ABSTRACT
The centrality of thermodynamics to scientific literacy has been clear for about as long as the concept of scientific literacy itself. In order to study the broader literary life of thermodynamics, it is useful to divide the nineteenth century into periods, as thermodynamic discourse operated quite differently in its contact with the changing zeitgeist of Romantic, mid- and late Victorian moments. The role of metaphor in thermodynamic discourse is not limited to its deployment in the popular dissemination of thermodynamic ideas. The early history of thermodynamic discourse suggests that it is not merely a distorted scholarly perspective that finds the seeds of contemporary science among the Victorians. The most famous Victorian suggestion for evading apparently inevitable entropic decline, however, hails from Maxwell's prolific and poetic imagination. A focus on waste or conservation or resource management or sustainability or other such problematic but ecologically concerned terms brings us to the possibilities of thermodynamics for the emergent area of Victorian ecocriticism.
