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H. G. Wells's Plant Plot: Horticulture and Ecological Narration in The Time Machine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2019

Mary Bowden
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Extract

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) imagines the environmental consequences of two important Victorian horticultural trends: artificial selection and selective breeding. Victorian horticulturalists glorified these techniques as steps toward the subjugation of the natural environment. This horticultural narrative of environmental control seemingly reaches its apex in the novel's future world of 802,701: Wells's Time Traveller believes he has entered an environment perfectly engineered to suit human needs. While critical attention has typically focused on the novel's humans, I use its engagement with contemporary horticulture to describe a plant-centered plotline. Building on critical work that argues for the possibility of nonhuman narrative agency, I read the novel's plants as minor characters. I argue that Wells's novel pits its plant and human characters against one another in competing plotlines, in a narrative refraction of ecological competition. Earlier ecocritical analyses of Victorian works have pointed to the harmonious entanglement of humans with the nonhuman vegetal environment. I argue that ecological competition, as exemplified both in horticultural narratives’ descriptions of environmental subjugation and in Wells's competing plant and human plots, was also a significant source of inspiration for Victorian environmental depictions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , Fall 2019 , pp. 603 - 628
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

I wish to thank Ivan Kreilkamp, Monique Morgan, the editors of Victorian Literature and Culture, and the journal's anonymous reviewer for their generous and incisive comments on this piece.

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