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- Title
Industrial Souls: Climate Change, Immorality, and Victorian Anticipations of the Good Anthropocene.
- Authors
Scott, Heidi C. M.
- Abstract
Climate change toward a tropical England occurs repeatedly in Victorian fiction, and warm weather often carries negative moral valences that show the complexity of Victorian engagement with what we now call the Anthropocene. After discussing the moral implications of several Victorian climate fictions, this essay reads John Ruskin's The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884) as a unique work of nonfiction that develops climate science in nascent forms, but transcends its limits using a religious diction that inveighs against individualism and social blasphemy. Ruskin blends observation with revelation to sketch a solution to the 1880s climate calamity by prescribing empathic human behavior. While most environmentalists decry a Good Anthropocene based solely on new technologies, Ruskin and his admirer William Morris root for an alternative happy future by appealing to social cohesion.
- Subjects
CLIMATE change; IMMORALITY; BIOLOGICAL evolution; INDUSTRIALIZATION; POLLUTION
- Publication
Victorian Studies, 2018, Vol 60, Issue 4, p588
- ISSN
0042-5222
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2979/victorianstudies.60.4.04