Dickens in the City: Science, Technology, Ecology in the Novels of Charles Dickens

‘A Ghastly and Blasphemous Nightmare’: Environmental Ethics in Dickens’s Journalism

“…According to Parham, scientific knowledge aims at unveiling the secret of nature in order to respect its basic organic principles (2010). Dickens's well-known allusions to scientific subjects and characters in his fiction and journalism have been thoroughly studied (Levine, 2006;Winyard and Furneaux, 2010;Parham, 2010). Similarly, in A Monument of French Folly he refers in many an occasion to the statement proffered by the Head of the Natural History Section of the British Museum, Professor Sir Richard Owen.…”

Energy, Ecology, and Victorian Fiction

“…Indeed, Regenia Gagnier finds “pre‐disciplinary Victorians … closer to this way of thinking than the rationalized disciplines of the past hundred years, which reduced causality to nature or culture exclusively” (19). Ecology itself is not only Victorian in origin but always‐already what we call interdisciplinary: “Ecology conjoins two different nineteenth‐century scientific frameworks, natural history – positing a ‘balance of nature’– and evolutionary theory, change driven by species competition.” And as Victorian ecology comes into contact with Victorian energy science, we find also the roots of what we now call “ecosystems theory.” Drawing on such energy concepts, Haeckel’s “total relations,” are rearticulated: “‘all relations among organisms … in terms of purely material exchange of energy and of such chemical substances as water, phosphorus, nitrogen, and other nutrients’” (Parham 258).…”