Chapter 5 argues that preoccupation with travel, topography, and geography merely formed the basis for even more ambitious projects that did, however, show the limits of what practical patriotism might achieve. When combined with a providential belief in the potential of the land, the application of geographical and botanical knowledge to the countryside meant that spaces which had hitherto been considered ‘empty’ or ‘wild’ could be filled with new meaning. Reformers were concerned with the role of people (Indians, but also Europeans, Africans, and Caribbeans of African descent, as well as enslaved people) in managing landscapes. They increasingly discussed questions of what we might call ‘biopower’ after Foucault, conceiving of labour and the management of the population as a resource. In this, reformers paid particular attention to the possibility that humans might influence environments in more profound ways than just by building roads. They hoped that human errors that had made Caribbean environments ‘unhealthy’ in the past could be reversed by building better-ventilated settlements, or regulating military barracks to help soldiers behave like agricultural settlers and make this land productive.

This chapter considers the role of form in debates related to the reconfiguration of novel’s place in the 1880s literary field. To do so it turns to three cultural debates underpinned by questions of form: the distinction between the healthy and the unhealthy house in relation to the International Health Exhibition (1884); the distinction between healthy and unhealthy novels in a series of 1884 essays on the novel by Walter Besant, Henry James, and George Moore respectively; and the distinction between healthy and unhealthy novels in relation to print censorship and the Henry Vizetelly trial and debates (1888-89). Taken together, these debates illuminate how form was reconfigured for the reading public in the 1880s to at once enhance and challenge the role of the novel as a vital and consequential social force. They also illustrate the ways in which frameworks for evaluation were tested, explored and refined in ways that continue to reverberate for literary studies today.