Talking About the Weather: Climate and the Victorian Novel
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TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER: CLIMATE AND THE VICTORIAN NOVEL JOANNE SARAH WAUGH PHD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgments IV Declaration V Abstract VI Abbreviations Vll INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 'The Old Smoke-Jack': Industrial Climates and Mary Barton 31 CHAPTER 2 'Strangely Trying': Reading the Bronte Climate 66 CHAPTER 3 'The Desolation Wrought By That Flood': Diluvial Theories and The Mill on the Floss III CHAPTER 4 'Curious Repute': Forecasting, Prophecy and The Mayor of Caster bridge 146 CHAPTER 5 'The London Particular' after Dickens: Fog and Narrative at The Fin de Siecle 192 CONCLUSION 232 11 APPENDIX Admiral Robert FitzRoy's Weather Report, 22nd January 1863. 239 BIBLIOGRAPHY 240 111 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In writing this thesis, I have incurred a debt of gratitude to a number of people. My supervisor, Jane Moody, has offered constructive criticism and advice throughout, and has also been incredibly supportive and patient. I thank her whole-heartedly for her help, tolerance and unrelenting kindness. John Bowen has also made useful suggestions and comments at various points during the composition of the thesis, and I am very grateful for this. My parents, David and Rosemary Waugh, convinced me to undertake this project and then helped and supported me in every way possible, and I am enormously grateful to them for both these things. Tom Downing has provided tremendous support long past a point where it might have been expected, and is owed a special 'thank you' for this. Tom Adams proof-read the thesis in its final stages, and identified numerous mistakes both small and glaring, as well as being gratifyingly mildly interested in the writing itself, for which I am at least as thankful. Last and least in a purely physical sense, Kate and Alex Downing have been more patient and understanding than anyone their size should ever have to be. I thank them profoundly. IV DECLARATION This thesis is my own work, and has not appeared in whole or in part elsewhere. v ABSTRACT This thesis explores the striking and previously unremarked intersection between the proliferation of weather in the Victorian novel, and various contentious and influential theories about climate in the period. At the beginning of the Victorian era, meteorology was viewed as an open field, emblematic of optimism for scientific progress. By the mid-1860s, it had become a site of controversy, ridicule, superstition and fakery. Climatic theories in medicine and evolution also faced challenges, yet remained in circulation throughout the period. Novels of the period show climate and weather on a quotidian level, but also frequently allude to the many debates and discourses which surrounded weather and climate in the Victorian age. This thesis shows weather in the Victorian novel variously engaging with, challenging and contributing to debates about climatic theories and meteorology. My Introduction argues for an ongoing and interdisciplinary set of discussions about weather, climate and meteorology in the Victorian period, and outlines their legacies from earlier, influential climatic theories. Chapter 1 explores the discourses surrounding changed and polluted climates in the industrial city of the 1830s and 40s, and their representation in Gaskell's Mary Barton. Chapter 2 focuses on Charlotte Bronte's engagement with climatic theories relating to both body and place, and their representation in her correspondence and fiction. Chapter 3 connects the flood in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss with early nineteenth-century diluvialist geology and with Eliot's early ambivalent response to Darwinian theory. Chapter 4 reads Hardy's weather-forecaster in The Mayor of Casterbridge in the context of Victorian suspicions and reservations toward meteorology. Chapter 5 explores some of the well-known literary depictions of fog in the fin de siecle narrative in relation to contemporary non-literary writing about fog and urban pollution. This thesis argues that by reading weather and climate in the Victorian novel closely and contextually, it becomes possible to identify novelists taking part in a number of important contemporary discussions about region, science, medicine, industry and chance. VI ABBREVIATIONS OED Oxford English Dictionary. DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2008. <http://www.oxforddnb.com> NB. The reference style used in the footnotes and Bibliography in this thesis is that set out in the Graduate Handbook for the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, pp.40-58. VB INTRODUCTION This thesis is about the striking intersection between the proliferation of weather in the Victorian novel, and contemporary debates about climatic theories in industry, economics, health, national identity and evolution, as well as in the emergent field of meteorology. One of the most noticeable features of Victorian novels is their weather: fog, snow, wind and rain appear in the narrative in order to obscure, chill, batter or drench individuals, and even so as to alter the course of the plot. Many other texts of the period, meanwhile, debate the extent to which climate itself might affect the individual or group; whether climate had determined the course of evolution; whether climate might change or be changed; and indeed whether the weather might be predicted or understood. Novelists and their characters, as well as doctors, scientists, social theorists, economists and of course meteorologists all talk about the weather: literary critics, in general, do not. In this thesis, I bring together social and political commentary, medical writing, geological treatises and meteorological texts, and reintegrate them with the weather described in the Victorian narrative. The thesis argues, then, that weather in the Victorian novel is frequently more than either a phatic or scenic detail: when narratives or characters 'talk about the weather', they are also engaging in conversations of many kinds which they mayor may not intend. 'Conversations' about the weather in literary, scientific and social writing of the period frequently intersect, sharpening or sharing terms with one another as they do so. 'Talking about the weather' is, of course, a quotidian undertaking, often valuable 1 precisely for its meaninglessness and non-contentious nature, but this thesis aims to show that it was also frequently a highly significant activity during the Victorian period. Weather takes place within the broader context of climate; climate is, in theory at least, a constant, made up of the average behaviour of the weather within a region or nation. 'Climate remains, but the weather changes', as an article in the Cornhill Magazine, which I discuss in more detail below, stated in 1860. 1 The difference between the two appears to have been broadly understood by writers of the period: Hardy's observation in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) that Tess's baby, having lived only a week, thought 'the week's weather climate' demonstrates the difference between the terms, and the idea that climate can only be discerned through a far longer observation and knowledge of weather tendencies in any given place.2 Sergeant Troy neatly defines the difference in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), when he observes that 'wet weather is the narrative, and fine days are the episodes, of our country's history' .3 Troy's pessimistic analogy is a useful one, and not only because it defines the difference between climate (the 'wet weather') and weather ('the episodes'). Many novels have what might be described as 'narrative' climates, within which 'episodes' of weather occur. One might attribute a 'climate' to almost any novel of the period: the stormy skies of The Return of the Native (1878), the sunshine of Adam Bede (1859), the fog and rain which characterize, respectively, two of the most important locations in Bleak House (1853), the persistent dirty, city rain of Little Dorrit (1857) and, perhaps most well-known of all, the snow of A Christmas Carol (1843). This thesis is attentive to both climate and weather in the Victorian narrative, reading 'episodic' weather 1 David T. Ansted and Robert Drummon, 'On the Weather' in Cornhill Magazine, vol. III (July December 1860), 565-79, (p.578). 2 Thomas Hardy, Tess ofthe D 'Urbervilles, ed. by Tom Dolin, introd. and notes by Margaret R. Higonnet (London: Penguin, 1998), p.96. All further references are to this edition. 3 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (London: Macmillan, 1957 rpt. 1967), p.289. All further references are to this edition. 2 alongside and in relation to 'narrative' climates and to the broader question of climate itself. In the Victorian novel, 'climate' is frequently used as though it were synonymous with 'place'. References to trying climates, pestilent climates, native climates and hazardous climates are part of the characterization in the period of other countries, and especially colonial countries, by their climates and the deleterious influence of those climates not only on health but on racial characteristics.4 The question of colonialism and climate is not central to my argument in this thesis, though in Chapters 1 and 2 I explore instances of the powerful metaphors to which ideas about the perilous tropical or Indian climate, in particular, gave rise. 5 This thesis largely focuses on Victorian writing about the effects and importance of climate in Britain; though the relationship between colonialism and climate is one which could be developed in future work. The four main areas which this thesis explores are: climate as subject to change and pollution in the Victorian period; climate and its effects on both the individual and social body; climate and evolutionary theory; and Victorian attempts at the prediction of weather. Frequently, these themes intersect with one another: this intersection, rather than making my argument more difficult, confirms the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of conversations about climate and weather.