Norbert Lennartz.

Charles Dickens: The Romantic Heritage

Charles Dickens:
The Romantic Heritage and the Victorians' Challenge of Ecology

Norbert Lennartz, University of Vechta

Keywords: Romanticism, Victorianism, Ecology, Nature, Nature-Culture Dualism,

Gendering of Nature, Wordsworth, Dickens, London

Mots-clés: romanticisme, victoriannisme, écologie, nature, dualisme nature-culture,

nature et genre, Wordsworth, Dickens, Londres

1. Dickens and Wordsworth: Two Contradictory Views of London?

Romanticism had long come to an end when Dickens entered the stage of
Victorian literature. After Coleridge’s death in 1834 there was essentially only one
relic of the Romantic age left, and that was William Wordsworth, who was on the
point of turning into an inveterate Victorian poet and eschewing his Romantic
affiliations. Although Michael Slater writes about Dickens’s admiration for Wordsworth
in his 2009 biography (136), contact between both writers seems to have been
sparse. Dickens is said to have met Wordsworth only once, at a dinner in February
1839; the poet and the novelist do not seem to have been much impressed by each
other. In his 1989 biography, William Wordsworth, A Life, Stephen Gill does not even
refer to this fleeting encounter, and Dickens seems to have been more intrigued by
Wordsworth’s son, about whom he viciously remarked that copyrights needed to be
hereditary, since genius obviously was not (Schlicke, 604).
Although Wordsworth seems to have outlived his fame in the Victorian age and
even though as Poet Laureate from 1843 to 1850 Wordsworth was seen as “the poet
of unpoetical natures” (Heims, 53), both he and Dickens share an ecological concern
which was, however, ultimately eclipsed by the Victorians’ adoration for technology
and industrialisation. In September 1802, Wordsworth was ready to ignore the
squalor, “the blackening church[es]” and the corruption of London which William

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Blake had so clearly foregrounded (Blake, “London,” l. 10). When in his famous poem
“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3 1802” Wordsworth imagines
London as a place of morning beauty and silence, he is as anti-Dickensian as he can
possibly be, but by using sartorial imagery and representing the city clothed in the
splendor of a particular September morning—“This City now doth, like a garment
wear / The beauty of the morning" (Wordsworth, “Westminster Bridge,” l. 4f.)—he
seems to insinuate that clothes are transitory and subject to change. Unlike the
clothes at the beginning of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, which pin down man’s identity and
prove to be stigmatising tickets, the garments in which Wordsworth’s London are
robed are extremely evanescent, and, for the time being, give the delusive
impression that a new symbiosis of culture and nature is possible after their
dissociation in the Age of Enlightenment: “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and
temples lie / Open unto the fields, and to the sky” (ll. 5–6). The extent to which this
ecological view of the metropolis is highly ambivalent is made clear by the fact that
the beautiful morning garment reveals more than it was supposed to conceal: simple
references to the “smokeless air” (l. 8), on second glance, imply that at other times of
the day the city’s garments might be grimy, the streets of early 19 th-century London
densely filled with soot and that, notwithstanding Wordsworth’s concept of the “plastic
power” of the poet’s imagination, the dualism of culture and nature was too deeply
entrenched.
The poem, which is mildly evocative of a severe ecological imbalance behind what
looks like the glittering and vibrating colours of a Turneresque painting, is
chronologically related to the more “Dickensian” depiction of London which
Wordsworth inserts into his 1805 version of The Prelude.1 Radically different from his
reveries on Westminster Bridge, the Regency capital that Wordsworth now comes
across has shed its glittering morning dress and shows not so much its revolting
nakedness underneath as its complete dissociation from nature. The semantic fields
that are derived from nature are now geared to the chaos of the teeming city:
Before me flow,
Thou endless stream of men and moving things!
[…]
the quick dance
Of colours, lights, and forms; the deafening din;
The comers and the goers face to face,
1
The Prelude (1805). All references in the text are to the Selincourt text, Poetical Works, 494–588. In contrast to
Nicholas Halmi’s Norton edition of the text (2014), Selincourt follows MS A of the 1805 Prelude.

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Face after face; the string of dazzling wares,

Shop after shop […]. (VII, 150–58, my italics)

While in the famous 1804 poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud” the “host of golden
daffodils” engages in a harmonious cosmic dance which involves the waves, the
stars and eventually even the heart of the hesitant speaker, the dance (and the
heartbeat) of the city is different; and as the adjective “quick” indicates, it is a frenzied
sequence of colours, lights and figures which corresponds to the nervousness and
anti-natural rapidity of metropolitan life. Translating the language of nature poetry into
the context of an urban narrative, Wordsworth seems to explore the templates that
Dickens was to use for his later descriptions of London. In order to convey the idea of
London as an “endless stream” of men and things, Wordsworth not only reverts to an
upbeat rhythm and a staccato enumeration of nouns in Book VII of The Prelude, he
also alarmingly equates men with things and shows the extent to which the
metropolis is a leveller both of social and ontological categories. In this incessant flux
of phenomena, there is no longer a strict distinction between the species, between
objects and their users, and while human beings are reduced to a bewildering
multitude of anonymous faces (somewhat suggestive of the rapidly emerging faces in
Ezra Pound’s later poem on the Paris metro), the “string of dazzling wares” and their
symbols of burgeoning capitalism are also increasingly endowed with human
qualities and become agents in their own rights. The reader is immediately reminded
of Adorno’s groundbreaking essay on Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop (1841), where
Little Nell is seen as a victim in a relentlessly modernist world of commodification,
where the girl is nothing more than a piece of brittle china in the curiosity shop of
capitalism and objects assume a semblance of life (cf. Hollington, 95–101).
As the early 19th-century hotbed of commerce and capitalism, London is excitingly
colourful, but the “display and the cornucopia” (Porter, 173) of colours and articles
are the visual expression of a wild mixture of different nationalities and of a
cacophony of Babelian tongues. Having bidden farewell to the “sheltered seats / Of
gowned students” and the “privileged ground” (VII, 53f. / 54) of the University of
Cambridge, Wordsworth’s speaker unexpectedly finds himself flung into a medieval
spectacle of exotic ‘otherness,’ surrounded by “Moors, / Malays, Lascars, the Tartar;
the Chinese, / And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns” (VII, 226–28). As if walking
through a Dantean hell of freaks and monstrosities—“[g]iants and dwarfs, / Clowns,
conjurors, posture-makers, harlequins, / Amid the uproar of the rabblement” (VII,

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271–73)—Wordsworth’s persona cannot help being engulfed by the crude delights of

the London nether-world, by the tacky grands guignols of Regency plays. But the
lowest point of Wordsworth’s urban hell, its nadir, is still to come: Bartholomew Fair,
where, in a Walpurgis night of blurry, infernal and distorted shapes, the Romantic
concepts of anthropological dignity are severely put to the test. The “Giants,
Ventriloquists,” the speaking bust, the waxworks and the puppets not only testify to
the fact that Madame Tussaud had opened her famous waxworks to the London
public in 1802, but also that, in the wake of Romanticism, the 18 th-century concept of
the homme machine is resuscitated, this time devoid of the Enlightenment
implications of rationality and precision.
Without being aware of Wordsworth’s pejorative portrait of London in the (then
unpublished) 1805 version of The Prelude, Dickens, proves to be at his most
Wordsworthian, when, on the one hand, he introduces Mrs. Jarley’s waxworks into
The Old Curiosity Shop, and when, on the other, he depicts the Smithfield livestock
market as the nucleus of urban chaos in Oliver Twist (1838). While the scene with
Mrs. Jarley’s life-like figures, which make the young ladies in Baker Street scream
and confuse Mary Queen of Scots with Lord Byron (hardly a compliment for the wax
figure sculptor), elicits laughter, the depiction of Smithfield in Oliver Twist reflects
Dickens’s concern about the moral and ecological risks that man is willing (or
doomed) to take in these congested urban areas. While Henry Mayhew’s compilation
of newspaper articles London Labour and the London Poor (1851) concentrates on
and pinpoints the glaring economic imbalances of rampant capitalism, Dickens never
loses sight of the fact that the problems of Victorian urban life are multi-faceted,
constituting an intricate web of economic, moral, ecological and sanitary threads.
When Sikes and Oliver approach the city, the first thing that perplexes and
intimidates the boy is the noise and the traffic, both of which rapidly swell “into a roar
of sound and bustle” (Oliver Twist, 171). Dickens makes use of a whole semantics of
the auditory to convey the unthought-of din of the metropolis, the “tumult of
discordant sounds,” and to make plausible the fact that Oliver’s “amazement” (171) is
not only astonishment, but most of all the loss of orientation in a labyrinthine
confusion, in the maze of the streets.
The description of the market morning that, in its glaring colours and deafening
noises, takes up a long, enumerative paragraph of the narrative reveals the
compellingly early modern heritage in Dickens’s texts. The focus on the “filth and

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mire,” on the “thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle,” in
conjunction with the sooty fog, “which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops” (171),
is, however, a clear evidence of Dickens’s awareness of the ecological damage that
appears to go hand in hand with commercial prosperity. But what is even more
threatening is that, in Smithfield, man is not only dragged into an ecological disaster,
but that he/she is absorbed into a swamp in which ontological boundaries have
ceased to exist and in which everything is enveloped in a dense pall of dirt, odour
and noise. Dickens seems to agree that the “great foul city of London,” which Ruskin
disparaged as “a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every
pore,” (Porter, 341) threatened not only man’s health (as it did during the Great Stink
of 1858), but that it also endangered the foundations of man’s existence: his
environment, his natural habitat and the myth of his theomorphic identity. In order to
convey the dizzyingly degenerative process which reduces man (a chequered
assortment of “butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers and vagabonds of
every low grade,” 171) to the level of bleating sheep and squealing pigs, Dickens (like
Wordsworth before him) reverts to the stylistic device of the vertiginous list and
exposes his readers to an overwhelming catalogue of nouns and participles which is
meant to erase the distinction between the species:2 the “discordant din” (171) blurs
the difference between drovers, oxen, sheep and pigs and transforms the scene into
what, from a more distanced perspective, Wordsworth called a noisy “ant-hill” (VII,
149).
In the same way that London’s towers and theatres disturbingly merged with
nature in Wordsworth’s 1802 poem, culture, in Dickens’s novels, proves to be
vexingly susceptible to inroads of nature, to onsets of a nature which has lost its
Romantic sublimity and turned vindictive. There is no denying that Wordsworth’s
concept of nature is compounded of two sides, beauty and fear, and that for reasons
of edification, she (nature is always gendered feminine) “may use / Severer
interventions” (I, 355), but nonetheless Wordsworth leaves his readers in no doubt
that nature is intertwined with man, that communication between nature and the
Romantic hero has never come to a halt: “the earth / And common face of Nature
spake to me / Rememberable things” (I, 586–88). By contrast, Uriah Heep, the
uncanny horse whisperer, the Jew Fagin and Daniel Quilp, Nell’s repellent

2
For Umberto Eco’s idea of the dizzying proliferation of things in Dickens, cf. Orestano, 205–14.

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succubus,3 are, due to their ghastly liminality, the emissaries of a malicious,

detrimental and corrosive nature. While Uriah Heep is not only persistently compared
to animals and reptiles (as a bat foreshadowing the parasitical Count Dracula), he is
also characterised by an enormous degree of natural porosity, especially when his
fingers leave snail-like traces on the pages of the books that he seems to peruse. In
the case of Fagin, the image of a monstrously porous and retaliatory nature is even
more evident. To make this natural implication visible, Dickens deploys a whole
battery of figurative language when, on a “chill, damp [and] windy night” (153) he has
Fagin leave his bestial den, which is not on the rural outskirts, but right in the heart of
London. That his “shrivelled body” (153) neatly fits into the atmosphere of dampness
and oozing liquidity is a clear sign that he is capable of mimicry, that he knows how to
keep his body invisible in the rain that is falling “sluggishly down.” The fact that Fagin
“glide[s] stealthily along” (153) like a water-snake is a Dickensian foray into the
fantastic, into the Gothic novel which the Victorian novel is not only closely affiliated
with, but to a certain degree, a translation of into 19th-century realism. But apart from
the mere evocation of the uncanny, there is more to Dickens’s use of the fantastic
and the Gothic: the fact that Fagin’s shrivelled body is associated with a “loathsome
reptile” (153) prowling the streets of London conveys the alarming idea that culture is
always threatened by nature running riot, that nature, in the shape of hideous
mutations or Frankensteinian monsters, might strike back and take fierce revenge on
the various tamers of shrewish nature.
Considering the fact that Victorian literature is teeming with monsters, imps, goblin
men and other eerie freaks of nature (cf. Goetsch, 126–28), the reader is invited to
account for these striking intrusions of the monstrous by taking an ecocritical
perspective: the more nature is repressed, domesticated, explicated and made
subservient to technology, the more the hideous residues and mutilations of nature
will take on a life of their own. The enormous pride that the Victorians took in London
as the hub of modern metropolitan life and especially in the Crystal Palace as the
manifestation of steely technological prowess was thus constantly jeopardised by
harbingers of a porous, malicious and freakish nature, by mutations that in the post-
modern form of multi-resistant germs or virulent diseases still wreak havoc in our
times. In order to stress the Jew’s radical otherness and the ecological catastrophe
that produced him (a detail that was deeply interwoven with Victorian phantasms of

3
For a consideration of Nell as the “object of sexual interest to Quilp,” cf. Bowen, 138.

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anti-Semitism), the Jew is compared to a monster that was born in a process of

abiogenesis, “engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved” (153).
As David Paroissien proves, this passage is clearly indebted to a Romantic text, to
Lord Byron’s verse drama Cain, where Lucifer tells Cain that the man's poor
attributes are made to suit “[r]eptiles engendered out of the subsiding / Slime of a
mighty universe” (Dickens, OT, 506n). The horrors that modern cities seem to have in
store for man are thus regularly visualised by the recourse that 19th-century authors
have to what Mary Shelley had termed the “workshop of filthy creation”
(Frankenstein, 55).
Dickens resorts to Byron’s dark and gloomy fantasies about primordial nature
while Wordsworth (unbeknownst to Dickens in the late 1830s) sums up his disgust at
the (human) perversions of nature in the contradictory image of a “Parliament of
Monsters” (VII, 718), an oxymoronic image that conflates political culture with the
nightmarish idea of its monstrous parody. In order to convey his feelings of nausea at
the manifold “freaks of nature” (VII, 715)—from the “[d]umb proclamations of the
Prodigies” to the “chattering monkeys” (VII, 693f.), the buffoons, the dwarfs and the
“learned Pig” (VII, 708)—, Wordsworth depicts Bartholomew Fair itself, with its tents
and booths, as a devouring monster, as a mill that after consuming its visitors
unceremoniously throws them up again. For the Romantic poet, Bartholomew Fair is
not only the symbol of a modern trivialised and hybridised city, it also epitomises the
return to the state of primeval existence where life was just as nondescript and of a
pulpy uniformity as the monstrous crabs that H.G. Wells’s time traveller envisages at
the end of his Time Machine (1895): “the same perpetual whirl / Of trivial objects,
melted and reduced / To one identity, by differences / That have no law, no meaning,
and no end” (VII, 725–28). For both Wordsworth and Dickens the city is a
treacherous thing: beneath its lurid colours and attractively fashionable garments it is
scarcely more than a deformed lump, an incessant vortex in which all ontological
demarcation lines become horrifyingly blurred. No matter whether it is London or
other imaginary cities and towns such as Mudfog, urban structures in the works of
19th-century writers are imagined as gigantic sponges that absorb all sorts of beings,
retain them in their porous, web-like substances only to release them to assail
civilisation and to aid and abet ruthlessly destructive nature.
Whilst the time-honoured antagonism between nature and civilisation, between the
city and the countryside was fuelled by the Romantics, the ecological combat was

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aggravated to such an extent in Victorian novels that nature more often than not
turned sadistic and tried to ambush man in a final showdown. Even though the term
‘ecology’ was coined by the Darwinist Ernst Haeckel as late as in 1866 (Reinhard,
404), mid-Victorian writers already sensed that the old balance between man and
nature was contested and in dire need of re-negotiation. In her 1848 novel Jane
Eyre, Charlotte Brontë sheds an interesting light on the relationship between man
and nature, when she reveals nature not as benign and communicative, but rather as
treacherous and collusive with death. In lurid contrast both to the semantic field of
maternity and to the idea of spring as a time of regeneration (reverdie), the beauty of
the vernal countryside, the locus amoenus, is suddenly and shockingly unmasked as
a hotbed of typhoid fever; as “the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence” (89) and in
deceptive collusion with the “quickening spring,” nature, as a false and insidious
mother, breathes typhus into the school dormitory. It might be too far-fetched to
ascribe this sceptical view of nature to Charlotte Brontë’s intellectual engagement
with the darkish works of Lord Byron, but there is no denying that Byron’s radical
deconstruction of nature certainly had a sustained impact on Victorian novelists and
that his disenchanting poems from “Darkness” to Don Juan ushered in a new form of
realism which was unprecedented and out of tune with what was generally
considered to be Wordsworthian or “positive” Romanticism.4 Byron’s ruthless ways of
unveiling nature as being unsympathetic, crude and inimical to man not only takes
Wordsworth’s short-lived disillusion in “The World is Too Much with Us” to extremes,
but it also suggests that Romantic notions of ecology (including a radical recourse to
vegetarianism) have become subservient to the idea of a nature that savagely
“gnaw[s]” man to the resolution of becoming a brutish transgressor and cannibal
(Byron, “Don Juan,” II l. 75, 598).

2. Ecological Dystopias
Byron’s warped idea of ecology, his lop-sided view of nature as terrifyingly sublime
and apocalyptic (in line with Beddoes’s, Martin’s and Mary Shelley’s dark visions of
the last man in the universe), is subjected by Dickens to a more balanced and
complex view of nature. Man and nature seem to be locked in a more complicated
and variable relationship of being the victim and the victimiser than in Byron’s and
other Romantics’ poetry. While nature seems to produce monstrosities like Fagin,

4
For the old categorisation of “positive” and “negative” Romanticism, cf. Peckham, 5–23.

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Heep and Quilp to checkmate man and to subvert his achievements of civilisation,
Dickens also gives his readers a whole array of characters that seem to be intent on
domesticating, manipulating and destroying nature, on giving the balance between
man and nature a dangerous tilt. This ecological perspective was lost on most of
Dickens's contemporaries who, in the wake of Byron, defined nature in terms of
uncouthness, as something in dire need of cultivation and who, like Oscar Wilde,
were only ready to bear with nature when it was embellished, artificialised (“green
lacquer leaves of the ivy,” The Picture of Dorian Gray, 10) and even humanised. By
leaving out the aspect of nature and environment altogether, mid-20th-century studies
such as Jerome H. Buckley’s The Victorian Temper (1951) or Walter Houghton’s The
Victorian Frame of Mind (1957) seem to insinuate that an awareness of ecology was
non-existent in the Victorian age, recent publications such as Allen MacDuffie’s book
on Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (2014), however,
underline the fact that questions of environmental damage, loss of energy and
pollution were indeed addressed by many authors from Dickens and Ruskin to
Stevenson and Wells.
While MacDuffie is more interested in the “global problem of energy and
irreversibility” (131), as it is touched upon in Our Mutual Friend, the 1848 novel
Dombey and Son tackles the issue of ecology from the assumption that there is a
binary opposition between nature and the world of machines, the latter benefiting
from the boost of the Blakean dark “Satanic mills” (“Milton,” l. 27) and man’s longing
for mobility. In what looks like a losing battle for nature, swathes of devastation are
cut across the countryside by the thrusting iron engines of the railway. Elevated on to
an allegorical level, Mr. Dombey’s train journey is shown as the modern and
mechanised equivalent of the old danse macabre: while in the early modern age
death is represented in the guise of a fiddler leading a long train of people into the
abysmal grave, in Dickens’s novel, it is the piercingly transgressive power of the
engines that in their steely monstrosity drag “living creatures of all classes, ages, and
degrees behind” them (297–98). To what extent Dickens’s dance of death is also
sexualised is clear from the fact that the modern triumph of the death-inflicting railway
is represented as a ruthless act of rape. When the engine burrows its way through
the “damp earth,” “plunging down into it” (298) with deafening shrieks and roars, it not
only encroaches upon all the (feminine) elements that were traditionally used in
pastoral poetry, the heath, the orchard and the garden; what is conveyed to the

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Victorian reader is that the encounter between industrialisation and nature can
scarcely be imagined other than in terms of sexual violence and rape. More than a
generation prior to Émile Zola’s anthropomorphisation of railway engines in La bête
humaine (1890), Dickens conflates iconographies of death and patriarchal violence in
the image of a fiercely devastating railway engine. The ecological (and sexual)
consequences for the traditionally female earth are apocalyptic: “Everything around is
blackened. There are dark pools of water, muddy lanes and miserable habitations far
below” (299). While in the programmatic preface to her novel Felix Holt, the Radical
(1866), George Eliot visualises travelling as a futuristic shuttle service, in which
people are bandied to and fro in something like a pneumatic tube system, Dickens is
(literally) more down to earth and alert to the fact that mobility cannot be thought of
without ecological havoc and the ruthless rape of the earth by the accelerated dance
of death in the guise of progress.
Like painters such as J.M.W. Turner who wavered between their fascination for
the velocity of trains and a feeling of revulsion at engines that were said to appear
like threatening and disturbing centipedes in their landscapes, Dickens, who came to
be almost absorbed in the vortex of the modern danse macabre in the 1865
Staplehurst crash, never tired of voicing his distrust of the railway and its footprints of
“remorseless Death” while showing a kind of “complicity with the engine’s relentless
advance”(Douglas-Fairhurst, 173). Revising his monumental poetic autobiography
around the time of the publication of Dombey and Son, Wordsworth seems to turn a
blind eye to the disastrous effects of industrialisation and prefers to marginalise
ecological issues by relegating them to his shorter occasional poetry. In his 1844
sonnet “On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway,” he vaguely associates
the project of the railway with a “rash assault” and admonishes nature, apostrophised
as “thou beautiful romance / Of nature,” to raise its “constant voice” and to protest
against the intrusion of technology (Miscellaneous Sonnets, XLV). Pitted against his
earlier and more idealistic poetry, this sonnet is comparatively weak and reveals the
awkward position of the aged Poet Laureate, wandering, like Arnold, between two
worlds and looking wistfully at the lost myth of uncontested nature.
As long as ecological problems did not reach and threaten the Lake district,
Wordsworth employs the strategy of ignoring them and arranging his biography as a
circuitous journey, as a return from the debased city to the unviolated haven of
Grasmere: “escaped / From the vast city, where I long had pined / A discontented

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sojourner […] till choice was made / of a known Vale whither my feet should turn” (I,
6–8 / 71–72). Unlike the parochial Wordsworth, Dickens follows in the footsteps of
Victorian contemporaries such as Samuel Sidney who turned their backs on
industrialised Britain and tried to re-cast exotic places such as Australia as a 19th-
century Arcady revisited, where “every striving man who rears a race of industrious
children, may sit under the shadow of his own vine and fig-tree” (Lansbury, 75). In the
final chapters of David Copperfield, Dickens has his social misfits start a new life in
Australia, where neither the moral restrictions of Grundyism nor the ecological taints
of civilisation exist. Wanting to keep his idealised image of Australia unimpaired by
the grim reality of Magwitch and his companions Dickens declined all invitations to
visit a place which had the unfortunate reputation of being the meeting point for
criminals of all sorts (Schlicke, 27-28). Unaware of texts such as Eliza Hamilton
Dunlop’s poem “The Aboriginal Mother (from Myall’s Creek),” which had been
published in the Australian in 1838 and which thematised the massacre of some thirty
unarmed aborigines by European stockmen (Forché and Wu, 390), Dickens depicts
Australia as a utopian island where the “English steel” (l. 12) threatens neither nature
nor human beings’ bodies. The utopian character of Dickens’s image of Australia is
even enhanced by a twofold fiction, by fictitious letters in a novel, by unreliable
narrations that are transmitted by dropouts and liminal figures such as Mr. Peggotty
or Mr. Micawber, the latter being especially notorious for his flamboyant, but
fabricated stories.
Dickens’s utopia abruptly turns into a dystopia at the very moment when the oral
accounts and the myths of Arcadian places are suddenly juxtaposed with their crude
reality; it is only then that Dickens finds his desire to escape to (non-) European
places thwarted and the illusion of untouched nature translated into the lurid colours
of a realism that adumbrates later naturalist pessimism. Since the England of mid-
Victorian times was too firmly in the grip of the Murdstones, who destroy the young
protagonist’s ideal of a paradisiacal garden and even try to enforce a pedagogical
fundamentalism, Dickens seems to be on the lookout for alternative worlds where the
ecological equilibrium has not been upset. The feeble hope that America might be
the golden age revisited was soon destroyed by William Blake in his visionary poem
“America,” where Albion is described as being “sick” and America as being on the
point of fainting (l. 21). What, for Dickens, proved to be even worse, however, was
not so much that America was the stage of apocalyptic battle (whose ecological

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chaos was caused by leprous Urizen)5 as that it turned out to be a place where
nature and man were on an equal footing in their barbarism. While 20th-century critics
such as Gregory Bateson start from the assumption that the relationship between
man and nature is a dynamic one and that culture is to be defined as an evolutionary
adaptation of nature (referring to the “curious homology whereby the engine is
located in the front of the automobile, where the horse used to be,” Bateson, 253), 6
most Victorians were to think of nature in terms of an entity that had to be colonised.
Even for Dickens who always had a less imperialist stance towards nature than
most of his contemporaries the shock must have been tremendous, when he found
himself faced with a country in which man was afflicted by the same lack of
containment as oozing nature was and ecology was just synonymous with a brutal
“ecocentric naturalism” (cf. Abram). The antagonistic relationship between man and
nature which characterises the staple works of Victorian literature seems, in
Dickens’s American Notes, to give way to the idea of a collusion in which ignoble
savages and inhabitants in the likeness of Swift’s Yahoos betray their pretensions to
civilisation by wallowing in filth and yellowish sputum. Not only from an ecological
point of view is Dickens’s travelogue a rigorous repudiation of idealised notions which
both the Romantics and his friend Wilkie Collins entertained of America. The
disenchanting mirror which Dickens holds up to the several warped images of
America deconstructs not only the Romantic myth of the colonies and their rebellious
“Thirteen Angels,” (Blake, “America,” l. 113) but also the stereotypical ideas of the
rough, lonesome and honest hero with which Collins dallies in his sensational
characterisation of the scalped Matthew Grice in Hide and Seek (1854). In Dickens’s
writings, the long cherished idea of heterotopic America and its incorruptible frontier
hero is eventually supplanted by a growing pessimism in which the dark sides of
ecology and anthropology are disturbingly conflated.
The trip on the Mississippi to Cairo is just one case in point: foreshadowing Joseph
Conrad’s late Victorian novel Heart of Darkness (1899), Dickens’s voyage is a
descent into the hell of primitivism where man no longer tries to domesticate nature
but allows himself to be debased and absorbed by it. It is this extreme form of
resignation and ‘letting go’ that the Victorians dreaded most when they showed man

5
“His stored snows he poured forth, and his icy magazines / He opened on the deep, and on the
Atlantic sea,” “America,” ll. 212–13.
6
Cf. also Zapf, 253–58.

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exposed to tribal life and the laws of uncultivated nature. Surrounded by foulness and
seepage and travelling on the Mississippi as on the back of a "slimy monster,"
(American Notes, 190) Dickens is at one point even compelled to drink the “muddy
water of this river” (191). This drinking of the “opaque gruel” (191), which the native
Americans consider to be wholesome, is more than just a daunting medical
experiment; it is a symbol of the insidious way American anti-civilisation seizes hold
of old-world man and instils the hellish germs of retrogressive nature into him.
The gigantic bog and ecological dead-end location that the American Dream of
colonisation seems to be drowning in are expanded on in the America chapters in
Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). In order to pinpoint the ecological and anthropological
horrors of the former colonies, Dickens, via his narrator, not only reverts to the
Swiftian image of the trough from which the Americans feed in a Yahoo-like manner,
he also maliciously shows the American Eden for what it really is: a monotonous
expanse of land which is intertextually meant to remind the reader of “the grim
domains of Giant Despair” in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress:
A flat morass, bestrewn with fallen timber; a marsh on which the good
growth of the earth seemed to have been wrecked and cast away, that
from its decomposing ashes vile and ugly things might rise; where the very
trees took the aspect of huge weeds, begotten of the slime from which
they sprung, by the hot sun that burnt them up; where fatal maladies,
seeking whom they might infect, came forth, at night, in misty shapes, and
creeping out upon the water, hunted them like spectres until day; where
even the blessed sun, shining down on festering elements of corruption
and disease, became a horror; this was the realm of Hope through which
they moved. (MC, 360)

For the ironic evocation of the place called Eden, Dickens has recourse to a variety of
natural phenomena which are linked to pseudo-scientific and mythological lore. Four
years later, in Dombey and Son, Dickens will repeatedly refer to the phoenix in a
rather tongue-in-cheek manner, but in America the phoenix has lost all satirical
implications and has taken on the shape of monsters, “vile and ugly things,” that rise
from the “decomposing ashes.” As in Oliver Twist, the theme of abiogenesis seems
to be paramount in Dickens’s mind: the “slime” is not only the incubator of monstrous
births and of luxuriously rank vegetation, it is also the basis of his 19 th-century belief
in miasma whose contagiousness was seen as the fountainhead of diseases such as
cholera and typhoid fever. What the "blessed sun" shines on and eventually helps to
bring forth stands not only in blatant contrast to the imagery of procreation in John

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Keats’s ode “To Autumn” (1819)—the “maturing sun” (l. 2)—, but is a form of
“corruption and disease” that, from an ecological point of view, reveals Dickens as an
unflinching precursor of Baudelaire and his shocking nostalgie de la boue.7 The latter
(without taking heed of the British novelist) dedicates an entire poem of his Fleurs du
mal (1859), “Une charogne,” to a rotting piece of carcass which the scorching sun
metamorphoses into various stages of decomposition.
The Eden that Dickens conjures up is thus a sarcastic misnomer, with the post-
diluvian references—“[t]he waters of the Deluge might have left it but a week before”
(360)—making it patently clear that the American paradise is synonymous with hell,
with an ecological waste in which “slime and matted growth” make all attempts at
civilisation futile. While his Victorian contemporaries are expected to sneer at the
Americans’ abortive endeavours to tame and colonise nature, and might especially
decry the “tottering” building of the Bank and National Credit Office which was
gradually being sucked into the primordial mud, Dickens seems to insinuate that the
“jungle” was not confined to the wilderness of America, but could easily infiltrate into
the modern metropolises of Europe. The “fetid vapour” and the slimy “black ooze”
(363) are, thus, apart from being components that bring forth figures such as Fagin,
also characteristics of the Thames which winds through London and, with its corpses
and putrid matter in Our Mutual Friend (1865), is ecologically on a par with the
Mississippi (cf. Ackroyd, 551–52).
With “eco-catastrophes” looming large and lurking everywhere, Dickens mitigates
the dire consequences of his scenarios and more often than not adopts the blinkered
view of Wordsworth, when, as MacDuffie complains, he either shifts to “an allegorical
mode” by the end of Our Mutual Friend or leaves his readers with “the unsatisfying
idea that middle-class marriage makes possible some kind of clean, untapped,
uncompromised energy source” (136). The only (non-European) place where
Dickens’s quest for Romantic nature does not meet with immediate disappointment is
Canada, which at the time of Dickens’s visit was still British territory (“British
Possessions,” AN, 222) and which, one generation prior to Rudyard Kipling’s
veneration of Canada as a clean and virginal country, accorded the hitherto
Smelfungian traveller a short spell of Wordsworthian worship of nature (Lennartz,
145–61). Listening to the language of the thundering water at the Niagara Falls and

7
Isabel Vila-Cabanes pinpoints Baudelaire’s proximity to Dickens, but focuses more on the metropolis than on
nature, 108–20.

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interpreting the moisture of the spray in terms of the “Heavenly promise” of “angels’
tears” (AN, 220), Dickens temporarily seems to have found a retreat where an
ecological balance between man and nature is still possible. The diction that Dickens
uses clearly has a Wordsworthian ring to it, and in striking contrast to the supercilious
distance that he preserves for American places, Dickens is for the first time
overwhelmed and drawn to the language of the Romantic sublime:
Then, when I felt how near to my Creator I was standing, the first effect,
and the enduring one—instant and lasting—of the tremendous spectacle,
was Peace. Peace of Mind: Tranquility: Calm recollections of the Dead:
Great Thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness: nothing of Gloom or
Terror. (220)

“Gloom” and “Terror,” the latter of which has nothing to do with Ann Radcliffe’s
influential differentiation between claustrophobic horror and soul-expanding terror,
vanish and leave the mind open to the awe-inducing beauties of nature, which, as in
Wordsworth’s mystical spots of time, tip the ecological balance in favour of a self-
sufficient nature (with man in the humble role of a Caspar David Friedrichian
onlooker). The extent to which even this sacred place, “the very steps of Nature’s
greatest altar” (222), is jeopardised by man’s intrusion is clearly highlighted by the
fact that this sanctified scene is not exempt from “profanations” in the form of
obscene scribblings on the rocks. Given the sad fact that this temple of nature is
encroached upon by “human hogs” (222), Dickens is inclined to counterpoise the
Romantic “bliss of solitude” in nature with a Victorian alertness to the anthropological
problems of the 19th century. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the Romantic passages
of the American Notes with their references to the speaker’s purification in nature are
deleted in the fictionalised travelogue of Martin Chuzzlewit. Having been doomed to
run the whole gamut of anthropological and biological hell for a considerably long
time (including the obligatory spell among the nauseating tobacco chewers), Martin is
eventually transported to his Victorian homeland, deprived of the privilege of finding
the shelter and the ecological reprieve that figures such as David Copperfield find in
the abode of divine nature.

3. After-Thoughts
With Industrialisation in full swing, Dickens seems to be the first Victorian writer to
see that Romantic ecology and Victorian interests could hardly be reconciled.
Victorian concepts of progress and nature tend to contradict each other: nature is

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either violated by the Victorian hallmarks of civilisation or is shown to retaliate upon

the feats of technology and to drag man to its level of meanness and squalor. If there
had been an alliance between feminine nature and patriarchal culture, that bond, with
the Victorian age picking up speed, was on the point of being torn asunder; and in
the same way that, after the Romantic period, women were squeezed into carapaces
of steel and fish-bones and put into fashionable constructions that hardly allowed
them to breathe, nature was violated by or put into iron structures and opened up to
the brute force of phallic machines (Munich, 62; Zweig, 91).
In the wake of Blake’s radical poetry, which Dickens was apparently not
conversant with, but which seems to reverberate in novels such as Oliver Twist,
where Harry Maylie thinks about social stratification in terms of fancy and “mind-
forg’d manacles,” Dickens voices his distrust of the metropolis London and envisages
the British capital in terms of both a magic lantern and in what Wordsworth abhorred
as the epitome of confusion. In his autobiographical novel David Copperfield
(published in the same year as Wordsworth’s revised Prelude),8 Dickens seems to be
so disappointed at the rift that was gaping between nature and culture in Britain that
he leaves us in no doubt that his protagonist has to leave Victorian England and its
“Parliament of Monsters.” In Switzerland, in the sublime region of the Alps, he is
painfully made aware of the fact that right up to his pilgrimage, to his re-definition of
the Romantic Grand Tour, he had been impervious to the language of nature,
suffering from ecological illiteracy: “If those awful solitudes had spoken to my heart, I
did not know it” (820). In passages like these, as in various passages in Bleak House,
Dickens is closer to Wordsworth than one might have thought. Despite their
conspicuous ecological illiteracy, protagonists such as David and Esther Summerson
are suddenly made aware of special spots of time, of epiphanic moments in which
the characters see through the fabric of phenomenological reality and detect a
language that lies beyond mere words.9
While “the dread heights and precipices,” the “roaring torrents, and the wastes of
ice and snow” in David Copperfield (821) are scarcely more than a Romantic
backdrop, a cultural citation showing Dickens's awareness of the long tradition of the

8
Dickens even owned a copy of the revised 1850 Prelude (see Slater, 316)
9
Cf. Bleak House, Chapter 31, where Esther Summerson is suddenly made aware of a
Wordsworthian spot of time: “the feeling with that spot and time, and with everything associated with
that spot and time," (485). Dickens’s reading of Wordsworth is quite evident here. For this hint I am
indebted to Ian Duncan, who gave a fabulous close-reading of this passage in Vechta.

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 Norbert Lennartz. Charles Dickens: The Romantic Heritage

sublime since Ann Radcliffe’s novels, there is a solemnity in nature, a highly charged
language (transmitted either by the Swiss shepherds or by an almost apocalyptic
London) that suddenly alert David and Esther to a lingua franca which seems to have
been lost in their Victorian environment, the language of “great Nature” (DC, 821).
Without disclosing what nature has imparted to them, Esther and David have learnt
lessons which they had completely ignored in their biographies: the closing of the
gap between feminine nature and masculine culture by lifting the Victorian ban on
tears, porousness and feeling.
Resting his weary head on the grass, David eventually succumbs to the urge to
shed tears and weeps “as [he] had not wept yet, since Dora died!” (821). Although
David clearly points out that he has “sought out Nature, never sought in vain” (822,
and thus re-emphasises his indebtedness to Wordsworth), he returns to England
(notably on “a wintry autumn evening,” 825) to re-negotiate his affiliations with
Romanticism and its fusion of ecology and dialectics. Given the fact that autumn in
the Romantic age resonates with connotations of decline and rejuvenation, David—
like Esther—seems to have imbibed the principles of a new moral ecology: that the
rotten and stagnant elements have to be lopped off so that growth of the
protagonist’s mind will not be stunted. But as Dickens’s later darker novels show, the
ecological and moral aspects of the Romantic heritage were difficult to preserve in
the burgeoning hard times of rampaging capitalism, environmental damage and
looming railway catastrophes.

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