<i>Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature</i> by Adrian Tait

In Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature, Adrian Tait adopts ecocritical and new materialist approaches to analyze nineteenth-century engagements with the issue of workers’ rights to live and prosper in a healthy, comfortable environment. He effectively argues that the damage to human lives caused by industrial modernity requires an awareness of the coreliances among humans, other species, and objects. His study gives primary attention to the living conditions of the working classes as addressed in works by Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, and a selection of Chartist authors. Tait conscientiously tracks the slippery logic of the envisioned (or ignored) relationships among economic theory, industrial capitalism, literary form, and organic ecology, with his work on the last of these elements offering particularly innovative insight into the strengths and limitations of Victorian formulations of workers’ rights.During the period Tait addresses, British industrialization and free-market capitalism gave rise to classist delineations between the countryside, the suburbs, the city core, and the industrial wasteland. The last of these, Tait notes, was frequently envisioned by the middle class as a single abject slurry of household refuse, dilapidated housing, dustheaps, vermin, and the laboring poor. However, this ecological sacrifice zone (as we might call it today) was actually characterized by dynamic interactions and coreliances among humans, other animals, and the material world. This dynamic is central to Tait’s discussion of Carlyle and Engels—including their turn to literary tropes—which establishes the broader context of his inquiry. As Tait argues, although Carlyle challenged the common conceptual split between nature and culture, when he spoke of green spaces, he retained an anthropocentric perspective, waxing positively about an agrarian vision of a landscape conducive to the health and thriving of all humans. Stating that Carlyle envisioned a “non-hierarchical relationship to the environment” (48), Tait also affirms that Carlyle repeatedly described the organic non-human in terms of use value, declaring that he “nowhere challenged the existing status quo. Nor did he acknowledge that ‘the Land’ is part of a larger living system” (49). Similarly, Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1842–44), turned to the pastoral to imagine a preindustrialist life of unalienated labor, while making use of the Gothic to capture the horrors of workers’ urban lives in a modern, industrial dystopia. By considering Engels’s works through a new materialist lens, Tait develops a nuanced understanding of the conceptual slippage between the agency of objects and the objectification of the workers, who are valued for their mechanistic contribution to capitalist production. Industrial modernity, in this model, is rendered as a macrostructural inevitability or foundational truth, a sort of hyperobject (in Timothy Morton’s formulation) that enacts a form of slow violence beyond full human comprehension.In his chapter on the Chartists, environmental justice remains defined primarily as human rights and freedoms within the ecology in which they operate. Through readings of works by Thomas Cooper, Thomas Martin Wheeler, and others, Tait expertly untangles Chartist authors’ struggles to create empathy for workers as not brutes destined by their limited knowledge and agency to a life of deprivation, a move that then required them to accept their own impact on and responsibility toward the rest of their ecological network. In Tait’s account, Chartist writings reflect an awareness of their difficulties but not a fatalistic sense of inevitability, whether struggling in an urban or rural environment. While Chartism encouraged a sense among workers of their greater agency as a collective, the model did not accord with the tendency in novels such as Elizbeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) or Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) to focus on the individual’s struggle for self-affirmation. In short, as Tait argues, the form of the popular realist genre was inadequate for imagining a way out of the overarching economic order.Tait’s analysis of Ruskin digs deeper into the relation of ethics specifically to aesthetics through an examination of his vision of an ethical eco-aestheticism enacted by divine will. In Modern Painters (1843–60), Ruskin argued that beautiful things are useful “because they are beautiful, and for the sake of their beauty only; and not to sell, or pawn—or in any way, turn into money” (qtd. in Tait, 165). Tait does not situate Ruskin in conversation with the environmentalist potential of the Aesthetic Movement as found in authors such as Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, or William Morris (although Morris is engaged in a later chapter). Rather, Ruskin’s notion of vital beauty challenged the view of the nonhuman as resource, as “dead matter to be exploited without limit or consequence” (163). For Ruskin, all elements of the organic world contribute to a collective system of mutual support. In a discussion on iron and rust, for example, Ruskin noted that “we cannot even blush without its help” (qtd. in Tait 162). Drawing together several strands of his study, Tait helpfully reveals that Ruskin echoed a key aim of some Chartist writers in his suggestion that the appreciation of such interdependencies could lead from an economy driven by divisive self-interest to a moral, collectivist one.It is in the two chapters focused on Dickens’s novels Bleak House (1852–53) and Hard Times that one finds Tait’s most complex analysis of the cross-influence of literary form, industrialism, the state of the working class, and the diverse agents of an environment, resulting in an overarching paradigm of coreliance that also recognizes differences among classes and genders, as well as across locales—the urban, the suburban, and the rural. Arguments recognizing the inseparability of culture and nature are replaced in these chapters with a rich theorization of relationality among multispecies communities of support and care. As such, the chapters also suggest useful connections between Dickens’s work, as Tait presents it, and recent scholarly approaches to vegetal sentience, nonhuman globalism, and the eco-weird. While the rights of other species are noted in the Dickens chapters, they are not a major focus; there is no discussion, for example, of the rise of animal rights activism or the various local environmentalist movements of the period. Nor does Tait address, as many Victorians themselves had, the ways in which the oppression of one segment of society supported the oppression of another, such as the scientific and judicial abuse of nonhuman animals reinforcing the oppression of women. Tait does, however, make effective use of Val Plumwood’s scholarship on macro-structural assumptions of subordination through which, in Plumwood’s analysis, a disrespect of the organic world implicitly underpins the subordination of women and the colonized. Tait’s sensitive engagement with Dickens’s respect for the imagination, or what the novelist called “fancy,” also encourages a profound conceptual link between environmental studies and species studies.In the chapter on Bleak House, Tait addresses the ways industrial capitalism and the legal system, particularly regarding real estate ownership, operated in tandem to allow the slow decay of both urban dwellings and their inhabitants, who suffered mentally and physically from poverty and unsanitary living conditions. In Bleak House, Tait shows, Dickens emphasized the inseparability of the human, material, and organic, drawing readers to ask whether humans can become the very vermin and disease from which they struggle to demarcate themselves. As Tait argues, Dickens even used the literary form of Bleak House, with its seemingly chaotic entanglements of characters and plot lines, to “reject the separation of subject and object, and with it, the process of radical exclusion” (115). In the process, he captured the chaotic state not only of an inner-city neighborhood, but also of Britain itself as a sort of Gothicized hyperobject.With Hard Times, Tait turns to the environmental classism of industrial modernity. In this work, a reductive rationalism fosters workers’ views even of themselves as machinery, inadvertently contributing to their slow violence against not only the environment but also their own mental and physical health. Tait argues that Hard Times departs from the standard realist novel by emphasizing the imagination, encouraging the defamiliarization of its subject as a means of cracking open normative assumptions about class, gender, and even species. Further, the novel’s form, Tait contends, enacts an imaginative excess as a “counter-proposal” to realism’s complicity with a social system that buttressed the very oppression it aimed to render visible (141). One of the most original aspects of Tait’s argument is his consideration in this chapter of the nonhuman not as a symbol of human struggles or as examples of other denigrated contributors to the dominant order but as a means of escaping the system of divisiveness itself. In Hard Times, the main community for what Henry Salt, in Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892), would call imaginative sympathy is found in Sleary’s circus, where people “work alongside their animals, and share the risks with them, creating a kind of (ethical) equivalence” (147). In Tait’s view, Dickens here challenged the ethical extensionism that bestows rights on the nonhuman based only on their similarities to humans, instead emphasizing the importance of the relationalities across sentient beings. Imagination encourages an appreciation for “a kind of nondualistic assemblage” with “a general absence of the divisive rifts that characterize society as a whole”—across class, gender, and species (148). But imagination also demands readers consider themselves as something other than the restrained identity category imposed by industrial modernity. The view of the worker as machinery or as brute could be said to proffer a similar identificatory transmutation between the human and nonhuman, but it is Dickens’s fancy and the living-in-chaos captured in the form of his novels that encourages one to kick against such locked conflations. Collectively, the analyses Tait offers in his study provide a focused, thorough consideration of the role of literature in the construction and critique of industrial society, as well as, on occasion, imaginative glimmers of the means of moving beyond it.