ABSTRACT
The mid-twentieth-century criticism of writers such as Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Walter Houghton, and Mario Praz established a long-standing narrative about Victorian literary culture: that the Victorians were troubled by the discrepancy between an inherited Romantic idealization of the natural world and rural life, and the “realism” both of new scientifi c paradigms (evolutionary theory, thermodynamics) and the social, cultural, and environmental impacts of industrialization; and so, consequently, they sought to withdraw. Yet, as has long been recognized, this misattributes both Romanticism and Victorianism. The Victorians shared an understanding of nature’s mutability, vitality, and perpetual (re)emergence-in all its social ramifi cations-with what Eric Wilson, via Coleridge, has called “romantic turbulence.” Therefore, one might posit “turbulent materialism” as the concept that unites some of the more recent developments in Victorian literary criticism: new historicism, literature and science, and ecocriticism. In this essay, I will suggest another, “new materialism” or material ecology, a live fi eld of debate that encompasses science, philosophy, literary criticism, feminism, and (material) ecocriticism. This essay will examine what Victorian literature, Dickens, and Bleak House can tell us in terms of analyzing, representing, and living within a human material ecology.
