In the next chapter, we will explore Richard Jefferies’s invention of a postapocalyptic pristine nature, where ecological succession has engulfed the relics of Victorian civilization but the toxic legacy of industry skulks just below the surface. Jefferies was witness to British food shortages from crop failures due to Krakatoa’s volcanic winters in the 1880s, and he was openly intrigued by environmental chaos’s power to reinvent a degraded world. H. G. Wells did not write under the influence of an eruption, but he uses the theory of evolution by natural selection to imagine a harrowing connection between Victorian industry and an actual machine nature within a million years. In this story, the initial conditions of industrial economic inequality have chaotic downstream effects on human evolution.
I have divided the four works into two separate chapters on chaos be-cause the traditional transition from the Romantic to the Victorian period around midcentury also signals an upward shift in the intensity of industrial activity and its ecological effects in England. In the earlier writing of White and Shelley, industry is a mere shadow beyond the borders of the narrative. By the second half of the century, Jefferies and Wells designate industrial pollution and machinery as central elements in future nature. A moral thread that distrusts the influence of industrialism colors their writing, and this thread is absent in the Romantic works. Jefferies and Wells also had Darwin’s ideas at their disposal, so they are necessarily in dialogue with natural selection. Before delving into the Victorian novels, I discuss how contemporary atmospheric science was beginning to make connections between volcanic eruptions and factory emissions as comparable forms of air pollution.
In all four works, conceptual innovations of chaotic nature foreshadow theories in modern ecology, including population ecology, succession dynamics, disturbance mosaics, and climate change. Purposely omitted in this study are cozy catastrophes such as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). Although these works show a Victorian disaffection for urban industrial settings, their simplistic “back-to-the-earth” dreamworlds are not particularly enlightening in relation to ecological studies in the twenty-first century. Their utopianism is classical rather than modern.
The literary use of catastrophe patterns requires a move beyond the calm quotidian of drawing room and garden settings. British novels of the nineteenth century mostly conformed to the convention of nature’s constancy beneath human historical turmoil, from Scott to Austen, Eliot to Gaskell. Nature may change cosmetically from industrial blackening, as in Gaskell’s North and South (1855), but polluted nature is not the central concern; character self-realization is. Where classic novels like Bleak House (1852–53) and Middlemarch (1874) prize coherent conclusions that advance moral arguments centered on human action, Romantic and Victorian literary scholarship has said less about contemporaneous novels with a modern vision of nature. The Last Man (1826) and After London (1885) are perhaps inferior works of literature when character and plot are the major considerations, but in exchange they propose that nature has become its own tragic character in a new age of ecological stressors: nature is dynamic, damaged, unpredictable, vengeful, enduring, and nurturing. The apocalyptic thriller can also afford a sense of triumph to readers. When not upstaged by nature, characters often show latent capabilities that come to shine in the new environment, as the old, outworn culture is turned under. Catastrophe provides an outlet for a different kind of romance, with fresh adversities and heroes showing adaptive spots and stripes: inoculated wanderers, new frontiersmen, and time travelers. The ecological thriller is receptive to subversive comedy and romance; it is not always a desperate slog through dystopian lands of extinction. Readers share the hope that catastrophe engenders unforeseen bounties, and that we are ennobled and strengthened by enduring its hardships.
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault explores how a clearer understanding of deep time enabled by new findings in geology and biology caused a rupture in the Western episteme of the nineteenth century, which had been built upon a long-standing assumption of natural history as a human-centered, providential narrative:
[I]t was discovered that there existed a historicity proper to nature; [. . .] man found himself dispossessed of what constituted the most manifest contents of his history: nature no longer speaks to him of the creation or the end of the world, of his dependence or his approaching judgment; it no longer speaks of anything but a natural time; its wealth no longer indicates to him the antiquity or the immanent return of a Golden Age; it speaks only of conditions of production being modified in the course of history. [. . .] The human being no longer has any history: or rather, since he speaks, works, and lives, he finds himself interwoven in his own being with histories that are neither subordinate to him nor homogeneous with him. By the fragmentation of the space over which Classical knowledge extended in its continuity, by the folding over of each separated domain upon its own development, the man who appears at the beginning of the nineteenth century is “dehistoricized.” (367–69)
In effect, the increasingly sophisticated life sciences were proposing a new and indeterminate paradigm of deep time in which human history was only one of myriad narratives. The human story was recent, heroic only from an egocentric point of view, and had neither clear origins nor a telos. The human story meandered, like all other life histories, through a pathless wood deprived of the landmarks that heroic history and religion had provided. Foucault’s perspective is postmodern and retrospective, and his reading pays little attention to how Darwin crafted a conscious narrative of purpose, articulation, and improvement to characterize evolution. Still, the kind of vertigo expressed by Matthew Arnold, “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born,” captures the more shadowy zeitgeist of Darwin’s time, which Foucault identifies through his theory of the “dehistoricized” culture of the nineteenth century (“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” lines 85–86).
The main thesis of these two opening chapters is that chaos in literature predates the scientific study of chaos in ecology. Eighteenth-century geologists, including Cuvier, Buffon, Lamarck, and (a little later) Lyell, had discovered both deep time and cataclysm in fossil evidence, but their discoveries were slow to be adopted into theories of the ongoing state of nature. From an ecological standpoint, these four literary works are precocious because they appraise catastrophic events in natural history and weave them into the fabric of futurity. It would overstress the interdisciplinary project to claim that these works demonstrate formal mathematical chaos. However, the very pattern of sudden ecological punctuation is a timely contribution of a literary imagination, as is the ecology of disturbance. These works are precursors to contemporary chaos ecology