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Conclusion: The Afterlife of Climate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2016

Jessica Howell
Affiliation:
Wellcome Research Fellow, King's College London
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Summary

This book began with a puzzle – why did the climatic paradigm of disease hold sway for so long within the colonial imagination, even as germ theory was gaining a strong foothold? Why did writers travelling to the West Indies and Africa continue to blame the interaction between bodies and the environment for illness? Undoubtedly, the links between climate and racial science made the concept of ‘environmental pathology’ an especially incisive political tool, allowing those who wielded it to label entire regions as fatal to subjects of a specific race or ‘constitution’ and thereby to delimit groups of people within specific climate ‘zones’. However, as Mark Harrison observes, political reasons alone do not fully explain the ‘longevity’ of this conceptual system (1999: 206).

Analysis of five Victorian writers – Mary Seacole, Richard Burton, Africanus Horton, Mary Kingsley and Joseph Conrad – has shown how images of climate morphed and changed through the latter half of the nineteenth century. Authors such as Kingsley, Burton and Conrad create foreboding visions of clammy mist, rotting vegetation, dirty pools and ‘sickly’ sun, while writers of colour such as Seacole and Horton stress their familiarity with the secrets of their native landscapes. I have suggested that these authors continue to depict the subtle and shifting balance of heat and cold, wet and dry, long after these factors were no longer widely considered scientifically conclusive, in order to enhance their own writerly authority. Narratives of illness from the environment give credence to the speaker's own experience in ways that narratives of infection cannot. The ‘longevity’ of climate in the literature of Empire, therefore, shows that Victorian authors were not only concerned with containing risk, but also with unbinding it, allowing disease to float in the air or travel on the tides. To do so allowed them an expertise of ‘place’ that trumped any laboratory test. The lives and livelihoods of these individuals were embroiled with the continuing colonial project, which may help to explain why elements of germ theory were merely assimilated to meteorological explanations for disease during the fin de siècle.

However, authors continued to revisit and revise the colonial association of tropical environments with illness well into the twentieth century.

Type
Chapter
Information
Exploring Victorian Travel Literature
Disease, Race and Climate
, pp. 164 - 172
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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