Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture, by Wendy Parkins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture by Wendy Parkins Fredrik Albritton Jonsson (bio) Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture, by Wendy Parkins; pp. vi + 238. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, £110.00, £36.99 paper, $155.00, $47.95 paper. At first blush, the topic of Victorian sustainability may strike some readers as wildly anachronistic. After all, the term sustainable development entered into widespread circulation with Gro Harlem Brundtland's 1987 UN report "Our Common Future," that warned of long-term challenges to global and intergenerational equity, including deforestation, desertification, fossil fuel exhaustion, climate change, population pressure, and decline in biodiversity. These concerns were plainly products of a specific historical moment. And yet it would be a grave mistake to assume that worries about environmental degradation have surfaced only in recent decades. Historians and literary scholars have for some time now explored the deep roots of sustainability, preservationism, Malthusianism, and environmental utopianism. Wendy Parkins's Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging and stimulating exploration of the problem of environmental degradation and its remedies during the nineteenth century. Major themes include discourses of urban pollution and sprawl; affective and spiritual bonds with animals and with the wider natural world; debates about agricultural chemistry and soil fertility; experiments in post-growth economies and simple living; and the Victorian science of climate change. According to Parkins, the Victorians were the first to contemplate "the widespread environmental despoliation wrought by industrialization" on a national and planetary scale (1). Victorian writers challenged the "instrumentalist view of the natural world" in literature "as well as in the fields of politics, economics, philosophy and agriculture" [End Page 322] (Gillen D'Arcy Wood qtd. in Parkins 2). This critique also had a constructive side, aimed at conceiving social "alternatives beyond the imaginative horizons of industrial capitalism" (33). Victorian forms of sustainability thus ranged beyond the ecological and technological realms into psychology and everyday practice. John Parham opens the anthology with an exciting essay on John Stuart Mill, which rightly stresses the radical character of Mill's famous chapter on the stationary state in Principles of Political Economy (1848). Parham places Mill's call for voluntary limits to growth in the context of his exchanges with French utopian thought, especially Auguste Comte's sociology and Joseph Fourier's communitarianism. He then traces the evolution of Mill's views forward to the 1860s, connecting stationary state economics with his interest in the Common Preservations Society and the Land Tenure Reform Association. Subsequent chapters by John Holmes, Peter Adkins, Emma Mason, Roslyn Jolly, and Mary L. Shannon explore a series of parallel projects in sustainability, springing from the same context as Mill's environmental sensibility. Holmes looks at William Morris's sprawling narrative poem "The Earthly Paradise" (1868–70), while Adkins examines the intellectual roots of Edward Carpenter's socialist experiment in simple living. Mason turns to theology to uncover what she calls the "ecology of grace" in Christina Rossetti's poetry (69). On her reading, Rossetti's The Face of the Deep (1892) articulated a radical promise of multi-species community and spiritual kinship with the nonhuman. Jolly's essay uncovers in early Victorian travelogues an ideal and practice of "slow travel" intended to counter the "speed and artificiality of modern life" (103). Shannon investigates the many meanings of the Thames in Charles Dickens's writings. She shows how the river linked country and city both as a pastoral idyll and as a conduit of pollution and waste. The second half of the volume includes contributions by Lesley Kingsley, Matthew Ingleby, Michael Shaw, Paul Young, and Dennis Denisoff, with an afterword by Gillen D'Arcy Wood. Kingsley explores the many cultural meanings of guano from high farming and popular chemistry to sanitation and social theory. Ingleby tackles incipient concerns with suburban growth through a genealogy of the term sprawl. Shaw's piece carries on the theme of urban planning by looking at Patrick Geddes's social theory from an aesthetic point of view. Young considers W. H. Hudson's The Purple Land That England Lost (1885) as an eco-romance about the environmental consequences of British global meat markets. Young also demonstrates how...