Exploring Victorian travel literature: disease, race and climate

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

1997

There has been considerable recent interest in the history of landscape representations and environmental intervention within the British Empire. [1] This work has drawn on literary theory and art history as well as earlier studies examining the socially-constructed relationship between humans and their environment. [2] In Europe, this relationship both informed and was informed by the process of imperial expansion. Both European and colonized peoples' understandings of nature formulated complex ideas about environmental influence on human health and disease. [3] A connection was commonly made between the healthiness of the physical and the social body and a particular type of landscape. Some attention has been paid to the historical implications of the close relationship between environment and health in settler ideology during the colonial period in Africa. [4] As Ranger has pointed out, however, in order to understand fully the historical geography of colonial Africa it is cr...

Victorian Review, 2021

I n cHarlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Edward Rochester attempts to justify to Jane his choice to confine his wife, Bertha, to the attic of Thornfield Hall. He frames this choice as inspired by a European wind. During a "fiery West Indian night," Rochester opened the casement window and let in a "wind fresh from Europe," which "blew over the ocean" and made the air "pure" (262-63). Witness to a "refulgent" tropical sunrise, surrounded by lush foliage, Rochester heard the "Atlantic thundering in glorious liberty" and thus found revival, renewal, and "Regeneration" (263). Regeneration is the counterpoint to degeneration, which threatened Rochester if he remained in the West Indies. He attempts to excuse the immoral acts of imprisoning Bertha and lying to Jane based on the implied moral imperative for a white British subject to return to his own native climate before he loses both his health and his connection to his civilization. Rochester's argument assumes a Victorian reader's familiarity with concepts of racialized climate "zones." It invokes the most common nineteenthcentury use of this framework, which was to stress the dangerous effects of tropical environments upon British subjects' health. James Johnson, British surgeon and theorist of climatic illness, writes in his famous tract, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions (1812), that "animals translated from a temperate to a torrid zone" "die," "droop," and "degenerate" (2). Humans are no different, he claims, and he suggests that in the tropics, British doctors should use "reason" and "experience" to "aid the constitution" through "artificial means of prevention and melioration" (3). 1 While Johnson believes that the negative impact of tropical heat can be remedied through feats of Western engineering and science, no similar solution is offered that would allow people of colour to thrive in the British cold. He says that "intertropical natives approaching our own latitudes. .. seldom survive the third year in this country" (13). Instead, nineteenth-century commentary on the well-being of people of colour arriving in Britain focuses on their susceptibility to phthisis (pulmonary tuberculosis) and the need to promptly return them to their native climates. 2 From the nineteenth well into the twentieth century, white children of British descent living in the colonies were often sent home for their formative educational years in the belief that their native climate would allow for the best physical and mental development. A similar logic, but in reverse, was used for the education of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, the captive girl gifted by the king of Dahomey to Queen Victoria in 1850 (Olusoga 329). After arriving in England, she was presented to Queen Victoria, who was " 'graciously pleased

PMLA, 2021

Anthropocene criticism of Victorian literature has focused more on questions of temporality and predictability than on those related to climate in the nineteenth century. Climate knowledge is central to the regional novel, which is attuned to the seasonal basis of agriculture and sociality, but the formal influence of the British climate also becomes more apparent through a consideration of the genre's adaptation to colonial conditions. Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge highlights how a known seasonal cycle underpins the differentiation of climate and weather and explores the role of economic systems in mediating the experience of climate. Rolf Boldrewood's The Squatter's Dream, set amid the nonannual seasonal change of Australia, demonstrates the fracturing of the regional novel form under the stress of sustained drought. Such a comparative approach highlights the importance of regular seasonality as the basis of the Victorian novel's ability to conceptualize the relation of climate, weather, and capital.

Global warming epitomizes a paradox in the relationship between humans and climate. Recognizing the anthropogenic causes of climate change also involves recognizing the immense collective human influence on the earth's life system. The prevailing concept of the climate is, however, one in which human bodies and actions, cultures and societies play no significant role. The current "weather-biased understanding of the atmosphere" (Fleming/Jancovic 2011) has uncoupled climate from human experience and forms of life. Yet climate is omnipresent in the history of cultures and their aesthetic, political and scientific representation -as a condition and product of life, as responsible for and a threat to human existence (Hulme 2017). This themed section aims to retrieve case studies, readings, and theoretical reflections on the relations between cultures and climates. While the representation of climate change is currently being reexamined in fictional and nonfictional writing (Clark 2015, Johns-Putra 2018), we would like to broaden the topic to climate representations beyond climate change. This renewed attention to "human climates," we believe, will illuminate vital dimensions of a crisis not only of climate and climate knowledge but of ecological relationships in general.

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2008

Smallpox was a much feared disease until modern times, responsible for many deaths worldwide and reaching epidemic proportions amongst the British population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is the first substantial critical study of the literary representation of the disease and its victims between the Restoration and the development of inoculation against smallpox around 1800. David Shuttleton draws upon a wide range of canonical texts including works by Dryden, Johnson, Steele, Goldsmith and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the latter having experimented with vaccination against smallpox. He reads these texts alongside medical treatises and the rare, but moving writings of smallpox survivors, showing how medical and imaginative writers developed a shared tradition of figurative tropes, myths and metaphors. This fascinating study uncovers the cultural impact of smallpox, and the diVerent ways writers found to come to terms with the terror of disease and death.

Ecozon@ - European Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Environment, 2020

Climate crisis is perhaps the most urgent critical collective issue that the contemporary global population faces today. It is therefore a matter of shared concern to imaginatively address these meteorological and anthropogenic issues through such a means as literature. This dissertation investigates the underlying tropes of Western climate fiction and seeks to understand how they may be better used to create awareness and galvanise action for mitigating climate crisis. Using critical and theoretical analyses of predominantly American contemporary novels, this dissertation examines the influence of different literary tropes that are widely used in climate fiction, such as humanitarian extinction, the child saviour and class discrimination. These are complicated through other themes of interest, which include consumerist culture, legacy, religion and the poetics of remains, authenticity and responsibility. Broad tropes of importance to this discussion include urban, wilderness, pastoral and collapse motifs. The themes are explored in conjunction with existentialism, post-structuralism, idealism and morality. Key critics

Hispanic Review, 2014

The British Journal for the History of Science, 1999

On Wednesday 27 April 1898, Dr Luigi [Louis] Westenra Sambon (1865–1931) addressed the Royal Geographical Society in London on a topic of much interest to the Victorian public. An Anglo-French medical graduate of the University of Naples, a Fellow of the London Zoological Society and a recent visitor to Central Africa, he was well equipped to tackle the subject of the ‘Acclimatization of Europeans in Tropical Lands’. The ‘problem of tropical colonization’, he began, ‘is one of the most important and pressing with which European states have to deal. Civilization has favoured unlimited multiplication, and thereby intensified that struggle for existence the limitation of which seemed to be its very object…I know full well that the question of emigration is beset with a variety of moral, social, political, and economic difficulties; but it is the law of nature, and civilization has no better remedy for the evils caused by overcrowding.’Even from these introductory remarks, it is already...