Containment Narratives: Legal and Literary Treatments of Pollution During the Victorian Fin de Siècle Kamila Maria Lis Arlington, Virginia B.A., Harvard University, 2005 M.A., University of Virginia, 2008 J.D., Yale Law School, 2011 A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia May, 2014 © 2014 by Kamila Lis All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT “Containment Narratives: Legal and Literary Treatments of Pollution During the Victorian Fin de Siècle” argues that smoke for the late Victorians was a proxy for an unarticulated anxiety about entropic degeneracy; this underlying unease, and not any direct reaction to the phenomenon as it was actually experienced by the senses, was what shaped legal and literary reactions to airborne pollution. In replacing miasma theory, which attributed disease to vapors emanating from discrete and ultimately containable sources of organic decay, the idea of pollution disrupted the longstanding view that airborne waste could be controlled with the suggestion that it was indefatigably expansive. This shift, and the disruption it occasioned, happened at a time rife with such analogous disruptions as advances in industry and biology, as well as the sudden emergence of new areas of inquiry within the social and natural sciences, which collectively destabilized numerous conceptual categories that had previously been relied upon for their immutability. The longing for permanence that resulted surfaced in both legal and literary discussions of smoke as a move toward narrative containment. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful to the many whose wise counsel guided me in this endeavor. My first debt is to my committee. I could have wished for no better advisor than Alison Booth, whose kind encouragement and intellectual probity over the years have been invaluable to my growth as a scholar. Stephen Arata and Paul Cantor offered indispensable insights on various iterations of the project, helping me to hone both its argument and its prose. Further thanks go to Douglas Kysar, who first encouraged me to explore the relationship between environmental law and popular literature, and to the late Gregory Colomb, without whose strategic advice the path between New Haven and Charlottesville would have been impossible to chart. The communities of scholars I had the good fortune to join along the way have been wells of not only inspiration but also friendship. Mieszko Lis and Andrew Karas have been more patient editors, more steadfast confidants, and in all things far better friends than I deserve. For their enthusiastic support and good cheer, I also thank Sue Bai, Jessica Barrett, Catherine Bode, Anna Glinia!ska, Allison Hibbitt, Jonathan Kandelshein, Agnieszka Rafalska, and Seth Rokosky. And my deepest gratitude, as ever, I owe to my brother Mieszko and our parents, Wies"awa and Norbert Lis. This dissertation is dedicated to them. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .........................................................................................................................iii Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................... iv Note on Citations ........................................................................................................... vi Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Redefining Airborne Emissions From Static Waste to Entropic Pollutant ...................... 15 Chapter Two: Making Sense of Pollution Through Holmesian Logic................................................... 55 Chapter Three: Framing a Narrative of Containment Through Environmental Nuisance Law ................ 95 Chapter Four: Making Sense of Holmesian Logic Through Contagious Vampirism........................... 139 Afterword ................................................................................................................... 181 Works Cited................................................................................................................ 186 v NOTE ON CITATIONS In an attempt to declutter my prose, I have adopted the conventional abbreviations proposed in 1947 by Jay Finley Christ in An Irregular Guide to Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: BLUE “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” BRUC “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” CARD “The Cardboard Box” COPP “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” HOUN The Hound of the Baskervilles LAST “His Last Bow” MISS “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter” NAVA “The Naval Treaty” REDH “The Red-Headed League” REIG “The Reigate Squires” RESI “The Resident Patient” SIGN The Sign of Four SPEC “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” STUD A Study in Scarlet 3GAB “The Adventure of the Three Gables” vi INTRODUCTION When, in what would prove to be the last chronological installment in the Holmes canon, Arthur Conan Doyle has his otherwise impassive protagonist ardently compliment “good old” Watson for being “the one fixed point in a changing age,” he betrays a late- Victorian longing for stability that by 1917 proved to be little more than a pipe-dream (LAST, Vol. 2, 1443). During the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, the myth that stability could be regained was very much alive. This longing for permanence surfaced in both law and popular literature as a move toward narrative containment, and especially so in discussions about airborne pollutants. Late Victorian society responded in telling ways, both legal and cultural, to the specter of airborne pollutants. While this preoccupation can partially be explained as a reaction to the sensory impact that airborne pollutants had on the Victorians—the plumes of smoke spreading above England would have been difficult to ignore—the character of the legislative and literary expressions of that preoccupation give rise to at least two additional questions. First, how did legislators address the problem of airborne pollution, and why did the laws they wrote so clearly miss the mark? Second, how might these anxieties have contributed to the popularity of late-Victorian detective and Gothic fiction, two genres especially preoccupied with representations of pollution as a contagion? Because, concerned as they are with methodologies that are often applied in isolation, these two questions have not yet been asked in concert, doing so can prove uniquely informative. Indeed, exploring them in tandem, as I will do in the following chapters, suggests a common answer: 1 namely, that pollution for the late Victorians was a proxy for some unarticulated anxiety and that this underlying unease, and not any reaction to pollutants as they were actually experienced by the senses, was what shaped legal and literary treatments of pollution during the fin de siècle. Articulating that anxiety as a concern about entropic degeneracy—and demonstrating the usefulness of tracing its expression in Victorian popular literature, legislation, and public policy—is the broad purpose of this project. To that end, it is helpful to first define entropic degeneracy, a term I use as shorthand for a particular species of conceptual disruption. In replacing miasma theory, which attributed disease to vapors emanating from discrete and ultimately containable sources of organic decay, the idea of pollution disrupted the longstanding view that waste could be controlled with the suggestion that it was indefatigably expansive. This shift and the disruption it occasioned happened at a time rife with other such disruptions. During Doyle’s fin de siècle, contemporaneous advances in industry and biology, as well as the sudden emergence of new areas of inquiry within the social and natural sciences, led to the expansion and destabilization of numerous conceptual categories that had previously been relied upon for their immutability: psychoanalysis broadened the notion of the self to include the murky subconscious, orderly historical time was replaced by seemingly impenetrable geological time, and human biological exceptionalism was challenged by the suggestion of evolutionary commonality with lower species. The conceptual relationship between entropy and degeneracy can be traced to the 2 earliest discussions about the former. While a number of scientists independently arrived at the first law of thermodynamics throughout the 1830s and 1840s, it was not until Rudolf Clausius articulated the law in 1850 that the idea began to gain traction beyond scientific circles. Clausius explained that, “[i]n all cases in which work is produced by the agency of heat, a quantity of heat is consumed which is proportional to the work done; and conversely, by the expenditure of an equal quantity of work an equal quantity of heat is produced” (qtd. in Sullivan 78). But while Clausius’s adaptation of the law of conservation of energy to thermodynamic systems—the argument being that the total amount of energy in a closed system remains constant—was relatively straightforward, the second law of thermodynamics complicated the issue in a conceptually threatening way. As early as 1824, Sadi Carnot suggested that some calories available for generating work would be lost in any real process. Thirty years later, Lord Kelvin speculated that this loss was one of heat, leading Clausius to articulate a rudimentary understanding of entropy in 1865. Clausius dubbed this irreversible