Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 [1st ed.] 9783030532451, 9783030532468

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LITERATURES, CULTURES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884

Seth T. Reno

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment

Series Editor Ursula K. Heise Department of English University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment focuses on new research in the Environmental Humanities, particularly work with a rhetorical or literary dimension. Books in this series explore how ideas of nature and environmental concerns are expressed in different cultural contexts and at different historical moments. They investigate how cultural assumptions and practices, as well as social structures and institutions, shape conceptions of nature, the natural, species boundaries, uses of plants, animals and natural resources, the human body in its environmental dimensions, environmental health and illness, and relations between nature and technology. In turn, the series makes visible how concepts of nature and forms of environmentalist thought and representation arise from the confluence of a community’s ecological and social conditions with its cultural assumptions, perceptions, and institutions.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14818

Seth T. Reno

Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884

Seth T. Reno Auburn University at Montgomery Montgomery, AL, USA

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment ISBN 978-3-030-53245-1 ISBN 978-3-030-53246-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53246-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Artepics/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to my daughter Eliza, an initially sleepy and silent but increasingly vocal partner as I worked from home in 2018–2020. I will always remember our time together, and I hope my generation leaves you a planet full of beauty, wonder, biodiversity, strangeness, and hope for the future.

Preface

As I write this preface, in April 2020, the world is gripped by a global pandemic of COVID-19, the third novel coronavirus outbreak of the twenty-first century, and most likely a zoonotic disease spawned by humans’ increasing disruption of Earth’s ecosystems. Global economic markets are crashing, entire nations are on lockdown, and citizens of the United States are hoarding toilet paper, of all things. Yet, the sun shines, spring flowers bloom all around, and my eighteen-month-old daughter laughs and waves bumblebees. But spring here sprung months ago, much earlier than usual, and it’s much hotter than normal. The last six years (2014–2019) were the hottest on historical record globally, a result of increasing carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. In 2016, CO2 concentrations topped 400 parts per million, a threshold scientists warned might be irreversible in this century, and a level that will likely cause catastrophic glacial ice melting, sea level rise, displacements of millions of people, mass extinctions, water shortages, food scarcity, and a planet increasingly hostile to human life. In the meantime, a handful of powerful billionaires and politicians continue to manufacture doubt about the realities of climate change. Countries like the United States continue to drill for oil, natural gas, and coal, and much of the industrialized world continues the same kind of industrial capitalism that has produced so much prosperity (for some) and so much environmental destruction (for all). These nations continue the

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work of the Anthropocene—the proposed name for our current geological epoch dominated and shaped by the human species. This is a book about how we got to this point: my contention is that the idea of the Anthropocene is older than popular opinion holds, and my focus is on the early years of the Anthropocene in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the debates and controversies of today surrounding industrialization, pollution, environmentalism, and globalism were already raging then, and while the texts and contexts are different, the root of the problem is the same: how to preserve the planet for future generations when humanity has become a geophysical force of nature. I explore this problem by analyzing literature, art, and science in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, during the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and of the Anthropocene. The multifaceted nature of the early Anthropocene is reflected in the organization of the book into four chapters focused on the classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, demonstrating human impacts on the geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. Each chapter develops chronologically, from roughly the mid-eighteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century, and each examines a wide variety of texts, including canonical poems and novels, scientific essays, obscure industrial literature, visual art, and other cultural artifacts. While the four classical elements were replaced scientifically by Antoine Lavoisier’s list of chemical elements in the eighteenth century (an early form of the periodic table), they remained deeply embedded in mythology, religion, literature, and popular culture, and they continue to serve as a powerful collective concept for imagining Earth’s systems. Like the poet Percy Shelley, I have no illusions that those in power will read my book, but their sons and daughters—and their teachers— may. My readers are probably professional academics and educators like me, and what we read has a profound impact on what and how we teach. Fortunately, university professors and lecturers are usually not bound to a prescribed curriculum or set of texts in the classroom, and the everchanging canon is now evolving toward recognition of the Anthropocene. In this book, I discuss well-known authors but also a wide range of obscure authors and texts on topics that were pressing then as now: industrialization, ecology, nature, capitalism, urbanization, and pollution. My hope is that this book will inspire others to bring these topics and voices

PREFACE

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into the classroom and public discourse, and to connect what we teach to how we think about the natural world, the environment, the climate, and Earth itself—in short, to what is most important to the future of humanity. Huntersville, NC, USA

Seth T. Reno

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many friends, colleagues, and editors who took time to read and respond to this book during its composition: Michel Aaij, Cassie Falke, Blake Gerard, Greg Gerrard, John Havard, Ursula Heise, Alex Kaufman, Ken Linthicum, Lisa Ottum, Alan Rauch, Ashley Reno, Ben Robertson, Matt Rowney, Clayton Tarr, Allie Troyanos, and the external reviewers for Palgrave. I am also grateful to have received financial support for this project: the Research Council at Auburn University Montgomery awarded me a 2016 Summer Research Grant and a 2019 Faculty Research Grant-in-Aid, the latter of which funded a trip to the Jerwood Centre in Grasmere, England. AUM also supported this project with a 2018 Professional Improvement Leave, which was instrumental in giving me the time to research and write much of this book. I thank the following for permission to reprint previously published material. Sections of Chapter 2 originally appear in “The New Volcanoes of Industry,” in Eighteenth-Century Anthropocene Cultures, edited by Ken Linthicum, The 18 th -Century Common (2019). A section of Chapter 3 originally appears in “Eco-literary Tourism in Wordsworth Country,” in Literary Tourism and the British Isles: History, Imagination, and the Politics of Place, edited by LuAnn McCracken Fletcher (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 93–118. Sections of Chapter 4 originally appear in “Romantic Clouds: Climate, Affect, Hyperobjects,” in Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780–1830,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

edited by Ben P. Robertson (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 37– 58; and “Environment, Ecology, and Apocalypse in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” in Critical Insights: Mary Shelley, edited by Virginia Brackett (Salem Press, 2017), 211–26.

Contents

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Earth: The Cradle of the Anthropocene Outline of the Book Rethinking Earth: Deep Time and the Deep Space Sublime Remaking Earth: The Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions Looking to the Skies: Early Climatology and the Science of Global Warming References

1 8 11 33 49 65

Fire: Volcanoes and Industrialization in Early Anthropocene Literature Volcanoes and Industry in the Eighteenth Century Laki, Tambora, and the Damnable Picturesque Volcanoes and Industry in the Nineteenth Century Krakatoa and Climate Science The Human Volcano References

73 77 88 96 104 107 115

Water: Rivers, Canals, and Commerce in the Early Anthropocene Coal, Canals, and the River Tyne Ecotourism and Conservation in the Lake District Dirty Father Thames

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Rivers as Liquid History References 4

Air: Clouds and Climate Change in the Nineteenth Century Clouds and Early Climatology Science and Futurity: Literary Clouds Cloud Art: Turner and Constable Endurance and Sustainability: The Wordsworths’ Hopeful Vision Manufactured Clouds in the Late Nineteenth Century The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century References

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171 179 183 190 198 204 210 217

Epilogue: Modernism and the Anthropocene

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3

Fig. 1.4

Fig. 1.5

Fig. 1.6

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Orbis Spike,” in “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (2015) Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Bomb Spike,” in “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (2015) Adriane Lam and Jen Bauer, “Temperature and CO2 for the last 1,000 Years,” in “CO2: Past, Present, and Future,” Time Scavengers, https://timescavengers.blog/ climate-change/co2-past-present-future/ Samuel Dunn, A General Map of the World, or Terraqueous Globe with all the New Discoveries and Particulars in the Solar, Starry and Mundane System, 1794, in Kitchin’s General Atlas (London: Laurie and Whittle, 1797) Henry De la Beche, Duria Antiquior—A more Ancient Dorset, 1830. Watercolor on paper. National Museum Cardiff, Wales, UK E.H. Dixon, King’s Cross, London: The Great Dust-Heap, 1837. Watercolor on paper. Wellcome Library, London, UK Philip James de Loutherbourg, Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801. Oil on canvas. Science Museum, London, UK John Sell Cotman, Bedlam Furnace Near Irongate, Shropshire, 1803. Watercolor on paper. Private collection, Bridgeman Images

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 4.9

Fig. 4.10

Paul Sandby Munn, Bedlam Furnace, Madeley Dale, Shropshire, 1803. Watercolor on paper. Private collection, Bridgeman Images J.M.W. Turner, Dudley, Worcestershire, 1832. Watercolor on paper. Tate, London, UK “Old King Coal” and the Fog Demon, in Punch (13 November 1880). University of Heidelberg, Germany J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway, 1844. Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London, UK William Heath, Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water, 1828. Etching with watercolor. Wellcome Library, London, UK Dirty Father Thames, in Punch 15 (London, 1848) Antonio de Correggio, The Assumption of the Virgin, 1526–30. Fresco. Parma Cathedral, Italy John Constable, Extensive Landscape with Grey Clouds, c. 1821. Oil on paper and panel. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA J.M.W. Turner, Vesuvius in Eruption, 1817–20. Watercolor on paper. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA J.M.W. Turner, Heavy Clouds above a Landscape, c. 1820–40. Watercolor on paper. Tate, London, UK J.M.W. Turner, Sunset amid Dark Clouds over the Sea, c. 1845. Watercolor and chalk on paper. Tate, London, UK John Constable, Cloud Study, Sunset, c. 1821. Oil on paper. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA John Constable, Cloud Study, 1821. Oil on paper. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA John Constable, Cloud Study, 1822. Oil on paper. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA James Whistler, Nocturne in Gray and Gold: Chelsea Snow, 1876. Oil on canvas. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, USA Francis Molena, “The furnaces of the world,” in “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate—What Scientists Predict for the Future,” Popular Mechanics (March 1912)

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CHAPTER 1

Earth: The Cradle of the Anthropocene

God made the country, and man made the town. —William Cowper, The Task (1785)

On February 4 and 11, 1884, John Ruskin delivered two lectures on climate change at the London Institution. Published in book form the following month under the title The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, these lectures reflect on nearly one hundred years of atmospheric changes in Britain. Ruskin identified a new kind of atmosphere shaped by industrial pollution, coal smoke, and erratic weather patterns. The new “plague clouds” and “plague winds” of the nineteenth century, he argued, heralded a new epoch dominated by a capitalist fossil fuel economy. This new atmosphere “looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke,” he said, and “very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls.”1 Because of such imaginative descriptions—along with his repeated use of classical and biblical allusions, and his tendency to cite personal observations, literature, and artistic works as evidence alongside meteorological data—many of Ruskin’s contemporaries dismissed his lectures as the ravings of a once magnificent mind in decline. Yet, Ruskin got it right: twelve years later in 1896, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius proved the link between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and Earth’s global temperature—this is the phenomenon © The Author(s) 2020 S. T. Reno, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53246-8_1

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now called global warming. But modern readers may be surprised to know that writers had been documenting these links long before Arrhenius’s studies and Ruskin’s lectures. The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century culminated over one hundred years of climate writing stretching back to the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. In the mid-eighteenth century, geologists began to uncover the long history and evolution of Earth. Excavations of fossils and studies of strata that compose Earth’s physical crust, as well as analysis of natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, ice ages, and soil erosion that shape Earth’s environments, radically changed the way humans thought about their place on Earth. At the turn of the nineteenth century, early climatologists and meteorologists began to study how atmosphere affects environments, and how advances in industrialization affect the atmosphere. At the same time, authors and artists began using geologic language and meteorological imagery in the earliest depictions of industrialization, which was quickly reshaping the landscape and geography of Britain. Scientists, poets, and artists collaborated in documenting and articulating a new geological epoch. They depicted humanity as a geophysical force of nature—a conflation at the heart of recent discussions and definitions of the Anthropocene. This book traces these writings and artworks in order to tell the story of the early Anthropocene in Britain from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1750 to Ruskin’s lectures in 1884. The Anthropocene, meaning “The Age of Humans” (anthropos + cene), is the proposed name for our current geological epoch, which began when human activities started to have a noticeable impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems.2 Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen popularized the term in 2000, writing that the Anthropocene refers to “the present, human-dominated, geologic epoch, supplementing the Holocene.”3 His essay spurred two decades of debate, with most scholarship centered on defining the characteristics of the Anthropocene and establishing its dates. The term “Anthropocene” quickly emerged as a vital paradigm in geology, the social sciences, and the humanities, with each field taking a different approach. While geologists are primarily concerned with determining a definitive stratigraphic boundary between the Holocene and Anthropocene, social scientists challenge the unified notion of “Anthropos” by examining the unequal distribution of power, resources, and capital across the world. For many social scientists, the very term “Anthropocene” is troubling, as only a

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Fig. 1.1 Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Orbis Spike,” in “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (2015)

handful of industrialized nations have produced the global ecological damage that characterizes this new epoch. Many scholars have therefore suggested alternative names, such as Capitalocene (to foreground capitalism) and Plantationocene (to foreground colonialism and race). Meanwhile, humanities scholars are rethinking the divisions of human and natural histories, as well as the human/nonhuman binary dominant in Western attitudes, through critical analyses of literary, scientific, artistic, and political texts. The combined result is a new interdisciplinary field of Anthropocene studies.4 Crutzen initially proposed that the Anthropocene began with the Industrial Revolution, citing James Watt’s patent of the steam engine in 1784 as a possible marker. Other scientists have since argued for the “Orbis spike” of 1610, the start of the Nuclear Age in 1945, and the “bomb spike” of 1964.5 The “Orbis spike” refers to a dramatic decrease in CO2 levels in the Americas after the Columbian Exchange and a century of genocide resulted in unprecedented forest growth (see Fig. 1.1). Scholars who support this narrative of the Anthropocene highlight imperial colonialism and global trade as its defining characteristics, both of which reshaped the trajectory of Earth’s biosphere.6 More recent markers are the Trinity Nuclear Test in 1945 (the first detonation of an atomic bomb) and the “bomb spike” of 1964, the latter of which shows a dramatic increase in radionuclides as a result of nuclear testing (see Fig. 1.2). These narratives center on the Great Acceleration—that is,

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Fig. 1.2 Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Bomb Spike,” in “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (2015)

the concurrent accelerations of CO2 emissions, global industrialization, species extinctions, and other related effects of intensified global warming since 1950—as well as nuclear fallout, which will be detectable in Earth’s crust for millions of years.7 I advocate for 1750 as a convenient starting date for the Anthropocene, which coincides with the Industrial Revolution, Agricultural Revolution, and rise of capitalism in Britain, and is thus an apt marker for the start of the global fossil fuel era.8 It also corresponds with the start of the so-called Romantic Century (1750–1850), a rubric that challenges (and blends) the traditional historical markers of the Eighteenth Century, Long Eighteenth Century, Romantic Era, Victorian Period, Nineteenth Century, Long Nineteenth Century, and so on. While the Industrial Revolution does not have a specific start date or unambiguous stratigraphic marker, its imprint marks virtually every aspect of life on Earth. Moreover, there is a clear rise in CO2 beginning around 1750, which is a direct result of fossil fuels, though not a “golden spike,” which is what geologists use to mark official stratigraphic boundaries (see Fig. 1.3).9 What is most important to me, however, are the scientific and cultural understandings of anthropogenic climate change in relation to the Anthropocene: the eighteenth century is the first time that writers recognized humanity as a geological force of nature, and the first moment that the Anthropocene concept was theorized. This book traces various cultural responses to this new epoch in the literature, art, and science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.10

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Fig. 1.3 Adriane Lam and Jen Bauer, “Temperature and CO2 for the last 1,000 Years,” in “CO2: Past, Present, and Future,” Time Scavengers, https://timescave ngers.blog/climate-change/co2-past-present-future/

While the notion that eighteenth-century writers were somehow aware of global climate change might at first seem anachronistic, the argument that the Anthropocene begins with the Industrial Revolution has been gaining steam for close to two decades.11 In his influential essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009), Dipesh Chakrabarty cites the transition to fossil fuels around the year 1750 as a determining moment of the Anthropocene—the moment when geologic and human history converged. Similarly, in Fossil Capital (2016), Andreas Malm reads the Anthropocene through a Marxist lens, tracing our current geological moment back to the eighteenth-century rise of capitalism and its reliance on coal.12 In The Shock of the Anthropocene (2016), Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz identify the first stage of the Grand Narrative of the Anthropocene as the period from the Industrial Revolution to World War II, when steam engines and industrialization spread worldwide. The second stage is the Great Acceleration (1945–2000), and the final stage is the twenty-first century, when global warming became part of the global discourse.

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The theory of this Grand Narrative, however, is plagued by its presentism: as Bonneuil, Fressoz, and others argue, it falsely posits an “awakening” in the late twentieth century when humans realize they are causing climate change. In fact, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers were reflecting on the climatic consequences of industrialization and naming their new geologic epoch. For example, French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, le comte de Buffon attributed climate change to human activity in Epochs of Nature (1778). British author Thomas Carlyle wrote of “the Mechanical Age” in 1829. Scottish geologist Charles Lyell suggested the term “Recent epoch” in 1830. Welsh geologist Thomas Jenkyn wrote of the “Anthropozoic” in 1854, calling his present day “the human epoch.” American environmentalist George Perkins Marsh summarized existing research on “climatic change” in Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864), writing that the industrial and agricultural revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “have tended to produce great changes in the hygrometric, thermometric, electric, and chemical condition of the atmosphere.”13 Less than ten years later in 1873, Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani called this the “anthropozoic era.” And in 1884, Ruskin identified a new epoch dominated by the “plague clouds” and “plague winds” of industrialization. The recovery of these early climate writings led scholars to reread eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts through the lens of the Anthropocene, most notably Jesse Oak Taylor in The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016), Tobias Menely and Jessie Oak Taylor in Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (2017), and Wendy Parkins and Peter Adkins in Victorian Ecology and the Anthropocene (2018). Menely and Taylor argue for an improvisational kind of literary reading that eschews methodological and theoretical consistency in favor of a “multiform, multiscalar, multitemporal” approach suitable for the Anthropocene.14 Reading the Anthropocene means reading humanity’s imprint on Earth itself. Just as geologists read strata to uncover the history of Earth, Anthropocene readers decipher humans’ writing on Earth. This kind of reading requires hybridity and interdisciplinarity: Anthropocene readers must fuse science, art, literature, and theory into what Bernd Scherer calls a “sensuousaesthetic praxis.”15 No single perspective or approach will suffice to

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produce a complete narrative of the Anthropocene, which “cannot necessarily be concretely observed,” and which ultimately “exceed[s] narrativization.”16 Literary reading in the Anthropocene means looking at the stratigraphic and the social, the ecological and the aesthetic, and how “literary history register[s] modes of affect and experience related to thermodynamic, geological, and atmospheric processes.”17 This method reveals a body of Anthropocene literature, defined by Gabriele Dürbeck as those “literary texts that reflect on the human condition in the face of fundamental human transformations of the planetary surface on a global scale.”18 As these contemporary critics indicate, there is no single narrative of the Anthropocene, but rather multiple narratives, captured in genre-defying and interdisciplinary literary writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the division and specialization of the disciplines. Still, received wisdom about Western environmentalism and its recent origins persists. Despite compelling evidence to the contrary, most literary studies of the Anthropocene uphold the Grand Narrative in arguing that recognition of anthropogenic climate change does not emerge until the twentieth century,19 and, in general, the vast majority of Anthropocene studies focus on science, theory, and history.20 This book proposes a novel framework built on the substrate of little-noticed acknowledgments of climate change in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary and scientific writings. Beginning around 1750, British literature registers an early Anthropocene. The writers I profile in this book may not have understood the complex mechanisms of global warming or Earth system science, but they certainly were making intuitive—and often scientific—connections between the effects of natural phenomena and the effects of industrialization. These connections are sometimes tenuous and often take shape in imaginative writing rather than “hard science,” but a clear pattern develops across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that exceeds coincidence: writers were responding to a rapidly changing world. They were writing the Anthropocene. Literature documents this radical new existence, and piecing together a literary history of the early Anthropocene is the goal of this book.

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Outline of the Book Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain contains four chapters focused on the classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. Rather than maintain traditional historical periodization, this structure reflects human impacts on the geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere in the Anthropocene. Each chapter unfolds chronologically, but the book moves fluidly between 1750 and 1884 to emphasize the continuity and complexity of the Anthropocene. The chapters themselves are structured as mosaics that piece together a wide range of texts (literary, artistic, scientific, theoretical, political), offering various snapshots of the early Anthropocene from different angles and perspectives. Some texts and authors reappear in later chapters from different perspectives and within different contexts. This organizational structure takes inspiration from Erasmus Darwin’s highly popular scientific poem The Botanic Garden (1791), the first part of which is divided into four cantos focused on the four classical elements. As an influential work on both science and literature throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Darwin’s poem appears frequently throughout this book. The vast majority of the writers, artists, and scientists taken up in this study are British, even though the Anthropocene and its attendant effects are necessarily global. Nonetheless, I make the case for Britain as the cradle of the Anthropocene, for it is in eighteenth-century Britain that the capitalist, imperialist, fossil economy emerges, along with the kind of mechanized industrialization that shapes most of the world today. Britain is unique in this sense, as befits the nation where the Industrial Revolution began. In this first and introductory chapter, I outline the historical, scientific, and theoretical contexts of the early Anthropocene in Britain. Building on Tita Chico’s argument “that [eighteenth-century] science is a literary trope,”21 I trace the emergence of geology, natural history, and climatology alongside literature and art, establishing the central role these sciences play in the second scientific revolution, British colonialism, the British Agricultural Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Through close readings of the works of scientists, poets, novelists, and explorers, I establish parallels between scientific and literary imaginings of climate change. What emerges is a pattern of writers using scientific language and imagery to depict industrialization and its effects as a geological force of nature, implicitly collapsing human and geological histories. I then

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examine details of these essential features of the early Anthropocene in subsequent chapters: Chapter 2 focuses on geology, volcanoes, and industrial poetry; Chapter 3 focuses on rivers, canals, and water pollution; and Chapter 4 focuses on meteorology, clouds, and climate change. Chapter 2 examines the fires of volcanoes and industrial factories. I read some of the earliest literary responses to the changes wrought by industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from anonymous poems on industrial cities and technologies published in popular literary magazines to more well-known works by authors such as William Cowper, Anna Seward, Lord Byron, Robert Southey, and John Ruskin. These writers employ similar language and imagery in describing the anthropogenic impacts of industrialization and the geologic impacts of volcanic eruptions. These eruptions were at the center of geological theories of Earth in prominent writings by Buffon, Hutton, Darwin, and others, and the conflation of human and geological phenomena presents Britons as geophysical agents in a new industrial epoch. Chapter 3 focuses on water. Modified rivers and canals were essential to the Industrial Revolution and to Britain’s global-colonial empire, and the transformation of rivers like the Thames, Tyne, and Wye throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals how waterways impacted every aspect of life. In addition to analyzing a wide range of writings on industrial rivers, this chapter also examines early conservation efforts linked to tourism in the Wye Valley and Lake District, a literature that counters the industrial writings that dominate depictions of the Thames and Tyne. But the lasting influence of the nineteenth-century river-writing tradition is the industrial, imperial, (post)apocalyptic mode carried on in famous works such as Richard Jeffries’s After London (1885) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), as well as contemporary climate fiction centered on catastrophic floods. In the twenty-first century, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and water scarcity are major threats in our era of accelerated global warming, and these are frequently taken up in popular climate fiction and films. This chapter locates the seeds of such thinking and aesthetics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. In the fourth chapter, about air and atmosphere, I look at the boom of cloud poems and paintings at the turn of the nineteenth century, arguing that we can see an emerging awareness of climate change by reading literary and visual representations of clouds sequentially throughout the nineteenth century: authors and artists were documenting the ecological impacts of industrialization. Popular poets such as William Wordsworth,

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John Keats, and Percy Shelley wrote cloud poems; painters such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable created hundreds of cloud studies; and the cloudy, smoggy, polluted atmosphere of London became a perennial feature in Victorian novels, including the works of Charles Dickens and William Delisle Hay. Similar to the work of twenty-firstcentury photographers who create sequences of photos to illustrate global warming, authors and artists during the nineteenth century use clouds to represent the un-representable: climate change. I conclude the book with a brief epilogue that examines two modernist texts that engage the Anthropocene in a more explicit and self-conscious manner than prior eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928). The experimental forms of these modernist works develop as means to express the new reality of the Anthropocene, which becomes even more pronounced in contemporary climate fiction. Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain thus provides a bridge from existing work on contemporary climate change literature back to its roots in the eighteenth century. One final introductory remark: Chapter 1 is a bit different from the other chapters in this book. In addition to serving as an introduction to the project as a whole, it does not develop in a straightforward chronological manner, as do the other chapters. This less chronological chapter contains three sections, each of which spans the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the first section, I establish the importance of early geology and astronomy to writing and thinking on Earth during this period. In the second section, I analyze industrial and agricultural literature alongside their respective revolutions, emphasizing human effects on the geosphere. In the third section, I discuss early climatology and meteorology in the nineteenth century in relation to the science of global warming in the twenty-first century. The thread that connects these three sections is the radically new conceptualization of Earth, both in terms of humans’ transformation of the physical world and writers’ rethinking of the world as a concept in an interconnected, global context. Thinking about Earth is just as vital to the Anthropocene as transforming Earth, and the Anthropocene concept contains this contradiction: humanity is a geophysical force of nature capable of modifying Earth—that’s the “Anthropos,” which, as scholars have pointed out, refers mainly to industrialized nations, and, within the context of this study, mainly Britain—but Anthropocene thinking shows that humans are also utterly insignificant in the contexts of deep time and deep space.

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Humans are all-powerful, yet totally irrelevant. British writers in the early Anthropocene often portray Britain as the apex of civilization, but their writings also reveal a deep history where Britons, and the human species, don’t really matter to Earth and the universe. These parallel phenomena reflect my dual understanding of the Anthropocene: (1) as a geophysical phenomenon/geological categorization, and (2) as a cultural phenomenon. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain enacted large-scale deforestation, enclosure, clearings, and industrialized urbanization, dramatically modifying the nation’s landscape and the chemical-material makeup of the sizeable portion of Earth it controlled. Through British imperial colonialism, humans reached nearly every corner of the globe, drastically transforming the physical spaces of other nations as well. These combined efforts ushered in the Anthropocene epoch. Britons created an anthropogenic landscape like nothing before the Industrial Revolution, one that spread throughout the world and continues to shape Earth’s ecosystem in the twenty-first century. At the same time, Britons’ perspective of the world changed drastically: suddenly, everything was connected. What emerges in the writings and artwork of this new Anthropocene epoch is a tension between humans as powerful geological agents and humans as insignificant in the vast immensity of deep time and deep space. And the fact is, humans are both: humans’ imprint on Earth will mostly disappear millions of years after we are extinct, though Earth’s trajectory has been permanently modified. The world in which we live today—the Anthropocenic world of the twenty-first century—is a product of humans. If “God made the country, and man made the town,” as William Cowper quips in the line that serves as an epigraph to this chapter, then humans remade the country in the early Anthropocene, and we still live in that country today.22

Rethinking Earth: Deep Time and the Deep Space Sublime The conception of Earth as a global system where all nations and ecologies are deeply connected solidified during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.23 In Britain, the confluence of colonialism, exploration, and the second scientific revolution resulted in an Earth system perspective exemplified by Samuel Dunn’s 1794 General Map of the World, or Terraqueous Globe with all the New Discoveries and Particulars in the Solar, Starry

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and Mundane System (see Fig. 1.4). Here is Earth in its entirety—with all of the known continents, islands, and bodies of water—situated within the solar system. Dunn’s highly detailed map was reprinted frequently in atlases throughout the nineteenth century. The eastern and western hemispheres of Earth are the focal point, surrounded by short scientific essays and explanations embedded within a variety of smaller astronomical maps—notably, a map of the solar system in the upper left-hand corner, an astronomical analemma in the upper right-hand corner, and a map of the moon at the bottom center. Earth, with Europe and Asia as the most detailed and dominant, thus appears central, signaling humankind’s power, but also, implicitly, only one of innumerable planets that make up the solar system.

Fig. 1.4 Samuel Dunn, A General Map of the World, or Terraqueous Globe with all the New Discoveries and Particulars in the Solar, Starry and Mundane System, 1794, in Kitchin’s General Atlas (London: Laurie and Whittle, 1797)

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Dunn’s map offers a global-cosmic perspective of Earth, similar to the visions of astronomer William Herschel and poet-scientist Erasmus Darwin. Dunn was a mathematician and schoolteacher who regularly published articles on astronomy and navigation in Philosophical Transactions, a journal also publishing the work of Herschel, Darwin, and other prominent scientists. Herschel, already famous from his discovery of Uranus in 1781, conducted a series of deep sky surveys in the 1780s and 90s, the results of which he published in a series of essays. “On the Construction of the Heavens” (1785) and “Catalogue of One Thousand Nebulae and Clusters of Stars” (1786) are especially relevant.24 In these essays, Herschel presents detailed charts of star clusters that have existed for “millions of ages,” arguing that they “may be the Laboratories of the universe.”25 Using his own reflector telescopes, Herschel discovered a universe so large and so old that it defied human understanding. His notion of star clusters as “laboratories” suggests a universe in constant flux, always changing, always adapting, and always experimenting—the laboratory, after all, is where scientists conduct their own experiments, which involve testing theories, developing new technology, and observing phenomena. This notion of an experimental universe destabilized the prevailing eighteenth-century Christian worldview of a fixed and stable universe. Herschel presents a radical new perspective, proving that there are hundreds of nebulae, each containing hundreds of thousands of stars, and all of which are very, very far from one another—and this is only what he can see through his telescope, one tiny speck of an immense universe in which Earth barely registers. Herschel’s deep space sublime was mind-blowing at the time (and still is), showing the power of human technology to make a discovery that simultaneously relegates that technology, and all of human existence, to an insignificant speck in the vast universe of things. Herschel’s work proved what astronomer Thomas Wright had speculated over three decades earlier in 1750: What an amazing Scene does this display to us! what inconceivable Vastness and Magnificence of Power does such a Frame unfold! Suns crowding upon Suns, to our weak Sense, indefinitely distant from each other; and Miriads of Miriads of Mansions, like our own, peopling Infinity, all subject to the same Creator’s Will; a Universe of Worlds, all deck’d with Mountains, Lakes, and Seas, Herbs, Animals, and Rivers, Rocks, Caves, and Trees; and all the Produce of indulgent Wisdom, to chear Infinity with endless Beings, to whom his Omniprescence may give a variegated eternal Life.26

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Dunn captures something of this deep space sublime in his map. He had previously published a popular world atlas in 1774, but his 1794 map comes after both Herschel’s astronomical discoveries and James Cook’s infamous voyages of global discovery in the 1770s, both of which Darwin cites as inspiration in his scientific poem The Botanic Garden. Dunn clearly draws from the sciences of his day to present Earth and the solar system as a unified system, and it is likely that he was familiar with Herschel’s work and Darwin’s widely read poem. In The Botanic Garden, Darwin presents a veritable smorgasbord of eighteenth-century scientific theories. The first part of the poem, entitled “The Economy of Vegetation,” is divided into four cantos corresponding to the classical elements of Fire, Earth, Water, and Air. Darwin offers a deep history of Earth and of the universe itself: his roving eye scans the globe, from tropical regions to the Arctic, from the strata of Earth to the composition of the skies to deep space. In the first canto, which focuses primarily on fire, Darwin imagines his version of the Big Bang in the context of Herschel’s astronomical discoveries: “—LET THERE BE LIGHT!” proclaim’d the ALMIGHTY LORD, Astonish’d Chaos heard the potent word;— Through all his realms the kindling Ether runs, And the mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first; Bend, as they journey with projectile force, In bright ellipses their reluctant course; Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll, And form, self-balanced, one revolving Whole. —Onward they move amid their bright abode, Space without bound, THE BOSOM OF THEIR GOD!27

Part mythological, part biblical, and part astronomical, this passage expresses the deep space sublime: millions of exploding suns create innumerable planets in boundless space, all unified into a “revolving,” though ultimately ungraspable, “Whole.” Earth is but one of seemingly infinite planets. In an extensive footnote to the passage, Darwin writes of Herschel’s discoveries and the formation of the Milky Way: “If these innumerable and immense suns thus rising out of Chaos are supposed to have thrown out their attendant planets by new explosions, as they ascended; and those their respective satellites, filling in a moment the immensity

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of space with light and motion, a grander idea cannot be conceived by the mind of man.”28 Later, in Canto IV, Darwin continues to marvel at Herschel’s discoveries: So, late decry’d by HERSCHEL’s piercing sight, Hang the bright squadrons of the twinkling Night; Ten thousand marshall’d stars, a silver zone, Effuse their blended lusters round her throne; Suns call to suns, in lucid clouds conspire, And light exterior skies with golden fire; Resistless rolls the illimitable sphere, And one great circle forms the unmeasured year.29

Like Wright’s vision of “Suns crowding upon Suns” and Herschel’s “Laboratories of the universe,” Darwin’s imagery depicts a deep space sublime inspired by eighteenth-century astronomy. Darwin’s astronomical sublime has important implications for his nascent Earth system science. His poem moves seamlessly between cosmic, atmospheric, and terrestrial perspectives, making connections between deep space and deep time. He grounds his thinking in science and uses literary devices to advance these theories and speculate on their possibilities. A common literary device in The Botanic Garden is analogy.30 For example, in Canto IV, Darwin concludes an extended analogy using the seed of an oak tree to explain the deep history of Earth: —So, fold on fold, Earth’s wavy plains extend, And, sphere in sphere, its hidden strata bend;— Incumbent Spring her beamy plumes expands O’er restless oceans, and impatient lands, With genial lusters warms the mighty ball, And the GREAT SEED evolves, disclosing ALL; LIFE buds or breathes from Indus to the Poles, And the vast surface kindles, as it rolls!31

This is a complex passage. The national tree of England is the oak, so the analogy immediately has a nationalistic undertone in keeping with Darwin’s view of Britain as the apex of civilization. The oak is also sacred in Greek and Celtic mythology, to which Darwin consistently alludes throughout the poem. Moreover, oak trees can live for a very long time, a major factor in their mythological and national significance. England

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alone contains four world-famous, thousand-year-old oaks.32 These oaks embody the long, slow process of deep time, evolving from seeds to the massive trees that stood (and still stand) as symbols of Britain’s power. Earth, over millennia, also “evolves” like the trees. Darwin reads this history in the “hidden strata” of Earth. He would develop this theory of evolution in later works such as Phytologia (1800) and The Temple of Nature (1803), which inspired his grandson Charles in the 1840s. Darwin’s analogy also has negative connotations related to land-use changes. In the late eighteenth century, Britain had experienced a massive loss of oak (and other) trees from wide-scale deforestation. Between 1608 and 1783, England’s royal forests diminished by nearly 80%. Some counties experienced even sharper declines.33 The felling of forests served to fuel colonial pursuits, industrialization, and urban growth. This practice was not initially framed in a negative context: in “Windsor Forest” (1713), for example, Alexander Pope glorifies turning oak trees into ships for the Royal Navy. However, many Britons became dismayed at the nation’s disappearing forests. A number of prominent poets wrote about ancient trees, often lamenting their loss. One particularly representative example is William Cowper’s “Yardley Oak” (1804), which recounts the long, slow life of an oak tree over centuries to its imminent demise in the early nineteenth century. The oak, which stood in Olney, Buckinghamshire, where Cowper lived, is a “Clock of History,” as he writes.34 Yet, the oak is the last of what was once a great forest: Survivor sole, and hardly such, of all That once lived here thy brethren, at my birth (Since which I number threescore winters past) A shatter’d vetran, hollow-trunk’d perhaps As now, and with excoriate forks deform, Relicts of Ages! Could a mind imbued With truth from heav’n created thing adore, I might with rev’rence kneel and worship Thee. It seems Idolatry with some excuse When our forefather Druids in their oaks Imagin’d sanctity.35

Cowper first relates the lone oak to the livelier ecology of his youth thirty years earlier, suggesting local environmental change and reflection on his own mortality. He then invokes a deeper time scale, referring to the oak’s branches as “Relicts of Ages” and worthy of the worship of druids,

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the religious leaders in ancient Celtic cultures who met in oak groves, granting a sacred aura to the trees in cultural and mythological writings. Cowper thereby links the Yardley oak to the groves that existed over two thousand years before he wrote his poem. The loss of these groves is as much a spiritual as an ecological catastrophe, and it also haunts the passage from The Botanic Garden cited above. At the time Darwin wrote the poem, Britain was importing trees to supply its urban and industrial growth. His analogy is thus unintentionally prophetic: like the oaks, Earth is in danger of extinction from Britain’s insatiable desire for progress and capital. Paradoxically, Darwin often celebrates industrialization, which he sees as the natural progression and application of science. In his address to Fire in the first canto, he praises Francis Bacon and coal-mining: You taught mysterious BACON to explore Metallic veins, and part the dross from ore; With sylvan coal in whirling mills combine The crystal’d nitre, and the sulphurous mine; Through wiry nets the black diffusion strain, And close an airy ocean in a grain.—36

Writing on the cusp of Britain’s transformation to a fossil fuel culture, Darwin marvels at geologic-industrial discoveries and possibilities. He draws a direct line from scientific discovery to geological-volcanic excavation to industrial factories, illustrating what Alan Bewell calls a “cosmopolitan” perspective that embraces a global, hypermodern view of the natural world. For Bewell, Darwin grounds his poem in an “ecological imperialism” where the natures of the world exist for Britain’s use and development.37 Darwin also writes a brief history of the steam engine in a footnote, developed in more detail in a lengthy endnote.38 His meditation on steam leads to an outline of industrial cities that support the British Empire: every “rock,” “den,” and “oak” in Britain— and the entire planet—is mined and utilized for “clay-built cisterns,” “lead-lined towers,” “thousand[s of] pipes,” and new urban “cities,” all of which “nourish human-kind.”39 Later, he links the discovery of coal and oil fields in Britain with Benjamin Franklin’s discovery of electricity, presaging the fossil fuel culture that would dominate the world a century later.40 This kind of nationalistic, technocentric rhetoric recurs throughout the poem. At one point, Darwin compares Britain’s

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newfound industrial powers to the feats of Hercules, who tamed the natural elements and the gods themselves. Britons, he writes, are now “demigods on earth.”41 Eighteenth-century geology, industrialization, and intensified classical analogies saturate Canto II, which is addressed to the Gnomes of Earth. In one footnote, Darwin comments on natural and anthropogenic climate change: The great mass of matter which rests upon the lime-stone strata of the earth, or upon the granite where the lime-stone stratum has been removed by earthquakes or covered by lava, has had its origin from the recrements of vegetables and of air-breathing animals, as the lime-stone had its origin from sea animals. The whole habitable world was originally covered with woods, till mankind formed themselves into societies, and subdued them by fire and by steel.42

In a related and extended analogy, he narrates in great detail the seduction and rape of Europa by Zeus. According to Greek mythology, Zeus disguised himself in the form of a bull and persuaded Europa to ride him, at which point he jumps into the sea and takes her to Crete, where she becomes his forced queen, giving birth to three children who populate Europe. The results, according to Darwin, were “Kings and Heroes own illustrious birth, / Guards of mankind, and demigods on earth.”43 This classical interlude appears in between long disquisitions on the mining of Earth’s minerals and resources, a new power that culminates historically on “Britannia’s isle.”44 The accumulation of these and other classical allusions supports the argument that Britons now do what was once thought possible only by the gods of the ancient world: subdue, control, and reshape Earth. Humans have become a god-like geophysical force of nature. Along with geology, astronomy, and industrialization, imperialscientific exploration is also central to the new vision of Earth espoused by Darwin, Dunn, and others. Darwin explicitly cites the voyages of James Cook in the first canto of The Botanic Garden,45 and Cook’s brand of scientific colonialism helped to establish a total view of Earth and the ways that nations, cultures, and natures translated and adapted across physical and cultural boundaries. In many ways, British colonialism forged (or forced) this global, interconnected world. While there were many other British explorers throughout the eighteenth century, Cook exemplifies the cosmopolitan view of nature shared by Darwin.

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Cook’s first voyage (1768–71) was equally scientific and colonial. The Royal Society planned the voyage to chart the transit of Venus, but it was also commissioned by the Admiralty, who secretly tasked Cook with searching for new lands in the Pacific. The orders noted: “in case you find any Mines, Minerals or valuable stones you are to bring home Specimens of each, as also such Species of the Seeds of the Trees, Fruits and Grains as you may be able to collect.”46 Cook was an experienced captain in the Royal Navy and had a background in cartography and astronomy, making him the perfect leader for this expedition. He was accompanied by naturalist Joseph Banks, who later became President of the Royal Academy, due in large part to the thousands of natural specimens and cultural artifacts he collected during the trip. This was, then, a voyage of scientific imperialism, as were Cook’s second (1772–75) and third (1776–80) voyages, where he was joined by a number of prominent geologists and naturalists. While Cook did not discover a new continent in the Pacific, as many had imagined, his voyages provided the most comprehensive account of the known world, including the relatively unknown islands of New Zealand and New Holland (Australia), a host of other Pacific islands, the Antarctic Circle, and the Bering Strait—all of which Dunn and Darwin depict in their works. Cook’s journals and official reports detail the islands’ landscapes, produce, climates, cultures, and people, often in relation to those of Europe. His environmental, astronomical, and tidal measurements were so accurate that they were used in global compilations of tidal information and in the first tidal atlases in the nineteenth century.47 In addition to mapping the world, Cook’s voyages contributed to the mapping of geologic time, introduced as the colloquialism “deep time” by early geologists. In the mid-eighteenth century, the prevailing view of most Europeans was the biblical notion that God created Earth in 4004 BCE. James Ussher had popularized this date in 1650, which was based on long-standing estimates for the age of Earth. This biblical chronology began to shift around 1750: geologists and paleontologists were deciphering strata of Earth and uncovering fossils that were millions of years old, and explorers such as Cook were coming into contact with what they deemed as “primitive” cultures that pointed to much older human and natural histories than many believed.48 Two of the most influential geologists responsible for developing the concept of deep time were Georges-Louis Leclerc, le comte de Buffon and James Hutton. Buffon’s Epochs of Nature (1778) and Hutton’s

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“Theory of the Earth” (1788) were the culmination of decades of geological research, which resulted in magisterial, though still often speculative, histories of Earth. Buffon argued that Earth was at least seventy-five thousand years old, a claim that caused controversy and resulted in a halfhearted retraction. In his unpublished notes, he conjectured that Earth was more likely three million years old. Buffon tells his deep history in seven epochs, mirroring the seven days of creation in the Christian tradition, from the creation of Earth by a comet crashing into the sun, to the development of myriad plant and life forms, to the rise of humanity as a geophysical force in the eighteenth century. His evidence comes from astronomy, mathematics, geology, paleontology, personal observations, and speculative-imaginary narratives. Buffon argues that Earth transformed from a molten mass to a planet of water, explaining the emergence of the continents through gradual, natural processes unobservable to any individual human, graspable only through careful reading of strata and fossils. Of the seven epochs, the final epoch is most relevant to the Anthropocene concept. Entitled “When the Power of Man Has Assisted That of Nature,” the seventh epoch establishes the dominance of the human species: The entire face of the Earth today carries the imprint of the power of man, which, though subordinate to that of Nature, often created more than did she, or at least marvelously assisted, so it is with the help of our hands that she developed in all her extent, and that she arrived by degrees to the point of perfection and magnificence that we see today.49

Humans’ main contributions, Buffon claims, are agriculture, forest clearings, swamp drainings, and the establishment of industrialized society. As Noah Heringman explains, Buffon “offers the concept of a geological period defined by human agency and grounds it empirically in the growing use of fossil fuels.”50 While Buffon also argues that Earth was gradually getting cooler—a widely held theory throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—he also claims that humans were artificially heating local climates through increasing populations, deforestation, and coal-fires.51 His vision describes “civilization as a furnace,”52 one that could get warmer by burning fossil fuels but would eventually burn out. Hutton also uses industrial references and metaphors in his geological writings, comparing Earth to a “machine” modeled on the steam engine. The famous final line of his “Theory of the Earth” captures the concept of

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deep time: “The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”53 Hutton’s brand of uniformitarianism—the geological theory that Earth evolves through slow, gradual processes over long periods of time—was at odds with the prevailing scientific views of the eighteenth century. Geologists such as Abraham Gottlob Werner and Georges Cuvier argued for catastrophism, which asserted that Earth and its species change in response to violent, catastrophic events. Catastrophism often relied on brief, biblical time scales, and was therefore more acceptable to Christian readers. The concept of deep time became more mainstream in the midnineteenth century. In 1830, for example, geologist Henry De la Beche published a watercolor based on the work of Mary Anning, a paleontologist whose Jurassic fossil discoveries in southwest England changed public and scientific perspectives on the history of Earth. Entitled Duria Antiquior—A more Ancient Dorset (1830), it was the first widely circulated visual representation of deep time. It was quite popular, with many other scientists and painters making their own versions throughout the nineteenth century (see Fig. 1.5). A remarkably modern presentation of geology was also published in 1830: Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33). Lyell established uniformitarianism as the founding theory of geology, as well as paved the way for the theory of evolution articulated by Charles Darwin a few decades later. Much of the first volume presents a detailed history of geology from the ancient world to the nineteenth century, including an outline of the debates between Vulcanists and Neptunists throughout Lyell’s lifetime.54 He singles out the extraordinary advances in geology and astronomy between 1780 and 1830 that have overturned “so many preconceived notions” through the conceptions of deep time and deep space. In this new global-cosmic perspective of Earth, humans appear insignificant: Lyell speculates that all of the “modifications in the system of which man is the instrument” will disappear after the human species is extinct, and Earth will return to its natural course.55 At the same time, humans are “distinct” from all other life forms on Earth, as they are capable of momentous modifications to the system. In a section on “Changes caused by Man,” Lyell explains that if one species thrives in an area, other species suffer, and that no species has thrived in recent years more than humans. His primary example is the British Agricultural Revolution, which ushered in practices that provided humans with more food but had negative effects on ecosystems and other animals:

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Fig. 1.5 Henry De la Beche, Duria Antiquior—A more Ancient Dorset, 1830. Watercolor on paper. National Museum Cardiff, Wales, UK

examples are draining a lake to turn into a meadow; draining a marsh to plant corn; felling a forest to build houses, roads, and cities; and planting foreign plants and crops in Britain. Lyell particularly emphasizes the climatic effects of deforestation: “No application, perhaps, of human skill and labor tends so greatly to vary the state of the habitable surface, as that employed in the drainage of lakes and marshes, since not only the stations of many animals and plants, but the general climate of a district, may thus be modified.” Lyell provides a long list of animals whose numbers have greatly diminished as humans spread throughout the world, including otters, martins, polecats, badgers, wild boars, wolves, and a variety of birds. Other examples of anthropogenic change include the import of domesticated cattle and horses from Europe to the Americas; reindeer from Norway to Iceland; and various fowls from Britain to the West Indies. In other words, humans are creating new ecosystems.56 Lyell expands this argument in the third volume. He writes “on the influence of man in modifying the physical geography of the globe; for we must class his agency among the powers of organic nature.”57

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This geophysical “agency” points to a new geological epoch, but Lyell ultimately dismisses humans’ newfound power. In the conclusion, he contemplates the implications of Huttonian deep time: If, in tracing back the earth’s history, we arrive at the monuments of events which may have happened millions of ages before our times, and if we still find no decided evidence of a commencement, yet the arguments from analogy in support of the probability of a beginning remain unshaken; and if the past duration of the earth be finite, then the aggregate of geological epochs, however numerous, must constitute a mere moment of the past, a mere infinitesimal portion of eternity.58

This makes humans, and Earth itself, a “mere” speck in deep history, akin to the vision of Herschel and other astronomers of Earth in deep space. Lyell’s work was further popularized and mainstreamed by Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the first edition of which was published anonymously in 1844. Building on the work of Lyell and the Herschels, Vestiges achieved a wide readership, and, while its emphasis on evolution was controversial at the time, Charles Darwin later said that it opened the doorway for public acceptance of his work. Chambers made deep time and deep space palatable for the British public. Vestiges went through twelve editions, the last one published in 1884, the year of Ruskin’s lectures on climate change. Vestiges also inspired poets such as Alfred Tennyson, who drew from geology and evolution in his poetry, especially In Memoriam (1850). Composed between 1833 and 1850, In Memoriam is a meditation on time, history, grief, and the human condition, centered on the sudden death of Tennyson’s close friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died of a stroke in 1833, only twenty-two years old. The poem became a favorite of Queen Victoria’s after the death of Prince Albert in 1861; she famously met with Tennyson twice to discuss the poem (he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1850). T.S. Eliot said In Memoriam captured the mood of Tennyson’s generation, which was a mix of fear and anxiety: science was showing Earth and the universe to be the result of indifferent natural processes that revealed humans to be insignificant, rather than a product of divine creation wherein humans were special and protected. As Tennyson said, “[the poem] is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine.”59

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In addition to the well-known line about “Nature, red in tooth and claw,”60 much of In Memoriam dwells on the spiritual implications of deep time, deep space, and evolution.61 In section 2, Tennyson muses on the lifespan of a thousand-year-old yew tree, whose “roots are wrapt about the bones” of past generations, and who “Beats out the little lives of men,” season after season.62 Tennyson concludes: And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee.63

In this confrontation with deep time, Tennyson fuses momentarily with the tree, experiencing a kind of virtual deep time through grief. Tennyson, stuck in a state of grief, longs for the tree’s ability to grow from and through death; he is “sick” at the fact of the tree’s lifespan, which pits the transience of human life and history against the immensity of geological time and Earth history. What is the loss of a human life to this tree, or to Earth? Nothing—though it is everything to Tennyson at this moment. His attempt to reconcile this geological fact with spiritual feeling (and his hoped-for truth) is a main goal of the poem. In the following section, Tennyson turns from deep time to the deep space sublime, contemplating the infinite and indifferent immensity of outer space. A personified Sorrow tells him that “The stars…blindly run,” the “sky” is full of “waste places,” and the “sun” is “dying.”64 This vision of the universe is an apparent reference to the nebular hypothesis, proposed by Immanuel Kant in 1755, which asserts that the solar system developed and evolved from nebulae, or dense interstellar clouds of dust. Tennyson asks if he should “embrace” this understanding of the universe or “crush” it,65 signaling the poem’s central tension between Christian and scientific systems. What Tennyson demonstrates in the poem is a personal and national crisis of faith precipitated by the industrial and scientific revolutions of his era.66 The composition of In Memoriam develops alongside advances in geology and astronomy, offering an emotional and psychological snapshot of Britain in the early Anthropocene. In a way, Tennyson’s In Memoriam is a culmination of British poetic engagements with geology and astronomy, which begin to intensify at the turn of the nineteenth century, when a number of influential

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poets respond to the new perspectives offered by deep time and space. For example, in the opening lines to “Auguries of Innocence” (1807), William Blake engages the concept of deep time: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour67

Blake’s vision is both scientific and spiritual, though he inverts the expansive view of Herschel, Darwin, and Hutton. Rather than see the world through strata, Blake zooms in on a single grain of sand; rather than gaze up at the stars to see heaven, he looks down at a flower; rather than imagine infinity and eternity through geological time, he emphasizes the potential of a human moment. Kevin Hutchings identifies a form of “ecotheology” in Blake’s thinking here, but this is still Anthropocenic thinking, a fusing of human and natural history generated by the new understanding of humans’ place on Earth and in the universe.68 Earth itself, as Blake images in these lines, embodies infinity, eternity, unimaginable complexity, and interconnection: a “Universe of Worlds,” as Wright wrote in 1750, here imagined in the dust of Earth rather than the dust of space. Blake was notoriously opposed to rigid systems of thought, including scientific systems, though he was not necessarily “anti-science,” as many modern readers have claimed.69 He regularly calls out prominent scientists in his poems, preferring instead myth, imagination, and human creativity: “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.”70 Yet, Blake saw science as a creative act. The passage from “Auguries” recalls Darwin’s description of enclosing “an airy ocean in a grain” through coal, even as Blake expressed contempt for factories and the Industrial Revolution, notably condemning “dark Satanic Mills” that pollute “Englands mountains green” and “pleasant pastures.”71 Blake believed the march of science and industry opposed the spiritual outlook necessary to transform Earth in a different manner, but he clearly considered that humans were geophysical agents.72

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The poet Percy Shelley was more receptive to science, though not to fossil capitalism. Shelley’s poems, notebooks, and correspondence are full of references and responses to scientific theories and writings; he was wellversed in the science of his day. For example, the concept of deep time permeates “Mont Blanc” (1817), an ode to the tallest mountain in the Alps. Shelley wrote the poem during his travels through the Continent in 1816 at a time when many feared an impending ice age, due in large part to frigid summer temperatures caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. This eruption was arguably the most significant climatic event of the nineteenth century.73 During his tour through the Alps, Shelley reflected on “Buffon’s sublime but gloomy theory” of global cooling, as he wrote in a letter that Mary Shelley published in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817).74 As they explored the glaciers around Mont Blanc in July 1816, he observed: The snow on the summit of Mont Blanc and the neighbouring mountains perpetually augments, and that ice, in the form of glaciers, subsists without melting in the valley of Chamouni during its transient and variable summer. If the snow which produces this glacier must augment, and the heat of the valley is no obstacle to the perpetual existence of such masses of ice as have already descended into it, the consequence is obvious; the glaciers must augment and will subsist, at least until they have overflowed this vale.75

This fear of glacial catastrophe, shared by many of the locals with whom the Shelleys spoke, was the inevitable end of human life that Buffon forecasted. Shelley expands on the notion of Earth without humans in “Mont Blanc,” which most scholars read as kind of Shelleyan ur-poem about the subject/object divide, epistemology, and existence itself.76 Shelley imagines humankind’s insignificance in relation to deep time, geological power, and the universe, but he also holds on to that “specialness” of humanity, much like the scientists from whom he draws. As he gazes up at the “inaccessible” peak of Mont Blanc from a bridge over the River Arve in a ravine at the bottom of the mountain, Shelley thinks deep time in a way that nearly erases his individual human existence: the “giant brood of pines” on the mountain is from an “elder time,” and the “winds,” “odours,” and “waterfall” embody the mountain’s “deep eternity.”77 Engaging the central geological debate of his

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time—that between Neptunists and Vulcanists—Shelley wonders whether earthquakes or volcanoes shaped the “eternal” and “primaeval mountains,” whose ancient lifespan make the “work and dwelling” of humans “Vanish.”78 His emphasis on these natural phenomena as drivers of slow, gradual, geological change, as well as an indifferent and autonomous Earth, points to the influence of Buffon and Hutton, and thus a uniformitarian perspective.79 Accordingly, the poem builds to its famous final lines, which reframe the final line of Hutton’s “Theory of the Earth”: And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy?80

While many readers interpret these lines as concluding that nothing exists outside of human perception, the word “vacancy” betrays a fundamental fear of deep time: Earth existed for billions of years without humans and will exist for billions of years after humans are extinct. There is no beginning, and there is no end. This is a fact “not understood / By all,” as Shelley writes, “but which the wise, and great, and good / Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.”81 The geologists have interpreted Earth’s data, and poets, he suggests, must make others deeply feel their discoveries. The poem is as much about the emotional experience of deep time as it is about epistemology and the actual mountain, ravine, and river. Shelley contemplates the emotional experience of deep space in Queen Mab (1813), a dream-vision that he hoped would inspire aristocratic youths to adopt democratic principles when they become politicians and influential social figures later in their lives. Much of the poem focuses on political failures of the past and potential utopian futures, but the setting is outer space: the main character, a girl named Ianthe, is visited by the fairy Queen Mab in her sleep, and their spirits travel into outer space in order to achieve a global, transhistoric perspective of Earth. Here, Ianthe sees Earth as one of innumerable planets, and human history as a speck in the immensity of deep space and time. Shelley uses astronomical imagery to depict this outer-worldly experience: Ianthe and Mab pass through a “million constellations” and “Innumerable systems,” surrounded by “Flashing incessant meteors.”82 At this vantage point, Earth “appeared / The smallest light that twinkles in the heaven.”83 At times, their position is overwhelming:

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Above, below, around, The circling systems formed A wilderness of harmony; Each with undeviating aim, In eloquent silence, through the depths of space Pursued its wondrous way.84

Systems upon systems, worlds upon worlds, a complex mesh of existence: Shelley’s vision embraces the deep space sublime. In a series of scientific footnotes, the inspiration for which was Darwin’s Botanic Garden, Shelley links this view directly to astronomy. He marvels at astronomical calculations showing the closest star is “54,244,000,000,000 miles from the earth,” and that this “immense distance” is mind-boggling when considering how long it takes light to reach Earth. He also writes of “the plurality of worlds, the indefinite immensity of the universe is a most awful subject of contemplation. … The nearest of the fixed stars is inconceivably distant from the earth, and they are probably proportionately distant from each other. … Millions and millions of suns are ranged around us, all attended by innumerable worlds.”85 His language recalls that of Wright, Herschel, and Darwin, while other notes to the poem cite even more scientists. Shelley shows how this deep space perspective changes Ianthe’s understanding of human and natural history. Deep space “mocks all human grandeur.”86 From outer space, human history appears as a brief flash in the infinity of the universe, as Mab reveals the last “ten thousand years” of civilization as having passed in what amounts to less than the blink of an eye.87 Importantly, this new vision confirms the idea of Earth as a single ecosystem: There’s not one atom of yon earth But once was living man; Nor the minutest drop of rain, That hangeth in its thinnest cloud, But flowed in human veins.88

In an ecological register, Shelley concludes that all things on Earth are interconnected, and in a Blakean register, he suggests that the material world is divine: atoms contain worlds. Nothing on Earth is singular, and neither is anything in the vast immensity of space.

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While Shelley’s cosmic vision seems to reinforce the separation of human and natural-cosmic histories, he also argues that humanity, as a collective, shapes the physical attributes of Earth. For Shelley, human intervention is a possible way to modify Earth’s atmosphere for the better. As he would later write in Prometheus Unbound (1820), “The atmosphere of human thought” corresponds to the actual atmosphere of Earth,89 and Mab is full of references to how collective thinking determines physical reality: corrupt “generations” have “Load[ed] with loathsome rottenness the land”; “commerce” and capitalism have “poison[ed]” minds and bodies alike; loveless relationships have polluted the atmosphere; and the modification of farmed animals for meat has destroyed the land and humans’ relationship to the nonhuman world.90 Earth’s atmosphere mirrors moral and spiritual atmospheres in the poem and in Shelley’s thinking: he remarks on “the putrid atmosphere of crowded cities” and “the exhalations of chemical processes” that correspond to a similar moral and spiritual failure of the human spirit.91 In other words, humans are already modifying the atmosphere, and a revolution in human thought could modify Earth in a more positive and sustainable manner. The deep space sublime also appears in the poetry of Shelley’s contemporary John Keats. In several of Keats’s astronomical sonnets, the concept of deep space generates complex psychological and emotional states, highlighting the lived human condition in the Anthropocene. For example, in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), Keats compares his “discovery” of Chapman’s seventeenth-century translation of Homer to Herschel’s 1781 discovery of Uranus: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.”92 This astronomical vision immediately segues to colonial exploration, as Keats offers another simile: “Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He star’d at the Pacific.”93 The reference to this sixteenth-century Spanish explorer parallels Cook’s recent voyages to the Pacific, fusing astronomical and terrestrial exploration in the context of poetic creation. However, watching the skies more often leads to existential crises for Keats. In the sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (1818), Keats dwells on humans’ cosmic insignificance while “behold[ing]…the night’s starr’d face.”94 Star-gazing generates a moment of selfintrospection that in turn leads to a conclusion similar to that of Shelley in “Mont Blanc”: “then on the Shore / Of the wide world I stand alone and think / Till Love and Fame to Nothingness do sink.—”95 Confronted by the deep space sublime, all that Keats most longs for—love

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and fame—appears meaningless. The deep space sublime also appears in “Bright Star,” a sonnet Keats composed as he neared death from tuberculosis in 1819. While gazing at Polaris (the North Star), Keats wishes human life could be as seemingly “stedfast” and “eternal” as the star.96 While the stated desire to prolong an intimate moment with his lover (“live ever—or else swoon to death—”97 ) would lend itself to a metaphor involving stellar eternity seen from below, he actually imagines the star’s cosmic perspective, looking down on Earth, rather than that of a human on Earth looking up. This is how deep space feels. This is what living in the early Anthropocene means for humans’ emotional and psychological development. Poetic references to stars and moons during this period often indicate the importance of Herschel. While “the heavens” are a perennial feature of poetry, astronomical poems in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries take on a different character: many of them respond not only to the beauty and mystery of deep space but also to how deep space changes how humans think about Earth. William Wordsworth, for instance, wrote numerous poems about the moon and stars, inspired by “worlds unthought of till the searching mind / Of Science laid them open to mankind.”98 Most of his astronomical poems follow a familiar pattern: the moon appears, startling the speaker from inward-turning reverie to meditate on the vastness of the universe; the speaker articulates an interchange between the cosmic and the human individual; the moon disappears, or the speaker looks elsewhere, having gained insight both into the insignificance of human life and the infinite potential of the human mind. Consider the fragment “A Night-Piece” (1798): The sky is overspread With a close veil of one continuous cloud All whitened by the moon, that just appears, A dim-seen orb, yet chequers not the ground With any shadow,—plant, or tower, or tree. At last, a pleasant gleam breaks forth at once, An instantaneous light; the musing [man] Who walks along with his eyes bent to earth Is startled. He looks about, the clouds are split Asunder, and above his head, he views The clear moon, and the glory of the heavens. There, in a black-blue vault she sails along, Followed by multitudes of stars, that small,

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And bright, and sharp, along the gloomy vault Drive as she drives. How fast they wheel away! Yet vanish not! The wind is in the trees, But they are silent; still they roll along Immeasurably distant, and the vault Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds, Still deepens its interminable depth. At length the vision closes, and the mind Not undisturbed by the deep joy it feels, Which slowly settles into peaceful calm, Is left to muse upon the solemn scene.99

The sudden sight of the moon jolts Wordsworth from his earth-bound “musing” to contemplate the immensity of deep space and relative insignificance of human life. Using astronomical language, he describes the “multitudes of stars” that are “immeasurably distant” within the “interminable depth” of the universe. These celestial bodies “wheel away” and “roll along” as Earth rotates on its axis, silent cosmic movements that contrast the “wind…in the trees” on Earth. This “vision” “disturb[s]” Wordsworth with “deep joy,” generating a new contemplative state of mind that links terrestrial and cosmic perspectives. This pattern recurs in Wordsworth’s later poems. In “To the Moon” (1835), he marvels at a low-hanging moon that “com’st so near / To human life’s unsettled atmosphere.”100 Here, Wordsworth plays on dual meanings of the word “atmosphere,” referring simultaneously to Earth’s atmosphere—that is, the layer of gases surrounding the planet—and atmosphere as a mood or state of mind. According to Thomas Ford, this dual usage of “atmosphere” as both material and metaphorical was a new development in the early nineteenth century, one that Wordsworth in particular used in distinctive ways. Ford writes that “atmosphere” is often “neither metaphoric nor literally physical, but instead point[s] to a zone of indistinction, or of as yet unsettled knowledge, somewhere between literality and figuration, between scientific concepts and poetic evocation.”101 In this poem, Wordsworth’s use of the adjective “unsettled” further blurs the boundaries to which Ford refers: humans, Wordsworth suggests, have modified Earth’s atmosphere, both metaphorically and literally. The poem dwells on this indistinct suggestion, as do many others. In “A Night Thought” (1842), which is something of a pendant to “A Night-Piece,” Wordsworth compares the eternal moon to the “mortal eye” of the human race.102 And in “The Crescent-Moon, the Star of Love” (1842),

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“Who but is pleased to watch the moon on high” (1846), and a series of sonnets on the planet Venus from the late 1830s, he continues to dwell on his own version of the astronomical sublime and its implications for human life on Earth. Wordsworth’s increasing interest in astronomy parallels his interest in geology throughout the 1830s and 40s. He had dabbled in geological and environmental history in his Guide to the Lakes , and in the 1830s he began to meet regularly with Adam Sedgwick and William Whewell, two geologists at Trinity where Wordsworth’s brother Christopher was a Master. Sedgwick and Whewell visited Wordsworth at his home in Rydal several times throughout the 1830s and 40s. John Wyatt has traced these visits and correspondences, arguing that they show an exploration of the geological sublime in much of Wordsworth’s later poetry. Like the astronomical sublime, the geological sublime indicates an affective moment when human existence pales in comparison with deep time and the vast existence of Earth.103 Fear of rapid terrestrial changes caused by industrialization also prompted Wordsworth’s later editions of the Guide (fifth edition published in 1835) and his famous railroad sonnet of 1844, in which he opposes the construction of the Kendal-Windermere railway. Not only would the railway destroy the landscape of the Lake District, Wordsworth argued, but it would further fuel fossil capitalism, which was “a Power, the Thirst of Gold, / That rules o’er Britain like a baneful star.”104 Britain ushered in the fossil fuel era at the turn of the nineteenth century, when geology and industrialization became dependent on each other: geologists needed to get down into the earth, a vantage that mines provided, and geologists’ scientific data and technology helped industrialists become more efficient.105 John Scafe demonstrates this nexus in his semi-humorous scientific poem King Coal’s Levee (1818), one of the most popular geological poems of the nineteenth century. It was the center of much geological debate and has the distinction of appearing in an advertisement in Wordsworth’s 1820 River Duddon volume, which also contained an early version of his Guide to the Lakes .106 In King Coal’s Levee—the title of which plays on the dual meaning of “levee” as a river embankment and a royal reception—a personified King Coal, “the mighty hero of the mine,” calls for a meeting to be held “fathoms deep” within the earth with all of the known minerals found throughout Britain.107 Scafe describes this “prince of smoke and flame,” surrounded on his throne by “gas-lights,” with geologic-volcanic terminology: Earth shakes

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when he calls the levee, “Volcanic agonies…sh[a]ke the land” when the metals refuse to show up, and the other minerals attribute earthquakes and thunder to their king.108 As discussed in Chapter 2 of this book, the conflation of volcanic, geologic, and industrial activities constitutes a new literary trope in early Anthropocene literature that points directly to humanity as a geophysical force of nature. What’s more, King Coal’s Levee signals Britain’s shift to a fossil fuel economy. While the poem is structurally unremarkable, written in heroic couplets and developing as a series of poetic-geological descriptions of the various minerals that appear at the levee (akin to Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants ), its focus on coal was something new. Kent Linthicum argues that the poem appears “at a crucial moment in British history,” when the nation was becoming a coal-powered industrial juggernaut. Whereas coal was primarily associated with domestic use in the eighteenth century, it was fueling industrial machinery and the work of the British Empire by 1800. The poem is representative of what Linthicum calls a “petroaesthetic” wherein coal is “the key to hegemony, sovereignty, and the future of the British nation.”109 Fossil fuel culture had arrived, and coal was king.

Remaking Earth: The Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions The most apparent and immediate elements of the early Anthropocene were the changes wrought by industrialization in Britain. Between the arrival of the Newcomen steam engine in 1712 and James Watt’s patent on the double-acting steam engine in 1784, Britain transformed from a largely agrarian nation made up of independent villages to a largely industrial nation with a population increasingly concentrated in large cities. Its population grew from approximately six million in 1750 to over sixteen million in 1801, and then to over forty million by 1851, at which time the majority of Britons lived in urban areas. The populations in newly industrialized cities such as Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool increased by over 150% during the first three decades of the nineteenth century.110 Giant mills and mega-factories appeared throughout the Midlands and Northern England, along with pervasive air and water pollution. Charles Babbage wrote in 1832 that this widespread industrialization “distinguishes [Britain] more remarkably from all others.”111 Contemporary historians such as Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson agree, arguing that

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“industrial activity has…been the major force for change…of the earth” since the eighteenth century.112 During the second half of the eighteenth century, the British Agricultural Revolution intensified these momentous changes. New and more efficient farming practices, coupled with developments in property rights and enclosure acts, fueled Britain’s economic and population growth. Robert Bakewell and Thomas Coke implemented selective breeding systems for cattle, sheep, and horses, which revolutionized the food industry by doubling the size of cattle and setting the stage for factory farming. Edward Packard created the first commercial fertilizer by dissolving coprolites (fossilized feces) in sulfuric acid, successfully merging skills and technologies from the emerging fields of paleontology, geology, and chemistry with agriculture. The fertilizer was shipped around the world throughout the nineteenth century. These agricultural improvements fed into the population boom, drastically changing the way people grew, thought, interacted, and perceived the world, as well as transforming the physical landscape of Britain. According to Wendy Parkins and Peter Adkins, “Britain emitted four times as much carbon dioxide [as France] over the course of the nineteenth century…not only polluting the atmosphere with a hitherto unseen intensity but establishing the blueprint for a modern fossil fuel dependent industrial society.”113 While France, Germany, and the United States eventually witnessed the same kinds of industrial transformations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Anthropocene began in Britain. When William Blake wrote of “dark Satanic Mills” infiltrating the English countryside in 1810, the modern industrial factory system was well underway. The world’s first factory was built in 1721: John and Thomas Lombe’s Derby Silk Mill.114 The factory became famous, bringing in tourists from all over Britain, and it served as a model for the factory system: a large building (or set of buildings) housed coal-powered machines that were operated by a concentrated group of lower-class workers who were easily supervised and controlled by an owner or manager. The rise in factories corresponds to an explosion of the steampowered cotton industry, fueled by coal. In turn, the need for coal fueled mining and urbanization, as mills no longer had to rely on rivers for power. The factory system quickly spread to agriculture, with the first modern factory farms popping up around London in the early nineteenth century.115 The urban sprawl outwards from London changed the countryside into a land of “brick and mortar,” as several nineteenth-century

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writers observed.116 In 1820, Blake wrote of “London: continually building & continually decaying desolate! / In eternal labours: loud the Furnaces & loud the Anvils.”117 He lamented the “cities turrets & towers & domes / Whose smoke destroyd the pleasant gardens & whose running Kennels / Chokd the bright rivers.”118 In fact, industrial activity in London produced so much waste that the collection of industrial dust became a common commercial enterprise. Savvy businessmen organized this dust into huge mounds in and around London, for use mostly in the manufacture of bricks. The most famous example was the so-called Great Dust Heap in King’s Cross, comprised mostly of cinders and ash from domestic and industrial coal use. This particular dust heap traveled across the continent: it was shipped to Russia in 1848, in part to make way for the construction of King’s Cross railway station (see Fig. 1.6). Russians used the heap to reconstruct much of Moscow, which had been destroyed during the Napoleonic Wars.119 These new industrial mills, factories, and agricultural practices resulted in the strange new landscape of the early Anthropocene. Britons literally

Fig. 1.6 E.H. Dixon, King’s Cross, London: The Great Dust-Heap, 1837. Watercolor on paper. Wellcome Library, London, UK

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reshaped the land. By the mid-nineteenth century, most of the country was connected through series of man-made roads, canals, and railways, and the nation’s waters and atmosphere contained the imprint of human manufacture. Ashton Nichols calls this new nature the “urbanatural,” a term suggesting “that all human and nonhuman lives, as well as all animate and inanimate objects around those lives, are linked in a complex web of interdependent interrelatedness.”120 This had always been the case, but industrialization and advances in science revealed the ways that humans impacted the natural world, and vice versa. Humans now being active geophysical agents, there was no longer a “human world” and a “natural world.” As Nichols argues, “between 1750 and 1859,” scientists and poets began to “emphasize not separate but rather connected creation, a unified tree or web of life and living things.”121 Jesse Oak Taylor goes further, arguing for the “abnatural” (or absence of the natural) in the Anthropocene, as “nature exists in a perpetual state of withdrawal.” Literature on “abnatural ecology,” Taylor argues, “captures the experience of dwelling in a manufactured environment.”122 Both Nichols and Taylor locate the beginnings of the urbanatural and abnatural in the nineteenth century: human activity was impacting everything in the web of life. William Wordsworth’s “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” (1802) illustrates this new conception of nature. This sonnet is notable as one of the few Wordsworth poems centered on a city (in this case, London), and Nichols reads it as capturing the “essence” of “urbanatural energy.”123 It also captures the early Anthropocene: Earth has not any thing to shew more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth like a garment wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!124

Forgoing picturesque landscapes, Earth demonstrates London as a spiritual “sight” enmeshed in the nonhuman world. Wordsworth equates

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human-made structures with organic valleys, rocks, and hills. London’s buildings are fully “open” to the surrounding “fields” and “sky” in constant interchange. However, Wordsworth subtly stresses the transitory nature of this sight: the city is “silent,” the air is “smokeless,” and the houses (and the people in them) are “asleep.” These descriptions imply the impending state of London: loud, full of people, and full of smoke. Dorothy Wordsworth makes the same note in a journal entry, writing, “The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke & they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly with such a pure light that there was even something like the purity of one of nature’s own grand Spectacles.”125 The two clauses of this sentence emphasize what William hints at in his poem. In the first clause, Dorothy establishes the typical state of London: endless houses steeped in coal smoke. In the second clause, she marvels that the sun is able to penetrate the density of the city, producing the beautiful sight before her. In both the sonnet and the journal entry, the Wordsworths document the new nature of the Anthropocene. Wordsworth’s sonnet contrasts with many other nineteenth-century depictions of London, which tend toward the dark and destructive. The most famous examples can be found in the novels of Charles Dickens— especially the opening paragraphs of Bleak House (1853), analyzed in Chapter 4 of this book—but literature on industrial cities abounds in this period. For instance, Lord Byron describes London as “the Devil’s drawing room” in Don Juan (1824): A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe, through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown On a fool’s head—and there is London Town!126

Juan, who enters London as “The sun went down,”127 sees a much different sight than the Wordsworths, who left as the sun went up. Byron accentuates the dirtiness and pollution of London, which, as he writes, constitutes “the natural atmosphere” of Britain in the early Anthropocene.128 Yet, his metaphors and imagery signal an urbanatural landscape similar to what Wordsworth presents in “Westminster Bridge.”

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Trees have transformed into a “forestry of masts,” and what was once a natural wilderness is now a “wilderness of steeples,” a “mass of brick” and coal smoke. Such descriptions of industrialized cities intensify during the second half of the nineteenth century. In his 1865 poem “A Winter Night in Manchester,” Philip Connell observes “a wilderness of chimneys high” that produces a “troubl’d sky” of “fogs” and “dusky air.”129 The new atmosphere of the Anthropocene is generated by human-industrial activity. Wordsworth, though, was no apologist for industrialization. While his descriptions of London in “Westminster Bridge” and Book VII of The Prelude (1805) tend toward the affirmative, many of his most well-known works critique British industry and capitalism in favor of the tranquility and rusticity of the Lake District.130 Wordsworth was also concerned with climatic and land-use changes over time. His Guide to the Lakes charts an environmental history of the Lake District from around 200 BCE through the 1830s, cautioning against human modification of the land and proposing means for preservation and conservation. In the second section, titled “Aspect of the Country, as Affected by its Inhabitants,” Wordsworth speculates that ancient Celts were drawn to the area for its dense forests, which had covered the land for thousands of years. When the Romans conquered Britain at the turn of the first millennium, they “encouraged the Britons to the improvement of their lands in the plain country of Furness and Cumberland, [but] they seem to have had little connexion with the mountains, except for military purposes, or in subservience to the profit they drew from the mines.” The mining of lead, iron, and coal, along with deforestation, intensified during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which “affected the face of the country materially.” For the most part, though, Wordsworth stresses that the area, a mix of arable land, meadows, commons, woods, and wastes, was relatively unchanged until the eighteenth century, with its establishment “of furnaces upon a large scale.”131 Wordsworth argues that the most extreme changes to the Lakes have occurred over the past sixty years, since 1770, around the start of the industrial and agricultural revolutions. However, while the rise of industrial furnaces and commercial sheep farms certainly reshaped northwestern England, Wordsworth is much more concerned with tourism and its attendant effects. William Gilpin and Thomas West had written notable guides to the Lakes in the 1770s to cater to the growing number of middle-class Britons seeking a local holiday; tourism was well-established

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when Wordsworth moved to Grasmere in 1799. In the opening lines of his 1800 poem The Brothers, he expresses shock at the number of tourists peopling the Lake District. In his Guide, Wordsworth explains how trees are felled to create scenic viewpoints. New tenants build homes and gardens in ornate, modern styles, as opposed to traditional Lake cottages, of which Wordsworth has much to say: “these humble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of Nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to have been erected;—to have risen, by an instance of their own, out of the native rock.” These cottages are covered in mosses, ferns, and native flowers, “received into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields.” In contrast, new residents and visitors bring non-native plants and trees to use as decoration in their more “artificial” buildings. Wordsworth writes at length about the aesthetic and environmental consequences of these modifications, lamenting that “no one can now travel through the more frequented tracts, without being offended, at almost every turn, by an introduction of discordant objects, disturbing that peaceful harmony of form and colour, which had been through a long lapse of ages most happily preserved.” The “disfigurement which this country has undergone” is certainly aesthetic, but Wordsworth’s argument is also deeply ecological.132 After all, the Lake District of Wordsworth’s time was—and still is—the product of geological processes and careful human modifications. The physical geography of the Lakes (its mountains, valleys, landscapes, and lakes) was formed from a series of volcanic eruptions approximately four hundred million years ago, uplift and faulting three hundred million years ago, and periods of glaciation two million years ago. Agriculture and farming practices over the last two thousand years then led to the cultural landscape Wordsworth describes throughout the Guide: the grasses, rivers, sheepfolds, footpaths, flora, fauna, and wildlife comprise a delicate ecosystem sustained by the farmers who work the land. The Lake District is an Anthropocenic landscape, though far different from the streets of London or Manchester. In its explanation of awarding the Lake District World Heritage Status as an Area of Outstanding Universal Value in 2018, UNESCO cites the significance of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wordsworth’s writings and legacy were clearly a determining factor:

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Picturesque and Romantic interest stimulated globally-significant social and cultural forces to appreciate and protect scenic landscapes. Distinguished villas, gardens and formal landscapes were added to augment its picturesque beauty. The Romantic engagement with the English Lake District generated new ideas about the relationship between humanity and its environment, including the recognition of harmonious landscape beauty and the validity of emotional response by people to their landscapes. A third key development was the idea that landscape has a value, and that everyone has a right to appreciate and enjoy it. … The Picturesque values of landscape appreciation were subsequently transformed by Romantic engagement with the English Lake District into a deeper and more balanced appreciation of the significance of landscape, local society and place. This inspired the development of a number of powerful ideas and values including a new relationship between humans and landscape based on emotional engagement; the value of the landscape for inspiring and restoring the human spirit; and the universal value of scenic and cultural landscapes, which transcends traditional property rights. In the English Lake District these values led directly to practical conservation initiatives to protect its scenic and cultural qualities and to the development of recreational activities to experience the landscape, all of which continue today.133

The writers have in mind Wordsworth’s famous conclusion to the Guide, where he “deem[s] the district a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.”134 Even more interesting is UNESCO’s emphasis on human modification as a determining factor of the Lakes District’s “universal value.” The false nature/culture divide is clearly collapsed in the Lakes: both its “scenic and cultural landscapes” are only possible in the Anthropocene. While visitors may travel to the Lakes in search of “wild” or “undisturbed” areas, what they encounter is a landscape shaped indelibly by humans. Along with agriculture and industrialization, a series of enclosure acts throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also played a significant role in the reshaping of Britain’s landscape. Prior to the eighteenth century, much of the land in Britain was considered “common”: villages had open fields (large agricultural areas) and “wastes” (fens, marshes, and moors not suitable for agriculture) collectively worked by individual farmers and commoners, who were allowed to use the land for pasturing

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livestock, fishing, and foraging, among other things. Enclosure consolidated these common lands into large, privately owned farms, often restricted to one kind of use for increased productivity and economic value. Commoners were no longer able to use the land. Furthermore, the landholder often modified the land itself through new land-use practices. Enclosure was thus a driving force in both the agricultural and industrial revolutions: it enabled prominent landholders to institute new and more productive agricultural practices, and it drove many farmers and commoners to seek new work in cities. Enclosure also precipitated a decline in biodiversity and rise in the fossil-capitalist economy—both hallmarks of the Anthropocene. While enclosure often meant more profits for landholders and more food for Britons, there was widespread opposition, best exemplified by John Clare. Considered to be the world’s “first ‘deep’ ecological writer” and the preeminent “poet of the environmental crisis,”135 Clare wrote numerous enclosure elegies and poems of protest against Britain’s changing environmental and political landscapes. Clare was an agricultural laborer, writing most of his poetry in a distinctive dialect and often without use of punctuation, a style that gave him the title “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet,” which he hesitantly embraced. Students and scholars of Clare will be familiar with his connection to “dark ecology” and his privileged position in discussions of nineteenth-century ecological writing, but it is worth emphasizing the ways that Clare writes the early Anthropocene.136 Clare’s home village of Helpston, in the East Midlands of England, was drastically transformed by a series of enclosure acts between 1809 and 1820. Ancient forests were felled, marshes were drained, roads and canals were constructed, and the diversity of flora and fauna that Clare details in his writings was greatly reduced. These losses haunt Clare’s poetry, often resulting in a dual vision of the places he describes: before and after enclosure. For example, in “The Mores” (1831), he writes of how “centurys” of “eternal green” and “Unbounded freedom” in the commons were quickly “destroyed” by “Inclosure,” which “came and trampled on the grave / Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave.”137 Everything from “brooks” to “cows” to “flowers” to people have been restricted and, in many cases, erased from the land.138 Clare’s political point is explicit: enclosure and industrial capitalist ideology spell disaster for agricultural laborers and the working poor. This is a common theme in his poetry, as

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is his related ecological point: the landscape is shockingly different from his childhood. Clare’s best-known protest poem, “The Lament of Swordy Well” (1837), continues this critique of the early Anthropocene. He personifies an area near Helpston called Swordy Well, speaking as the land, which had been enclosed several years earlier. In what was once an area brimming with biodiversity, the speaker now has “scarce a nook to call my own / For things that creep or flye.”139 Swordy Well’s “mossy hills” have been “level[ed] into a russet land” by “greedy mind[s],”140 turning the heath into arable land used for excessive farming of grain, the prices of which skyrocketed during the first two decades of the nineteenth century.141 Clare laments the same fate in “Remembrances” (1832), where he contrasts the landscape of his childhood to its enclosed state as an adult. “Every commons gone,”142 writes Clare: Where bramble bushes grew & the daisy gemmed in dew & the hills of silken grass like to cushions to the view Where we threw the pissmire crumbs when we’d nothing else to do All leveled like a desert by the never weary plough All vanished like the sun where that cloud is passing now143

Clare’s use of local names for plants and insects underscores the importance of the commons to Helpston, and the contrasting similes represent his view of enclosure: “the hills of silken grass like to cushions to the view” have been “leveled like a desert by the never weary plough.” Clare proceeds to list specific spots around Helpston that have been “levelled” and transformed into private farmland, a practice he likens to warfare: “Inclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain.”144 The personal and ecological disasters of enclosure were even more pronounced in Scotland, where much of the Highlands were cleared for sheep and cow grazing throughout the nineteenth century. Large sheep farms were especially popular, as the price of wool increased significantly during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. In a process called the Highland Clearances, wealthy landowners evicted thousands of their tenants in north and western Scotland, often burning down cottages and villages in order to convert arable lands to sheep pastures. Tenants were either resettled in less-desirable lands called coastal crofts or sent overseas to Canada, the United States, and Australia, or they emigrated to urban areas in the Scottish Lowlands (e.g., Edinburgh and Glasgow).

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Important authors such as Walter Scott and James Hogg wrote of the Clearances and their effects. Scott, whose popular historical novels helped to shape and memorialize the culture of the Scottish Highlands, famously wrote: In too many instances the Highlands have been drained, not of their superfluity of population, but of the whole mass of the inhabitants, dispossessed by an unrelenting avarice, which will be one day found to have been as shortsighted as it is unjust and selfish. Meantime, the Highlands may become the fairy ground for romance and poetry, or the subject of experiment for the professors of speculation, political and economical.145

Scott extends use of agricultural imagery (“drained”) to the human effects of the Clearances. The “shortsighted” and “unrelenting avarice” of industrial capitalism is a major driving force of the Anthropocene. He speculates that the Highlands will become something of the past, lost and mysterious like romance, a popular genre associated with the medieval period. In fact, Scott capitalized very successfully on this idea of a disappearing “Old Scotland” in his novels. Hogg also captured a disappearing Scotland, writing numerous stories that critique the Clearances and English oppression. Ron Broglio explains how Hogg’s tales of witches, fairies, and shepherds depict the “other Scotland” that was disappearing at the turn of the nineteenth century as a result of industrial capitalism, the Clearances, and, I add, the birth of the Anthropocene.146 While Scotland was remade in the early Anthropocene, the Highlands became a literal and symbolic place of resistance. A lesser-known writer on the Highland Clearances is Mary Macpherson, a Gaelic poet from the Isle of Skye in northwestern Scotland. Macpherson, who became an important poet to the Gaelic Revival, composed all of her songs and poems in the 1870s and 1880s, mostly in response to the plight of crofters in Skye. Her writings are fiercely political, and several of them helped to elect reform candidates in 1885 after the Voting Act of 1884 gave rights to crofters. Those candidates, inspired by her poems, went on to support the Crofters’ Holdings Act of 1886, which slowed the Clearances. During the “Crofters’ War” (1882– 86), thousands of Scots were forced out and shipped off to Canada to make way for sheep, resulting in loss of biodiversity from over-grazing and loss of woodlands. Florence Boos notes that Macpherson’s poems

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lament “social and physical changes on Skye,” often with an eye toward the effects of the Clearances.147 One representative example is “Farewell to the New Christmas” (1891), a ballad that memorializes Macpherson’s return to Skye in 1882. She had moved to Iverness in 1844 to marry her husband, and then, after his death, to urban Glasgow in 1872 to earn a degree in obstetrics. Glasgow also had a significant community of displaced Skye people. After nearly four decades away, Macpherson reflects on the environmental and cultural changes in Skye: I left the lovely Isle of Skye, more than two score years ago; and now the custom’s altered there, and sad for me to tell the tale.

Bowed with sadness many a Gael, bred up in the Land of Mists, smothers now in urban streets, from city dust and reek of coal.

The miles are growing barren now, of fertile earth that fosters crops, where once brave warriors were bred, who put their enemies to rout.

But change has come upon the clouds, and on the hills and pasture-lands, where once the honest people lived, only the great sheep and their lambs.148

Custom and landscape had changed throughout the nineteenth century, as villages were leveled to make room for commercial sheep farming and pastures converted to deer forest.149 Macpherson probably saw more sheep and deer than people: the population of Skye decreased by nearly 35% between 1841 and 1891, and she notes that sheep have replaced “the honest people” who once lived there. The effects of depopulation

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are most apparent and shocking to Macpherson: Skye is now all sheep and “crops.” There are no “barking…dogs” to greet her, as in her youth; her “grandsire’s dwelling lay in dust”; and “the Tribute Well, / where [she] was wont to drink [her] fill,” is “filled with oyster shells” and “a filthy scum.”150 Macpherson also makes a pointed contrast between the Skye of her past and the “urban streets” of industrialized cities in the Lowlands, where “dust” and “coal” fill the air rather than Highland “Mists.” Like Clare, Macpherson deploys a double-vision in the poem: before and after the Clearances. According to Broglio, these massive agricultural and industrial changes indicate the dawn of a new biopolitical regime in Britain. Biopolitics refers to “the regulation of life en masse”—that is, how political systems use bodies as “a general strategy of power.”151 In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, much of this biopower centers on regulating the laboring classes through enclosure, clearances, agricultural and economic strategies, cartography, census data, and statistics—in short, the factory system model applied to a nation. While Broglio does not discuss biopolitics in relation to the Anthropocene, his analysis of the intersections between agriculture, literature, art, and politics illuminates an important capitalist component of the early Anthropocene. As Broglio rightly argues, biopolitical Britain shaped the land and the bodies of people (and animals) living on that land, remaking what it meant to be human. The rise of biopolitics in Britain parallels the dawn of the Anthropocene. Consider, for instance, Thomas Batchelor’s The Progress of Agriculture; or, The Rural Survey (1801), a poem in praise of Britain’s Agricultural Revolution. Batchelor was a tenant farmer for Francis Russell, the fifth Duke of Bedford, in Bedfordshire, just north of London, where he ran what was considered to be a model modern farming system. The Duke was on the Board of Agriculture and involved in a survey of the nation for best farming practices. Batchelor helped in these efforts with various writings for the Board and with his poetry, which often praises the Duke and his agricultural practices. The Progress of Agriculture is one such poem. It begins with an epigraph from James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748) that establishes a focus on the changing rural landscape of England:

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New scenes arise, new landscapes strike the eye, And all th’ enliven’d country beautify; Gay plains extend where marshes slept before; O’er recent meads th’ exulting streamlets fly; Dark-frowning heaths grow bright with Ceres’ store, And woods embrown the steep, or wave along the shore.152

Thomson writes of “new landscapes” that emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, at the start of the Agricultural Revolution and the uptick in enclosure acts.153 “Marshes” have been converted to “plains” for pasturing, “streamlets” have been routed to “recent mead[ows],” and grain (Ceres is god of grain) “grow[s] bright” where once were “frowning heaths.” Batchelor similarly praises Britain as the apex of civilization and its new farmers as the apex of agriculture, singling out the beneficial effects of enclosure: Yet I have seen, nor long elaps’d the day, When yon rich vale in rude disorder lay; Each scanty farm dispread o’er many a mile, The fences few, ill-cultur’d half the soil; Seen rushy slips contiguous roods divide, Mid worthless commons boundless stretching wide, Where ev’ry owner sought his proper land, By rude initials in the grass-grown sand.154

This passage offers a much different perspective from that Clare and others, though the contrast is the same: the country before and after enclosure. Batchelor emphasizes a lack of traditional “order,” clear boundaries (and thus private land), and soil conducive to modern agriculture. He derides the “worthless commons,” which appear “boundless”—a term with positive connotations for Clare (and for many twenty-firstcentury readers), but negative for Batchelor in its suggestion of a limitless, uncontrolled natural world—and both the agricultural and industrial revolutions are focused on humans’ control of the natural world. For Batchelor, the Agricultural Revolution means better lives for Britons, in the long run: “And thus, around my natal soil I see / The bless’d effects of peaceful industry.” These effects include more food and an increase in population. New agricultural practices have “smooth’d the rugged land,” “pulveriz’d and cleans’d the weedy soil,” and “Manures and argil o’er the surface spread,” effectively creating a new landscape shaped by humans:

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“But now, see! stables, granaries, barns extend, / White fences shine, and household smokes ascend.” Batchelor goes on to explain that much of Britain’s land has been cleared for sheep grazing: these new “woolly tribes displace” the laborers. While he acknowledges that this displacement benefits the wealthy more than the laborers—he includes a lengthy section on “the peasant’s complaint”—he concludes that this is what is demanded by the new biopolitical system, and, ultimately, it will benefit the nation.155 This new landscape shaped by the Agricultural Revolution may look different from the factory- and mine-riddled landscape created by the Industrial Revolution, but authors of the period stress the same point: human activity is a major driver of geological change. In subsequent chapters of this book, I take up industrial literature in greater detail, but it’s worth noting here that agricultural and industrial writers agree that Britons reshaped the landscape on a massive scale. In passing through the Midlands near Birmingham in 1811, future Poet Laureate Robert Southey observed that the land appeared as a “sort of hell above ground—hills of scoria, an atmosphere of smoke, and huge black piles, consisting chiefly of chimneys and furnaces, grouped together in the finest style of the damnable picturesque.”156 In a single sentence, Southey attributes industrial activity in this “iron country” to volcanoes (“scoria” and “smoke”), geological formations (“huge black piles”), and Hell. There are countless instances of authors supporting, opposing, critiquing, and representing industrialization, but what modern readers often miss is how these authors imagine the Industrial Revolution as the start of a new geological epoch. Collectively, Britons understood industry as a geophysical force that worked on the same plane as volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters that reshape Earth. John Ruskin’s 1880 essay “Fiction—Fair and Foul” illustrates this new body of early Anthropocene literature. Four years before his lectures on atmosphere and climate change, Ruskin recounts a walk through Croxsted Lane in March 1880, presenting a dual vision: as he remembers the lane from his childhood in the 1820s and as he sees it in 1880. He recalls that Croxsted “was once a country lane” in South London, “a green bye-road…little else than a narrow strip of untilled field, separated by blackberry hedges from the better cared for meadows on each side of it.” His reminiscence centers on the area’s biodiversity: there were plentiful “weeds,” “primrose[s],” “white archangel[s],” “daisies,” “purple thistles in autumn,” “long grass beneath the hedges,” “duck-weed,” “fresh-water

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shell,” “little skipping shrimps,” “tadpoles,” “tittlebat[s],” and more.157 Sixty years later, this flora and fauna has vanished. Croxsted Lane and the surrounding area has been transformed, and Ruskin struggles to find an appropriate language to describe it: The peculiar forces of devastation induced by modern city life have only entered the world lately; and no existing terms of language known to me are enough to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin, that varied themselves along the course of Croxsted Lane. The fields on each side of it are now mostly dug up for building, or cut through into gaunt corners and nooks of blind ground by the wild crossings and concurrencies of three railroads. Half a dozen handfuls of new cottages, with Doric doors, are dropped about here and there among the gashed ground: the lane itself, now entirely grassless, is a deep-rutted, heavy-hillocked cart-road, diverging gatelessly into various brick-fields or pieces of waste; and bordered on each side by heaps of—Hades only knows what!—mixed dust of every unclean thing that can crumble in drought, and mildew of every unclean thing that can rot or rust in damp: ashes and rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery, shreds of nameless clothes, doorsweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen garbage, back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber jagged with out-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure, indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering foully here and there over all these,—remnants broadcast, of every manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering and flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of stinking dust and mortal slime.158

This is a striking passage. Ruskin uses violent imagery to describe industrialization and urbanization. At times, it seems as if he is alternately describing a war zone and an area after a natural disaster. The “fields” have been “dug up,” replaced by “building[s]” and “railroads” that “cut through” the land in “wild” and chaotic ways. Their presence also brings an increase in coal smoke and “mixed dust.” Several “new cottages” stand in the “gashed ground,” and “the lane itself” is “grassless,” “deeprutted,” and “gateless,” surrounded by “brick-fields,” “pieces of waste,” and “pits of stinking dust and mortal slime,” all of which evokes “Hades.” Every “corner and nook” of this hellish landscape carries the imprint of humanity. In the final lines, Ruskin presents a collage of the Anthropocene, listing industrial and domestic items that have reshaped the land in an “indescribable” manner. Ruskin’s search for a language suitable

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for this new nature—this new epoch—attests to the once-unimaginable changes he has witnessed over the past sixty years. Ruskin proceeds to link this new landscape to a shift in human consciousness and perception, one not suited to beauty, emotion, or art, but rather blunted from over-stimulation and characterized by dissatisfaction, calculating (almost robotic) minds, and all-around cultural and environmental malaise. Drawing from nineteenth-century advances in climatology, he links cultural and environmental atmospheres: industrial culture and thinking was producing the Anthropocenic landscape and atmosphere of Britain, and, in return, that new, polluted atmosphere was shaping the way Britons perceived and thought about themselves and the world in which they lived. Reminiscent of William Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold, who critique their modern age in similar terms, Ruskin’s emphasis on the depravity of newspapers and advertising is part of his larger critique of Britain’s industrial capitalist economy. Most scholars link Ruskin’s thinking here to Victorian sanitation reforms,159 which he surely had in mind, but this essay also points to the geophysical power of humanity in the early Anthropocene. Britons were reshaping Earth, just as they were reshaping the skies. “Fiction—Fair and Foul” is a sort of companion piece to Ruskin’s Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. In both cases, Ruskin traces the drastic environmental, cultural, and spiritual changes wrought by British industrialization. The Age of Humans had arrived.

Looking to the Skies: Early Climatology and the Science of Global Warming At the turn of the nineteenth century, meteorology and climatology were advancing rapidly. Eighteenth-century developments in geology, astronomy, physics, and the atmospheric sciences, along with new technical instruments and the specialization of disciplines, significantly aided in understanding and measuring the global climate. As early as the late seventeenth century, scientists began to create maps of trade winds and to publish the first major treatises on air pollution. Benjamin Franklin produced the first chart of the Gulf Stream in 1786, and just three years later, Erasmus Darwin included the Gulf Stream in his scientific poem The Loves of the Plants (1789). The rise of industrialized cities led meteorologists such as Richard Kirwan and Luke Howard to study local and global connections between temperature, wind, precipitation, and air pollution,

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while intense interest in volcanic eruptions led to the first studies of global climate. By the end of the nineteenth century, the connection between carbon emissions and global temperatures was established. While the first chapter of this book has centered on the geosphere in the early Anthropocene, I conclude with the atmosphere in a nod to the archaic usage of “geosphere” as a collective name for the four classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. Earth system science shows that these elements—or their more properly scientific “spheres”— are connected and related in complex ways, and in subsequent chapters of this book, I uncover how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors understood and imagined those interconnections. Writing on air pollution in large cities predates the eighteenth century, although the term “air pollution” was not common in English until the 1870s.160 The first London commission to address air pollution met in 1285, and one of the first treatises on air pollution was John Evelyn’s Fumifugium: or The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London (1661), a pamphlet primarily concerned with effects on human health. Peter Brimblecombe and other historians have studied extensively Evelyn’s impact on climatology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, concluding that he was influential in a number of environmental issues pertinent to the early Anthropocene, including forestry and city design.161 In A Character of London (1659), he criticized London as a “congested” city under “a cloud of sea-coal, as if there be a resemblance of hell upon earth, it is in this vulcano in a foggy day: this pestilent smoak, which corrodes the very yron, and spoils all the moveables, leaving a soot on all things that it lights: and so fatally seizing on the lungs of the inhabitants, that the cough and the consumption spares no man.”162 As I discuss in Chapter 2, referring to industrialized cities as volcanoes becomes a literary trope in the eighteenth century. In Evelyn’s metaphor, London is as destructive as a natural disaster. This passage was reprinted frequently in the early nineteenth century, including in new editions of Fumifugium. In Fumifugium, Evelyn outlines pressing problems associated with London’s famous fog: the health of Londoners, rusting of iron, and blackening of buildings. He suggests one solution would be to relocate especially noxious industries “five or six miles distant from London below the River of Thames.” He attributes the poor state of London’s air to “the immoderate use of, and indulgence to Sea-coale,” which produces a “horrid Smoake” that “obscures our Churches, and makes our Palaces

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look old, which fouls our Clothes, and corrupts the Waters, so as the very Rain, and refreshing Dews which fall in the several Seasons, precipitate this impure vapour, which, with its black and tenacious quality, spots and contaminates whatsoever is expos’d to it.”163 This is the “natural atmosphere” of which Byron writes over one hundred years later, and which Ruskin describes in 1884: an industrial-cultural atmosphere utterly transforming the natural atmosphere, feeding on one another in a feedback loop. Evelyn proposes planting trees and vegetation throughout London as a way to counteract the smell of coal smoke. His ideas were memorialized in the “Ballad of Gresham College” (1663), an anonymous poem written in praise of the early members of the Royal Society who met weekly at the college: To guesse by one every one’s meritt, A Booke call’d Fumifugiam read. Its Author hath a publique spirit And doubtlesse too a subtile head He must be more than John an Oake Who writes soe learnedly of smoake.

He shewes that ’tis the seacoale smoake That allways London doth Inviron, Which doth our Lungs and Spiritts choake, Our hanging spoyle, and rust our Iron. Lett none att Fumifuge be scoffing Who heard att Church our Sundaye’s Coughing.

For melioration of the Ayre Both for our Lungs and eke our noses, To plant the Fields he doth take care With Cedar, Juniper and Roses, Which, turn’d to trees, ’tis understood, Wee shall instead of coale burne wood.164

As a member of the Royal Society, Evelyn’s proposals were more than poetic ideas. He was appointed Commissioner for the Improvement of the City Streets in 1662, and he succeeded in many respects, particularly in planting trees in royal parks. In Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions (1664), he

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expanded on his idea to burn wood instead of coal and to invest in regrowing England’s forests, which were quickly disappearing to feed the bourgeoning factory culture. Sylva went through multiple editions and was hugely influential in the development of forestry. Fumifugium also had lasting appeal, being reprinted during the height of the Industrial Revolution in 1772 and 1825, attesting to Evelyn’s exceptional foresight. During the eighteenth century, scientists turned their attention from the local to the global in studies of weather and pollution, although London still figured prominently. In 1787, Richard Kirwan, an Irish geologist and President of the Royal Irish Academy, published An Estimate of the Temperature of Different Latitudes, a collection of scientific essays exploring how global temperatures regulate local climates. Kirwan asserts that meteorology had become a global science, for “there is no science in the whole circle of those attainable by man, which required such a conspiracy, if I may so call it, of all nations, to bring it to perfection.” This concerted effort will take “some ages” to complete, and Kirwan predicts that “global meteorology” will one day allow humans to predict weather patterns and make global climate forecasts.165 This is the kind of approach taken up by Luke Howard, the most influential and popular climatologist of the nineteenth century. Best known for his Essay on the Modification of Clouds (1803), which established the cloud nomenclature system used today, Howard was also a great urban climatologist. He published a twovolume work called The Climate of London in 1818 and 1820, with an “enlarged and improved” third edition in 1833. The book is prophetic in describing the phenomenon now called “urban heat island,” which he attributed to population density and smog. Howard imagines a global balance of winds and water, arguing that droughts in one part of world were necessary for precipitation in another.166 However, it was his work on clouds that most influenced poets and artists, such as Wordsworth, Shelley, Constable, and Ruskin (all taken up in Chapter 4 of this book). It is no coincidence that meteorology and climatology advanced so rapidly during the nineteenth century. Writings and treatises on industrial mining, agricultural chemistry, and scientific technology had proliferated since the mid-eighteenth century, gradually revealing the ways that industrialization was modifying Britain’s terrestrial and atmospheric environments. Collaborations between scientists and industrialists were also common.167 The effects of industrialization were felt throughout the nation, from newly expanding cities to the Scottish Highlands. The skies, and the very air that Britons breathed, were changing quite noticeably.

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Poets and novelists began to emphasize these changes in their writing, which reached a larger audience than in any previous age. Through British imperial colonialism, the world became more connected and globalized, and climate was no longer just a local concern—scientists, artists, and authors increasingly represented the atmosphere in global terms. In the mid-nineteenth century, scientists built on the work of Kirwan and Howard through a series of scientific studies and experiments that established what came to be known as “the greenhouse effect,” the driving force of anthropogenic climate change.168 The name stems in part from the popularity of nineteenth-century glasshouses, or greenhouses, which displayed flora and fauna from around the world living in an artificial environment. These glasshouses underscored Britons’ ability to manipulate both the geosphere, through its imperial reach, and the atmosphere. The scientific and popular fascination with manufactured climates was on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, a pivotal moment in both industrialization and globalism. The Exhibition was held inside a gigantic glasshouse named the Crystal Palace. Designed by Joseph Paxton, a gardener renowned for his innovative glasshouse constructions, the Crystal Palace “epitomize[d]” what Jesse Oak Taylor refers to as “the world-as-glasshouse.” People from nations (and thus cultures and atmospheres) all over the world converged inside the Crystal Palace; it was an artificial environment located within London, the largest city in the world with “a manufactured environment in which every scrap of ground and breath of air bore traces of human action.” British literature from this period captures this “new kind of human habitat,” this new Earth in the early Anthropocene.169 During the second half of the nineteenth century, authors highlighted the manufactured nature of Britain’s atmosphere, especially London. Charles Dickens is the best example. His novels frequently take up what Charles Lamb called the “London particular”: an atmosphere “manufactured” of particulate matter “by Thames, Coal Gas, Smoke, Steam, and Co.”170 The famous fog that permeates Bleak House, which began its serialized publication less than six months after the Great Exhibition closed, displays Dickens’s concern with the cultural and environmental elements of London’s manufactured climate, so much so that Taylor reads the novel “as a climate model” that “render[s] the artificial reality of London’s climate visible.”171 This kind of atmospheric literature—that is, imaginative writing concerned with the atmosphere and its effects on cultures and ecologies—is an important genre in early Anthropocene literature. Even

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in the eighteenth century, “atmosphere” was understood to be a product of both natural and human-industrial forces. Such an understanding led to an increase of anti-pollution groups, smoke abatement campaigns, and efforts for sanitation reform throughout the nineteenth century, including the massive 1884 International Health Exhibition hosted in London (all issues explored in Chapter 4). This takes us back to Ruskin’s 1884 lectures on climate change. In The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, Ruskin writes of industrial smoke and its effects on people and the atmosphere. He cites scientific studies on clouds, volcanic eruptions, and the climate. He provides examples of Britain’s changing land- and sky-capes from Byron, Wordsworth, Turner, and other artists. And he concludes that “the air and the earth were [once] fitted…to the spirit of man,” but “that harmony is now broken.”172 Similar to his 1880 essay on the changes to Croxsted Lane, he was searching for language to explain a new world in a new geological epoch. Ruskin was writing the Anthropocene.

Notes 1. John Ruskin, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 34, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1908), 33. 2. For two excellent studies that outline the complex definitions and discourses of the Anthropocene, see Katrin Klinga, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer, eds., Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015); and Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015). 3. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000): 17. 4. For geology, see Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (2015): 171–80; and Jan Zalasiewicz, et al., “Making the Case for a Formal Anthropocene Epoch: An Analysis of Ongoing Critiques,” Newsletters on Stratigraphy 50, no. 2 (2017): 205–26. For the social sciences, see Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” The Anthropocene Review 24, no. 1 (2014): 62–69; and Cameron Harrington and Clifford Shearing, Security in the Anthropocene: Reflections on Safety and Care (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). For the humanities, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History:

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Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222; and Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). For a concise yet comprehensive overview of these debates, see Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). See Lewis and Maslin; Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Steve Mentz, “Enter Anthropocene, circa 1610,” in Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, ed. Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 43– 58. See Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 59–72. Mark Overton argues that the British Agricultural Revolution begins in 1750. See Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also E.L. Jones, Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974). Geologists use a specific set of criteria to determine a “golden spike,” or Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point, that separates stages on the geological time scale. The Industrial Revolution does not qualify, but climate scientists have traced global warming from melting Arctic sea ice back to nineteenth-century industrialization. See Georg Feulner, Stefan Rahmstorf, Anders Levermann, and Silvia Volkwardt, “On the Origin of the Surface Air Temperature Difference between the Hemispheres in Earth’s Present-Day Climate,” Journal of Climate 26 (2013): 7136–50. Similar to the multiple “romanticisms” invoked in literary scholarship, there are also multiple “anthropocenes” in climate change studies. For an overview of these various anthropocenes, see Christophe Bonneuil, “The Geological Turn: Narratives of the Anthropocene,” in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, ed. Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne (New York: Routledge, 2014), 15–31. See also Donna J. Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–65; and Stef Craps and Rick Crownshaw, “Introduction: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 50, no. 1 (2018): 1–8.

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11. For the scientific basis of this dating, see Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–21. See also Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (2002): 23. 12. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016). Malm locates the origins of what he calls “fossil economy” in Britain with James Watt’s patent of the steam engine (16). His emphasis on capitalism and economy parallels some scholars’ preference for the term Capitalocene rather than Anthropocene. 13. George P. Marsh, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (New York, 1864), 13. 14. Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, “Introduction,” in Anthropocene Reading, 15. 15. Bernd M. Scherer, “Preface,” in Textures of the Anthropocene, 3. 16. Scherer, 4; Menely and Taylor, 9. 17. Menely and Taylor, 14. 18. Gabriele Dürbeck, “Ambivalent Characters and Fragmented Poetics in Anthropocene Literature: Max Frisch and Ilija Trojanow,” the minnesota review 83 (2014): 112. 19. Most literary studies of Anthropocene literature focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. See, for example, Malcolm Miles, Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature, and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015); Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Antonia Mehnert, Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2016); Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016); Sam Solnick, Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology, and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (London: Routledge, 2016); Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Lynn Keller, Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self Conscious Anthropocene (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018); Craps and Crownshaw; Diletta De Cristofaro and Daniel Cordle, eds., “The Literature of the Anthropocene,” C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 6, no. 1 (2018); Frank Biermann and Eva Lovbrand, eds., Anthropocene Encounters: New Direction in Green Political Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Jon

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20.

21.

22. 23.

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Hegglund and John McIntyre, eds., Modernism and the Anthropocene (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019). Other scholars have begun to trace the links between nineteenth-century literature and the Anthropocene, though not making a case for early Anthropocene literature. See Heidi Scott, Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014); Evan Gottlieb, ed., Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760–1820 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015); Kate Rigby, Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015); Taylor; Menely and Taylor; Thomas H. Ford, Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air: Atmospheric Romanticism in a Time of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Chris Washington, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). For an overview of scholarly work on the intersections of Romanticism and the Anthropocene, see Devin Griffiths, “Romantic Planet: Science and Literature within the Anthropocene,” Literature Compass 14, no. 1 (2017): 1–17. For influential examples, see Chakrabarty; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Bonneuil and Fressoz; and Malm. Tita Chico, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 5. William Cowper, The Task, bk. 1, line 749, in The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (London: Routledge, 1994). I am indebted to a number of studies on the history of science: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Margaret Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011); Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); and Al Coppola, The

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24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). William and Caroline Herschel published hundreds of astronomical papers throughout the 1780s, though William received most of the credit and acclaim. William Herschel, “On the Construction of the Heavens,” Philosophical Transactions 75 (1785): 217. Thomas Wright, An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, Founded upon the Laws of Nature, and solving by Mathematical Principles the General Phaenomena of the Visible Creation; and Particularly the Via Lactea (London: H. Chapelle, 1750), 46. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (London: J. Johnson, 1791), 1.103–14. References are to canto and line numbers, excepting footnotes, which are referenced by page number. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 4.359–66. On the importance of analogy to both Erasmus and Charles Darwin’s theories of evolutions, see Gillian Beer, “Plants, Analogy, and Perfection: Loose and Strict Analogies,” in Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution, ed. Joel Faflak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 29–44. Darwin, 4.401–8. These are the Bowthorpe Oak in Bourne, Lincolnshire; the Minchenden in Southgate, London; the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire; and the Crouch Oak in Addlestone, Surrey. See Matthew Rowney, “Broken Arbour: ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and Deforestation,” European Romantic Review 26, no. 6 (2016): 719–41. William Cowper, “Yardley Oak,” line 46, in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 2nd ed., ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). Ibid., lines 1–11. Darwin, 1.237–42. Alan Bewell, Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 72. Darwin, 26–27. Ibid., 1.265, 67, 72, 73, 78. Ibid., 2.349–60. Ibid., 2.270. Ibid., 70. Darwin, 2.269–70. Ibid., 2.304. Ibid., 21.

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46. William Frame, “The First Voyage of James Cook,” The British Library, https://www.bl.uk/the-voyages-of-captain-james-cook/articles/thefirst-voyage-of-james-cook. 47. See Philip L. Woodworth and Glen H. Rowe, “The Tidal Measurements of James Cook during the Voyage of the Endeavour,” History of Geoand Space Sciences 9, no. 1 (2018): 85–103. 48. See Matthew Daniel Eddy, The Language of Mineralogy: John Walker, Chemistry, and the Edinburgh Medical School, 1750–1800 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008); and Noah Heringman, “Deep Time in the South Pacific: Scientific Voyaging and the Ancient/Primitive Analogy,” in Marking Time, 95–121. 49. Georges-Louis Leclerc, le comte de Buffon, The Epochs of Nature, trans. and ed. by Jan Zalasiewicz, Anne-Sophie Milon, and Mateusz Zalasiewicz (University of Chicago Press, 2018), 124. 50. Noah Heringman, “Deep Time and the Dawn of the Anthropocene,” Representations 129, no. 1 (2015): 63. 51. Buffon, 127–28. 52. Heringman, “Deep Time,” 67. 53. James Hutton, “Theory of the Earth,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1 (1788): 304. 54. The theory of Neptunism, dominant throughout the eighteenth century, held that water was the driving force of Earth’s evolution, and its proponents tended to embrace a shorter, Christian time scale. In contrast, Vulcanists argued that volcanic fires were more important to the formation of Earth, and that most evidence supported uniformitarianism. 55. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology; or, The Modern Changes of the Earth and Its Inhabitants considered as Illustrative of Geology, 9th ed. (New York: Appleton & Co., 1854), 60–61, 150. 56. Ibid., 680–84, 716. 57. Ibid., 713. 58. Ibid., 798. 59. Tennyson made these remarks to James Knowles. See The Poems of Tennyson, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 613. 60. Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., in Tennyson’s Poetry, ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr. (New York: Norton, 1999), 238. 61. There is a large body of scholarship on Tennyson and nineteenth-century geology. For two recent studies, see Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); Michelle Geric, Tennyson and Geology: Poetry and Poetics (New York: Palgrave, 2017). 62. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 207. 63. Ibid.

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64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 208. 66. For a useful essay on these issues, see E.E. Snyder, “Tennyson’s Progressive Geology,” Victorian Network 2, no. 1 (2010): 27–48. 67. William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” lines 1–4, in The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (New York: Penguin, 1986). 68. Kevin Hutchings, Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 58. 69. See Hutchings; and Harry White, “Blake’s Resolution to the War between Science and Philosophy,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2006): 108–25. 70. William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, plate 10, lines 20–21, in The Complete Poems. 71. William Blake, Milton: A Poem, lines 26, 20, 22, in The Complete Poems. 72. Blake directly engages with geology, physics, biology, and anthropology in many of his poems. For two recent essays, see Tilottama Rajan, “Blake, Hegel, and the Sciences,” The Wordsworth Circle 50, no. 1 (2019): 20– 35; and Ya-feng Wu, “Blake’s Critique of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden,” The Wordsworth Circle 50, no. 1 (2019): 55–73. 73. For more details on Tambora, see Chapter 2 of this book, 92–95. 74. Mary Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland: with Letters descriptive of a sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni (London: T. Hookham, 1817), 161. 75. Ibid. 76. For an excellent essay on various approaches to the poem, see Ann McCarthy, “The Aesthetics of Contingency in the Shelleyan ‘Universe of Things,’ or, ‘Mont Blanc’ without Mont Blanc,” Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 3 (2015): 355–75. 77. Percy Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” lines 20–23, 26, 29, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002). 78. Ibid., lines 75, 99, 118–19. 79. See Bryon Williams, “Process and Presence: Geological Influence and Innovation in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc,’” in Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies, ed. Dewey W. Hall (Lexington Books, 2016), 87–104. 80. Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” lines 142–44. 81. Ibid., lines 81–83. 82. Percy Shelley, Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem, 1.233, 253, 237, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. References are to canto and line numbers, excepting footnotes, which are referenced by page number. 83. Ibid., 1.250–51.

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84. Ibid., 2.77–82. 85. Percy Shelley, Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem (New York: William Baldwin and Co., 1821), 90–91. 86. Ibid., 2.56. 87. Ibid., 2.182. 88. Ibid., 2.211–15. 89. Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, act 1, line 676, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. 90. Shelley, Queen Mab, 5.8, 38, 44. 91. Ibid., 163. 92. John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” lines 9–10, in The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 93. Ibid., lines 11–12. 94. John Keats, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” line 5, in The Major Works. 95. Ibid., lines 12–14. 96. John Keats, “Bright Star,” lines 1, 3, in The Major Works. 97. Ibid., line 14. 98. William Wordsworth, “To the Moon,” lines 40–41, in Last Poems, 1821– 1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 99. William Wordsworth, “A Night-Piece,” in The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44–45. 100. William Wordsworth, “To the Moon,” lines 1–2, in Last Poems. 101. Ford, 4. 102. William Wordsworth, “A Night Thought,” line 3, in Last Poems. 103. See John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 104. William Wordsworth, “Proud were ye, Mountains, when, in times of old,” lines 4–5, in Last Poems. 105. See Noah Heringman, “The Rock Record and Romantic Narratives of Earth,” in Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 53–84. 106. See Wyatt; and Noah Heringman, “Introduction: The Commerce of Literature and Natural History,” in Romantic Science, 1–19. 107. John Scafe, King Coal’s Levee, or Geological Etiquette, with Explanatory Notes, 2nd ed. (Alnwick: J. Graham, 1819), lines 1, 3. 108. Ibid., lines 27, 35, 64, 1086. 109. Kent Linthicum, “Rise of British Petroaesthetics in King Coal’s Levee,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 60, no. 4 (forthcoming, 2020).

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110. See Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: C. Knight, 1832), 5. 111. Ibid., 3. 112. Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson, Industry in the Landscape, 1700– 1900 (London: Routledge, 1994), 17. 113. Wendy Parkins and Peter Adkins, “Introduction: Victorian Ecology and the Anthropocene,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 36 (2018): 9. 114. See Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Norton, 2018), 1. 115. See Elizabeth McKellar, The Landscapes of London: The City, the Country, and the Suburbs, 1660–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 13–15. 116. See Michal Rawson, “The March of Bricks and Mortar,” Environmental History 17, no. 4 (2012): 844–51. 117. Blake, Jerusalem, plate 53, lines 19–20. 118. William Blake, Vala, or the Four Zoas, pt. 9, lines 167–69, in The Complete Poems. 119. See McKellar; and Heather Tilley, “Waste Matters: Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Nineteenth-Century Book Recycling,” in Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary, ed. Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 152–74. 120. Ashton Nichols, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting (New York: Palgrave, 2011), xii. 121. Ibid., 16. 122. Taylor, 5. 123. Nichols, 12. 124. William Wordsworth, “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” in Major Works, 285. 125. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 123. 126. Lord Byron, Don Juan, 10.649–56, in The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). References are to canto and line numbers. 127. Ibid., 10.641. 128. Ibid., 10.663. 129. Philip Connell, “A Winter Night in Manchester,” in Poaching on Parnassus; A Collection of Original Poems (Manchester: Heywood, 1865), 29. 130. Book 7, entitled “Residence in London,” outlines Wordsworth’s time in the city after he graduated from Cambridge in 1791. It is the only book in the epic to focus on a large, industrialized city.

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131. William Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes, 5th ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Henry Frowde, 1908), 52, 55, 61. 132. Ibid., 62, 63, 72, 73. 133. “The English Lake District,” UNESCO, http://whc.unesco.org/en/lis t/422. 134. Wordsworth, Guide, 92. 135. James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 78; George Monbiot, “John Clare, the Poet of the Environmental Crisis—200 Years Ago,” The Guardian, 9 July 2012; Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), xii; and John Goodridge, John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 105. 136. See, for instance, Timothy Morton, “John Clare’s Dark Ecology,” Studies in Romanticism 47, no. 2 (2008): 179–93; Richard D.G. Irvine and Mina Gorji, “John Clare in the Anthropocene,” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 31, no. 1 (2013): 119–32; and Seth T. Reno, “John Clare and Ecological Love,” John Clare Society Journal 35 (2016): 59–76. 137. John Clare, “The Mores,” lines 4, 2, 7, 19–20, in Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–1837 , vol. 2, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P.M.S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 138. Ibid., lines 30, 23, 16. 139. John Clare, “The Lament of Swordy Well,” lines 113–14, in Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 5. 140. Ibid., lines 129–31. 141. Overton, 64. 142. John Clare, “Remembrances,” line 42, in Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 4. 143. Ibid., lines 45–49. 144. Ibid., lines 68, 67. 145. Sir Walter Scott, “Walter Scott on Highland Evictions,” in The Celtic Magazine, vol. 10 (Iverness: A. & W. Mackenzie, 1885), 556. 146. Ron Broglio, Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life in British Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017), 50. 147. Florence Boos, “‘We Would Know Again the Fields…’: The Rural Poetry of Elizabeth Campbell, Jane Stevenson, and Mary Macpherson,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17, no. 2 (1998): 325–47. 148. Mary Macpherson, “Farewell to the New Christmas,” in Roderick Watson, ed., The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots and English 1380–1980 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 489–90. 149. See James Hunter, “Sheep and Deer: Highland sheep Farming, 1850– 1900,” Northern Scotland 1 (1972): 199–222.

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150. Macpherson, 491. 151. Broglio, 6. The term “biopolitics” originated with Michel Foucault but has since been taken up in a number of different fields. 152. Thomas Batchelor, Village Scenes, The Progress of Agriculture, and Other Poems (London: Parnassian Press, 1804), 65. 153. While there were parliamentary enclosure acts prior to 1750, the two largest waves were 1760–80 and 1790–1820. See Overton, 150–51. 154. Batchelor, 70. 155. Ibid., 76, 77, 82, 90, 88–95. 156. Robert Southey, Letter to W. S. Landor, in Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, vol. 2, ed. J.W. Warter (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856), 231. 157. John Ruskin, “Fiction—Fair and Foul,” in The Ethics of Dust; Fiction, Fair and Foul; The Elements of Drawing (Boston: D. Estes, 1890), 153. 158. Ibid., 154. 159. See, for example, Eileen Cleere, The Sanitary Arts: Aesthetic Culture and the Victorian Cleanliness Campaigns (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014); and Sabine Schulting, Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2016). 160. See Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 82. 161. See Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times (London: Methuen, 1987); James C. McKusick, “John Evelyn and the Forestry of Imagination,” Wordsworth Circle 44 (2013): 110–14; and Taylor. 162. John Evelyn, Fumifugium: or The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London (London: W. Godbid, 1661), i. 163. Ibid., 16, 5–6. 164. “In Praise of that choice Company of Witts and Philosophers who meet on Wednesdays weekly at Gresham Colledg,” qtd. in Dorothy Stimson, “Ballad of Gresham College,” Isis 18, no. 1 (1932): 115–16. 165. Richard Kirwan, An Estimate of the Temperature of Different Latitudes (London: J. Davis, 1787), iii–iv, v–vi. 166. Luke Howard, The Climate of London, deduced from Meteorological Observations, made in the metropolis and various places around it, 2nd ed. (London: Harvey and Darton, 1833). 167. See Samuel J. Rogal, Agriculture in Britain and America, 1660–1820 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994); and Palmer and Neaverson. 168. Major figures in this trajectory are Joseph Fourier, a French physicist whose research in the 1820s established the basic idea of the greenhouse effect on Earth; Eunice Newton Foote, an American scientist whose studies in the 1850s showed how carbon gases increased temperatures on the surface of Earth; and John Tyndall, an Irish physicist whose work

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in the late 1850s and 60s essentially proved the greenhouse effect. The Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius solidified these studies with calculations that showed the direct relationship between global temperatures and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, arguing that humans’ carbon emissions were increasing Earth’s temperature. Taylor, 1–2, 23, 24. J.C. Thompson, Bibliography of the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb: A Literary History (London: J.R. Tutin, 1908), 88. Taylor, 37, 43. Ruskin, Storm-Cloud, 96.

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Dürbeck, Gabriele. “Ambivalent Characters and Fragmented Poetics in Anthropocene Literature: Max Frisch and Ilija Trojanow.” t he minnesota review 83 (2014): 112–21. Eddy, Matthew Daniel. The Language of Mineralogy: John Walker, Chemistry, and the Edinburgh Medical School, 1750–1800. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. “The English Lake District.” UNESCO. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/422. Evelyn, John. Fumifugium: or The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London. London: W. Godbid, 1661. Faflak, Joel, ed. Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Feulner, Georg, Stefan Rahmstorf, Anders Levermann, and Silvia Volkwardt. “On the Origin of the Surface Air Temperature Difference between the Hemispheres in Earth’s Present-Day Climate.” Journal of Climate 26 (2013): 7136–50. Ford, Thomas H. Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air: Atmospheric Romanticism in a Time of Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Frame, William. “The First Voyage of James Cook.” The British Library. https://www.bl.uk/the-voyages-of-captain-james-cook/articles/the-first-voy age-of-james-cook. Freeman, Joshua B. Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. New York: Norton, 2018. Geric, Michelle. Tennyson and Geology: Poetry and Poetics. New York: Palgrave, 2017. Goodridge, John. John Clare and Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Gottlieb, Evan, ed. Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760–1820. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015. Griffiths, Devin. The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. ———. “Romantic Planet: Science and Literature within the Anthropocene.” Literature Compass 14, no. 1 (2017): 1–17. Griffiths, Matthew. The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna J. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–65. ———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Harrington, Cameron, and Clifford Shearing. Security in the Anthropocene: Reflections on Safety and Care. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

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Hegglund, Jon, and John McIntyre, eds. Modernism and the Anthropocene. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. Heringman, Noah. “Deep Time and the Dawn of the Anthropocene.” Representations 129, no. 1 (2015): 56–85. ———. “Deep Time in the South Pacific: Scientific Voyaging and the Ancient/Primitive Analogy.” In Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution. Edited by Joel Faflak. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. ———. “Introduction: The Commerce of Literature and Natural History.” In Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History. Edited by Noah Heringman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. ———. “The Rock Record and Romantic Narratives of Earth.” In Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History. Edited by Noah Heringman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Herschel, William. “On the Construction of the Heavens.” Philosophical Transactions 75 (1785): 213–66. Howard, Luke. The Climate of London, deduced from Meteorological Observations, made in the metropolis and various places around it. 2nd ed. London: Harvey and Darton, 1833. Hunter, James. “Sheep and Deer: Highland Sheep Farming, 1850–1900.” Northern Scotland 1 (1972): 199–222. Hutchings, Kevin. Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Hutton, James. “Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1 (1788): 209–304. “In Praise of that choice Company of Witts and Philosophers who meet on Wednesdays weekly att Gresham Colledg.” In Dorothy Stimson, “Ballad of Gresham College.” Isis 18, no. 1 (1932): 103–17. Irvine, Richard D.G., and Mina Gorji. “John Clare in the Anthropocene.” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 31, no. 1 (2013): 119–32. Jacob, Margaret. The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Jones, E.L. Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974. Keats, John. The Major Works. Edited by Elizabeth Cook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Keller, Lynn. Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Kirwin, Richard. An Estimate of the Temperature of Different Latitudes. London: J. Davis, 1787. Klinga, Katrin, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer, eds. Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.

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Lewis, Simon, and Mark Maslin. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519 (2015): 171–80. Linthicum, Kent. “Rise of British Petroaesthetics in King Coal’s Levee.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 60, no. 4 (forthcoming, 2020). Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology; or, The Modern Changes of the Earth and Its Inhabitants considered as Illustrative of Geology. 9th ed. New York: Appleton & Co., 1854. Macpherson, Mary. “Farewell to the New Christmas.” In The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots and English 1380–1980. Edited by Roderick Watson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso, 2016. Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review 24, no. 1 (2014): 62–69. Marsh, George P. Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. New York: Charles Scribner, 1864. McCarthy, Ann. “The Aesthetics of Contingency in the Shelleyan ‘Universe of Things,’ or, ‘Mont Blanc’ without Mont Blanc.” Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 3 (2015): 355–75. McKellar, Elizabeth. The Landscapes of London: The City, the Country, and the Suburbs, 1660–1840. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. McKusick, James C. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. ———. “John Evelyn and the Forestry of Imagination.” Wordsworth Circle 44 (2013): 110–14. Mehnert, Antonia. Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Menely, Tobias, and Jesse Oak Taylor. “Introduction.” In Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. Edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Mentz, Steve. “Enter Anthropocene, circa 1610.” In Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. Edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Miles, Malcolm. Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature, and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Mitchell, Robert. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Monbiot, George. “John Clare, the Poet of the Environmental Crisis—200 Years Ago.” The Guardian, 9 July 2012. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

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———. “John Clare’s Dark Ecology.” Studies in Romanticism 47, no. 2 (2008): 179–93. Nichols, Ashton. Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Overton, Mark. Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Palmer, Marilyn, and Peter Neaverson. Industry in the Landscape, 1700–1900. London: Routledge, 1994. Parkins, Wendy, and Peter Adkins. “Introduction: Victorian Ecology and the Anthropocene.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 26 (2018): 1–15. Rajan, Tilottama. “Blake, Hegel, and the Sciences.” The Wordsworth Circle 50, no. 1 (2019): 20–35. Rawson, Michael. “The March of Bricks and Mortar.” Environmental History 17, no. 4 (2012): 844–51. Reno, Seth T. “John Clare and Ecological Love.” John Clare Society Journal 35 (2016): 59–76. Rigby, Kate. Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Rogal, Samuel J. Agriculture in Britain and America, 1660–1820. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994. Rowney, Matthew. “Broken Arbour: ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and Deforestation.” European Romantic Review 26, no. 6 (2016): 719–41. Ruskin, John. “Fiction—Fair and Foul.” In The Ethics of Dust; Fiction, Fair and Foul; The Elements of Drawing. Boston: D. Estes, 1890. ———. The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. In The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Vol. 34. Edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1908. Scafe, John. King Coal’s Levee, or Geological Etiquette, with Explanatory Notes. 2nd ed. Alnwick: J. Graham, 1819. Scherer, Bernd M. “Preface.” In Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray. Edited by Katrin Klinga, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. Schulting, Sabine. Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture. London: Routledge, 2016. Scott, Heidi. Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Scott, Walter. “Walter Scott on Highland Evictions.” In The Celtic Magazine. Vol. 10. Iverness: A. & W. Mackenzie, 1885.

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Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Shelley, Mary. History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland: with Letters descriptive of a sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni. London: T. Hookham, 1817. Shelley, Percy. Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem. New York: William Baldwin and Co., 1821. ———. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York: Norton, 2002. Snyder, E.E. “Tennyson’s Progressive Geology.” Victorian Network 2, no. 1 (2010): 27–48. Solnick, Sam. Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology, and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. London: Routledge, 2016. Southey, Robert. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey. Vol. 2. Edited by J.W. Warter. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–21. Stewart, Larry. The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Tennyson, Alfred. The Poems of Tennyson. Vol. 1. Ed. Christopher Ricks. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ———. Tennyson’s Poetry. Edited by Robert W. Hill, Jr. New York: Norton, 1999. Thompson, J.C. Bibliography of the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb: A Literary History. London: J.R. Tutin, 1908. Thorsheim, Peter. Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. Tilley, Heather. “Waste Matters: Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Nineteenth-Century Book Recycling.” In Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary. Edited by Gill Partington and Adam Smyth. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Washington, Chris. Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. White, Harry. “Blake’s Resolution to the War between Science and Philosophy.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2006): 108–25.

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Williams, Bryon. “Process and Presence: Geological Influence and Innovation in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc.’” In Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies. Edited by Dewey W. Hall. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Woodworth, Philip L., and Glen H. Rowe. “The Tidal Measurements of James Cook during the Voyage of the Endeavour.” History of Geo- and Space Sciences 9, no. 1 (2018): 85–103. Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals. Edited by Pamela Woolf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Wordsworth, William. Guide to the Lakes. 5th ed. Edited by Ernest de Selincourt. London: Henry Frowde, 1908. ———. Last Poems, 1821–1850. Edited by Jared Curtis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. ———. The Major Works. Edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wright, Thomas. An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, Founded upon the Laws of Nature, and solving by Mathematical Principles the General Phaenomena of the Visible Creation; and Particularly the Via Lactea. London: H. Chapelle, 1750. Wu, Ya-feng. “Blake’s Critique of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden.” The Wordsworth Circle 50, no. 1 (2019): 55–73. Wyatt, John. Wordsworth and the Geologists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. “Making the Case for a Formal Anthropocene Epoch: An Analysis of Ongoing Critiques.” Newsletters on Stratigraphy 50, no. 2 (2017): 205–26.

CHAPTER 2

Fire: Volcanoes and Industrialization in Early Anthropocene Literature

In Parts thro’ prospects scattered far, and near, Pale-glowing gleams, and flickering flames, appear, Like new volcanoes, ’mid deep darkness nurs’d, From cooking coals, in ruddy brilliance, burst, While smokey curls, in thickening columns, rise, Obscure the landscapes, and involves the skies —James Woodhouse, The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus (1820)

There, black and huge, the haunt of Cyclop bands, And crown’d with spiry flames, a Furnace stands; Incessant, day and night, its crater roars, Like the volcano on Sicilian shores; Its fiery womb the molten mass combines, Thence, lava-like, the boiling torrent shines —John Holland, Sheffield Park, a Descriptive Poem (1820)

In his 1820 topographical poem Sheffield Park, John Holland describes a large industrial furnace as a volcano that transformed Sheffield from a market town known primarily for cutlery manufacture to a major center of steel production and coal mining during Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Holland’s poem is mostly an ode to his hometown written in © The Author(s) 2020 S. T. Reno, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53246-8_2

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the picturesque mode, but, in the passage above, he describes industrial fires using volcanic-geological imagery. In addition to the Cyclops reference, and to comparing the factory to a volcanic “crater” and its fires to Mount Etna, Holland portrays Sheffield as the place where “swarthy Vulcan toils” and where Britain’s “cannons” are created for “war.”1 In classical mythology, the Cyclops assisted Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, in forging weapons for the gods under Etna, an active volcano in Sicily. Holland’s dual mythological and imperial description attributes supernatural powers to Sheffield’s industrial technology. Later, in describing the lasting effects of the coal and steel industries, Holland returns to volcanic imagery: Ascending now, the river’s course to mark, Along the western limit of the Park, We pass a hill with scarce a verdant trace, Where flaming ovens burnt along its base,— Globes hot as Aetna, whence the glowing coke Belch’d, from each fiery crater, clouds of smoke, Which form’d, beneath the sapphire arch of night, A dusky canopy of lurid light: Now cold, disrupted, spread their fireless wombs, Like the torn fragments of exploded bombs, Such as are oft from hostile mortars thrown Within the wall of some beleaguered town.

Beyond that sterile slope the fields resume Their verdant freshness and their fragrant bloom2

This extended analogy is striking. Holland imagines Sheffield as experiencing a cycle of destruction and regeneration similar to the environmental and geological effects of areas after a major volcanic eruption. Holland’s language typifies what Cian Duffy calls “the volcanic sublime,” an aesthetic associated with “potent images of natural renewal and generation.”3 Holland places this volcanic sublime over Sheffield’s industrial transformation. When he writes that “numerous coal-black hills deform the vale,”4 he means more than landscape aesthetics:

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Where yonder gloomy cope of smoke conceals A huge automaton of ropes and wheels, The untired machine, through day’s protracted length, Exerts a more than Atlantean strength5

The automaton is a coal-powered forge that signals a new presence on the landscape, a human-made machine whose power exceeds the Greek Titan Atlas, who, in classical mythology, held up the heavens from Earth. Holland’s comparison suggests that industrial machinery now plays this role, shaping the ecosystem comprised of land and sky around Sheffield. Why does Holland make these volcanic comparisons in a poem about Sheffield? From what texts and traditions does he draw? How does Sheffield Park fit into the larger body of industrial poetry throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Holland, also an amateur geologist and industrial historian, was not alone in linking industrial cities with volcanic imagery, and his volcanic tropes were not original. Sheffield Park points to a confluence of volcanic imagery, geological theories, and industrial poetry in the nineteenth century. The poem’s language and imagery are common in a volcanic-industrial tradition stretching back to the mideighteenth century, and Holland signals something of a saturation point in that tradition: Lord Byron observes in Don Juan (1824) that volcanic metaphors had become “common place” in British writing.6 The first two decades of the nineteenth century were a watershed moment in the tradition of volcanic-industrial writing. Scientists such as Humphry Davy, James Smithson, and Luke Howard were arguing that industrial emissions had atmospheric effects similar to those of volcanic eruptions.7 In 1804, the editors of the Edinburgh Review expressed amazement that such a connection had “so long eluded observation.”8 Howard, writing on London in 1812, referred to the chimneys of the city as a collective “volcano of a hundred thousand mouths.”9 Major volcanic eruptions of Vesuvius and Laki in the eighteenth century had generated widespread popular and scientific interest, fueled further by Tambora in 1815, which Gillen D’Arcy Wood calls “planet Earth’s greatest eruption of the millennium,” one that inaugurated the development of modern environmental science and the concept of climate change.10 Percy Shelley climbed Vesuvius in 1818, inspiring the volcanic imagery that pervades his 1820 Prometheus Unbound volume, and, as Heidi Scott reveals, “Davy climbed Mount Vesuvius fourteen times in 1820 alone, inspired by his research in coalmines to test the various contemporary theories

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on volcanic action.”11 That same year, James Woodhouse was writing his long and far-reaching autobiographical poem, The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus, which includes a substantial section on the “new volcanoes” of Birmingham and Wolverhampton. While Woodhouse achieved a kind of celebrity status in the 1760s as “the Poetical Cobbler,” being a shoemaker by trade, he was not particularly well-regarded, and he is not a particularly original poet, cobbling together “often-used” phrasings, to use Byron’s quip, so his use of these geological similes and comparisons attests to their saturation in British culture at this historical moment. In addition to the passage that serves as the first epigraph to this chapter, Woodhouse writes that industrial fire and smoke “blends” with the atmosphere, “Diffusing, all around, red, lurid, light,” and key volcanic terms appear frequently in subsequent stanzas, such as “scalding streams” from “clanking engines,” “thunder” from forges, and “cloud[s]” from “Furnaces’ iron lungs loud-breathing.”12 Volcanoes were a common theme in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury literature, art, and science.13 Eighteenth-century geologists argued that volcanoes played a vital role in the formation and evolution of Earth. Violent eruptions and subsequent processes of erosion, decay, and rejuvenation not only inspired writers to imagine a geological time scale for the first time—that is, “deep time”—but also made volcanoes a major attraction for natural historians and tourists alike. At the same time, many poets and novelists began using geological language and volcanic imagery in depictions of industrialization. They linked the hellish flames of industrial factories to the geophysical force of volcanic eruptions. In doing so, these authors conflate human and geological phenomena, presenting humans as geophysical agents in a new industrial epoch. In this chapter, I trace some of the earliest representations of industrialization alongside geologic writings on volcanoes. I focus on volcanoes and not on other natural phenomena such as earthquakes or floods, because literature, art, and science on volcanoes is so widespread during this period, and because this volcanic literature overlaps with industrial literature in unique ways.14 What emerges is a pattern that characterizes early Anthropocene literature in Britain: writers use volcanic tropes and imagery to depict industrialization and its effects as a geological force of nature.

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Volcanoes and Industry in the Eighteenth Century Before the explosion of geological writings in the mid-eighteenth century, writers were fascinated with volcanic activity and imagery. Classical Greek and Roman literature regularly featured volcanoes, and the development of modern volcanology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relied on this classical tradition.15 The word “volcano,” first coined in the fifteenth century, derives from the Latin “Vulcan,” the Roman god of fire (in turn derived from the Greek god Hephaestus). There are thus often dark, destructive, and violent undertones to classical volcano literature, reflecting both the effects of eruptions and the volatile nature of the gods. The connection of volcanic fires with Hades further strengthened these undertones. Many classical writers also documented specific eruptions, most notably Pliny the Younger, whose well-known letters describe in vivid detail the effects of the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius. These letters serve as a foundation for scientific and literary writings on volcanoes throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.16 What distinguishes eighteenth-century literature are the ways in which writers began to fuse this classical tradition with modern geology and industrialization. For example, one of the earliest poems on British industrialization draws from volcanism and classical mythology. Thomas Yalden’s Poem on the Mines Late of Sir Carbery Price (1701) is a nationalistic, industrial poem that celebrates Britain’s mines and machinery as great modern inventions. Yalden praises the early British industrialist Humphry Mackworth for his “useful Engines,” emphasizing the seemingly unending flow of natural resources discovered throughout the country. Focusing on the lead and copper mines in the Welsh county of Cardiganshire, the poem also embodies a structure typical across the eighteenth century: after praising Britain’s industrial power, Yalden compares the mines to volcanoes and then outlines geological explanations for the formation of Earth. After a string of classical allusions, Yalden presents a quasi-mythological view of miners and their work: Drawing in pestilential Steems his Breath, Resolved to conquer tho’ he combats Death. Nights gloomy Realms, his pointed Steel invades, The Courts of Pluto, and infernal Shades: He Cuts thro’ Mountains, Subterraneous Lakes, Plying his work each nervous Stroke he takes,

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Loossens the Earth, and the whole Cavern Shakes. Thus with his brawny Arms the Cyclops stands: To form Jove’s Lightning with uplifted Hands: The pond’rous Hammer with a force Descends, Loud as the Thunder which his art intends; And as he Strikes, with each resistless Blow, The Anvil yields, and Aetna groans Below.17

The work of the miners reflects that of the Cyclops. Their industrial work mirrors the volcanic power of Etna, whose eruptions were, at this time, thought to be a central part of Earth’s formation and evolution. Yalden outlines this theory in one of three successive stanzas on geology, writing how the “subterraneous” and “Devouring Flames” of volcanoes, along with lava, “ferment” the earth and “the nobler parts Refine” through mixture with “Cold” waters, producing “Solid Metals” within Earth’s strata. To avoid controversy, which such geological speculation certainly stirred, Yalden frames this stanza as conjecture and situates it in between two stanzas that offer more accepted theories: in the first explanation, Yalden imagines the “Chymic Flames” of “the active Sun” shining “propitiously” on the landscape of Britain—a variant on the nationalist view of Britain as the world’s chosen nation—and in the third and final explanation, he asserts that God shaped Earth and its mountains and minerals through the original act of creation.18 Even in this early poem, the emerging technologies of industrialization were being compared with volcanic-geologic activity. Keywords, such as “subterraneous flames,” “craters,” “pestilential steams,” “vapours,” and “sulphureous air,” as well as direct references to mythological figures and specific volcanoes, appear with regularity in industrial poetry throughout the eighteenth century. An anonymous poem in the March 1738 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine, entitled “The Cyclops: An Address to the Birmingham Artisans,” connects Vulcan and the Cyclops to contemporary industrialization. The author calls new industrial trades “a faculty divine” likened to the work of gods, who can transform Earth in their own image and to their own liking.19 This is one of many poems that imagine mythological figures lording over industrial sites in Britain, and it is the juxtaposition that is most striking: while these authors do not explicitly link negative environmental effects with industrialization, they often place dark, classical volcanic imagery side-byside with descriptions of industrialization, suggesting a nascent awareness, an almost-acknowledged connection. Over and over again, authors draw

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from volcanology in their industrial poems. Moreover, this type of writing was a trend in The Gentleman’s Magazine: it consistently published scientific essays and poems on volcanoes and industry throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, so much so that in a 1767 issue, the editor wrote in an article on volcano tourism that “Mount Vesuvius has been so often and so well described by travellers, and their relations so amply inserted in this Magazine, that little can be added on the subject without repeating what has been already said.”20 Volcano writings were also common in the European Magazine, the London Review, Philosophical Transactions, and many other popular magazines. So, it is no surprise that language from this pervasive form of writing began to pop up more frequently in poetry beginning around 1750, when geological writings began to flourish.21 In an anonymous poem published in the February 1751 issue of the Birmingham Gazette, the author calls Birmingham “Vulcan’s Province,” where the “sulphureous Air” produces a “cloud above the thund’ring Town.”22 This description of Birmingham as a new industrial volcano remains consistent over the next one hundred years. The author then contrasts Birmingham with the “burning Banks” of Wednesbury, a town just to the north that supplied coal to fuel Birmingham’s industry. In a footnote, the author writes that Wednesbury is “famous for Coal Mines, and subterraneous Fires.”23 So, while Birmingham benefits socially and financially from industrialization, smaller towns suffer through the destruction of their landscape and people. This is a common refrain: authors lament the changed aesthetic of British landscapes and express moral outrage for the plight of the workers, but ultimately favor industrial progress, as does the author of this poem. Similarly, the Irish poet James Eyre Weeks celebrates industrialization in his 1752 poem A Poetical Prospect of the Coast, Town and Harbour of Workington. He also compares the smoke and flames of the town’s industries to a volcano: Near are the coalworks, Lowther’s treasur’d mines, Whence the foul-air, thro’ artful tubes refines, Like a Volcano the perennial Flame Sulphureous burns in nature much the same, Yet so by art contriv’d that thro’ the fire The pestilential vapour may transpire, The air expung’d above, and free to breathe, Th’ adventurous collier works insur’d beneath.24

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While the simile “Like a Volcano” draws a direct link between the “sulphureous” “flame[s]” and “pestilential vapours” of an eruption and those of the coalmine, Weeks emphasizes the ingenuity and safety of industrial smoke. The changes to Britain are shocking, to be sure, but ultimately favorable to the Empire. Other mid-eighteenth-century poems also contrast industrial cities with surrounding picturesque landscapes, often as a means to justify industrialization. In his topographical poem Edge-Hill (1767), Richard Jago moves between descriptions of the idyllic rural countryside and the more “subterraneous Cit[ies],” where “chilling Damp[s]” and “unctuous Mist[s]” creep up “from the crumbly Caverns,” stopping “the Springs of Life.”25 While Jago praises steam engines as “Instruments” of “human Force” that have a power similar to that of “Providence,”26 he also likens industrial fires to those of volcanoes, which create hellish landscapes, and which, he suggests, may not be fully under our control: But who that fiercer Element can rule? When, in the nitrous Cave, the kindling Flame, By pitchy Vapours fed, from Cell to Cell, With Fury spreads, and the wide fewell’d Earth, Around, with greedy Joy, receives the Blaze. What Art, what Time can stop the burning Pest? By its own Entrails nourish’d, like those Mounts Vesuvian, or Sicilian, still it wastes, And still new Fewel for its Rapine finds Exhaustless.27

The fires of industry are like those of Vesuvius: uncontrollable, unpredictable, destructive, and terrifying. Jago concludes that the benefits of industry’s “thronging Merchandise” are worth the risk,28 but this passage is disturbingly prescient of technology that exceeds humans’ control. John Dalton also marvels at England’s quickly changing landscape in his 1755 Descriptive Poem, Addressed to Two Ladies, at their Return from Viewing the Mines near Whitehaven. This humorous poem portrays an industrial tour as an epic-to-the-Underworld narrative, but it also supplies real scientific and cultural knowledge about volcanoes and industrialization through a series of extensive footnotes, which were written by Dalton’s friend, Dr. William Brownrigg. While ultimately in support of “the glories of the mine,”29 Dalton outlines drastic changes to Whitehaven over the past thirty years in the poem’s preface: “When we behold

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rich improvements of a wild and uncultivated soil, in their state of maturity, without having observed their rise and progress, we are struck with wonder and astonishment, to see the face of Nature totally changed. It carries an air of enchantment and romance.”30 The transformation of Whitehaven is an “improvement,” but one that seems unreal, uncanny, and otherworldly, linked to magic and supernaturalism. Such change evokes “wonder and astonishment” along with enchantment, three closely linked affective states typically triggered by a moment of suspension or surprise in which sensory perception is heightened.31 While this kind of enchantment recalls the Romantic sublime in its movement from tension to insight and mastery of nature, the focus here seems not so much on humans’ mastery of wild nature but rather the ability to transform it so quickly—a form of mastery, yes, but one that seems impossible, even potentially dangerous with regard to unintended consequences. Dalton seems to be asking, “What’s next? What else might happen as a result of our newfound industrial power? What will this place look like in another thirty years?” The accelerated pace of transformation is the focus of the preface.32 In addition to this eerie acknowledgment of anthropogenic landscape transformation, the opening stanza of Dalton’s poem describes coalmines as anthropogenic volcanoes: Welcome to light, advent’rous pair! Thrice welcome to the balmy air From sulphurous damps in caverns deep,* Where subterranean thunders sleep, Or, wak’d, with dire Aetnaean sound Bellow the trembling mountain round, Till to the frighted realms of day Thro’ flaming mouths they force their way; From bursting streams, and burning rocks,** From nature’s fierce intestine shocks; From the dark mansions of despair, Welcome once more to light and air!33

The sights, sounds, smells, and effects of the mines parallel those of Etna. The footnotes are also quite suggestive. In the first footnote, Brownrigg writes of “dreadful explosions” in the mines, which are “very destructive…bursting out of the pits with great impetuosity, like the fiery eruptions from burning mountains.” In the second footnote, he explains

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that these unintended fires “burn for ages.”34 This is an exaggeration, of course, but one that implicitly links the long, slow progress of a geological age with the experience and projection of humans’ imagined geologic imprint, which ties back to the sentiment of the preface.35 Volcanic similes and metaphors continue throughout A Descriptive Poem. Dalton references the “perpetual fire” of industry, as well as the “hissing,” “moaning,” and “roaring” of the “fire-engines” and other modern inventions,36 all of which produce substances akin to volcanic lava: But who in order can relate What terrors still your steps await? How issuing from the sulphurous coal Thick Acherontic rivers roll?*37

Dalton describes water pumped from the mines as hellish lava, which he compares to the fiery water of the River Acheron in Hades. In a footnote, Brownrigg explains the pumping process in more detail: “The water that flows from the coal is collected into one stream, which run towards the fire-engines. This water is yellow and turbid, from a mixture of ocher, and so very corrosive, that it quickly consumes iron.”38 Anthropogenic lava indeed. Dalton’s Descriptive Poem indicates the trajectory of scientific poetry throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century. The structure of the poem, which alternates between poetry and scientific footnotes, not only anticipates the style made famous by Erasmus Darwin nearly four decades later but also points toward the confluence of scientific and literary writing on volcanoes and industry in the mid-eighteenth century. Several of the most important geological texts on volcanoes appeared between 1743 and 1788, including the first English translation of Francesco Serao’s The Natural History of Mount Vesuvius (1743), Sir William Hamilton’s Observations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, and Other Volcanos (1773), Georges-Louis Leclerc, le comte de Buffon’s Natural History (36 volumes, 1749–1788), James Hutton’s “Theory of the Earth” (1788), and Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791). While there were many other scientific writings on volcanoes, I single out these works as the most influential of the period.

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Serao’s Natural History was extracted and written about extensively in a 1747 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine and in subsequent issues throughout the 1750s and 1760s. Focused mainly on the 1737 eruption of Vesuvius, this text exemplifies the kinds of descriptions typical in volcano writings. Serao writes of Vesuvius: “Its continual Fires, and dreadful Eruptions…seem inextinguishable.” The entire area around the volcano “exhales hot sulphureous Vapours, attended with a thick smoke,” and there are “subterraneous Fires…raging” everywhere. Of the 1737 eruption, he writes: “An intermitted Smoke with bright Flames daily increas’d”; “the Flames were visibly observ’d thro’ the Smoke of the Volcano, as bright as Rockets in a dark night”; “Fill’d with Horror, and dreading the worst, the Inhabitants of the neighbouring Villages began to retire with their Effects”; the “loudest Thunder” was everywhere heard, and extreme weather patterns of wind, rain, and lightning occurred. Significantly, Serao compares these natural phenomena to human effects. He repeatedly refers to underground volcanic fires as “furnaces,” compares volcanic vapors to those in coalmines, and writes, “the Noise of our Vesuvian Thunder was momentaneous, like the Discharge of a Cannon fir’d at Sea.”39 These similes and analogies attribute geologic power to industrial technology in ways similar to the poets I have discussed so far, demonstrating a shared consciousness and aesthetic. Hamilton also focuses on Vesuvius in Observations, which recounts his travels to several famous volcanoes. Like Serao’s text, Observations was extracted and reprinted in various popular magazines. Originally published as a series of essays in Philosophical Transactions, Hamilton’s text contains vivid descriptions of volcanic smoke, earthquakes, lava, “noxious vapours,” and “dreadful inward grumblings, rattling of stones, and hissing” similar to industrial poetry written in the same decades.40 Indeed, more so than Serao, Hamilton adopts a literary style, fusing imaginative and literary elements with his scientific observations. Moreover, he compares the smoke and ash of Vesuvius to the fog of London: “it was impossible to judge the situation of Vesuvius, on account of the smoak and ashes, which covered it entirely…the sun appearing as through a thick London fog.”41 London’s famous fog was mostly the result of suspended particulate matter: soot, smoke, and dust caused from coal burning. In 1825, Charles Lamb would call this “the ‘London particular,’ so manufactured by Thames, Coal Gas, Smoke, Steam, and Co.”42 These kinds of scientific-industrial comparisons were also widespread in scientific

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writings: perhaps most famously, Hutton presents Earth as a “machine” modeled on the steam engine. Volcanoes attained their highest scientific valence in the geological writings of Hutton and Buffon, two of the most influential scientists of the eighteenth century. Buffon in particular has become a central figure in Anthropocene studies, and he is particularly interesting because of his imaginative, literary style of writing, a key element of eighteenth-century geology of which Noah Heringman has written of quite extensively.43 For example, initial readers of Buffon’s works labeled them rather derogatively as “romance,” relegating his writings to a fantastical literary genre rather than science. In Epochs of Nature (1778), which outlines a deep history of Earth and the solar system in seven distinct epochs, Buffon articulates what geologist Jan Zalasiewicz calls “the first real expression of an idea that bears much resemblance to what in the twenty-first century is referred to via the Anthropocene concept.”44 Buffon’s fourth epoch focuses on volcanoes, but it is in the seventh and final epoch, “When the Power of Man Has Assisted That of Nature,” that he makes his Anthropocene argument, offering “nothing less” than “the first geological glimpse of the idea that humans are altering the very foundations of the Earth.”45 In addition to claiming that “the entire face of the Earth today carries the imprint of the power of man,”46 Buffon argues that humans might artificially modify Earth’s climate to stop what he understood to be a cooling pattern. While he was right that the world was experiencing what we now refer to as the “Little Ice Age”—a global cooling phenomenon between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries resultant from an extended period of high volcanic activity—Buffon and other scientists did not comprehend fully the warming trend that began with the Industrial Revolution. But Buffon does suggest that humans could gradually warm Earth: “man can modify the influences on the climate in which he lives, and can secure, so to speak, the temperature to the level at which it suits him. And here is something that is singular: it is more difficult for him to cool the Earth than to heat it.”47 He argues that more people means more fires means more industry, all of which produces more heat, which warms the climate. This, after a long history of the role volcanoes play in the formation of Earth, presents humans as a new geological force of nature. Hutton, too, in his “Theory of the Earth” devotes significant space to volcanoes, which offer examples of how Earth is alive—a “superorganism” as he calls it—much like the perspective of Earth system science today.48

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Drawing direct lines of influence between scientists and poets is tricky, but it is clear that these ideas and terms were in circulation, and that they were reproduced in a variety of publications. And while it is not clear who or how many authors read Buffon, Hutton, and other scientists, it is clear that Erasmus Darwin read their works, and many prominent nineteenth-century poets read Darwin. Darwin thus serves as a conduit for these poets, as is becoming clearer as studies on Darwin proliferate. The extensive footnotes that fill the pages of The Botanic Garden offer a bibliographical lit review of major eighteenth-century science and geology. The four cantos of “The Economy of Vegetation,” which is the first part of The Botanic Garden, focus on Fire, Earth, Water, and Air, respectively, and the overall narrative of the creation and evolution of Earth, its life, and the solar system take their cue from the organizing principles of Hutton’s “Theory of the Earth” and Buffon’s Epochs of Nature. Within the first two hundred lines of the poem, Darwin argues that volcanoes were essential to the formation of Earth and then segues to the “chemic arts” of modern humans, praising the steam engine in particular. The trajectory is from a cosmic, quasi-mythological-but-scientifically informed emergence of Earth to humans’ rise to a similar cosmic kind of power. The machinery of industry now “shakes the earth,” as Darwin writes, and he offers a prescient idea of where steam power is headed, imagining self-propelled cars and airplanes.49 Adding to this futuristic (now realized) vision is an additional note where Darwin writes a history of steam from the ancients to James Watt, as well as a footnote where he suggests that nations of world should unite their ships to drag icebergs from the Arctic to southern oceans in order to cool tropical regions, making them more inhabitable for humans. Such industrial and technological focus has led Siobhan Carroll to argue that The Botanic Garden is a poem about “geoengineering” that “places devices such as the steam engine at the center of its vision of the natural world.”50 Darwin’s “iceberg scheme,” ridiculed throughout the nineteenth century, was intended both to reverse the climate cooling in Europe and to kick-start cooling in the tropics. His suggestion seems to prefigure The Simpsons clip in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), where politicians in the late twenty-first century decide that dropping giant ice cubes into oceans is a suitable solution to slow global warming. While we laugh off such suggestions, Darwin’s idea does have contemporary resonance: Paul Crutzen and other atmospheric scientists have proposed releasing sulfur and manufactured aerosol sprays into Earth’s atmosphere as a means to cool the

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global climate artificially.51 Whether or not we laugh at such a suggestion fifty years from now is not my point, but rather that scientists have been imagining ways to control Earth’s climate since the eighteenth century. Darwin’s conflation of cosmic, geologic, and human power continues in Canto II. The canto’s argument reads like prose poem of the Anthropocene, weaving together images of solar volcanoes, Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, recent scientific discoveries, British colonialism, and classical mythology, all in a tapestry at once beautiful and chaotic: Address to the Gnomes. I. The Earth thrown from a volcano of the Sun; it’s atmosphere and ocean; it’s journey through the zodiac; vicissitude of day-light, and of seasons, 11. II. Primeval islands. Paradise, or the golden Age. Venus rising from the sea, 33. III. The first great earthquakes; continents raised from the sea; the Moon thrown from a volcano, has no atmosphere, and is frozen; the earth’s diurnal motion retarded; it’s axis more inclined; whirls with the moon round a new centre. 67. IV. Formation of lime-stone by aqueous solution; calcaneous spar; white marble; antient statute of Hercules resting from his labours. Antinous. Apollo of Belvidere. Venus de Medici. Lady Elizabeth Foster, and Lady Melbourn by Mrs. Damer. 93. V. 1. Of morasses. Whence the production of Salt by elutriation. Salt-mines at Cracow, 115. 2. Production of nitre. Mars and Venus caught by Vulcan, 143. 3. Production of iron. Mr. Michel’s improvement of artificial magnets. Uses of Steel in agriculture, navigation, war, 183. IV. Production of acids, whence Flint. Seas-sand. Selenite. Asbestus. Fluor. Onyx, Agate, Mocho, Opal, Sapphire, Ruby, Diamond. Jupiter and Europa, 215. VI. 1. New subterraneous fires from fermentation. Production of Clays; manufacture of Porcelain in China; in Italy; in England. Mr. Wedgwood’s works at Etruria in Staffordshire. Cameo of a Slave in Chains; of Hope. Figures on the Portland or Barberini base explained, 271. 2. Coal; Pyrite; Naphtha; Jet; Amber. Dr. Franklin’s discovery of disarming the Tempest of it’s lightning. Liberty of America; of Ireland; of France, 349. VII. Antient central subterraneous fires. Production of Tin, Copper, Zink, Lead, Mercury, Platina, Gold and Silver. Destruction of Mexico. Slavery of Africa, 395. VIII. Destruction of the armies of Cambyses, 431. IX. Gnomes like stars of an Orrery. Inroads of the Sea stopped. Rocks cultivated. Hannibal passes the Alps, 499. X. Matter circulates. Manures to Vegetables like Chyle to Animals. Plants rising from the Earth. St. Peter delivered from Prison, 537. Departure of the Gnomes, 575.52

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This argument captures the dizzying experience of thinking deep time, the disorientation of living in the Anthropocene. Neither chronological nor linear, the passage collapses the initial moment of Earth’s creation with the Industrial Revolution and the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Lists of minerals and chemicals push up against scientists, historical figures, and mythology in a condensed version of Buffon’s Earth history. Darwin illustrates how everything is connected, from ancient minerals to Renaissance art to volcanic eruptions to slavery. The second canto proper then begins with a vision of Earth’s creation from solar volcanic explosions, and the formation of continents by the first earthly volcano, followed by the development of Earth’s strata and metals by subsequent volcanic eruptions: You! who then, kindling after many an age, Saw with new fires the first VOLCANO rage, O’er smouldering heaps of livid sulphur swell At Earth’s firm centre, and distend her shell, Saw at each opening cleft the furnace glow, And seas rush headlong on the gulphs below.53

Extensive footnotes describe geological explanations of Earth’s formation by volcanoes and earthquakes deep beneath the sea pushing up landmass. Darwin’s terminology is also significant, showing the overlap between geology and industrial poetry. He presents nothing less than a poetic imagining of the Anthropocene epoch and the thinking through which the Anthropocene concept is imagined. Many of the scientific ideas outlined in this section were disregarded, rejected, or nearly forgotten, but for Victorian-era and twentieth-century scientists who returned to these writers, and, more recently, scholars and historians who are beginning to recover these writings and their relation to literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I take up the latter in the next section by looking at several poets and painters who developed the volcanic-industrial tradition of the early Anthropocene.

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Laki, Tambora, and the Damnable Picturesque Two major volcanic eruptions occurred thirty-two years apart around the turn of the nineteenth century: Laki in 1783 and Tambora in 1815. Both eruptions had wide-ranging environmental effects and inspired a wide range of literature and art. The Laki volcano in Iceland erupted on June 8, 1783, producing multi-year effects around the world. The eruption was disastrous in Iceland: fluoride poisoning from the volcanic cloud and ash killed approximately 25% of the population and over half of the country’s livestock. Europe and North America experienced extreme climate changes and crop failures. The year 1783 was the hottest on record until 1995, and the winter of 1783–1784 was one of the coldest on record. In England and most of Europe, a persistent fog of sulfur dioxide covered the nation throughout the summer. Perhaps most famously, Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay in 1784 linking this “Universal Fog” to the “Consumption of Fire” of meteors passing Earth and to “the vast Quantity of Smoke” produced by Laki.54 Darwin also included an essay on “Meteors” in The Botanic Garden, where he hypothesized that volcanoes attract meteors, citing 1783 as a particular example. At the same time, the climatic effects of Laki drew parallels to the visible effects of industrialization, enhancing the connections between volcanoes and industry already present in literature and science. One of the earliest literary responses to Laki appears in Book II of William Cowper’s The Task (1785). Cowper meditates on the growth of megacities such as London, the rise of industrialization, global slavery perpetuated by British colonialism, and the bizarre weather of 1783. He prophesizes a “gen’ral doom” in the erratic patterns of “winds,” “waves,” and the “crazy earth,” with specific references to volcanic “Fires beneath, and meteors from above.”55 Additional footnotes link his description to a recent hurricane in Jamaica, a meteor that passed over England, and “the fog that covered both Europe and Asia during the summer of 1783.”56 Following this passage, Cowper situates the volcanic fog in relation to the smoke and pollution of London; details a violent earthquake in Sicily linked to volcanic activity; and imagines God’s impending punishment of England for its transgressions. He later writes of London’s “Metropolitan volcanoes,” whose industrial smoke causes an “eclipse.”57 While these passages are heavily saturated with Cowper’s apocalyptic Christianity, the links he draws between Laki, urbanization, colonialism, and climate change reflect a growing trend in British writing to document the new Anthropocene era.58

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Similarly, Anna Seward writes explicitly of industry’s effects in her 1785 poem Colebrook Dale, where she presents the village of Coalbrookdale as being “violated” by “tribes fuliginous” of industry.59 The village was famous for its ironworks, and it became a center of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. This is what Seward responds to in her poem, fusing volcanism and classical mythology with industrial and colonial critique. She imagines that naiads and “watry sisters” of the area have been “Usurpt by Cyclops,” emphasizing industrial factories’ “throng[ing] barge[s],” “clang[ing] engines,” and “countless red fires, / With umber’d flames,” which “bicker on all thy hills, / Dark’ning the Summer’s sun with columns large / Of thick, sulphureous smoke.”60 This image of industrial flames and smoke blotting out the sun draws directly from the tradition of volcano writing and alludes to the specific poisonous cloud from Laki, which had blotted out the sun the previous year. Thus, when Seward describes the “smouldering fires” and “smoke-involv’d” landscapes of the new, urban, industrial world—which correspond to “frequent,” “dark,” and “drizzling rains” that “sull[y]” the “hills” and “lofty mountains”—she provides a snapshot of the early Anthropocene.61 In subsequent stanzas, Seward’s vision takes on a colonial perspective, situating Britain’s changing climate in the global world. She imagines “the large stores of [Coalbrookdale’s] metallic veins / Gleam[ing] over Europe,” which “transatlantic shores / Illumine wide.” The fruits of English industry are transported to India, Brazil, and Persia, where they are translated into “the traffic rich” of jewelry, spices, and other materials. Like the universal fog of Laki, English industrialization spreads throughout the world: the smoke of industry and accompanying “commercial rage” “creep” to “adjacent hills,” “now here, now there, / Divergent.”62 Seward connects the pernicious, global spread of industry, capitalism, and British colonialism to the global spread of climate change caused by volcanic eruptions. Other visitors to Coalbrookdale had similar reactions. An anonymous writer on a tour of Wales in 1801 wrote, “the fabulous stories of the Cyclops and Vulcans forge seemed now to be completely realised…a more awful and terrific Scene could not I think be exceeded except by an irruption of Aetna or Vesuvius.”63 Ten years later, future Poet Laureate Robert Southey similarly observed:

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There is something very striking in that sort of hell above ground—hills of scoria, an atmosphere of smoke, and huge black piles, consisting chiefly of chimneys and furnaces, grouped together in the finest style of the damnable picturesque. The things are too mean in themselves ever to acquire a sublimity, to whatever magnitude they may attain; but they have a hideousness which almost produces the same effect.64

This “damnable picturesque,” which verges on a sublimity typically reserved for awesome natural objects, could serve as a signature aesthetic of the early Anthropocene. Southey also grants an active principle to the “filth” and pollution of industrial cities, writing that it “fills the whole atmosphere and penetrates everywhere, spotting and staining every thing, and getting into the pores and nostrils. I feel as if my throat wanted sweeping like an English chimney.”65 His description parallels accounts of volcanic ash and suggests the all-pervasive, inescapable essence of pollution and global warming. Southey’s repeated use of the word “atmosphere” underscores this point: the term had applied strictly to natural philosophy since the seventeenth century, but around 1800 “atmosphere” took on the metaphorical dimensions of “mood” and “ambience,” a fusion with what we now call affective atmosphere. The same evolution happens with the term “climate,” though, for nineteenth-century writers, these words were much more material than they are to us now.66 Along with these literary representations, various painters captured the affective atmosphere of Coalbrookdale. Philip James de Loutherbourg’s well-known Coalbrookdale by Night (1801), often read as a symbol (and celebration) of the Industrial Revolution, offers an ominous perspective of the Bedlam Furnaces, which worked in coal and iron ore (see Fig. 2.1). Having toured Wales in 1786 and 1800, Loutherbourg was familiar with British industrialization. In this painting, he contrasts the town itself—dull, black, and sooty, with marginalized inhabitants on the peripheries—with the vibrant, hellish fires of industry. One visible smokestack on the lower right-hand side excretes black smoke into the small patch of blue sky, while a second smokestack in the painting’s center is nearly engulfed by volcanic-industrial activity. That this activity is mostly hidden, with only its fiery and smoky effects visible, suggests anxiety, fear, and wonder at the unseen power that so transforms the town. This is an

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Fig. 2.1 Philip James de Loutherbourg, Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801. Oil on canvas. Science Museum, London, UK

eerie landscape, not quite urban and not quite rural—it is exceedingly representative of the damnable picturesque. Other painters offer more apocalyptic visions of Coalbrookdale. During their tour of the area in the late eighteenth century, John Sell Cotman and Paul Sandby Munn were inspired to paint the Bedlam Furnaces. Cotman’s Bedlam Furnace Near Irongate, Shropshire (1803) offers a distant view of the town from across the River Severn (see Fig. 2.2). In the background, smokestacks appear like industrial volcanoes, having replaced the trees, spewing black smoke into the polluted atmosphere. The foreground depicts a bleak, barren landscape with one solitary human, back turned and walking toward the town. The indistinctness of the painting suggests an uncertain wariness, a fear of present and future change. Munn’s Bedlam Furnace, Madeley Dale, Shropshire (1803) similarly focuses on the atmospheric effects of industrialization, with the smokestacks in the background fueling a black, polluted sky (see Fig. 2.3). Much more detailed than Cotman’s painting, Munn’s painting

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Fig. 2.2 John Sell Cotman, Bedlam Furnace Near Irongate, Shropshire, 1803. Watercolor on paper. Private collection, Bridgeman Images

is less apocalyptic but just as climate-focused. Both works represent a new kind of landscape painting that emerges during the early Anthropocene. These various authors and painters point to a shift in industrial art at the end of the eighteenth century: we begin to see a bit more critique and a bit less celebration. Their early responses still often voice moral and aesthetic concerns rather than what we would now call ecological ones, but these works are eerie, unsettling, and vaguely apocalyptic—they present the new nature of the Anthropocene. While Seward laments the industrial “Chemists” who “bruise / The shrinking leaves and flowers” with their new technologies,67 her focus is really on the aesthetics of the British landscape and the fate of people in towns like Coalbrookdale, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, and Sheffield, much like the paintings of Loutherbourg, Cotman, and Munn. A few decades later, however, Luke Howard and other meteorologists would make such poetry and art appear anticipatory of climate science. While Laki inspired a range of literary and artistic works, the most important volcanic event of the nineteenth century was the 1815 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia. The subsequent “climate emergency of 1815– 18” resulted in erratic weather patterns, crop failures, and a traveling cloud of volcanic ash throughout the global atmosphere that drastically

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Fig. 2.3 Paul Sandby Munn, Bedlam Furnace, Madeley Dale, Shropshire, 1803. Watercolor on paper. Private collection, Bridgeman Images

changed the seasons and the appearance of sky, sun, and clouds.68 The second decade of the nineteenth century is the coldest decade in the historical record, due in large part to Tambora’s effects, which caused many Britons to imagine an impending Ice Age, or the end of the world. And it was, in many ways.69 The first shocks of Tambora were perceived to be canons. Sir Thomas Raffles, then the Lieutenant-Governor of Java (several hundred miles from Tambora), wrote the only contemporary account of the eruption, which he pieced together from various eyewitness reports and published in the Batavian Transactions in 1817. Raffles explains that the “explosions were…almost universally attributed to distant cannon; so much so that a Detachment of Troops were marched from Djocjokarta, in the expectation that a neighbouring Post was attacked, and along the Coast boats were in two instances dispatched in quest of a supposed ship in distress.”70 Subsequent descriptions of the aftermath are dominated by

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darkness, ash, death, and absence of the sun. These changes quickly spread throughout the globe.71 While British and European colonialists purposefully obscured the seriousness and severity of the eruption for fear that others would not want to invest in the region, it nonetheless influenced a wide range of writings. For example, Lord Byron draws from the destruction and darkness associated with Tambora in his 1816 poem “Darkness.” He imagines a post-apocalyptic world in which the atmosphere and Earth are on the verge of entropic collapse. Indeed, what is perhaps most disturbing in the poem is the lack of conventional atmospheric signs: the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.72

As volcanoes erupt and forests are burnt to the ground, the “world” becomes a “void,” “Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless— / A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.”73 Beyond the immediate changes to Earth’s climate as a result of Tambora, Byron also captures the end of the world brought about by the Anthropocene. The world as he knew it had ended, but Earth remained. And the future of Earth, as Byron imagines, was in danger of becoming nothing more than “hard clay,” unable to support life as it had before Tambora and before the Industrial Revolution. This is the new nature of the Anthropocene. Tambora and the Anthropocene concept shed new light on other canonical works, such as the climate poetry of Percy Shelley, the novels of Mary Shelley, and the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, among many others (taken up in other chapters of this book). We see these works differently now, and scholars have begun to re-envision them, indicating one way a literary history of the Anthropocene creates a new canon of climate change literature and art.74 One example of this new form of Anthropocene art is Turner’s 1832 painting, Dudley, Worcestershire. Known as the capital of “Black Country,” Dudley is where the first Newcomen steam engine was used in the coal works in 1712. Turner illustrates the town as a kind of apocalyptic nightmare, reminiscent of both Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1510) and Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death (1562), and anticipatory of a modernist aesthetic of the early twentieth century (see Fig. 2.4). The impression-

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Fig. 2.4 J.M.W. Turner, Dudley, Worcestershire, 1832. Watercolor on paper. Tate, London, UK

istic town is barely discernable in the background, where Dudley Castle and a church steeple occupy a blue-gray landscape that appears to be a heap of ruins. These symbols of Britain’s past contrast with the intensity of industrial activity in the foreground, where hidden fires illuminate a night scene on the Dudley canal. Smoke rises from volcanic chimneys, feeding the clouds and atmosphere and further obscuring the ruinous background. Turner works in, through, and past Southey’s designation of the damnable picturesque as a particular Anthropocenic aesthetic. At the same time, Turner did not have a wholly negative view of industrial technology. While John Ruskin later interpreted this painting as expressing hatred of industrialization,75 it is more likely that Turner saw his work as representing what John Gold and George Revill call a “symbiotic relationship” between industrial and natural progress. They argue that Turner sees industrialization, “aristocratic wealth, and traditional authority” as “driving forces for environmental change.”76 Britons had become a force of nature. The painting is a glimpse into the early Anthropocene.

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Volcanoes and Industry in the Nineteenth Century By the early nineteenth century, the volcanic-industrial tradition was well established. The sciences of geology, meteorology, and climatology were thriving, and Britain was industrializing at a rapid pace. New forms of topographical poetry and landscape painting reflected Earth on the cusp of a new geological epoch. The two epigraphs for this chapter illustrate the far-reaching saturation of this early Anthropocene tradition. Woodhouse’s image of the “new volcanoes” of industry is perhaps the most common trope in this tradition, but Holland’s topographical history of Sheffield and its industrial transformation captures the emotional and psychological experience of living through a time of momentous, and potentially irreversible, environmental change. Holland was also an amateur geologist, having published a comprehensive History and Description of Fossil Fuel, the Colliers, and Coal Trade of Great Britain (1835). Stretching to nearly five hundred pages, this volume includes substantial chapters on “Fire and Fuel,” “Geological Theories,” and both the domestic and foreign coal trade. The manner in which Holland situates the development of geology, natural history, and capitalism as intersecting uniquely in the nineteenth century is suggestive of a new epoch espoused by the scientists he cites. These intersections also appear throughout Sheffield Park, his most ambitious poem, and the two texts share many similarities in language and imagery. For instance, in a chapter from the History on industrial “accidents” and unintended “subterranean fires” in coal pits, Holland calls a thirty-year coal-seam fire in the village of Benwell a “pseudo volcano.” He goes on to detail the “devastation” caused by similar fires “near the towns of Wednesbury, in Staffordshire, and Dudley, in Worcestershire,” where “vast masses of coal on fire…have been burning for ages.”77 This geological description of a human-caused coal-seam fire recalls the same phrase used in Dalton’s Descriptive Poem (“burn for ages”), which in turn emphasizes the continuing impact of the volcanic-industrial tradition. Holland’s History also serves as an early theorization of the Anthropocene concept: he traces the overlap of geological and human histories, showing how digging up the past to fuel the future might result in unintended consequences. Holland’s history demonstrates how various and often conflicting geological theories of Earth coalesce in the 1830s and 1840s. While the writings of Buffon, Hutton, and Darwin were not accepted fully in their time, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), discussed

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at length in Chapter 1 of this book, solidified uniformitarianism as the leading geological theory. Uniformitarianism proposed that slow, gradual processes effect change over long periods of time, contrasted with the catastrophism that stressed sudden violent events. Lyell also coined the current names for our geological epochs (Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic) and outlined the “backed up-building” theory of volcanic eruptions.78 He suggested that literary genres were the best models for geological history, and his writings, which, according to Jesse Oak Taylor, moved “geology from romance to realism,”79 proved influential for future geologists and in the theory of evolution developed by his friend Charles Darwin. These popular, though controversial, scientific theories resulted in a paradox regarding anthropogenic climate change. On the one hand, industrialization appeared even more powerful than before, able to effect geological change on an almost unimaginable scale. On the other hand, uniformitarianism showed that any major changes would take place over thousands or millions of years, and not within a single decade or century. As a result, the latter half of the nineteenth century saw both a growing number of early environmental groups and an increase in industrialization. Anti-pollution campaigns proliferated in industrial cities, as did conservation groups in more remote areas, such as the Lake District.80 Most of these campaigns failed, due in large part to a lack of viable and persuasive narratives. There simply were not a lot of literary and artistic works that made explicit connections between industrialization and climate change in an engaging and accessible manner, and those that did rarely translated into meaningful action. Brian Maidment argues that anti-industrial and anti-capitalist poems failed because they seemed “to have served a cathartic effect rather than a persuasive one.”81 There were, however, many popular pro-industry works of art and propaganda that influenced public opinion. The industrialists won out, as it were.82 Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, a growing number of scientists published findings and reports that identified what we now call global warming, and, while these writings were influential in the scientific community, they had little impact on popular and political conceptions of industrialization. In Views of Nature (1850), Alexander von Humboldt speculated that increases in human population and emissions from steam engines resulted in climate warming around Pennsylvania in the early nineteenth century.83 In 1859, physicist John Tyndall established the greenhouse effect, which Svante Arrhenius used to prove that CO2 emissions caused global warming in 1896. American

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environmentalist George Perkins Marsh wrote that “man made the earth” in his influential Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864), in which he identified irreversible impacts of human civilization on Earth and its climate. At the end of the nineteenth century, Alfred Russell Wallace, known as the “father of biogeography,” wrote on the distinction between dangerous, human-made dust produced by industrial coal combustion and the natural forms of dust necessary to existence. In an essay on “The Importance of Dust” (1898), Wallace reflects on Britain’s changing climate across the nineteenth century: drawing from gardening periodicals and the perspectives of farmers, he explains that climate change resulted in major agricultural shifts “owing to the enormously increased amount of dust thrown into the atmosphere as our country has become more densely populated, and especially owing to the vast increase of our smoke-producing manufactories.”84 These writings, however, did not have an immediate impact on social and political views of industrialization. One movement that did attempt to slow the march of industrial capitalism was the Chartist movement of the 1830 and 1840s.85 Chartist poetry often details how capitalism and industrialization disproportionately affect the working classes in negative ways, usually with a focus on social issues rather than ecological ones.86 But there are some poets who develop the volcanic-industrial tradition. Ebenezer Elliot, a factory owner known as the “Corn Law Rhymer” for his staunch opposition to the Corn Laws, wrote on the industrialization of Sheffield in his 1840 poem “Steam at Sheffield.” The poem recounts a conversation between the speaker and a blind engineer named Andrew, who was the first to introduce a steam engine to Sheffield decades earlier. As they walk through the town, observing various industrial phenomena, the speaker compares machinery over and over again to mythological gods, and he describes the landscape as war-torn and hellish. Watt’s new steam engines produce “miracles of demi-deity,” and the “metal god” that rules the city creates a “bloodless Waterloo! this hell on wheels.”87 He also makes a volcanic comparison: Commingling growl, and roar, and stamp, and hiss, With flame and darkness! Like a Cyclop’s dream, It stuns our wondering souls, that start and scream With joy and terror.88

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The simile (“Like a Cyclop’s dream”) suggests that Sheffield embodies the ideal of this mythological figure that toils beneath Etna. The Cyclops could only dream that his vision would one day become a reality. The simile also casts the city itself as unreal: visitors are stunned, frozen in disbelief, lost in a dream, as their souls “scream” with “joy” at humans’ ingenuity and “terror” at the consequences. These Anthropocenic affects indicate the human experience of witnessing environmental crisis and change in real time. Elliot again stresses terror and existential dread in the poem’s final stanza, writing that Sheffield’s earliest “volum’d smoke,…like a prophet, told / Of horrors yet to come.”89 John Bolton Rogerson also situates the Industrial Revolution within a longer historical timeline. In “Manchester” (1844), a poem comprised of three English sonnets, Rogerson recounts the history of Britain from the Roman and Anglo-Saxon invasions in early medieval years (stanza one), to its industrialization in the eighteenth century (stanza two), to its cultural transition into a capitalist-consumer society in the nineteenth century (stanza three). In the second stanza, he describes urbanization and anthropogenic climate change: Where once the forest-tree uprear’d its head, The chimney casts its smoke-wreath to the skies, And o’er the land are massive structures spread, Where loud and fast the mighty engine plies; Swift swirls the polish’d steel in mazy bound, Clamorous confusion stuns the deafen’d ear, The man-made monsters urge their ceaseless round, Startling strange eyes with wild amaze and fear.90

The transformations of trees to chimneys, castles to factories, and animals to machinery result in a “confusion” of the senses. Visitors are startled and stunned, struck “with wild amaze and fear” at the “man-made monsters” of industrialization. The imaginative figures of medieval romance—fairies, dragons, wizards—have been replaced with the monstrous realities of the Anthropocene. These images of an industrial hell on Earth were common in literature, especially poetry. Inspired by classical literature, geological and volcanic writings, and biblical associations of fire with Hell, these volcanicindustrial works draw from myriad traditions in representing a new geological epoch. Chartist poets also use the volcano as a symbol of revolution, a trope stretching back to the French Revolution. For example, in

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his haunting poem “When the World is Burning” (1845), Ebenezer Jones fuses imagery of Earth literally on fire as a result of industrialization with the figurative fires of political anger, the spark of a working-class revolution yet to ignite fully. He imagines an imminent future where “fierce flames, uprushing, / O’er all lands leap, crushing, / Till earth fall, fireswathed,” unless the “One soft flame” of revolution spreads to save “the great world’s burning.”91 Edward Mead also uses hell-fire imagery in “The Steam King” (1843), where personified Steam appears as a modern incarnation of Moloch, an ancient god associated with fire and child sacrifice. In Rabbinical and literary traditions, Moloch’s stomach is a blazing furnace into which children are thrown—a ritual that also evokes the fire and volcano sacrifice ceremonies in ancient Mesoamerican cultures, which had been documented since the eleventh century. In “The Steam King,” child laborers, and factory workers more generally, serve as sacrifices to the god of fossil capitalism. The poem critiques the effects of industrialization on both the environment and laborers: There is a King, and a ruthless King, Not a King of the Poet’s dream; But a Tyrant fell, white slaves know well, And that ruthless King is Steam.

He hath an arm, an iron arm, And tho’ he hath but one, In that mighty arm there is a charm, That millions hath undone.

Like the ancient Moloch grim, his sire In Himmon’s vale that stood, His bowels are of living fire, And children are his food.92

Mead directly links Birmingham to “Himmon’s vale,” or Hell, and he develops this imagery throughout the poem, describing the reign of Steam as unleashing “hells upon earth.”93 This was such a powerful poem that Friedrich Engels included it in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

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Depicting capitalist-industrial power as a king that rules the nation persists throughout the nineteenth century. In 1880, an anonymous poem entitled “‘Old King Coal’ and the Fog Demon” appeared in Punch, along with an image of the two eponymous figures lording over London (see Fig. 2.5). The poet labels “Old King Coal” as an “autocrat” that will rule the world for “a long time,” and thus “needs Constitutional check and control.” The King’s “minions” include “The Smoke Fiend,” or “Fog Demon,” who, from the “coal fires” of “Soot-columns foul,” is “belched from chimney and cowl” in “fetid fumes” and “malodorous puffings.” Londoners have “nought to inhale / But unconsumed carbon, and sulphurous acid,” which, as the cartoon makes clear, is at least partially (if not mostly) responsible for London’s famous fogs, along with “asthma,” “bronchitis,” “pneumonia,” and “pleurisy.”94 The link between coal burning and pollution is clear, and both the poem and cartoon reflect the association of industrialization with hellish, apocalyptic landscapes—the kind typically associated with areas immediately surrounding a volcanic

Fig. 2.5 “Old King Coal” and the Fog Demon, in Punch (13 November 1880). University of Heidelberg, Germany

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eruption.95 London here is a microcosm for Earth, a glimpse of a global fossil fuel economy. This is fossil fuel capitalism; this is the Anthropocene. Despite this anti-industrial tradition, pro-industrial poetry proved more popular and effectual. The “new volcanoes” of industry were more often celebrated than feared, and a number of popular songs and poems from the 1840s and 1850s associated the black smoke of chimneys with economic growth and prosperity. According to Stephen Mosley, these songs naturalized and rationalized “the relationship between wealth and air pollution in the minds of the urban masses.”96 For instance, Richard Baines’s highly popular “Manchester’s Improving Daily” (1844) praises the “wonders [of] steam,” as well as the city’s “iron lords and cotton majors,” which give the people “daily bread.”97 Drastic changes to Manchester—including accelerated urban construction and thousands of chimney stacks stretching high into the sky—are presented as “improvements”: In Manchester, this famous town, What great improvements have been made, sirs; In fifty years ’tis mighty grown, All owing to success in trade, sirs; For see what mighty buildings rising, To all beholders how surprising; The plough and harrow are now forgot, sirs; ’Tis coals and cotton boil the pot, sirs. Sing Ned, sing Joe, and Frank so gaily, Manchester’s improving daily.98

Underlying this comic song is a rather ominous acknowledgment: farming and sustainable agriculture are “forgot,” and the only way to earn a decent living is found in the coal and cotton industries. But this was not the takeaway for most nineteenth-century readers. One of the most explicit poems in praise of industrialization is E.J. Bellasis’s “The Smokeless Chimney” (1862). The speaker responds to travelers on the Northern Railway who “See the hundred smokeless chimneys” in passing cities as “Better far” than the industrial “clouds” that “taint…nature’s beauty, / With their foul obscurity.” However, as the speaker explains, those clouds that float “from yon chimney” are signs of “the golden breath of life”: “each smokeless chimney / Is a signal of despair” for the working class. She therefore encourages passengers to

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pray that “We may see these smokeless chimneys / Blackening all the land again.” The poem was apparently persuasive: a footnote states that it sold well “at the railway stations.”99 Steam railway capitalism added to Britain’s industrial fervor. Industrial fire was now on the move. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway—the first fully steam-powered railway in the world—opened in 1830, marking what one American engineer called “the epoch of railways.”100 Over the next twenty years, railway in Britain would expand from about 100 miles to 6600 miles (and, by the century’s end, 19,000 miles).101 In addition to transporting goods and people more quickly and effectively, railways moved tons of coal around the country, significantly expanding and accelerating the bourgeoning fossil fuel economy. Railways also provided geological evidence of Earth’s history: construction of railway lines necessitated cutting deep into the earth, which often revealed more evidence in support of geological theories and deep time.102 While the railways were highly profitable and popular, there was notable opposition. Thomas Carlyle called steam railway “the devil’s mantle.” Lord Shaftesbury remarked that if the devil were to travel, he would do so by train. In The Last Judgement (1853), John Martin depicts a railway train full of Satan’s troops falling into an abyss. As historian Michael Freeman argues, writers and artists were “echoing deeply seated contemporary emotions when they attached to the railway images from Hell.”103 In response, railway companies regularly paid artists to portray railways in a positive light, as symbols of progress and prosperity, much like pro-industrial poetry.104 So, railways, like volcanoes and industrialization more broadly, were the source of both fascination and fear. This tension is perhaps best exemplified in J.M.W. Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844) (see Fig. 2.6). Known as “God’s Wonderful Railway,” the GWR opened in 1838 and connected London with the west of England and Wales. While some see in Turner’s painting “a train of death” that symbolizes “the potentially destructive power of railroad technology, akin to the cataclysms of nature,”105 others see his fusion of natural and industrial elements as indicative of a new order of nature. Like the aesthetic of Dudley, Worcestershire, which rests on Turner’s characteristic indistinctness, Rain, Steam, and Speed suggests the power of humanity to change the shape and trajectory of Earth, and, like the train approaching the viewer, that this is something now unstoppable, beyond human control. The Anthropocene is coming, whether you like it or not.

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Fig. 2.6 J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway, 1844. Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London, UK

Krakatoa and Climate Science The last significant volcanic eruption of the nineteenth century was Krakatoa in 1883. Like Laki and Tambora, Krakatoa inspired a range of literary, artistic, and scientific responses, but unlike those earlier eruptions, scientists clearly understood the global effects of Krakatoa. Telegraph spread news of the eruption throughout the world in hours, and within months there were myriad newspaper and journal articles documenting the spectacular sunsets caused by volcanic particles in the upper atmosphere. The Royal Society collected these articles, along with their own scientific data, and published a detailed report on their findings: The Eruption of Krakatoa, and Subsequent Phenomena: Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society (1888). The frontispiece includes six sketches of the Krakatoa sunsets by William Ascroft, who exhibited over five hundred colored pastels in the London Science Museum. Many

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other artists and authors were inspired by these sunsets, including Frederic Edwin Church, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alfred Tennyson, R.M. Ballantyne, M.P. Shiel, and John Ruskin.106 Throughout the Royal Society Report, observers frequently compare the effects of Krakatoa to those produced by industrial fires and smoke, as well as previous volcanic eruptions, including extensive sections of data on Laki and Tambora.107 Along with observational and scientific data, artistic and literary representations appear as evidence, including lines from Cowper’s The Task on Laki and references to Turner’s paintings.108 The Report also includes passages from Hopkins’s essay “The Remarkable Sunsets” (1884), which Richard Hamblyn describes as “a heightened prose poem that mixe[s] rhapsodic literary experimentation with a high degree of meteorological rigour.”109 Hopkins notes that Krakatoa’s intense sunsets are often “mistaken for the reflection of a great fire,”110 and in some cases local fire brigades were dispatched.111 Yet, more than inspiring wonder and art, Krakatoa and the Royal Society Report mark a turning point in climate change writings. Volcanic eruptions were definitively linked to changes in the global atmosphere, and, by extension, the atmospheric effects of industrialization now had global implications. Scientific studies by Lyell, Tyndall, Marsh, and others added to this growing body of climate science. The nascent scientific and imaginative connections established between volcanoes and industrialization in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries now had a persuasive body of supporting evidence. Many scholars thus mark the late nineteenth century as the starting point of climate change literature, but this chapter shows that such literature appears much earlier. Ruskin hints at this longer history of climate change writing in his 1884 lecture The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. Focused on “a series of cloud phenomena…peculiar to our own times” that “came on gradually” between 1831 and 1871, Ruskin’s lecture provides a mix of observational, meteorological, and artistic descriptions of what he calls the new “plague clouds” and “plague winds” that dominate the atmosphere of nineteenth-century Britain.112 While Ruskin often attributes this new atmosphere to a moral failing of the country, he also ties climate change directly to industrialization. On first recognizing the new cloud on a walk from Oxford to Abingdon in 1871, Ruskin writes, “It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way.

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It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls.”113 This cloud, then, is not simply chimney smoke, but something totally new, something Ruskin cannot properly name or identify. The cloud is unsettling—thus the analogy of “dead men’s souls.” But even in this analogy the chimney smoke is linked to the deaths of thousands of factory workers and colliers who supply the country with coal. The hundreds of chimneys are undoubtedly a part of this new atmosphere, having merged with and modified the natural order of things. Subsequent descriptions use industrial terminology: “Thunderstorm; pitch dark, with no blackness,— but deep, high, filthiness of lurid, yet not sublimely lurid, smoke-cloud; dense manufacturing mist”; “By the plague-wind every breath of air you draw is polluted, half round the world.”114 In a particularly telling entry, Ruskin links this new atmosphere to Manchester: The most terrific and horrible thunderstorm, this morning, I remember, it waked me at six, or a little before—then rolling incessantly, like railway luggage trains, quite ghastly in its mockery of them—the air one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog, like smoke; scarcely raining at all, but increasing to heavier rollings, with flashes quivering vaguely through all the air, and at last terrific double streams of reddish-violet fire, not forked or zigzag, but rippled rivulets—two at the same instant some twenty to thirty seconds apart, and lasting at least half a second, with grand artillery-peals following; not rattling crashes, or irregular cracklings, but delivered volleys. It lasted an hour, then passed off, clearing a little, without rain to speak of,—not a glimpse of blue,—and now, half-past seven, seems settling down again into Manchester devil’s darkness.115

The thunderstorm emerges from and retires to Manchester, one of Britain’s industrial capitals, linked, as in previous writings, to Hell. Indeed, this passage draws from myriad industrial-literary tropes: Ruskin deploys a series of similes to compare thunder to railway trains; clouds and atmosphere to the foggy, smoky skies of large cities; lightening to fires suggestive of both industry and volcanoes; and Manchester to Hell. In a note, he points out that these new climatic changes were not present in 1883, “under the impression that the lurid and prolonged sunsets of last autumn had been proved to be connected with the flight of volcanic ashes.”116 He writes that those Krakatoa sunsets were “unnatural and terrific” but of a slightly different sort than what he identifies in his lecture. He also notes similar atmospheric observations in 1783 after the eruption of Laki. In short, he makes the point that the new clouds and new climate of Britain are similar to the atmospheric effects caused by

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volcanic eruptions. When the Royal Society Report was published four years later, his hypothesis was further corroborated.

The Human Volcano At the turn of the twentieth century, volcanic-industrial connections persisted. In M.P. Shiel’s novel The Purple Cloud (1901), a bizarre adventure romance in which a powerful volcanic eruption kills all but two people on Earth, the protagonist on multiple occasions describes volcanoes as appearing like “chimneys” on the landscape. In a 1902 issue of the Illustrated London News , the thousands of chimneys that reach into the sky above Britain’s capital are referred to as “London volcanoes.”117 More recently, twenty-first-century climate researchers write of the “human volcano” when describing the impacts of anthropogenic climate change.118 As early as the 1970s, industrialized nations were spewing so much soot and ash into the atmosphere that the effects imitated a volcanic eruption. In the early twenty-first century, this phenomenon intensified with a global increase in coal burning, resulting in stratospheric pollution previously only seen from volcanic activity. When major volcanic eruptions occur—such as Tambora in 1815, Krakatoa in 1883, Mount St. Helens in 1980, and Mount Pinatubo in 1991—huge clouds of sulfur and volcanic ash enter the atmosphere and stratosphere, traveling around the globe and causing air quality issues, crop failures, and global temperature changes. But the eruption ends, and, while volcanoes can cause severe environmental damage, the most common eruptions affect Earth’s ecosystems for only few years. However, unlike an actual volcano, the so-called human volcano continues to increase steadily over time. There is no end to the eruption: industrialized nations continue to erupt, slowly and without pause. So, while a volcanic eruption is more catastrophic and destructive in the short term, the human volcano can be more long-lasting, producing what climate scientists call global warming. Humans, in other words, have become a geophysical force of nature akin to volcanoes. In the twenty-first century, humans have supplanted volcanoes as a major catalyst of climate change. At the time of writing this chapter, the last six years (2014–19) were the hottest on record globally, owing almost entirely to the human-volcano effect. There is no sign of this trend slowing down. And while this warming trend is recent, the connections among industrialization, volcanoes, and climate change are not. These

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connections, which both signal and conceptualize the Anthropocene, form a volcanic-industrial tradition in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British writing that serves as an important aspect of early Anthropocene literature and theory.

Notes 1. John Holland, Sheffield Park, a Descriptive Poem (Sheffield: James Montgomery, 1820), 10. 2. Ibid., 15–16. 3. Cian Duffy, The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830 (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 85. 4. Holland, 28. 5. Ibid., 30. 6. Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto 13, line 282, in The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 7. See Heidi Scott, Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 13. 8. Qtd. in G.M. Matthews, “A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley,” ELH 24, no. 3 (1957): 197. 9. Luke Howard, The Climate of London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 203. Howard makes multiple comparisons to volcanic eruptions and industrial smoke throughout this work. 10. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 2. 11. Scott, 49. 12. James Woodhouse, The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus, in The Life and Poetical Works of James Woodhouse, ed. R.I. Woodhouse (London: Leadenhall Press, 1896), 25. 13. Artificial volcanic spectacles became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century. Sir William Hamilton’s famous Vesuvian Apparatus is something of a prototype for these spectacles. See Noam Andrews, “Volcanic Rhythms: Sir William Hamilton’s Love Affair with Vesuvius,” AA Files 60 (2010): 9–15; and Nicholas Daly, “The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage,” Victorian Studies 53, no. 2 (2011): 255–85. 14. For two important studies on the two-way street between geology and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004).

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15. On these classical connections, see Duffy; and Noah Heringman, Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 16. For a comprehensive overview of these traditions, see Haraldur Sigurdsson, Melting the Earth: The History of Ideas on Volcanic Eruptions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 17. Thomas Yalden, A Poem on the Mines Late of Sir Carbery Price (London: J. Nutt, 1701), 4–5. 18. Ibid., 6–7. 19. “The Cyclops: Addressed to the Birmingham Artisans,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle 8 (March 1738): 159. 20. “Eruption of Mount Vesuvius,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle 38 (December 1767): 572. 21. Rudolf Beck has argued similarly that we see a boom in industrial poetry in the 1770s. See Rudolf Beck, “From Industrial Georgic to Industrial Sublime: English Poetry and the Early Stages of the Industrial Revolution,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (2004): 17–36. 22. “A Letter from a Mechanick in the busy Town of Birmingham, to Mr. Stayner, a Carver, Statuary, and Architect, in the sleepy Corporation of Warwick,” Birmingham Gazette (February 1751), qtd. in Robert K. Dent, Old and New Birmingham: A History of the Town and Its People (Birmingham: Houghton and Hammond, 1880), 124. 23. Ibid. 24. James Eyre Weeks, A Poetical Prospect of the Coast, Town and Harbour of Workington, in The Lakers: The Adventures of the First Tourists, Norman Nicholson (London: Robert Hale, 1955), 19. 25. Richard Jago, Edge-Hill, or, The Rural Prospect Delineated and Moralized, A Poem in Four Books (London: J. Dodsley, 1767), 108. 26. Ibid., 109. 27. Ibid., 110. 28. Ibid., 116. 29. John Dalton, A Descriptive Poem, Addressed to Two Ladies, at their Return from Viewing the Mines near Whitehaven (London: Rivington and Dodsley, 1755), line 179. 30. Ibid., iii. 31. On enchantment, see Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). The term “wonder” also has scientific connotations, as Richard Holmes deftly articulates in The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2008). Two discoveries at the center of Holmes’s book are William Herschel’s

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32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

astronomical concept of “deep space” and the geological concept of “deep time,” both of which were emerging in the mid-eighteenth century and are central to the early Anthropocene. Dalton warns readers to expect such changes: “If, by the imperfect sketch in the following Poem, or by what he may elsewhere hear of the vale of Keswick and lake of Derwentwater, he should be induced to visit the Original, he must not confidently expect to see it exactly in the state described. For, if he goes thither with an imagination glowing warm with classical enthusiasm, and expects to find the sylvan shrines of the rural divinities wholly undisturbed and unprofaned, he will be much mistaken. Instead of that, he must prepare to be shocked at some late violations of those sacred woods and groves, which had, for ages, shaded the sides of the surrounding mountains, and (if prose may be allowed the expression) the shores and promontories of that lovely lake” (vii). Dalton, lines 1–12. Ibid., 1–2. Natural coal-seam fires can burn for thousands of years, and they can be started by human causes, such as accidents and explosions in the mines. Dalton, line 44. Ibid., lines 87–90. Ibid., 8. Francesco Serao, The Natural History of Mount Vesuvius (London: E. Caves, 1743), 5, 15, 18, 42, 45, 64, 197. Sir William Hamilton, Observations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, and Other Volcanos (London: T Cadell, 1774), 17. Ibid., 31. J.C. Thompson, Bibliography of the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb: A Literary History (London: J.R. Tutin, 1908), 88. See Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks; and “The Anthropocene Reads Buffon; or, Reading Like Geology,” in Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geological Times, ed. Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 59–77. See also Georg Braungart, “The Poetics of Nature: Literature and Constructive Imagination in the History of Geology,” in Inventions of the Imagination: Romanticism and Beyond, ed. Richard T. Gray, Nicholas Halmi, Gary J. Handwerk, Michael A. Rosenthal, and Klaus Vieweg (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 26–35. Jan Zalasiewicz, Sverker Sorlin, Libby Robin, and Jacques Grinevald, “Introduction: Buffon and the History of the Earth,” in The Epochs of Nature, trans. and ed. Jan Zalasiewicz, Anne-Sophie Milon, and Mateusz Zalasiewicz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), xxxii–xxxiii. Back cover of Epochs of Nature. Buffon, The Epochs of Nature, 124.

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47. Ibid., 128. 48. For an excellent essay on the literary elements of Hutton’s writing, see Tom Furniss, “A Romantic Geology: James Hutton’s 1788 ‘Theory of the Earth’,” Romanticism 16, no. 3 (2010): 305–21. 49. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (London: J. Johnson, 1791), 1.262, 289–92. References are to canto and line numbers, excepting footnotes and arguments, which are referenced by page number. 50. Siobhan Carroll, “On Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, 1791– 1792,” BRANCH (April 2016), ed. Dino Franco Felluga, ext. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, n. pag. See also Alan Bewell’s reading of the poem in Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). 51. P.J. Crutzen, “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?” Climate Change 77 (2006): 211–19. 52. Darwin, 57–58. 53. Ibid., 2.67–72. 54. Benjamin Franklin, “Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures,” in Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, 2nd ed. (London: T. Cadwell, 1789), 375–76. 55. William Cowper, The Task, bk. 2, lines 53, 55, 60, 57, in The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (London: Routledge, 1994). 56. Ibid., 86. 57. Ibid., bk. 3, lines 736–37. 58. For an essay on Cowper and the Anthropocene, see Tobias Menely, “‘The Present Obfuscation’: Cowper’s Task and the Time of Climate Change,” PMLA 127, no. 3 (2012): 477–92. 59. Anna Seward, Colebrook Dale, in The Poetical Works of Anna Seward; with Extracts from Her Literary Correspondence, vol. 2, ed. Walter Scott (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne and Co., 1810), 314. 60. Ibid., 314–15. 61. Ibid., 318. 62. Ibid., 315, 316, 317, 318. 63. “A Tour in South Wales by M., 2 October 1801,” qtd. in A.D. Harvey, “First Public Reactions to the Industrial Revolution,” Etudes Anglaises 31, no. 3 (1978): 282. 64. Robert Southey, Letter to W.S. Landor, in Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, vol. 2, ed. J.W. Warter (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856), 231. 65. Robert Southey, Letters from England: by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), 59. 66. See Thomas H. Ford, “Punctuating History Circa 1800: The Air of Jane Eyre,” in Anthropocene Reading, 72. See also Jean-Baptiste

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67. 68. 69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

79.

Fressoz, “Losing the Earth Knowingly: Six Environmental Grammars around 1800,” in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, ed. Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne (New York: Routledge, 2014), 70– 84; Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016); and Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Seward, 317. Wood, 8. See Henry Stommel and Elizabeth Stommel, Volcano Weather: The Story of 1816, The Year Without a Summer (Newport: Seven Seas Press, 1983); and William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman, The Year Without a Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History (New York: St. Martin’s, 2013). Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, “Narrative of the Effects of the Eruption from the Tomboro Mountain in the Island of Sumbawa on the 11th and 12th of April 1815,” Transactions of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences 8 (1817): 3–4. For detailed accounts of the eruptions and its immediate aftermath in the Sumbawa region, see Wood, 12–32. Lord Byron, “Darkness,” lines 2–5, in The Major Works. Ibid., lines 69, 71–72. See, for example, Ben P. Robertson, ed., Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780–1830 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015); Dewey W. Hall, ed., Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016); Bewell; Chris Washington, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019); and Menely and Taylor. John Ruskin, “Notes by Mr. Ruskin on His Drawings by Turner,” in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 13, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904), 435. John Gold and George Revill, Representing the Environment (London: Routledge, 2004), 48. John Holland, History and Description of Fossil Fuel, the Colliers, and Coal Trade of Great Britain (London: Whittaker and Co., 1835), 255. Similar to uniformitarianism, the backed up-building theory asserted that volcanoes developed gradually, slowly building up to their violent explosions. Taylor, 73, 202.

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80. For example: Manchester Association for the Prevention of Smoke (1842); Manchester and Salford Noxious Vapours Abatement Association (1876); Thirlmere Defence Association (1877); Committee for Testing Smoke Abatement Appliances (1889); National Trust (1895). There were also a number of anti-pollution acts passed, though none of them were effective or long-lasting, such as the Smoke Nuisance Acts of 1853, the Sanitary Acts of 1858 and 1866, and the Public Health Act of 1875. 81. Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self -Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Carcenet Press, 1987), 37. 82. See Stephen Mosley, The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (Winwick: White Horse Press, 2001); and Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times (London: Methuen, 1987). 83. Alexander von Humboldt, Views of Nature (London: H.G. Bohn, 1850), 103. 84. Alfred Russell Wallace, “The Importance of Dust: A Source of Beauty and Essential to Life,” in Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray, ed. Katrin Klinga, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 51–52. 85. Chartism was a working-class movement in Britain that sought, among other things, voting rights for all male adults, fair democratic representation, and reforms to employment laws. 86. Peter Brimblecombe and Stephen Mosley have deftly traced the various public and political reactions to England’s growing “age of smoke,” showing how a lack of imaginative, artistic, and literary representations of climate change partly resulted in industry’s increasing power. 87. Ebenezer Elliot, “Steam at Sheffield,” in Poorhouse Fugitives, 104. 88. Ibid., 104. 89. Ibid., 106. 90. John Bolton Rogerson, “Manchester,” in Poorhouse Fugitives, 155. 91. Ebenezer Jones, “When the World is Burning,” in The Poorhouse Fugitives, 39. 92. Edward P. Mead, “The Steam King,” in Poorhouse Fugitives, 41. 93. Ibid., 42. 94. “‘Old King Coal’ and the Fog Demon,” Punch, or The London Charivari (13 November 1880): 220. 95. As Taylor explains, this “demonization of pollution” in Punch represents a central paradox in nineteenth-century environmental thinking: while science clearly links coal burning with the various chemical pollutants and diseases listed in the cartoon, the personification of the fog as a demon—or, in other publications, as a ghost, ghoul, or spirit—suggests

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96. 97.

98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106.

107.

108. 109.

pollution is mysterious, beyond this world, and ultimately unknowable (104). Mosley, 72. Richard Baines, “Manchester’s Improving Daily,” in Memorials of Manchester Streets, by Richard Wright Procter (Manchester: Thomas Sutcliffe, 1874), 42. Ibid., 40. E.J. Bellasis, “The Smokeless Chimney,” in Ballads and Songs of Lancashire, 2nd ed., ed. John Harland (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1875), 497, 498, 500. Robert Carlson, The Liverpool and Manchester Railway Project, 1821– 1831 (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1969), 16. See Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 1–4. Ibid., 15–16. Ibid., 15. Not all opposition used hellish imagery. Most famously, in 1844 William Wordsworth published a sonnet and series of letters opposing the construction of the Kendal and Windermere Railway, claiming that the increase in tourism would result in the eventual destruction of the Lake District. The poet Richard Monckton Milnes published a sonnet-response to Wordsworth, arguing that the working classes deserved the opportunity to vacation in the area so beloved by Wordsworth. See Freeman, esp. chap. 8. Ibid., 226. See Richard D. Altick, “Four Victorian Poets and an Exploding Island,” Victorian Studies 3, no. 3 (1960): 249–60; Tom Simkin and Richard S. Fiske, Krakatau 1883: The Volcanic Eruption and Its Effects (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983); Richard Hamblyn, Terra, Tales of the Earth: Four Events That Changed the World (London: Picador, 2009); and Monique R. Morgan, “The Eruption of Krakatoa (also known as Krakatau) in 1883,” BRANCH (January 2013), ed. Dino Franco Felluga, ext. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, n. pag. See The Eruption of Krakatoa, and Subsequent Phenomena: Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society, ed. G.J. Symons (London: Trubner & Co., 1888), 156–80, 388–405. Ibid., 173, 390. Richard Hamblyn, “The Krakatoa Sunsets,” The Public Domain Review (28 May 2012): n. pag.

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110. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Remarkable Sunsets,” Nature (3 January 1884): 222. 111. See Ian Thornton, Krakatau: The Destruction and Reassembly of an Island Ecosystem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 24. 112. John Ruskin, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 34, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1908), 10. 113. Ibid., 33. 114. Ibid., 36, 39. 115. Ibid., 37. 116. Ibid., 78. 117. “London Volcanoes,” Illustrated London News (15 March 1902): 17. 118. Richard A. Kerr, “Humans Emulate Volcanoes in the Stratosphere,” Science, 25 July 2009.

References Altick, Richard D. “Four Victorian Poets and an Exploding Island.” Victorian Studies 3, no. 3 (1960): 249–60. Andrews, Noam. “Volcanic Rhythms: Sir William Hamilton’s Love Affair with Vesuvius.” AA Files 60 (2010): 9–15. Baines, Richard. “Manchester’s Improving Daily.” In Memorials of Manchester Streets, Richard Wright Procter. Manchester: Thomas Sutcliffe, 1874. Beck, Rudolf. “From Industrial Georgic to Industrial Sublime: English Poetry and the Early Stages of the Industrial Revolution.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (2004): 17–36. Bellasis, E.J. “The Smokeless Chimney.” In Ballads and Songs of Lancashire. 2nd ed. Edited by John Harland. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1875. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bewell, Alan. Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Braungart, Georg. “The Poetics of Nature: Literature and Constructive Imagination in the History of Geology.” In Inventions of the Imagination: Romanticism and Beyond. Edited by Richard T. Gray, Nicholas Halmi, Gary J. Handwerk, Michael A. Rosenthal, and Klaus Vieweg. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. Brimblecombe, Peter. The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times. London: Methuen, 1987.

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Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, le comte de. The Epochs of Nature. Translated and edited by Jan Zalasiewicz, Anne-Sophie Milon, and Mateusz Zalasiewicz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Byron, Lord. The Major Works. Edited by Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Carlson, Robert. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway Project, 1821–1831. New York: A.M. Kelley, 1969. Carroll, Siobhan. “On Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, 1791–1792.” BRANCH (April 2016). Edited by Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Cowper, William. The Task and Selected Other Poems. Edited by James Sambrook. London: Routledge, 1994. Crutzen, P.J. “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?” Climate Change 77 (2006): 211–19. “The Cyclops: Addressed to the Birmingham Artisans.” The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle 8 (March 1738): 159. Dalton, John. A Descriptive Poem, Addressed to Two Ladies, at their Return from Viewing the Mines near Whitehaven. London: Rivington and Dodsley, 1755. Daly, Nicholas. “The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage.” Victorian Studies 53, no. 2 (2011): 255–85. Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden. London: J. Johnson, 1791. Duffy, Cian. The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Elliot, Ebenezer. “Steam at Sheffield.” In The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain. Edited by Brian Maidment. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1987. “Eruption of Mount Vesuvius.” The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle 38 (December 1767): 572. Ford, Thomas H. “Punctuating History Circa 1800: The Air of Jane Eyre.” In Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geological Times. Edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Franklin, Benjamin. “Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures.” In Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. 2nd ed. London: T. Cadwell, 1789. Freeman, Michael. Railways and the Victorian Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste. “Losing the Earth Knowingly: Six Environmental Grammars around 1800.” In The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch. Edited by Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne. New York: Routledge, 2014.

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Furniss, Tom. “A Romantic Geology: James Hutton’s 1788 ‘Theory of the Earth’.” Romanticism 16, no. 3 (2010): 305–12. Gold, John, and George Revill. Representing the Environment. London: Routledge, 2004. Hall, Dewey W., ed. Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Hamblyn, Richard. “The Krakatoa Sunsets.” The Public Domain Review (28 May 2012): n. pag. ———. Terra, Tales of the Earth: Four Events That Changed the World. London: Picador, 2009. Hamilton, William. Observations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, and Other Volcanos. London: T Cadell, 1774. Heringman, Noah. “The Anthropocene Reads Buffon; or, Reading Like Geology.” In Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geological Times. Edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. ———. Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology. New York: Cornell University Press, 2004. ———. Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Holland, John. History and Description of Fossil Fuel, the Colliers, and Coal Trade of Great Britain. London: Whittaker and Co., 1835. ———. Sheffield Park, a Descriptive Poem. Sheffield: James Montgomery, 1820. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “The Remarkable Sunsets.” Nature (3 January 1884): 222–23. Howard, Luke. The Climate of London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Humboldt, Alexander von. Views of Nature. London: H.G. Bohn, 1850. Jago, Richard. Edge-Hill, or, The Rural Prospect Delineated and Moralized, A Poem in Four Books. London: J. Dodsley, 1767. Jones, Ebenezer. “When the World is Burning.” In The Poorhouse Fugitives: SelfTaught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain. Edited by Brian Maidment. Manchester: Carcenet Press, 1987. Kerr, Richard A. “Humans Emulate Volcanoes in the Stratosphere.” Science, 25 July 2009. Klingaman, William K., and Nicholas P. Klingaman. The Year Without a Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History. New York: St. Martin’s, 2013. “A Letter from a Mechanick in the Busy Town of Birmingham, to Mr. Stayner, a Carver, Statuary, and Architect, in the sleepy Corporation of Warwick.” Birmingham Gazette (February 1751). In Robert K. Dent, Old and New Birmingham: A History of the Town and Its People. Birmingham: Houghton and Hammond, 1880.

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Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth. Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. “London Volcanoes.” Illustrated London News (15 March 1902): 17. Maidment, Brian. The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain. Manchester: Carcenet Press, 1987. Matthews, G.M. “A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley.” ELH 24, no. 3 (1957): 191– 228. Mead, Edward P. “The Steam King.” In The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain. Edited by Brian Maidment. Manchester: Carcenet Press, 1987. Menely, Tobias. “‘The Present Obfuscation’: Cowper’s Task and the Time of Climate Change.” PMLA 127, no. 3 (2012): 477–92. Morgan, Monique R. “The Eruption of Krakatoa (also known as Krakatau) in 1883.” BRANCH (January 2013). Edited by Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Mosley, Stephen. The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester. Winwick: White Horse Press, 2001. “‘Old King Coal’ and the Fog Demon.” Punch, or The London Charivari (13 November 1880): 220. Raffles, Thomas Stamford. “Narrative of the Effects of the Eruption from the Tomboro Mountain in the Island of Sumbawa on the 11th and 12th of April 1815.” Transactions of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences 8 (1817): 3–25. Robertson, Ben P., ed. Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780–1830. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015. Rogerson, John Bolton. “Manchester.” In The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain. Edited by Brian Maidment. Manchester: Carcenet Press, 1987. Ruskin, John. “Notes by Mr. Ruskin on His Drawings by Turner.” In The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Vol. 13. Edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1904. ———. The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. In The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Vol. 34. Edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1908. Scott, Heidi. Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Serao, Francesco. The Natural History of Mount Vesuvius. London: E. Caves, 1743. Seward, Anna. The Poetical Works of Anna Seward; with Extracts from Her Literary Correspondence. Edited by Walter Scott. Edinburgh: James Ballantyne and Co., 1810.

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Sigurdsson, Haraldur. Melting the Earth: The History of Ideas on Volcanic Eruptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Simkin, Tom, and Richard S. Fiske. Krakatau 1883: The Volcanic Eruption and Its Effects. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983. Southey, Robert. Letters from England: by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella. 2nd ed. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808. ———. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey. Vol. 2. Edited by J.W. Warter. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856. Stommel, Henry, and Elizabeth Stommel. Volcano Weather: The Story of 1816, The Year Without a Summer. Newport: Seven Seas Press, 1983. Symons, G.J., ed. The Eruption of Krakatoa, and Subsequent Phenomena: Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society. London: Trubner & Co., 1888. Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Thompson, J.C. Bibliography of the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb: A Literary History. London: J.R. Tutin, 1908. Thornton, Ian. Krakatau: The Destruction and Reassembly of an Island Ecosystem. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. “A Tour in South Wales by M., 2 October 1801.” In A.D. Harvey, “First Public Reactions to the Industrial Revolution.” Etudes Anglaises 31, no. 3 (1978): 273–93. Wallace, Alfred Russell. “The Importance of Dust: A Source of Beauty and Essential to Life.” In Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray. Edited by Katrin Klinga, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. Washington, Chris. Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Weeks, James Eyre. A Poetical Prospect of the Coast, Town and Harbour of Workington. In The Lakers: The Adventures of the First Tourists, Norman Nicholson. London: Robert Hale, 1955. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Woodhouse, James. The Life and Poetical Works of James Woodhouse. Edited by R.I. Woodhouse. London: Leadenhall Press, 1896. Wyatt, John. Wordsworth and the Geologists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Yalden, Thomas. A Poem on the Mines Late of Sir Carbery Price. London: J. Nutt, 1701. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Sverker Sorlin, Libby Robin, and Jacques Grinevald. “Introduction: Buffon and the History of the Earth.” In The Epochs of Nature. Translated and edited by Jan Zalasiewicz, Anne-Sophie Milon, and Mateusz Zalasiewicz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

CHAPTER 3

Water: Rivers, Canals, and Commerce in the Early Anthropocene

I wander thro’ each charter’d street Near where the charter’d Thames does flow —William Blake, “London” (1794)

In his 1794 poem “London,” William Blake characterizes the city’s streets and waters as dominated by licensed trade and Royal Charters. The Thames, which wanders right through most major districts in the City of London, had been subject to charters and restrictions for hundreds of years, but they had become the center of fierce political debate in the 1790s. Charters were documents granted by the monarch that structured a system of commercial management in London—a charter could establish a corporation, reward an individual or company, and, as was often the case, create a monopoly on the import and sale of certain goods.1 Charters thus made up a kind of state-sponsored capitalist control of the Thames, resulting in great freedoms for a select few and great restrictions for everybody else. As historian E.P. Thompson explains, Blake’s use of the word “charter’d” is directly “associated with commerce,” and Blake probably had in mind “the monopolistic privileges of the East India Company, whose ships were so prominent in the commerce of the Thames, which applied in 1793 for twenty-years’ renewal of its charter, and which was under bitter attack in the reformers’ press.”2

© The Author(s) 2020 S. T. Reno, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53246-8_3

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For Blake, charters implied monopolies, and so the Thames was more associated with industry than with, well, water. In the 1790s, various corporations and groups battled over wharves and waterways in the Thames to control important goods like cotton, saltpeter, spices, and coal.3 Coal was a particularly important commodity, as demand had surged along with the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. Companies throughout Britain were paying top dollar to buy up land between coalmines and rivers, and even more to buy up wharves in London, often with the intent to drive up prices and suppress the rights of workers.4 By 1750, “500,000 chaldrons of coal were imported into London annually, most of which was used in the trades.”5 By the midnineteenth century, there were nine thousand square miles of coalfields in Britain, producing thirty-two million tons of coal each year—and nearly a third of that coal came into London via the Thames.6 Thousands of Londoners and hundreds of wharves were devoted to the coal trade, described by Charles Knight in 1847 as “a black army of more than 40,000 strong.”7 Even the Royal Navy was involved, acting as security for ships entering London with exceptionally large cargoes of coal.8 So, those “Marks of weakness” and “woe” that Blake sees on Londoners’ faces could also be literal black marks of coal: anyone walking near the Thames at this time would have seen the “black army” and heard their cries.9 Blake’s poem is a reflection on human control and modification of the River Thames as much as it is a reflection on the “mind-forg’d manacles” of British ideology and biopolitics.10 The river is a central image of the poem, despite only appearing in the second line. In fact, Blake titled the first draft of the poem “Thames,” and in it, he wandered through “dirty,” not “charter’d,” streets, observing the “dirty Thames.”11 This emphasis on dirtiness draws attention to the coal trade and coal burning, which accounted for much of the filth and pollution that typified eighteenthcentury London. A fragment in same notebook, seemingly intended for the poem “Thames,” furthers this fossil fuel context: Why should I care for the men of thames Or the cheating waves of charter’d steams Or shrink at the little blasts of fear That the hireling blows into my ear

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Tho born on the cheating banks of Thames Tho his waters bathed my infant limbs The Ohio shall wash his stains from me I was born a slave but I go to be free12

Blake’s distinction between pure and polluted waters points to broader cultural attitudes toward waterways in the eighteenth century. He associates the polluted Thames with “cheating” capitalist commerce—playing on the dual meaning of “banks”—as well as the political oppression and culture of fear instituted in 1790s England in the wake of the French Revolution.13 Blake and other Britons have been “stain[ed],” or marked, by this biopolitical oppression since birth, but those stains may be “wash[ed]” away by the Ohio River in America, which symbolizes a pure, uncorrupted river flowing freely. The Ohio River had been a central waterway of Native American civilizations for thousands of years before European conquest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it had played an important strategic role in both the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War. Britain seized control of the river through the Ohio Company in 1749 but later relinquished it to the United States with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The river then served as the symbolic dividing line between the slave-holding South and the free North. For Blake, the Ohio River represents democratic freedom from British rule and ideology, a kind of “purity” that mirrors its seemingly unmanufactured ecology. Canals and bridges were not built on the river until later in the nineteenth century, and, while the Ohio River of the twenty-first century often tops the list of most polluted rivers in the United States, it was exceptionally “pure” compared to the eighteenthcentury Thames, particularly in its freedom from industrial trade and waste. That lack of manufacture is key for Blake. Much of the “cheating” trade and freight on the Thames revolved around coal, which was subject to a host of duties, fees, taxes, and administrative paperwork. To manage all of this work, the London Coal Exchange was established on Thames Street in 1770 as a market controlled by private coal merchants to set prices, collect duties, and regulate import and delivery, and it remained a central fixture of the financial district throughout the nineteenth century. Coal was everywhere, and it was used to fuel almost everything. So, the “blackning Church” Blake writes about in “London”

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is more than critique of Church and State: it also indicates the modified and manufactured nature of the Thames.14 The Thames is a river of the early Anthropocene. In “London,” the chartered Thames and the blackened church point to the coal trade, human modification of the river, and the human imprint on water and environment, with psychological, as well as bodily health, consequences. And its industrial modifications intensified throughout the nineteenth century, ultimately resulting in the Great Stink of 1858, in which the Thames became a manufactured river deadly to human life, filled with human waste from a surging population, manure from commercial farms, and, as physician and chemist Arthur Hill Hassall remarked in 1850, “the refuse of gas, chemical, and various other works.”15 The Great Stink was a full-on health and water crisis that precipitated sanitation reforms throughout London, including a modernization of the city’s sewage system and the creation of new embankments along the River Thames to stop the overflow of filth into its waters. The transformation of the Thames indicates another important facet of the early Anthropocene: modified waterways. Manufactured and anthropogenic waters impacted all areas of human and nonhuman life, and they facilitated urbanization, global trade, and fossil fuel culture. Rivers and canals created a network of internal transport and traffic, as well as gateways to Britain’s increasing collection of colonies. Of course, water is ubiquitous in literary and historical studies of Britain (it’s an island, after all), but this chapter centers on rivers that are central to the early Anthropocene: the Thames, the Tyne, the Wye, and the Duddon. These particular rivers are prominent in literary and artistic works, and they serve as representative examples of what happens to other rivers in Britain throughout the nineteenth century.16 The literature of rivers and canals captures deep-seated anxieties about dramatic environmental change: fears of water access and pollution, of losing one’s home, and of existential threats to Britain itself. From the industrial Tyne and Thames to those like the Wye and Duddon, which played an important role in tourism and early conservation efforts, rivers were both local and global in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Britain: they are almost always linked to global trade and colonialism, to regional distinctions and manufacture, and to the human experience of living in a new geological epoch.

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Coal, Canals, and the River Tyne In his 1651 poem “News from Newcastle: Upon the Coal-pits about Newcastle-upon-Tyne,” William Ellis situates Newcastle’s booming coalmining industry within a global context of European colonialism: “England’s a perfect world! Has Indies too! / Correct your maps: Newcastle is Peru.”17 The European conquest of Peru in the sixteenth century decimated the Inca civilization and led to a profitable silver mining industry, but it’s not as advantageous as Newcastle’s coal mining industry, according to Ellis. He explains that coal is superior to any other type of rock or mineral: a Newcastle “coal-pit is a mine of everything,” as it fuels every industry, from textile manufacturing to minting coins to brewing beer. In fact, Newcastle’s coals are “our sun” and its mines “A muzzled Etna,” capable of controlling the climate, producing “summer’s winter, winter’s summer.”18 Ellis anticipates tropes that become popular in the eighteenth century: coals are as powerful as the sun, mining is as powerful as a volcano, and climate bends to the desires of Britons. These tropes signal Britons as a geophysical force of nature, and Ellis uses them before the steam engine facilitated industrial expansion in the eighteenth century. What’s more, Ellis depicts the River Tyne as the central means by which to transport coal around the nation, and the river’s lack of picturesque beauty is a sign of its economic prowess: Rich meadows and full crops are elsewhere found: We can reap harvest from our barren ground. The bald parched hills that circumscribe our Tyne Are no less fruitful in their hungry mine.19

Ellis subverts the pastoral tradition by locating value in barrenness, dryness, and coalmines. This coal-centered economic pastoral, along with colonial references, positions Newcastle-upon-Tyne as the epicenter of Britain’s bourgeoning Industrial Revolution. Newcastle was well-established as a major economic and industrial hub in the seventeenth century, well before the Industrial Revolution kicked off, and this is one reason that Ellis’s poem seems a century ahead of its time. Just a few years later in 1655, Newcastle native Ralph Gardiner published a famous grievance against the Newcastle Corporation, a private group of individuals charged with governing the town and regulating its coal trade. Queen Elizabeth created the Company with the Great Charter of 1600, the same year she granted a Royal

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Charter to the East India Company. Gardiner cites charters and a lack of proper river improvement as major reasons for corruption and environmental (and thus economic) problems.20 Although leaders of the Corporation were keenly aware of the Tyne’s environment and sought to maintain it for financial reasons—including everything from controlling human waste in the river to ballasting—attempts “to control the river’s climate” tended toward maintaining the status quo rather than improving environmental health.21 The Newcastle Corporation was continually criticized throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until the Tyne Improvement Commission replaced the Corporation in 1850 to help conserve the river. Historian John Nef provides an even starker vision of the Tyne’s transformation: Picture the mouth of the muddy, narrow River Tyne, jammed with four or five hundred keels and two or three hundred ships…think of the hilly slopes to the north and south covered with hundreds of small carts and wagon, leaving behind them trails of black refuse on the green countryside; and then think of a time when this same countryside was at rest…when the only evidence of the coal industry was a few pits at the water’s edge. … In this comparison you have…a view of the change wrought around the town of Newcastle in the century following the accession of Elizabeth.22

Nef attributes the Tyne’s transformation—from an idyllic pastoral river to a polluted, industrial, anthropogenic waterway—to the series of charters initiated by Queen Elizabeth in the late sixteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, locals and tourists alike associated Newcastleupon-Tyne with this industrial vision, and writers often used classical allusions to the Underworld to capture the emotional experience of confronting this new kind of waterway. In his 1778 Travels of the Imagination; a True Journey from Newcastle to London, James Murray compares the River Tyne to the River Charon: it is as if one is crossing over into Hades when entering the north-east Newcastle area.23 Nef’s description also reflects eighteenth-century histories of Newcastle, which similarly indicate a “before-and-after” the great corporatization. The most important eighteenth-century history is John Brand’s 1789 History and Antiquities of the Town and County of the Town of Newcastle upon Tyne, including an Account of the Coal Trade of that place and embellished with Engraved Views of the Publick Buildings, &c.24 Even the title stresses the central contrast between

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Newcastle-upon-Tyne of the past and the coal-fueled present, the latter of which corresponds to an increase of charters and monopolies beginning in the late sixteenth century. For example, the Great Charter of 1600 stipulated that the monarch would get a financial piece of all coal dug up in the area, ruling that a certain amount of profits must be spent in Britain, and not elsewhere, forever. Charters made coal more lucrative to the Corporation and the British Empire. In the process, the Tyne became a river for trade, economics, and industry. Brand details an endless string of charters, monopolies, acts, laws, duties, and taxes, all of which aim to regulate and monopolize the coal trade. Over half of Newcastle’s coal shipped to London, with the rest going to British colonies and other nations throughout the world.25 Brand emphasizes the superiority of British coal, which is “at present the common fuel of most of Europe, as well as of other parts of the globe.”26 Coal was king on the Tyne long before it was king in Britain. In addition, Brand uses several industrial poems as epigraphs to illustrate the manufactured nature of the Tyne. His chapter on the coal trade begins with a passage from Richard Jago’s Edge-Hill (1767), which, among other things, links Britain’s industrial power to volcanic activity and alludes to a biblical passage about Earth being “transformed by fire.”27 In Chapter 2 of this book, I discuss how Jago’s poem is part of an emerging volcanic-industrial tradition in eighteenth-century topographical poetry wherein poets use volcanic and geological terminology to represent Britain’s newfound industrial powers and their environmental effects. By linking volcanic and industrial imagery, poets like Jago present Britons as geophysical agents in a new geological epoch. Brand’s use of the poem highlights the impact of this new literary tradition. Moreover, the second volume of Brand’s history includes a lengthy passage from Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1622) on the River Tyne, which reinforces the river’s global-colonial connotations: Now having gone so far, Their strengths me their dear Tyne do wond’rously enrich, As how clear Darwent draws down to Newcastle, which The honour hath alone to entertain me there, As of those mighty ships that in my mouth I bear, Fraught with my country coal, of this Newcastle nam’d, For which, both far and near, that place is no less fam’d Than India for her mines.28

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Collectively, Brand’s industrial history of Newcastle, coupled with the numerous poetic epigraphs and references, depicts the transformation of the Tyne from a local river to a modified industrial waterway of the early Anthropocene. Yet, there are many pastoral treatments of the River Tyne. In a passage from his well-known poem The Pleasures of the Imagination (1770), Mark Akenside recounts his childhood on the Tyne: —Would I again were with you! O ye dales Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where Oft as the giant flood obliquely strides, And his banks open, and his lawns extend, Stops short the pleased traveller to view Presiding over the scene some rustic tower Founded by Norman or by Saxon hands: O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook The rocky pavement and the mossy falls Of solitary Wensbeck’s limpid stream; How gladly I recall your well-known seats Beloved of old, and that delightful time When all alone, for many a summer’s day, I wandered through your calm recesses, led In silence by some powerful hand unseen, Nor will I ever forget you.29

Anticipating the mode of reminiscence William Wordsworth famously deploys a few decades later, Akenside thinks back on an earlier version of the Tyne from his childhood in the 1720s and 1730s. He grew up in his father’s butchery on Butcher Bank, which overlooked the Tyne in Newcastle, so he had first-hand knowledge of the river’s transformation. Now, nearly fifty years later, the Tyne looks much different—what Akenside does not describe are the effects of deforestation and industrialization in and around Newcastle and the River Tyne. He redirects attention to the River Wansbeck, located in a rural area about fifteen miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but the mode of reminiscence implicitly contrasts the Tyne’s present with its imagined idyllic past. The new aesthetic and landscape of the Anthropocene bubble just under the surface of this passage, threatening to infect the standard picturesque aesthetic. Wordsworth makes a similar move in “Tintern Abbey” (1798), a poem about the River Wye and the Wye Valley, among other things. As I discuss

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in the next section of this chapter, the Wye was central to the blossoming British tourism industry in the eighteenth century, but by the 1790s its banks were home to industrial furnaces and coal manufactories, and those on tour were as likely to see smoke-filled landscapes as picturesque abbeys. Wordsworth leaves out these details in his poem, and a similar intentional omission works in Akenside’s poem. There are many other pastoral treatments of the Tyne: the river flows nearly one hundred miles and is composed of Tyne North and Tyne South, which begin near the Scottish border and in Cumbria, respectively, with the mouth of the combined river on the east coast of England, and so it varies greatly in its geography. However, poets of the northeast and Newcastle area often focus on its economic and industrial significance rather than its pastoral or picturesque beauty.30 These poets celebrate the river’s modifications. Consider the opening stanzas of John Gibson’s “The Tyne” (1806): Roll on thy way, thrice happy Tyne! Commerce and riches still are thine; Thy sons in every art shall shine, And make thee more majestic flow.

The busy crowd that throngs thy sides, And on thy dusky bosom glides, With riches swell thy flowing tides, And bless the soil where thou dost flow.31

Gibson associates the river with commerce, attributing the water’s “dusky” luster (caused by pollution and filth) and “swell[ing] tides” (most likely from over-ballasting) to prosperity, represented by the “busy crowd” of the city. In subsequent stanzas, he contrasts this modernday prosperity to the river’s pre-industrial history, which was dominated by war, further reinforcing the before/after dynamic that shapes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writings on Newcastle. Many other poets take a nationalistic approach to the Tyne. In an anonymous poem on “The Coal Trade” (1827), the author attributes all success, security, and survival to British coal:

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May vultures on the caitiff fly, And gnaw his liver till he die, Who looks with evil, jealous eye Down upon the Coal Trade.32

This allusion to Prometheus is curious and telling. In classical mythology, Zeus punished Prometheus for giving fire to humans by chaining him to the Caucasus Mountains indefinitely, where a vulture (or eagle in certain versions) would eat his liver every day. The poet equates Prometheus with individuals who oppose coal-powered industrialization, which would make industrialists the collective, all-powerful Zeus. Yet, in the nineteenth century, Prometheus served as a symbol of new science (as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and of the democratic spirit standing up to tyrannical authority (as in the works of Goethe, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley). So, the poet seems to have internalized fossil capitalism, valuing the economic benefits of “the Coal Trade” above all else, vilifying Prometheus, the savior of humanity, and thereby destroying the possibility of a more equal and democratic system. The poet goes on to identify the Wear, Tyne, and Thames as central industrial waterways of the British Empire, making no mention of anything other than coal, trade, and economics with the River Tyne. “Coaly Tyne” (1820), another anonymous song from the same decade, also attributes the “Great riches from the mine” to the river.33 The adjective “coaly” is a sign of national pride but also a real descriptor of the state of the river, which was muddied by coal dust continually dropping down from ships, industrial waste from various manufactories, and mud from the ballasting and de-ballasting of ships.34 In contrast, Robert Gilchrist laments these changes in “More Innovations” (1842). The title is sarcastic (Gilchrist probably imagined air quotes around “innovations”), with Gilchrist writing that “Newcassell’s sore transmogrified.”35 He questions the benefits of industrial transformation, noting the many modifications to roads and buildings around the river to facilitate trade and tourism, whereby the ancient town has given way to modern commerce. Like other writers, he contrasts the present with a pastoral past. Similar river transformations took place in Liverpool, the West Midlands, and other areas of Britain, even in smaller cities. For example, in “Colebrook Dale” (1785), poet Anna Seward uses the village of Coalbrookdale as a case study of the negative effects of industrialization occurring all over Britain. Her separation of the village’s name in

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the title indicates how it has been ripped apart by the coal and iron industries, which had grown substantially throughout the eighteenth century. Seward initially locates the industrial “violation” of Coalbrookdale in the transformation of its natural waterways. Using a string of classical allusions, she observes the disappearance of naiads from Coalbrookdale’s “crystal flood” and “clear wave[s]”; these mythical “watr’y sisters” have been “Usurpt” by Cyclops, who brings with him “throng’d barges,” “pond’rous engines,” and “countless red fires, / With umber’d flames,” which “Dark[e]n the Summer’s sun with columns large / Of thick, sulphureous smoke.” These industrial “flames” and effluent “pollute thy gales, / And stain thy glassy waters.” Coal and iron ship to nearby cities, then to London, and then around the world, from Brazil to India, “wafted o’er our subject seas / To every port.”36 Drawing from the volcanic-industrial tradition, Seward connects this local transformation directly to changes throughout the nation and Britain’s global empire, just as they were literally connected by waterways. Coalbrookdale’s transformation left a lasting impact on Seward. In a 1787 letter to William Hayley, she outlines a tour of the village she undertook with a friend, using many of the same images and phrases that appear in her poem. She writes of the “uncommon union” of industrial machinery and surrounding scenes of “romantic nature”: Where the Cyclops usurp the dwellings of the Naiads and Dryads, and drown, with their dissonance, the woodland song; light their blazing fires on each of the many hills, and, with the thick black smoke, shroud, as with a sable crape, the lavish woods and fantastic rocks; sully the pure waters of the Severn, and dim the splendour of the summer’s sun; while the shouts of their crouding barges, and the clang of their numerous engines, din through every winding of the valley.37

Seward’s marvel is typical of eighteenth-century visitors, though, as Donna Coffey and Sharon Setzer have pointed out, her environmental concern and emphasis on pollution is unique.38 In the letter, as in the poem, she references water pollution as especially egregious. The River Severn was essential to the coal and iron trades, as it linked the Midlands to the Bristol Channel, Britain’s central port for transatlantic trade. Coalbrookdale became a particularly important point on the river’s route after Abraham Darby pioneered the practice of smelting iron ore with coke in the early eighteenth century, a process further revolutionized by the

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steam engine. The coal and iron industries boomed in Coalbrookdale and surrounding areas, and the Darby family catered to tourists, who came in increasing numbers to see the strange confluence of industrial technology and the picturesque.39 The novelty of this new landscape, and the mixture of emotions it elicited—wonder, awe, horror, anxiety—captures part of the strangeness of living in the Anthropocene. Seward’s use of classical mythology and imagery reflects the otherworldly experience many visitors expressed. British polymath Charles Dibdin compared the Severn to the River Styx, as did many other tourists.40 Seward uses this same language in a 1799 sonnet “To Colebrooke Dale.” Thy Genius, Colebrooke, faithless to his charge, Amid thy woods and vales, thy rocks and streams, Form’d for the Train that haunt poetic dreams, Naiads, and Nymphs,—now hears the toiling Barge And the swart Cyclops’ ever-clanging forge Din in thy dells;—permits the dark-red gleams, From umber’d fires on all thy hills, the beams, Solar and pure, to shroud with columns large Of black sulphureous smoke, that spread their veils Like funeral crape upon the sylvan robe Of thy romantic rocks, pollute thy gales, And stain thy glassy floods;—while o’er the globe To spread thy stores metallic, this rude yell Drowns the wild woodland song, and breaks the Poet’s spell.41

In a more condensed form, Seward makes the same argument using the same language and imagery as her earlier poem and letter. This return to Coalbrookdale’s transformation indicates intensity of thought and critique. As Coffey argues, “Seward was aware of the interconnections between her nation’s global quest for ‘glory or…gold’ and the industrialization which was beginning to scar Britain’s own landscape.”42 For Seward, the disappearance of “pure” waters in Coalbrookdale points toward a global shift in cultural attitudes toward waterways and the natural world. Human activity was reshaping rivers and landscapes, and this was cause for both wonder and consternation—yet it seemed inevitable and unstoppable, evidenced by Seward’s repeated return to Coalbrookdale. Seward’s trip to Coalbrookdale was clearly an experience that stuck with her, and it was one that also impacted her friend, collaborator,

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and Lichfield neighbor Erasmus Darwin. However, he takes a decidedly different approach to industrialization, embracing what Alan Bewell calls a cosmopolitan view of nature—that is, a global perspective afforded by the Industrial Revolution and reach of the British Empire, one that celebrates Britain’s technological-industrial-imperial innovations and their commercial potentials.43 Darwin’s popular scientific poem The Botanic Garden (1791) exemplifies this cosmopolitan perspective. Darwin touches on nearly every element of the early Anthropocene in Britain, including discoveries of fossil fuels near Coalbrookdale in the 1780s. In a lengthy endnote added to the third edition of the poem in 1795, Darwin explains how colliers discovered “fossil tar…or petroleum” near the banks of the Severn while constructing a canal “for the more easy acquisition and conveyance of the coals.”44 He provides a detailed description of the various minerals and strata surrounding the petroleum, speculating that it formed through a process of distillation and heat applied to coal during some ancient period. He wanders into deep time, citing the work of James Hutton on uniformitarianism, who famously concludes his geological “Theory of the Earth” (1788) with the idea that “we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”45 What is most interesting is how pleased Darwin is that the construction of a canal led to the discovery of petroleum. From a twenty-first-century position, this modification of the River Severn is a crucial moment in the coming oil industry. Darwin goes on in the poem to praise waterways as vital to Britain’s population growth and global economic dominance, comparing “lucid cataracts” to “peopled vales” and writing of the nation’s “freighted tides.”46 Darwin’s image of “freighted tides” reflects not only the British Empire’s command of seas and oceans through global-imperial trade but also the so-called Canal Age (1757–1835). Canals were crucial to the Industrial Revolution and to the making of the modern world. The Sankey Canal—England’s first canal—opened in 1757 as a direct waterway from Lancashire’s coalfields to Liverpool, and canal construction reached its height in 1806.47 Most early canals linked coalfields to major rivers and cities, facilitating industrialization and fueling urbanization, but they also quickened the transport of goods throughout Britain and provided a blueprint for railways in the nineteenth century.48 In an 1831 Liverpool Guide; or, Stranger’s Companion, the author writes at length of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, used primarily for “the receipt

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of coal for use of the town, and for shipment.” This tiny, delicate guidebook designed for tourists references numerous docks and manufactories along the canal, and it concludes with a lengthy section on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which the author claims is “the greatest object of attraction to strangers visiting Liverpool.”49 Nevertheless, the canal remained just as important as the railway in terms of transport and industrialization throughout the nineteenth century. At the same time, new canals and “improved rivers” drastically transformed British wetlands and ecologies. Marshes and fens were drained in the creation of canals, which often served the dual purpose of creating arable lands for farming. These activities directly impact climate change, as wetlands regulate the climate through carbon storage and other processes. Wetlands also make up some of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in the world, and biodiversity is a key marker for the health of ecosystems. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century canals contributed to bank erosion, an increase in water turbidity, and declines in aquatic plants and invertebrates, the latter of which impacted fish communities and behavioral patterns, as well as birds and other mammals.50 For example, the River Tyne, historically famous for its salmon fisheries, experienced a rapid decline in salmon population throughout the nineteenth century due to a combination of pollution and overfishing. By the mid-twentieth century, salmon had disappeared, although they reemerged in the twentyfirst century through the combined efforts of environmental conservation and hatcheries. In other words, the manufactured waters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have had cascading effects well into the twenty-first century. Britons’ modifications of rivers and wetlands also relate to the leading eighteenth-century geological theory about the history of Earth: Neptunism. As outlined in Chapters 1 and 2 of this book, the NeptunistVulcanist debate shaped early geology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Proponents of each school regularly published essays in scientific and popular magazines, and their work was cited and referenced in popular poems, such as Darwin’s Botanic Garden and John Scafe’s King Coal’s Levee (1818). In short, this debate centered on whether water (Neptunism) or volcanic fire (Vulcanism) was the main driver of Earth’s formation and evolution. German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner (who also happened to be a professor of mining and mineralogy) developed the Neptunist theory in the late eighteenth

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century, and Scottish mineralogist Robert Jameson advocated for it in Britain. Neptunists argued that Earth was originally composed of water, and that a process of sedimentation from materials in those originary waters formed the terrestrial planet—its core, continents, and layers of rock and minerals. Flooding and the flow of waters were thus the most important phenomena in the formation of Earth. This theory was attractive to religious thinkers threatened by studies that showed Earth to be tens of thousands of years old (or older), as it seemed to validate to the biblical story of Noah’s flood. While the Neptunists enjoyed widespread scientific and popular support in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, geologists eventually embraced Vulcanism and its attendant theory of uniformitarianism, due in large part to the work of Charles Lyell.51 Natural phenomena like floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions were increasingly associated with geology and Earth history, and, by extension, humans’ ability to modify and regulate rivers and waterways was associated with impacting the evolution of Earth. So, when poets wrote of the Tyne’s coaly nature, or historians and scientists referenced the transformational power of river industrialization, or Seward and Darwin wrote of polluted waters in Coalbrookdale, they were doing more than celebrating or critiquing Britain’s industrial-economic interests: they were imagining the geophysical impact of Britons’ new industrial powers. They were writing the early Anthropocene. In other parts of the country, movements were underway to protect rivers from human modification. These early conservation efforts often emerged as responses to the immediate and projected effects of industrialization and tourism. The next section focuses on the literature of these movements related to the Wye Tour and the Lake District, providing a counter to the industrial poetry that dominates the first part of this chapter. At the same time, this conservation literature also reflects humans’ ability to control and regulate waters in the early Anthropocene.

Ecotourism and Conservation in the Lake District In the first edition of William Wordsworth’s 1820 River Duddon collection, the publishers included a lengthy advertisement in the endpapers for “New Works on Botany, Gardening, Agriculture, Geology, Mineralogy, Philosophy, &c.” Among the numerous works listed for purchase are William Salisbury’s two-volume Botanist’s Companion, George Graves’s

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Naturalist’s Pocketbook, Robert Bakewell’s Introduction to Mineralogy, G.B. Greenough’s Critical Examination of the First Principles of Geology, and the fourth edition of John Scafe’s scientific poem King Coal’s Levee; or, Geological Etiquette, with Explanatory Notes.52 Why did the publishers think readers of Wordsworth’s poetry would also be interested in botany, geology, and natural philosophy? What does the River Duddon have to do with geological debates? What connections were they making? The clearest reason is that publishers wished to capitalize on the overlap between geology, rivers, and tourism in the Lake District. The full title of Wordsworth’s volume clarifies this connection: The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia: And Other Poems. To which is annexed a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England. The topographical description is an early version of Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes , which became one of his most popular works by the 1830s. Wordsworth writes that he “attached [it] to these volumes…from a consciousness of its having been written in the same spirit which dictated several of the poems, and from a belief that it will tend materially to illustrate them.”53 The practical, material guide complements the lyrical and more abstract sonnets, which also center on the Lake District. The guide provides a deep environmental history of the Lake District, a philosophy of nature and conservation, and rules for tourists, who had been coming to the Lakes since the 1760s, when a number of popular guidebooks established the area as a place worthy of travel and attention, initially for its wild, untamed natural geography, and later for its picturesque beauty. This form of ecotourism persisted throughout the nineteenth century, enhanced by Wordsworth’s rise to fame as a celebrity author: his body of work, which focuses almost exclusively on the Lakes, became intimately connected to the international tourism industry that blossomed after his death in 1850, and which now dominates the local economy in the twenty-first century. Ecotourism is a term coined in the early 1980s to describe a particular form of sustainable alternative tourism centered on undisturbed, natural areas. However, this practice dates back to eighteenth-century Britain: the Wye Tour and Tour of the Lakes became highly popular during the 1790s when travel to the Continent was prohibited in the aftermath of the French Revolution and ensuing Napoleonic Wars. These tours were memorialized in literature, visual art, and guidebooks, and, in 1895, nationalized through the creation of the National Trust.

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What distinguishes ecotourism from other forms of nature tourism is its emphasis on education, sustainability, and ethics. David Fennell, an expert in tourism studies, defines ecotourism as “a sustainable form of natural resource-based tourism that focuses primarily on experiencing and learning about nature, and which is ethically managed to be low-impact, non-consumptive, and locally oriented (control, benefits, and scale). It typically occurs in natural areas, and should contribute to the conservation or preservation of such areas.”54 Wordsworth makes a strong case for this kind of tourism in his 1820 collection. Wordsworth and the publisher’s connection between rivers, geology, and tourism first emerged in eighteenth-century guidebooks. One of the most popular and influential guides was William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye (1782), based on his travels throughout Wales in 1770. Gilpin is best known for theorizing the picturesque, an aesthetic that inspired generations of poets, artists, and publishers of guidebooks. In Observations, Gilpin writes of “the rules of picturesque beauty,”55 a series of instructions on how to appreciate the rustic, rural, and rough irregularity of the British landscape, which was quite different from the kinds of classical beauty and architecture travelers would encounter on a Grand Tour of the Continent. In order to illustrate the picturesque, Gilpin established the Wye Tour as a formal tour, describing a number of succeeding picturesque sites a tourist should admire while traveling up the Wye, such as ruined abbeys, a variety of woods and rocks, and specific scenic views. Gilpin notes that one of the river’s key features is its “free,” “uninterrupted,” and “mazy course,” which he contrasts with canals and modified rivers.56 While his point is mainly aesthetic, Gilpin’s emphasis on the importance of acknowledging and understanding picturesque beauty is also an implicit call for preservation of the river. Without the uninterrupted flow of the river, picturesque sites would be devalued or lost, and the Wye Tour would cease to be an integral part of Britain’s environmental and cultural heritage. This loss of aesthetic and environmental diversity had already occurred elsewhere in Britain: Gilpin’s first tour was on the modified Thames in 1764, but he decided it was not picturesque enough for a full study, opting instead to focus his first guidebook on the Wye. At the same time, the Wye was not immune to industrialization. As Gilpin observes, “Many of the furnaces, on the banks of the river, consume charcoal, which is manufactured on the spot; and the smoke, which is frequently seen issuing from the sides of the hills; and spreading

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it’s thin veil over a part of them, beautifully breaks their lines, and unites them with the sky.”57 Curiously, Gilpin admires the smoky effects but not the furnaces themselves, which were certainly not conducive to the picturesque—yet they were sources of tourism and fascination. Similarly, Wordsworth omits industrial furnaces in “Tintern Abbey,” a poem named after the most popular site on the Wye Tour, yet, unlike Wordsworth and other authors, Gilpin includes many references to commerce, pollution, and industry in his Observations. In a section on Tintern Abbey, which he describes as the epitome of picturesque beauty, Gilpin notes a very different environment less than a half-mile upstream, where a “great ironworks” produces “noise and bustle into these regions of tranquillity,” and where the river, before “clear, and splendid,” now becomes “ouzy, and discoloured” with “sludgy shores.”58 If left unchecked, Gilpin implies, this kind of water pollution might ruin the Wye. Gilpin also wrote of industry and tourism in the Lake District. In the introduction to Observations on several parts of England, particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland (1786), he provides a recent environmental history of the Lakes, noting that logging and deforestation have “destroyed” the picturesque beauty of towns like Keswick. In another section, he contrasts rivers with canals, the latter of which have “disfigured” the land in a “disgusting” manner.59 Again, Gilpin writes in terms of aesthetics—new, unnatural canals disrupt otherwise picturesque views of the countryside—but he also makes a claim for conservation by consistently privileging natural rivers and lakes over modified waterways. He argues that lakes in particular possess inherent value from their ancient geological formation: “Its magnificent, and marble bed, formed in the caverns, and deep recesses of rocky mountains, received originally the pure pellucid waters of some rushing torrent, as it came first from the hand of nature.”60 Gilpin’s focus on geological formations and strata draws from eighteenth-century geology, and he inspired geologists and tourists alike to visit the area throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.61 For Gilpin, the Lake District is irreplaceable. He upholds the district as a pure and undisturbed part of Britain whose “magnificen[ce]” possesses aesthetic, historical, and ecological value. He writes that lakes are “living,” that the “brisk circulation of fluid through these animated bodies of water” creates a “vital stream” flowing through “a thousand little gurgling rills, which trickling through a thousand veins, give life, and spirit to every part.”62 This biological life of the lakes indicates an ecosystem

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that animates the waters and surrounding landscape. Maintaining and protecting the health of this ecosystem is a key component of his aesthetic argument. When Gilpin rides on a barge down a canal to Manchester, his tone is completely different: lyrical musings on the spiritual and ecological value of the natural world disappear, and he is afforded “little amusement.”63 But the canal is necessary to his tour through the country—it’s essential to tourism as well as commerce. By 1820, when Wordsworth published the River Duddon volume, Britain was an industrialized nation, waterways were being harnessed for industrial and tourism purposes, and publishers were churning out guidebooks to the Lakes. Wordsworth had been writing about the Lake District for over thirty years, and he was established as a literary celebrity and emerging as a champion of conservation. So, part of what he is doing in the 1820 volume is praising “natural” waters as protected from human intervention and industrial-geophysical changes. Additionally, by linking his Duddon sonnets to the topographical description of the Lakes, he outlines a theory of conservation to be applied to the Lake District first and then to the rest of Britain. Wordsworth’s Duddon collection is part of the so-called Romantic Sonnet Revival. After the sonnet fell from popularity in the seventeenth century, many poets “revived” the form between 1750 and 1850. Wordsworth alone wrote over five hundred sonnets.64 His Duddon sonnets draw from the eighteenth-century tradition, when poets often used the river as a symbol of the flow of human life, and, in Wordsworth’s case, the flow of the sonnet tradition itself. Eighteenth-century sonneteers focused on rural elements of rivers, emphasizing the connection between clear, pure waters and poetic inspiration. This is the conventional reading of Wordsworth’s 1820 collection, which contains thirty-three sonnets composed over more than a decade. Together, they form a poetic walking guide down the River Duddon, as Wordsworth deploys his characteristic toggling between observations of the natural world and internal meditations on his cognitive and emotional processes. Yet, there is more to these sonnets than Wordsworth’s internal musings on poetic tradition and inspiration. Several sonnets contrast the River Duddon and Lake District with more industrialized areas, often through a deep time perspective. For example, in sonnet XXI Wordsworth compares the rural Duddon to the London Thames, the latter of which is “With

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Commerce freighted or triumphant War.”65 For the most part, though, Wordsworth is subtler, as in sonnet II: Child of the clouds! remote from every taint Of sordid industry thy lot is cast; Thine are the honors of the lofty waste; Not seldom, when with heat the valleys faint, Thy hand-maid Frost with spangled tissue quaint Thy cradle decks;—to chaunt thy birth, thou hast No meaner Poet than the whistling Blast, And Desolation is thy Patron-saint! She guards thee, ruthless Power! who would not spare Those mighty forests, once the bison’s screen, Where stalk’d the huge deer to his shaggy lair Through paths and alleys roofed with sombre green, Thousands of years before the silent air Was pierced by whizzing shaft of hunter keen!66

Clouds, ever associated with weather and climate in Wordsworth’s poetry, provide the first image as a reflection in the river, but they also symbolize the complex ecosystem that comprises the Lake District. Clouds feed and thus half-create the River Duddon through near-constant rain in a cycle of precipitation and evaporation, wherein the river also half-creates the clouds and atmosphere. This initial image of clouds has a particular scientific-cultural valence. Meteorologist Luke Howard had recently published seminal works on clouds and climatology with which Wordsworth was familiar—On the Modification of Clouds (1803) and The Climate of London (1818)—and, as I discuss in Chapter 4 of this book, Howard’s 1803 essay partly inspired one of Wordsworth’s most well-known poems, “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” (1807, 1815). In fact, a number of prominent poets and artists created cloud poems and paintings inspired by Howard and other climatologists, including the famous cloud studies of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. In his sonnet, Wordsworth enhances this scientificecological imagery by writing that the Duddon remains “remote” from Britain’s pervasive industrial pursuits. In this second important image of the poem, Wordsworth plays on the dual meanings of “sordid” and “industry”: the former indicates immorality or filthiness; the latter a reference to manufacturing in general or a dedicated devotion to one particular

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task. In both cases, Wordsworth means the abstract and material usages of each word simultaneously: the river is remote from the filth of industrial manufacturing and the single-minded capitalist pursuit of wealth that drives that manufacturing. Instead of these economic honors, the Duddon possesses “the honors of the lofty waste,” referring to a type of common land deemed a “waste” because it was not suitable for agriculture. In the sestet, Wordsworth takes a decidedly deep time view, imagining the forests, bison, and Leigh deer that populated the area thousands of years before the arrival of humans. According to John Wyatt, this “is the first note of total extinction of the Leigh deer,”67 which lived in the area over ten thousand years before Wordsworth’s time. Wordsworth writes of various forms of extinction in his Guide, outlining the increasing destruction of the Lake District through deforestation, tourism, and industrial agriculture. In the sonnet, Wordsworth stresses the threat humans now pose to the river as geophysical agents. Wordsworth continues a deep time perspective in subsequent sonnets. In sonnet V, he imagines “green alders,” “ashes,” “birch-trees,” and “pines” slowly growing over decades and centuries on the banks of the River Duddon. He then pivots from trees to a recently erected cottage: And thou has also tempted here to rise, ’Mid sheltering pines, this Cottage rude and grey; Whose ruddy children, by the mother’s eyes Carelessly watch’d, sport through the summer day, Thy pleas’d associates:—light as endless May On infant bosoms lonely Nature lies.68

This contrast between the slow, ancient growth of trees and the recent uptick in cottage construction indicates Wordsworth’s conflicted state of mind on tourism in the Lake District. On the one hand, this passage pits an eternal Duddon against the transient lives of humans, a theme that pops up in several other sonnets. On the other hand, it gestures toward the Duddon’s immediate future: more tourists, residents, houses, and land-use changes. In his Guide, Wordsworth expounds at length on the cottage as a special kind of structure central to the cultural landscape of the Lakes. Cottages, he writes, “remind the contemplative spectator of a production of Nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to have been erected;—to have risen, by an instance of

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their own, out of the native rock.”69 As in the sonnet, where the cottage seems to “rise” of its own agency among the trees, this passage urges an ecologically minded construction that is both aesthetically and environmentally consistent with the land. New buildings should be “received into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields.”70 Modifications should be kept to a minimum in order to preserve the distinctive cultural landscape that makes up the Lake District and draws so many tourists. Wordsworth realizes that more people will come to the Lakes, making the area more susceptible to industrialization and ecological degradation, and so he offers various “rules of taste for preventing their [i.e., tourists’] bad effects.”71 This cultivation of ecotourism offers a way to mitigate the inevitable growth in population and industrialization. Along with emphases on industry and deep time, several sonnets in the series focus on biodiversity. Consider sonnet VI: Ere yet our course was graced with social trees It lacked not old remains of hawthorn bowers, Where small birds warbled to their paramours; And, earlier still, was heard the hum of bees; I saw them ply their harmless robberies, And caught the fragrance which the sundry flowers, Fed by the stream with soft perpetual showers, Plenteously yielded to the vagrant breeze. There bloomed the strawberry of the wilderness; The trembling eye-bright showed her sapphire blue, The thyme her purple like the blush of even; And, if the breath of some to no caress Invited, forth they peeped so fair to view, All kinds alike seemed favourites of Heaven.72

In moving from trees to smaller plants, flowers, birds, and insects, Wordsworth acknowledges a “social” network, a living community along the banks of the River Duddon. This is no lyrical musing, either: twentyfirst-century research has uncovered the complex social relationships between trees in forests and other ecosystems.73 In connecting trees to the more visible network of life supported by the River Duddon, Wordsworth draws attention to trees as living things vital to human and nonhuman lives. Bees pollinate plants and flowers, which are “fed”

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by the river and compose a “fragrant” atmosphere. Wild strawberries grow side-by-side with eyebright and thyme, all of which have nutritional and medicinal uses, in addition to their ecological and aesthetic values. Wordsworth’s list-like treatment of these various flora and fauna attributes value to biodiversity and implicitly calls for conservation and protection—a call he makes explicit in the Guide when he argues that the district should be deemed “a sort of national property.”74 Many other poets used the sonnet form to comment on the changing landscapes and waterscapes of Britain. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, friend and collaborator of Wordsworth, wrote “To the River Otter” (1791) about the river that flowed near his childhood home in Devon. The sonnet is not immediately ecological in nature, but rather serves as a reminder of Coleridge’s “Visions of childhood” from his adult perspective.75 In a common move, the river operates as poetic inspiration, producing a range of emotional and affective states in the poet’s mind and body. However, as James McKusick remarks, readers often wonder why Coleridge makes no mention of actual otters, or any kind of wildlife. The reason? There were no otters in the river in the nineteenth century: they had been eradicated by industrial and agricultural activities. Thankfully, wild-growing beavers have reemerged in the twenty-first century, after decades of conservation work improved the river’s riparian ecosystem.76 John Clare also wrote numerous river poems, most of which focus on the personal and ecological consequences of enclosure near his home in Helpston. As Bridget Keegan has written on at length, Clare’s river poems are most often elegies, reflections on a recent environmental past that has been changed utterly by enclosure and industrialization.77 For instance, in “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters” (1818), Clare personifies a brook to express the pain and outrage that resulted from enclosure. Round-Oak criticizes the “greedy souls” that laid waste to “the greens and pastures,” felled the trees along its banks, and decimated the local culture and ecosystem: “There’s scarce a greensward spot remains / And scarce a single tree.”78 Without a vibrant ecosystem, the brook has dwindled away and will soon disappear completely. In both cases, Coleridge and Clare trace changes to British waterways that continue to impact ecosystems for hundreds of years. While it was somewhat in vogue to write poems about smaller, regional rivers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are far more poetic treatments of the Thames, in part because it’s so central to English

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culture, history, and commerce, but also because of its unmistakably manufactured nature: the nineteenth-century London Thames was filthy, as much a product of urbanization as a natural-flowing waterway through southern England (it’s the longest river in England). But it inspired nearly as many tours and guides as the Wye and Lake District, and certainly more literary tributes. The dangers of this Anthropocenic river came to a head in the mid-nineteenth century, when anthropogenic climate change became too visible to ignore any longer.

Dirty Father Thames In September 1884, Truth magazine held a parody competition to determine who could write the best poem about the Thames in the style of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). The contest winner provides a humorous, though haunting, vision of the nineteenth-century Thames: Water, water everywhere But offal foul can stink The sweetest water anywhere. And poison it for drink.

For though there come both cats and dogs, And corpses young and old. The filth breast-high that’s floating by Is from some barge’s hold.

God bless me! honest waterman. You’ve told me quite enough. Why look’st thou so? From my barge know I shot the putrid stuff!79

The poet captures everything wrong with the Thames: poisonous, cholera-spreading waters; overwhelming stench from industrial and human waste; dead bodies; and overcrowding from industrial barges. This was over twenty years after the Great Stink. Many nineteenth-century writings on the London Thames alternate between lamentations on its newly modified and manufactured nature,

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such as satiric pieces in popular magazines like Truth and Punch, and more serious odes to the ancient river, which often focus on the Thames’s place in Britain’s history and cultural imagination. Some poems accomplish both at the same time, like Thomas Love Peacock’s The Genius of the Thames (1810). This lyrical ode is based on Peacock’s two-week walking tour of the Thames in 1810. Although he expressed disappointment when he arrived at the source of the Thames, which, by that time, was dominated by a large pump pouring water into the Thames and Severn Canal, the poem is largely positive and nationalistic, praising the Thames as a constant source of poetic inspiration. That inspiration, though, was in danger of fading: in verses that serve as an epigraph and introduction to the poem, Peacock laments that “Dryads and Genii,” which once populated the Thames, have fled “the dying gales,” “desolated hills, / Polluted meads, and blood-stained rills” that now dominate its ecosystem.80 However, Peacock spends little time on the current state of the Thames, instead tracing its centrality to Britain and the literary tradition from the ancient world through Roman conquest to the emergence of the British Empire. At one point, he details a “lofty forest” of “giant” trees where London now stands.81 Drawing from a common literary trope of the time—to describe a “forest of masts” on the Thames— Peacock calls to readers’ minds the transformation of ancient trees into the many ships, docks, and houses that line the Thames in London.82 He goes on to describe other cities on the Thames, such as Chelsea, Twickenham, and Oxford, which were removed from the pollution and muck of London and which drew authors throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ultimately, he provides a cultural history of the Thames, but, looking back, its appearance in 1810 serves as a cautionary artifact on what might be lost in the Anthropocene and what was to come just a few decades later. By the 1820s, satires on the Thames were commonplace in magazines and newspapers. In his well-known engraving Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water (1828), William Heath depicts a woman in a state of shock after looking at a drop of Thames water through a microscope: what she sees is a host of human-made monsters (see Fig. 3.1). The drawing is partly a satirical response to an 1828 report by the Commission of the London Water Supply on the city’s unsafe drinking water, and in

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Fig. 3.1 William Heath, Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water, 1828. Etching with watercolor. Wellcome Library, London, UK

part a caricature of popular traveling exhibitions where pseudo-scientists would use microscopes to examine river water. Twenty years after Heath’s drawing, a cluster of Thames-related pieces appeared in the fifteenth volume of Punch magazine (1848). On a single page in this volume, a satiric “Ode on the Thames” appears directly above a short piece on “British Manufactories,” where the author humorously explains that a Westminster hospital will no longer take in patients with cholera unless they can prove it is local British cholera, and not some other form of foreign cholera. After a global cholera outbreak reached London in the 1830s, killing tens of thousands of Britons, another had just begun in 1848, affecting London most severely—due in large part to the polluted Thames. The ode plays on this link between the river and deadly disease:

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Beneath the City’s thousand sewers Old Thames runs to and fro; This way and that its filth he pours, As his tide doth ebb and flow; And foul Mephitis ever soars From the mud that swags below. Oh! oh! This thing ought not to be so; No! no! no!

Oh! cease your idle clatter, Since to us it is no matter, Tho’ the Thames grow thick as batter; And for all you say, Though Miasma play the devil, Yet while fluids find their level, We will wallow, roll, and revel In our mud for aye! Yes, in every kind of faecula, In sempiterna saecula, In saecula, in faecula, In faecula and saecula Hooray! hooray!83

The Thames is so filthy that it produces “Mephitis,” or poisonous gas, to the poet’s feigned despair. But the anxiety was real: people could no longer trust water. The unwholesome and unnatural atmosphere of London, it seems, “pours” from the Thames. The river is not so much water as some kind of manufactured slime: the poet describes the Thames as “mud” and “batter,” and, in the final lines, sarcastically cheers for the eternal life (sempiterna saecula) of its muddy, filthy sediment (faecula). The Thames’s transformation from a natural waterway to a modified product of human manufacture seems permanent. “Dirty Father Thames” appears a few pages later in the same volume: it is a full-page drawing of a disheveled man fishing for trash on the Thames, accompanied by a satirical poem (see Fig. 3.2). The Thames is full of dead fish, boots, clothing, and barges blowing smoke into the air. The poem provides an even darker set of images:

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Fig. 3.2 Dirty Father Thames, in Punch 15 (London, 1848)

Filthy river, filthy river, Foul from London to the Nore, What art thou but one vast gutter, One tremendous common shore?

All beside thy sludgy waters, All beside thy reeking ooze, Christian folks inhale mephitis, Which thy bubbly bosom brews.

All her foul abominations Into thee the City throws; These pollutions, ever churning, To and fro thy current flows.

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And from thee is brew’d our porter— Thee, thou gully, puddle, sink! Thou, vile cesspool, art the liquor Whence is made the beer we drink!

Thou, too, has a Conservator, He who fills the civic chair; Well does he conserve thee, truly. Does he not, my good Lord Mayor?84

The poet identifies the most “filthy” and “foul” stretch of the Thames as that from London to the Nore, an area about thirty miles east of the city where the river reaches the North Sea. This stretch is “one vast gutter,” a dumping zone for human and industrial waste. Like other poetic critiques, the author describes the river as producing poisonous gas, sludge, and “reeking ooze.” The poet attributes the various “pollutions” directly to the Thames. Curiously, the poet also laments the fact that London porter is brewed from the Thames’s waters, though beer was much safer to drink than water. By the nineteenth century, breweries were located all along the Thames in and around London, initially to draw water from the river and then increasingly because of the easy access to coal and grain arriving on ships. However, most breweries relied on either wells or the New River for their water, the latter of which was an artificial waterway that brought in freshwater to London from the River Lea and various springs along its route. But these sources were also subject to pollution from the Thames and from London in general. Accordingly, in the final stanza, the poet makes a direct appeal to the city’s leaders to address the Thames problem, echoed frequently in newspapers and magazines throughout the 1840s and 1850s. In another essay from the 1848 Punch volume, just a few pages after “Dirty Father Thames,” a writer muses on London’s rapid urban expansion. The author marvels at the “new towns that have lately sprung up, like so many aquatic mushrooms, on each side of the Thames.”85 This simile plays on how rapidly mushrooms grow, as well as the fact that fungi thrive in wet conditions, providing a rather dirty, funky image of suburban sprawl. The author refers to “the tremendous overflow of population” in London as a “mania,” imagining a near future where the Thames “will be only one immense street [with] large barges…fitted up as hotels, and

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a little town of inhabited boats moored in the middle of the stream.”86 The essay then develops as a satirical guide for tourists visiting the new suburb of North Woolwich, which, at the time of writing, had no hotel, restaurant, or residents: it’s a new town waiting to be populated (this is an exaggeration—several hundred people lived there in the 1840s). Yet, the author must have been at least partially genuine: London’s growth was unmistakable, and it was clear that commerce and urbanization followed closely the route of the Thames through the city. Britain’s greatest nineteenth-century poet of the Thames wasn’t even a poet, but a novelist: Charles Dickens. His novels are full of some of the most memorable descriptions of the London Thames and its polluted environs, and scholars have written about these in great length. Yet, excepting recent work by Jesse Oak Taylor and Allen MacDuffie, Dickens’s descriptions of the Thames have not been read as representations of the early Anthropocene.87 Taylor devotes two chapters to Dickens in The Sky of Our Manufacture (2016), focused on smog and atmosphere, while MacDuffie shows how Dickens uses images of energy loss when writing of urban ecologies. According to MacDuffie, Dickens associates London with loss of heat, death of the sun, nonrenewable natural resources, and environmental destruction. His novels imagine what scientists were beginning to uncover in the nineteenth century: how “the entire cosmos…was being remade by industry.”88 On a more local scale, the transformation of the Thames from “a fine fresh river” to “a deadly sewer” often serves as a model of the urban world for Dickens.89 Consider, for instance, his well-known description of Jacob’s Island in Oliver Twist (1839), which is “near to that part of the Thames…where the buildings on the banks are the dirtiest and the vessels on the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of close-built low-roofed houses.”90 Jacob’s Island was an infamous slum on the south bank of the Thames, known in the nineteenth century for its criminal activity, poverty, and intense levels of pollution and disease. Dickens first emphasizes the pervasiveness of coal soot and smoke from ships on the river and houses along the bank, which are partly responsible for the filthy waters. As Henry Mayhew wrote at the time, the waters around Jacob’s Island are “as red as blood, from the colouring matter that pours into it from the reeking leather-dressers close by,”91 and Dickens also points out that the “sluices at the Lead Mines” regularly dump waste into the waters.92 But the main thrust of his description shows a link between the filthy, manufactured ecology and the people who live on Jacob’s Island.

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For Dickens, this new urban environment had a direct impact on human development: To reach this place, the visitor has to penetrate through a maze of close, narrow, and muddy streets, thronged by the roughest and poorest of waterside people, and devoted to the traffic they may be supposed to occasion. The cheapest and least delicate provisions are heaped in the shops; the coarsest and commonest articles of wearing apparel dangle at the salesman’s door, and stream from the house-parapet and windows. Jostling with unemployed labourers of the lowest class, ballast-heavers, coal-whippers, brazen women, ragged children, and the very raff and refuse of the river, he makes his way with difficulty along, assailed by offensive sights and smells from the narrow alleys which branch off on the right and left, and deafened by the clash of ponderous waggons that bear great piles of merchandise from the stacks of warehouses that rise from every corner. Arriving, at length, in streets remoter and less-frequented than those through which he has passed, he walks beneath tottering house-fronts projecting over the pavement, dismantled walls that seem to totter as he passes, chimneys half crushed half hesitating to fall, windows guarded by rusty iron bars that time and dirt have almost eaten away, and every imaginable sign of desolation and neglect. In such a neighbourhood, beyond Dockhead in the Borough of Southwark, stands Jacob’s Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet deep and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in, once called Mill Pond, but known in these days as Folly Ditch. It is a creek or inlet from the Thames, and can always be filled at high water by opening the sluices at the Lead Mills from which it took its old name. At such times, a stranger, looking from one of the wooden bridges thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see the inhabitants of the houses on either side lowering from their back doors and windows, buckets, pails, domestic utensils of all kinds, in which to haul the water up; and when his eye is turned from these operations to the houses themselves, his utmost astonishment will be excited by the scene before him. Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half-a-dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched: with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it—as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch.93

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The filth of the polluted Thames has penetrated every aspect of human life on Jacob’s Island, from the crazy and crumbling buildings to the warehouses and their stuffs to the people themselves, who haul up the dirtiest of Thames water, presumably for drinking, cooking, and washing. The wooden homes seem to emerge from the “mud” and “slime” of the river itself, “thrusting themselves out” and “fall[ing back] into it” in a cycle that follows the ebb and tide. These “roughest and poorest of waterside people” are a product of the Thames, inhabitants of the early Anthropocene most vulnerable to and impacted by the coal-powered industrial capitalism that has reshaped the city. Haunting images of the Thames and its urban environs pop up in many of Dickens’s other novels. In the memorable opening chapter of Our Mutual Friend (1865), two mudlarks fish out a dead human body from the river.94 As Dickens makes clear, such activity was not atypical. In an oft-cited passage from David Copperfield (1850), the titular character tracks down a social outcast named Martha Endell to a “dreary neighborhood” where the Thames meets Westminster: There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and groveling in the dust, underneath which—having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather—they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves. The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river side, arose by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year’s handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb tide. There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole place. Or else it looked as if it had gradually decomposed into that nightmare condition, out of the overflowings of the polluted stream.95

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This accumulating list of filth, garbage, and industrial objects abandoned on the riverbank connects environmental degradation with industrialcapitalist culture. The “waste” of land, dominated by “mud,” “ooze,” and “slush,” corresponds to a waste of things: “carcases of houses” (which recalls actual carcasses of humans and animals in the Thames), “rusty iron monsters,” and numerous “strange objects” litter the landscape, material emblems of the capitalist cycle of production, consumption, and discharge. This waste accumulates in and around the Thames, as do the various industrial works that “pour smoke” into the atmosphere. These things continue to have a kind of life, indicated by Dickens’s characteristic quasi-personification of inanimate objects: they are “groveling in the dust” and “trying to hide themselves.”96 This waste, in other words, continues to impact the Thames, and, by extension, London, England, Britain, and Earth itself. Where does all our stuff end up? Where does our waste go? How does it continue to seep into and modify environments? This impact is gradual, almost imperceptible, but, as Dickens suggests, these inanimate objects, like the smoke that pours from factories, sticks around, accumulates, and creates a history that will haunt the future world. Dickens also imagines this area as ground zero for London’s recent cholera outbreaks, drawing a link between industrialization and disease. Cholera, he muses, either emanates from the ground itself or originates in “the overflowings of the polluted stream,” which creates the “nightmare condition” he ultimately fails to capture adequately with language. This new landscape, this new waterscape, this new nature of the Anthropocene defies conventional narrative techniques and literary descriptions. Thus, Dickens uses the accumulating list, an aesthetic of early Anthropocene literature. Dickens uses similar imagery in his nonfiction writings. In “Down with the Tide” (1853), an essay published in his popular weekly magazine Household Words, Dickens develops the list aesthetic with a deep time perspective on the Thames: A very dark night it was, and bitter cold; the east wind blowing bleak, and bringing with it stinging particles from marsh, and moor, and fen—from the Great Desert and Old Egypt, may be. Some of the component parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London might be mummy-dust, dry atoms from the Temple at Jerusalem, camels’ footprints, crocodiles’ hatching-places, loosened grains of expression from the

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visages of blunt-nosed sphynxes, waifs and strays from caravans of turbaned merchants, vegetation from jungles, frozen snow from the Himalayas. O! It was very, very dark upon the Thames, and it was bitter, bitter cold.97

Dickens imagines “particles” and “vapours” blowing in from surrounding wetlands as containing the same atoms, the same bits of Earth, as those from ancient civilizations and geological wonders that span the globe. Dickens adopts the global, interconnected theory of Earth established by several eighteenth-century writers (as discussed in Chapter 1 of this book), as well as a transhistorical perspective that blends past, present, and future. He situates the Thames as a symbol of the British Empire, akin to the Great Desert of Old Egypt and the Temple Mount of Old Jerusalem, which simultaneously asserts Britain as the world’s most powerful civilization and civilization itself as transitory and ultimately meaningless. In the second half of the passage, Dickens moves away from human history to the jungles and frozen mountains of a pre-human past, an Earth indifferent to empire and industrialization. The Thames, too, while currently transformed by Britain’s newfound geophysical power, will outlive this London blip. The “river,” he writes, “looks so broad and vast, so murky and silent, seems such an image of death in the midst of the great city’s life.”98 The darkness of the night enhances this inward-turning moment, where Dickens loses sense of his individuality and momentarily embraces the insignificance of human life when situated in terms of a geological time scale. Despite Dickens and many other authors writing on the dangerous state of the Thames, London’s leaders took no meaningful action until the Great Stink of 1858, when, during a particularly warm summer, the smell of sewage and industrial filth in the Thames reached such a level that Parliament soaked its curtains in lime chloride to combat the stench. Leaders proceeded to dump lime into the river itself, but this proved ineffectual. Politicians such as Benjamin Disraeli, then Leader of the House of Commons, called the Thames “a Stygian pool” during a Parliamentary debate,99 an apt metaphor given that 250 tons of sewage were dumped into the river on a daily basis.100 Henry Morley, Dickens’s editor, responded with an essay on “A Way to Clean Rivers” (1858). Morley outlines major problems with industrial rivers in Manchester, Birmingham, and London, which had been polluted “as never before have rivers been polluted since the world was made”: fish have disappeared, people are dying from disease, filth pours into the waters at an alarming

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rate, and the human population continues to grow.101 To address the Great Stink, Morley calls for an embankment of the Thames and a modernization of London’s sewage system, which eventually happened: the government appointed Joseph Bazalgette to build a new sewer system, which was completed in 1875.102 Yet, by the end of the century, the Thames remained a manufactured river of the early Anthropocene, albeit a cleaner one than in the preceding decades. Magazines continued to publish satires, and poets continued to imagine its hellish nature. In a sonnet from Margaret Armour’s Thames Sonnets and Semblances (1897), she asks, “Blighted and baleful stream! What wizard spell / Hath turned thy lucent wave to Stygian slime[?]”103 In two lines that culminate a century of literary treatments of the Thames, Armour likens Britain’s geophysical-industrial power to magic and the Thames to the River Styx—for what else could transform a river as ancient as the Thames into a poisonous boundary to the Underworld? In the twenty-first century, the Thames Water utility company still struggles with environmental issues, as London’s population is now over eight million. The lasting impacts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization continue to shape London, its ecologies, and its people, and the literature of the early Anthropocene continues to shape perceptions and imaginings of the Thames.

Rivers as Liquid History Joseph Conrad offers a darker Dickensian view of the Thames in the opening scene of Heart of Darkness (1899). The narrator first provides a brief English history of the “old river” focused on “the seed of commonwealths” and “germs of empires” during the reign of Queen Elizabeth—a kind of mainstream, nationalistic history of the Thames— but when Marlow breaks the group’s silence with his famous phrase that London “also…has been one of the dark places of the earth,” this history takes a much longer view. Marlow explains that humans “live in the flicker…as the old earth keeps rolling,” an image that conjures both deep time and deep space, of Earth rolling in the vast void of the immense universe and humans a mere flicker on its four-billion-year-old existence. Marlow then imagines “when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago,” when England was “the very end of the world” and there was “nothing but Thames water to drink.” At that time, the area where they now sit in London was full of “all that mysterious life of the wilderness

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that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men…the incomprehensible.” Marlow collapses time, linking that mysterious, wild past with the present savagery of the British Empire. The Romans, he continues, “were no colonists,” but rather “conquerors,” though it’s all the same, in the end: “It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale. …The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves.” His ensuing tale is the story of Heart of Darkness, but this frame—four men on a boat on the Thames—indicates the continued significance of the river to literary inspiration and Britain’s industrial-imperial-capitalist empire. In the final lines of the novel, when this frame returns, the men sit on the boat in silence, meditating on Marlow’s tale, watching “the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth.”104 The Empire is not yet done, and the Anthropocene is just underway. The Thames is a driving force of the early Anthropocene. Writers at the end of the nineteenth century continued to depict the river as a central symbol of the British Empire and industrial expansion, though in different forms than their predecessors. And unlike Heart of Darkness, which focuses on Britain’s present, many authors shifted focus to the future, especially in seminal works of science fiction. Two key examples, which could just as easily be called cli-fi as sci-fi, are Richard Jeffries’s After London (1885) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). Both novels imagine potential futures of the London Thames: After London is post-apocalyptic, while News from Nowhere is utopian, but each speaks to the early Anthropocene and the rise of climate fiction in the twentieth century. The Thames figures prominently in News from Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest. The subtitle indicates the new geological epoch Morris envisions for the future—it’s a version of the Anthropocene not dominated by industrial capitalism. The plot of this “utopian romance” is rather straightforward: the narrator-protagonist, William Guest, falls asleep in a dingy room on the banks of the Thames in 1890 and awakens in the twenty-first century, where England has become an agrarian socialist society without private property, money, or class distinctions. He learns about this society and the revolution that produced it through conversations with the people he encounters, and much of this “action” takes place during a four-day trip up the Thames. One of the first things that strike Guest is the state of the Thames. He is immediately astonished that

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men are fishing for salmon in the river, as fish had disappeared in the mid-nineteenth century: I was going to say, “But is this the Thames?” but held my peace in my wonder, and turned my bewildered eyes eastward to look at the bridge again, and thence to the shores of the London river; and surely there was enough to astonish me. For though there was a bridge across the stream and houses on its banks, how all was changed from last night! The soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys were gone; the engineer’s works gone; the lead-works gone; and no sound of rivetting and hammering came down the west wind from Thorneycroft’s. Then the bridge! I had perhaps dreamed of such a bridge, but never seen such an one out of an illuminated manuscript; for not even the Ponte Vecchio at Florence came anywhere near it. It was of stone arches, splendidly solid, and as graceful as they were strong; high enough also to let ordinary river traffic through easily. Over the parapet showed quaint and fanciful little buildings, which I supposed to be booths or shops, beset with painted and gilded vanes and spirelets. The stone was a little weathered, but showed no marks of the grimy sootiness which I was used to on every London building more than a year old. In short, to me a wonder of a bridge.105

The Thames is clean and thriving, and London is free from the pollution and filth caused by industrialization and overpopulation. This new River Thames reflects the new England that Guest observes during his trip up the river: all of the bridges and buildings are pristine, untouched by the black soot and smoke from coal-burning factories and chimneys, and all of the people seem so, well, happy. Everything is so “pleasant,” Guest notes on multiple occasions, so unlike the nineteenth-century Thames and its environs. In the final line of the story, after he has awakened back in 1890 London, he muses that this was “a vision rather than a dream.”106 Morris presents the story as a real possibility, a prophetic vision of a potential future—a version of the Anthropocene in which humans have transformed Earth for the better. Jeffries, on the other hand, presents a new version of the apocalyptic flood narrative prevalent in Greek mythology and various world religions, but rather than a flood sent by the gods, the flood in After London is caused by an unspecified natural disaster that results in the end of organized civilization. After London is thus a seminal work of post-apocalyptic fiction (and one that inspired Morris’s News from Nowhere). In Jeffries’s book, the natural world has slowly reclaimed England, and the remaining

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humans have returned to a kind of barbarism, living in isolated communities on the island of England. The novel contains two parts: “The Relapse Into Barbarism” and “Wild England.” The first is a detailed overview and history of the new nature in this post-apocalyptic world, and the second an adventure romance centered on the protagonist, Felix, as he explores post-apocalyptic England. But the plot is largely superfluous. Jeffries focuses on detailed descriptions of nature in the form of a futuristic natural history work. The novel is a richly imaginative meditation on a possible future. In the opening pages, Jeffries places special emphasis on water. As canals, dams, mills, and modified rivers deteriorate, waterways revert to their natural states and transform the anthropogenic landscape. Rains and flooding create new wetlands, burying bridges, villages, and other humanmade structures. A gigantic lake forms in the middle of England, and the area where London once stood becomes a poisonous swamp devoid of life. The waters are “black” and possess a foul odor, and a “yellow mist” encompasses the entire area.107 In the second part of the novel, Felix accidentally enters this danger zone: He had penetrated into the midst of that dreadful place, on which he had heard many a tradition: how the earth was poison, the water poison, the air poison, the very light of heaven, falling through such an atmosphere, poison. There were said to be places where the earth was on fire and belched forth sulphurous fumes, supposed to be from the combustion of the enormous stores of strange and unknown chemicals collected by the wonderful people of those times. Upon the surface of the water there was a greenish-yellow oil, to touch which was death to any creature; it was the very essence of corruption. Sometimes it floated before the wind, and fragments became attached to reeds or flags far from the place itself. If a moorhen or duck chanced to rub the reed, and but one drop stuck to its feathers, it forthwith died. Of the red waters he had not heard, nor of the black, into which he had unwittingly sailed.108

Drawing from the work of John Ruskin, who had delivered and published his lecture on The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century the previous year, Jeffries links moral and environmental degradation, a critique of capitalism and its attendant effects on bodies, minds, and ecologies. He also draws from the tradition of climate writing on London and the Thames, which emphasizes the city’s manufactured atmosphere and the river’s discolored waters. But what is most haunting here is the idea

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that Britons’ industrial activity in the nineteenth century will continue to impact Earth well into future, and potentially forever. This is a key element of the Anthropocene: Jeffries suggests that nineteenth-century Britain inaugurated a new geological epoch. As Jesse Oak Taylor writes, Jeffries shows “that the legacy of modernity will lie not in the decaying grandeur of its monuments but in the everlasting life of its waste.”109 This legacy continues to haunt the world in the twenty-first century, as several nations grapple with nuclear waste and how to warn future humans about the dangers of nuclear waste sites, which will remain deadly for tens of thousands of years (if not longer). Anthropologists and scientists working in the field of nuclear semiotics are developing ways to mark deep geological nuclear repositories, something Jeffries did not consider fully in his vision of a drowned, post-apocalyptic London. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, new versions of the flood myth are common in works of climate fiction, as authors imagine catastrophic floods caused by global warming. In his important study of contemporary Anthropocene fiction, Adam Trexler observes that the flood has become “the dominant literary strategy for locating climate change.”110 Various flood narratives drive some of the most influential and popular works of climate fiction, such as J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), George Turner’s The Sea and the Summer/Drowning Towers (1987), Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Earth (2015) and New York 2140 (2017). These novels reflect real worries about melting glaciers, disappearing islands, and flooded coastal cities. They also reflect real opportunities: in twenty-first-century geopolitics, nations are already jostling for control of anticipated waterways in the Arctic that will be created as glaciers melt. There will likely be much competition in the Arctic for new trading routes, new areas for resource development and exploitation, and, perhaps hundreds of years from now, land for human habitat and agriculture. And, as in the nineteenth century, literature continues to offer ways to imagine these possible futures and to represent how manufactured waters shape the Anthropocene.

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Notes 1. See Stephen Bygrave, “Romantic Poems and Contexts,” in Romantic Writings, ed. Stephen Bygrave (London: Routledge, 1996), 20. 2. E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: The New Press, 1993), 176. 3. See Raymond Turner, “English Coal Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” The American Historical Review 27, no. 1 (1921): 1–23. 4. Ibid., 8–9. 5. Turner, 6. A “chaldron” was an imprecise measurement for coal, ranging from three to six thousand pounds. 6. Charles Knight, et al., The Land We Live in: A Pictorial, Historical, and Literary Study of the British Islands, vol. 2 (London: Charles Knight, 1847), 26. 7. Ibid., 30. 8. Turner, 3. 9. William Blake, “London,” lines 3–4, in The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (New York: Penguin, 1986). 10. Ibid., line 8. 11. Qtd. in Thompson, 175. 12. Ibid. 13. The “little blasts of fear” refer to political proclamations against reformers, delivered by the “hireling,” or a person paid by the government to repress dissent. 14. Blake, “London,” line 10. 15. Arthur Hill Hassall, A Microscopic Examination of the Water supplied to the Inhabitants of London and the Suburban Districts (London: Samuel Highley, 1850), 25. 16. There are many studies devoted to particular rivers in Britain, but none that do so from an Anthropocenic perspective. For key studies to which I am indebted, see Peter Ackroyd, Thames: Sacred River (New York: Random House, 2007) and Thames: The Biography (New York: Anchor Books, 2009); Christina Hardyment, Writing the Thames (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2016); and Leona J. Skelton, Tyne after Tyne: An Environmental History of a River’s Battle for Protection (Winwick: White Horse Press, 2017). 17. William Ellis, “News from Newcastle: Upon the Coal-pits about Newcastle-upon-Tyne,” lines 1–2, in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, vol. 3, ed. George Saintsbury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). Saintsbury attributes the poem to John Cleveland, but it was published under the name of William Ellis in 1651. 18. Ibid., lines 36, 42, 50, 86.

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19. Ibid., lines 123–26. 20. Ralph Gardiner, Englands Grievance Discovered, in relation to the Coal Trade with the Map of the River of Tine, and Situation of the Town and Corporation of Newcastle (London: R. Ibbitson, 1655). 21. Skelton, 82. 22. J.U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1932), 29–30. 23. James Murray, The Travels of the Imagination; a True Journey from Newcastle to London: To Which Are Added, American Independence, an Everlasting Deliverance from British Tyranny: a Poem (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1778), 12. 24. For an overview of the evolution of Newcastle histories, see Rosemary Sweet, “The Production of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England,” Urban History 23, no. 2 (1996): 171–88. 25. John Brand, The History and Antiquities of the Town and County of the Town of Newcastle upon Tyne, including an Account of the Coal Trade of that place and embellished with Engraved Views of the Publick Buildings, &c., vol. 2 (London: B. White and Son, 1789), 310. 26. Ibid., 242. 27. Ibid., 241. 28. Ibid., 22. 29. Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of the Imagination; and Other Poems (New York: R. and W.A. Bartow, 1819), 82–83. 30. See, for example, Neil Astley, ed., Land of Three Rivers: The Poetry of North-East England (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2017). 31. John Gibson, “The Tyne,” in Allan’s Illustrated Edition of Tyneside Songs and Readings, rev. ed. (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: T. and G. Allan, 1891), 32. 32. “The Coal Trade,” in Allan’s Illustrated Edition of Tyneside Songs, 277. 33. “Coaly Tyne,” in Allan’s Illustrated Edition of Tyneside Songs, 158. 34. There were often so many ships ballasting and de-ballasting that the river fluctuated dangerously between super shallow and overflowing. In 1765, a petition had been put forth to regulate the ships but was shot down by the Corporation. See Brand, 32. 35. Robert Gilchrist, “More Innovations,” in Allan’s Illustrated Edition of Tyneside Songs, 194. 36. Anna Seward, “Colebrook Dale,” in The Poetical Works of Anna Seward; with Extracts from Her Literary Correspondence, ed. Walter Scott (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne and Co., 1810), 314–15, 316. 37. Letters of Anna Seward, vol. 1, ed. Archibald Constable (Edinburgh: George Ramsey and Company, 1811), 338–39.

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38. See Donna Coffey, “Protecting the Botanic Garden: Seward, Darwin, and Coalbrookdale,” Women’s Studies 31, no. 2 (2002): 141–64; and Sharon Setzer, “‘Pond’rous Engines’ in ‘Outraged Groves’: The Environmental Argument of Anna Seward’s ‘Colebrook Dale’,” European Romantic Review 18, no. 1 (2007): 69–82. 39. See Barrie Trinder, The Most Extraordinary District in the World: Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale (Felpham: Phillimore, 1998). 40. Ibid., 72. 41. Anna Seward, Original Sonnets on Various Subjects and Odes Paraphrased from Horace (London: G. Sael, 1799), 65. 42. Coffey, 150. 43. See Alan Bewell, Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). 44. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, 3rd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1795), 60. 45. James Hutton, “Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1 (1788): 304. 46. Darwin, canto 3, lines 264–66. 47. Max Satchell, “Navigable Waterways and the Economy of England and Wales: 1600–1835,” in The Online Historical Atlas of Transport, Urbanization and Economic Development in England and Wales c. 1680–1911, ed. L. Shaw-Taylor, D. Bogart, and M. Satchell (University of Cambridge, 2017), 23. 48. See Gerard Turnbull, “Canals, Coal and Regional Growth during the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review 40, no. 4 (1987): 537–60. 49. The Liverpool Guide; or, Stranger’s Companion, 3rd ed. (Liverpool: Worrall and Taylor, 1831), 5, 21. 50. Richard Jeffries writes of this loss of biodiversity in his 1884 essay “The Modern Thames.” See also Mike Acreman, ed., The Hydrology of the UK: A Study of Change (London: Routledge, 2000); and Paul A. Keddy, Wetland Ecologies: Principles and Conservation, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 51. For details of Lyell’s contributions to geology, see Chapters 1 and 2 of this book. 52. These advertisements appear in the April 1820 edition of the collection, held by the Huntington Library. 53. William Wordsworth, Advertisement to The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia: And Other Poems. To which is Annexed a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820).

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54. David A. Fennell, Ecotourism: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1999), 43. 55. William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye: and several parts of South Wales, &c. relative chiefly to picturesque beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770, 2nd ed. (London: R. Blamire, 1789), 1–2. 56. Ibid., 17–18. 57. Ibid., 22–23. 58. Ibid., 52–53. 59. William Gilpin, Observations on several parts of England, particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, 2nd ed. (London: R. Blamire, 1788), xi–xii, 69, 70. 60. Ibid., 94. 61. See Richard Hamblyn, Landscape and the Contours of Knowledge: The Literature of Travel and the Sciences of the Earth in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1994); and John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 62. Gilpin, Lakes, 95. 63. Ibid., 77. 64. See Paula R. Feldman and Daniel Robinson, eds., A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 65. William Wordsworth, sonnet XXI, in Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Geoffrey Jackson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 74. 66. William Wordsworth, sonnet II, in Sonnet Series, 57. 67. Wyatt, 161. 68. William Wordsworth, sonnet V, in Sonnet Series, 58–59. 69. William Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes, 5th ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Henry Frowde, 1908), 62. 70. Ibid., 63. 71. Ibid., 69. 72. William Wordsworth, sonnet VII, in Sonnet Series, 59. 73. See, for example, Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World, trans. Jane Billinghurst (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016). 74. Wordsworth, Guide, 92. 75. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Sonnet: To the River Otter,” in The Major Works, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6. 76. See James C. McKusick, “Afterword: The Future of Ecocriticism,” in Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Lisa Ottum and Seth T. Reno (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2016), 233–40.

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77. See Bridget Keegan, “Clare’s River Poetry,” The Wordsworth Circle 34, no. 3 (2003): 134–37; and British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 (New York: Palgrave, 2008), esp. chap. 6. 78. John Clare, “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters,” lines 121–22, 126, 191, 193, in John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Merryn and Raymond Williams (London: Methuen, 1986). 79. Qtd. in Hardyment, 177–78. 80. Thomas Love Peacock, The Genius of the Thames: A Lyrical Poem, in Two Parts (London: T. Hookham, 1810), v–vi. 81. Ibid., 34. 82. For details on this trope in poetry and art, see Markman Ellis, “River and Labour in Samuel Scott’s Thames Views in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” The London Journal 37, no. 3 (2012): 152–73. 83. “Ode on the Thames,” Punch 15 (London, 1848): 136. 84. “Dirty Father Thames,” Punch 15 (London, 1848): 152. 85. “Sketches in Fresh and Salt Water,” Punch 15 (London, 1848): 158. 86. Ibid. 87. See Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016); and Allen MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 88. MacDuffie, 85. 89. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857), 21. 90. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (New York: Random House, 2001), 384. 91. Henry Mayhew, “Home Is Home, be it never so Homely,” in Meliora: or, Better Times to Come. Being the Contributions of Many Men Touching the Present State and Prospects of Society, 2nd ed., ed. Viscount Ingestre (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1852), 277. 92. Dickens, Oliver Twist, 384. 93. Ibid., 384–85. 94. Mudlarks were people who scavenged the Thames at low tide for money or items they could sell. A mudlark was something of an official “profession” in the nineteenth century: Henry Mayhew wrote of mudlarks in London Labour and the London Poor (1851). 95. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (New York: Penguin, 2004), 685–86. 96. For the seminal study of this Dickensian device, see Dorothea Van Ghent, “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s,” The Sewanee Review 58, no. 3 (1950): 419–38. 97. Charles Dickens, “Down with the Tide,” Household Words (5 February 1853): 481. 98. Ibid.

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99. Commons and Lords Hansard, Commons Sitting, Metropolis Local Management Act Amendment Bill, First Reading, 15 July 1858, vol. 151, 1508. 100. Michelle Allen, Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographers in Victorian London (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 58–59. 101. Henry Morley, “A Way to Clean Rivers,” Household Words (19 July 1858): 80. 102. For details on this event in London history, see Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999). 103. Margaret Armour, “Wharves at Night,” in Thames Sonnets and Semblances (London: Mathews, 1897), 45. 104. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003), 69, 70, 71, 72, 158. 105. William Morris, News from Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from a Utopian Romance (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), 14–15. 106. Ibid., 278. 107. Richard Jeffries, After London; or, Wild England (London: Duckworth and Co., 1911), 257. 108. Ibid., 266. 109. Taylor, 205. 110. Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 82.

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Murray, James. The Travels of the Imagination; a True Journey from Newcastle to London: To Which Are Added, American independence, an Everlasting Deliverance from British Tyranny: a Poem. Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1778. Nef, J.U. The Rise of the British Coal Industry. Vol. 1. London: Routledge, 1932. “Ode on the Thames.” Punch 15 (London, 1848): 136. Peacock, Thomas Love. The Genius of the Thames: A Lyrical Poem, in Two Parts. London: T. Hookham, 1810. Satchell, Max. “Navigable Waterways and the Economy of England and Wales: 1600–1835.” In The Online Historical Atlas of Transport, Urbanization and Economic Development in England and Wales c. 1680–1911. Edited by L. Shaw-Taylor, D. Bogart, and M. Satchell. University of Cambridge, 2017. Setzer, Sharon. “‘Pond’rous Engines’ in ‘Outraged Groves’: The Environmental Argument of Anna Seward’s ‘Colebrook Dale.’” European Romantic Review 18, no. 1 (2007): 69–82. Seward, Anna. Letters of Anna Seward. Vol. 1. Edited by Archibald Constable. Edinburgh: George Ramsey and Company, 1811. ———. Original Sonnets on Various Subjects and Odes Paraphrased from Horace. London: G. Sael, 1799. ———. The Poetical Works of Anna Seward; with Extracts from Her Literary Correspondence. Edited by Walter Scott. Edinburgh: James Ballantyne and Co., 1810. Skelton, Leona J. Tyne after Tyne: An Environmental History of a River’s Battle for Protection. Winwick: White Horse Press, 2017. “Sketches in Fresh and Salt Water.” Punch 15 (London, 1848): 158. Sweet, Rosemary. “The Production of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England.” Urban History 23, no. 2 (1996): 171–88. Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Thompson, E.P. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: The New Press, 1993. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Trinder, Barrie. The Most Extraordinary District in the World: Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale. Felpham: Phillimore, 1998. Turnbull, Gerard. “Canals, Coal and Regional Growth during the Industrial Revolution.” Economic History Review 40, no. 4 (1987): 537–60. Turner, Raymond. “English Coal Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The American Historical Review 27, no. 1 (1921): 1–23. Van Ghent, Dorothea. “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s.” The Sewanee Review 58, no. 3 (1950): 419–38.

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Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World. Translated by Jane Billinghurst. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016. Wordsworth, William. Guide to the Lakes. 5th ed. Edited by Ernest de Selincourt. London: Henry Frowde, 1908. ———. The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia: And Other Poems. To which is Annexed a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820. ———. Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845. Edited by Geoffrey Jackson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Wyatt, John. Wordsworth and the Geologists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

CHAPTER 4

Air: Clouds and Climate Change in the Nineteenth Century

The first time I recognized the clouds brought by the plague-wind as distinct in character was in walking back from Oxford, after a hard day’s work, to Abingdon, in the early spring of 1871…It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls—such of them as are not gone yet where they have to go, and may be flitting hither and thither, doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them. —John Ruskin, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884)

This final chapter focuses on air and atmosphere. As I demonstrate in Chapter 2, industrial fire, smoke, and pollution were increasingly linked to a new geological epoch dominated by humans throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Authors and artists began to represent humanity as a geophysical force of nature that could modify and reshape Earth, similar to the effects of volcanic eruptions and other geological phenomena. As climatology and meteorology developed in the nineteenth century, more attention turned from the ground to the sky, especially in industrial cities where air pollution became a serious public health concern. Smokestacks took on new scientific and cultural meanings. The fog and pollution of London became a perennial feature in literature and art. Poets and artists became obsessed with observing and documenting © The Author(s) 2020 S. T. Reno, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53246-8_4

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the sky. In particular, clouds became a symbol of climate. In this chapter, I argue that literary and visual representations of clouds provide a narrative of climate change in the early Anthropocene as authors and artists document the ecological impacts of industrialization, representing the un-representable: climate change. In making this claim, I extend and expand on Jesse Oak Taylor’s wonderful book, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016). Specifically, I extend his work backward in time. Through what he calls “atmospheric readings” of major late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novels, Taylor treats Victorian literature as Anthropocene literature, arguing that authors’ intensified focus on the artificial climate of London between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Great Smog of 1952 produced the first literary representations of the Anthropocene. However, early Anthropocene literature emerges around one hundred years earlier in the mid-eighteenth century. While much of this earlier work focuses on the geosphere (Chapters 1 and 2 of this book) and hydrosphere (Chapter 3), the atmosphere becomes central to ecological discourses at the turn of the nineteenth century. At the end of the century, John Ruskin identifies “new clouds” in the atmosphere, pointing to another facet of the early Anthropocene. In The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), originally delivered as two lectures at the London Institution, Ruskin uses the cloud as a symbol of Britain’s moral and intellectual decline, as well as an actual manifestation of pollution and climate change. Ruskin first outlines the standard scientific definition of a cloud as “visible vapour of water floating at a certain height in the air” before developing that description through literary and artistic imagery, personal observation, and emotional experience. The purpose of clouds, he argues, is partly to satisfy “human sight and nourishment,” “filling [our] hearts with food and gladness.” Indeed, the appearance of what Ruskin calls “plague-clouds” and “plague-winds” in the latter half of the nineteenth century corresponds both to a “moral gloom” in Britain and to the rise of industrial pollution: the new cloud “looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me.” Nature itself thus shows “an expression of anger as well as of fear and distress” at the “radical change” in climate,

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a “panic-struck, and feverish” mood that results in “Blanched sun,— blighted grass,—blinded man.” Ruskin offers examples of this mood from science, literature, and visual art, concluding that Britons can address climate change through recovering a love of nature: “harmony [with nature] is now broken, and broken the world round. … [Humanity’s] only true happiness is to live in Hope of something to be won by him, in Reverence of something to be worshipped by him, and in Love of something to be cherished by him, and cherished—for ever.”1 Reconciliation is not possible, but, as Ruskin suggests, there is hope that love and happiness may lead to social, political, personal, and spiritual change. Ruskin’s brand of ecological thinking can be traced back to Romanticera poets and artists whose representations of clouds register as modes for feeling and thinking about climate. This emotional component is key. What feelings do humans experience in a rapidly changing world? What new modes of feeling do we need to live in the Anthropocene? In his lecture, Ruskin singles out fear and hope as dominant emotional responses to Britain’s new atmosphere: fear of radical environmental change and hope that a sustainable way of life is still possible. This is a major reason that the Storm-Cloud is considered to be a foundational text of modern environmentalism,2 though it clearly has its roots in the Romantic movement. The rise of climate science, coupled with the visible effects of industrialization, allowed Romantic-era authors to become what James McKusick calls “the first full-fledged ecological writers in the Western literary tradition.”3 Consider, for instance, the opening stanza of the most famous nineteenth-century cloud poem, William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” (1807): I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills, When all at once I saw a crowd A host of dancing Daffodils; Along the Lake, beneath the trees, Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.4

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Wordsworth’s identification with and of a cloud leads to a series of ecological perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. His initial feelings of isolation and melancholy give way to joyful recognition of interconnectedness. The sight of the cloud initiates movement from solitude to community, and the cloud indicates Wordsworth’s engagement with the bourgeoning field of meteorology. He had recently read Luke Howard’s 1803 Essay On the Modification of Clouds, a seminal work in meteorology and climatology. Known as the world’s first meteorologist, Howard’s influence and popularity cannot be understated: he was a celebrity scientist through the first three decades of the nineteenth century, delivering lectures to thunderous applause and influencing poets and artists such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe, Constable, and Turner. He invented the cloud nomenclature used today, and his two-volume Climate of London (1818–1820) inaugurated the study of urban climatology. What he developed was a new way to read the skies as a barometer of weather and climate: after 1803, writers and artists never saw clouds in the same way again.5 Wordsworth draws from this new climate science along with his own understanding of the natural world. In a second stanza added to the 1815 version of the poem, Wordsworth even connects the local space in the Lake District to the solar system, writing that the daffodils are “Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way.”6 The cloud registers Wordsworth’s emotional responses to the interrelatedness of climate, environment, and human existence, and his poem implicitly expresses fear in the possible loss of this natural space: “I gazed—and gazed—but little thought / What wealth the shew to me had brought.”7 The preservation of the Lake District is significant for its poetic inspiration, but, even more so, for the area’s continued presence in the world. “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” is just as much about the cloud as the daffodils: the cloud floats over the entire poem, and its presence as a visible emblem of climate is the catalyst for Wordsworth’s thinking. The poem is an early articulation of ecological awareness grounded in emotional and scientific responses to the climate of Britain. In this way, I draw from art historians such as Hubert Damisch and John Thornes, who chart the evolution of clouds in painting. As they have shown, from Antiquity to the Renaissance, clouds functioned as a symbol of the heavens, of abstract forces (or of God) far removed from human life on Earth. For example, in Antonio de Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin (1526–30), clouds create a portal to heaven—they are not of

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Fig. 4.1 Antonio de Correggio, The Assumption of the Virgin, 1526–30. Fresco. Parma Cathedral, Italy

Earth (see Fig. 4.1). However, a shift in landscape painting during the eighteenth century challenged this view: clouds descended from the heavens to Earth as painters began to embrace the picturesque and, during the nineteenth century, science.8 John Constable is a key figure here: in his landscapes, clouds are an intimate part of Earth, linked to the landscape and indicative of climate. Constable also read Howard, and he is famous for creating hundreds of “cloud studies,” where he would paint England’s changing skyscape on a daily basis, noting the date, time, temperature, wind, etc., in a scientific manner (see Fig. 4.2). Similarly, when poets like Wordsworth depict clouds, they are engaging with the climate made perceptible and accessible, if only for a moment. Much more than literary commonplace or background detail, these works of cloud art are aesthetic representations of climate.

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Fig. 4.2 John Constable, Extensive Landscape with Grey Clouds, c. 1821. Oil on paper and panel. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA

Nineteenth-century clouds act as acknowledgments of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” objects so vast and massive that we cannot directly access them, yet nevertheless exert their influence on every aspect of human life. Hyperobjects provide a useful way to understand literary and artistic clouds and the kinds of affective and emotional responses they register. As Morton explains, hyperobjects such as global warming and evolution force us to think about vast spatial and temporal dimensions of the world in a much different manner than we are accustomed to, often resulting in the strange, uncanny realization of ecological coexistence and interconnectedness. Hyperobjects also elicit a range of emotional responses, from well-known feelings such as awe, wonder, joy, hope, and fear, to relatively recent feelings such as global dread and solastalgia, the latter of which refers to an existential distress at the loss or drastic transformation of one’s home as a result of extreme environmental change.9 These new Anthropocenic feelings find precursors in the nineteenth century. Apocalyptic “end of the world” claims are typical in modern environmental rhetoric, and similar fears were rampant during the nineteenth

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century, but, as Morton argues, the end of the world already happened. It occurred along with the Industrial Revolution, the moment when humans became “a geophysical force on a planetary scale.”10 The world ended when the Anthropocene began. For Morton, the Anthropocene marks the end of the anthropocentric world, but Earth remains. What hyperobjects force us to do is engage directly with Earth—with material, ecological realities—and not illusory conceptions of the world. Both climate change and affect are kinds of hyperobjects: they are beyond (and prior to) language, measurable but not tangible, felt but not completely understood. Both also require narratives to make them intelligible. As affect theorists such as Eric Shouse, Brian Massumi, and Martha Nussbaum have argued, narrative makes affect accessible through a kind of “translation” into emotion. Shouse describes affect as “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.”11 Massumi similarly defines affect as a non-conscious “intensity” that the mind later “qualifies” as emotion.12 Importantly, narrative facilitates this qualification and movement. Nussbaum suggests that emotions are narratives: “emotions…have a complicated cognitive structure that is in part narrative in form, involving a story of our relation to cherished objects that extends over time.”13 Many scholars thus distinguish affect from emotion along narrative lines: “affect” is a pre-conscious biological response, or physiological intensity, while “emotion” involves awareness of affect through cognition, memory, and narratives of accumulative experiences. This understanding of affect is not entirely new. In fact, the contemporary affect theorists cited above ground their work in the writings of seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who had a significant influence on eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy. He was also widely read by Romantic-era poets and scientists, such as Darwin, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley.14 In Ethics (1677), Spinoza defines the “affects” as “affections of the Body by which the Body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections. … Affects are confused ideas of the Mind and Body at once.”15 Spinoza uses the Latin word affectus, which editors have translated as “affect” and “emotion,” but for Spinoza “affect” is a modification produced in the body before it is consciously understood (thus the “confused idea”). This dual process of corporeal and cognitive response is what eighteenth-century writers

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such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant pick up on in theories of the sublime, and what modern theorists like Shouse and Massumi have in mind when they write of affects as “intensities.” So, for many eighteenthand nineteenth-century writers, such as Wordsworth, Spinozan affect was an integral part of their thinking about the atmosphere, always imbued with affective resonance and an interaction of environment, bodies, and cognition.16 These suggestions from affect theory have important implications for nineteenth-century clouds. For many poets, painters, and scientists, clouds construct a narrative of climate change, and, importantly, that narrative is suffused with the psychological, physiological, and emotional experiences of living in a time of great change, of witnessing the transition from one geological epoch to another. This is why literature and art are so important to any narrative of the Anthropocene: artworks force us “to awaken…from the dream that the world is about to end, because action on Earth…depends on it.”17 Nineteenth-century clouds, as local manifestations of the hyperobject climate change, are a form of such ecological thought. In this chapter, I trace a trajectory from writings on industrial smoke and clouds at the turn of the nineteenth century to Ruskin’s 1884 lecture, forming a narrative of nineteenth-century climate change through clouds. Studies of clouds have tended to focus on the emergence of meteorology and climatology, as well as landscape painting and theories of visual art, but scholars have recently begun to recover the emotional valences of clouds.18 For example, Mary Jacobus has shown how John Constable and John Clare link clouds to moods, to “the fleeting thoughts or emotions of the moment, spent out of doors, arising spontaneously in response to the effects of weather and season.” In this sense, clouds are like “unformed” moods in constant flux, metaphors “for mobility and transformation.”19 Jacobus, however, focuses more on aesthetics and theories of perception than on the specificity of those moods and affects. I extend and develop her approach by analyzing clouds in a range of nineteenth-century poetry, prose, and paintings, with particular focus on fear and hope. Clouds capture both climate and humans’ affective responses to climate change. Whether in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, Turner’s cloud paintings, or Ruskin’s lecture, fear and hope recur as responses to clouds and climatology: fear of ecological disaster—of the end of the world—and hope that we can stop it.

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Clouds and Early Climatology Connections between geological phenomena and industrialization were widespread by the turn of the nineteenth century. Industrial fires were reshaping Earth. Smokestacks were seen as new volcanoes. Industrial cities were imagined to be the home of Vulcan and the Cyclops. These analogies, tropes, and comparisons persist in writings on clouds and climatology: industrial smoke was reshaping the skies and creating a new atmosphere of the Anthropocene. While acknowledgment of air pollution in large cities appears in writings as early as the classical period, it was not until the nineteenth century that pollution was seen as a “problem” that might need to be addressed through legislation. Indeed, use of the word “pollution” in a negative environmental sense did not become common until the nineteenth century. As Peter Brimblecombe argues, most eighteenth-century writers “discuss air pollution in a tone of passive acceptance,” and, even in the early nineteenth century, smoke “symbolized the wealth and opportunities of a nation and empire” more so than environmental degradation.20 This made it difficult to garner support for anti-pollution and smoke abatement campaigns. Such smoke symbolism persists throughout the century: there are just as many works praising the smoke and steam produced by coal burning as there are works depicting atmospheric pollution as deadly, destructive, and hellish. What changes in the early nineteenth century are the scientific and cultural associations of natural and industrial clouds, and the realization that industrial smoke was modifying the atmosphere. Lord Byron addresses this paradox in a telling description of London from Don Juan (1824): The sun went down, the smoke rose up, as from A half-unquenched volcano, o’er a space Which well beseemed the ‘Devil’s drawing room,’ As some have qualified that wondrous place. But Juan felt, though not approaching home, As one who, though he were not of the race, Revered the soil, of those true sons the mother, Who butchered half the earth, and bullied t’ other. A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping

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In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe, through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown On a fool’s head—and there is London Town! But Juan saw none of this: each wreath of smoke Appeared to him but as the magic vapour Of some alchymic furnace, from whence broke The wealth of worlds (a wealth of tax and paper): The gloomy clouds, which o’er it as a yoke Are bowed, and put the sun out like a taper, Were nothing but the natural atmosphere, Extremely wholesome, though but rarely clear.21

Byron first draws from the established volcanic-industrial tradition, imagining the city as a volcano that spews smoke into the troposphere. In classical and popular mythology, volcanic craters are portals to Hell—thus his reference to “the Devil’s drawing-room.” The global, industrial power of the British Empire, here symbolized by its volcanic capital, is reshaping Earth itself by “butchering” India and “bullying” America (Byron’s notes). After establishing the geological power of London, Byron then describes industrialization as having created a new kind of landscape: an artificial atmosphere produced by the smoke from coal burning encloses the similarly artificial geosphere of the city, “A mighty mass of brick, and smoke” under a “sea-coal canopy.” Ship masts construct an urban forest, and “a wilderness of steeples” make up a filthy “cupola,” a term that refers both to a dome and an industrial furnace. Rather than express shock or uneasiness regarding this new nature, Juan associates London’s smoke with “The wealth of worlds.” He perceives the new “gloomy clouds,” which “put the sun out” similar to the smoke from a volcanic eruption, as part of “the natural atmosphere.” While Byron is being somewhat sarcastic here, this is largely true: in the Anthropocene, there is no boundary or distinction between nature and culture, human history and natural history. Byron describes a new epoch where the distinction between an “artificial” or “natural” atmosphere has ceased to matter. There is no taking anthropogenic emissions out of the sky. Luke Howard provides the scientific basis of Byron’s description of London. In The Climate of London, Howard writes that chimneys and industrial emissions produce a “fuliginous cloud” that hangs over

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London, visible “from a distance of forty miles.”22 His study is comprised of decades of data, ranging from detailed and often lyrical observations of climate and weather patterns, to more clinical records of barometric readings, temperature, wind, and precipitation. While Howard stresses that his goal is to present data on which other scientists can build and draw, and to offer a history of the climate of London that contributes to the growing knowledge of meteorology more generally, he makes many conclusions regarding the atmospheric impacts of anthropogenic emissions. During a stay in the northern county of York in 1815 (a county home to many important industrial cities), Howard records the following observations: The scite commands an extensive and pretty deep valley, in which lies the town of Bradford with a considerable scattered population, and, in the bottom of the valley over against the house, some iron-works. When it grew dark, the large coke fires and flaming chimneys of the latter made a conspicuous appearance, representing a mass of buildings in a state of conflagration. Having enjoyed this spectacle over-night, and happening to wake at an early hour next morning, I looked out, to see what appearance the works would then put on. To my surprise for the moment, the various objects which I had before contemplated were not now to be found! An immense Stratus had risen, and filled the valley: its level surface, on which the light of the morning began to be spread, lay stretched out like a lake, bounded by the opposite hills. But turning my view a little to the left, I recognized the situation of the iron-works by the smoke and flames of the principal furnace, still rising from under this sea of vapour, in a manner which forcibly recalled the description of a submarine volcano. The smoke spread itself horizontally upon the surface of the cloud, probably by the effect of an opposite electricity; but the sun’s rays presently began to disturb this arrangement, the Stratus was dissipated by six o’clock, and a fine day, as to this neighbourhood, was the result. Proceeding, however, the same morning on my journey, and passing the mountainous ridge called Blackstone Edge into Lancashire, I remarked that, precisely at the summit of the ridge, we left the fair weather behind us, and encountered the first of a series of showers (at intervals indeed heavy rain), which continued the whole way to Liverpool.23

Howard describes the Low Moor Ironworks, one of the most significant industrial sites in Yorkshire at this time. The landscape and atmosphere around the works were blackened and wasted throughout the nineteenth century by what Howard identifies as “the large coke fires and

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flaming chimneys,” though, like many other tourists, he finds enjoyment in the “spectacle.” However, it is Howard’s description of the interplay between mist and industrial smoke that is most significant with regard to his climatological conclusions. The industrial cloud competes with the natural cloud, spreading out along the stratus and creating a mirror mist produced wholly from the furnace. Howard compares this phenomenon to a “submarine volcano”—that is, a volcanic vent located under water— which grants a geological power to the industrial smoke with an ability to modify the climate. The stratus ultimately dissipates, leaving coal smoke as the dominant component of the sky. While Howard writes that this produces “a fine day,” he qualifies that statement with the clause “as to this neighbourhood,” suggesting that industrial pollution still dominates the atmosphere—the smoke would have been inescapable. Moreover, less-desirable weather returns the closer he travels to Liverpool, a major industrial center. Similar to Ruskin’s equation of Manchester with the “devil’s darkness,” Howard associates Liverpool with a change in climate akin to the industrial atmosphere near Bradford. The Low Moor Ironworks also inspired poets. John Nicholson, known variously as the “Airedale Poet” and the “Bingley Byron,” wrote the celebratory and nationalistic “Low Moor Iron Works” in 1829. A poem primarily in praise of the economic benefits of the works, it also includes revealing descriptions akin to Howard’s notes. In the opening stanza, Nicholson compares the works to the sublime powers of “Parnassus’ mountain” and “smoking Aetna,” establishing mythological-volcanic associations.24 Throughout the poem, he illustrates the area’s distinctive atmosphere: Wrapp’d in dark clouds that curling rise on high, Mix’d with the quiv’ring flames of ev’ry dye, Noble in blackness, great, and wide, and deep, Not like mankind, thou never art asleep; Thy sun-white flames for years have been awake, Thy mighty hammers all the mountains shake25

The sky is composed of the “dark clouds” of coal smoke, illuminated and “mix’d” with industrial “flames.” Such activity is constant—as Nicholson writes later, the “sky” remains “cloudy” even at “midnight,” the furnaces continually “blast,” and the flames never cease to “soar” through the sky.26

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Other early atmospheric scientists built on the work of Howard, eventually leading to the theory of global warming by the end of the century. George Mackenzie provided a history of Britain’s climate from 1803–21 in System of the Weather of the British Islands (1821), with a specific focus on the roles of wind and rain.27 A few years later in 1824, French physicist Joseph Fourier discovered the greenhouse effect in a study of solar radiation and Earth’s temperature.28 Fourier’s theory was tested and proved by John Tyndall in the 1850s and 1860s as part of his research on glaciers, though most contemporary scientists and historians credit the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius with proving a definitive link between carbon dioxide and global temperatures. In essence, scientists gradually drew the connections between industrial smoke and air pollution, and then formulated a nascent theory of global warming.29 However, there is relatively little attention to clouds in the work of most atmospheric scientists when compared to Howard: Howard truly is the “Godfather of Clouds,” and his work influenced poets and artists just as much as scientists. As I show in the next sections of this chapter, it is in literary and artistic renderings that we find the most sustained and complex representations of climate and atmosphere in the early Anthropocene.

Science and Futurity: Literary Clouds In “The Cloud” (1820), Percy Shelley draws from the science of his day to depict the interdependence of all things in the natural world.30 The poem is a lyrical autobiography of a cloud, and it’s full of meteorological and geological imagery. In addition to Howard’s influential work, Shelley had read closely the writings of Erasmus Darwin, George Gregory, and other early climate scientists.31 Shelley’s decision to write from the perspective of a cloud is more than a literary device; the cloud becomes a symbol of climate itself. In adopting the first-person voices of various types of clouds—all of which are caught in the middle station between “Earth and Water”—Shelley establishes an affectionate connection grounded in hope. Clouds, as Shelley writes, hold a unique position in the natural world. They play a vital role in dispersing waters to life forms on Earth; they provide shade and protection; they reflect and refract sunlight; and they “pass through the pores” of “Earth and Ocean,” absorbing and thus reflecting the health of the planet. Clouds constantly “change, but…cannot die,” and in these changes Shelley reads the future of Earth.32

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Shelley’s hope for the future was an “ecotopia” in which love and harmony would reshape the world.33 Clouds offer hope of what he called “a brighter morn,”34 a world renewed and regenerated like clouds themselves, but, also like clouds, this future was indeterminate, uncertain, and not yet in reach. Ecotopia requires a psychological and physical transformation of the world. As he writes in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820), “until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness.”35 In the third and fourth acts of that lyrical drama, Shelley imagines such a utopian future. Similarly, in “Ode to the West Wind,” another poem from the Prometheus Unbound collection, Shelley uses the wind as a metaphorical catalyst for the sociopolitical revolution that he imagined was as inevitable as nature itself—a kind of new life from death akin to the cycle of clouds, which “arise…like a ghost from the tomb.”36 Shelley’s hope for ecotopia was inextricably bound to fear of ecological disaster. What the new sciences of meteorology and geology revealed was a material basis for what Shelley already believed—the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things in the world. Shelley often writes of this interconnectedness as a form of love.37 At the same time, the idea that all things in the universe are connected means that climate disaster is never an isolated phenomenon. Darwin’s writings throughout the 1790s revealed a world of ecological entanglement with implications for neural and cognitive processing, love and sexuality, and the evolution of life. Darwin also wrote a 1788 essay on the interrelations of clouds, climate, and atmospheric temperature,38 which suggests his thinking on climate was similar to his thinking at the time on minerals, plants, and animals. And, of course, climate science was a constant source of excitement during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, due in large part to the success and popularity of Howard. Shelley read and responded to these and other scientific writings, developing a climate poetics that shifts uneasily between the hope and fear of an interconnected planet. Two of Shelley’s most climate-focused poems, Queen Mab (1813) and Prometheus Unbound, reveal the poet’s vision of Earth’s futurity. In Mab, Shelley counterposes Earth’s current state with a possible utopian future reliant upon fundamental changes in human consciousness and behavior, as well as climate change. In this dream-vision, the fairy Queen Mab takes the soul of a young girl named Ianthe into outer space, or the

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“Spirit of Nature,” to achieve a global, transhistoric perspective of Earth. Here, surrounded by “fleecy,” “billowy,” “feathery,” “golden clouds,” Mab reveals to Ianthe an ecotopia in which social, political, and human perfectibility have been achieved through the spirit of love, as opposed to the violent and destructive failures of the past and present.39 As in other nineteenth-century poems, the clouds in Mab generate a stream of ecological thinking. Ianthe’s other- and outer-worldly experience allows her to see a universe in which everything is connected: Above, below, around, The circling systems formed A wilderness of harmony; Each with undeviating aim, In eloquent silence, through the depths of space Pursued its wondrous way.40

This shifting movement from Earth to clouds to the solar system—a move Wordsworth also makes in “I wandered lonely as a Cloud”—positions climate change in a spatiotemporal position that exceeds human thought. Shelley cannot fully comprehend the vast “wilderness of harmony” of the universe, and the hyperobject climate change forces upon him this realization. This realization, in turn, affects his relationship to Earth: all things speak Peace, harmony, and love. The universe, In nature’s silent eloquence, declares That all fulfil the works of love and joy,— All but the outcast man.41

Shelley’s vision of systems and worlds contrasts with the present state of the planet. Yet, at the same time, he recognizes ecological interdependence. People are as intimately connected to each other, to the natural world, and to the universe as are the “circling systems” in outer space: There’s not one atom of yon earth But once was living man; Nor the minutest drop of rain, That hangeth in its thinnest cloud, But flowed in human veins.42

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The regenerative cycle of clouds serves as a material example of the interconnectedness of humans and climate: the smallest particles and atoms are a part of humankind, and they are also worlds themselves. Even “the minutest atom comprehends / A world of loves and hatreds,”43 and in that affective essence of the universe, Shelley reads the future. If we perceive the universe through the spirit of love, Shelley argues, ecotopia would be possible. While scholars such as Eric Gidal have read Shelley’s thinking here as “a tragically misguided vision” with dangerous implications for humans’ manipulation of the planet,44 I believe we must see his hope as intimately tied to fear of ecological disaster. As Morton argues, Shelley “cannot think past disaster,”45 leaving him caught in a feedback loop of utopia and disaster, hope and fear. Shelley depicts ecotopia in the final two acts of Prometheus Unbound, but, as in Mab, that utopia remains conditional: “To-morrow comes: / Cloud upon cloud, in dark and deepening mass, / Roll o’er blackened waters.” These dark storm clouds in Mab symbolize the “horror” and “misery” of “Man’s evil nature,” embodied by “War,” “Commerce,” and “the discord-wasted land.”46 However, Shelley retains hope for the future: Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear: Earth was no longer hell; Love, freedom, health, had given Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime, And all pulses beat Symphonious to the planetary spheres.47

From Mab’s imagined position in the clouds, “The habitable earth” becomes visible. In a future ecotopia, glaciers “are unloosed” from arctic regions and “desarts of immeasureable sand” are now home to “shady woods” and “pastures.” Shelley imagines a warming world, but that’s a good thing: “All things are recreated” by an enlightened human species driven by love.48 While the idea that humans could artificially modify Earth’s atmosphere for the better appears dangerous and shortsighted from a twenty-first-century vantage point, it does indicate that Shelley and his contemporaries believed humans to be a geophysical force of nature reshaping the planet. In fact, Erasmus Darwin first proposed the idea of moving glaciers from the Arctic to the tropics, so as to warm the former and cool the latter.49 Importantly, disaster remains tethered to

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Shelley’s vision: in Mab, Ianthe awakens at the end of the poem to find her vision was only a dream, albeit one with powerful possibilities. And perhaps more poignantly, Prometheus Unbound ends with Demogorgon’s warning that even an achieved utopia would not eliminate the potential for Earth’s destruction. Fear of disaster persists even in ecotopia. It is such fear on which many other authors focus. While Shelley imbued clouds with utopian possibility, it was just as common for poets to read disaster in the clouds. One recalls, for instance, the cloud that inaugurates William Blake’s unfinished poem The French Revolution (1791): The dead brood over Europe, the cloud and vision descends over chearful France; O cloud well appointed! Sick, sick: the Prince on his couch, wreath’d in dim And appalling mist50

Blake links “the cloud” with his “vision” of Europe, the latter of which possesses two connotations: Blake’s mythic-poetic vision of the French Revolution and Blake as visionary, reading the future through signs in the present. The cloud symbolizes Europe’s futurity, and it also indicates the changing climate of Europe: “Sick the mountains, and all their vineyards weep.”51 Like Ruskin’s storm-cloud, Blake’s cloud represents both a moral and environmental climate.52 Byron, too, draws from fear of ecological disaster in “Darkness” (1816), where he imagines an end to the world in which even “the clouds perish’d.”53 The death of clouds, and subsequent end to their regenerative cycle, signals a stagnation and collapse of the atmosphere and thus of Earth. Byron had only to look around him in 1816 to imagine this future entropic state: the eruption of Tambora in 1815 resulted in erratic weather patterns that persisted for several years as volcanic ash circulated throughout the global atmosphere, drastically changing the seasons and the appearance of clouds.54 Clouds also signal a sickness of the planet in Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826), in which the appearance of “plague winds” and “plague clouds” recur variously as environmental catastrophes develop alongside the unstoppable path of plague throughout the world. At its heart, The Last Man is a novel about ecological disaster. It imagines in great detail one of our greatest fears: the end of the world—or rather,

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the end of the human world. For at the end of the novel, as Lionel Verney stands as “the LAST MAN,”55 Earth remains, along with its plants, animals, insects, waters, winds, and trees. The plague, it turns out, only affects humans. It signifies the inevitable result of what Shelley saw as the degradation of the natural world caused by the Industrial Revolution and patriarchy. Lauren Cameron thus reads the novel “as a commentary on humans’ unsustainable practices” and political leaders’ failure “of instituting systems to protect humanity from natural catastrophes.”56 The Last Man also speaks directly to the early Anthropocene. Kate Rigby suggests that the novel’s “empoisoned air could very well be associated, whether figuratively or literally,” with industrial smog.57 Lisa Ottum similarly argues that the novel centers on “the constellation of anxiety, paralysis, and trauma brought about by Anthropocenic conditions…of an Earth with no spaces of refuge, where biological forces interact unpredictably with one another and with inanimate matter.”58 By locating the end of the world at the end of the twenty-first century, Shelley eerily anticipates what early-twenty-first-century scientists forewarn: if humans continue along this path, Earth will become uninhabitable. Shelley imagines apocalypse as a real possibility that could devastate human society: as the novel demonstrates, infectious diseases and ecological disasters are unintended consequences of an industrialized planet.59 Shelley was inspired by both the 1815 eruption of Tambora (and its lengthy aftermath) and a global cholera pandemic, which was threatening to spread into Europe in the 1820s (it would not reach Britain until 1832). Shelley writes that the spread of the plague was “woven in the clouds, stamped on the very front of the universe.”60 Clouds, that is, are the face of the universe, the signs of the times. Throughout her novel, atmospheric signs consistently indicate the severity of the plague, and the accumulation of floods, super-storms, and crop failures parallel the effects of global warming in the twenty-first century. In The Last Man, the surviving members of the human race eventually band together and travel south, spurred on by the “hope” of a “natural Paradise” where they may rebuild a more enduring Earth. Of course, they never reach paradise, leaving Verney as “the LAST MAN,” who, with “neither hope nor joy,” concludes his tale by “read[ing] fair augury in the rainbow—menace in the cloud.”61 This correlation between plague and climate change reveals Shelley’s awareness of the effects of industrialization. While the plague does not cause the natural disasters that occur throughout the novel, they emerge

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from the same atmosphere. As Verney writes, the accumulation of natural disasters is just as destructive as the plague itself: Some disorder had surely crept into the course of the elements, destroying their benignant influence. The wind, prince of air, raged through his kingdom, lashing the sea into fury, and subduing the rebel earth into some sort of disobedience. … Their deadly power shook the flourishing countries of the south, and during winter, even, we, in our northern retreat, began to quake under their ill effects.62

While Verney’s use of the term “disorder” suggests that the atmosphere, like the human species, has contracted the plague, this is not the case. He is searching for a way to decipher atmospheric signs. Why are super-storms and earthquakes occurring at higher rates? Why has the climate so drastically changed over the course of only twenty years? Verney also discusses how extreme climate change destroys cities and nations, subsequently displacing large numbers of people: “Quito [the capital of Ecuador] was destroyed by an earthquake. Mexico laid waste by the united effects of storm, pestilence and famine. Crowds of emigrants inundated the west of Europe; and our island became the refuge of thousands.” The plague surely plays a role here—England has been least affected by the plague, so people seek refuge there—but Shelley emphasizes ecological catastrophes: earthquakes, storms, famine, and migration. Verney is overcome “with wonder and dismay” at this new state of the planet: “whole countries are laid waste, whole nations annihilated, by these disorders in nature. The vast cities of America, the fertile plains of Hindostan [northern India], the crowded abodes of the Chinese, are menaced with utter ruin.”63 Even when the final group of two thousand humans dwindles down to Verney, Earth remains. This is Shelley’s key ecological point in the novel: saving the world—the human world—means saving Earth. Throughout the final four chapters of the novel, as the human race disappears, other life forms thrive. In one passage, Verney wonders what will become of Earth after the extinction of humans: Will the earth still keep her place among the planets; will she still journey with unmarked regularity round the sun; will the seasons change, the trees adorn themselves with leaves, and flowers shed their fragrance, in solitude? Will the mountains remain unmoved, and streams still keep a downward course towards the vast abyss; will the tides rise and fall, and the winds fan

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universal nature; will beasts pasture, birds fly, and fishes swim, when man, the lord, possessor, perceiver, and recorder of all these things, has passed away, as though he had never been?64

Verney’s description of “man” as “lord, possessor, perceiver, and recorder” is a last grasp at the kind of anthropocentric thinking that led to the destruction of Earth. In an echo of the final lines of Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (1817)—“And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?”65 —Verney questions whether the world will exist if humans aren’t there to perceive it. The answer, of course, is yes. As Verney looks round, oxen and sheep inhabit empty churches and other buildings; the songs of birds and crickets fill the air; and mountains still hold majestic beauty. Verney writes, “Yes, this is the earth; there is no change—no ruin—no rent made in her verdurous expanse; she continues to wheel round and round, with alternate night and day, through the sky, though man is not her adorner or inhabitant.”66 Humans are not the center of the universe. We cannot do whatever we want to the natural world in the name of industry, economics, politics, or progress. This is Shelley’s message. However, Verney—the human race—realizes this too late, despite the early signs in the skies. Verney witnesses the end of the world—now what?

Cloud Art: Turner and Constable Climatic irregularities and radical weather changes also influenced the work of J.M.W. Turner, whose volcano paintings, cloud studies, and sunsets document Britain’s changing climate. Many artists depicted volcanic eruptions and the skies during this period, but Turner’s works are distinguished by what James Heffernan describes as the “swirling clouds” and “elemental vortex” that “epitomize…the dominating power of natural forces.”67 For instance, in Vesuvius in Eruption (1817–20), Turner emphasizes clouds as much as the volcano (see Fig. 4.3). He paints indistinct masses of black and ashy red clouds, which frame the central focus of the volcano in eruption. The bright lava flowing from the center of the painting disperses through Turner’s outward-turning brushstrokes and zigzagging lines into the vortex of clouds, suggesting both movement and the pervasive stretch and power of the clouds. At the bottom of the frame, groups of humans look on in fear and terror, and viewers

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Fig. 4.3 J.M.W. Turner, Vesuvius in Eruption, 1817–20. Watercolor on paper. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA

of the painting feel in Turner’s clouds a similar affective response to an imagined future. The lack of linear distinctness further accentuates fear and, subsequently, highlights the cloud as hyperobject. Critics often read Turner’s indistinctness as a marker of the Romantic sublime, and the psycho-physical experience of the sublime as outlined by Edmund Burke offers a useful frame for thinking about fear. Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was a highly influential text throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was the first treatise to categorize the sublime and beautiful as distinct aesthetic categories, and Burke’s preference for the sublime played a major role in the development of the Romantic movement.68 What’s more, his emphasis on “pleasure,” “pain,” “sensation,” and the “body” places his theory of the sublime squarely within the scientific and physiological discourses of his time, which scholars now acknowledge as the bases of contemporary affect theory. For Burke,

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the sublime is a corporeal experience: while the elements of “obscurity,” “power,” “darkness,” and “vastness” in an object are sources of the sublime, the actual experience registers in the body. The kind of “delightful horror” Burkes identifies is a means to translate pre-linguistic and pre-conscious affect into recognizable emotion.69 Turner’s painting certainly draws from the Burkean sublime, but the affect of fear is its driving force—and a fear of climate change pushes beyond the sublime. This is what hyperobjects do: they transcend the sublime through ecological thinking. As Morton writes, “The ecological thought contemplates a subaesthetic level of being, beyond the cute and beyond the awesome. We can’t call it beautiful (self-contained, harmonious) or sublime (aweinspiring, open). This level unsettles and disgusts.”70 This “subaesthetic level of being,” I argue, is also the level of affect. Turner’s painting pushes beyond thought in its attempt to capture fear through clouds as hyperobject, unsettling our conceptions of the world and humans’ place within it. Turner’s cloud studies and sunsets also capture the atmospheric changes caused by volcanic eruptions and industrial pollution.71 While John Constable garners more critical and scholarly praise for his precise, realistic cloud studies, Turner’s clouds are indeterminate, indistinct, and imagistic.72 In this way, Turner’s clouds more closely approximate the hyperobject climate change than those of Constable. For example, Heavy Clouds above a Landscape (c. 1820–40) is characteristic of Turner’s treatment of clouds (see Fig. 4.4). In this watercolor, Turner depicts climate and atmosphere more so than clouds: the clouds appear as climate. While Turner clearly outlines a cumulonimbus, especially in the more detailed section on the left end of the clouds, the main focus of the painting is the dark, condensed center, surrounded by ambiguous gray areas through which the heart of the cloud disperses with Turner’s distinctive brushstrokes. We see the suggestion of storm clouds, but Turner indicates the impossibility of truly capturing a cloud as we perceive it; instead, he illustrates the feeling of atmosphere, the feeling of the Anthropocene. The painting’s indeterminacy figures affect—that is, the pre-conscious bodily phenomenon that translates into a distinct feeling or emotion through

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Fig. 4.4 J.M.W. Turner, Heavy Clouds above a Landscape, c. 1820–40. Watercolor on paper. Tate, London, UK

expression. What does it feel like to live in a new geological epoch? Unsettling. Turner captures that state in many of his cloud studies. Consider, too, Sunset amid Dark Clouds over the Sea (c. 1845), a painting from Turner’s “most atmospheric decade.”73 As in Heavy Clouds, Turner only suggests clouds, opting instead for an affective depiction of atmosphere. Like many of Turner’s sunsets, which were influenced by atmospheric changes in the immediate aftermath of Tambora, the glowing red sun bleeds into the surrounding atmosphere, diffusing in a strange, uncanny vision of ecological interconnectedness (see Fig. 4.5). Even in other atmospheric paintings, such as his famous Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844), Turner portrays an uneasiness regarding climate change: the industrial steam from the train fuses

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Fig. 4.5 J.M.W. Turner, Sunset amid Dark Clouds over the Sea, c. 1845. Watercolor and chalk on paper. Tate, London, UK

with clouds, suggesting a direct link between industrialization and climate change.74 In contrast to Turner’s paintings, Constable’s cloud studies offer detailed, meticulous representations of Britain’s skies. We see not so much an affective atmosphere as a fusion of art and science. In addition to annotating his paintings with meteorological data and observations akin to Luke Howard’s records, Constable focuses on the structure and movement of clouds, producing realistic, three-dimensional paintings. While individual works are strikingly amazing in and of themselves, the studies must be viewed in sequence or in clusters for the full effect of Constable’s sustained attention to the skies. Constable created many of his best cloud studies while living at Hampstead in 1821–22, which he painted sequentially nearly every morning. He was literally charting the changing clouds in England’s atmosphere. Consider three paintings: Cloud Study, Sunset (c. 1821); Cloud Study (1821), which shows the effects of winds on cloud movement; and Cloud Study (1822), which portrays the shape

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of cumulous clouds in exquisite detail (Figs. 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8). These three cloud studies highlight Constable’s artistic capabilities and obsession with capturing the essence of skies. Constable famously wrote, “Skies must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition. … It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the ‘key note,’ the ‘standard of Scale’ and the ‘chief Organ of sentiment.’”75 And, in particular, it is clouds that dominate Constable’s skies. As he told his friend John Fisher, “I am the man of clouds.” Taken as a whole, nineteenth-century cloud studies and skyscapes visualize climate. Similar to modern artists who use photography to reveal the impact of climate change across place and time,76 these artists chart the changes in clouds and atmosphere, thereby offering glimpses of the hyperobject climate change. Indeed, when meteorological photography began in Britain around 1850, photographers drew from the methods of landscape painters such as Constable and Turner.77 This is partly what Ruskin

Fig. 4.6 John Constable, Cloud Study, Sunset, c. 1821. Oil on paper. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA

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Fig. 4.7 John Constable, Cloud Study, 1821. Oil on paper. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA

had in mind when he referenced Turner in his lecture on The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.78 Ruskin traced Britain’s changing climate across Turner’s body of work, just as we can read an emergent awareness of climate change across nineteenth-century literature, art, and science. What early Anthropocene literature and art reveal is the potential end of the world as it was conceived in the nineteenth century. This is what hyperobjects force us to acknowledge. Hyperobjects put human life and individuality into fearful perspective, and clouds offer a way to articulate those fears. In his well-known sonnet on mortality, “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (1818), John Keats reads in clouds the annihilation of self:

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Fig. 4.8 John Constable, Cloud Study, 1822. Oil on paper. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, Before high piled Books in charactery Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain— When I behold upon the night’s starred face Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And feel that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of Chance: And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more Never have relish in the fairy power Of unreflecting Love: then on the Shore Of the wide world I stand alone and think Till Love and Fame to Nothingness do sink.—79

Although Keats only references clouds once, they play a pivotal role in the poem. In the first quatrain, Keats’s fears center on his failure to compose all the thoughts in his “teeming brain” before death—in other words, to fall short of his ambitious poetic goals. In the second quatrain, his fears take on existential urgency: he sees huge clouds in the night sky that act as “symbols of a high romance.” This reference to the literary

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genre Keats frequently used continues his worries about literary legacy— as well as his personal relationship with Fanny Brawne to which he alludes in the third quatrain—but it also situates his reading of clouds as a faint awareness of hyperobjects. As Morton writes, hyperobjects “cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos. Perhaps this is the most fundamental issue—hyperobjects seem to force something on us, something that affects our core ideas of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is.”80 As in Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” Keats then moves from clouds to existence itself. Temporarily removed from the concept of the world, he adopts a new way of thinking wherein personal “Love and Fame,” synonymous with the concept of self, sink into a “Nothingness” suggestive of both the end of the world and the new perspective demanded by the Anthropocene. As Keats stands on the imagined “Shore” of a conceptual “world,” gazing at the clouds, he recognizes the impermanence of self and society, and, at the same time, embraces the reality of the planet.81 Across these various nineteenth-century writers and painters, we see the significance of clouds to representations of the early Anthropocene. Percy Shelley in particular develops a distinctive dialectic of hope and fear that serves as a model for responses to the growing awareness of climate change. Whereas the apocalyptic visions of Mary Shelley, Blake, Byron, and, to a lesser extent, Turner were more widespread during this time, Shelley’s writings embody the larger cultural and scientific consciousness of the nineteenth century. In Turner, however, we also see a more profound representation of climate change, which finds a companion in Keats’s existential sonnet. Yet, it is in the writings of William and Dorothy Wordsworth that we see a more fully developed hopeful outlook for the future, one that is also, as I discuss in the next section, more practical about how to create a sustainable planet in the Anthropocene.

Endurance and Sustainability: The Wordsworths’ Hopeful Vision In 1991, Jonathan Bate urged scholars to see Wordsworth “as preeminently not the author of ‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Prelude but the compiler of the Guide to the Lakes ,”82 and, although the idea has not caught on, it provides a good starting point for thinking about Wordsworth’s environmental writings. The Guide spans nearly forty years of Wordsworth’s career, offering both a geological history of the Lake

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District and a history of Wordsworth’s ecological thought, a more practical version of the ideas he presents in his poetry. Indeed, from the very first lines of the Guide, it is apparent that Wordsworth imbues the work with the same instructive intentions as his poetry: “In preparing this Manual, it was the Author’s principal wish to furnish a Guide or Companion for the Minds of Persons…who might be inclined to explore the District of the Lakes.”83 In addition to offering geographical descriptions, the Guide presents an ecological mode of thinking that will influence readers to become more ethical actors on a more sustainable planet. As he writes in The Prelude (1805), “what we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how.”84 His hope for the future was not an ecotopia but rather a protected and more enduring Lake District. In contrast to the apocalyptic clouds discussed in the previous section, Wordsworthian clouds are generally hopeful and joyful, and they often possess local and national appeal. As Ron Broglio argues, Wordsworth “valorize[es]” clouds in the Guide as a form of English nationalism wherein clouds are “coded” as English.85 For instance, Wordsworth invites readers to grab a seat on a comfortable cloud for their tour of the Lakes: in establishing an imaginative view of the entire District in the Guide, Wordsworth tells readers to “suppose our station to be a cloud hanging midway between” the Great Gavel and Scawfell mountains.86 Moreover, in a section focused on “climate” and “skiey influences,” Wordsworth describes clouds with affectionate specificity: Akin to these [vapours] are fleecy clouds resting upon the hill-tops; they are not easily managed in picture, with their accompaniments of blue sky; but how glorious are they in Nature! how pregnant with imagination for the poet! and the height of the Cumbrian mountains is sufficient to exhibit daily and hourly instances of those mysterious attachments. Such clouds, cleaving to their stations, or lifting up suddenly their glittering heads from behind rocky barriers, or hurrying out of sight with speed of the sharpest edge—will often tempt an inhabitant to congratulate himself on belonging to a country of mists and clouds and storms, and make him think of the blank sky of Egypt, and of the cerulean vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a sad spectacle.87

Wordsworth describes cirrocumulus clouds, which form at high altitudes in constant flux. These clouds are often short-lived, “lifting up suddenly” and “hurrying out of sight,” a description that refers both to the sight of the clouds and to their existence. Cirrocumulus clouds can quickly

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become cirrostratus or cirrus clouds as a result of their water content. These clouds, pregnant with water, are also “pregnant with imagination for the poet.” Through this scientific metaphor, Wordsworth imagines his own imagination in the creative process, constantly morphing and combining ideas, directly engaging with the natural world. The clouds register as hope for Wordsworth’s future enterprises. They are “mysterious attachments,” which, similar to affect, require translation. The hope for Wordsworth is both future poetic composition and a sustainable future for Britain; in contrast to Egypt and Italy, Wordsworth’s “country of mists and clouds and storms” offers the promise of endurance and stability, if properly preserved. This hope in local and national preservation pervades the Guide. In a section comparing a view of the Alps to that of the Lakes, Wordsworth suggests that such perceptual experiences can help travelers to understand how they are a part of the natural world, not a subject separate from it: “the sublime and beautiful region, with all its hidden treasures, and their bearings and relations to each other, is thereby comprehended and understood at once.”88 Wordsworth recognizes how an ecosystem works and how all things are connected and interdependent. To emphasize this point, he discusses humans’ impact on the district’s ecosystem in following sections entitled “Aspect of the Country, as Affected by its Inhabitants” and “Changes, and Rules of Taste for Preventing Their Bad Effects.” Here, he provides a two-thousand-year environmental history of the Lakes, outlining negative effects of recent tourism and human habitation, such the development of commercial farms, establishment of industrial furnaces, felling of trees, construction of new houses, and general influx of people from around the nation. Wordsworth calls for preservation to counteract these negative effects. He has identified the Anthropocene, as it were, and so offers ways to remedy the already-apparent changes to Britain’s climate and local environments. Wordsworth’s emphasis on preservation, as well as his moves from the local to the global, indicates a nascent recognition of the global climate. In one of several reminiscences, Wordsworth narrates an experience at the top of Scawfell-Pike, where he and his companions take part in a common childhood pastime: naming the shapes of clouds. They focus on a cluster of clouds, which they identify first as a “ship” and then a “horse,” before their guide alerts them that the clouds signify an approaching storm:

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We perceived a light vapour unnoticeable but by a shepherd accustomed to watch all mountain bodings. … The air changed to cold, and we saw that tiny vapour swelled into mighty masses of cloud which came boiling over the mountains. Great Gavel, Helvellyn, and Skiddaw, were wrapped in storm; yet Langdale, and the mountains in that quarter, remained all bright in sunshine. Soon the storm reached us; we sheltered under a crag; and almost as rapidly as it had come it passed away, and left us free to observe the struggles of gloom and sunshine in other quarters. Langdale now had its share, and the Pikes of Langdale were decorated by two splendid rainbows. Skiddaw also had his own rainbows. Before we again reached Ash-course every cloud had vanished from every summit.89

Wordsworth portrays the movement and morphing of clouds as coterminous with climate. This brief storm is decidedly local—the Lake District is famous for its fast-changing weather and abundance of rain—but, when read in relation to the national and global claims throughout the Guide, this description of local climate suggests a broader awareness of climate change. And, importantly, Wordsworth does not present this storm in a negative or fearful manner; he focuses on hope and beauty. While the storm rages in one quarter, others “remained all bright in sunshine.” The temporary “struggles of gloom and sunshine” eventually give way to “splendid rainbows.” The “mighty masses of cloud” that develop from “a light vapour” disperse, producing a clear, promising day. Wordsworth does not imagine destruction or a pessimistic outlook on the future, but rather reads in the changing climate hope for a better future. Hopeful appearances and dispersals of clouds also pop up in Wordsworth’s poetry. Perhaps most famously, the ascent to Mount Snowdon in Book XIII of The Prelude culminates with a parting of clouds that reveals the moon, which Wordsworth later imagines as “The perfect image of a mighty mind.”90 That moment finds an earlier incarnation in “A Night-Piece” (1798), where clouds frame both a vision of the moon and Wordsworth’s hope for the future: The sky is overspread With a close veil of one continuous cloud All whitened by the moon, that just appears, A dim-seen orb, yet chequers not the ground With any shadow,—plant, or tower, or tree. At last, a pleasant gleam breaks forth at once, An instantaneous light; the musing [man] Who walks along with his eyes bent to earth

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Is startled. He looks about, the clouds are split Asunder, and above his head, he views The clear moon, and the glory of the heavens. There, in a black-blue vault she sails along, Followed by multitudes of stars, that small, And bright, and sharp, along the gloomy vault Drive as she drives. How fast they wheel away! Yet vanish not! The wind is in the trees, But they are silent; still they roll along Immeasurably distant, and the vault Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds, Still deepens its interminable depth. At length the vision closes, and the mind Not undisturbed by the deep joy it feels, Which slowly settles into peaceful calm, Is left to muse upon the solemn scene.91

Catalyzed by clouds, this fragment articulates Wordsworth’s awakening ecological consciousness and the influence of William Herschel’s deep space sublime.92 The piece begins by contrasting the “continuous cloud” in the sky and the musing man’s focus on the “earth,” a disjunct reconciled only when the clouds “split / Asunder” to reveal “The clear moon, and the glory of the heavens.” The clouds, at first hiding the cosmic interconnectedness Earth, atmosphere, and solar system, shift, thereby revealing the “multitudes of stars” that “roll along,” though “Immeasurably distant” from the man’s position on Earth. This scene, framed by “white clouds, enormous clouds,” opens up the “interminable depth” of the universe, creating an enlightened, though “disturb[ing],” perspective of the world. This new perspective places Earth in the vast, immeasurable space of the universe: the clouds expose human existence in relation to the cosmos. The startle, surprise, and wonder generated by this new deep space perspective, followed by intense meditation and reflection, draws from existing theorizations of the Anthropocene, though in a more positive manner than apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic treatments. As in “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” Wordsworth moves in “A Night-Piece” from local environment to solar system, which radically alters the way he thinks about the world and humans’ place within it. This moment registers at the level of affect: as he “muse[s] upon the solemn scene,” he also “feels” “the deep joy” produced by the scene, a phrase redolent of “the deep power of joy” from “Tintern Abbey.”93 The entire scene and

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sequence, initiated and framed by clouds, leads Wordsworth to a joyful, hopeful state, and the fragment itself points toward his more developed ecological thought in later writings. Dorothy Wordsworth also articulates an emergent ecological thought in her journals, from which William drew frequently in the composition of his poems.94 For example, her well-known entry from 25 January 1798 served as a starting point for William’s “A Night-Piece”: Went to Poole’s after tea. The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and left her in the centre of a black-blue vault. She sailed along, followed by multitudes of stars, small, and bright, and sharp. Their brightness seemed concentrated, (half-moon).95

In subsequent entries from 31 January 1798, Dorothy details changes in clouds and climate, situating clouds in relation to “wind,” “rain,” “Venus,” “Jupiter,” “hawthorn hedges,” “the moon,” and “the stars.”96 Revealing the influence of meteorology, climatology, and the deep space sublime of astronomy, she moves easily between stars and planets in the solar system to the bushes in her front yard. In an entry from 3 February 1798, she depicts this interrelatedness further: A mild morning, the windows open at breakfast, the red-breasts singing in the garden. Walked with Coleridge over the hills. The sea at first obscured by vapour; that vapour afterwards slid in one mighty mass along the seashore; the islands and one point of land clear beyond it. The distant country (which was purple in the clear dull air), overhung by straggling clouds that sailed over it, appeared like the darker clouds, which are often seen at a great distance apparently motionless, while the nearer ones pass quickly over them, driven by the lower winds. I never saw such a union of earth, sky, and sea. The clouds beneath our feet spread themselves to the water, and the clouds of the sky almost joined them. Gathered sticks in the wood; a perfect stillness. The redbreasts sang upon the leafless boughs. Of a great number of sheep in the field, only one standing. Returned to dinner at five o’clock. The moonlight still and warm as a summer’s night at nine o’clock.97

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Here, again, clouds lead to ecological thought. The “vapour” in Dorothy’s entry transforms into “one mighty mass,” akin to the “straggling” and “darker clouds” at higher altitudes. Dorothy’s new perspective of the “union of earth, sky, and sea” produces a final series of imagistic observations: gathering sticks, stillness, redbreasts singing, leafless boughs, one sheep standing, dinner, moonlight. This is a prose poem of the early Anthropocene. Dorothy’s journals bring us back to “I wandered lonely as a Cloud.” What clouds offer the Wordsworths is a glimpse into the unfathomable interconnectedness of the planet and the universe. When the Wordsworths gaze at clouds, they see more than what meteorologists had identified—a scientific, material understanding of cloud formation and its relation to climate—they saw hope in a more enduring future. Wordsworth used this hope to preserve and protect the Lake District and to articulate an ecological thought that formed the basis of modern environmentalism. Dorothy’s hope for the future constitutes a continued joy and pleasure in recognizing the beauty of ecological interconnectedness for its own sake. As she wrote in a journal entry from 5 April 1802, she saw in that famous moment of daffodils by Ullswater “the simplicity & unity & life of that one busy highway—We rested again & again.”98 And in that rest, they found hope and “life and food / For future years.”99

Manufactured Clouds in the Late Nineteenth Century By the mid-nineteenth century, writers and artists were just as likely to document industrial smoke and air pollution as they were mists and clouds. The cloud studies of Constable and Turner became the “fog studies” of James Whistler and Claude Monet (see Fig. 4.9). The fog of London is ubiquitous in Victorian-era literature and art, and popular magazines regularly published pieces on the smoke of industry. Punch’s famous poem and cartoon on “‘Old King Coal’ and the Fog Demon” (1880) are the most representative of these publications.100 Anti-pollution campaigns also gained steam during the second half of the century, though not enough to stop the global spread of industrialization. An essay on “The Fogs of London” from an 1880 issue of Nature outlines various proposals for ridding the city of air pollution. The author blames the increase in smog on London’s ever-increasing

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Fig. 4.9 James Whistler, Nocturne in Gray and Gold: Chelsea Snow, 1876. Oil on canvas. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, USA

population and “the smoke which issues from our dwelling-houses [and] manufactories,” concluding that Londoners have all of the scientific data necessary to prove the link between emissions and smog.101 But the only way to address the problem is through legislation, and Parliament is slow to act. Meaningful legislation would not be enacted until after the Great Smog of 1952. The major industrial centers in Northern England also experienced an exponential increase in atmospheric pollution. Widnes, known as “the birthplace of Britain’s chemical industry,”102 transformed from a grouping of rural hamlets and villages to a major center of the Industrial Revolution in the 1850s after the first chemical works were established in 1848. The town was linked on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, and, by 1870, it was known as one of the dirtiest and most dangerous places in England. As Jennifer Tucker explains, the alkali

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industry “released sulphuric acid into the atmosphere, which devastated local crops and woodland. By 1891, about five hundred acres of land in the region had been buried under an average depth of twelve feet of alkali waste.”103 Manchester, too, became dirtier and more dangerous, as the poet Philip Connell details in “A Winter Night in Manchester” (1865). In the first half of the poem, Connell describes Manchester as a filthy, smoky, dirty, dark, and hellish place. The city typifies “the stormy terrors of the North” with its “fogs” and “dusky air,” and the chief source of its polluted atmosphere is the “wilderness of chimneys high” that blocks “The palid sun beneath a troubl’d sky.” The “world,” in Manchester, is “cold and dark,” and the industrial workers’ only reprieve is the warmth of their hearth at home, which paradoxically fuels the hellish atmosphere in which they toil.104 Jesse Oak Taylor and others have written extensively and authoritatively on air, atmosphere, and pollution in Victorian and Edwardian England, and I will not rehash their excellent work here. Instead, I will conclude this chapter with brief examinations of two works of fiction that speak to the atmosphere of the early Anthropocene: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) and William Deslile Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880). Much has been written on Dickens’s myriad portrayals of the working classes and industrialization, from the fictional Coketown in Hard Times (1854)—clearly based on industrial cities like Manchester and Birmingham—to the ubiquitous fog in Bleak House. Yet, his novels remain some of the most “direct means to experience the atmosphere” of nineteenth-century Britain in their “interfaces between atmosphere, ideology, and history.” As Taylor argues, Dickens’s novels “render the artificial reality of London’s climate visible.”105 At the same time, Dickens’s depictions of atmosphere and smog draw from the literary tradition of geologic- and atmospheric-industrial writing stretching back to the eighteenth century. To illustrate this point, I offer a single passage from Dickens’s oeuvre: the famous opening paragraphs of Bleak House. London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one

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might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.106

A sense of geological time and Anthropocenic atmosphere pervades these paragraphs. Ancient muds commingle with smoking chimneys that produce “black drizzle” and “flakes,” adding to the mess of earth through which Londoners move. A Megalosaurus emerges and then withdraws into Earth’s history, while horses and dogs, equally “undistinguishable in mire,” pop in and out of existence. The all-pervasive fog creates a “nether sky” into which the subjectivities of “foot passengers” and “chance people” withdraw in a parallel to the Megalosaurus. Gaslight replaces the sun, further illuminating this anthropogenic atmosphere. Much like earlier cloud poems and cloud studies, this opening section of the novel visualizes the hyperobject climate change—and it writes the early Anthropocene.

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There is considerably less scholarship on Hay’s atmospheric novella The Doom of the Great City. It was not popular in the nineteenth century, and it is virtually unknown today, but it captures the uneasiness, anxiety, and fear associated with anthropogenic climate change in the nineteenth century. According to Brett Beasley, it can be considered as “the first modern tale of urban apocalypse.”107 While The Doom of the Great City is one of many late-nineteenth-century narratives that imagine London’s demise by a poisonous fog, what distinguishes Hay’s novella is its immediacy and realism. The story is a work of speculative fiction, but the poisonous fog that Hay imagines does manifest—though to a much lesser degree—in the Great Smog of 1952, and Hay draws from contemporary accounts of air pollution and atmospheric science. At the same time, he wavers between attributing the fog to environmental pollution and “punishment” for London’s “corruption,” much like Ruskin does in The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.108 The Doom of the Great City is split roughly into two major sequences, which comprise a letter the narrator writes to his grandchildren in 1942 on the “GREAT EVENT” about which he has been reluctant to speak for the past sixty years. In the first half of the story, the narrator describes the moral and social state of London in 1882, which amounts to a rant against the “evils” of capitalism (a term he uses several times). He details the prevalence of gambling, prostitution, unfair legal and business practices, and the rise of hedonism and Aestheticism. London’s “murky atmosphere” is as much moral as it is environmental. As the story gets underway, the narrator travels to a friend’s house in the suburbs to celebrate a birthday. Along the way, he encounters a particularly dense and evil fog: A London fog was no mere mist: it was the heavy mist, in the first place, that we are accustomed to in most latitudes, but it was that mist supercharged with coal smoke, with minute carbonaceous particles, “grits” and “smuts,” with certain heavy gases, and with a vast number of other impurities. It was chiefly the result of the huge and reckless consumption of coal carried on over the wide-extending city, the smoke from which, not being re-consumed or filtered off in any way, was caught up and retained by the vapour-laden air. The fog was the most disagreeable and dangerous of all the climatic sufferings that Londoners had to bear. It filled the nostrils and air-passages of those who breathed it with soot, and choked their throats and lungs with black, gritty particles, causing illness and often death to the aged, weakly, and ailing.109

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The narrator provides an apt account of the manufactured atmosphere of the Anthropocene: this new kind of “mist” is not naturally occurring but rather the result of coal burning, which produces emissions “caught” in the air—a kind of greenhouse effect. This new atmosphere gives rise to a whole range of illnesses, as attested by the Fog Demon in Punch. The narrator notes that London had always been subject to fogs, but that fogs had become progressively worse and more dangerous over the past twenty years. In talking with his friends later after dinner, he laments the difficulty in studying these “artificial” fogs and mists, as they are a new component of the climate and do not act like naturally occurring fogs.110 The second half of the novella moves much more quickly as the narrator wakes in the morning to news that a poisonous fog has killed everyone in London, including, presumably, his mother and sister. He first sees a “hideous obscurity” of brown fog enveloping London from the house, and he becomes increasingly distraught when the newspaper does not show up at the normal time: “A feeling, indefinable and objectiveless, of despondency and nervous shrinking I have already confessed to—just such as inexplicable sensation of presentiment, of waiting for some unknown, un-thought of horror that was lying ready to appear, but was at present shrouded from view.”111 This indefinable feeling illustrates a predominant affect of the Anthropocene: “global dread.” Coined by Glenn Albrecht, “global dread” refers to “the anticipation of an apocalyptic future state of the world that produces a mixture of terror and sadness in the sufferer for those who will exist in such a state.”112 This dread permeates The Doom of the Great City. Survivors from the outskirts of London eventually filter into the suburbs, and the narrator learns what has happened: “like the sudden overflow of Vesuvius upon the towns below,”113 the poisonous fog descended upon London and killed everyone it reached. The remainder of the novella recounts the narrator’s journey through London to find his family members, who are, we learn at the story’s end, dead. As he walks through post-apocalyptic London, he sees the bodies of the same gamblers, prostitutes, and businessmen whose practices he rails against in the opening pages—a divine justice of sorts— before the final melodramatic scene in which he discovers the bodies of his mother and sister by the hearth in their house. That he finds them in front of the hearth—a major source of the smog itself—is a telling detail about the seemingly uncontrollable nature of the fossil fuel economy.

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The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century Four years after Hay’s post-apocalyptic novella, Ruskin delivered his lecture on The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. That lecture serves as a bookend for the early Anthropocene. Writing on the cusp of the twentieth century and major scientific breakthroughs in climate science, Ruskin explicitly articulates the new consciousness of the Anthropocene: reflecting on nearly a century of environmental change in Britain, he identifies a new modern era in which humans’ presence has drastically transformed Earth, and he does so by analyzing clouds. Clouds in nineteenth-century literature and art represent the atmosphere. They manifest the climate. They are signs of the Anthropocene. And the Anthropocene, as Taylor argues, “changes what climate is, insofar as it no longer lies (if it ever did) beyond the scope of human history.”114 This is what Ruskin attempts to articulate in his lectures. Like Hay, Ruskin links the Anthropocene to a moral failing in Britain, and these moral and spiritual claims are directly tied to the capitalist, fossil-fueled environmental changes he identifies. Also like Hay, Ruskin voices global dread: in the passage that serves as an epigraph to this chapter, Ruskin imagines coal smoke as “dead men’s souls,” and he later writes that the “polluted air” of England stretches “half round the world.”115 What atmospheric and climatic changes will future generations endure? What global effects will Britain’s fossil fuel economy produce? These ungraspable spatial and temporal questions persist in the decades following Ruskin’s lecture, and they play a prominent role in Anthropocene literature, science, and art of the twentieth century. In a 1912 article in Popular Mechanics entitled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate—What Scientists Predict for the Future,” Francis Molena argues that the “furnaces of the world” are adding “carbon dioxide to the atmosphere” at an alarming rate, which “may” have “considerable” effects “in a few centuries” (see Fig. 4.10).116 The effects came much sooner, and they were already coming in 1884. Ruskin identifies the early Anthropocene in the clouds, and he warily points to the storm-cloud of the twenty-first century: the current era of accelerated global warming.

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Fig. 4.10 Francis Molena, “The furnaces of the world,” in “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate—What Scientists Predict for the Future,” Popular Mechanics (March 1912)

Notes 1. John Ruskin, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 34, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1908), 7, 10, 14, 33, 34, 40, 80. 2. See Michael Wheeler, ed., Ruskin and Environment: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and Jesse Oak Taylor, “Storm-Clouds on the Horizon: John Ruskin and the Emergence of Anthropogenic Climate Change,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 36 (2018): n. pag. 3. James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 19. 4. William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” lines 1–6, in Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 5. See Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). 6. Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” (1815), lines 7–8. 7. Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” (1807), lines 11–12.

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8. See Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); and John E. Thornes, John Constable’s Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science (New York: Continuum, 1999), esp. 154–96. See also Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 21–45. 9. See Glenn Albrecht, “‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity,” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 3 (2005): 41–55. 10. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 7. 11. Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8 (2005): n. pag. 12. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 28. 13. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2. 14. See, for example, Marjorie Grene and Deborah Nails, eds., Spinoza and the Sciences (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986); Marjorie Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” Studies in Romanticism 46, no. 4 (2007): 367–408; and Seth T. Reno, Amorous Aesthetics: Intellectual Love in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, 1788–1853 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). 15. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. Edward Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 493, 501. 16. See Thomas H. Ford, Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air: Atmospheric Romanticism in a Time of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 17. Morton, 7. 18. See Damisch; James A.W. Heffernan, The Re-Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Turner (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1984); and Thornes. 19. Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 10, 11, 29–30. 20. See Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London Since Medieval Times (London: Methuen, 1987), 90–91. 21. Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto 10, lines 641–64, in The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 22. Luke Howard, The Climate of London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 203. 23. Ibid., 316–17. 24. John Nicholson, “Low Moor Iron Works,” in The Poetical Works of John Nicholson, the Airedale Poet, ed. W.G. Hird (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1876), 265. 25. Ibid., 266. 26. Ibid., 271.

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27. George Mackenzie, The System of Weather of the British Islands (Perth: R. Morison, 1821). 28. See James R. Fleming, “Joseph Fourier, the ‘Greenhouse Effect’, and the Quest for a Universal Theory of Terrestrial Temperatures,” Endeavor 23, no. 2 (1999): 72–75; and Rudy M. Baum, Sr., “Future Calculations: The First Climate Change Believer,” Distillations (2016): n. pag. 29. See Heidi Scott, Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 45–52. 30. See Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 219–27; and Ashton Nichols, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 23–26. 31. For Shelley’s reading list, see Frederick L. Jones, ed., The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). For the influence of Howard and Darwin on Shelley, see Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets (London: Macmillan, 1986). 32. Percy Shelley, “The Cloud,” lines 73, 1–4, 49–72, 75–80, 21, 76, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002). 33. For a useful study of “ecotopia” in Queen Mab, see Timothy Morton, “Queen Mab as Typological Repertoire,” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (1997): n. pag. 34. Percy Shelley, Queen Mab, 5.251, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. References are to canto and line numbers. 35. Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 209. 36. Shelley, “The Cloud,” lines 84, 83. 37. See Reno, esp. chap. 3. 38. See Erasmus Darwin, “Frigorific Experiments on the Mechanical Expansion of Air,” Philosophical Transactions 78 (1788): 43–52. 39. Shelley, Queen Mab, 1.229, 2.9, 2.16, 2.43. 40. Ibid., 2.77–82. 41. Ibid., 3.195–99. 42. Ibid., 2.211–15. 43. Ibid., 4.145–46. 44. Eric Gidal, “‘O Happy Earth! Reality of Heaven!’: Melancholy and Utopia in Romantic Climatology,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2008): 75. 45. Timothy Morton, “Romantic Disaster Ecology: Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth,” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2012): n. pag. 46. Shelley, Queen Mab, 4.25–27, 4.72, 4.74, 4.76, 4.168, 5.44, 4.79. 47. Ibid., 8.13–18. 48. Ibid., 9.58, 9.63, 9.70, 9.75–76, 8.107.

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49. See Chapter 2 of this book, 85–86. 50. William Blake, The French Revolution, lines 1–3, in The Complete Works, ed. Alicia Ostriker (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). 51. Ibid., line 6. 52. Arden Reed claims that “mist” functions as synecdoche for the atmosphere in Romantic-era writing. See Arden Reed, Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1984), 12. 53. Lord Byron, “Darkness,” line 81, in The Major Works. 54. For details, see Chapter 2 of this book, 92–95. 55. Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1996), 367. 56. Lauren Cameron, “Questioning Agency: Dehumanizing Sustainability in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” in Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780–1830, ed. Ben P. Robertson (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), 261, 267. 57. Kate Rigby, Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 80. 58. Lisa Ottum, “The ‘Vast Prison’ of the World: Counter-Anthropocenes in the Works of Mary Shelley,” in Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Dewey W. Hall and Jillmarie Murphy (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2019), 32. 59. Shelley composed The Last Man between 1824 and 1826, during a time of great personal trauma and grief. Her husband, Percy Shelley, had drowned tragically while boating in Italy in 1822; her friend and poet Lord Byron had died in Greece while supporting Greek independence in 1824; and two of her children had died just a few years earlier in 1818 and 1819. Many scholars thus read The Last Man as a working-through of these personal catastrophes. This conventional reading situates the novel as a rejection of the hope and optimism associated with “mainstream” masculine Romanticism. While other Romantic writers, such as Mary Shelley’s husband Percy, often use apocalypse as a means to argue for millennial transformation, Mary Shelley, argues many scholars, writes an apocalyptic novel without hope. See Bruce Snyder, “Apocalypse and Indeterminacy in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” Studies in Romanticism 17, no. 4 (1978): 435–52; Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1988); Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1989); William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber, 1989); Morton D. Paley, “Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: Apocalypse Without Millennium,” Keats-Shelley Review 4 (1989): 1–25; Betty T. Bennett, “Radical Imaginings: Mary Shelley’s

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60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72.

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The Last Man,” The Wordsworth Circle 26, no. 3 (1995): 147–52; Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); and Chris Washington, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). Shelley, Last Man, 186. Ibid., 180–88, 210–11, 244, 367. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 183–84. Ibid., 322–23. Percy Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” lines 142–44, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Shelley, Last Man, 357. Heffernan, 82. The sublime, beautiful, and picturesque were three dominant aesthetic categories throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the sublime being particularly popular for the Romantic movement. Burke presented the sublime and beautiful as somewhat opposing categories: the beautiful was associated with Classical ideals of art that emphasized symmetry, wholeness, smoothness, and order, while the sublime was associated with the Romantic preference for disorder, terror, vastness, fragmentation, and uncertainty. German philosopher Immanuel Kant responded to Burke’s classifications by developing two distinct types of the sublime—the mathematical and the dynamical—which further fueled interest in the sublime aesthetic in the nineteenth century. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For details on William Gilpin’s famous theory of the picturesque, see Chapter 3 of this book, 137–39. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: J. Dodsley, 1757), 42, 43, 51, 52, 142. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 91. See U. Seibold, “Meteorology in Turner’s Paintings,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 15 (1990): 77–86; and Thornes. While Ruskin favored Turner over Constable, many contemporary scholars see Constable as the superior artist. See Ronald Paulson, Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Heffernan; Thornes; Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “Constable, Clouds, Climate Change,” Wordsworth Circle 38, nos. 1–2 (2007): 25– 34; Ron Broglio, Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750–1830 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008); and Jacobus.

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73. Heffernan, 177. 74. For an analysis of Rain, Steam, and Speed, see Chapter 2 of this book, 104. 75. John Constable, letter to Rev. John Fisher, 23 October 1821, in Letters of the Great Artists, from Blake to Pollock, ed. Richard Friedenthal (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), 42. 76. See, for example, Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas de Pencier, Anthropocene (Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2018). Perhaps most famously, Al Gore used multiple series of photos in his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth (Hollywood: Paramount, 2006). 77. See Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 78. Ruskin, 61. 79. John Keats, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” in The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 168–69. 80. Morton, Hyperobjects, 15. 81. For a useful essay on clouds in this sonnet, see Emily Grosholz, “Clouds, Sensation and the Infinite in the Poetry of John Keats,” The Hudson Review 53, no. 4 (2001): 599–606. 82. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), 42. 83. William Wordsworth, A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England, with a Description of the Scenery, & c. for the use of Tourists and Residents, 5th ed. (Kendal: Hudson and Nicholson, 1835), 1. 84. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, bk. 13, lines 446–47, in The Major Works. 85. Broglio, 157–58. 86. Wordsworth, Guide, 22. 87. Ibid., 45–46. 88. Ibid., 21. 89. Ibid., 115–16. 90. Wordsworth, Prelude, bk. 13, line 69. 91. Wordsworth, “A Night-Piece,” in The Major Works, 44–45. 92. For details on the deep space sublime, see Chapter 1 of this book. 93. William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” line 49, in The Major Works. 94. See Elizabeth Fay, Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Susan J. Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); and Lucy Newlyn, William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in Each Other (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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95. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 142. 96. Ibid., 142–43. 97. Ibid., 144. 98. Ibid., 85. 99. Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” lines 65–66. 100. For analysis of “Old King Coal,” see Chapter 2 of this book, 101–102. 101. “The Fogs of London,” Nature (23 December 1880): 165. 102. Jennifer Tucker, “It’s No Downton Abbey, but It’s Just as Much a Part of English History,” History News Network, 12 June 2018. 103. Ibid. 104. Philip Connell, “A Winter Night in Manchester,” in Poaching on Parnassus; A Collection of Original Poems (Manchester: Heywood, 1865), 29. 105. Taylor, Sky of Our Manufacture, 28, 43. 106. Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 13–14. 107. Brett Beasley, “Bad Air: Pollution, Sin, and Science Fiction in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880),” Public Domain Review (30 September 2015): n. pag. 108. William Delisle Hay, The Doom of the Great City; being the Narrative of a Survivor, written A.D. 1942 (London: Newman & Co., 1880), 44. 109. Ibid., 21–22. 110. Ibid., 30. 111. Ibid., 31–32. 112. Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 199. 113. Hay, 36. 114. Taylor, “Storm-Clouds.” 115. Ruskin, 39. 116. Francis Molena, “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate—What Scientists Predict for the Future,” Popular Mechanics (March 1912): 342.

References Albrecht, Glenn. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. ———. “‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity.” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 3 (2005): 41–55. Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge, 1991.

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Baum, Rudy M., Sr. “Future Calculations: The First Climate Change Believer.” Distillations (2016): n. pag. Beasley, Brett. “Bad Air: Pollution, Sin, and Science Fiction in William Delisle Hay’s The Dom of the Great City (1880).” Public Domain Review (30 September 2015): n. pag. Bennett, Betty T. “Radical Imaginings: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” The Wordsworth Circle 26, no. 3 (1995): 147–152. Bewell, Alan. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Blake, William. The Collected Works. Edited by Alicia Ostriker. New York: Penguin, 1986. Brimblecombe, Peter. The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London Since Medieval Times. London: Methuen, 1987. Broglio, Ron. Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750–1830. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: J. Dodsley, 1757. Burtynsky, Edward, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas de Pencier. Anthropocene. Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2018. Byron, Lord. The Major Works. Edited by Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cameron, Lauren. “Questioning Agency: Dehumanizing Sustainability in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” In Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780–1830. Edited by Ben P. Robertson. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015. Connell, Philip. Poaching on Parnassus; A Collection of Original Poems. Manchester: Heywood, 1865. Constable, John. Letters of the Great Artists, from Blake to Pollock. Edited by Richard Friedenthal. London: Thames and Hudson, 1963. Damisch, Hubert. A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Darwin, Erasmus. “Frigorific Experiments on the Mechanical Expansion of Air.” Philosophical Transactions 78 (1788): 43–52. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Edited by Nicola Bradbury. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Fay, Elizabeth. Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Fleming, James R. “Joseph Fourier, the ‘Greenhouse Effect’, and the Quest for a Universal Theory of Terrestrial Temperatures.” Endeavor 23, no. 2 (1999): 72–75. Ford, Thomas H. Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air: Atmospheric Romanticism in a Time of Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

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“The Fogs of London.” Nature (23 December 1880): 165. Grene, Marjorie, and Deborah Nails, eds. Spinoza and the Sciences. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986. Grosholz, Emily. “Clouds, Sensation and the Infinite in the Poetry of John Keats.” The Hudson Review 53, no. 4 (2001): 599–606. Hamblyn, Richard. The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Hay, William Delisle. The Doom of the Great City; being the Narrative of a Survivor, written A.D. 1942. London: Newman & Co., 1880. Heffernan, James A.W. The Re-Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Turner. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1984. Howard, Luke. The Climate of London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Jacobus, Mary. Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Jones, Frederick L., ed. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Edited by Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Keats, John. The Major Works. Edited by Elizabeth Cook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. King-Hele, Desmond. Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets. London: Macmillan, 1986. ———. Shelley: His Thought and Work. London: Macmillan, 1960. Levinson, Marjorie. “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza.” Studies in Romanticism 46, no. 4 (2007): 367–408. Mackenzie, George. The System of Weather of the British Islands. Perth: R. Morison, 1821. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. McKusick, James C. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Routledge, 1988. Molena, Francis. “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate—What Scientists Predict for the Future.” Popular Mechanics (March 1912): 339–42. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

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———. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ———. “Queen Mab as Typological Repertoire.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (1997): n. pag. ———. “Romantic Disaster Ecology: Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2012): n. pag. Newlyn, Lucy. William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in Each Other. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Nichols, Ashton. Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Nicholson, John. The Poetical Works of John Nicholson, the Airedale Poet. Edited by W.G. Hird. London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1876. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ottum, Lisa. “The ‘Vast Prison’ of the World: Counter-Anthropocenes in the Works of Mary Shelley.” In Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century. Edited by Dewey W. Hall and Jillmarie Murphy. Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2019. Paley, Morton D. “Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: Apocalypse Without Millennium.” Keats-Shelley Review 4 (1989): 1–25. Paulson, Ronald. Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Reed, Arden. Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1984. Reno, Seth T. Amorous Aesthetics: Intellectual Love in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, 1788–1853. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. Rigby, Kate. Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Ruskin, John. The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. In The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Vol. 34. Edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1908. Scott, Heidi. Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Seibold, U. “Meteorology in Turner’s Paintings.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 15 (1990): 77–86. Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1996. Shelley, Percy. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. Shouse, Eric. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” M/C Journal 8 (2005): n. pag. Snyder, Bruce. “Apocalypse and Indeterminacy in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” Studies in Romanticism 17, no. 4 (1978): 435–452.

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Spinoza, Baruch. Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 1. Translated by Edward Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. St. Clair, William. The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. London: Faber, 1989. Sunstein, Emily W. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1989. Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. ———. “Storm-Clouds on the Horizon: John Ruskin and the Emergence of Anthropogenic Climate Change.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 36 (2018): n. pag. Thornes, John E. John Constable’s Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science. New York: Continuum, 1999. Tucker, Jennifer. “It’s No Downton Abbey, but It’s Just as Much a Part of English History.” History News Network, 12 June 2018. ———. Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Washington, Chris. Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Wheeler, Michael, ed. Ruskin and Environment: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Wolfson, Susan J. Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. “Constable, Clouds, Climate Change.” Wordsworth Circle 38, no. 1–2 (2007): 25–34. Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals. Edited by Pamela Woolf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Wordsworth, William. A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England, with a Description of the Scenery, & c. for the use of Tourists and Residents. 5th ed. Kendal: Hudson and Nicholson, 1835. ———. The Major Works. Edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Epilogue: Modernism and the Anthropocene

By the end of nineteenth century, nations around the world were experiencing the kind of rapid industrialization begun in eighteenth-century Britain. Continental Europe, Japan, and the United States all had their own industrial revolutions, and during the first half of the twentieth century, anthropogenic climate change became a fixture of the modern world. Along with mass industrialization, the first industrialized world war decimated Europe in 1914–1919, and World War II was even worse, sparking the Nuclear Age in 1945 and the Great Acceleration in 1950. The latter date is now the frontrunner for the formal stratigraphical marker of the Anthropocene epoch. The climatic effects of nineteenthcentury industrialization were also taking more definite shape as global warming. Climate scientists now refer to this era as Early Twentieth Century Warming—a kind of precursor to the Great Acceleration— but early twentieth-century scientists also recognized Earth’s changing climate.1 Building on the work of nineteenth-century scientists, Svante Arrhenius proved that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels caused Earth’s rising surface temperatures. At the same time, authors began developing more explicit and nuanced engagements with anthropogenic climate change and the Anthropocene. Humans’ impact on climate is a regular feature of modernist literature. By the early twentieth century, the Anthropocene had woven its way into the very fabric of literature and art, at both thematic and formal © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. T. Reno, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53246-8

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levels. For example, in “The Capital” (1938), W.H. Auden presents a vision of modern urban life in the Anthropocene. He does not specify the city about which he writes, though it’s most likely London, the capital of his home country, or Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the first industrialized city on Continental Europe. Auden writes that in the city’s restaurants and shops, “the rich are always waiting, / Waiting expensively for miracles to happen.”2 These “miracles” of food production and global trade mirror humans’ mastery of climate: “You with your charm and your apparatus have abolished / The strictness of winter and spring’s compulsion.”3 The ability to control the seasons—which results in a “belief in our infinite powers”4 —refers not only to the availability of food year-round from all parts of the world but also to modern climate control: Willis Carrier invented the first air-conditioning system in 1902, which was introduced in public buildings in 1925, and Frigidaire began selling the first commercial refrigerators in the 1920s (ironically, these cooling inventions exacerbate global warming). But the powers of this new industrialized world benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else: In unlighted streets you hide away the appalling; Factories where lives are made for a temporary use Like collars or chairs, rooms where the lonely are battered Slowly like pebbles into fortuitous shapes.5

Industrialized cities are made and supported by the bodies of the poor, the factory workers whose lives are “temporary” like the objects they manufacture. References to the plight of the working classes were common in nineteenth-century literature, but Auden emphasizes human alienation in the new urban world. This is a perennial theme in modernist literature, including Auden’s own work: he wrote many poems on the abandoned Rookhope Mines in Northern England. Yet, Auden wrote “The Capital” within a global context. The city is symbolic of the handful of industrialized nations most responsible for global warming, for the Anthropocene itself, at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable nations, mostly in the Global South, that feel the effects of the Anthropocene most forcefully and urgently. Britain was facing this lasting legacy as its empire declined in the aftermath of World War I, and the problem continues to impact global climate policies in the twenty-first century: addressing issues of social and environmental justice caused by global

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warming was a central topic of the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference, but no meaningful progress was made.6 As Auden concludes in the poem, the “glow” of the city “is visible far / Into the dark countryside,” where it “beckon[s]…the farmer’s children.”7 The draw of the modern industrialized world is too powerful, the desire for wealth too strong to quell. Many of the most well-known authors of the early twentieth century deal with living in the Anthropocene. This is a major reason that scholarly studies on the Anthropocene tend to focus on twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury literature. There is a clear body of modern climate fiction, and, as the science of climate change entered popular discourses during the second half of the twentieth century, authors of cli-fi began to grapple directly with sociopolitical debates about global warming. While the idea of humanity as a geophysical force was more-or-less accepted by the nineteenth century, it was not until the 1970s that anthropogenic climate change became deeply politicized and “controversial” in the United States and other parts of the world (there was no real controversy in Britain or Continental Europe). Climate research entered US politics in the 1970s and 1980s, with growing opposition and intentional disinformation campaigns from fossil fuel capitalists during the presidency of George H.W. Bush (1989–1993). Industrial concerns and free market money won out, mostly with support from US Republicans and industrial groups, and global warming became a highly polarizing issue during the presidency of George W. Bush (2001–2009). Historian Bolin Bert describes this period as “a decade of hesitance and slow progress,” which slowed even more when Donald Trump became president in 2017.8 American literature reflects these changing dynamics of climate science and politics: there is an explosion of industrial poetry in the twentieth century, followed by an explosion of climate fiction in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.9 However, in twentieth-century Britain there’s more of a rise in urban poetry (as opposed to industrial poetry), and this urban poetics constructs the landscape of early modernist literature. The conventional view of Modernism is a radical break from the nineteenth century, but rethinking literary history through the Anthropocene shows much continuity between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Poets such as Thomas Hardy and William Butler Yeats span both centuries, but scholars and readers typically associate Modernism with the experimental forms of T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot,

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and Virginia Woolf, which are quite different from dominant nineteenthcentury modes. In The New Poetics of Climate Change (2017), Matthew Griffiths argues that Modernism is best “equipped to articulate the complexities and nuances with which climate change confronts us” through a variety of new approaches and strategies that reflect a constantly changing planet.10 Along with traditional modernist literary techniques— such global perspectives, fragmentation of self and world, and nonlinear time—Griffiths lists several key elements of the modernist “climate change poem” prevalent in the works of Pound, Eliot, and others: ironies of representation and a resistance to received ideas of “Nature”; transnational or global scales; hybridization of natural change with cultural and social (anthropogenic) change and the breakdown of dualisms; a new problematics of environmental selfhood; language’s vexed attempt to engage with the world and, reflexively, with its own materialism; and the expression of a troublesome environmental unconscious, which has been repressed by narratives of civilized progress.11

These strategies result in experimental and avant-garde poems that capture the confusing and dizzying hyperobjectclimate change. They also capture the acknowledged experience of living in the Anthropocene. However, as I have shown throughout this book, many eighteenthand nineteenth-century authors also used these strategies. Griffiths does qualify his argument by stating that twentieth-century writers were more acutely aware of climate change than their predecessors, and therefore intentionally used these strategies, but he does not connect the modernist climate change poem to the long history of climate literature and science dating back to the eighteenth century. The new phase of the Anthropocene in the twentieth century demanded new literary modes, but modernist climate literature is not so much a radical break from the past as an evolution of early Anthropocene literature. I conclude this book with two examples of modernist Anthropocene literature that demonstrate this evolution: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928). Both are works of “High Modernism,”12 and both deal with the affective and psychological experiences of a changing climate in the early twentieth century. By no means do I provide exhaustive readings of these monumental works of literature, but rather snapshots of what becomes of Anthropocene literature in the twentieth century. Through experimental forms and aesthetics, as well as

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their critique and hesitant embrace of certain nineteenth-century traditions, The Waste Land and Orlando embody the chaos and complexity of living in the Anthropocene.

Time and Weather in Eliot and Woolf Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1921 when England was experiencing a severe yearlong drought. He was staying in Margate, a seaside town in southeastern England that received only nine inches of rain the entire year—a UK record for the lowest annual rainfall.13 The drought cannot be linked directly to human activity—no single drought can—but anthropogenic climate change makes droughts more frequent and intense, and studies have shown that severe droughts in the UK increased after World War I.14 While Eliot certainly had in mind the wasted land of Europe in the aftermath of the war, he was also certainly musing on the 1921 drought. The Waste Land is a post-apocalyptic poem preoccupied with climate. Four of the poem’s five parts focus on the classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air,15 and, as Griffiths argues, water is the poem’s “defining element,” both as a symbol of fluidity and non-representationality and, I add, actual Anthropocenic waters such as the Thames. Griffiths focuses on form and culture, showing how “The Waste Land offers a literary analogue of [the] process of climate change” through its accumulation of cultural references and images, but Eliot also develops the modes of early Anthropocene literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.16 A century of industrial waste and capitalism leads to World War I and the environmental, cultural, and spiritual climates that Eliot grapples with in the poem. Among many other things, he addresses the waste of the early Anthropocene and how that waste sticks around and shapes his present. The poem depicts a world that is dead, both physically and psychologically. As eco-philosopher Timothy Morton says, the end of the world has already happened, yet here we are, still going on, still existing.17 The first truly global and industrialized war ravaged the planet, creating a literal wasteland throughout much of Europe, and the 1921 drought had turned much of England into a brown waste as well—and all this on top of the industrial transformations of the nineteenth century. Londoners appear dead-though-still-living in the poem, mostly oblivious to those around them and the earth dying beneath their feet. They also slip in and out of historical time, disrupting linear temporality:

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Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson! ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? ‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? ‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, ‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! ‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!’18

This mind- and time-bending image of London life emerges from a collage of literary allusions, cultural references, and historical collapse. Much like the famous opening sequence of the poem, this passage describes the simultaneity of human experience, the overwhelming and incomprehensible mesh of existence, that typifies Anthropocenic thinking. Modern London is “Unreal,” couched in its famous “brown fog” (also called “pea soup fog,” “London fog,” and “the London particular”), a dangerous combination of coal smoke and industrial emissions. In parallel to a famous scene in Dante’s Inferno where the uncommitted dead toil for eternity on the banks of the River Acheron, and in emulation of the nineteenth-century industrial-literary tradition, Londoners here cross the River Thames on the London Bridge in a psychological and spiritual fog, moving though stagnant, more like ghosts than living humans, consumed and alienated by the modern world they do not even look up to observe. Eliot’s conflation of the Thames and Acheron is particularly telling, as it associates the industrialized river with the swamp-like river-portal to Hell from Greek mythology, depicting the people of modern London as stuck in suspended torture. When two people do attempt to establish a connection on the bridge, historical time collapses: the speaker calls out to Stetson (a possible reference to the famous nineteenth-century hat company founder), who was apparently with him at the Battle of Mylae, which took place over two thousand years earlier in 260 BCE.

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Their one-sided exchange turns to gardening and weather in twentiethcentury England, concluding with quotes from John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). This collage of time and texts reflects the disorientation of the Anthropocene, of human history within a geological time scale, of a new epoch forged by humans but out of human control. The Unreal City, its brown fog, and the industrial Thames reappear in other parts of the poem, as inescapable as the nineteenth-century industrial emissions that produced them. In the opening sequence of Part III, the Thames is prominent as a fragmented and polluted symbol of modern London. Eliot repeatedly observes that “The nymphs are departed,” and he identifies garbage and waste as the river’s defining elements: “empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends / Or other testimony of summer nights.”19 This accumulative aesthetic is reminiscent of the mode deployed by Charles Dickens and John Ruskin in their Anthropocene writings. The Song of the Thamesdaughters reinforces Eliot’s use of this nineteenth-century aesthetic: “The river sweats / Oil and tar,” dominated by “barges” that seem to “drift” aimlessly and “wash / Drifting logs” downstream.20 Like nineteenthcentury poets of the Thames, Eliot draws from mythological river nymphs frequently invoked in Renaissance poetry but increasingly absent from industrialized rivers of the early Anthropocene: the nymphs here sing of petroleum, filth, and commercial barges. The language and style of the song emerge from a mesh of other texts, including Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion (1596), Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), Richard Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods (1876), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Texts and contexts, like industrial waste and carbon emissions, accumulate in the new atmosphere of the Anthropocene. The filth of London and the Thames can only be erased, or at least partially cleansed, through an apocalyptic deluge. Like nineteenth-century apocalyptic fiction, a natural catastrophe may be the only way to slow down the Anthropocene. In Part IV, “Death by Water,” the image of a vortex serves this function, a catastrophic swirling and flooding, indicative not only of a natural catastrophe but also of what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls a vorticular form of reading:

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A vortex often obliterates. Yet its spirals and shifts may also render evident long-standing embroilments, the unexpected touchings of forces and entities within expansive spatial and temporal systems. Vortices are disjunct histories in contiguity, binding lines into curved motion, a model of temporality that does not easily sediment into discrete layers. Most Anthropocene narratives embrace linearity…[yet] their currents swirl with affective detritus, recondite matter, queer fragments, anomalous proximities.21

For Cohen, the vortex is an apt symbol of and for the Anthropocene, of the messy convergence of human and geological histories, of the vorticular nature of both time and weather. He calls for a new vorticular reading that eschews linear analysis and stratified research, instead whirling, circling, and disorienting, much like Eliot’s method in The Waste Land. This new reading, this new narrative for the Anthropocene, is also what Griffiths has in mind when he argues that modernist literature captures the essence of living in the Anthropocene more forcefully than nineteenth-century literature. Within the image of the vortex is the deluge, the great flood, glacial melting, sea level rise, and environmental catastrophe, but also rebirth, cleansing, and spiritual regeneration. The Waste Land is post-apocalyptic: it folds historical time in upon itself, but it’s ultimately optimistic. The end of the world has happened. Now what? The collapse of historical time is also an essential feature of Woolf’s Orlando, though it occurs in a much more linear fashion in her novel. Spanning four centuries of British history through the supernatural and gender-bending life of its titular character, Orlando traces Britain’s changing cultural and environmental landscapes. Like The Waste Land, Orlando hinges on major climatic events, and three in particular drive the narrative and Woolf’s meditations on the Anthropocene: the Great Frost of 1608, the Industrial Revolution, and the combined effects of mass industrialization and World War I in the early twentieth century. Gender is arguably the novel’s central theme, but Orlando is also a novel about climate.22 The first major climate event in Orlando is the Great Frost of 1608, when the Thames was frozen over for two months. This frost resulted in the first recorded “frost fair,” a recurring cultural event where a marketplace and carnival were established on the frozen Thames for the enjoyment of its citizens and visitors. But even before the frost occurs, Woolf makes clear that climatic changes are central to British history and culture: “The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor

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their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper altogether.”23 Woolf’s emphasis on climate and weather persists throughout the novel, and in this itemized list, she implies interconnection and influence: weather and climate play a fundamental role in shaping morals, literature, and food. Moreover, the inclusion of the Great Frost as a centerpiece of the first chapter highlights climate change: it’s much warmer in the twentieth century of Woolf’s time. England’s last frost fair was in 1814, and, after that, the Thames did not freeze over again until 1963 (most likely the last freeze for the next one hundred thousand years or so). In the novel, the Great Frost demonstrates how drastically the climate has changed over four hundred years. This climatic event also drives the narrative: the thawing of the Thames coincides with Orlando’s first heartbreak, leading to a prolonged state of depression and, ultimately, his decision to leave England. When Orlando returns to London as a woman over one hundred years later in the eighteenth century, she barely recognizes the city. Woolf makes clear that the Industrial Revolution was the most transformative event in the history of Britain. Orlando first notes that London has “completely changed” from “a huddle of little black, beetle-browed houses” to a bustling, modern city full of life and energy, of “broad and orderly thoroughfares,” of endless “ship[s],” “coaches,” “houses,” “signs,” shops, “coffee-house[s],” and “taverns.”24 She sees a city dominated by industry and fueled by fossil capitalism. But most significant is the transition to the nineteenth century, to the fully industrialized British Empire, symbolized by the arrival of John Ruskin’s storm cloud. Woolf was familiar with Ruskin’s writings, though she read them more for style than substance, and the similarities between Woolf’s musings on industrialization and Ruskin’s 1884 lecture are unmistakable:25 This great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of the British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed, or rather, did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering gales, long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived beneath its shadow. A change seemed to have come over the climate of England. Rain fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no sooner over than they began again. The sun shone, of course, but it was so girt about with clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that its beams were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort took the place of

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the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century. Under this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less intense, and the white of these now was muddied. But what was worse, damp now began to make its way into every house—damp, which is the most insidious of all enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible, ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the stone. So gradual is the process, that it is not until we pick up some chest of drawers, or coal scuttle, and the whole thing drops to pieces in our hands, that we suspect even that the disease is at work. Thus, stealthily, and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour of the change, the constitution of England was altered and nobody knew it. Everywhere the effects were felt. The hardy country gentleman, who had sat down gladly to a meal of ale and beef in a room designed, perhaps by the brother Adam, with classic dignity, now felt chilly. Rugs appeared, beards were grown and trousers fastened tight under the instep. The chill which he felt in his legs he soon transferred to this house; furniture was muffled; walls and tables were covered too. Then a change of diet became essential. The muffin was invented and the crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing-room to glass cases, and glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads, and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little dogs, mats, and antimacassars, the home—which had become extremely important—was completely altered. Outside the house—it was another effect of the damp—ivy grew in unparalleled profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were smothered in greenery. No garden, however formal its original design, lacked a shrubbery, a wilderness, a maze. What light penetrated to the bedrooms where children were born was naturally of an obfusc green and what light penetrated to the drawing-rooms where grown men and women lived came through curtains of brown and purple plush. But the change did not stop at outward things. The damp struck within. Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did the same

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fertility show itself within. The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus—for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork—sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.26

In a parallel to her earlier remarks on the Elizabethan climate, Woolf attributes nearly every aspect of nineteenth-century British culture to climate change, both natural and anthropogenic. A major reason for the colder, damper climate Woolf details was the “Little Ice Age,” a period of global cooling from roughly the mid-sixteenth century through the midnineteenth century, caused in large part by volcanic activity: as volcanic ash and sulfur dioxide enter the atmosphere and stratosphere, circulating the planet, these particles block and reflect solar radiation, causing the global temperature to drop. As detailed in previous chapters of this book, a series of intense volcanic eruptions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributed to this phenomenon, but Woolf probably had most in mind the eruptions of Krakatoa in 1883 and Tambora in 1815— the latter was the largest eruption in human history. Tambora not only caused the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816, and nearly three years of global crop failures, famine, and disease, but also a proliferation of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature. At the same time, Britain’s uptick in industrialization and concurrent global-colonial-imperial domination established the fossil-fueled British Empire, which reshaped the geographies and ecologies of Earth. As the Little Ice Age ended around 1850, the environmental impacts of a hundred years of coal-powered industry became much more visible and traceable in everything from rivers to landscapes to farms to clouds to the way people thought and interacted with one another and their environs. Forty-four years after Ruskin delivered his lecture, Woolf arrives at a similar conclusion regarding the nineteenth century: the Anthropocene had arrived. As Orlando’s late-Victorian life becomes more crowded with people, things, and chaos, with the disorientation and uncertainty of living in the Anthropocene, she searches for a new way to understand the simultaneity of experience, the changes across culture, history, and climate. Here, Woolf adopts a more familiar modernist mode of writing, episodic and imagistic:

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Here she was in St. James’ Street; a married woman; with a ring on her finger; where there had been a coffee house once there was now a Restaurant; it was about half past three in the afternoon; the sun was shining; there were three pigeons; a mongrel terrier dog; two hansom cabs and a barouche landau. What then, was Life? … Behold, meanwhile, the factory chimneys, and their smoke; behold the city clerks flashing by in their outrigger. Behold the old lady taking her dog for a walk and a servant girl wearing her new hat for the first time not at the right angle. Behold them all.27

And then, in a single paragraph break, time jumps forward to the present day in 1928: The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying—but how it’s done, I can’t even begin to wonder.28

Despite the global interconnectedness made possible by airplanes, electricity, and radios, Orlando feels a disjunct between life and technology, between consumption and the means of production, an Anthropocenic sense of disorientation, and, increasingly, as the novel rushes to its conclusion, a form of solastalgia, what Glenn Albrecht calls “the lived experience of negative environmental change…the homesickness you have when you are still at home.”29 Orlando no longer recognizes the world around her, and so her identity and the narrative spiral in the final pages of the novel, literally collapsing in on themselves: the concepts of self, history, and meaning fragment and dissipate into a vortex of disparate thoughts, persons, selves, and histories. The final moments in Orlando illustrate this signature affect of the Anthropocene, this solastalgia, a struggle to understand the epoch that has ended, and the new epoch just beginning.

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Conclusion As the Great Acceleration drastically reshaped Earth’s ecosystem after World War II, and as climate scientists made great strides in understanding climate change and communicating their findings to the general public, so too did the writing and publication of climate fiction accelerate, becoming one of the most popular genres in the twenty-first century. These works of contemporary Anthropocene literature have their roots in eighteenthand nineteenth-century climate writings, which appeared in the cradle of the Anthropocene in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Is Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain a definitive history of the Anthropocene or of Anthropocene literature? No. As I hope I’ve made clear in this book, there is no single narrative, no single start date for this new epoch, despite the “1750” that appears in the title. But one powerful and important narrative of the Anthropocene is that of fossil fuel culture and capitalism, both of which are tied to the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Much literature and art of that period, spanning roughly 1750–1884, shapes and reflects the drastic changes wrought by industrialization, which in turn produced what many scientists and authors called a new epoch dominated by humans. This body of early Anthropocene literature offers twenty-first-century readers a glimpse into the origins of contemporary responses to anthropogenic climate change, and to the origins of the Anthropocene concept itself. This book shows that our understanding and acknowledgment of climate change stretches back much further than is typically assumed, that we’re still living in this industrializing moment, and that we can still act to alter the trajectory put in place by the British Industrial Revolution. There’s something both reassuring and disturbing in this fact: we’ve been working to address environmental crises for a long time, but we’re still debating similar issues and problems, still continuing the industrial-economic “progress” that got us to this point. Early Anthropocene literature documents the past, makes sense of the present, and imagines possible futures forever in flux. After all, the twenty-first century is not yet the post-apocalyptic world of Mary Shelley’s Last Man or Richard Jeffries’s After London, nor the utopian worlds of Percy Shelley or William Morris. In many ways, we’re still in Ruskin’s storm cloud, peering through the smoke of our own manufacture, trying to see clearly enough to write the story of the Anthropocene, and, through that writing, to lead us toward a better and more sustainable future.

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Notes 1. Gabriele C. Hergerl, et al., “The Early 20th Century Warming: Anomalies, Causes, and Consequences,” WIREs Climate Change 9 (2018): e522. 2. W.H. Auden, “The Capital,” lines 1–2, in Selected Poems, 2nd ed., ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage Books, 2007). 3. Ibid., lines 5–6. 4. Ibid., line 10. 5. Ibid., lines 13–16. 6. Leading the opposition to climate solutions like cutting emissions and creating a carbon market were major industrialized countries responsible for the vast majority of global environmental problems: the United States, Russia, China, India, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. 7. Auden, lines 17–18, 20. 8. Bert Bolin, A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 163. 9. See, for example, Peter Oresick Nicholas Coles, ed., Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990); and Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015). 10. Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 10. 11. Ibid., 30. 12. High Modernism refers to the second of three phases of literary modernism. This second phase develops during the 1920s and is exemplified by the works of Eliot, Woolf, Pound, and others. See Joshua Kavaloski, High Modernism: Aestheticism and Performativity in Literature of the 1920s (Rochester: Camden House, 2014). 13. Jeremy Plester, “Weatherwatch: The Great Year-Long Drought of 1921,” The Guardian, 13 October 2011. 14. See G.A. Cole and T.J. Marsh, The Impact of Climate Change on Severe Droughts: Major Droughts in England and Wales from 1800 and Evidence of Impact (Bristol: Environment Agency, 2006). 15. “The Burial of the Dead,” “The Fire Sermon,” “Death by Water,” and “What the Thunder Said,” respectively. 16. Griffiths, 43–44, 56. Griffiths develops the approach of Grover Smith, who used geological strata as an analogy for reading the poem in order to examine the layers of cultural ages and literary references. See Grover Smith, The Waste Land (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983).

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17. Morton often uses this phrase as an opening gambit when discussing global warming and the Anthropocene. He makes this argument in his book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and his BBC radio show The End of the World Has Already Happened (2020). 18. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 60–76, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (Orlando: Harcourt, 1962). 19. Ibid., lines 175, 177–79. 20. Ibid., lines 266–67, 268, 273–74. 21. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Anarky,” in Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times., ed. Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 26. 22. Biography dominates readings of the novel: it is both a satiric biography and a “love letter” to Woolf’s close friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, who also appears as Orlando in photos throughout the novel. 23. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006), 20. 24. Ibid., 123. 25. See Diane R. Leonard, “Proust and Virginia Woolf, Ruskin and Roger Fry: Modernist Visual Dynamics,” Comparative Literature Studies 18, no. 3 (1981): 333–43; Gillian Beer, “The Victorians in Virginia Woolf: 1832– 1941,” in Dickens and Other Victorians: Essays in Honour of Philip Collins, ed. Joanne Shattuck (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 214–35; and John Coyle, “Ruskin, Proust, and the Art of Failure,” Essays in Criticism 56, no. 1 (2006): 28–49. 26. Woolf, 167–68. 27. Ibid., 207, 215. 28. Ibid., 220. 29. See Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 200.

References Albrecht, Glenn. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Auden, W.H. Selected Poems. 2nd ed. Edited by Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage Books, 2007. Beer, Gillian. “The Victorians in Virginia Woolf: 1832–1941.” In Dickens and Other Victorians: Essays in Honour of Philip Collins. Edited by Joanne Shattuck. New York: Macmillan, 1988. Bolin, Bert. A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Anarky.” In Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. Edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Cole, G.A., and T.J. Marsh. The Impact of Climate Change on Severe Droughts: Major Droughts in England and Wales from 1800 and Evidence of Impact. Bristol: Environment Agency, 2006. Coles, Peter Oresick Nicholas, ed. Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Coyle, John. “Ruskin, Proust, and the Art of Failure.” Essays in Criticism 56, no. 1 (2006): 28–49. Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909–1962. Orlando: Harcourt, 1962. Griffiths, Matthew. The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Hergerl, Gabriele C., et al. “The Early 20th Century Warming: Anomalies, Causes, and Consequences.” WIREs Climate Change 9 (2018): e522. Kavaloski, Joshua. High Modernism: Aestheticism and Performativity in Literature of the 1920s. Rochester: Camden House, 2014. Leonard, Diane R. “Proust and Virginia Woolf, Ruskin and Roger Fry: Modernist Visual Dynamics.” Comparative Literature Studies 18, no. 3 (1981): 333–43. Morton, Timothy. The End of the World Has Already Happened. BBC Radio 4, 2020. ———. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Plester, Jeremy. “Weatherwatch: The Great Year-Long Drought of 1921.” The Guardian, 13 October 2011. Smith, Grover. The Waste Land. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006.

Index

A Adkins, Peter, 6, 34, 62 affect theory, 178, 191 Agricultural Revolution, 4, 6, 38, 46, 47 Akenside, Mark, 128, 129, 161 Albrecht, Glenn, 209, 212, 217, 234, 237 Anning, Mary, 21 Anthropocene bomb spike, 3, 4 Early Twentieth Century Warming, 223 Great Acceleration, 3, 5, 223, 235 Orbis spike, 3 See also climate change; global warming Armour, Margaret, 155, 165 Arrhenius, Svante, 1, 2, 65, 97, 183, 223 astronomy, 10, 13, 15, 18–21, 24, 28, 32, 49, 203 Auden, W.H., 224, 225, 236

B Babbage, Charles, 33, 62 Baines, Richard, 102, 114 Bakewell, Robert, 34, 136 Batchelor, Thomas, 45–47, 64 Bazalgette, Joseph, 155 Beche, Henry de la, 21, 22 Bedlam Furnaces, 90, 91 Bellasis, E.J., 102, 114 Bewell, Alan, 17, 58, 111, 112, 133, 162, 215 biopolitics, 45, 64, 122 Birmingham, 47, 76, 78, 79, 92, 100, 109, 154, 206 Birmingham Gazette, 79, 109 Blake, William “Auguries of Innocence”, 25, 60 Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Great Albion, 60 “London”, 35, 121, 123, 160 Milton: A Poem, 60 “Thames”, 121–124

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. T. Reno, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53246-8

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INDEX

The French Revolution, 123, 187, 214 Vala, or the Four Zoas , 62 Bonneuil, Christophe, 5, 6, 54, 55, 57, 112 Brand, John, 126–128, 161 Brimblecombe, Peter, 50, 64, 113, 179, 212 British Empire, 17, 33, 127, 130, 133, 145, 154, 156, 180, 231, 233 Broglio, Ron, 43, 45, 63, 64, 199, 215, 216 Brownrigg, William, 80–82 Buffon, Georges-Louis, le Comte de, 6, 9, 19, 20, 26, 27, 59, 82, 84, 85, 87, 96, 110 Burke, Edmund, 178, 191, 192, 215 Byron, Lord, 9, 37, 51, 54, 76, 94, 130, 180, 198, 214 “Darkness”, 94, 112, 187, 214 Don Juan, 37, 62, 75, 108, 179, 212 C Cameron, Lauren, 188, 214 canals, 9, 36, 41, 95, 123, 124, 133, 134, 137–139, 158 Carlyle, Thomas, 6, 103 Carrier, William, 224 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 5, 54, 57 Chambers, Robert, 23 charters, 121, 122, 126, 127 Chartist movement, 98 Chico, Tita, 8, 57 Christianity, 88 Clare, John “Remembrances”, 42, 63 “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters”, 143, 164 “The Lament of Swordy Well”, 42, 63

“The Mores”, 41, 63 climate change, 1, 4–10, 18, 23, 47, 53–55, 75, 88, 89, 94, 97–99, 105, 107, 113, 134, 144, 159, 172, 173, 177, 178, 184, 185, 188, 189, 192, 194–196, 198, 201, 207, 208, 223, 225–227, 231, 233, 235. See also Anthropocene; global warming climate fiction, 9, 10, 156, 159, 225, 235 climatology, 8, 10, 49, 50, 52, 96, 140, 171, 174, 178, 179, 203 clouds, 9, 10, 24, 37, 50, 52, 54, 88, 89, 93, 95, 102, 105–107, 140, 172–176, 178, 179, 182–188, 190–204, 207, 210, 216, 231, 233, 235 coal, 1, 5, 17, 25, 33–35, 37, 38, 45, 48, 52, 73, 74, 79, 82, 83, 90, 94, 96, 98, 101–103, 106, 107, 113, 122–125, 127, 129–134, 149, 150, 160, 210, 211, 228, 232 Coalbrookdale, 89–92, 130–133, 135 Coffey, Donna, 131, 132, 162 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 57, 229, 230, 237 Coke, Thomas, 34 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 143, 144, 177, 203 “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, 144 “To the River Otter”, 143, 163 Connell, Philip, 38, 62, 206, 217 Conrad, Joseph, 9, 155, 165, 229 conservation, 9, 38, 97, 124, 134–139, 143 Constable, John, 10, 52, 140, 174, 175, 178, 192, 195, 204, 215, 216 Cloud Study, 194, 196, 197

INDEX

Cloud Study, Sunset , 195 Extensive Landscape with Grey Clouds , 176 Cook, James, 14, 18, 19, 29, 59 Correggio, Antonio de, 174, 175 Cotman, John Sell, 91, 92 Cowper, William, 9, 11, 16, 111 The Task, 57, 88, 105, 111 “Yardley Oak”, 16, 17, 58 Crutzen, Paul, 2, 3, 54, 56, 85, 111 Cuvier, Georges, 21

D Dalton, John, 80–82, 96, 109, 110 Darwin, Charles, 21, 23, 58, 97 Darwin, Erasmus iceberg scheme, 85 Phytologia, 16 The Botanic Garden, 8, 14, 15, 17, 18, 58, 82, 85, 88, 111, 133, 162 The Temple of Nature, 16 Davies, Jeremy, 55 Davy, Humphry, 75 deep time, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 21, 23–27, 32, 76, 87, 103, 110, 133, 139, 141, 142, 155. See also geology deforestation, 11, 16, 20, 22, 38, 128, 138, 141 Derby Silk Mill, 34 Dickens, Charles Bleak House, 37, 53, 206, 217 David Copperfield, 152, 164 “Down with the Tide”, 153, 164 Hard Times , 206 Little Dorrit , 164 Oliver Twist , 150, 164 Our Mutual Friend, 62, 152 Dirty Father Thames, 144, 147, 149 Disraeli, Benjamin, 154

241

Drayton, Michael, 127 Dudley, 94–96 Duffy, Cian, 74, 108, 109 Dunn, Samuel, 11–14, 18, 19 Dürbeck, Gabriele, 7, 56

E Edinburgh Review, 75 Eliot, T.S., 10, 23, 225–230, 236, 237 Elliot, Ebenezer, 98, 99, 113 Ellis, William, 125, 160 enclosure, 11, 34, 40–42, 45, 46, 64, 143 Engels, Friedrich, 100 Eruption of Krakatoa, and Subsequent Phenomena: Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society, The, 104 Evelyn, John, 51 A Character of London, 50 Fumifugium, 50, 52, 64 Sylva, 51

F factories, 9, 17, 25, 34, 35, 45, 47, 52, 74, 76, 98–100, 106, 153, 157, 224, 234 Fennell, David, 137, 163 Ford, Thomas, 31, 57, 61, 111, 212 Fourier, Joseph, 64, 183, 213 Franklin, Benjamin, 17, 49, 88, 111 Freeman, Michael, 103, 114 Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste, 5, 6, 54, 57, 112

G Gardiner, Ralph, 125, 126, 161 Gentleman’s Magazine, The, 78, 79, 83

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geology catastrophism, 21, 97 Neptunism, 134 uniformitarianism, 21, 97, 133, 135 Vulcanism, 134, 135 See also deep time Gibson, John, 129, 161 Gidal, Eric, 186, 213 Gilchrist, Robert, 130, 161 Gilpin, William, 38, 137–139, 163 Observations on several parts of England, particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, 138, 163 Observations on the River Wye, 137, 163 global warming, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 55, 85, 90, 97, 107, 159, 176, 183, 188, 210, 223, 224, 225, 237. See also Anthropocene; climate change Gore, Al, 85, 216 Great Dust Heap, The, 35 Great Exhibition, The, 53, 172 Great Frost, The, 230, 231 Great Stink, The, 124, 144, 154, 155 Gregory, George, 183 Griffiths, Matthew, 56, 57, 59, 226, 227, 230, 236

Hogg, James, 43 Holland, John, 74, 75, 96, 108 History and Description of Fossil Fuel, the Colliers, and Coal Trade of Great Britain, 96, 112 Sheffield Park, 73, 75, 96, 108 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 105, 115 Howard, Luke, 49, 53, 64, 75, 92, 175, 181–184, 194, 213 Essay on the Modification of Clouds , 52, 174 The Climate of London, 52, 108, 140, 174, 180, 212 Humboldt, Alexander von, 97, 113 Hutchings, Kevin, 25, 60 Hutton, James, 9, 19–21, 25, 27, 59, 82, 84, 85, 96, 111, 133, 162 hyperobjects, 176–178, 185, 191, 192, 195, 196, 198, 207, 226

H Hamilton, William, 82, 83, 108, 110 Hassall, Arthur Hill, 124, 160 Hay, William Deslile, 10, 206, 208, 210, 217 Heath, William, 145, 146 Heffernan, James, 190, 212, 215, 216 Heringman, Noah, 20, 59, 61, 84, 108–110 Herschel, William, 13–15, 23, 25, 28–30, 202 Highland Clearances, 42, 43

J Jacob’s Island, 150–152 Jacobus, Mary, 178, 212, 215 Jago, Richard, 80, 109, 127 Jeffries, Richard, 9, 156–159, 162, 165, 235 Jenkyn, Thomas, 6 Jones, Ebenezer, 55, 100, 113

I Illustrated London News , 107, 115 Industrial Revolution, 2–5, 8, 9, 11, 25, 41, 46, 47, 52, 55, 84, 87, 89, 90, 94, 99, 122, 125, 133, 177, 188, 205, 223, 230, 231, 235

K Kant, Immanuel, 24, 178, 215

INDEX

Keats, John, 10, 197, 198 “Bright Star”, 30, 61 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, 29, 61 “When I have fears that I may cease to be”, 29, 61, 196, 216 Kirwan, Richard, 49, 52, 53, 64 Knight, Charles, 62, 122, 160 L Lake District, 9, 32, 38–40, 97, 114, 135, 136, 138–142, 144, 174, 199, 201, 204 Lamb, Charles, 53, 83 Lewis, Simon, 3, 4, 54, 55 Linthicum, Kent, 33, 61 Little Ice Age, 84, 233 Liverpool, 33, 103, 130, 133, 134, 181, 182, 205 London, 10, 12, 34–39, 45, 50–54, 75, 83, 88, 91, 95, 101–104, 121–124, 127, 131, 145–150, 153–155, 157–159, 171, 172, 179–181, 193, 194, 204, 206, 208, 209, 224, 228, 229, 231 Loutherbourg, Philip James de, 90–92 Low Moor Ironworks, 181, 182 Lyell, Charles, 6, 21–23, 59, 96, 97, 105, 135, 162 M MacDuffie, Allen, 150, 164 Mackenzie, George, 183, 213 Macpherson, Mary, 43–45, 63, 64 Malm, Andreas, 5, 54, 56, 57 Manchester, 33, 38, 39, 99, 102, 106, 113, 139, 154, 182, 206 Marsh, George, 6, 56, 98, 105 Maslin, Mark, 3, 4, 54, 55 Massumi, Brian, 177, 178, 212 Mayhew, Henry, 150, 164

243

McKusick, James, 63, 64, 143, 163, 173, 211 Mead, Edward, 100, 113 Menely, Tobias, 6, 55–57, 110–112, 237 meteorology, 9, 10, 49, 52, 96, 171, 174, 178, 181, 184, 203 Modernism, 225, 226, 236 Molena, Francis, 210, 211, 217 Morley, Henry, 154, 155, 165 Morris, William, 156, 157, 165, 235 Morton, Timothy, 57, 63, 176, 177, 186, 192, 198, 212, 213, 215, 216, 227, 237 Mosley, Stephen, 102, 113, 114 Munn, Paul Sandby, 91–93 Murray, James, 126, 161 mythology Acheron, 228 Atlas, 75 Charon, 126 Cyclops, 74, 78, 99 Europa, 18, 86 Hades, 77 Hercules, 86 Prometheus, 130 Styx, 132 Vulcan, 74, 77, 78, 86 Zeus, 18, 130

N Nef, John, 126, 161 Newcastle, 125–129, 161 Nichols, Ashton, 36, 62 Nicholson, John, 109, 182, 212, 216 Nussbaum, Martha, 177, 212

O Old King Coal, 101, 113, 204 Ottum, Lisa, 163, 188, 214

244

INDEX

P Parkins, Wendy, 6, 34, 62 Peacock, Thomas Love, 145, 164 picturesque, 36, 74, 80, 125, 128, 129, 132, 136–138, 175, 215 damnable, 47, 90, 91, 95 See also Gilpin, William Pliny, 77 pollution, 1, 37, 52, 88, 90, 101, 107, 114, 122, 129, 134, 138, 145, 149, 150, 157, 172, 182, 192, 205 air, 33, 49, 50, 102, 171, 179, 183, 204, 206, 208 water, 9, 33, 124, 131, 138 Pope, Alexander, 16 population, 20, 33, 34, 43, 44, 46, 52, 88, 97, 124, 133, 134, 142, 155, 181, 205 Punch, 101, 145, 146, 148, 149, 204, 209 R Raffles, Thomas, 93, 112 railroads, 32, 48, 103 Rigby, Kate, 57, 188, 214 rivers Duddon, 124, 136, 139–142 Severn, 91, 131–133 Thames, 9, 122, 124, 147, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 157, 228 Tyne, 9, 124–130, 134 Wensbeck, 128 Wye, 9, 124, 128 Rogerson, John Bolton, 99, 113 Romanticism, 55, 57, 214 Ruskin, John, 2, 6, 9, 23, 48, 51, 52, 65, 95, 105, 106, 112, 173, 178, 182, 187, 210, 216, 217, 229, 231, 233, 235 “Fiction—Fair and Foul”, 47, 49, 64

The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, 1, 2, 49, 54, 115, 158, 172, 196, 208, 210, 211

S Scafe, John, 32, 61, 134, 136 Scherer, Bernd, 6, 54, 56, 113 Scotland, 42, 43 Scott, Heidi, 57, 75, 108, 213 Scott, Walter, 43, 63, 111, 161 Sedgwick, Adam, 32 Serao, Francesco, 82, 83, 110 Seward, Anna, 111, 112, 161, 162 Shelley, Mary, 60, 94, 130, 198, 214 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 26 The Last Man, 187, 188, 214, 215, 235 Shelley, Percy “Mont Blanc”, 26, 29, 60, 190, 215 Prometheus Unbound, 29, 61, 75, 184, 186, 187, 213 Queen Mab, 27, 60, 61, 184, 213 “The Cloud”, 183, 213 Shiel, M.P., 105, 107 Shouse, Eric, 177, 178, 212 Simpsons, The, 85 Skye, 43–45 Smithson, James, 75 Southey, Robert, 9, 47, 64, 89, 90, 95, 111 Spinoza, Baruch, 177, 212 steam engine, 3, 5, 17, 20, 33, 56, 80, 84, 85, 94, 97, 98, 125, 132 Stoppani, Antonio, 6 sublime astronomical, 14, 15, 32 deep space, 13–15, 24, 28, 29, 202, 203, 216 geological, 24, 32 Romantic, 81, 191, 215

INDEX

See also Burke, Edmund; Kant, Immanuel

T Taylor, Jesse Oak, 6, 36, 53, 55–57, 97, 110, 112, 150, 159, 164, 172, 206, 210, 211, 237 Tennyson, Alfred, 23, 24, 59, 105 Thompson, E.P., 121, 160 Thomson, James, 65, 110 tourism, 79, 114, 124, 130, 135, 138, 141, 200 ecotourism, 136, 137, 142 industrial tourism, 9, 38, 129, 136, 139, 141 Trexler, Adam, 56, 159, 165, 236 Truth, 144, 145 Tucker, Jennifer, 205, 216, 217 Turner, J.M.W. Dudley, Worcestershire, 94, 95, 103 Heavy Clouds above a Landscape, 192, 193 Rain, Steam, and Speed, 103, 104, 193 Sunset amid Dark Clouds over the Sea, 193, 194 Vesuvius in Eruption, 190, 191 Tyndall, John, 64, 97, 105, 183

U UNESCO, 39, 40 urbanization, 11, 34, 48, 88, 99, 124, 133, 144, 150, 155 Ussher, James, 19

V volcanoes Etna, 78 human, 8, 27, 76, 84, 107 Krakatoa, 107

245

Laki, 88, 106 Tambora, 88, 94, 107 Vesuvius, 77, 83 W Wallace, Alfred Russell, 98, 113 Watt, James, 3, 33, 56, 85, 98 Wednesbury, 79, 96 Weeks, James Eyre, 79, 80, 109 Werner, Abraham Gottlob, 21, 134 Whewell, William, 32 Whistler, James, 204, 205 Widnes, 205 Wood, Gillen D’Arcy, 75, 108, 215 Woodhouse, James, 76, 96, 108 Woolf, Virginia, 10, 226, 230, 231, 233, 237 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 37, 62, 178, 198, 203, 217 Wordsworth, William “A Night-Piece”, 30, 31, 61, 201–203, 216 “A Night Thought”, 31, 61 “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”, 36, 62 Guide to the Lakes , 32, 38, 63, 136, 163, 198 “I wandered lonely as a Cloud”, 140, 173, 174, 185, 198, 202, 204, 211 River Duddon, 32, 135, 136, 139, 162 “The Crescent-Moon, the Star of Love”, 31 The Prelude, 38, 198, 201, 216 “Tintern Abbey”, 128, 138, 198, 202, 216, 217 “To the Moon”, 31, 61 “Who but is pleased to watch the moon on high”, 32 World War I (WWI), 223, 224, 227, 230

246

INDEX

Wright, Thomas, 13, 15, 25, 28, 58

Y Yalden, Thomas, 77, 78, 109

Wyatt, John, 32, 141 Wye Tour, 135–138. See also Gilpin, William

Z Zalasiewicz, Jan, 54, 59, 84, 110