How Victorian Literature Predicts Our Ecological Crisis
When we think of the Victorian era, images of industrial smog, sprawling cities, and steam-powered machinery often come to mind. It's precisely this backdrop of rapid environmental change that makes Victorian literature a surprisingly rich field for ecological exploration. Victorian ecocriticism is a burgeoning field that examines how 19th-century writers grappled with the profound environmental transformations of their time, offering us valuable historical perspectives on contemporary issues like climate change and environmental justice. Despite the obvious connections between Victorian industrialization and ecological concerns, this area of study remains surprisingly underdeveloped compared to ecocritical work on Romanticism or contemporary literature 1 .
The Victorian era witnessed unprecedented industrialization that reshaped landscapes and societies, creating the foundation for modern environmental challenges.
Victorian authors developed narrative techniques to represent ecological interconnectedness and systemic environmental change, often without specific scientific vocabulary.
The Victorians lived through what we might call the first great acceleration of the Anthropocene—the geological epoch defined by human impact on the planet. As coal smoke blanketed cities and imperial expansion reshaped landscapes across the globe, writers of the period documented these changes, often with remarkable ecological awareness. This article will guide you through the fascinating world of Victorian ecocriticism, exploring its key concepts, examining a groundbreaking scholarly experiment, and providing a toolkit for understanding how literature helps us navigate our relationship with the natural world.
Victorian ecocriticism isn't a single method but a diverse set of approaches that reveal how 19th-century literature engages with environmental questions. These perspectives help us understand how Victorians perceived their changing world and how their insights remain relevant today.
Long before the term "Anthropocene" entered our vocabulary, Victorian writers were documenting human-driven environmental change. The scale of transformation during the 19th century was unprecedented: coal consumption in Britain increased tenfold between 1800 and 1850, cities expanded rapidly, and imperial networks globalized environmental impacts 1 .
This approach focuses on material ecology—the literal substances and objects that populate Victorian novels. Instead of treating landscapes and objects merely as symbolic backdrop, ecocritics examine their physical presence and environmental significance.
Victorian ecocriticism increasingly recognizes that environmental issues cannot be separated from social power structures and colonial history. As one scholar notes, this perspective highlights "how settler colonialism and ecological concerns are intricately connected" in the Victorian period 2 .
Early industrialization; rapid urban growth; public health concerns emerge
Peak of coal consumption; Great Exhibition of 1851; Dickens publishes Bleak House
Conservation movements begin; Ernst Haeckel coins "ecology" (1866)
Late Victorian environmental awareness; Hardy's ecological fiction; early pollution controls
While Victorian ecocriticism often involves theoretical and historical analysis, some scholars have developed innovative methodological experiments that demonstrate how we can extract quantitative environmental data from qualitative literary texts.
In a groundbreaking 2013 study, scholar Jesse Oak Taylor set out to test a provocative hypothesis: Can novels serve as climate models? Specifically, Taylor investigated how Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53) registers the emerging phenomenon of the greenhouse effect—something not yet scientifically understood in Dickens's time 1 . This experiment represents a fascinating example of practical ecocriticism applied to Victorian literature.
Taylor's methodology combined close reading, historical context, and ecological theory:
Taylor's analysis revealed that Bleak House creates what he terms a "narrative greenhouse effect." The novel's famous opening—"Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes"—does more than establish mood; it materializes atmosphere in ways that parallel how the greenhouse effect operates 1 .
| Narrative Technique | Climatic Parallel |
|---|---|
| Interconnected plotlines | Ecological interdependence |
| Persistent atmospheric descriptions | Accumulation of greenhouse gases |
| Fog as literal and metaphorical | Climate as physical and cultural |
| Urban setting | Anthropogenic environment |
| Reference Type | Frequency |
|---|---|
| Fog/mist | 47 instances |
| Smoke/soot | 28 instances |
| Temperature references | 32 instances |
| Weather events | 41 instances |
The experiment concluded that Dickens's novel—like other Victorian fiction—functions as a kind of cultural climate model that registers ecological transformations not yet fully understood by science. Taylor argues that literature can provide valuable insights into how societies experience and process environmental change at the level of daily life and cultural imagination 1 .
For scholars exploring Victorian ecocriticism, certain primary texts, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches have proven particularly fruitful. What follows is a guide to the essential "research reagents" in this field.
This toolkit enables scholars to conduct what Laurence Mazzeno and Ronald Morrison term "practical ecocriticism"—the application of ecological principles to Victorian texts in ways that are both theoretically sophisticated and historically grounded . The field continues to evolve, with new approaches emphasizing the need to confront the "disorienting spatiotemporal scales of our age" while embracing the "environmental justice origins of the field" 2 .
Victorian ecocriticism reveals that our current ecological crisis has deep historical roots. The Victorian period was not just the dawn of the industrial age but also the moment when writers began developing narrative forms to comprehend human-driven environmental change. From Dickens's fog to Hardy's woodlands, Victorian literature offers us precious archives of ecological thought that can enrich our contemporary environmental understanding.
As we face the escalating challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice, these Victorian perspectives remind us that our relationship with the natural world is both long-standing and constantly evolving. The Victorian ecological imagination, with its blend of material precision and metaphorical richness, provides us with conceptual resources for building more sustainable futures.
The next time you pick up a Victorian novel, look beyond the melodrama and manners to notice how the environment permeates the narrative. You might find that these 19th-century texts have something vital to say about 21st-century ecological dilemmas.