[In the following essay, Parham outlines the environmental concerns of Victorian authors and goes on to discuss, from an ecocritical point of view, works of several writers of the period, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin.]

Despite its attempts to re‐write the canon, ecocriticism, to some extent, has only succeeded in creating a canon of its own. The centrality, in the US, of Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination, which establishes Thoreauvian Romantic nature writing as the origin of ‘ecocentric’ thought, and the dominance in the UK of Jonathan Bate's book on Wordsworth, Romantic Ecology, has installed ‘Romanticism’ as pivotal within this ecocritical canon. Yet even its most literal statement, Bate's, is somewhat paradoxical. Bate argues that it is ‘valuable and important to make claims for the historical continuity of a tradition of environmental consciousness.’ Yet, parts of the book are less about Wordsworth and more about a Victorian tradition. For instance, his third chapter ends by stating (the italics are mine):

Wordsworthian faith in the moral of landscape remained the foundation. But Ruskin built on this foundation in a way that speaks vitally to us today, for by the end of his analysis he had come to something new: a programme for education into ecological consciousness.¹

My intention in this essay, then, is to muddy the waters—and to propose a ‘Victorian ecology’ that stands in an obvious, critical relation to ‘Romantic ecology’. ‘Victorian ecology’, I believe, offers a rich mine of sources for the ‘tradition of environmental consciousness.’ It could (and should) be the subject of a far broader study than I can offer here. However, this essay will outline the main trajectories of ‘Victorian ecology’ and indicate some central, literary sources in ways not previously attempted.

There are four underlying reasons for proposing Victorian ecology. The first two concern its proximity to the origins of contemporary ecology. I say two because ‘ecology’ can be understood as both a scientific and a social philosophy. The word was invented and defined in 1866 by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel as

the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and organic environment, including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact.²

This stress on ‘friendly and inimical’, or ‘harmony’ and ‘competition’, attempts to reconcile ‘balance’ and ‘conflict’. It also represents a conjunction of natural history and evolutionary theory, two paradigms widely acknowledged as the origin of ecological science³ but whose relationship troubled (in particular) earlier Victorian poets such as Tennyson and Arnold. Subsequently, ecological science came to incorporate the physics of energy systems. Relations between animals and plants became structured in terms of the ‘material exchange of energy’ and ‘chemical substances’.⁴ While ‘ecosystems theory’ developed only in the 1930s, it derived from the laws of thermodynamics and in particular the first law whereby species receive energy in exchange with other species or abiotic (non‐living) sources. To simplify, energy circulates; and lost energy is replaced by solar energy (through photosynthesis) if it has been used efficiently—hence, the contemporary stress on sustainability. This incorporation of evolutionary and thermodynamic theory gives scientific ecology a dialectical quality.

What is interesting is that both paradigms shaped Victorian literary culture, as the burgeoning work within the field of Victorian studies on literature and science implies; that is, Victorian writers were incorporating precisely those scientific ideas that formed ecology. Gillian Beer's groundbreaking book Darwin's Plots argued for the impact of The Origin of Species and assimilation of (though sometimes resistance to) evolutionary theory in Victorian novels.⁵ Furthermore, her later work, like that of Greg Myers, argues that ‘thermodynamics were transforming Victorian perceptions’ (a fact obscured by the attention given to evolutionary theory).⁶ The result, as I will demonstrate, is that literary figures, like Victorian scientists, were grasping towards ecological theory and displaying at least an intuition of both ecosystems' theory and sustainability.

What also developed in this period were the origins of the environmental movement. In Environmental Groups in Politics, Jane Goyder and Philip Lowe point out that the first wave of pressure groups emerged in the 1880s, ranging from the Selbourne Society for the Protection of Birds, Plants and Pleasant Places to the Coal Smoke Abatement Society (now the National Society for Clean Air). The mutual co‐operation and often shared membership of these groups they see as evidence of a common environmentalist ethos and movement.⁷ Similarly, Peter Gould, in Early Green Politics, has argued that the most important period for green politics until the 1980s came with the early socialist movement, specifically the Social Democratic Federation (to which William Morris belonged), between 1880 and 1900. Gould sees the movement as a response to economic depression and social unrest centred around a critical examination of, in particular, the philosophy of industrialism, the relationship of the individual to their social and physical environment, and the function of the city. Earlier ‘back to nature’ elements, which Gould views as defeatist acts of withdrawal, were transformed from the 1880s into a radical, populist political agenda.⁸

The proximity of Victorian critics to the development of ecology is important both in proving its ‘continuity’ and for didactic reasons which underpin the last two reasons for studying Victorian ecology. The third important factor, then, is the correspondence between Victorian social critics and modern environmental critics in their approach to modernity. The sensitivity of writers such as Ruskin to the negative environmental impacts of industrial society derived in part, and as I will show, from an understanding of those modern scientific paradigms, evolutionary and thermodynamic theory, which had replaced pre‐modern concepts such as ‘balance of nature’. This corresponds, as Dominic Head points out in this collection, to Raymond Williams's critique of the information society in Towards 2000, a critique which found hope in the ecological movement's similar alliance of scientific research with social and political protest and campaigning. Both mark not a withdrawal from but a positive engagement with modernity. Note that when Marshall Berman sought a ‘dynamic and dialectical modernism’ to counter twentieth‐century ‘passivity and helplessness’ he found it, simultaneously, in both the contemporary environmental movement (roads protesters) and in the ‘modernisms of the nineteenth century’⁹ where the major critics combined a ‘critical bite’ with a ‘romance of construction’ (or reconstruction). Naming names—Marx, Carlyle, Mill—Berman writes:

The great modernists of the nineteenth century all attack this environment passionately, and strive to tear it down or explode it from within; yet all find themselves remarkably at home in it, alive to its possibilities, affirmative even in their radical negations.¹⁰

Their utility, as Berman states, lies in their ability to provide ‘the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the twenty first [century].’¹¹

The fourth, last, and perhaps most important reason for studying Victorian ecology is what I identify as a ‘shared critical problem’. Bearing in mind the prominence of Romantic ecology in ecocriticism, Victorian writers in fact share an ambivalence towards Romanticism with several contemporary ecological theorists. For instance, David Pepper, responding specifically to Bate's Romantic Ecology, has argued that, while Romanticism is one of the ‘roots of ecocentrism,’ it is nevertheless problematized by its concentration on ‘the isolated individual’ (contrary to ecology's holistic nature) and its failure to ‘contemplate rationally the nature of social, political and economic structures.’¹² Pepper is alluding here to a conflict identified by several critics between what is variously called the Romantic‐rational, ecocentric‐technocentric, or Arcadian‐imperialist elements in contemporary ecological theory.¹³ This conflict calls to mind those literary critics—Walter Houghton, Mario Praz, Jerome Hamilton Buckley—who, around about the 1960s, were examining the ways in which Victorian writers consciously differentiated and separated themselves from Romanticism. Buckley, for example, uses the phrase ‘anti‐Romanticism’ in arguing that Victorian writers rejected the ‘sharp individuality’ and ‘self‐expression for its own sake’ of the Romantic writers.¹⁴ Yet ‘anti‐Romanticism’ is problematic. For as Raymond Williams has implied the Romantic poets' experience and articulation of the impacts of industrialization (‘on the senses: hunger, suffering, conflict, dislocation’)¹⁵ is an important legacy. Furthermore, at least one contemporary theorist, Tim O'Riordan, describes this ‘divergence’ as troubling contemporary ecology. Accordingly, my preferred conceptual framework is one offered by a self‐professed ‘disciple’ of Houghton and Buckley. Alison Sulloway's post‐Romanticism conceptualizes the attempt, by Victorian critics, to utilize the Romantic sensibility through scientific knowledge and social engagement (the two facets of ecology) into what she describes as ‘a new empiricism from which emerged a new pragmatism or utilitarianism.’ In other words, she seeks to reconcile ‘Romantic’ and ‘rational’. While the post‐Romantic project was often ‘wearying to the spirits,’ leaving Victorian writers ‘adrift in moral ambiguities,’ Sulloway, in stating that post‐Romanticism anticipates a ‘conflict in the twentieth century between ‘the claims of objective, empirical, utilitarian science … [and] disciplines trying to protect the unquantifiable, yet equally utilitarian demands of the human spirit,’ is near enough describing the central critical conflict of contemporary ecology. The ecocritic's task, in this context, is to find those writers who embody or even transcend those contradictions troubling contemporary ecological thought.

While this essay is not an attempt to undermine Romantic ecology (Romanticism influencing both Victorian post‐Romanticism (obviously) and contemporary ecology), if there is one compelling argument against it, it is that Romantic ecology historically pre‐dates the development of Darwinian evolutionary theory and thermodynamic theory. Accordingly, my interest lies, then, in tracing the gradual historical development towards both ‘post‐Romanticism’ and a corresponding ‘Victorian ecology’ informed by modern scientific paradigms.

This is not straightforward. Another of those 1960s critics—Wendell Stacy Johnson—argued that Victorian writing was characterized both by an intense self‐consciousness that derived from the ‘uncertainty’ engendered by social change (political upheaval, urbanization, loss of faith, and so on) and by a ‘deep feeling of ambivalence about the sea, the sky, the seasonal trees, flowers, and fruits, the very light of day—about the whole Romantic landscape.’¹⁶ Concentrating, for now, on this second observation, Laurence Lerner has written that Wordsworth's response when confronted by natural selection in the poem ‘The Redbreast Chasing the Butterfly’ was one of bewilderment and denial. Yet Wordsworth, nevertheless, was able to deny the impending disruption of evolutionary theory and retain a moral order premised on the ‘balance of nature’.¹⁷ No such option was available to Victorian writers confronted, even before the publication of The Origin of Species (1859), with forerunners such as Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830‐3) and Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Accordingly, Victorian poets—Arnold, Tennyson, Browning—inherited the Wordsworthian sense of human meaning in the landscape but often replaced positive with ambivalent or even negative associations, for instance the ‘grotesque wastelands’ of Tennyson's ‘The Vision of Sin’ or Thomson's City of Dreadful Night.¹⁸ Yet, at the same time, as Johnson points out, there does occur a post‐Romantic shift in that these writers invariably practised conscientious, accurate, scientific description. One poem that characterizes this dichotomy, fearful ambivalence against close description, is Tennyson's In Memoriam.¹⁹

The poem contains passages of carefully observed, detailed nature description that, in places, almost anticipate scientific ecology and an understanding of the atmosphere as a sustainable energy system.

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,
          That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
          Of evening over brake and bloom
And meadow, slowly breathing bare
The round of space, and rapt below
          Thro' all the dewy‐tassel'd wood,
          And shadowing down the horned flood
In ripples, fan my brows and blood
The fever from my cheek, and sigh
          The full new life that feeds my breath
          Throughout my frame.

(lxxxvi.1)

The air is ‘slowly breathing’ energy into the environment. Furthermore, in referring to the energy in his ‘blood’ and ‘throughout my frame,’ Tennyson incorporates the human within that ecosystem. Yet, what follows is a valuable ecocritical lesson as Tennyson eschews ecological representation for compulsive symbolism. In this next passage

Witch‐elms that counterchange the floor
          Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;
          And thou, with all thy breadth and
                    height
Of foliage, towering sycamore;
How often, hither wandering down,
          My Arthur found your shadows fair.

(lxxxix.1)

the ‘witch elms’ that shadow and protect the surrounding countryside (like the trees in the preceding passage) are displaced to become a metaphor for Arthur Hallam. In consequence, an ecological understanding of the natural environment (that might have replaced the disruption of ‘balance’ by evolutionism) is lost:

The hills are shadows, and they flow
          From form to form, and nothing stands;
          They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
But in my spirit will I dwell,
          And dream my dream, and hold it true;
          For tho' my lips may breathe adieu,
I cannot think the thing farewell.

(cxxiii.5)

This first stanza is remarkably similar to Marx's comment on the disorientation of modernity—‘All That is Solid Melts Into Air’; the second suggests a retreat into memories of a lost, imagined nature.

Arnold's ‘Dover Beach’ (written 1851) displays similar anxieties about nature and society founded upon evolutionary theory's undermining of religious belief. He makes the famous analogy between inhospitable nature—‘the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling’—and the decline of organized religion, in the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of ‘The Sea of Faith’ before declaring that the world:

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain.

Terry Gifford, writing in this collection about ‘Dover Beach’, argues that Arnold's horror at a ‘biocentric view of the essential neutrality of the world’ was because he failed to see ‘the necessity for both the death and the creative processes.’ This, I would suggest, occurs in lieu of an alternative paradigm for seeing nature, one that, eventually, ecological theory's dialectical reconciliation of ‘balance’ and competition would provide. For certainly when Tennyson ends the last‐quoted passage with ‘I cannot think the thing farewell,’ there is the suggestion, reinforced by the ecological intuition displayed elsewhere in the poem, that he is awaiting this alternative paradigm which, I will argue, comes closer through the enhanced, post‐Romantic ‘empiricism’ of certain other Victorian writers.

The second aspect to consider is the development towards ecological social philosophy and a critique which, underpinned by scientific knowledge, was one example of Sulloway's ‘new empiricism from which emerged a new pragmatism or utilitarianism.’ Here, too, Tennyson and Arnold are important figures in understanding the transition to post‐Romanticism. In the Victorian period, as we know, the industrial impacts experienced (‘on the senses’) by the ‘Romantic artist’ had escalated. In particular, urban expansion created problems around housing, working conditions, unemployment, and what we would now more specifically understand as ecological problems—sanitation, air quality, disease, deforestation. Consequently, it became an age of observation, investigation, and social responsibility, in turn, prompting campaigning, political intervention, and legislation. This impulse to intervene, to say and do something, permeated Victorian literary culture, for instance in the great Victorian social novelists, Dickens, Gaskell, Kingsley, and so on. Yet, as Houghton points out, there also existed an alarming number of negative moods. His third category, in describing the ‘Victorian frame of mind,’ is ‘Anxiety’—the Victorians, he writes were ‘haunted by fear and worry, by guilt and frustration and loneliness’²⁰—that is, the ‘wearying’ that Sulloway describes. Interestingly, the resultant dichotomy—engagement versus withdrawal—is conceptualized by Buckley, through Tennyson, as the ‘two voices’. At Cambridge, Buckley explains, Tennyson's tendency towards introspection was tempered by the group called the Cambridge Apostles, one of whom reportedly told him, ‘Tennyson, we cannot live in art.’ Thereafter, his poetry is characterized by these ‘two voices’—attempts at public pronouncement and a ‘“national” art centred upon immediate actualities juxtaposed with a tendency to withdrawal.’²¹ Hence his reaction to a nature now, it seems, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ in In Memoriam, is to ‘dwell’ ‘in my spirit’ and to ‘dream my dream’. Conversely, while Arnold similarly retreats in Dover Beach to a weak, romanticized—‘love, let us be true / To one another!’, he perhaps more than Tennyson, is aware of the inadequacies of his response here. For Arnold is a central figure in Sulloway's conceptualization of ‘post‐Romanticism’, the critical moment being his famous resolve to forsake poetry in favour of ‘essays in criticism’. While this, itself, proves problematic in the context of Victorian ecology, Arnold's twinned attempt, to transcend the anxious impressionism of Dover Beach in order ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’ (science) and to replace poetry with ‘essays in criticism’ (social philosophy) exemplifies a post‐Romantic moment out of which came the Victorian ecology exemplified best, as I will now explore, through John Ruskin.

Writing to his friend the poet Richard Dixon, Gerard Manley Hopkins admonishes him for having roses redder than poppies and because ‘the rain could never be wooed by the rainbow which only comes into being by its falling.’²² Hopkins remarks that Dixon is ‘pre‐scientific’—he did not ‘see the object as in itself it really is’—thereby highlighting his own post‐Romanticism. Hopkins would come to attempt to reconcile new scientific insights and religious orthodoxy²³ but the earliest, most influential Victorian critic to incorporate these to social philosophy was Carlyle.

Greg Myers argues that Carlyle's metaphor of the universe as steam engine, in Sartor Resartus, was just one example of a ‘rhetorical commonplace’ that had emerged from the formulation of the first law of thermodynamics, in the 1840s. This had established ‘energy as an elementary entity in nature.’ So, by the time John Tyndall had established what would become an ecological principle, the conservation of energy, he found it already anticipated in Sartor Resartus suggesting (as Myers does) that an abundance of ‘such passages … might justify us in giving Carlyle the credit of poetically, but accurately, foreshadowing the doctrine.’²⁴

Carlyle is also a central post‐Romantic figure with regard to social thinking. Fervently rejecting the impulse to ‘dream’, he writes, in ‘Varnhagen von Ense's Memoirs’:

they do not suit us at all. They are subjective letters … the grand material of them is endless depicturing of moods, sensations, miseries, joys and lyrical conditions of the writer; no definite picture drawn, or rarely any, of persons, transactions or events which the writer stood amidst: a wrong material as it seems to us. To what end, to what end? we always ask.²⁵

The (utilitarian) ‘end’ Carlyle envisaged was to deploy the Romantic idea of the artist's superior ‘perception’ and critical insight in the service of social comment. Whether addressing ‘The Condition of England’ question, or interpreting ‘The Signs of the Times’, the ‘Men of Letters’ replaced the priest as:

the dispensers and living types of God's everlasting wisdom, to show it in their writings and actions, in such particular form as their own particular times require it in.²⁶

As post‐Romanticism feeds into Victorian ecology, I would suggest that it is Carlyle's most famous disciple, John Ruskin, who comes, then, to foreshadow the doctrine of ecology and to recognize that one ‘particular form’ of ‘wisdom’ required in Victorian times was ecological critique and remedy.

We can trace the development of Ruskin's ecological ideas back to the unfolding volumes of Modern Painters. From the start, the book was concerned, as Bate implies, with formulating a ‘moral of landscape’. However, a pivotal point in the project comes in volume 2 (1846) with the important link between ‘typical’ and ‘vital’ beauty. ‘Typical beauty’ refers to the outer form and is constituted by aesthetic rules supposedly derived from nature so that, for example, artists should follow the graceful symmetry of oak leaves. ‘Vital beauty’ refers to an ‘inner goodness’ or rounded character, a personal or spiritual beauty, that is. The link is that a person's ability to perceive ‘typical beauty’ depends upon their possession of ‘vital beauty’ meaning that art becomes a barometer for the moral health of society. If social organization is wrong, the conditions for an artistic way of seeing cannot exist. Furthermore, because Ruskin relates the rules of art to a proper understanding of nature, much of this critique focused upon the Victorian relationship with, attitudes to, and treatment of the natural environment. Accordingly, in the chapter actually titled ‘The Moral of Landscape’ (volume 3 [1856]), Ruskin describes the ‘love of nature’ as ‘connected properly with the benevolence and liberty of the age … it is precisely the most healthy element which distinctively belongs to us.’ Yet Ruskin, here, is not advocating a withdrawal into an idealized nature. For what develops is not so much a ‘moral of landscape’ as a ‘moral of energy economics.’ And, furthermore, he understood not only modern science but also Carlyle's injunction to attend to the ‘signs of the times.’

While Ruskin regarded Tyndall somewhat cynically, disliking his materialism, many of his works nevertheless highlight a keen awareness of energy economics. This is true of The Eagle's Nest and The Storm‐Cloud of the Nineteenth Century but also of Modern Painters. We can see this in Ruskin's fascination with clouds, described as having an:

appearance of exhaustless and fantastic energy which gives every cloud a marked character of its own, suggesting resemblances to the specific outlines of organic objects.

This confirms that he understood energy to be the ‘elementary entity’ or organizing principle of a dialectical nature.²⁷ At the same time, however, the Victorian ‘love of nature,’ he believed, was too readily equated with a return to pre‐modern scientific frameworks of ‘balance’ and ‘harmony’. This, Ruskin decided, was ‘partly forced upon us by mistakes in our social economy, and led to no distinct issues of action or thought.’²⁸

The post‐Romantic link made here helps explain the transition in Ruskin's writing, after the 1840s, from art to architectural criticism—that is, discussing how society reshapes and dwells within its environment—and, from the 1870s, to more explicit social and environmental questions. By this point Ruskin had become imbued with the ethos of social engagement. Within his ninety‐six ‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’, published as Fors Clavigera, Ruskin declared, ‘I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like … because of the misery that I know of,’ and ‘the day has come for me to cease speaking, and begin doing, as best I may.’²⁹ Two pieces are particularly indicative of an ecological angle to Ruskin's post‐Romanticism, the lecture ‘The Storm‐Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ and Letter 5 of Fors Clavigera, ‘The White‐Thorn Blossom’, touched upon by Bate but ready, I feel, for a more ecologically detailed reading.

In both pieces Ruskin attacks Victorian environmental damage. He criticizes deforestation, describes the rivers as ‘common sewers’ and condemns air pollution. From Fors Clavigera:

You are vitiating [the air] with foul, chemical exhalations; and the horrible nests, which you call towns, are little more than laboratories for the distillation into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia for decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease.³⁰

Likewise, in ‘The Storm‐Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’, Ruskin indicts Victorian social organization with changing the weather. Observing that the sky has become blacker and describing his own experience of the ‘devil's darkness’ of ‘the most terrific and horrible thunderstorm,’ Ruskin designates the storm cloud as the ‘sign of the times’ before describing ‘the plague‐wind of the eighth decade of years in the nineteenth century.’ This apocalyptic tone recurs in Fors Clavigera:

You can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of death, to any extent. You might easily vitiate it so as to bring such a pestilence on the globe as would end all of you.³¹ [my italics]

Such apocalyptic environmental protest is something Ruskin shares with both certain contemporaries and elements within the modern environmental movement. Myers points out the similarity of ‘Storm‐Cloud’ to the scientist William Thomson's 1852 essay ‘On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy’ which forecasts ‘heat death’ (entropy) and irreversible decline so that ‘within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be unfit for the habitation of man.’³² Contemporary environmentalist echoes include Garrett Hardin's grim, Malthusian predictions about overpopulation³³ or the ‘Spaceship Earth’ thesis that pollution has destroyed so much energy that the Earth has become a ‘closed system’ in which inputs have to be controlled and regulated like the atmosphere of a space capsule.

Yet despite his forebodings, Ruskin, writes Myers, holds out the hope that ‘the world will be redeemed by a new moral order.’ This is Berman's link, between ‘critical bite’ and the ‘romance of construction,’ and is strikingly similar, also, to an ecological theory, Jim Lovelock's ‘Gaia hypothesis’, that presents an alternative to the ‘depressing picture of our planet as a demented spaceship.’ Gaia posits the earth as a single ecosystem or ‘superorganism’ that continually adapts to changing environmental conditions by manipulating the atmosphere to find those physical and chemical properties optimal for life.³⁴ Each adaptation may leave behind species that cannot survive under new climatic or chemical conditions. Yet the obvious implication, that changes wrought by human activity (for instance, the greenhouse effect) might activate adaptations ‘good for the biosphere as a whole but bad for man as a species,’ nevertheless retains the importance of human agency. For to prevent this, Lovelock argues, ‘it is up to us to act personally in a way that is constructive.’³⁵ Ruskin's work also carries that empowering sense of human agency. In ‘Storm‐Cloud’ he simultaneously echoes Carlyle and anticipates Lovelock—‘whether you can affect the signs of the sky or not, you can the signs of the time.’ Indeed, in Modern Painters, Ruskin wrote:

The universe presents itself continually to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, or of choice, the good and evil set on the right hand and the left.³⁶

The most sustained (sic) statement of Ruskin's position comes, however, in the fifth letter of Fors Clavigera. Here he truly transcends environmental protest to reach an ecological perception. Understanding that we live within an ecosystem and that it is incumbent upon us to maximize the efficient consumption of energy, to use natural resources sustainably, Ruskin read the ‘signs of the times’, as described above, to perceive the problems caused by Victorian industrial society. Furthermore, he could suggest amelioration and, possessed by the ‘romance of construction’, argue that we had a ‘choice’, and press for social change in ways that are necessary also to a vigorous contemporary environmental movement. So, deforestation, was a choice between ‘planting wisely and tending carefully’ or creating ‘drought … by ravage of woods and neglect of soil.’ Similarly, air pollution could be solved:

by dealing properly and swiftly with all substances in corruption; by absolutely forbidding noxious manufactures; and by planting in all soils the trees which cleanse and invigorate earth and atmosphere.³⁷

Overall, society must decide how it consumed natural resources: ‘you can destroy them at your pleasure or increase, almost without limit, the available quantities of them.’³⁸

In a contemporary context, Michael Allaby has argued that ecological principles require a ‘radical restructuring’ of society.³⁹ If this forms one possibility for Berman's twenty‐first century ‘modernisms’, then Ruskin not only offers the ecological perception but also a model of the ‘vision and courage’ required to make this happen. For in the letter Ruskin powerfully advocates the ‘radical restructuring’ of modern ‘political economy, when it has become a science’—that is when it understands science—on what can only be described as an ecological basis:

There are three Material things, not only useful, but essential to Life. … These are Pure Air, Water, and Earth.

Yet if Ruskin appears to be offered here as a ‘founding‐father’ of contemporary ecology that is not my intention. He ends the letter by proposing the medieval Guild of St George, a localized remedy for ecological ills. Ruskin promises to tithe one‐tenth of his income (‘you shall see the accounts’) to this practical initiative for buying land to be cultivated ‘by Englishmen, with their own hands, and such help of force as they can find in wind and wave.’ This forms what Bate calls Ruskin's ‘programme for education into ecological consciousness’:

We will try to take some small piece of English ground, beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no steam‐engines upon it, and no railroads; we will have no untended or unthought‐of creatures on it; none wretched, but the sick; none idle but the dead. We will have no liberty upon it; but instant obedience to known law and appointed persons: no equality upon it; but recognition of every betterness that we can find, and reprobation for every worseness.⁴⁰

However, I do not personally feel this regression ‘back to nature’ and feudal social organization (following Carlyle's Past and Present) was equipped to deal with Victorian, let alone contemporary, ecological problems. Indeed, when Ruskin instigated the Guild, with himself as master, it soon collapsed. Instead, my argument is that ecological theory is diverse and that the utility of Victorian ecology lies in its range of available sources for and approaches to early ecological thinking. We need only follow any writer so far as their work helps us to address our own contemporary concerns. An alternative model to Ruskin, then, following Gould, might be William Morris's socialism. Morris's essay ‘How I became a Socialist’ is the standard matter of Ruskinian social critique. He discusses the mastery and waste of mechanical power, ‘the commonwealth so poor,’ the ‘filth of civilisation’ and the ‘eyeless vulgarity which has destroyed art.’ Yet Morris departs at this point from Ruskin and channels his critique, instead, to ‘practical socialism,’ a critique of capitalist production for surplus profit founded upon an understanding of the mutual links between human quality of life and sustainability. This becomes imaginatively represented, perhaps as a forerunner to the works Lisa Garforth discusses in this collection, in his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890). Morris depicts a society where salmon swim in an unpolluted Thames, where urban London is designed along Italian architectural lines, in which the countryside is a ‘garden’ (Eden) to be cultivated by all, and where the population barely age, and live life free of law and government.

So Victorian literature offers a diversity of ecological perspectives. There must, however, be boundaries. The Victorian social critics, I have argued, intuitively understood the central tenets of both scientific and social ecology, that is ecosystems theory and sustainability. Accordingly, the two criteria for studying those writers who might constitute Victorian ecology should be a detailed philosophical understanding of nature as a dialectical system and, in terms of the human relationship to it, an attempt to translate this understanding into some form of ‘social philosophy’. Filtered through the lens of post‐Romanticism, these common threads, I believe, unite writers as diverse as Ruskin, Morris, Mill, Gaskell, Dickens, Hardy, and Hopkins.

As I have implied, both Ruskin and Morris deserve much fuller studies of their transition from Romantic to ecological critics: Ruskin, in terms of a fuller elaboration of the trajectory outlined above, incorporating other important works, for instance Unto the Last; and Morris, in terms of his transition from ‘nature‐love’ and Ruskinian art criticism to a revolutionary red‐green politics. Mill is interesting as another, more philosophical, example of the trajectory from Romantic to Victorian ecology and of the attempt to reconcile the ecocentric ‘Romantic sensibility’ to the rational, ‘technocentric’ mind. For he developed a ‘philosophy’ of nature—from Wordsworthian ideals of solitude and meditation, ‘in the presence,’ he wrote, ‘of natural beauty and grandeur’—before advocating anti‐growth, subsistence economics in The Principles of Political Economy.

Alternatively, one might find from Victorian sources the opportunity to develop and identify sources for other new kinds of ecocriticism. For example, Gaskell's work imaginatively depicts the convergence of social and environmental ills in the Victorian city, opening up the possibility, simultaneously, of an ‘urban ecocriticism’ and even a ‘humanist ecocriticism’. Her works imaginatively represent how negative impacts on the ecosystem are embodied (literally) in the urban populace. Note, for instance, Gaskell's description of John Barton—a telling contrast to Morris's utopian populace—who was:

born of factory workers, and himself bred up in youth, and living in manhood, among the mills. He was below the middle size and slightly made; there was almost a stunted look about him; and his wan, colourless face, gave you the idea that in his childhood he had suffered from the scanty living consequent upon bad times.⁴¹

In the same manner, Dickens might also be studied for his detailed analysis of how social organization, through the urban environment, shapes both the non‐human and human components of the ecosystem. And Hardy too, who, in books like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, depicts the impact of a non‐sustainable ‘political economy,’ alternatively, on the rural ecosystem and its people. Both the reaping‐machine that reaps in circular motions pushing ‘rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice’ into an ‘ephemeral refuge’ and inevitable death in the middle of the field, and the threshing machine that shakes Tess ‘bodily by its spinning’ and into an ‘incessant quivering, in which every fibre of her frame participated’ serve a distant metropolis exploiting land and people alike.

On another level, Victorian ecology's paradigms, particularly post‐Romanticism, raise theoretical issues. As we have seen, the post‐Romantic strain in Victorian literature encouraged many writers to forsake literary for more utilitarian activities. Yet Ruskin's practical initiative, the Guild of St George, is uninspired, unimaginative next to the sharp rhetoric of his critique. Similarly, Hopkins's miserable, frustrated vocation as a Jesuit priest contrasts with religious nature poetry that, whether celebratory, elegiac, or angry, was always powerful. On the other hand Morris's practical environmental politics and Mill's influential social philosophy were enabled by writing and the love of poetry. A study of how Victorian writers attempted to balance and reconcile their writing with practical activities might then inform the contemporary ‘ecocritic's task’. All of these writers share in E. P. Thompson's acknowledgement of Hopkins as ‘one of the few men who … (whenever he dared to look) registered in the depths of his being the impact of the truths of his society.’⁴²

So, lastly, I hope that any study of Victorian ecology would find a place for Gerard Manley Hopkins. For I believe that Hopkins was the one Victorian poet who consistently, imaginatively re‐created the specific conditions of the Victorian ecosystem. He did so in poems as diverse as ‘Inversnaid’ (wilderness) ‘Binsey Poplars’ (tree‐felling) and ‘Felix Randal’ (urban pollution, human health), articulating and representing near enough the full range of ecological thinking. These poems contain an imaginative seed with the essence, not just of a broader understanding of Hopkins, or of Victorian ecology, or even of ecocriticism, but of ecology, itself.

Notes

1. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 9, 84.

2. Cited in Robert P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 7‐8.

3. Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 192‐3; Michael Allaby, Basics of Environmental Science (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 12‐13; I. G. Simmons, Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 22‐3; Tim Hayward, Ecological Thought: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), pp. 25‐6; Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 45‐8.

4. See Hayward, Ecological Thought, p. 27.

5. Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth‐Century Fiction (London: Ark, 1985), pp. 1‐11.

6. Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 243; Greg Myers, ‘Nineteenth‐Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy’ in Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain, ed. Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 307, 308‐9.

7. Jane Goyder and Philip Lowe, Environmental Groups in Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 17‐18.

8. Peter Gould, Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back to the Land, and Socialism in Britain 1880‐1900 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1988), pp. vii‐ix, 32‐3.

9. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), see ‘Introduction’, and pp. 170‐71.

10. Berman, All that is Solid, p. 19.

11. Berman, All that is Solid, p. 36.

12. See David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 188‐92, 226‐30.

13. For each of these paradigms, see, respectively, Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, p. 38; Tim O'Riordan, Environmentalism (London: Pion, 1981), p. 1; Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. xi, 2.

14. See Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969); pp. 15‐17.

15. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780‐1950 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987), p. 31.

16. Wendell Stacy Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Poet as Victorian (New York: Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 20, 44.

17. See Lawrence Lerner, ‘What did Wordsworth mean by Nature’, Critical Quarterly, 17:4 (1975), pp. 305‐8.

18. Johnson, Hopkins: The Poet as Victorian, pp. 31‐3.

19. All references from The Poetical Works of Tennyson (London: Oxford University Press, 1959).

20. Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, p. 54.

21. Buckley, Victorian Temper, pp. 73, 83.

22. Hopkins to Richard Dixon, The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 61, 20.

23. Beer, Open Fields, p. 251.

24. Myers, ‘Nineteenth‐Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics’, p. 314.

25. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Varnhagen von Ense's Memoirs’, in Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (London: Chapman and Hall, 1845), vol. 3, p. 245.

26. Cited in Bernard M G Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore: A Century of Religious Thought in Britain (London: Longman, 1971), p. 378.

27. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds), The Complete Works of John Ruskin (London: George Allen, 1903‐12), vol. 3, p. 373.

28. Cook and Wedderburn (eds), Works of Ruskin, vol. 5, pp. 37, 354.

29. Cook and Wedderburn (eds), Works of Ruskin, vol. 27, pp. xviii‐xix.

30. Cook and Wedderburn (eds), Works of Ruskin, vol. 27, p. 91.

31. Cook and Wedderburn (eds), Works of Ruskin, vol. 34, pp. 31, 27, 91.

32. See Myers, ‘Nineteenth‐Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics’, pp. 316‐19.

33. See Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, and ‘Living on a Lifeboat’, both repr. in Garrett Hardin and John Baden (eds), Managing the Commons (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977).

34. J. E. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life On Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 6.

35. Cited in Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 145.

36. Cited by Terry Gifford in his ‘Conclusion’ to Ruskin and Environment, ed. Michael Wheeler, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 191.

37. Cook and Wedderburn (eds), Works of Ruskin, vol. 27, pp. 91‐2.

38. Cook and Wedderburn (eds), Works of Ruskin, vol. 27, p. 91.

39. Allaby, Basics of Environmental Science, p. 9.

40. Cook and Wedderburn (eds), Works of Ruskin, vol. 27, p. 96.

41. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 41.

42. E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin Press, 1977), p. 142.