Fog, Coal, Capitalism: Dickens's Energy Atmospherics and the Anthropocene

Fog, Coal, CapitalismDickens's Energy Atmospherics and the Anthropocene Thomas A. Laughlin (bio) Life—in interaction with the existing environment—created the atmosphere as we know it. Life exists only in the lower regions of the sky and upper regions of the soil and ocean. An interrelationship between living and nonliving materials within the biosphere produces a cycling of chemical elements. Thus the history of life and the biosphere is a story of coevolution.1 London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.2 "Implacable November weather," but not just in Bleak House (1852–53) or November. The weather is often implacable in Dickens. Near the midpoint of Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), the narrator informs us, "It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark."3 But Dickens's fog is never just fog. Through a reading of key passages from the novels mentioned above and Hard Times (1854), this article argues that Dickens's fog accrues multiple meanings through a series of implied associations or metonymic links, which depict the atmosphere as a flash point in larger metabolic exchanges between nature and society, creating a new urban biogeocoenosis and fragile life-earth balance.4 [End Page 132] The effect of human activity on this life-earth balance and especially on the atmosphere looms large over Dickens's work. In Bleak House, the fog mixes with "smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes"5; and in Our Mutual Friend, it makes "London … a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither."6 In both cases fog and soot conspire to block out the light, as if the sky (Bleak House again) had "gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun."7 Dickens's reference to "the death of the sun" invokes exaggerated fears in Victorian era about the so-called heat death of the universe, which it was claimed would result from using up the sun's energy. As Allen MacDuffie explores in Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (2015), heat death was often tied in the Victorian imaginary to concerns about entropy and the depletion of the earth's resources, particularly coal.8 Thus, while Dickens's sooty fogs are, on the surface, relatively mimetic (verisimilar) renderings of the effects of coal consumption on the urban atmosphere and environment (for example, through smoke pollution), they are, at the same time, shot through with a host of other connotations, which make them into conduits for fears associated in the Victorian mind with resource scarcity—what the Victorian political economist William Stanley Jevons termed "the coal question"—and also social-ecological entropy. The Dickensian atmosphere, through the sheer power of its ever-expanding connotations, is tied back, not just to the metaphorical ground of Victorian civilization, but also to the prehistory of the earth system, in which those fateful coal deposits discovered by the mining industry were first formed. The signifying power of the atmosphere in Dickens's novels works through these layered meanings, or metonymic associations, which are implied rather than spelled out on the surface of his works. Here, the fog connects but also obscures; the association is "divided in purpose between being visible and invisible." Charged with such nebulous meanings, the atmosphere suddenly flashes, in a kind of literary lightning strike, suggested images of a social-ecological totality indexed in suggestive ways to the Industrial Revolution and, with it, the rise of fossil fueled capitalism. These "sooty spectre[s]" of implied meaning, invoked here...