Chapter 4 - The 1850s Sustainability Novel

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.