Has there ever been something called the environment? And if so, what was it—before we destroyed it? Or again, and the reverse: when did the environment come into being? While the term, derived from the middle French “to surround,” dates in English to the seventeenth century, gaining force in the eighteenth, one version of our commonsensical notion of environment—as the physical milieu for biotic life—is definitively Victorian. The Oxford English Dictionary gives its birth year as 1855, and attributes it to Herbert Spencer.Footnote ¹ It was not until 1912 that Thomas Hardy would re-outfit his novelistic oeuvre by classifying some as “Novels of Character and Environment.” Yet in Hardy's Wessex Edition nomenclature, the term stands to mean not a ontologically complete or total nonhuman world, “the environment,” but the variable milieus—Flintcomb Ash, the Vale of Froom—that enable and constrain the human actors attempting to flourish in those particular zones. This pluralized notion of “environment” is the crystal of what Elizabeth Miller calls Hardy's “bioregional” project, and helped Hardy imagine how an organism like Tess Durbeyfield might or might not fit with a given ecosystem.Footnote ² Hardy's commitment to documenting the relation between organism and milieu takes shape, in Miller's words, as a “dialectical approach to human characters, the environment in which they live, and the complex, reciprocal relation between them,” and is generated from a post-Darwinian sense of human beings’ entanglement with forces and entities beyond themselves.Footnote ³

Hardy's work was to document the collapse of liberalism's fictions of autonomy under the pressure of evolutionary thought. But the notion of environment as a relatively fixed local milieu that determines human action is also what Annales School historian Fernand Braudel had in mind when, in the first section The Mediterranean (1949, 1966), he referred to “The Role of the Environment” in the social history of that region. For Braudel, environment names the “constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles” of nonhuman activity, where change is slow or absent and history is “almost timeless.”Footnote ⁴ “The mountains,” he says, “resist the march of history … or they accept it only with reluctance.”Footnote ⁵ Braudel's environment is a static or nearly static local backdrop, in dialogue with which human history might coevolve, but which human action cannot substantively change—a formulation that has cognates in the novelistic concept of “setting.” In this sense as an unchanging mise en scène, environment exists in tension with ecology, another Victorian term, which denotes a more robustly interactive collaboration among factors or agents in a system. As Vin Nardizzi has noted, thinkers like Michel Serres in the 1990s began to critique “environment” for its crypto-anthropocentrism and called on philosophy to “forget the word environment in this context.”Footnote ⁶ While working on Tess, Hardy himself gothically pointed to lack of reciprocal interaction between foreground and background in his model, when he recorded feeling “as if I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment.”Footnote ⁷

Whatever his existential dilemma, Hardy refers here to my environment, not the environment. That latter usage, “[f]requently with the,” the OED says, understands the environment as singular abstraction or ecological totality: “[t]he natural world or physical surroundings in general.”Footnote ⁸ This world-scaled abstraction was unavailable to Hardy in 1888 and even 1912, and arrives, we are told, only in the postwar moment, smack at the center of the period of vertiginous “growth” and rapidly gathering ecological catastrophe that environmental historians call the Great Acceleration: in 1948, the year of my parents’ birth.Footnote ⁹ Where did this environment come from? Timothy Mitchell argues that the interlinked disasters driven by the twentieth century's petroleum economy succeeded a Victorian scenario by which coal was extracted, distributed, and incinerated along networks connecting major cities by rail. By the 1970s, these Victorian practices of accumulation—fixed to physical limits, bound by established lines of connection—came to seem quaint against an emergent economic logic whereby petroleum traveled by tanker along variable routes, and in which the concept of growth itself had become unmoored from “spatial and material processes that had physical limits.” Instead, growth came to be conceived in relation to a new and theoretically limitless abstraction: “the economy.”Footnote ¹⁰ Mitchell shows how, for reasons too complex to detail here, this notion of “the economy” as a closed totality of monetary circulation generated countermovements, political and economic both, that culminated in the “production of the environment as a rival object of politics.”Footnote ¹¹ In this telling, “the environment” owes its roots to specific antagonisms over labor, capital, and energy access in the crisis period of early neoliberalism: it was a new abstraction vast enough to leverage against “the economy.” Baby boomers, caught as they were in the whirlwind of the Great Acceleration's money economy—which was, we might note, also the moment that established Victorian Studies as a discipline—thus succeeded in solidifying a notion of environment coextensive with something like “earth” or “nature” conceived as total system. Like the first Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency dates from 1970, when it was proposed as an entity able to manage items of legislation, like the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972), directed at more particular earth systems. And as the Great Acceleration accelerated, so too did this newly abstract environment: Google's NGram shows the sharpest spike for “the environment” between 1960 and 1975, after which point the definite-articled term levels off until the mid-1980s, when it shoots skyward again.

Published at the height of this new burst in 1983, Gillian Beer's masterful evaluation of Darwinian thought bears a snapshot of environment's conceptual history in its syntax. In Darwin's Plots, Beer summarized natural selection by noting that “the fitness of an individual to its environment” depended on a sense (contra Hardy) that “the environment is not monolithic or stable.”Footnote ¹² She continued: “we tend to think of the individual organism as dynamic and the environment as static—but the environment, being composed of so many more varied needs than the individual, is prone to unforeseeable and uncontrollable changes.”Footnote ¹³

Varied and changeful as it is here represented to be, “the environment” nevertheless receives the definite article: it is a container into which so many other local milieus might be subsumed. Beer's hesitation between “its” and “the” environment thus fixes into uneasy totality what the sentence argues to be plural and endlessly variable. This tension crystallizes the mismatch between, on the one hand, the argot of post-1970s environmental thought informing Beer's 1983 intervention and, on the other, the more plastic or pluralized dance between milieu and instance, background and foreground, animate “organism” and questionably animate milieu, that Charles Darwin himself had always imagined as “entangle[ment].” The twist is that the term “environment” appears not a single time in On the Origin of Species itself. Instead Darwin uses a plural term, “conditions,” which appears endlessly, and in multiple forms: as “surrounding conditions,” “physical conditions,” “conditions for … propagation,” and (most commonly) “conditions of life.”Footnote ¹⁴

To recover this definitional question as a problem for Victorian form, we might turn finally to Dickens, who in Our Mutual Friend (1865) translates into narrative opportunity the very conceptual difficulties in “environment” charted so far. That gothic study of systems and entropy folds its human and nonhuman worlds together only to prise them back apart, and vice versa. This interchange between foreground and background confirms Bruno Latour's insight that what he calls the work of purification, which establishes the living world of human culture and the inert or mechanistic domain of nonhuman nature as “entirely discrete ontological zones,” comes hand in hand with “work of translation,” which “creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids between nature and culture.”Footnote ¹⁵ Articulated skeletons, animate dolls, heaps of dust, dead bodies dragged from the river: in all these tropes and more, the novel crystallizes the play between the categories of thing and person, environment and character, nature and culture, a drama that plays out, as in Beer, at the level of syntax: here, the personal pronoun. Dead bodies, nearly obsessively, are denied it, and thus find themselves separated across a semantic divide from the world of the human characters who might participate in the sentimental melodrama of this marriage plot. “It was insensible,” notes Lizzie of her future husband Eugene Wrayburn, now floating as part of her environment in the Thames, “if not virtually dead; it was mutilated, and streaked the water all about it with dark red streaks. As it could not help itself, it was impossible for her to get it on board.”Footnote ¹⁶ But in Dickens’s heteronormative economy of redemption, it must be redeemed into he, and this appalling object does become human again. In charting this recuperative motion Dickens ratifies the humanism Latour calls “modern” thinking, but in so doing also names as problematic the very dilemma the term “environment” likewise identifies. I am referring to the transitional space between milieu and character, a variable line that both separates and connects the world of objects from the world of (human) subjects. In this sense Dickens’ experiment might spur us to convert our questions about “Victorian literature and the environment” into other, nimbler conceptual pairings: Victorian Cultures of Nature, say, or Nonhuman Victorians, or even, to channel Dickens and Darwin, The Conditions of (Victorian) Life.