ABSTRACT
The most physical manifestation of change in the Victorian period can be seen in the technological and industrial advances that were wrought at the hands of the Industrial Revolution. Throughout the nineteenth century, steam engines became the ubiquitous symbols of progress and movement, whether it was the railway or the factory machine. Industrialization contributed to an ideological shift in Victorian England, as the cottage industry gave way to the mass-produced factory, that temple of economic capitalism. This chapter is a survey of the industrial changes witnessed in England throughout the period; it turns to philosophical, theoretical, and personal accounts to examine how the factory and the factory system was a horrifying addition to the British economy and its depiction in literature, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s condition-of-England novels, is frightening. Environmental critics posit that environments contribute to knowledge and cultural interaction within the confines of a physical space; likewise ecoGoths argue that destroyed and desolate spaces also contribute to cultural knowledge of a society’s tenancy on a specific space and place. It is the assertion of this author that the hellish depictions of factory settings allowed Gaskell an ecoGothic approach to creating narratives of terror through the hands of industrial transition.
