Introduction: the practice of paradise

Summary

“The gate to paradise remains sealed by the term risk.”

Niklas Luhmann, Risk

“ … theirs is the hunger for paradise.”

H. D., “The Flowering of the Rod”

This book is about a massive, disorganized and highly successful Victorian cultural enterprise: the textual construction of a safe England in a dangerous world between 1832 and 1897. Beginning in the 1830s, a diverse group of writers labored to help the first victims and beneficiaries of industrialization imagine that danger could be banished from the domestic scene and relocated in the world outside British borders. Careful representations of the precise locations of safety and danger – in such diverse texts as statistical analyses of the British empire, handbooks of hospital reform, memoirs of balloon aeronauts, travelogues of Alpine mountaineers, and ethnographic studies of Africa – suggested that risk could be either avoided altogether (in England) or engaged voluntarily in the dangerous world beyond it. The attempt to resolve risk geographically ignores the most salient feature of risk: that it is by definition a temporal problem; it exists only and always as a possibility, a future contingency. A geographical solution obscures the impossibility of banishing risk. This form of risk management thus involves the colonization of time: danger would seem to be plucked out of its hiding place in the invisible reaches of the future and brought into the present, to be experienced, survived and thus eradicated.