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ОглавлениеRomantic 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, works, and lives, he finds himself interwoven in his own being with histories that are neither subordinate to him nor homogeneous with him. By the fragmentation of the space over which Classical knowledge extended in its continuity, by the folding over of each separated domain upon its own development, the man who appears at the beginning of the nineteenth century is “dehistoricized.” (367–69)
In effect, the increasingly sophisticated life sciences were proposing a new and indeterminate paradigm of deep time in which human history was only one of myriad narratives. The human story was recent, heroic only from an egocentric point of view, and had neither clear origins nor a telos. The human story meandered, like all other life histories, through a pathless wood deprived of the landmarks that heroic history and religion had provided. Foucault’s perspective is postmodern and retrospective, and his reading pays little attention to how Darwin crafted a conscious narrative of purpose, articulation, and improvement to characterize evolution. Still, the kind of vertigo expressed by Matthew Arnold, “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born,” captures the more shadowy zeitgeist of Darwin’s time, which Foucault identifies through his theory of the “dehistoricized” culture of the nineteenth century (“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” lines 85–86).
The main thesis of these two opening chapters is that chaos in literature predates the scientific study of chaos in ecology. Eighteenth-century geologists, including Cuvier, Buffon, Lamarck, and (a little later) Lyell, had discovered both deep time and cataclysm in fossil evidence, but their discoveries were slow to be adopted into theories of the ongoing state of nature. From an ecological standpoint, these four literary works are precocious because they appraise catastrophic events in natural history and weave them into the fabric of futurity. It would overstress the interdisciplinary project to claim that these works demonstrate formal mathematical chaos. However, the very pattern of sudden ecological punctuation is a timely contribution of a literary imagination, as is the ecology of disturbance. These works are precursors to contemporary chaos ecology because they all insist that natural and anthropogenic disturbance must figure in our understanding of modern nature.
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
Between 1768 and 1787, Gilbert White brought to the Enlightenment the first in-depth, in situ study of an ecosystem. The text has never been out of print since it was first published in 1789. White’s Illustrated Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne reports on several aspects of Selborne’s environment: its geology, botany, zoology, and climate. Notably for a man of the cloth, the Reverend Gilbert White never invokes God or any higher power in his attempts to explain mysterious forces of nature. He keeps his letters literal, detailed, and secularly speculative. White’s narrative momentum is maintained through the progression of time, since the three dimensions of space remain fixed in his home parish. The single location distinguishes White’s epistemological strategy from that of his contemporary Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled extensively to understand geographical relations in ecology. Observations while traveling gave Humboldt the theoretical grounds for biogeography, as he de-tailed the importance of elevation in the distribution of plant types in the Andes range. In contrast, Gilbert White’s work is an early microcosm study because of his decades-long dedication to a circumscribed microenvironment. In a time when natural historians were engaged in a mania of exotic collection to fill cabinets of curiosities, White’s enduring absorption in his home parish shows an impressive degree of concentration on the biodiversity in his immediate purview. The wanderlust of the colonial scientist did not influence White’s own methods, though he kept up a considerable correspondence with traveling collectors and scientific societies in London (Worster 6).
White’s original use of phenology, the study of naturally recurring cycles such as the seasons, provisionally advanced knowledge according to Enlightenment expectations of stability. A devotion to ornithology predisposed him to detailing species migration according to predictable annual patterns. In spite of its phenological design, the Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne deconstructs the Enlightenment sensibility of coherent, patterned nature. By the end of White’s chronicle, the author views extraordinary events of ecological disturbance as essential to Selborne’s natural state. Critics have nearly always distilled White’s text down to precisely the inverse of chaos by celebrating its stable Enlightenment essence. The prevailing consensus on White’s work is that his letters from Selborne articulate an Edenic vision of man living in contemplative symbiosis with his natural surroundings. This balanced, preindustrial microcosm frame of reference massages the reader’s shoulders with visions of simpler times to which we may retreat, if only psychologically (Allen 50–51). Another perspective credits White with appreciating changes in nature, but only within the comfortable boundaries of a taxonomic challenge, citing “his fascination and delight in an ever-living yet ever-changing, ever-elusive, ever-miscellaneous nature” (Bellanca 77).
There is more than fascination and delight in Gilbert White’s letters: readers also receive a ration of confusion, awe, and horror. Although the first two-thirds of White’s chronicle are passably at peace with the world and imply the utopia of a stable and dynamic cosmos, to pin the whole work within this frame of balance deprives White of the credit he deserves for contemplating chaotic disturbance, the less comfortable mode of ecological thought. Before the end of his quarter-century of correspondence, White has grown into a more radical speculator on the complex dynamics around him. If Selborne were really a chronicle recording eternal peace, it would be functionally obsolete; a twenty-first-century visitor to the parish would recognize very little from White’s account. Selborne is a classic text for modern times not because it reinforces a set of established conventions about the balance of Mother Nature, but because White successfully divests the balance paradigm in favor of a more modern view of nature based on discord and contingency. The microcosm of Selborne, White discovers, was vulnerable to violent change and rapid degradation partially by virtue of its diminutive scope. These theories of chaotic endangerment have not been developed in the critical literature on White’s work.
By 1770, two years into his study, White is detailing the elaboration of precise methods of observation, and has coined for himself the title of “monographer” writing on a single scientific subject: “Men that undertake only one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with: every kingdom, every province, should have its own monographer” (125).1 White is wary of being overwhelmed by too much natural information and losing the clarity of an expert’s vision in a specific sphere of knowledge. The Enlightenment filled shelves with surface-level, encyclopedic studies. Selborne has borders, and ample natural provisions within them, to keep his scientific interests sated. Another way to think about this kind of circumscribed environment is through the concept of the “ecosphere”—the regional environment that was the entire sphere of existence for most people before the Industrial Revolution. Preindustrial life centered on the ecosphere and the values of bioregionalism that ecological philosophers now cite as a necessary corrective to the “biosphere” mentality of globalization. Individuals in developed nations with a biosphere mentality expect goods to come from anywhere on the planet: they expect materials to be extracted in one location, parts forged in a second, components assembled in a third, and finished products sold and consumed in a fourth, without regard to the distance between places. The ecosphere or bioregional ethic, seen now in retrospect as the prevailing way of life before industrialism, advocates that consumers and goods should originate in the same ecological region (Buell 143).
Over the course of four letters, White comes to realize the strong potential of this serendipitous method of monography. It began with simple regional records designed to enable detailed migratory reports. But White’s instincts push his cataloguing science toward innovation: “For many months I carried a list in my pocket of the birds that were to be remarked, and, as I rode or walked about my business, I noted each day the continuance or omission of each bird’s song; so that I am as sure of the certainty of my facts as a man can be of any transaction whatsoever” (117). The key concept here is White’s notice of omission in migratory patterns. Not merely the presence of an identifiable species but also its absence become formalized as facts in the Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Here is a crucial turn in methods of ecological knowledge. Science was accustomed to in-depth study of apparent, observable, material entities, but it had no clear interest in the gaps that are equally important to understanding patterns of species distribution over time, especially in disturbed environments. In effect, his monographic focus provides a crucial trial of the stability and continuity over time that natural history had previously assumed to be inherent in ideas like the great chain of being. This discovery of species absence shifts White’s original study of phenology into the modern age, and annual migratory cycles are discovered as shifting and unreliable. Modern phenology has become a central method of ornithologists who study the effects of climate change on migratory patterns.
The widespread appeal of White’s chronicle rests partially on his caring and concerned voice for all the creatures of Selborne. Revealingly, he shows more affection for oaks, turtles, and worms than for the “hordes of gypsies which infest the south and west of England” (179). White may be accused of class prejudice, but he is also making an implicit statement about the inherent value of nonhuman inhabitants. Human activity too often destroys the peaceable network of other species in Selborne. Where the oak is felled, the intrepid mother bird is struck dead (11); where hunters are unfettered by regulation, the partridges and red deer become rare or extinct, leaving a “gap” in Fauna Selborniensis (22); lowly worms, though despised, are essential to soil health. “Earth-worms,” White writes, “though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm. [. . .] Worms probably provide new soil for hills and slopes where the rain washes the earth away; and they affect slopes, probably to avoid being flooded. Gardeners and farmers express their detestation of worms. [. . .] But these men would find that the earth without worms would become cold, hard-bound, and void of fermentation; and consequently sterile” (196).
White’s innovative thinking goes beyond the hierarchical great chain of being that was thought to extend from rocks, at the bottom, to plants, animals, humans, and finally God. Here, environmental stress is evident through the deletions in an interdependent biotic network, a web of nature. White’s point falls hard on the ignorance of gardeners and farmers who assume the subordination of other species rather than their equality and inherent value. When nature’s economy is violated, surprising imbalances occur and have chaotic effects on the web of life. The loss of the red deer may allow for the advance of brambly undergrowth that chokes the forest. Though the balance of biological complexity is his ethic, White needs a catalyst of disturbance and extinction to recognize the value of biodiversity. Degradation is a prerequisite to ecosystem-level conservation.
In time, White’s tone shifts from passing elegies for lost species to more concentrated expressions of awe and fear at the unpredictable weather of the 1780s. A primer for the narrative tone at the end of the chronicle comes when a landslide caused by a sudden massive thaw hurls a “huge fragment” of earth hundreds of yards down a steep slope. Houses, woods, and farm fields are “strangely torn and disordered” by the mysterious event. All witnesses agree “that no tremor of the ground, indicating an earthquake, was ever felt” (222–23). In this and other apocalyptic passages, White offers little speculation as to the cause and makes no reference to biblical Armageddon. He seems to enjoy lingering on the perversity of the incident, providing only an objective account that allows sensation to work its own effect in the individual reader. The narrative gains momentum when White considers the effects of these climatic anomalies on established ecological relationships. He explicitly brings meteorology, the study of the unpredictable or “meteoric,” into Selborne’s history: “Since the weather of a district is undoubtedly part of its natural history, I shall make no further apology for the four following letters, which will contain many particulars concerning some of the great frosts and a few respecting some very hot summers, that have distinguished themselves from the rest during the course of my observations” (253). This letter, the sixty-first of sixty-six, opens an extended ex-position on sublime phenomena noted objectively as temperature and barometrical readings, but also on the psychological effects of unprecedented events in natural history. He never returns to his initial phenological perspective, which assumes cyclical, consistent patterns of deistic design open to the naturalist’s observation.
White’s language comes to rely on exceptional terms quite foreign to a natural theology based on the balanced economy of nature. The words paradox, severity, loathsome, amazing, tremendous, extraordinary, portentous, superstitious, strange, prodigious, violent, deluging, convulsed, and fierce enliven the final series of letters (253–68). The four letters that detail sudden and unseasonable extremes of warmth and cold prepare the reader for the last two entries, which detail the atmospheric effects of 1783’s Laki volcano eruption in Iceland and the severe thunderstorms that accompanied this catastrophe. White uses these extreme observations rhetorically as well as epistemologically. The ethos established by his early talent for close and patient description is a counterbalance for this new narrative of wild weather. It provides a sense of authorial reliability lacking in the work of more histrionic writers. White feels confident as a respectable member of the scientific establishment, as well as an independent-minded scholar who knows the subject of his monograph better than anyone else.
As a microcosm, Selborne’s dynamics make intelligible the movements of a larger natural world. White is eager to learn the lessons of the model, however surprised he may be by its recalcitrance. Sudden, unseasonable changes in temperature determine the biological character of entire years; they are not merely passing inconveniences for human beings. The exceptional winter seasons of 1768 and 1776 impress him with “wild and grotesque” scenes of extreme cold and heavy snowfall (258). These “accidental severities,” which occur “once perhaps in ten years,” provide knowledge of which plants can withstand extreme cold and which succumb when temperatures go off-kilter (256). Conversely, the summer extremes are notable for their effects on animal populations: “The summers of 1781 and 1783 were unusually hot and dry. [. . .] The great pests of the garden are wasps, which destroy all the finer fruits just as they are coming into perfection. In 1781 we had none; in 1783 there were myriads” (263). This passage provides some of the earliest speculation on the future science of population ecology. White’s notes reveal that the demographics of some species, like wasps, are subject to wild vacillation each year, without any obvious reversion to a long-term norm and certainly no annual constancy.
Although White did not have the quantitative tools to unravel the mysteries of population fluctuation, his work effectively acknowledges a problem that the science of ecology would model more than two hundred years later. When today’s population ecology takes account of a variable environment over many years, the system often shows nonlinear and emergent properties consistent with chaotic dynamics. One important variable that mathematical modelers are currently attempting to capture is the effect of ecological variation on population and community dynamics (Chesson 253). White has no desire to elide or simplify these chaotic patterns that become apparent when closely observed and recorded in the long term. Though he can provide no answers for why two equally hot, dry summers would result in such different wasp infestations, his posing the question started public inquiry.
The wasp population explosion that summer was upstaged by a literal explosion. On 8 June, the Laki volcano in Iceland erupted. White’s description of the impact in Selborne speaks for itself:
The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phenomena; for, besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunder-storms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smokey fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man. By my journal I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June 23 to July 20 inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that butchers’ meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. The country people began to look with superstitious awe, at the red, louring aspect of the sun; and indeed there was reason for the most enlightened person to be apprehensive; for, all the while, Calabria and part of the isle of Sicily, were torn and convulsed with earthquakes; and about that juncture a volcano sprung out of the sea on the coast of Norway. (265)
Up to this point White has maintained his educated distance from the superstitions of country people and has advanced solid objective reports. He appeals here to Romantic discourse that appreciates the wonder of natural forces and delights in their irreducible mystery. Inspired by the same event, William Cowper noted in his journal, “We never see the sun but shorn of his beams, the trees are scarce discernible at a mile’s distance, he sets with the face of a red hot salamander and rises with the same complexion” (quoted in Grattan and Brayshay 128). Alternatively, 1783 was known as the “sand summer” in England because of the lingering atmospheric ash, as described in White’s account of the blanched midday sun. The Laki eruption infused a massive volume of sulfurous ash into the stratosphere, which had the effect of reflecting some sunlight back into space and cooling the atmosphere; but the ash also dispersed admitted light and created a milky-white luminosity like a frosted incandescent light bulb. As Laki continued to pump ash and gases into the atmosphere for eight months, widespread famine, stifling air pollution across Europe, and a particularly severe winter into 1784 condemned most of Iceland’s livestock to death, and one-quarter of its human population followed. Local parish records across England from 1783–84 suggest that the accumulated effects of the Laki eruption killed twenty-three thousand British men and women, which makes it one of the largest natural disasters to beset modern England. An estimated 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide were emitted, or three times the total industrial pollution of Europe in 2006 (Walker).
The Laki eruption had the kind of apocalyptic qualities that led the religious to believe that they were experiencing a form of divine retribution, and made secular-minded Enlightenment thinkers question the perfectibility of human society through reason and science. Religious, folk, and scientific perspectives preserved in eighteenth-century periodicals demonstrate the high levels of anxiety and troubling portents swirling in various social circles (Grattan and Brayshay 129–32). The virulent heat in July 1783, the violent cold throughout the winter of 1783–84, and the confusion of the alternately blanched and ensanguined sun raised serious doubts about the human ability to understand or control chaotic elements of nature. Rather than dismiss the “superstitious awe” of country people, White feels on an epistemological par with them. Even the educated had little scientific explanation for the horribly surreal scenes during those years.
Benjamin Franklin was more analytical. Not knowing whether a volcano was involved, he called the phenomenon a “universal fog” and forthrightly rendered the mystery a useful predictive mechanism. If dry summer fogs were to become a new reality, “men might from such fogs conjecture the probability of succeeding hard winter, and of the damage to be expected by the breaking up of frozen rivers in the spring; and take such measures as are possible and practicable, to secure themselves and effects from the mischiefs that attended the last” (377). Franklin wished to secure a useful indicator from a confusing event, and the lesser ecological effects in America may have permitted his more stoical reaction.
White allows the chaos of this sublime year to remain mischievous. He turns to literature to make a lasting image of 1783: “Milton’s noble simile of the sun, in his first book of Paradise Lost, frequently occurred to my mind; [. . .] it alludes to a superstitious kind of dread, with which the minds of men are always impressed by such strange and unusual phaenomena” (265). The passage he quotes abuts a description of Satan as the “Arch-Angel ruin’d [. . .] th’excess of Glory obscur’d” (Paradise Lost 1.593–94). Having fallen, Satan’s full angelic sun is occluded by his moral corruption, and his legions are filled “with fear of change” (1.598). Satan’s band of fallen angels organizes in ranks, and they emit “A shout that tore Hell’s Concave, and beyond / Frighted the Reign of Chaos and old Night” (2.542–43). The revolution itself is a principle of disorder set against divine cosmic harmony. White’s allusion to Milton is suggestive: it figures the ensanguined sun following Laki’s eruption as a principle of corruption and error. The Laki eruption cannot be ignored, nor can it be explained away; it is one of the chaotic raw elements of the cosmos. As Milton’s Satan has only begun in Book I to cause trouble in the balanced hierarchy of God’s creation, White perceives a nagging sense of imbalance and future calamity surrounding these “horrible phaenomena” (265).
Recent volcanic events have stimulated new interest in Laki’s 1783 performance. When Eyjafjallajökull (AYE-yah fyat-lah yir-kutl) erupted in Iceland in April and May 2010, its ash filled the atmosphere over Europe in a morphing cloud that covered the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, and eastern Europe, and extended as far south as Spain and the heel of Italy. As measured by both the Volcanic Explosivity Index and total ash weight, this eruption was a minor event compared to Laki, but it caused the highest level of air traffic disruption since World War II (Sydney Morning Herald). The estimated $200 million per day in lost airline revenue and the major economic disruptions for Europe and its trading partners (primarily in Africa, Asia, and Australia) are stark reminders of a global society’s economic reliance on long-distance air transportation (Wearden). An eruption today on the much greater scale of Laki might have fewer repercussions for human health because of better technologies, but its economic effects would be dismembering. Eyjafjallajökull was a reasonably polite reminder of how environmental events disrupt modern business as usual. The chaotic narrative sporadically quashes the sunny ideal of steadily growing economies on a supportive ecological stage.
White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne is more ecologically complex than critics have allowed. The text indeed has extended passages that epitomize economic balance. But the work is innovative for other reasons. Its use of monography allows a microcosmic vision that is echoed in the ecosystem concept that would emerge in the twentieth century. The microcosm is subject to damaging changes in composition. White observes extinction due to human activity, which he imagines as gaps in an interconnected web of life rather than a hierarchical chain of being. Some of his careful observations raise questions that ecological scientists are still actively researching in the twenty-first century, such as the ecology of chaotic population fluctuation, the minimum viable populations of stressed species, the impacts of deforestation, and the multivariate dynamics of natural disasters, including thunderstorms, landslides, and volcanoes. White’s a priori expectation to observe economy in nature by no means blinds him to the importance of extreme, unpredictable weather and its downstream effects over many seasons and across species. There is no indication in the text that White is particularly disconsolate as a result of his uncertainties, but there is a sense that the phenomena are beyond the state of his science. His epistolary narrative is precocious and should be appraised as an important early work in the comparison of ecologies of balance and chaos.
The Last Man
Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826) may appear to be a fiction far removed from White’s natural history chronicle. Divided by genre and composed within different cultural climates, the two works nevertheless find common ground in their concern for nature’s patterns of disturbance. Both Shelley and White look to the Romantic sublime in nature’s chaotic plots. Last men enjoyed a literary vogue after the Indonesian volcano Tambora’s eruption in 1815 and the economic depression of the 1820s. In 1823 Thomas Campbell published a poem with the same name as Shelley’s novel, which Campbell claimed had inspired Byron’s “Darkness,” a poem written in July 1816 under the dark skies of “the year without a summer.” These two lyrics convey the visceral feeling of apocalypse that fell over Europe in those surreal summer months. Byron’s work envisions volcanic chaos as a barren landscape:
The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
(69–72)
Campbell’s “The Last Man” centers on a cosmic disease transferred to humans:
The Sun’s eye had a sickly glare,
The Earth with age was wan,
The skeletons of nations were
Around that lonely man!
Some had expired in fight,—the brands
Still rusted in their bony hands;
In plague and famine some!
Earth’s cities had no sound nor tread;
And ships were drifting with the dead
To shores where all was dumb!
(11–20)
Indeed, Tambora’s eruption in 1815 was a worthy inspiration for these apocalyptic visions. It was the largest eruption in recorded history, as measured by the volume of magma expelled—140 billion tons (Oppenheimer 230). The sudden ejection of such a mass of pollution into the higher levels of the atmosphere had gradual global climate effects: it took slightly more than a year for the high-flown ash and gases to form an aerosol veil that darkened European and North American skies the following summer. As with Laki, this global event was more than a chilly inconvenience. Tambora caused crop failures, widespread animal deaths, and subsequent famine. Life on earth in 1816 also had the misfortune of particularly low solar activity, which intensified the volcanic winter.
In the poetry of Byron and Campbell, the effect was figured as ecocidal, driving earth to death in either the deep past or the entropic future. To Byron, earth seemed to have reverted to a primordial form, a “lump” and “chaos of hard clay” unsupportive of life and subject to wicked extremes in the elements—a young, undifferentiated planet. Campbell’s vision is centered more on the fate of humans and the postapocalyptic vacuum of life and culture extinguished. The sun’s “sickly glare” and the aged earth’s “wan” face are images of senescence that speak of entropy as the ruling cosmic force dismantling order, and Campbell’s sun and earth resemble the bloody sunsets and milky daylight of a volcanic atmosphere. In both poems, despite the wicked weather of 1816, the effects of ecological chaos are too weird to be contemporary; they must be primordial or futuristic.
Details of these climate extremes and their literary offspring in Byron and Mary Shelley are part of the lore of Romantic scholarship. A unique summer like 1816’s must make an indelible impression on the mind, especially if it serves as the inspiration for an author’s magnum opus, as it did for Shelley in Frankenstein. In the spirit of a theme with variations, Shelley’s flint stone for catastrophe in The Last Man is again chaotic weather, but in this novel the climate is not the clammy summerless depths of Ingolstadt laboratories or the remote reaches of the Hebrides or the Arctic (or Frankenstein’s brain); rather, she develops catastrophe out of humid tropical warmth that is an excellent vector for disease. The novel was written in the confines of Shelley’s London apartment after the death of three of her children and Percy Shelley’s drowning, and the roman à clef explores the widow’s new realities in its characters, events, and climates. Her letters in those years reveal how she felt like The Last Woman, marooned apart from her lost generation. She gathers her circle by reanimating the dead in the forms of Percy Shelley and Byron (in the characters of Adrian and Raymond, respectively), and by transforming the chilly London dampness of February 1824, when she began writing, into a lush, tropical England in the last decades of the twenty-first century. Like the later nineteenth-century Thames Valley catastrophes, which include After London and The Time Machine, Shelley’s vision of her perishing civilization invokes the powers of a wild, witchlike Mother Nature. Shelley implicitly challenges the assumption that global trade and colonialism were healthy endeavors, not only for the British body but also for English ecosystems. Influenced by her knowledge of Thomas Malthus’s Principles of Population, The Last Man depicts the environmental checks on population that undercut philosophies of Enlightenment utopia such as those advocated by her own father William Godwin.
The novel progresses from the classic autobiographical beginning of the hero, Lionel Verney, with the first line, “I am the native of a sea-surrounded nook,” to the promised singular resolution: “behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney—the LAST MAN” (9, 470). Any apparent coherence or order in this seeming A-to-Z narrative is misleading. The frame of The Last Man, contained in the preface, introduces a second author of the narrative, an unnamed vacationer who in 1818 discovers the scattered “Sibylline leaves” that he assembles into Verney’s linear story. The Last Man is a narrative of fused fragments confused by time: the human extinction of the late twenty-first century is assembled from fragments in 1818. This discoverer, a cave spelunker, describes his formative editorial role: “I present the public with my latest discoveries in the slight Sibylline pages. Scattered and unconnected as they were, I have been obliged to add links, and model the work into a consistent form. [. . .] Sometimes I have thought that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe their present form to me, their decipherer. [. . .] My only excuse for thus transforming them, is that they were unintelligible in their pristine condition” (6–7). These “obscure and chaotic” fragments of a narrative are assembled in a certain order, one that doggedly pursues coherence and causality, when they essentially have none. In their discovered form they are admittedly “unintelligible,” and this outer-frame narrator claims responsibility for causal sense in the unfolding of events, including his temerity in composing “links” between fractured episodes. The novel seems unable to fulfill its own prophecy of human extinction. Frankenstein’s doubly framed narrative makes an apparent study of each teller’s manipulations and reliability. Shelley’s framing in The Last Man is less coherent, and therefore more mysterious. One could claim that the preface’s sole purpose is to seal off logical objections that the narrative of a last man would have no readers, but her placement of the preface anterior to the agonies of the twenty-first century gestures to a more essential, if enigmatic, role for these initial five pages out of nearly five hundred total. The time inversion might suggest that Verney’s story is a prophecy of future England, not a lived event, or that Shelley wishes to fragment linear time in order to question assumptions of the inevitable advance of society. Perhaps when nature itself behaves chaotically, narrative follows.
Narrative chaos has been embraced by literary deconstruction, which looks at narrative dynamics through a lens of nonlinearity and contingency (see Hayles; Parker; Conte; Palumbo; and Livingston). Most of this material comes from twentieth-century literature, and James Joyce in particular is a strange attractor for chaos. Carolyn Merchant has suggested in Reinventing Eden that chaos, from a narrative theory perspective, “might posit characteristics other than those identified with modernism, such as a multiplicity of real actors; acausal, nonsequential events; nonessentialized symbols and meanings; many authorial voices, rather than one; dialectical action and process, rather than the imposed logos of form; situated and contextualized, rather than universal, knowledge. It would be a story (or multiplicity of stories) that perhaps can only be acted and lived, not written at all” (157–58). Harmony, causation, and coherence are constructed from the disordered elements that make up the original story. Any appearance of order in The Last Man is based on an illusory cognitive drive to organize chaos.
This cryptic beginning leaves authorship indeterminate and creates a narrative experiment. It is a literary echo of Charles Darwin’s notion that the fossil record was an imperfect chronicle of a perfect story of evolutionary gradualism. Darwin filled in the gaps with narrative speculations on the intermediary forms not recorded in fossils. The “history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect,” required some spiffing up for Darwin’s gradualism to be true (Origin of Species 229). If the existing fossil record reflects the pattern of natural history, the evolutionary narrative is chaotically fragmented, like Shelley’s sibylline leaves. These texts are original artifacts, and the patched quilt of a coherent narrative pieced together from their fragments may show the author’s attempt to conform to the expectations of the nineteenth-century reading public. Shelley’s novel has received much more positive attention from postmodernist scholars than it did from her contemporaries. The Last Man received widespread critical appraisal only after a new edition was printed in America in 1965 (Parrinder 66). Reflecting the generally poor critical reception in 1826, one reviewer called the novel “the offspring of a diseased imagination, and of a most polluted taste” (“Review of The Last Man”). With today’s popular tastes, the ecological valences of disease and pollution may be read to great advantage in this prophetic novel, and its narrative chaos is familiar to modern readers.
It is a complicated tale, with a wandering plot and surprisingly conventional characters, not improved by the sentimental and logorrheic dialogue. The novel’s value lies in Shelley’s perceptive treatment of a chaotic female-gendered nature, her appreciation of radical contingency in natural history, and the remarkable visions of global warming through globalization, which together exacerbate the spread of disease. Her characters are tortuously, farcically Romantic, but the imagined twenty-first-century climate she describes is eerily apt. Frederick Buell’s analysis of apocalypse reminds us that “plague” has dated, almost medieval connotations for individuals in modern developed nations, who often believe that medical technology and inoculation have eradicated epidemiological threats to our bodies (132). However, Shelley realizes that disease transmission will only increase as the climate warms. Shelley’s novel shows a perverse reversal of the colonial project by depicting the decline of the British body as it is colonized by exotic microbes, and an assault on English nature by advancing tropical species.
Where Frankenstein drew scenes of sublime terror evoked by the vast arctic plains, ending with the blind image of the creature “lost in darkness and distance,” The Last Man capitalizes on the paradoxical horror of a too-pleasant nature mocking psychological despair. The early arrival of the warm season indicates the arrival of the survivors’ annual trial by plague. Mother Nature reveals her vindictive, witchlike properties in the face of humanity’s reasoned opposition:
Nature, our mother, and our friend, had turned on us a brow of menace. She shewed us plainly, that, though she permitted us to assign her laws and subdue her apparent powers, yet, if she put forth but a finger, we must quake. She could take our globe, fringed with mountains, girded by the atmosphere, containing the condition of our being, and all that man’s mind could invent or his force achieve; she could take the ball in her hand, and cast it into space, where life would be drunk up, and man and all his efforts for ever annihilated. (232)
This willful, vindictive, powerfully destructive characterization of Nature, the portrait drawn in chaos ecology, was originally embodied as the fallen Eve in the Western tradition (Merchant, Reinventing Eden 157). This gendering of Nature reawakens mythological traditions of natural power lying in the laps of personified goddesses, and Shelley extends the accusatory “she” from natural climate to the pestilence itself as a she-disease. The war between the sexes is fought along conventional lines, the revolting element of feminine nature, climate, and disease pitted against masculine human culture, science, and reason. As in Frankenstein, there are no female human characters with intellect or agency, though females have a disproportionate share of emotive dialogue. Nature, however, is a feminine element with chaotic agency that overcomes masculine reason, yielding a chic element of proto-ecofeminism to Shelley’s work (McKusick 109).
The tone in the passage quoted above echoes a Malthusian worldview, which helped Charles Darwin envision how survival itself was a virtue that affected evolutionary progress. Malthus’s “Essay on the Principles of Population” (1798) proposes that the plight of human experience (war, famine, disease) could not be wholly extirpated by Enlightenment institutions such as democratic government, intensive technological farming, and enhanced medical technology. Shelley’s father, William Godwin, an Enlightenment political idealist, wrote a lengthy refutation of Malthus’s essay. However, Mary Shelley’s novel consistently builds and then systematically destroys schemes of Enlightenment-rational and Romantic-imaginative hope developed by her male characters (Paley xv). The Last Man is a Malthusian work without recourse to salubrious progressive evolution. In describing the capricious moods of nature, Shelley figures Mother Earth as the author of both jeremiads and idylls; her duplicity is all the more unsettling. For chilled British readers, there is a notable irony that a warmer world resembling colonies in the British Indies (both East and West) may dress up like paradise, but the climate change is an epidemiological nightmare. Shelley takes the Malthusian notion one notable step further by envisioning a world in which even Edenic, productive, and nurturing Nature offers no succor to the cursed human race. Much worse than providing a challenge to survival, Lionel Verney comes to know the pleasant natural world as a set of false signs that belie a fate of death by disease. Order and balance seen in nature are illusive hopes, manifestations of overwrought human cognition rather than a true mirror of larger intelligible forces at work in the cosmos. Verney’s narrative repeatedly returns to microcosmic images of order and containment lost to the catastrophe of universal human decline.
Part of this lost control over the ecological world seems attributable to the lost cultural control of the imperial power. Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease devotes a long and thorough chapter to The Last Man’s epidemiology. England harbors ships that have landed on every continent, bringing their stores of trade goods, humans and other animals, and mi-crobes. Each one of these categories has a quality of invasiveness to it. Goods from other climates invade the British identity and change consumer appetites, a trend particularly suspect in the nineteenth century, with the import of addictive opium and foods reliant on slave labor (coffee, sugar, chocolate). Foreign men contribute to the worldliness of London, but their settling in England provides an early glimpse of immigration debates, which often took a pointedly racialized tone. Globalization allows the easy traversal of disease from more resistant populations to more vulnerable ones. Colonial history shows that most diseases were carried from Europe to the native populations of colonized lands, but in Shelley’s novel this pathway is reversed. The plague arrives in England from an American trade vessel, and in Italy from the nearest Eastern country: Turkey. Europe is laid open to the world’s diseases as a porous, susceptible body.
Part of the novel’s paranoia must be accounted for by the very real concerns about urban sanitation in the nineteenth century. Cholera arrived in England six years after the publication of Shelley’s novel, during the second cholera pandemic. The first pandemic affected India, China, and Indonesia, including British colonial regions where there was a large military presence (Paley xiii). The second pandemic reached London and Paris in 1832 from its origin in the Ganges River Delta, and it claimed sixty-five hundred lives in London and a hundred thousand in France (Rosenberg 101). Cholera remained a serious water-borne threat in Europe until 1851, the year of Shelley’s death. Her generation directly experienced how global trade routes served as disease vectors that could rapidly and efficiently carry bacteria from locales of origin into vastly different climates and populations, moves that often dramatically increased a disease’s virulence.
Shelley’s depiction of the rapid spread of disease in the mysteriously warmer English climate of 2100 aligns with present-day epidemiological concerns about how pathogen habitats will be expanded via climate change. As Frederick Buell notes, environmental despoilment in the twenty-first century involves a constant network of exchange among macro-, meso-, and microbiological conditions: “Raising the likelihood of a substantial increase in serious infectious disease are trends like climate change, development, habitat destruction, pollution, overpopulation, urban slummification, the industrialization of agriculture, and the rise of global transport and mobility. A host of decisive human modifications of natural and social environments—rapidly expanding modifications that lead not just to the destruction of macroecosystems but also to deeply problematic alterations in microbiological environments, are thus responsible for the rise of infectious disease” (129–30). This twenty-first-century perspective shows how the ecology of disturbance operates at many scalar equivalencies simultaneously—the macrocosmic issue of global epidemiology must consider microcosmic conditions in local climates and the immune capacities of local populations. Even as antibiotics have dramatically curtailed individual suffering from infections, they have the epidemiological side effect of promoting mutant bacteria. Liberated from intraspecies competition, our antibiotics select survivor microbes, or “superbugs,” that become the next generation to infect human populations.
Nineteenth-century theories of miasma suggested that unhealthy environments had certain characteristics, particularly fog and dampness that incubated “bad air.” Miasmatic theory was used to explain the cholera outbreaks in large European cities and provided the basis for major renovations that cleared out stagnant waterways in urban areas and drained wetlands in the country. These measures did indeed improve the sanitary and health situation, but not for the reasons miasmic theory cited. When John Snow discovered in 1854 that the epicenter of the London cholera epidemic had been the Broad Street pump in Soho, cholera transmission was correctly linked to waterborne germs, and the ground was laid for the identification of microbes as the causes of illness. Shelley’s treatment of Lionel’s inoculation certainly relies on the contemporary “bad air” conventions of miasma, but the scene is much more complex than the cliché of the damsel catching a chill from her evening walk in the moors. He enters a dark room in London: “A pernicious scent assailed my senses, producing sickening qualms, which made their way to my very heart [. . .]. I lowered my lamp, and saw a negro half clad, writhing under the agony of disease, while he held me with a convulsive grasp. With mixed horror and impatience I strove to disengage myself, and fell on the sufferer; he wound his naked festering arms round me, his face was close to mine, and his breath, death-laden, entered my vitals” (336–37). Here, it is not London’s bad breath that is infectious but the racialized encounter that throws the Englishman into the arms of the African, in a gust of colonial breath and tropical disease. Plenty of racial anxiety is revealed through the quasi-intimacy of their entanglement; this could not be an arbitrary choice of disease vector. This scene speaks to British anxiety about the effects of colonialism, which is the most popular interpretation of the novel. What is missing from these colonial and epidemiological readings is an account of how a disturbed nature provides the stage for this drama. There would be no disease exchange in this encounter between racial others if the climate had not already begun to shift away from established patterns.
The unnatural global warming estranges Europeans from their environments of adaptation, heightening their susceptibility and bringing them into an intimate common fate with the world’s other peoples. Contagion makes the other into brother. The Last Man’s global warming theme begins with descriptions of war-torn Constantinople, gateway between East and West:
The southern Asiatic wind came laden with intolerable heat, when the streams were dried up in their shallow beds, and the vast basin of the sea appeared to glow under the unmitigated rays of the solsticial sun. Nor did night refresh the earth. Dew was denied; herbage and flowers there were none; the very trees drooped; and summer assumed the blighted appearance of winter, as it went forth in silence and flame to abridge the means of sustenance to man. [. . .] All was serene, burning, annihilating. [. . .] The sun’s rays were refracted from the pavement and buildings—the stoppage of the public fountains—the bad quality of the food, and scarcity even of that, produced a state of suffering, which was aggravated by the scourge of disease. (189–90)
Here, the disease is secondary to the famine caused by the failure of the rains. The climate’s shift toward a desertlike ecosystem has occurred too rapidly for flora or agriculture to adapt, and the plague’s path cuts directly through the bodies of a weakened population. Before long, both the climate and its sidekick, the plague, have swept across Europe into England. This is the point at which the other disorders of civilization, war and colonialism, fall into inconsequence compared to the “eruptions of nature” (232). The people start to balk at catastrophe: “Can it be true [. . .] that whole countries are laid waste, whole nations annihilated, by these disorders in nature?” (233). Orators mislead their countrymen into believing that the English are not subject to the natural disasters as natives of the tropics are:
Countrymen, fear not! [. . .] [Plague] is of old a native of the East, sister of the tornado, the earthquake, and the simoom. Child of the sun, and nursling of the tropics, it would expire in these climes. It drinks the dark blood of the inhabitant of the south, but it never feasts on the pale-faced Celt. If perchance some stricken Asiatic come among us, plague dies with him, uncommunicated and innoxious. Let us weep for our brethren, though we can never experience their reverse. Let us lament over and assist the children of the garden of the earth. Late we envied their abodes, their spicy groves, fertile plains, and abundant loveliness. (233)
This speech, with its sneering blend of false pity and racial pride, screams for correction. It comes on the very next page, where those English who might have envied the “spicy groves, fertile plains, and abundant [ecological] loveliness” of the tropics find, to their dismay, their wish granted (237). In August, the disease in an oddly hot England “gained virulence, while starvation did its accustomed work. Thousands died unlamented; for beside the yet warm corpse the mourner was stretched, made mute by death” (235). Several deadly years on, the four English seasons have fallen completely off their orbit:
Winter was coming, and with winter, hope. In August, the plague had appeared in the country of England, and during September it made its ravages. [. . .] The autumn was warm and rainy: the infirm and sickly died off—happier they. [. . .] The crop had failed, the bad corn, and want of foreign wines, added vigour to disease. Before Christmas half England was under water. The storms of the last winter were renewed. [. . .] But frost would come at last, and with it a renewal of our lease of earth. Frost would blunt the arrows of pestilence, and enchain the furious elements; and the land would in spring throw off her garment of snow, released from her menace of destruction. It was not until February that the desired signs of winter appeared. For three days the snow fell, ice stopped the current of the rivers, and the birds flew out from crackling branches of the frost-whitened trees. On the fourth morning all vanished. A south-west wind brought up rain—the sun came out, and mocking the usual laws of nature, seemed even at this early season to burn with solsticial force. It was no consolation, that with the first winds of March the lanes were filled with violets, the fruit trees covered with blossoms, that the corn sprung up, and the leaves came out, forced by the unseasonable heat. We feared the balmy air—we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb, and the fragrant land smelled to the apprehension of fear like a wide church-yard. (269–70)
The plague is borne of ecological disturbance first and foremost. The pleasing signs of spring come unearned by the privations of winter, and the missed cycle of cold allows the plague to overwinter without check. The violets, fruit trees, and corn still have English ecological origins, but their rhythms are spun into strange oscillations as the warmer months gain dominance, making evolutionary shifts in species composition inevitable.
This estrangement between humans and their accustomed environment threatens psychological consequences that we are beginning to understand in this age of climate change. What dies is the cognitive comfort of the home ecology, the well-known oikos that carries yearly rituals and passes time in its intelligible, cyclical way. The psychology of disturbance inherits this vacated brain space, as it did for Mary Shelley dwelling beneath the parasol of Tambora’s ash in the lost summer of 1816. With a “global weirding” mentality, we come to expect weather anomalies and look to anthropogenic sources to explain them.2 Chaotic tangles of human and natural activities seem to underlie every event, even the pleasantly warm day in winter. We become less able to enjoy ourselves within the weather, whatever its conditions, because they seem to be signifiers of an inexorable process already on the move, a beast slouching toward Bethlehem.
This beast is borne out by the frequency of objectively measured landmark weather events. As of this writing, the twenty warmest years in the last 130 (when the National Climatic Data Center began measurement) have all occurred since 1983, and every year since 1977 has been above the average set during that 130-year period (NCDC). Habitat shifts result from climate shifts: animal species are migrating about four miles every decade toward the poles, and average temperatures are moving much faster, at thirty-five miles 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.
