Novel Environments

Abstract

Abstract This book shows how Victorian novelists helped to imagine the modern idea of an environment. The environment concept has shaped humanity’s relationship to the natural world, and has drawn attention to the effects of human actions on our natural surroundings. But when did we learn that we live in an environment? While scholars have often located the concept’s emergence in twentieth-century ecological and political thought, Novel Environments reconstructs a longer—and a specifically literary—history. It was in the descriptive worldmaking of the Victorian novel, this book argues, that the environment was first transformed from a scientific abstraction into a vivid object of imagination and feeling. Engaging the scientific theories of their contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Louis Stevenson turned to detailed description of physical surroundings—from gardens and landscapes, to weather and atmospheres—to model interactions between life and its environment. Far from merely furnishing static background, the descriptive apparatus of the Victorian novel imagined the nonhuman world as dynamically involved with human action, feeling, and development. By showing how the novel elaborated the environment concept over the course of the nineteenth century, this book sheds new light on the relationship between Victorian literature and the life sciences, and reveals how literary form has shaped the ecological concepts through which we apprehend the nonhuman world.