Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 4 - The 1850s Sustainability Novel

  • Edited by Gail Marshall, University of Reading
  • Book:
    Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s
    Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025, pp 90-112

  • Summary

    Shannon and Marshall read London alongside the city of Manchester, and the fictional town of Cranford in their chapter, which takes some of the decade’s industrial novels and examines them through the lens of sustainability. The chapter is mindful that it is in this period that industrialisation and globalisation begin to achieve the capacity that we are now seeking to control as we realise the environmental devastation of their proliferation; and that industrial success is based on a deeply unsustainable exploitation of human and natural resources. The authors argue that though Dickens and Gaskell did not have the language of sustainability that is available to us, nonetheless their work begins to recognise the costs of British trade domination. The picture is complicated by the novelists’ own dependence on the industrialisation of publishing, its increasingly necessary global reach, and the tight deadlines of the serialised novel, on which periodical publications depended.