‘Introduction: Literature, Science, and the Natural World in the Long Nineteenth Century’

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, nature occupies a crucial position in social, environmental, and economic debates about global sustainability. Many of these debates over humanity’s relationship with the natural world are not new, but emerged in response to an Enlightenment worldview positing human capacity to control nature through science and technology. The circulation of ideas about the impact of new technologies, the use and misuse of resources and landscapes, and human responsibilities towards the environment and its preservation intensified over the nineteenth century, due partly to the growth of industrialism and the new discourses to which it gave rise. “And what is impossible to science?” asked Friedrich Engels in 1844, arguing against the existence of natural limits in light of human ingenuity (qtd. in Dresner 14). Yet humanity's ability, and its right, to control nature were also debated and questioned over the course of the nineteenth century, a period which saw rapid social, industrial, and scientific change, bringing the natural world to the forefront of the Victorian cultural imagination. John Ruskin’s image of clouds as meteorological omens of the effects of modern industrialisation in The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884) encapsulated nature’s central function as metaphor as well as the focus of scientific investigation; the natural world itself responded to changing times and a changing Britain. The natural world was intricately bound up with how Victorians thought about themselves and how they related to their social world, to the extent that we can hardly extricate the idea of nature from the idea of the nineteenth-century imagination. Traditionally, literary studies of nature in the nineteenth century have tended to focus on the Romantic period. As Onno Oerlemans and P. M. Harman have recently shown, conceiving Romanticism as a movement towards the construction of scientific thinking in literature has led to the placement of nature and the natural world at the centre of how we think about the Romantic imagination. Part of the aim of this special issue is to extend this attention to how nature was perceived and imagined to focus on writers in the latter half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries. By doing so, the four essays that follow this introduction provide fresh literary and historical context for studies of nature during this period and bring to light the ways in which both well-known and understudied writers engaged with science and nature through the century, from Charles Kingsley to Richard Jefferies and D.H. Lawrence. These essays explore the boundaries between urban and natural, real and imagined, past and present, place and time to reveal the complexities of Victorian and early twentieth century attitudes to the natural environment and how these influenced the popular imagination through fiction. Scholars of the nineteenth century broadly agree that nature itself is scarcely a fixed or stable concept, existing rather as “multiple, socially constructed and contested ‘natures,’ each operating from within different, historically specific constellations of social, discursive, and material practices” (Hess 5). As a flexible concept, then, the idea of nature is continually reconstructed in literary texts and is deployed for a range of political and didactic purposes. The essays in this special issue each engage with different formulations of nature in literature, and explore how