The introduction provides an outline of the so-called acoustic turn of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when emerging scientific constructions of sound and its movement through the material world rendered that world audible in new and exciting ways. It argues that the new acoustic culture of the nineteenth century raised questions as to what lay beyond the limits of the human ear or scientific instrument and pointed to the existence of an inaccessible, intangible space between sound and silence, whose boundaries could not be measured and were always inherently unstable. That space, beyond the limited powers of human sensitivity, was a rich source of scientific, literary, and broader cultural reflection throughout the period. I delineate the volume’s progression through a series of auditory thresholds, each of which was brought to prominent scientific or medical attention in the period while becoming the subject of literary response and experimentation.

John Ruskin and Karl Marx – two heterodox economic thinkers writing in England in the 1860s – both considered production, circulation, and exchange in relation to the natural environment. After first discussing the imbrication of the economic and the ecological in their work, this chapter turns to George Eliot’s Felix Holt [GK19](1866) and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm [GK20](1861–62) to explore points of intersection between heterodox economic thought and literary realism. Focusing on soil fertility, an issue that evokes the uses of water, soil, and manure in service of capitalism, the chapter shows that Eliot and Trollope trace the ways in which ownership, labor, or trade transforms humans’ relations to animals, plants, and landscapes. Heterodox economic thought and literary realism in the 1860s took into account historical dimensions of the natural world, especially its economic involvement.