Horror in the Age of Steam: Tales of Terror in the Victorian Age of Transitions by Carroll Clayton Savant (review)

Horror in the Age of Steam: Tales of Terror in the Victorian Age of Transitions by Carroll Clayton Savant begins, unusually and excitingly, by asserting its roots in pedagogy. Savant notes that the book is a product of teaching an introductory humanities course at a community college. That said, he offers limited information about the course syllabus, the experience of teaching horror in the classroom, student response, or the pedagogical significance of the book. Instead, positing that scholarly works on horror are “often myopic in scope and reductive in breadth,” Savant seeks to bridge the gap between popular and academic conceptualizations of horror through an “aesthetic and historical survey of Gothicism” (3, 9).

Savant situates all four chapters of the book in extensive historical context and literature review. The book’s ambitious breadth is reflected in its generous engagement with horror studies from the last four decades, from late twentieth-century scholarship by Noël Carroll to current works by Darryl Jones and others, as well as its enthusiastic participation in myriad analytical paradigms including culture, ideology, race, gender, realism, ecocriticism, transcendentalism, neo-Victorianism, political economy, intellectual philosophy, and aesthetics. In turn, Savant engages with a wide range of nineteenth-century social theorists and reformers such as Thomas Carlyle, Sarah Stickney Ellis, Friedrich Engels, Harriet Martineau, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Caroline Norton.

Savant also aims to widen the conceptualization of horror beyond canonical Gothic texts. Chapter 1, which offers a survey of late eighteenth-century Gothic literature and the cultural creation of the monster, promisingly begins with an analysis of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novella The Haunted and the Haunters, or, The House and the Brain (1859) and briefly mentions the eighteenth-century novelist Clara Reeve. But the book is centered on a multitude of well-known literary figures from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries such as Horace Walpole, Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, and H. P. Lovecraft—Gaskell and Brontë novels constitute the core of the book’s literary analysis in subsequent chapters—rather than engaging in depth with lesser-known authors and texts.

Savant identifies and discusses gothic elements in texts belonging in genres such as the Condition-of-England novel, the industrial novel, and the sensation novel. Chapter 2, which is most closely associated with the book’s titular reference to steam, focuses on industrial novels and mass-market capitalism. Beginning with a close reading of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and exploring Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848) and North and South (1854–55), this chapter proposes to transcend the critical focus on how industrial novels advocate for social and economic reform. However, Savant argues that Gaskell’s novels warn against a mass-market economy through depictions of “the hellscapes of the industrial factory” and “the effects of industrialization on the individual” (70). The chapter presents a nuanced description of nineteenth-century industrialization by juxtaposing details about innovations, such as the process of refining iron with coal-heated furnaces and the machine production of yarn, with factory pollution and inhospitable working conditions. Savant also aims to recalibrate the concept of the ecogothic, the capacity of the gothic to capture current anxieties about climate change, and “create a new branch of ecocriticism, ecoHorror,” which posits that “man-made gothic environments are just as unsettling and affective as the ruined, wild, natural landscapes” (73, 77). Savant’s framing of “ecoHorror,” while distinct from the critical conceptualization of ecohorror as nature’s retaliation for human environmental disruption, recalls earlier scholarship such as Allan Pritchard’s “The Urban Gothic of Bleak House” (1991) and David Spurr’s analysis of gothic architectural ruins in Architecture and Modern Literature (2012), among others.

Chapter 3 focuses on the nineteenth-century development of the physical sciences. Beginning with references to works by Mary Shelley...