ABSTRACT

Kluwick’s contribution approaches cultural sustainability from a historical literary perspective. It focuses on debates concerning the utilisation of human excrement as manure in the context of sanitary reform in Victorian Britain and argues that the controversy to which this topic gave rise can essentially be regarded as an engagement with the concept of sustainability. The public health issues relevant in this respect were discussed in a significantly broader cultural domain, thus lending themselves to the exploration of the cultural dissemination of the notion of sustainability. As Kluwick’s discussion of the representation of water-borne waste disposal in Victorian literature shows, Victorian writers invested in an immensely rich aquatic imagery that influences our perception of water even today. Analysing non-literary texts in conversation with some of the novels of Charles Dickens, this chapter draws attention to the mechanisms of a culture which valued sustainability (the recycling of manure) but nevertheless made possible a shift from dry to water-borne sewage disposal as an imaginatively sustainable change. It focuses particularly on how intellectual and artistic activity interdiscursively processed, assimilated, and alienated the controversy about sewage disposal and translated it into a culturally sustainable imaginary of aquatic pollution and purification.