Haunting Ecologies: Victorian Conceptions of Water

By Ursula Kluwick

Victorians’ views of water and its role in how the social fabric of Victorian Britain was imagined

Water matters like few other substances in people’s daily lives. In the nineteenth century, it left its traces on politics, urban reform, and societal divisions, as well as on conceptualizations of gender roles. Drawing on the methodology of material ecocriticism, Ursula Kluwick’s Haunting Ecologies argues that Victorian Britons were keenly aware of aquatic agency, recognizing water as an active force with the ability to infiltrate bodies and spaces.
    
Kluwick reads works by canonical writers such as Braddon, Dickens, Stoker, and George Eliot alongside sanitary reform discourse, court cases, journalistic articles, satirical cartoons, technical drawings, paintings, and maps. This wide-ranging study sheds new light on Victorian-era anxieties about water contamination as well as on how certain wet landscapes such as sewers, rivers, and marshes became associated with moral corruption and crime. Applying ideas from the field of blue humanities to nineteenth-century texts, Haunting Ecologies argues for the relevance of realism as an Anthropocene form.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9780813950990

Book preview

Cover Page for Haunting Ecologies

Haunting Ecologies

Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Herbert F. Tucker, Editor

William R. McKelvy, Jill Rappoport, and Andrew M. Stauffer, Associate Editors

Haunting Ecologies

Victorian Conceptions of Water

Ursula Kluwick

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

The University of Virginia Press is situated on the traditional lands of the Monacan Nation, and the Commonwealth of Virginia was and is home to many other Indigenous people. We pay our respect to all of them, past and present. We also honor the enslaved African and African American people who built the University of Virginia, and we recognize their descendants. We commit to fostering voices from these communities through our publications and to deepening our collective understanding of their histories and contributions.

University of Virginia Press

© 2024 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2024

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Kluwick, Ursula, author.

Title: Haunting ecologies : Victorian conceptions of water / Ursula Kluwick.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2024. | Series: Victorian literature and culture series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023052302 (print) | LCCN 2023052303 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813950976 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813950983 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813950990 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: English literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Water in literature. | Pollution in literature. | Water—Pollution—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Ecocriticism. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Nature | LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Gender Identity

Classification: LCC PR468.W375 K58 2024 (print) | LCC PR468.W375 (ebook) | DDC 820.9/36—dc23/eng/20240109

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023052302

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023052303

Cover art: Steam on glass background, sidsnapper/istock.com; ornaments, Miguel Angel/Vecteezy.com

Cover design: Cecilia Sorochin

To the memory of my father, Alfred Kluwick, 1942–2022,

professor of fluid mechanics and academic extraordinaire,

who first taught me to see water,

to my mother, who gave me the most precious thing of all, literature,

and to my anchors, Marc, Benjamin, and Vera—always

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Beyond Water as a Symbol

Part I. Water and Pollution

1. Aquatic Discourse in the Era of Sanitary Reform: Water, Public Health, and the River Thames

2. The Aesthetics of Pollution: Charles Dickens’s (In)Sanitary Waters

Part II. Water and Transgression

3. Aquatic Social Space: The Imaginary Topography of Transgression

4. Floating Across: Water as Embodied Transgression

Conclusion: New Horizons for the Blue Humanities

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Sanitary drawing of faulty drain, from T. Pridgin Teale, Dangers to Health: A Pictorial Guide to Domestic Sanitary Defects (1878)

2. Masthead of The Illustrated London News (1858)

3. A Drop of London Water, John Leech, Punch (1850)

4. Sanitary and Insanitary Matters, Punch Almanack (1850)

5. The River Thames at Queenhithe, from Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, The Book of the Thames, from Its Rise to Its Fall (The Art Journal, Sept. 1858)

6. Painting of a rural stream, E. Duncan, The Illustrated London News (1858)

7. Painting of the New Westminster Bridge. Designed by P. N. Page, The Illustrated London News (1858)

8. Daguerreotype of a mudlark, from Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1864)

9. The Bird of Prey Brought Down, Marcus Stone, for Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1865)

10. The Death of Quilp, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), for Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840)

Acknowledgments

When I first started thinking about water back in 2005, this felt like rather an eccentric venture. While many agreed that water was an important topic, there was little research to lean on, less on water other than the sea, and still less on the theoretical consequences of considering water beyond symbol and theme. This has changed dramatically. Blue humanities scholars now form a strong presence at most ecocritical gatherings, and it is a great joy to know that this book is about to join a chorus of voices eager to explore the meanings and shapes of water.

As Haunting Ecologies is poised on the threshold between manuscript and book, I want to seize the opportunity to thank the colleagues and friends who have urged me on over the long years in which this book has been writing itself. Particular thanks go to Virginia Richter, my most steadfast supporter and advisor. Our journey together has been not only fruitful but formative, the best kind of collaboration.

Monika Fludernik, Annette Kern-Stähler, Christian Rohr, and Crispin Thurlow offered incisive feedback on a first version of this book from which I have profited immensely. To Monika Fludernik I am, moreover, grateful for many years of intellectual and practical support, while to Crispin, I am greatly indebted for his gift of a title for this book. I also thank Pamela K. Gilbert for reading the first draft of this manuscript and for generously sharing her impressive expertise on Victorian writing and public health. Without her input, this book would not be what it is.

I have been extremely lucky to work within several inspiring academic contexts. At Bern, I would like to thank the members of the modern English literature section and its research group, above all my former colleagues Marijke Denger and Irmtraud Huber, whose sharp minds are always a pleasure to commune with. Without Irmi’s friendship, moreover, much of this would have been less enjoyable. I also thank Guðrun í Jákupsstovu and Marion Troxler for being wonderful colleagues, and Beatrix Busse and Barbara Buchenau for years of friendship and long-distance support. Evi Zemanek invited me into a network on The Ethics and Aesthetics of Literary Representations of Ecological Transformation, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which offered incredibly productive collaborations with other European ecocritics. For their helpful feedback on presentations I gave within this context, I would like to thank all network members, particularly Serenella Iovino, Anke Kramer, Alexa Weik von Mossner, Hubert Zapf, and Evi Zemanek. Anke Kramer has been my aquatic friend ever since we met at the 2004 EASLCE conference on water in Klagenfurt, a visionary venture organized by Maureen Devine well before the inception of the blue humanities, and I thank Anke for this friendship that, in the true spirit of water, has managed to overcome distances of time and space.

While academia offers many chances to connect with other researchers, it can also be a lonely venture. For their companionship during the six months I spent on archival research in the British Library in London, I thank Matthias Mansky, Isabel Pérez Ramos, and Adam Trexler. Among other environmental humanities scholars and literature colleagues, I would also like to mention Christa Grewe-Volpp for first directing me toward Stacy Alaimo’s work, John Brannigan and Steve Mentz for their pioneering work within the blue humanities and for the fantastic talks and workshops they contributed to our The Beach in the Long Twentieth Century project, and Jens Martin Gurr for thinking through interdisciplinarity with me.

I have greatly benefited from the chance to share the arguments presented in this book at several academic gatherings. Sandra Dinter and Ariane De Waal inaugurated the DACH Victorianists network during the pandemic, and they deserve great praise for this initiative. Stephanie John and Jennifer Leetsch demonstrated the importance of Victorian ecocriticism by choosing it as the subject for the first thematic conference of this network, and I would like to thank them for allowing me to champion the blue humanities in my keynote on Victorian water at this event. To Ariane, a special thank-you goes out for our collaboration on the Victorian Materialisms special issue of EJES that we edited in 2022; rarely has collaboration been such effortless fun. Thank you, also, to Linda Heß and Lena Pfeifer for inviting me to give a webinar on the blue humanities for EASLCE in December 2022, and to Helga Ramsey-Kurz for inviting me to give a lecture on swimming with Shakespeare at the University of Innsbruck in April 2022. Also to Monika Fludernik and Benjamin Kohlmann for inviting me to speak about Dickens and the Thames and about the Mediterranean shore, respectively, at the University of Freiburg, as well as to Katharina Boehm for inviting me to participate in her Anthropocene (Post)Humanities workshop at the Bavarian Academy of the Sciences and Humanities in 2019. All these opportunities for academic exchange have helped me hone my argument, and I am grateful for the inspiring comments I have received in these contexts.

Work on this book project was generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through a Marie Heim-Vögtlin fellowship, their former funding scheme for excellent women (2014–16). I thank the SNSF for this boost that enabled me to finish the first draft of this project. As a unique scheme that gave female academics with care responsibilities the freedom to decide what they needed to bring a specific project to completion, the Heim-Vögtlin scheme successfully supported numerous women. For me, this scholarship was the greatest blessing, and I deplore its termination.

At the University of Virginia Press I thank Ellen Satrom and, above all, Angie Hogan for enthusiastically shepherding this book from proposal to production and for her goodwill and patience in the face of my many questions. I also thank Serenella Iovino, Kate Rigby, and John Tallmadge for welcoming this book into the Under the Sign of Nature series, and Herbert F. Tucker, William McKelvy, Jill Rappoport, and Andrew Stauffer, series editors of Victorian Literature and Culture, for lobbying to have it shifted into theirs. I’m happy my book has found such a home. I also want to express my profound gratitude to Claudine Bollinger and Charley Sitter (Bern), who took charge of preparing this manuscript for submission with incredible competence and dedication. For the press, Colleen Romick Clark has worked wonders with her meticulous but sensitive editing of the manuscript. All mistakes that remain are, of course, my own.

My family and friends have had great patience with my preoccupation with water (much of which turned out to be sewage), and I am grateful for their understanding and unwavering support. Thank you to the Kermani family, Susanne, Faraz, Leila, Jakob, and Samira, for providing a home away from home during research visits to London and Cambridge. Thank you to Lydia, Michael, Veronika, Sebastian, and Julia for all that time in the snow together. Also to Birgit and Graham, to Kerstin, Juliane, and Margarete. And to Michi and Marcus for keeping the link to home alive. My Austrian family has shown extraordinary patience in accepting that even when I come home to Vienna, I’m rarely on holiday. In this spirit, I thank Traudl and Rudi, Claudia and Katharine, and their families, for making time when I’m free.

My family-in-law has been incredibly loyal, traveling between Bern, Thun, and Zurich to help whenever they can. My parents and my sister Veronika and her family remain that necessary safe haven, and their support is unconditional. Their countless train journeys between Vienna and Zurich made this book possible by freeing me to write. And in the midst of it all, Marc has provided a calm and stable center and Benjamin and Vera a whirlpool of joy. Academic work is a privileged endeavor that relies on a mountain of unacknowledged other work, and I am more grateful than I can say to all those who have helped me combine the demands of a family with the occasionally insane demands of academic life in a way that keeps the great pleasure of research alive.

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I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint material previously published elsewhere. I first formulated the concept of ecological haunting in a chapter titled "The Coast as a Site of Ecological Haunting in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca," published in Navigating Cultural Spaces: Maritime Places, edited by Anna Horatschek, Yvonne Rosenberg, and Daniel Schäbler (Rodopi 2014, 237–55), and the introduction reproduces some of this material. Some passages on Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit first appeared in a chapter titled Dickens in America—America in Dickens, which appeared in The Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies, edited by Julia Straub (De Gruyter 2016, 448–69). I also gratefully acknowledge permission to use images from the British Library, granted by the British Library Board on June 7, 2016, and from the Illustrated London News archive at the Mary Evans Picture Library, granted by Illustrated London News Ltd. / Mary Evans. Grateful acknowledgment is also made for permission to quote from the following material held by the British Library:

Annually—. The Illustrated London News, 26 June 1858, pp. 626–27, © The British Library Board 4367.150000.

Booth, Charles, editor. East London. London, 1889. Vol. 1 of Life and Labour of the People in London, © The British Library Board RB.23.a.34942.

Chadwick, Edwin. Report to Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Home Department from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain; with Appendices. Presented to Both Houses of Parliament, by Command of Her Majesty, July 1842. London, 1842, © The British Library Board G.13877–80.

Dirty Old Father Thames. Punch, 4 Aug. 1855, p. 50, © The British Library Board C.194.b.199 (1855:29).

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: With Preface Written in 1892. Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky, London, 1892, © The British Library Board 08276.e.36.

Gavin, Hector. Unhealthiness of London, and the Necessity of Remedial Measures; Being a Lecture Delivered at the Western and Eastern Literary and Scientific Institutions, Leicester Square, and Hackney Road. London, 1847, © The British Library Board C.T.183.(5.).

Go to the Bath. Punch, 4 Aug. 1855, p. 51, © The British Library Board C.194.b.199 (1855:29).

Hollingshead, John. Odd Journeys in and out of London. London, 1860, © The British Library Board 12354.c.29.

———. Ragged London in 1861. London, 1861, © The British Library Board 12356.c.13.

———. Underground London. London, 1862, © The British Library Board W3/5597.

Hood, Thomas. The Bridge of Sighs. Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, edited by John Clubbe, Harvard UP, 1970, © The British Library Board X.981/1916.

The Lord Mayor in Danger. Punch, 4 Aug. 1855, p. 52, © The British Library Board C.194.b.199 (1855:29).

Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor; A Cyclopædia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work:The London Street-Folk;Comprising, Street Sellers. Street Buyers. Street Finders. Street Performers. Street Artizans. Street Labourers. With Numerous Illustrations from Photographs. London, 1861. 4 vols., © The British Library Board 08286.e.19.

Meat, Drink, and Manure. Punch, 4 Aug. 1855, p. 51, © The British Library Board C.194.b.199 (1855:29).

Ode to the Thames. Punch, 26 June 1858, p. 253, © The British Library Board C.194.b.199 (1858:34).

Potter, Beatrice. The Docks. East London, edited by Charles Booth, London, 1889, pp. 184–208. Vol. 1 of Life and Labour of the People in London, © The British Library Board RB.23.a.34942.

The Purification of the Thames. The Illustrated London News, 24 July 1858, pp. 71–72, © The British Library Board P.P.7611.

Ritchie, J. Ewing. The Night Side of London. 2nd rev. ed., London, 1858, © The British Library Board 12354.c.20.

Royal London Yacht Club Match. The Illustrated London News, 31 July 1858, p. 99, © The British Library Board P.P.7611.

Royal Thames Yacht Club. The Illustrated London News, 29 May 1858, p. 541, © The British Library Board 4367.150000.

Ryan, Michael. Prostitution in London, with a Comparative View of That of Paris and New York. London, 1839, © The British Library Board General Reference Collection 08415.de.79.

Sanitary and Insanitary Matters. Cartoon. 1850 Punch Almanack, p. 11, © The British Library Board P.P. 5276.(3).

Snow, John. On the Mode of Communication of Cholera. 2nd ed., London, 1855, © The British Library Board RB.23.a.32113.

Teale, T. Pridgin. Dangers to Health: A Pictorial Guide to Domestic Sanitary Defects. London / Leeds, 1878, © The British Library Board RB.23.a.35476.

Tenniel, John. How Dirty Old Father Thames Was Whitewashed. Punch, 31 July 1858, p. 41, © The British Library Board C.194.b.199 (1858:35).

———. The Silent Highway-Man. Cartoon. Punch, 10 July 1858, p. 15, © The British Library Board C.194.b.199 (1858:35).

The Thames and Its Tributaries. Punch, 11 Aug. 1855, p. 62, © The British Library Board C.194.b.199 (1855:29).

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Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

Haunting Ecologies

Introduction

Beyond Water as a Symbol

George Eliot’s Little Fable with a Great Moral, published in the Coventry Herald and Observer on February 12, 1847 (Newlin 2, 4), uses water as a central trope for diverse engagements with the world. The short text deals with two hamadryads, Idione and Hieria, nymphs whose life spans coincide exactly with the trees they inhabit: they are born with their trees, grow with them, and die with them. The main focus of the fable, however, lies not with the hamadryads’ trees, but with their relationship with the clear lake (Eliot, Little Fable 1) on which their forest borders, and by whose side they spend most of their lives. Both hamadryads regard the lake as a mirror, though what they see in this mirror is strikingly different:

Idione loved to look into the lake because she saw herself there; she would sit on the bank, weaving leaves and flowers in her silken hair, and smiling at her own image all the day long, and if the pretty water-lilies or any other plants began to spread themselves on the surface below her, and spoil her mirror, she would tear them up in anger. But Hieria cared not to look at herself in the lake; she only cared about watching the heavens as they were reflected in its bosom—the foamy clouds on the clear blue by day, and the moon and the stars by night. (1)

The two hamadryads’ antipodal engagements with the lake—as a tool for narcissistic self-reflection for Idione, as a window to the external world for Hieria—resonate with approaches to water typical of nineteenth-century Britain, the period and place under discussion in this study. Water, in this era, was a hotly debated issue that lent itself to the negotiation of diverse concerns, among them what closeness to water revealed about people. The quality of water, for instance, was associated not only with the population’s health but also with their moral condition. Thus, the polluted River Thames, which caused much consternation in the mid-nineteenth century, was treated as a reflection of cultural and moral decline as well as an indication of environmental and public health problems. Water, in short, was also a means of human self-reflection.

If this is reminiscent of Idione’s interaction with the lake, in other respects, Victorian attitudes chime with Hieria’s relationship with water and the oblique interconnections that it reveals. Because even though Hieria cannot see the changing and evolving land beyond her lake, as she watches its reflective surface, she is nevertheless affected by the larger changes taking place over the course of her long life: as, in the centuries she had lived, some of the thick forests had been cleared away from the earth, and men had begun to build and to plough, the sky was less often obscured by vapours, so that the lake was more and more beautiful to her, and she loved better and better the water-lilies that grew below her (2). Human agricultural activity, though itself outside Hieria’s horizon, has an impact on her vision of the world: without being aware, she registers the repercussion of events she cannot see. This is characteristic of Victorian representations of water, which, as this study shows, frequently reveal how strongly the human and the more-than-human are intertwined, in surprising ways and at unexpected junctions, aesthetically, discursively, imaginatively, and materially. Hieria’s changing appreciation of the surface of the lake draws attention to the vibrant entanglements between specific bodies of water and the rest of the world through shared actions, associations, and matter. The fact that in Eliot’s depiction, deforestation clears the atmosphere through changing patterns of evaporation explicitly draws attention to such entanglements. Hieria unwittingly registers anthropogenic change because of the surface appearance of the water, which is altered by the shifting diffusion of H2O in the air due to the felling of trees. Water here appears as a sensitive indicator of the slow dispersion of human acts.

Wet Ontology and Material Ecocriticism

The image of the lake as mirror is popular in literature; it already appears in the Narcissus myth to which Eliot’s representation of Idione alludes, and Romantic travel writing suggests that bodies of water that reflected the surrounding landscape were approached through a specific landscape aesthetics related to the Claude glass; travelers derived particular pleasure from such mirroring effects.¹ What is lost through the focus on the lake as mirror, however, is awareness of the water itself. The reflective lake appears as a glassy surface in the landscape but is not perceived as a voluminous body in its own right. As such, the engagement with water that Eliot sketches in her fable is symptomatic of a long history in literary and cultural studies of disregarding the materiality of water and its hydrophysical properties, and of flattening water into a symbol. But as Hester Blum observes in her programmatic 2010 article entitled The Prospect of Oceanic Studies, The sea is not a metaphor (670). It is one of the central arguments of this book that this oft-quoted agenda-setting first sentence (Steinberg 156) applies to all water, not just the sea. Water is one of the most fertile and oldest literary symbols, and it has a rich cultural history. But without acknowledgment of how hydrophysics, hydrotechnology, political history, and social construction are intertwined with the aesthetic function of water, the reduction of its role in literature to symbolism risks missing the ways in which human engagements with water as a substance with specific properties and functions and as a vital condition of life influence its literary representation. As Jules Law observes in his discussion of blood, milk, and water, a study of Victorian engagements with fluids must look beyond the symbolic: [F]luids in the Victorian period were not simply a metaphoric or symbolic means of negotiating the relationship of the individual to an increasingly complex and rationalized public space, but a principal (and highly contested) medium through which social relations were actually negotiated (12). Water was highly relevant to the Victorians in its various material forms: as the steam that formed the literal driving power behind the industrialization of Great Britain, but also, for instance, as a means of flushing waste from human spaces, in one of the biggest water-related controversies of the nineteenth century. But these material engagements with water also influenced its aesthetic representation in art and literature, and it is the main aim of this book to show how these intricate connections resonate across a variety of different texts and text types. German cultural theorist Hartmut Böhme argues that the mythopoetic history of water shows that humans cannot abstract themselves from naturally given water cycles and he regards human practices of dealing with water as evidence of the fact that when it comes to their relation with H2O, humans are always both subjects and objects, agents and affected parties (Handelnder and Betroffener, 16). Thus, as Hannah Boast asserts, the relationship between water and society is co-constitutive (19). Water mythology and symbolism highlight this reciprocity, and the cultural history of water, therefore, foregrounds the fact that as beings who act within nature, humans are always also a part of nature.² Indeed, the very fact that human bodies consist mainly of water shows that this is so. In Astrida Neimanis’s words, "[W]e are bodies of water—both embodied and comprising water—and our bodies’ wet constitution is inseparable from . . . ecological questions" (1; original emphases). As this study shows, this intrinsic connection significantly shapes nineteenth-century representations of the relationship between humanity and water.

When I first started research on the role of water in the Victorian age, I set out to explore how the Victorians dealt with water and what it meant to them, both as a trope and as a substance whose properties influenced its symbolic representation. My focus, in short, was on how Victorian artists, journalists, pamphleteers, public health officials, sociologists, and writers engaged with water, and what their treatment of water on both a material and a metaphorical level revealed about their attitude toward nature. Like Eliot’s hamadryads, I was looking at water without necessarily seeing it in its own right. I was interested in what people did to and with water, but it did not originally occur to me to ask what water did to them.

One of my most fundamental early findings, however, was the extreme agentiality of water that is palpable in Victorian texts. In the Victorian material under discussion here—and this includes both visual material such as satirical cartoons, technical drawings, paintings, and maps, as well as literary and nonliterary written texts—water is no passive object but an active force that interacts both with its physical environment and with human subjects. Historical overviews of the relationship between humanity and nature tend to foreground the growing influence of a mechanistic world picture from the eighteenth century onward (see H. Böhme 16–19, 24–25; see also Merchant 192–235), in which nature is cast in an increasingly passive role, and as an overarching development, this gradual shift to a conception of nature as inert might be apt. The representation of water, however, does not correlate with the mechanistic paradigm, for in Victorian texts, water tends to be cast in an extraordinarily active role. Water is a formidable force of nature, and Victorian writers were keenly conscious of its potential to curtail and frustrate human actions and designs. In dealing with water, humans are forcefully reminded of the fact that they share the world with many other agents, and as this study shows, Victorian depictions of human-aquatic engagements express this through emphasis on interaction and reciprocity.

Recognition of the agential nature of water is integral to the blue humanities, the movement within literary and cultural studies devoted to the study of water. As Alexandra Campbell and Michael Paye stress, blue humanities scholarship tends to emphasise the ocean’s lively materiality (106). This is to do with the fact that, as Steve Mentz argued in his 2009 programmatic article Toward a Blue Cultural Studies, which set out to describe and channel what he identified as a new maritime perspective into a distinct field, this new form of blue scholarship does not view the oceans simply as bodies to be crossed, but as subjects in themselves (997). While Mentz’s early blue humanities article still focuses on the sea as symbol and setting, in the intervening years, blue critics’ attention has become firmly hooked also on questions of agency and materiality, and both Mentz’s own work as well as new materialist writing, such as by Stacy Alaimo, are at the forefront of this. This study draws on a specific historical corpus, consisting mainly of nineteenth-century literary and nonliterary material, to show that Victorian engagements with water are keenly aware of H2O as a vibrant substance that is much more than a surface or an inert feature of landscapes.

The focus on water espoused by hydrocriticism entails a broader change of perspective, as is clear from early laments about the almost entirely terrestrial . . . outlook of ecocriticism (Brayton 173), such as Dan Brayton’s call for a focus on the global ocean (176), to the latest blue scholarship. In a recent publication, for instance, Mentz describes the blue humanities as an ocean-infused way to reframe our shared cultural history (At the Bottom xviii). The present study participates in this reframing by inquiring how water features in Victorian writing and thus by drawing attention to a period that has until recently been relatively neglected in ecocritical research, much of which has focused on the contemporary and early modern periods. This has begun to change with the prominence the Anthropocene has gained as a critical concept over the past decade, since one of the competing starting dates assumed for the Anthropocene is the industrial revolution. But within the blue humanities, the Victorian period remains underrepresented. While there are studies that deal with nineteenth-century maritime literature, mostly as one period among many,³ few of these adopt an ecocritical perspective (25). In addition, as Sidney I. Dobrin observes, most of these studies focus primarily on literature, neglecting the innumerable other texts that contribute to knowing ocean (25). The present book fills this gap because it is interested precisely in the conversation between literary and nonliterary texts and in how water discourses are shaped in but also across different text-types and media. I explore this in more detail in my discussion of the interdiscursiveness of literature below.

The main aim of this study is to reexamine the interaction between humans and the more-than-human world, as it is reflected, interrogated, and constituted in nineteenth-century aquatic texts. As Mentz and other hydrocritics suggest, a blue perspective brings into focus connections, events, networks, and meanings that potentially differ from a terrestrial one. But while blue humanities scholarship is still characterized by a distinctly saline flavor (Campbell and Paye 106), it is not only renewed attention to the ocean but also to H2O as such that has the potential to challenge perceived conceptions of the history of humanity-nature relationships. This study adopts a new materialist approach to water, positing agency as a principal characteristic of the H2O molecule and the substance we know as water. Thus, it shares its point of departure with material ecocriticism, a theoretical movement that has strongly influenced the development of the blue humanities, particularly through Alaimo and Neimanis’s work. As Jane Bennett writes in her preface to Vibrant Matter, one of the key texts of new materialism, material agency is often translated into anthropocentric concepts such as human mood, action, meaning, agenda, or ideology, and essentially obscured by this quick substitution (x). There is a conceptual difference, for instance, between regarding airborne infection as the result of one person coughing on another or as particles spreading through the air. But in fact, evidence of the impact of material agency is ubiquitous—just think of carcinogenic substances, or, as examples that link the present with the nineteenth century and the specific concerns of this study, anxieties over the effect of genetically modified food, which have a precursor in Victorian concerns about food adulterations, or about the spread of disease through fluids.

In addition to recovering material agency for critical thinking, new materialism also foregrounds the entangled nature of seemingly discrete categories of matter, such as organic and inorganic, or animate and inanimate (Coole and Frost 9). As Bennett contends, these categories are enmeshed rather than distinct. The new materialist story she wants to tell will highlight the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other. One moral of the story is that we are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world (4). As my study suggests, water was just such a vital player in the nineteenth century (as, indeed, it is today), a player that left its traces on politics, urban reform, popular and sociological divisions of the population into different groups, as well as on conceptualizations of gender roles, and it is acknowledged as such in Victorian texts.

New materialists challenge Cartesian notions of matter, whose repercussions Diana Coole and Samantha Frost usefully sketch in their highly condensed summary of conceptions of matter:

Many of our ideas about materiality in fact remain indebted to Descartes, who defined matter in the seventeenth century as corporeal substance constituted of length, breadth, and thickness; as extended, uniform, and inert. . . . According to this model, material objects are identifiably discrete; they move only upon an encounter with an external force or agent, and they do so according to a linear logic of cause and effect. It seems intuitively congruent with what common sense tells us is the real material world of solid, bounded objects that occupy space and whose movements or behaviors are predictable, controllable, and replicable because they obey fundamental and invariable laws of motion. (7–8)

It is immediately apparent how difficult it is to fit water into such a framework of corporeal substance: aquatic matter has no consistent dimensions, since H2O assumes different shapes in response to changing environmental conditions, such as air pressure and temperature, and their effect on hydrogen bonds between water molecules. As Veronica Strang remarks, its most constant ‘quality’ . . . is that it is not constant, but is characterised by transmutability (49). Furthermore, water needs no external agent to be able to move, and far from being subjected to a linear logic of cause and effect, or being predictable and controllable, the unique chemical and physical behavior of water has long been regarded as one of the greatest challenges for the natural sciences (Kalies 58). Even when one disregards its atypical shifts between aggregates, it is difficult to conceive of water as discrete. H2O, of course, is not an object, but even in the form of concrete watercourses and water bodies, it seems singularly hard to define with anything close to precision. Consider, for instance, the water of a river. When we talk of its water, what do we have in mind? Just the H2O molecules that, strictly speaking, form the pure chemical substance of water? What about other matter dissolved in the river, the many organic and inorganic particles, minerals, or pollutants one typically finds in watercourses? What about the relative percentages of different elements such as oxygen and nitrogen in the water? Are miniscule animalcule that are invisible to the eye part of the water? What about fish and other aquatic animals—where do we draw the line? As analyses of Victorian river water discussed in this study suggest, worms were a common ingredient of sources of drinking water, but this does not, of course, mean that they were regarded as an innate part of the substance of water. This example also indicates that what we are willing to accept as a natural component of water is a question of perspective and of purpose. A biologist, a chemist, an engineer, a natural philosopher, a poet—all of them would probably define river water in radically different ways. In a similar vein, while a healthy river is likely to contain worms as part of its normal ecological balance, worms in drinking water seem objectionable; in this context, most people would, presumably, consider them matter out of place.⁴

A question as seemingly harmless as what constitutes the water of a river, then, turns out to be surprisingly complex once the entanglement of matter comes to the fore. In fact, as the chapters dealing with pollution in this study show, when one considers water in the Victorian era, distinctions between animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman matter in drinking water cease to function. As the images and texts discussed in the chapters that follow indicate, different forms of matter were continuously collapsing into each other. Material agency and enmeshment, therefore, demand recognition and respect: as the example of water shows, differentiation between various forms of matter (clean versus polluted, for instance) can, literally, be vital.

On some level or other, we are probably all aware of the many forms of material agency that confront us daily, and the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly raised consciousness of the intricate network of agencies and relations that shape our naturalcultural world. This also means that materiality needs to be partly reconceived as materialization. As Coole and Frost stress, New materialists are rediscovering a materiality that materializes, evincing immanent modes of self-transformation (9). In fact, for Karen Barad, this aspect lies at the heart of what she calls agential realism. She asserts that in "an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency" (151; original emphasis).

As one of the most versatile of chemical substances, water is an excellent example of matter-as-materialization. It exists in a multiplicity of different material shapes, and the very fact that these are aggregates indicates that they are better conceptualized as materializations than concrete forms. Not only are many manifestations of water in constant flux (not