Chapter 15 - Extraction, Exhaustion, and the Sensation Novel of the 1860s

Summary

The 1860s marked a key moment in the history of extraction and the rise of extraction-based life, a social order premised on the removal of subsurface resources and, especially, on the coal economy. This decade saw the explosion of an economic discourse around coal exhaustion in Britain, thanks to the publication of William Stanley Jevons’s The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines[GK21] (1865), and the expansion of overseas imperial extraction projects following, for example, the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1869) in South Africa. In this chapter, I explore the role of extraction in the 1860s’ most characteristic genre: sensation fiction. After an overview of the chronotope of exhaustion and how it manifests in fiction, I turn to two sensation novels premised on extractive plots: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [GK22](1862) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone [GK23](1868). Together they suggest the extent to which British national life was, by the 1860s, already imagined to be fully dependent on extraterritorial mineral inputs.