Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction

Abstract

Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (bio) Frances Ferguson has memorably described “the sharp, sudden consciousness” of climate change as one that “comes upon us like the ominous tones of an intruder bent on murder when the babysitter picks up the telephone receiver in a horror film: ‘I’m in the house’” (33). There is no refuge from this stranger within, nor from the feelings of panic his phone call incites. As I write these words, in the summer of 2018, the phone is ringing off the hook: above the Arctic Circle, record highs of 33°C/92°F were measured in Finland; a new record was set in Oman when the temperature did not drop below 42°C/108°F for twenty-four hours.1 Closer to home, outside my window, California is on fire. Extreme heat and dryness brought an early, vicious start to fire season, and in the Carr Fire near Redding, more than a thousand homes have burned down and seven people have died.2 The sky outside my office is thick and gray, and the air quality is poor—a reminder of these nearby conflagrations and the fiery future they portend. Our climate is changing, but must Victorian studies change too? The real question is, how could it not? For scholarship depends on scholars, and no matter how hard we try to inhabit a detached critical perspective, none of us are writing from Mars. Heatwaves, smoky skies, an incessant phone ringing in the background: these are the conditions in which we work. Sometimes these conditions take on an aspect of cosmic irony; in September 2017, members of the Vcologies working group met at the University of Houston to exchange work-in-progress on Victorian ecologies and ecological thought, and as it turned out, our meeting would take place in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a record-breaking storm that drew its strength from record-high ocean temperatures. Institutional and economic advantages mean, of course, that [End Page 537] many academics have been relatively well protected from the ravages of climate change so far—my office window keeps the smoke outside, the University of Houston did not flood—but five miles north of the university, in a historically Black neighborhood with a high flood risk, house after house was turned inside out: the sodden, wrecked contents of homes were piled in the street, pianos next to baby dolls next to lampshades (fig. 1). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Kashmere Gardens, Houston, September 16, 2017. Photograph by Nathan K. Hensley. If these circumstances dictate—and I think they do—that climate change must move into every field of academic debate and every part of the university curriculum, it is equally the case that unique aspects of nineteenth-century Britain and its Empire make our field particularly connected to the topic of climate change. For one thing, the geographies of climate change, including urban flood plain maps, bear a historical relation to European and American imperialism, and in a devastating turn of imperial modernity’s screw, the impacts of climate change are now being borne disproportionately by those least responsible for them and least able to weather them. Thus Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee begins Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire with a discussion of Hurricane Katrina, arguing that ideas about natural disaster today “grew out, in important ways, of the British imperial experience in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia” (2). Similarly, while it would be too simplistic to say [End Page 538] that Victorian England is answerable for the climate crisis, it would also be an error to discount its unique historical role in cultivating the fossil fuel economy and the resulting surge in greenhouse gas emissions.3 The “workshop of the world,” as Benjamin Disraeli famously referred to industrial England, relied on coal combustion to accelerate production and speed transportation, forever transforming the scope of consumption habits, global trade, and imperial market-making (Disraeli n. p.). Just as the climate has changed, then, our understanding of the past must transform along with it, and indeed, conventional notions of past, present, and future are troubled in any account of anthropogenic climate change...