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       Victorian Chaos: Industrial Disruptions

      The Science of Chimneys and Calderas

      The atmosphere started absorbing entirely new levels of greenhouse gases beginning with the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century Europe, and levels have been on a nearly exponential increase ever since. The recognition that industrial air pollution had the power to change landscapes, species composition, and human health came to public notice with increasing concern over the course of the nineteenth century. Ominous images like Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills,” Dickens’s London sky shedding “soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes,” Gaskell’s northlands factories “puffing out black ‘unparliamentary’ smoke,” Ruskin’s “two hundred furnace chimneys” vomiting something that resembles “dead men’s souls”—these images evoke the aura of nineteenth-century urban British literature that writers alternatively fetishized and fled from to the green countryside (Blake 153; Dickens 1; Gaskell 55; Ruskin 637). Before taking an in-depth look at two Victorian science fiction novels that use industrial catastrophe as the creative energy that forges a new landscape, it will be useful to see how Victorian advances in atmospheric science in-formed contemporary thought.

      Over the course of the nineteenth century, the scientific investigation of air pollution from volcanoes and factories greatly improved the understanding of local and global interconnection. Atmospheric chemists came to understand the composition of smoke by studying volcanic eruptions, which were known to cause human health problems, strange corrosive rains discovered to be acidic, and climate aberrations for years afterward. Earth could be seen as a biosphere, with an insulating layer of ozone and a force field of gravity that held in the atmosphere of the closed global system. Although this cozy arrangement often inspired praise of divine design or just wonderful cosmic luck, other implications of the closed cosmos became apparent, such as the possibility that air pollution does not simply vanish; it insidiously accumulates above.

      The first scientific theory that can be identified with modern global warming came from the experiments of Joseph Fourier, a French physicist who pursued a theory of heat conduction. Chaos philosophers Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stegners identify Fourier’s work with the first conceptions of complex nonlinear systems, the science of complexity (104–5). His “General Remarks on the Temperature of the Terrestrial Globe and the Planetary Spaces” (1824) envisions the earth as a giant greenhouse. Fourier’s scheme of natural atmospheric insulation is cosmically benevolent: the gases and water vapor that collect at the outer reaches of the earthly sphere provide essential incubatory warmth for the plant and animal life on the surface. While the gases emitted by human industrial activity were identical to those naturally occurring in the stratosphere, Fourier did not pursue a theoretical connection. The earth’s system simply seemed too large, and the volume of greenhouse gas released by humans, too modest. Fourier also had the reassurance of religious faith, which reinforced a theory of active divine benevolence.

      In 1861 John Tyndall furthered Fourier’s ideas by demonstrating the high absorbent power of gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and ozone. His conclusions, like those of his predecessors, tended to place value on the insulating power of naturally occurring ozone gases, which seemed to keep the ice ages of deeper geological history at bay. Though local pollution in industrial centers was a health concern by midcentury, an overall trend of warming seemed blithely utopian to the chilled blood of northern European scientists. The term “greenhouse effect” was coined by the University of Wisconsin professor Thomas Trewartha in 1937. His Introduction to Weather and Climate, written more than a century after Fourier theorized the global greenhouse, is among the earliest scientific studies to raise alarms about rapid increases in greenhouse gases. The intervening century had rendered great changes in the atmosphere, but they were not nearly as significant as the changes wrought in the decades since Trewartha’s work.

      Residents in England’s newly industrial cities, particularly Manchester and London, bore witness to their polluted microclimates. Elizabeth Gaskell provides a fictional account of the city of Milton in her novel North and South (1855): “For several miles before they reached Milton, there was a deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction in which it lay. It was all the darker from contrast with the pale grey-blue of the wintry sky. [. . .] Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black ‘unparliamentary’ smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud which Margaret had taken to foretell rain” (59). The 1844 legislation meant to curb industrial emissions went largely unheeded by libertarian factory owners, among them Gaskell’s industrialist John Thornton, a Romantic hero for Victorian times. By 1866, Manchester’s medical representative identified the citizens as among the unhealthiest in Britain as a consequence of inhaling the air (Christianson 21).

      The Scottish chemist and industrial critic Robert Angus Smith discovered acid rain in 1852 in the environs of Manchester. He published the long-researched monograph Air and Rain: The Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology in 1872. Acid rain had the alarming power of dissolving the features of building façades (notably gargoyles), faces already shrouded in carbon precipitate. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, industrial smoke, and particularly sulfur dioxide, has decreased the pH of rain from a neutral 6 to a marginally acidic 4.5 or 4. Readings of 2.4, the acidity of vinegar, have occasionally been recorded in heavily industrialized areas (“Acid Rain”). Events of Waldsterben, the death of trees, had been known to follow large volcanic eruptions, but forest dieback near industrial areas in England and the Black Forest in Germany came to be linked to acid rain. Acid rain’s tendency to deface tombstones and public statues is a particularly bracing example of the self-annihilating side effects of industrial emissions. Even names carved in stone were imperiled by the airborne appetites of sulfur dioxide and oxidized nitrogen compounds.

      By century’s end, scientific consensus showed the effects of Manchester’s pollution on its plant life, humans, and habitations. In an 1893 essay called “The Air of Large Towns,” Manchester chemist G. H. Bailey made an emotional appeal to industrialists about their urban air filters, the trees. In his discursive preamble to the scientific data on pollutants, he wrote, “General experience has shown that evergreens cannot be grown in the heart of our larger cities and even the more hardy deciduous trees make little progress and sooner or later succumb. The sulfurous and other noxious vapors and the deposits of soot, hydrocarbons, etc., which form on the leaves are the chief agents in the destruction of plant-life” (201–2). Trees are only a step removed from animals, and Bailey invoked Britain’s famed urban fogs, “when the air is supercharged with such impurities,” to convey the pathos of the “fog demon,” a predator on public health in the new industrial environment: “The death-rate indeed from such [respiratory] diseases after foggy weather

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