theorized the global greenhouse, is among the earliest scientific studies to raise alarms about rapid increases in greenhouse gases. The intervening century had rendered great changes in the atmosphere, but they were not nearly as significant as the changes wrought in the decades since Trewartha’s work.
Residents in England’s newly industrial cities, particularly Manchester and London, bore witness to their polluted microclimates. Elizabeth Gaskell provides a fictional account of the city of Milton in her novel North and South (1855): “For several miles before they reached Milton, there was a deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction in which it lay. It was all the darker from contrast with the pale grey-blue of the wintry sky. [. . .] Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black ‘unparliamentary’ smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud which Margaret had taken to foretell rain” (59). The 1844 legislation meant to curb industrial emissions went largely unheeded by libertarian factory owners, among them Gaskell’s industrialist John Thornton, a Romantic hero for Victorian times. By 1866, Manchester’s medical representative identified the citizens as among the unhealthiest in Britain as a consequence of inhaling the air (Christianson 21).
The Scottish chemist and industrial critic Robert Angus Smith discovered acid rain in 1852 in the environs of Manchester. He published the long-researched monograph Air and Rain: The Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology in 1872. Acid rain had the alarming power of dissolving the features of building façades (notably gargoyles), faces already shrouded in carbon precipitate. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, industrial smoke, and particularly sulfur dioxide, has decreased the pH of rain from a neutral 6 to a marginally acidic 4.5 or 4. Readings of 2.4, the acidity of vinegar, have occasionally been recorded in heavily industrialized areas (“Acid Rain”). Events of Waldsterben, the death of trees, had been known to follow large volcanic eruptions, but forest dieback near industrial areas in England and the Black Forest in Germany came to be linked to acid rain. Acid rain’s tendency to deface tombstones and public statues is a particularly bracing example of the self-annihilating side effects of industrial emissions. Even names carved in stone were imperiled by the airborne appetites of sulfur dioxide and oxidized nitrogen compounds.
By century’s end, scientific consensus showed the effects of Manchester’s pollution on its plant life, humans, and habitations. In an 1893 essay called “The Air of Large Towns,” Manchester chemist G. H. Bailey made an emotional appeal to industrialists about their urban air filters, the trees. In his discursive preamble to the scientific data on pollutants, he wrote, “General experience has shown that evergreens cannot be grown in the heart of our larger cities and even the more hardy deciduous trees make little progress and sooner or later succumb. The sulfurous and other noxious vapors and the deposits of soot, hydrocarbons, etc., which form on the leaves are the chief agents in the destruction of plant-life” (201–2). Trees are only a step removed from animals, and Bailey invoked Britain’s famed urban fogs, “when the air is supercharged with such impurities,” to convey the pathos of the “fog demon,” a predator on public health in the new industrial environment: “The death-rate indeed from such [respiratory] diseases after foggy weather frequently increases to three-fold its normal value and is always exceptionally high in the densely populated districts” (202). Although urban centers in England had long been the loci of infectious disease transmission, Bailey’s essay identified a new health risk to industrial city dwellers that was not restricted to humans. Second natures, the patchy clusters of trees that serve aesthetic needs in cities, have their own version of black lung. Their sickness is a poignant symbol of the transorganismal health effects of air pollution. In 1910 T. S. Eliot lyrically described how the urban yellow fog “rubs its back upon the window-panes [. . .] / lingered upon the pools that stand in drains [. . .] / curled once about the house, and fell asleep” (“Prufrock” lines 15, 18, 22). The “fog demon” had become endemic, another offspring of industry.
Victorian factory architecture provides another measure of industrial air pollution. The statistics on average chimney height over the course of the nineteenth century reveal how legislation attempted to curtail urban pollution without the bother of regulating emissions. Gale Christianson traces the growth of “Cleopatra’s needles” from an average somewhat below 300 feet in the early decades of the century to new records of 435.5 feet in 1841 and 454 feet in 1857. An average of one hundred chimneys rose each year in London between 1846 and 1853. The House of Commons Select Committee on the Smoke Nuisance, created in 1843, recommended that manufacturers be removed from the city center to a radius of five or six miles (Christianson 56–59). These measures substituted a visibly apparent local environmental problem for an almost invisible but widespread trend toward the blackening of England, urban and rural. As these industrial forests came to define city skylines, architecture trended toward more attractive and ever-taller stacks capable of distributing their effluent over a wider area. Aesthetic chimneys included those designed after the Egyptian prototype, Cleopatra’s needle. Perhaps it helped with public opinion to have their aesthetics contribute some artistic character to otherwise utilitarian cities.
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