Novel Environments: Science, Description, and Victorian Fiction tells two stories, one about the unification of many complex aspects of the world into the single abstraction “environment,” the other about the ways of writing and perceiving that bring that abstraction to life. Jayne Hildebrand argues that these two stories became a shared project organizing the interplay of fiction, biology, and social sciences in the nineteenth century. Drawing on the scientific theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes, Hildebrand traces a large conceptual arc that reimagined material surroundings not as conditions that organisms must endure but rather as the source and support of life. In seeking new descriptive practices to capture this porosity between life and its surroundings, writers across disciplines “articulated a shared interest in the nature of the object or entity we now call an environment,” which Hildebrand locates in the work of Mary Russell Mitford, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and, in the book's coda, twentieth-century immersive sound artists (4). From this body of work emerge “multiple competing frameworks for envisioning relations between living organisms and their surroundings, and between humans and the nonhuman world” (4). At stake in these multiple frameworks are not just historical questions about agency, determinism, and embodiment in the nineteenth century but also a more acute awareness of the singular abstraction the environment. Hildebrand shows the intellectual limitations of this singularization, arguing that it shoehorns the nonhuman world into a taxonomic order centered on human interests, either a resource for or the victim of human activity.
Hildebrand's analysis centers on the expanded presence of descriptive language in nineteenth-century British fiction. Hildebrand interprets this omnipresent but easily overlooked development in literary history as the result of fiction's formal engagement with environmental thought, which focused new attention onto the agencies and animacies filling ambient space. According to Hildebrand, Lamarck's account of a continuous reshaping of organisms in response to their surroundings kickstarts modern environmental imaginaries. The book's first chapter teases out the growing energy of evolutionary theory at the start of the nineteenth century. Mitford's little-studied but highly influential sketches of rural life in Our Village (1824–32) translate the logic of evolutionary theory into formal-aesthetic terms, which Hildebrand argues diffuses the forward movement of narrative into proliferating descriptions that relocate action not in linear sequences of events but rather in the confluence of disparate forces and elements that combine to create the condition of possibility for events to occur. The formal harmony Mitford establishes between seemingly unrelated features of her stories provides Hildebrand with a through line linking scientific theories, literature, and diverse popular practices such as greenhouse gardening. Hildebrand argues that this attachment to description helped bring about a wider attention to locale across literary and nonliterary writing. Drawing on Ian Duncan's distinction between the specificity of regional fiction and provincialism's generalized, abstract sense of place, Hildebrand shows how the generic conventions of provincial fiction play a role in how we still conceptualize environments. The second chapter contextualizes Eliot's Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1871) within Eliot's interdisciplinary social circle, which included some of the chief theorists of nineteenth-century biology. As these theorists ascribed new forms of animation to matter, Eliot's modes of characterization reflect a persistent yearning for character and medium to merge. With exceptional sensitivity to Eliot's trajectory as a novelist, Hildebrand tracks the evolution of the environment from a set of emotional affordances for individual characters in her earlier fiction into a psychic abstraction that serves as the given or shared ground on which life occurs in Middlemarch.
The later chapters constitute a separate stage in the book's argument. The analysis in the first part of the book shows description rising to meet the challenge of a world that refuses to respect bounded singularity. In the second part, the environment no longer names a challenge presented by the behavior of matter and has instead become an explanatory model—a new conceptual template for making sense of actual and fictional worlds. In the third chapter, Hildebrand offers a new account of Hardy's fascination with ecological relations in The Woodlanders (1887), arguing that Hardy seizes on scientific models of the environment as a conceptual framework for representing the memories, perceptions, and psychological projections that inflect an individual's experience of the surrounding world. This makes the environment a false coherence, which Hardy fragments into distinct “virtual environments” that shroud individuals in incommensurate and irreconcilable versions of external reality. The fourth chapter, focused on Stevenson, presses further on this problem of fragmented environments. Stevenson's adventure fiction narrates the imperial project of unifying global regions into a single system of planetary space. The hyperparticularity of enclosed islands in Stevenson's work yields to the homogenizing force of the environment as an abstraction: environmental thought, Hildebrand argues, rescales nature as a set of hidden interconnections that network planetary space. By providing the fundamental framework for thinking about the planet, this environmental imaginary underpinned the artifices and constructs of empire. The conjunction of environment and empire, Hildebrand suggests, first framed the environment as a political and ethical topic, such that discussions of climate change in our own time contain some uncanny echoes of this earlier moment. The book's coda makes good on this by jumping ahead to the late twentieth century, when the environment had cemented its position as the aspirational vanishing point of aesthetic description. At the culmination of a trajectory that began with The Mill on the Floss's half-immersed narrator, immersive sound installations explicitly cast the environment as that which descriptive practice seeks to create or replicate.
The book is capacious and, at times, changeable in its definition of what an environment is. In broad strokes, it adopts philosopher Georges Canguilhem's influential account of the origins of environmental thought, which begins with theories of inert ethers surrounding living bodies in the seventeenth century. Following Canguilhem, Hildebrand argues that in the nineteenth century these theories were reconceptualized in terms of heterogeneous and granular properties of matter that “displace[d] the vital principle from the living being itself to its relationship with the nonliving matter” (Ferhat Taylan 2002, quoted on p. 12). There is some terminological fluidity in Hildebrand's articulation of what this displacement looked like in Victorian discourse, as her argument at different points characterizes environments as “nonliving matter,” “the nonhuman world,” and the varied subject matter of description more generally. This raises some questions about the interrelation of these terms. When humans and human-generated things act environmentally, do they pass into the category of the nonhuman or the nonliving in some way? Or do these different terminologies simply reflect distinct modes in which nineteenth-century writers apprehended the environment concept, rather than a coherent theorization of what an environmental imaginary does to the objects of its thought? Hildebrand does not resolve these questions, opting instead to keep them alive by showing that the development of the environment concept as an abstract template for thinking about spatial relations constantly invoked the need for its particularization through description.
In light of the widespread uptake of ecological thought as a critical methodology, the question of what environmental models do to the lives and spaces they are applied to is an important one. Novel Environments is especially incisive in making it clear that the environment is not simply a concept but, specifically, an abstraction. Although the book leaves this implicit, it is striking that the nineteenth century has been responsible for contributing many of the abstractions that literary and cultural studies now use as analytic tools—ideology and the culture concept, most notably. The rapid growth of the environmental humanities has recently installed “the environment” in a similar position. For readers interested in some sustained self-examination of what it means to adopt a historical abstraction as a theoretical perspective, Novel Environments will be a useful resource. As Hildebrand notes, critical interest in the environment concept is motivated by the need to free our thinking about contemporary ecological crises from historical legacies that lock us in to narrowly instrumentalized views of natural resources. But how does “environment” relate to “context,” “setting,” or other modes of entanglement and embeddedness that emerged in nineteenth-century discourse? And why was inextricability from one's surroundings such a frequent emphasis in this era, whether in environmental, cultural, or ideological connotations? Why, in other words, was what Hildebrand describes as “the swift dissemination of the term ‘environment’ into popular discourse” so swift—what does that indicate about a culture and an era that was so ready to accept it (16)?
The problems that the environment concept addressed in the nineteenth century may have been importantly different from the ecological problems that make it crucial today. Hildebrand persuasively shows that nineteenth-century writers “anticipate Elizabeth Grosz's suggestion that we understand nature ‘in terms of dynamics forces, fields of transformation and upheaval, rather than as a static fixity, passive, worked over, transformed and dynamized only by culture’” (Grosz 2005, quoted on p. 25). The politics of that suggestion, however, and the way it was applied to the world then as opposed to now, remains a lacuna for much scholarship in the environmental humanities. In the era of Victorian liberalism and rational-choice economics, the consolidation of human life into the form of an individual and its removal from the physical causalities of nature were dominant historical dynamics; was the dispersal of human life into its environments always a critique of individualism, or was it sometimes also a way of disqualifying people from the status of individuality?
By dissolving human life into the structural determinations of the systems it is embedded in, critical categories like the environment—along with a broader and older range of terms for referring to ideological and social contexts—aspire to counteract the assumptions of individualism with models of agency that are collective and distributed. This aspiration has, regrettably, had the by-product effect of neutralizing the agency and value attached to human thought. At a time when the academic humanities are being dramatically reduced, our own methodologies risk undervaluing human thinking by largely denying its potential to escape either the determinations of the sociological category or a kind of passive participation in the processes of its environment. In Hildebrand's treatment, the history of environmental thought offers a refreshingly different direction. By contrast to certain ecocritical models that reduce human life to its biological mechanisms as modeled by the material transactions between organism and environment, Novel Environments envisions an ecocriticism that engages and enriches human thought. Hildebrand's examination of description highlights the role of active refashioning in an organism's relationship to its environment. She stresses the role of attention, attunement, and sympathy in carving out and assembling complex relationships to our surroundings that constitute an environment. Particularly now, as bureaucratic justifications of the need for humanities scholarship depend increasingly on interdisciplinary collaboration with STEM fields, this book valuably promotes a sense of human life as a three-dimensional thing whose behavior and subjectivity are never completely reducible to the mechanisms by which they occur.
The book is impressively streamlined even while making arguments that spread out across such varied materials. Hildebrand exhibits a deep and nuanced engagement with vibrant questions in literary scholarship, the history of science, and wider discussions of ecological crisis. The book's intelligence shows most clearly in its ability to place texts within literary and scientific history simultaneously. This is not, then, an argument that dramatically transforms critical understandings of any given novel but rather one that unexpectedly reinterprets the etiology of defining trends in nineteenth-century novel writing. By saturating the familiar terms description and provincialism with surprising scientific significance, Novel Environments embeds widely read and often forgotten works alike in a single historical narrative. The formation of the environment concept has generally been told in terms purely of scientific naturalism or the industrial degradation of nature. Injecting the novel into that narrative allows Hildebrand to show readers the point at which environments stop being knowable and must be imagined.