen et al. 2011: 842). Usually dated from
1748, the year of James Watt’s steam engine, the Anthropocene is marked
by phenomena such as: unprecedented energy consumption; escalating
rates of extinction of biodiversity; the transformation of nitrogen, phos-
phorous and water cycles; and, perhaps most famously, climate change.
Such phenomena, as Bonneuil and Fressoz note, ‘have the dual property
of being caused by humans and being of a scale rarely noted in the geo-
logic past’ (2016: 12). In the Victorian era, we see evidence of a dawning
comprehension that people were living in an economy of scarcity, that
the resources required by industry were not infinite and that the rapid
transformation of society they experienced was ultimately unsustainable.
In 1848, John Stuart Mill decried a world where ‘every flowery waste or
natural pasture [was] ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds not domesti-
cated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food’ (1909: IV.6.8); in
1860, John Ruskin lamented the many who lived ‘diminished lives in the
midst of noise, of darkness, and of deadly exhalation’ (1985: 225); and,
in 1887, William Morris deplored that industrialisation ‘has covered the
merry green fields with the hovels of slaves, and blighted the flowers and
trees with poisonous gases, and turned the rivers into sewers’ (2003: 269).
Introduction 3
Recently, Timothy Morton has gone so far as to contend that ‘we are
still inside the Victorian period, in psychic, philosophical, and social
space’ (2014: 489) because we inhabit both industrial society and the
Anthropocene: ‘we confront gigantic entities that the Victorians also
confronted—geological time, vast networks of industry. And we have
the same feelings about them’ (2014: 490). Morton may provocatively
overstate the case—‘we’ don’t all feel the same in response to modernity,
now or then1—but he reminds us that ecological crisis is experienced at
the level of everyday life and, in the literary examples he discusses, shows
how nineteenth-century writers grappled with this emerging awareness
of the deleterious impact of human activity on the environment.
Mention of Morton, though, leads to a caveat regarding sustainabil-
ity. Morton is one of a number of eco-scholars who have rejected the
concept of sustainability as a valid or viable goal in environmental or
ecological terms (see Morton 2012). Stacey Alaimo argues that sustain-
ability has been ‘articulated too firmly to a technocratic, anthropocen-
tric perspective’ that ‘externalize[s] and objectif[ies] the world’ (2012:
563); Lynn Keller asserts that sustainability fits too neatly ‘within the
established patterns of capitalist consumption’ (2012: 580); and Steve
Mentz contends that cultural narratives about sustainability construct a
pastoral ‘fantasy about stasis’ that ‘imagines a happy, stable relation be-
tween human beings and the nonhuman environment’ (2012: 586, 587).
The very concept of the Anthropocene, argue Bonneuil and Fressoz,
‘cancels the peaceful and reassuring project of sustainable development’
that assumes that the economic, the social and the environmental can be
mutually negotiated (2015: 22, 23). In the Anthropocene,
We enter a world of limits, which is also marked by a greater vis-
ibility of the limits of scientific knowledge. Faced with the highly
unpredictable character of ecosystems and the Earth, the uncer-
tainties are structural, and it is no longer a matter of believing
that a simple compromise can be found between exploitation and
conservation. […] Far from the glorious advent of an “age of man,”
the Anthropocene thus rather attests to our striking impotence.
(Bonneuil and Fressoz 2015: 23–4)
In these accounts, the case against sustainability seems compelling.
And yet—is this picture of sustainability discourse one that advocates
of the concept would recognise? As Paul Thompson states, sustainabil-
ity does not imply a ‘total lack of change’ but is more usefully—and
more modestly— thought of in connection with notions of resilience
or adaptability (2015: 166). In Wood’s formulation, moreover, sus-
tainability studies aims to promote a broad understanding of the deep
interdependency of human and natural systems that ‘begins from the
principle that all systems, human and natural, are characterized by