Jesse Oak Taylor. The Sky of our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf.

Abstract

This engaging work of ecocriticism offers a much needed reading of ‘atmosphere’ in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British fiction. Jesse Oak Taylor analyses ‘atmosphere’ as ‘literal, in the meteorological sense’ as well as ideologically and symbolically charged (p. 6). He coins a new term, the ‘abnatural’, to indicate ‘nature’s absence and its uncanny persistence’ in literature (p. 5). Specifically, the book analyses how fiction represents the adaptation of organisms under artificial and ‘abnatural’ atmospheric conditions (p. 5). The monograph consists of three parts: ‘The Novel as Climate Model’, ‘Abnatural Supernaturalism’, and ‘Climatic Modernism’. These sections address the Victorian realist novel, fin-de-siècle Gothic fiction, and modernist fiction in turn. By following this historical progression and treating different literary genres, Oak Taylor can show how writers perceived both urban and domestic environments changing around them. In the first part, Oak Taylor analyses works by Charles Dickens and George Eliot to demonstrate that the nineteenth-century realist novel models climate conditions and climate change. He argues that narrative functions as an especially apt ‘mechanism for understanding’ climate because climate itself can only be ‘apprehended through time’ (p. 14). Chapters on Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and Daniel Deronda analyse different man-made, artificial atmospheres. These include glass houses, the Crystal Palace, and domestic spaces polluted by the coal-burning hearth. Oak Taylor connects these artificial environments to the ways in which each novel depicts economic and social relationships: for example, how coal consumption creates hierarchical social classes and power relationships, or how characters transmit affect and emotion within the smoky drawing room. Some of this section’s most suggestive observations are about the connection between atmosphere and literary form. For example, the argument that ‘metonymy is atmospheric’ because it ‘operates by proximity’ encourages readers to reread and perhaps look differently at the interstitial ‘spaces between’ within these novels (p. 28).