This article argues that natural environments should be seen as life-sustaining infrastructures. Countering a tendency to see infrastructures as human-engineered, I show how environmental infrastructures are shaped by humans and nonhumans alike, with their life-sustaining roles often only revealed by their disruption. I demonstrate how infrastructures might be shaped by nonhumans by highlighting the career of Elodea canadensis, or Canadian waterweed, an introduced plant that wrought havoc on Britain's watery environments in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Red weed, the plant introduced by the Martians in H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, echoes Elodea in its course through the British environment. But while Elodea and similar introduced species prompted nascent critiques of imperial plant movement, I show how Wells avoids such critiques by deleting red weed, and any further environmental consequences following from its introduction, from his novel's end. Instead, Wells endorses a natural-selection-driven explanation for the British environment's superior fitness—an explanation that affirms rather than critiques ecological imperialism and mitigates the role of nonhumans in reshaping environmental infrastructures.

The political geography of empire transformed with the Victorian rise of steam power and its infrastructure, especially with the emerging dominance of steam as the primary means of transoceanic travel and shipping. Oceanic infrastructure was a new feature of the British Empire especially in the period after 1860, when steamships were increasingly replacing sailing ships and when the material exigencies of fueling and refueling required the installation of coaling stations to support long-haul transport for steam-powered ships. In this essay we explore how these changes registered in literature and discourse, with Joseph Conrad as our prime example. We analyze two of Conrad's works that feature coaling stations and steam-carrying, Victory (1915) and The Mirror of the Sea (1906). Drawing on infrastructure studies, critical ocean studies, and the energy humanities, we make a case for more attention to oceangoing coal as part of a broader reconsideration of empire in the Anthropocene. We also make a case for Conrad as one of the great observers of environmental-infrastructural change in the early fossil-fuel era, worth revisiting now as both witness and interpreter.

The acquisition of nonnative flora and fauna was long framed by horticultural historians as the result of great British derring-do and hand-to-hand conflict. Yet nineteenth-century plant extraction actually involved comparatively few feats of physical bravery or scenes of Boys’ Own high drama. The letters of Victorian commercial plant-hunters reveal that the removal and exportation of plants entailed the deployment of emerging colonial and national infrastructures together with complex regional and local networks and knowledge systems. Much of a plant-hunter's day-to-day life, tellingly, involved paperwork: submitting drafts and bills of exchange, sending letters and cables to employers, and completing bills of lading to ship plants, in stages, to Europe, where they were received at customs houses before journeying on, by rail and by road, to nurseries, collectors, and auction houses. At the same time, emerging colonial infrastructures only took hunters so far; local and traditional knowledge systems were essential as well. Plant-hunting depended upon the support, expertise, knowledge, and traditions of local people—a fact the enduring narrative of hand-to-hand conflict and triumphant British vanquishing seems structured carefully to conceal.

In its dynamism and shared imaginative scope, popular fiction could provide a creative foundation for “not-yet-achieved” infrastructural projects. By insisting on the moral value of seeing others as “fellow-passengers to the grave,” Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) anticipates the London Necropolis Railway. Designed to relieve pressure on the capital, this purpose-built funeral railroad and cemetery opened in Brookwood, Surrey, in 1854. Through a fantasy that invokes locomotive hearses, Dickens humanizes the notion of a steam-powered funeral apparatus. He advocates for burial beyond the city by contrasting Tiny Tim's restful end in a “green place” with Scrooge's horrifying, “walled-in,” urban grave. Dickens's enduring Christmas story appeals to what could be and eases the imaginative leap required of those entrusting their loved ones to a novel postmortem infrastructure that was built to last.

Pensions were a means of social provisioning long before they became a cornerstone of state welfare policies in the early twentieth century. The multifarious pension forms that persisted and were reshaped during the Victorian period offer occasions to glimpse how social bonds and obligations across time were imagined and contested. The pensions of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53) suggest how the infrastructural potential of a form might flicker within the literary text, even as it is unacknowledged and left behind.

As part of the effort to secure the release of the Dorchester Labourers, a group of agricultural workers sentenced in 1834 to penal transportation, London theaters hosted four fundraising evenings for the prisoners and their families. A turning point in the popular stage, these evenings marked a moment when commercial venues became willing to ally with working-class protest movements. At three of the four events, the theaters mounted nautical melodramas. Using Judith Butler's theories of the political possibilities of mourning, this article argues that melodrama effectively explored the twinned crises of social austerity and political repression while imagining radical transformation emerging from loss.

Municipal solid waste management shapes public life at every moment, and it did so for the Victorians as much as it does for us today. Victorians were concerned about the sanitary risk unruly trash posed, but profit, not conservation or fear of hazardous waste, was the primary motivator behind all Victorian municipal waste management. Though the Victorian period is often characterized as a time when government and public works were becoming centralized, this was not the case with municipal solid waste management. Instead, a focus on the individual pursuit of profit meant that Victorian waste management was dispersed across society, with homemakers, recycling entrepreneurs, dustmen, and the very poorest members of society all playing a role. The structures Victorians built (or failed to build) to attend to their trash can help us understand how they ordered society. Waste management practices provide a microcosm of nineteenth-century British capitalism, class, gender roles, and imperial nationalism.

In the Victorian era, innovations in infrastructure, notably the revolutionary stagecoach, redefined women's travel experiences and offered them a means to break free from domesticity. While the rapid pace of the stagecoach initially unsettles individuals like Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), she accustoms herself to its motion to evade perilous situations. Bearing in mind the cadence of the stagecoach, I suggest that Patricia Park's modern retelling of Jane Eyre, Re Jane (2015), adapts the rhythm of the coach by recasting it as the motion of the New York City subway. Revising in this way, Park incorporates positive racial representation through the subway and its passengers. By re-creating the rhythm of the coach through the subway train, Park considers two historical ideas: the New York City subway was built by racial and ethnic minorities such as Irish immigrants and African Americans, and the subway also softly calls back to the beginnings of the American transcontinental railroad that erased the visibility of Chinese immigrant laborers. This essay contends that the transportation systems in nineteenth-century England and twenty-first-century New York created changes that liberated women from the rooted domestic ideologies of their respective periods.

The nineteenth century is the period when so many of the infrastructures on which we rely for the transmission and distribution of ideas, people, and goods were, on one hand, established and standardized and, on the other, contested and transformed in practice. We argue that literary and cultural scholars of the nineteenth century can make major contributions to the transhistorical and transimperial work of critical infrastructure studies. The pieces in this special issue give us a picture of Victorian infrastructure that we have loosely organized into four major themes: Water and Waste; Death and Bodies; Periods and Punctuation; and Care and Aid. Whether close-reading literary representations of infrastructure or close-reading literature as infrastructure, these essays collectively show how Victorian literature moved people. Our contributors address the following questions, among others: How did the material structures that moved people, goods, and ideas make people feel? How did people's feelings, libidinal energies, and practices affect how infrastructures were imagined, designed, built, used, and transformed—in literature and in the world?

This paper considers fossil fuel infrastructure alongside the punctuation infrastructure of writing. It focuses, in particular, on the period—as both punctuation and time frame—to ask how one demarcates the Victorian period in the context of climate change impacts that exceed it. The paper itself traverses different temporal periods and different forms of punctuation to make its point that infrastructure, while often unnoticed, shapes both ideas and action.

Historians and literary critics often observe that Victorian London had no Baron Haussmann to impose a rational, legible order on its tangle of streets. But the itineraries traced by early forms of public transportation—omnibuses, hackney cabs, and railways—nonetheless invited a reimagining and remapping of the city. Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz (1836), midcentury encyclopedic cab fare guides, and the debates that preceded the building of the 1863 Metropolitan Underground Railway overwrote the existing geography of the city with a cartographic infrastructure tactically organized into routes, nodes, intervals, and destinations.

The drive toward precision, punctuality, and an accurate global mapping of the ocean has always been in tension with the forces that undermine and undercut the attempt: human failure, bad weather, broken instruments, bad luck, and so on. The serial labor of embedding infrastructure is risky and requires both improvisatory skills and persistence. The ships that paid out the telegraph cable, and the many kinds of serial writing that took place onboard these ships, were all part of the infrastructural endeavor of the nineteenth century, and they anticipated the digital as much as the cables did themselves. If we think of their role as actively and serially remaking positionality in this uneven imperial world, we can think of serial data produced onboard moving ships in the nineteenth century as shaping an infrastructure that powerfully anticipates the digital.

This article examines Rokeya Hossain's “Sultana's Dream” (1905), a short story that pictures a solar-powered utopia governed by women, as a key site for thinking through the entanglements of sovereignty, gender, colonization, and environmental relations as they are articulated through infrastructure. To read infrastructurally in this way, we attend to socio-historical contexts of nineteenth-century Bengali society and to the Victorian imperial roots of early solar inventions, alongside the more modular aesthetics and meaning-making affordances of solar energy. Such a mode of reading makes infrastructure legible as an essential political ground for the maintenance or transformation of socio-ecological relations and reveals the irreducible political, material, and poetic qualities of infrastructures themselves. Texts like “Sultana's Dream” make such configurations visible and open to interrogation, and demonstrate the ways that solar, as infrastructure, energizes new social and political forms—even those yet undreamed.

In this essay I read debates about amenities of water and waste in the British Caribbean in the late and immediate post-Victorian period through histories of intimacy and kinship centered in fiction by Caribbean writers of the last twenty years. In these novels and short stories, collecting water at a stream or a standpipe or emptying a chamber pot are actions that produce or recall moments of desire and aspiration, shame and punishment, in storylines that move between a past of enslavement and indentureship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a present of political and psychological stasis or upheaval in the 1950s, 1970s, or the early twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century discussions about fire hydrants or standpipes index a British Caribbean colony's evolving landscape of modernization and the disagreements about what shape and speed this process should take, and recent fiction allows us to discern how these amenities inherit and bequeath associations of trauma.

This essay argues that Leslie Marmon Silko's 1999 historical-fiction novel Gardens in the Dunes enables Indigenous-centered interventions into Victorian studies, ecocriticism, and their intersection. Dramatizing an animistic Native American view of nature as agentic and enspirited, Silko's novel critiques Victorian plant hunting as rooted in settler-colonial logic that treats nature as inert. In turn, through representations of late Victorian gardeners, Silko suggests that British horticulture was also informed by colonial and capitalist ways of thinking about plants. At the same time, however, the novel locates an animistic strain running through Victorian gardening discourses, which I demonstrate through readings of Victorian garden books depicting plants as agentic and enspirited. Silko, I argue, invites us to revisit the late nineteenth century as characterized by a cultural revival of animistic thought, even as this period also saw the racist stigmatization of animism in the field of Victorian anthropology. I connect this fraught discursive moment in British history to an inherited hesitation toward animism in contemporary Victorian studies and ecocriticism, a hesitation that has contributed to uneven engagement with Indigenous thought in both fields. In response, this essay explicates and emulates Silko's critical methodology for an undisciplining engagement with animism in white-authored, ecocritical Victorian studies.

This article surveys works from Kerala related to Queen Victoria and situates M. R. Madhava Warrier's (1893–1952) biography, Victoria Maharani (1931), against the backdrop of early twentieth-century Travancore. It draws on threads related to the position of women on the Malabar coast, the actions of the maharani regent at the time, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi (r. 1924–31), and the political and social climate at the time of her reign. It also considers the relationship between the qualities of Queen Victoria praised in Victoria Maharani, reforms instituted by Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, and the reputation of both in Travancore.

In late nineteenth-century Telugu desa, “Victoria” was more than the name of the queen of Great Britain. It was, in Homi Bhabha's famous formulation, a “sign taken for wonder” the signification of which, however, remained ambivalent. As soon as she was proclaimed the empress of India, the queen's name acquired emblematic connotations that were exploited in both reform and counterreform discourses. Treating Queen Victoria not as a person but as a personification, the present essay reads some of the fetishized signs of the queen in the spatial, print, and literary cultures and notes how the colonial engines of modernity were appropriated, provincialized, and subverted in the domestic sphere.

This essay examines an 1877 Gujarati translation of Queen Victoria's Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. It was the work of M. M. Bhownaggree, later a British MP. The essay explores the circumstances under which Bhownaggree undertook the translation, its content, and its intended audience. It closes with some observations on the book's place in the history of Indian royalism, the place of Indian royalism in the development of modern Gujarati literature, and the interplay of the Gujarati identity that was emerging in the latter part of the nineteenth century with both royalism and Indian nationalism.

To mark Queen Victoria's jubilee celebrations, many Indian authors composed laudatory literature and music in their vernacular languages. Although these works were often dismissed as “enthusiastic effusions” from poets of dubious ability, they offer intricate examples of the varied meanings the queen's presence had for Indian writers. They illustrate the subtle manipulation of laudatory verse for purposes other than praise; and they frequently offer instances of sophisticated, multilingual intertextuality and reuses of literary traditions of praise (and subversion) in India's precolonial past. This article examines examples of Persianate laudatory writing produced by three Parsi writers in colonial India and demonstrates how these works performed “loyalty” in contested, ambivalent ways.

The death of Queen Victoria occasioned the publication of commemorative narratives in early twentieth-century Odisha. They serve as site for understanding how feminine authority was imagined as the Odia literati engaged in a fraught movement for the formation of a separate province of Odisha. They imagined an Odia motherland in relation to figures of maternal authority such as mother India and mother Victoria. This article explores this vernacular representation of the queen as mother in the work of the poet Madhusudan Rao. By drawing on traditions of lament and maternal authority, the article illustrates how Rao used lament to carve out a palimpsest of multiple identities, from imperial subjecthood to regional belonging.