Sensationalising Victorian domestic ecology: from Scrooge’s coals to sweetly-scented chemicals

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a focus on global impact, see Moore and Smith (2018); Hensley and Steer (2019). Taylor (2016) stresses the need to re-evaluate the distinction between domestic hearth versus industrial pollution. Ross (2020) considers the writing of Charlotte Brontё through an ecocritical lens, Gold develops a concept of “sympathetic ecologies” in Jane Eyre (2021, 105–135), and Miller (2021a) traces revealing connections between discourses on mining and extraction and the marriage plot.

2 See the seminal work of Parham (2011); Mazzeno and Morrison (2016); Miller (2021a; 2021b); and Taylor (2015; 2016). For recent discussions during Covid-19, compare Gilbert (2022, 283).

3 Recognising this multiplicity of responses has led critics to develop “a broader definition of ‘Victorian ecology’” as the best way to “interrogate Victorian writers and works by using the tools of ecocriticism” (Mazzeno and Morrison 2016, 5). Scholars speak of “Victorian ecologies” (Miller 2021b, 1) in the plural, or similarly, of “novel ecologies” in situating the analysis of nineteenth-century fiction within broader energy discourses (Gold 2021).

4 Beetham’s seminal work shows how Victorian advice publications transformed domestic labour into “a skilled task in a modern world which increasingly stressed literacy and print-based knowledge” (1996, 67).

5 Arguing against “the idea that modernity is characterized by an acceptance of the inevitability of risk,” Freedgood explores “the endurance and flexibility of cosmological thinking within it” (2000, 2).

6 Household books thereby prefigured what we now understand as modern ideas of home-safety through the elimination of risk-factors. Tarr and Tebeau see such publications as “the link between the role of women as home-makers and accident prevention” (1997, 198).

7 As Flick has already pointed out, despite earlier debates on “smoke nuisance,” in the nineteenth century public attention shifted to manufacturing cities, to the “black belt of central and northern England” (1980, 29). Taylor (2016) importantly explores the fraught distinction between such domestic and industrial pollution.

8 National regulation only proceeded after the “smog disaster” of 1952 (Taylor 2016, 3).

9 The material presence of the fog in the narrative complements its power as an extended metaphor. Taylor reads both Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend as Anthropocene “climate novels,” in which “settings, atmospheres and environments [are] agents” (2016, 36). See also Corton (2015, chap. 2); Parham (2016).

10 Several scholars have traced the progression of Mrs. Hale’s undiagnosed illness, and Schroeder has argued that “the atmospheric effects of industrial pollution are unevenly borne by the women characters in the novel, exemplifying the gendered environmental impacts of the Anthropocene” (2020, n.p.). Compare also Weaver (2016). However, Margaret’s father likewise develops respiratory distress. Having “occasionally experienced a difficulty in breathing” (Gaskell 1854, 410), he is said to be “suffering now from having lived so long in that Milton air” (1854, 415) shortly before his sudden death.

11 Better-known examples include Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) and Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Braddon’s The Fatal Three (1888) involves contaminated water.

12 On the notorious “Bradford Incident” of 1858, see Whorton (2010, 139–167).

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Tamara S. Wagner

Tamara S. Wagner is Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her books include The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture (2020), Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English (2016), Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction (2010), and Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740–1890 (2004).