This chapter contends that early Victorian authors often reformulated pastoral modes in ways that disclosed anxieties about unprecedented environmental, sociopolitical, demographic, and technological change. Employing what I would like to call pastoral ecocriticism, I argue for pastoral’s enduring power, not as an archaic poetic mode centred on idyllic imaginings, but as the principal form through which western authors and artists have addressed the problematical relationship between definitions of culture and nature. I turn to four early Victorian novels which are keenly aware of industry and other ‘urban’ phenomena in ‘rural’ areas: Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839), Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). They demonstrate the position of the British countryside within an international network of capitalist economic and environmental exploitation, substantiating John Miller’s claim that ‘the Victorian period is a pivotal stage in the nexus of ecological and political violence’. Under economic, social, and environmental pressure, traditional pastoral contrasts between rural (good) and urban (bad) break down in revealing ways. The novels undermine impulses towards simplistic pastoral idylls (representations of harmonious rural communities clearly distinct from their world-weary urban counterparts), instead finding in rural societies conflict and inequality, but also opportunity, diversity, and change. They reveal complex intersections between villages, towns, and cities (such as the presence of industries and crafts, the influence of city culture, and traffic between urban and rural) which traditional pastoral is incapable of representing.

Divisions between urban and rural were pressurised, and often rendered meaningless, by intensified capitalist networks of environmental violence and technological control that were clearly evident in the countryside. While small-scale industrial activity has long characterised rural economies, the tendency of conservative forms of pastoral to idealise agricultural life often obscures the farm labour that sustains both countryside and city, while also pushing other rural economic activities to the representational peripheries. Although strongly focused on the social life of agricultural communities, these novels, set in periods from 1799 to 1839, focus on the expanding rural industries, industrial workers, and labour migrations, and are sometimes aware of the environmental impacts of mining, quarrying, metalworking, and milling. Reflecting the changing Victorian and pre-Victorian countryside, and the varied state of its economic activities, they undercut the long-standing and illusory myth that the countryside rests on cultivation of land alone.