pole-ward per decade (Hansen 146). That is, as each decade passes you need to move thirty-five miles north in the Northern Hemisphere, and south in the Southern Hemisphere, to experience the same average temperatures. At this rate, New York City would have present-day equatorial temperatures in about seven hundred years, and London in just over one thousand years, with summer seasons much more severe than at the equator because of the tilt of the earth’s axis.
Species are also migrating uphill for cooler conditions, which crowds out the former flora and fauna of the highlands. Mary Shelley’s fearsome vision is both ecologically and psychologically prescient. Disease may have been the most convenient and apparent cause of human extinction in her fictional apocalypse, but standing back from the sensations of the plague and colonialism for a moment, we can see that a disturbance in climate is the real baseline point of engagement in this novel.
What mechanism causes the earth’s warming in The Last Man? The novel is silent on this point. The narrative is much more detailed in its description of events as they occur than in any hypothesis of a cause. For a vision of the late twenty-first century, Shelley’s work is surprisingly poor in futuristic detail: there is little advance in technology, industry, or political or social life. With its lexicon stuck in early nineteenth-century conventions, The Last Man’s most prescient features are its disturbed landscapes and altered climate patterns. In a dream vision, a mainstay of the Romantic imagination, Lionel is haunted by a scene of a great feast turned foul, where goblets “were surcharged with fetid vapour” and his friend Raymond, “altered by a thousand distortions, expanded into a giant phantom, bearing on its brow the sign of pestilence. The growing shadow rose and rose, filling, and then seeming to endeavor to burst beyond, the adamantine vault that bent over, sustaining and enclosing the world” (202). Meager though its meaning may seem, this image—half disease, half pollution—is reminiscent of a volcanic eruption and the darkness that follows. The convex sky that shelters life from vacuous outer space is infected from within. Greenhouse gases are the fetid vapors that would push the landscape toward the imagined climate of 2100. Twenty-first-century culture, familiar with climate disturbance, has come to appreciate the apocalyptic vision that makes The Last Man a classic. Shelley’s secular apocalypse became a popular convention in later nineteenth-century fiction, laying a foundation for the two Victorian works discussed in the next chapter, Richard Jefferies’s After London and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.
Shelley’s work is a dirge for her portion of the Romantic period. But even with this funereal, backward-looking exigency, Shelley creates something new in her vision of human fate, and out of a deep personal sadness brings forth a text that arrives at a new way of knowing the world. Her fictional proxy Lionel Verney is touched by an excerpt from Macbeth, which he hears at a London theater during the plague years: “Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself. It cannot be called our mother but our grave, [. . .] where violent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy” (4.3.164–70). Shelley’s sorrow is modern because her vision has fused into a valid ecological forecast in this, her future world.
The modern ecstasy of violent sorrow has become a big business in entertainment, with apocalyptic films and novels using the sensationalism of chaos for its thrill value. It is a kind of ecstasy characteristic of a complacent society to pay for a seat within a cool dark room and witness a marvelous spectacle of the world destroyed by fire, flood, drought, hurricane, or disease, even as these forces become more virulent outside the theater. Mary Shelley found her audience in our time, and The Last Man echoes through recent dystopian films such as Children of Men (2006) and Contagion (2011).
1. The OED records White’s use of “monographer” in 1770 as the first in the language. Later in his own narrative, White advises that “a good monography of worms would afford much entertainment and information at the same time, and would open a large and new field in natural history” (197). This monograph was not to appear until Darwin’s Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (1881), a work that does not acknowledge White.
2. Coined by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, the term “global weirding” is an alternative to “global warming,” reflecting the belief that climate change causes various weather-related extremes, including both hot and cold weather, to become more intense and to occur out of season.
Victorian Chaos: Industrial Disruptions
The Science of Chimneys and Calderas
The atmosphere started absorbing entirely new levels of greenhouse gases beginning with the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century Europe, and levels have been on a nearly exponential increase ever since. The recognition that industrial air pollution had the power to change landscapes, species composition, and human health came to public notice with increasing concern over the course of the nineteenth century. Ominous images like Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills,” Dickens’s London sky shedding “soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes,” Gaskell’s northlands factories “puffing out black ‘unparliamentary’ smoke,” Ruskin’s “two hundred furnace chimneys” vomiting something that resembles “dead men’s souls”—these images evoke the aura of nineteenth-century urban British literature that writers alternatively fetishized and fled from to the green countryside (Blake 153; Dickens 1; Gaskell 55; Ruskin 637). Before taking an in-depth look at two Victorian science fiction novels that use industrial catastrophe as the creative energy that forges a new landscape, it will be useful to see how Victorian advances in atmospheric science in-formed contemporary thought.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the scientific investigation of air pollution from volcanoes and factories greatly improved the understanding of local and global interconnection. Atmospheric chemists came to understand the composition of smoke by studying volcanic eruptions, which were known to cause human health problems, strange corrosive rains discovered to be acidic, and climate aberrations for years afterward. Earth could be seen as a biosphere, with an insulating layer of ozone and a force field of gravity that held in the atmosphere of the closed global system. Although this cozy arrangement often inspired praise of divine design or just wonderful cosmic luck, other implications of the closed cosmos became apparent, such as the possibility that air pollution does not simply vanish; it insidiously accumulates above.
The first scientific theory that can be identified with modern global warming came from the experiments of Joseph Fourier, a French physicist who pursued a theory of heat conduction. Chaos philosophers Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stegners identify Fourier’s work with the first conceptions of complex nonlinear systems, the science of complexity (104–5). His “General Remarks on the Temperature of the Terrestrial Globe and the Planetary Spaces” (1824) envisions the earth as a giant greenhouse. Fourier’s scheme of natural atmospheric insulation is cosmically benevolent: the gases and water vapor that collect at the outer reaches of the earthly sphere provide essential incubatory warmth for the plant and animal life on the surface. While the gases emitted by human industrial activity were identical to those naturally occurring in the stratosphere, Fourier did not pursue a theoretical connection. The earth’s system simply seemed too large, and the volume of greenhouse gas released by humans, too modest. Fourier also had the reassurance of religious faith, which reinforced a theory of active divine benevolence.
In 1861 John Tyndall furthered Fourier’s ideas by demonstrating the high absorbent power of gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and ozone. His conclusions, like those of his predecessors, tended to place value on the insulating power of naturally occurring ozone gases, which seemed to keep the ice ages of deeper geological history at bay. Though local
