Victorian Environmental Nightmares, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Environmental Nightmares ed. by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison Ailise Bulfin (bio) Victorian Environmental Nightmares, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison; pp. xi + 273. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $119.99, £79.99. Seeking to open new lines of inquiry for Victorian ecocriticism and address a notable gap within it, Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison’s Victorian Environmental Nightmares focuses on the dark side of Victorian literary engagements with the environment, aptly encapsulated in its arresting cover image of a spectral figure symbolizing deadly Thames pollution. This edited collection thus focuses on texts that offer insight into what it calls Victorian environmental nightmares, defined briefly as “actual and imagined environmental crises during the Victorian Age” (8). In doing so, it follows the relatively recent turn in ecocriticism from examining how the nonhuman world is represented in literature to focusing more specifically on representations of environmental degradation and catastrophe, often through the lens of the Anthropocene and inspired by contemporary awareness of the spiralling climate and biodiversity emergencies. As such, the collection is an important intervention in Victorian environmental criticism and one of the first full-length works to address this subject. A key strength of the book is its broad, inclusive approach, expanding the parameters of what the editors view as a “developing” “canon” of Victorian ecocritical genres, authors, and texts (4). The collection places essays on expected authors, such as John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, and H. G. Wells, in productive conjunction with essays on authors not yet typically considered from this perspective, such as Ouida and Oscar Wilde. Chapters pursue the theme of environmental crisis across an extensive range of sources, from mid-century realism and poetry to travel writing and children’s natural history, finde-siècle speculative fiction, and fairy tales. Taken together, the essays demonstrate both the transgeneric prevalence of this theme in Victorian writing and the corresponding presence of some form of environmental awareness and concern in Victorian society. In keeping with its inclusive stance, the collection imposes no prescribed critical or theoretical approach, though many contributors deftly apply critical tools from the interrelated frameworks of environmental humanities and postcolonialism to reveal [End Page 433] how the texts problematize human exceptionalism and critique the capitalist socio-economic structures underpinning the environmental degradation depicted within them. John Miller and Alicia Carroll use the lens of eco-apocalypse to reveal, respectively, the radical, even utopian, extinctionist strain in James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874) and the paradox in Ouida’s environmentalist The Waters of Edera (1900), in which “nature” versus “modernity” is framed as a zero-sum game that leaves no room for recovery, “thereby effectively curtailing an ecological futurity” (149). Other contributors deploy the concept of the Anthropocene. Mark Frost reads late-Victorian disaster tales as “early intimations of the crises of identity, being, and agency that the Anthropocene prompts,” while Shun Yin Kiang critiques the concept’s inherent anthropocentrism by showing how Wells decenters the role of the human in the island ecology depicted in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) (249–50). Together, these two essays draw attention to the ways in which all Victorian literature can be viewed as Anthropocene writing, extending Jesse Oak Taylor’s contention regarding the novel’s complicity in producing this epoch of massive human inscription on the nonhuman world. Despite, or perhaps because of, the collection’s wide-ranging, theoretically diverse approach, many synergies arise from the assembled essays—though the editors could have done more to highlight these in the introduction. Most notably, the essays collectively work to nuance scholarly understandings of Victorian environmental consciousness by revealing key differences as well as similarities between nineteenth-century and current perspectives, rather than simply reading contemporary views onto historical texts. Several contributors show how some Victorian authors conceived of the unadulterated nonhuman world as a threatening, hostile environment, notably Morrison’s deployment of the eco-gothic to illuminate Frances Trollope’s horror in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) at the threat posed by the uncultivated parts of the Western U. S. to the nascent domestic realm. Sara Atwood convincingly argues that the mythic and apocalyptic...