“As If the River Was Not Meat and Drink to You!”: Social Novels as a Means of Framing Nineteenth-Century Environmental Justice

Abstract

In current popular representations of nineteenth-century society, garbage and pollution seem omnipresent once characters leave the comfortable homes of the middle class and the aristocracy. At least, this is what modern TV productions, often based on contemporary novels, suggest. It is of course questionable whether this is an accurate image, but not only literary fiction confirms that environments in the nineteenths century were socially divided. Yet, rereading Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864), Wilhelm Raabe's Pfisters Mill (1883), Émile Zola's Germinal (1885), and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) from an environmental historian perspective, these can serve as novelistic case studies, providing cultural perspectives on unjust distribution of environmental risks in the context of accelerating industrialization and urbanization. All of these novels enjoyed great popularity at their time, due both to fame of their authors and wide circulation through their serial publication in well-known journals. Furthermore, each of the authors had some journalistic training or at least affinities for journalistic discourse. The novels in question were based on thorough research, inspired by a particular event, giving them a dimension of social reportage. Given their historical context and narratives, they can be situated within a toxic discourse (Buell) arising around the issues of sanitary reform from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards.