Reading ecologies: forms of regression in Victorian fiction

This dissertation examines the relationship between industrialization, ecological catastrophe, and the narrative structures of Victorian fiction. It explores how the Industrial Revolution’s carbon economy reconstituted not only Britain’s social and geographical landscapes, but its literary and cultural landscapes, giving rise to new (and correspondingly fractured) forms of literary expression that Reading Ecologies attends to. In this study, I illustrate how the unconventional narrative structures of four works of Victorian fiction index the tensions and disruptions wrought by accelerating ecological change. In addition, I analyze the contemporaneous reviews of these texts to show how the cultural reception of these works extends beyond literary critique to encompass the broader social and ecological anxieties that emerged with the rise of industrial capitalism.

The four experimental works of literature at the center this study—Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1848), Charles Dickens’s Mugby Junction (1866), and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) —emerged at different points throughout the century: the first during the cholera outbreak of the 1820s, the second during the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, the third during the railway boom of the 1860s, and the fourth during the agricultural depression of the 1890s. As such, they provide valuable insight into the different ways in which environmental crises shaped nineteenth-century literary production. Within each chapter of this dissertation, I demonstrate how the environmental effects of industrial capitalism (some of which include air pollution, species extinction, resource depletion, and plague) are formally registered in these works—recorded in their intersecting yet seemingly incompatible temporal schemes, manifested through their compressing yet distending narrative mechanisms. I also analyze the contemporaneous reviews of these texts to reveal not only the discomfort that Victorian reviewers felt in their engagements with these new, challenging ecological forms, but the unique challenge posed by ecological catastrophe—namely, its resistance to standard narratives of progress and mastery. By examining this relationship between narrative forms and planetary systems, we can gain a better sense of how our own ecological crisis, which is itself an extension of the Industrial Revolution’s carbon economy, defies traditional narrative structures and inherited modes of historical understanding.