href="#ulink_e3acf5bd-2631-5224-a5f3-2e11451875f9">1. Two valuable book-length studies by ecologists give further detail to this distinction between the old balance paradigm and the new chaotic model of change in nature: Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies and Kricher’s Balance of Nature. Leakey and Lewin’s Sixth Extinction contains an informative chapter on stability and chaos in nature. For a review of evolutionary patterns in theory, see Gould and Eldredge.
Romantic Chaos: Natural Patterns Disturbed
Four Histories of Change
The following two chapters read four British narratives of ecological disturbance—two Romantic and two Victorian. All four works show an innovative use of catastrophe to describe the state of the natural world and its tempo over time. In contrast to the paradigm of balance in nature, these four works experiment with the power and potential inventiveness inherent in a chaotic worldview. Chaos is the loss of control, but it is also the discovery of a new kind of infinity.
These works were inspired by specific moments in history when natural disasters stressed human conceptions of nature in balance. They form a series of footsteps across the long nineteenth century, each taking a sample of the current cultural and natural climate. Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne dates to the early Romantic 1780s; Mary Shelley’s The Last Man emerged in the late Romantic 1820s; Richard Jefferies’s After London is a work of the Victorian 1880s; and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine straddles the Victorian and modern periods at the turn of the twentieth century. These selections represent important crossroads between natural and human history because they were written in the wake of actual cataclysms. Three of the four works follow immense volcanic eruptions. Laki (1783), Tambora (1815), and Krakatoa (1883) had some of the most devastating global effects ever seen from eruptions, with tens of thousands of people killed in each event. Some estimates put the human death toll in the years following the eruptions in the hundreds of thousands (Walker, citing Grattan and Brayshay). Each eruption had acute and chronic effects across the globe, including anomalous cold weather, acid rain, crop failures and famine, and the spectacular optical effects of the ash suspended in the troposphere. Though balance, gradualism, and coherent evolution were popular constructs in British nineteenth-century culture, these authors wrote about chaos while under the influence of natural disasters. Their immediacy is particularly relevant to our ecological outlook in the twenty-first century with climate change. Gilbert White in the 1780s assumes that he will find a static, perennial nature in Selborne and instead finds surprising lurches in animal populations, extreme temperatures, and the Laki eruption flaring over the parish. Mary Shelley’s fiction imagines an apocalypse of the plague as globalization spreads disease transmitted via trade routes. The sickness is incubated by a perversely pleasant warm climate, but the lingering psychological effect of Mount Tambora’s eruption, which clearly marked Frankenstein, is still suspended in the atmosphere of The Last Man.
In the next chapter, we will explore Richard Jefferies’s invention of a postapocalyptic pristine nature, where ecological succession has engulfed the relics of Victorian civilization but the toxic legacy of industry skulks just below the surface. Jefferies was witness to British food shortages from crop failures due to Krakatoa’s volcanic winters in the 1880s, and he was openly intrigued by environmental chaos’s power to reinvent a degraded world. H. G. Wells did not write under the influence of an eruption, but he uses the theory of evolution by natural selection to imagine a harrowing connection between Victorian industry and an actual machine nature within a million years. In this story, the initial conditions of industrial economic inequality have chaotic downstream effects on human evolution.
I have divided the four works into two separate chapters on chaos be-cause the traditional transition from the Romantic to the Victorian period around midcentury also signals an upward shift in the intensity of industrial activity and its ecological effects in England. In the earlier writing of White and Shelley, industry is a mere shadow beyond the borders of the narrative. By the second half of the century, Jefferies and Wells designate industrial pollution and machinery as central elements in future nature. A moral thread that distrusts the influence of industrialism colors their writing, and this thread is absent in the Romantic works. Jefferies and Wells also had Darwin’s ideas at their disposal, so they are necessarily in dialogue with natural selection. Before delving into the Victorian novels, I discuss how contemporary atmospheric science was beginning to make connections between volcanic eruptions and factory emissions as comparable forms of air pollution.
In all four works, conceptual innovations of chaotic nature foreshadow theories in modern ecology, including population ecology, succession dynamics, disturbance mosaics, and climate change. Purposely omitted in this study are cozy catastrophes such as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). Although these works show a Victorian disaffection for urban industrial settings, their simplistic “back-to-the-earth” dreamworlds are not particularly enlightening in relation to ecological studies in the twenty-first century. Their utopianism is classical rather than modern.
The literary use of catastrophe patterns requires a move beyond the calm quotidian of drawing room and garden settings. British novels of the nineteenth century mostly conformed to the convention of nature’s constancy beneath human historical turmoil, from Scott to Austen, Eliot to Gaskell. Nature may change cosmetically from industrial blackening, as in Gaskell’s North and South (1855), but polluted nature is not the central concern; character self-realization is. Where classic novels like Bleak House (1852–53) and Middlemarch (1874) prize coherent conclusions that advance moral arguments centered on human action, Romantic and Victorian literary scholarship has said less about contemporaneous novels with a modern vision of nature. The Last Man (1826) and After London (1885) are perhaps inferior works of literature when character and plot are the major considerations, but in exchange they propose that nature has become its own tragic character in a new age of ecological stressors: nature is dynamic, damaged, unpredictable, vengeful, enduring, and nurturing. The apocalyptic thriller can also afford a sense of triumph to readers. When not upstaged by nature, characters often show latent capabilities that come to shine in the new environment, as the old, outworn culture is turned under. Catastrophe provides an outlet for a different kind of romance, with fresh adversities and heroes showing adaptive spots and stripes: inoculated wanderers, new frontiersmen, and time travelers. The ecological thriller is receptive to subversive comedy and romance; it is not always a desperate slog through dystopian lands of extinction. Readers share the hope that catastrophe engenders unforeseen bounties, and that we are ennobled and strengthened by enduring its hardships.
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault explores how a clearer understanding of deep time enabled by new findings in geology and biology caused a rupture in the Western episteme of the nineteenth century, which had been built upon a long-standing assumption of natural history as a human-centered, providential narrative:
[I]t was discovered that there existed a historicity proper to nature; [. . .] man found himself dispossessed of what constituted the most manifest contents of his history: nature no longer speaks to him of the creation or the end of the world, of his dependence or his approaching judgment; it no longer speaks of anything but a natural time; its wealth no longer indicates to him the antiquity or the immanent return of a Golden Age; it speaks only of conditions of production being modified in the course of history. [. . .] The human being no longer has any history: or rather, since he speaks,
