Introduction

Jesse Oak Taylor opens his 2015 review essay "Where Is Victorian Ecocriticism?" with what now seems a surprising statement: "The most striking thing about reviewing the field of Victorian ecocriticism is that there is so little of it" (877). This is especially notable, Taylor argues, when we consider that directly adjacent to the Victorian period, chronologically and spatially speaking, are British Romanticism and nineteenth-century American literature, both of which not only had generated a wealth of ecocritical scholarship by 2015, but were the origin points for field-defining works: Jonathan Bate's Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995). Compared to the previous generation of British writers or to their coevals across the ocean, the Victorians perhaps appeared less "green"—more interested in humanized or urban realms than in wild natural spaces, more invested in the minutiae of social realism than in nonhuman ontologies, more preoccupied by the shriek that echoes through Tennyson's In Memoriam than by the mournful trills of Keats's nightingale. While the vexed category of "nature" is crucial to the era of Darwin and Ruskin, it seems telling that what has long been considered the emblematic poem of the era, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," ends with the speaker enjoining his lover to turn away from the terrifying ocean waves and embrace entirely human forms of solace and meaning. There is often, it seems, something openly fearful and oppositional in the Victorian attitude toward a natural world that no longer seemed to stand as a reliable guarantor of meaning, or else seemed to stand in the way of some greater collective human destiny. Social progress, T. H. Huxley argued in Evolution and Ethics (1893), depends upon our ability "to subdue nature to … higher ends" (83).

In an age of anthropogenic climate change and myriad other manifestations of the Anthropocene, such attitudes have come to seem, if anything, even more important to understand. Victorianists have joined the ecocritical conversation belatedly, but they have made up for lost time in the handful of years since Taylor's essay appeared. Indeed, the period has become not just an important locus for ecocritical scholarship, but, one could argue, one of its centers of gravity; it is, after all, in Victorian Britain that we see the full implementation of the kind of urbanized, fossil fuel–intensive economic system that would come to dominate the globe and give rise to our current climate crisis. It is also a key period for understanding the relationship between exploitative environmental practices and imperial expansion and ideology. The last five years have seen important ecocritical monographs by Emma Mason (Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith [2018]), Vicky Albritton (Green Victorians [2016]), and Taylor himself (The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf [2016]). Other books connecting the literature and science of the period make crucial contributions to the conversation, including Kathleen Frederickson's The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences and Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance (2014); Emily Steinlight's Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (2018); Ivan Kreilkamp's Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (2018); and Ian Duncan's Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (2019), to name just a few. Larry Mazzeno and Ronald Morrison have edited three valuable collections of essays (Victorian Writers and the Environment [2016], Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture [2017], and Victorian Environmental Nightmares [2019]), and 2018 saw the publication of the indispensable collection Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (2018), edited by Nathan Hensley and Phillip Steer. Last year, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller guest-edited a special issue of Victorian Studies on the topic of climate change and the Victorians, and in 2020 Victorian Literature and Culture will publish a special issue, Open Ecologies, guest-edited by Deanna Kreisel and Devin Griffiths. To these contributions, we might also add essays by Kreisel, Hensley, Griffiths, Barbara Leckie, Tina Young Choi, Ella Mershon, Daniel Williams...