The Novel As Climate Model: Realism and The Greenhouse Effect in

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The Novel as Climate Model: Realism and

the Greenhouse Effect in Bleak House
JESSE OAK TAYLOR
In October 1850, Punch ran an article titled “Climates for All Nations” that lamented
an oversight in hospitality toward visitors to the upcoming Great Exhibition: many
foreigners would have difficulty adapting themselves to the climate of London.
Mr. Punch proposed hiring Joseph Paxton (the architect who designed the Crystal
Palace) to build a series of glasshouses imitating the climates of the world. “By
a well-contrived arrangement of large conservatories, every human being under
the sun might have been accommodated with his own climate” (229). Despite
the tongue planted firmly in his cheek, Mr. Punch crystallizes the connections
between London’s emergence as a global metropolis and the central ontological
dilemma of anthropogenic climate change: the fact that climate, long the para-
digm of that which lies beyond human influence (let alone control), has become
an ideological thing. In this article, I advance a reading of Charles Dickens’s Bleak
House as climate model, pairing Dickens’s novel with the artificial climates con-
tained in Victorian glasshouses in order to demonstrate how the novel performs a
kind of fictional “greenhouse effect” in which the real is severed from its stabiliz-
ing lifeline to the natural, giving way to the paradoxically artificial nature of the
Anthropocene.
Bleak House’s query: “What connexion can there be?” is in many respects the
quintessential question of global climate change. The linkages between the coal
mine and the light switch, the air conditioner and the melting ice cap, are dis-
tributed through a network of human and nonhuman actors that defies experi-
ential understanding. While the weather is immersive and immediate, climate—
the aggregation of weather patterns over time and space—is an abstraction that
can never be experienced firsthand. Any phenomenology of climate change thus
inheres in an eerie disconnection from sensate experience. A similar disconnection
also pertains to causes of ecological crisis, which occur through vast aggregations
of human and nonhuman actors. It is only through the aggregation of millions of
insignificant acts distributed over time and space that the entropy of everyday life
wreaks havoc on the atmosphere. The Anthro in Anthropocene is always an “us”
(and often implicitly a “them”) rather than an “I.”
Such radical dispersal presents a particular challenge for ecocriticism, which
has often grounded itself in a stable formulation of realism as the antidote to “post-
structuralist nihilism” (Love 236). Timothy Morton counters such “ecomimesis”
with a call for the ecological promise of “speculative realism,” dependent not on
In addition to the readers for Novel, I am grateful for helpful suggestions and comments from
Rob Nixon, Anne McClintock, Jonathan Bate, Caroline Levine, Mario Ortiz Robles, Susan Bern
stein, Elaine Freedgood, and William A. Cohen. Earlier versions were presented at the Narra-
tive Conference, Birmingham, UK, and at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Novel: A Forum on Fiction 46:1 DOI 10.1215/00295132-2019092 © 2013 by Novel, Inc.
Published by Duke University Press

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2 NOVEL | SPRING 2013
the materiality of direct experience but rather on the “irreducible darkness” of a

reality that, like the flip side of a coin or Schrödinger’s cat, cannot be experienced as
such. In this world, “causation is thus vicarious in some sense, never direct” (Mor-
ton, “Everything” 165). This conceptual rubric provides a useful means for reeval-
uating the ostensibly (and problematically) “realist” novels of Charles Dickens.
Dickens, whom Elaine Freedgood describes as a “master metonomyst,” inscribes
people, animals, objects, and language itself within vast networks of recursive
cause and effect (Freedgood, Ideas 17). In so doing, he reinscribes agency itself as
a property of such vicarious interactions. Dickens’s world abounds with textured
materiality such that the textual reality visibly exceeds any grounding in mimetic
accuracy. Dickens does not represent a world aspiring to mimetic verisimilitude
but rather creates one, bringing a fictional world into being that renders legible oth-
erwise invisible dynamics at work in the world. Similarly, ecocriticism’s greatest
contribution has arguably been strengthening the metonymic connection between
the world, the text, and the critic—as in John Elder’s efforts to learn to use a scythe
in order to gain an experiential understanding of Robert Frost’s “Mowing” (Elder,
“Poetry”)—rather than the mimetic one with which it is often associated. As Jona-
than Bate asks, “An artistic representation of a figure in a landscape cannot but
be mediated. Is it possible, though, for a figure to stand in a natural landscape and
relate to it in a manner that is unmediated?” (126). It is precisely because the answer
is “no” that ecological art matters.
Rather than asking us to read the text as though it is an adequate representation
of the world, ecocriticism at its best shows us the extent to which our experience of
the world is itself enriched by its mediation in language—the point at which Elder
“reads” the landscape in terms of Frost’s poetry rather than the other way around
(Reading). This dynamic becomes at once more evident and more complicated
when dealing with a phenomenon such as climate, which literally cannot be expe-
rienced firsthand. Rather than distancing us from the realities of climate change,
mediation and modeling provide our only evidence of its existence. Climatology
and meteorology have long been singularly dependent on records, maps, and other
models, in order to investigate “phenomena that were beyond direct experience”
(Anderson 16). In fact, meteorologist John E. Thornes (“Cultural Climatology”)
has called for a turn to what he terms “cultural climatology” carried out through
the analysis of cultural artifacts, most notably paintings, as a more direct means to
experience the atmosphere as an entity otherwise “seemingly regarded by many
meteorologists as an invisible fluid that inhabits their supercomputers” (John Con-
stable’s 19). Thornes’s turn to painting to make visible atmospheric phenomena of
the past is thus an attempt to escape the constructed realm of the meteorologi-
cal model. The trouble is that Thornes’s treatment of art, which takes paintings’
resemblance to the atmosphere as equivalence, overlooks the fact that paintings
are also models and thus more akin to the fluid in his colleagues’ supercomput-
ers than the weather outside. Ecocriticism must embrace the power of mediating
constructions, instruments, and models as models if it is to engage productively
with the imaginative challenges posed by anthropogenic climate change. Making
this turn does not abandon the real for a funhouse of mirrors and endless playful
signifiers but rather focuses on what the models make visible as a means to form

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TAYLOR | THE NOVEL AS CLIMATE MODEL 3
new kinds of seeing, thinking, and imaginatively inhabiting a climate (as opposed
to the immersive immediacy of the weather, when we step outside to walk the dog
in the rain of an unseasonably warm December).
Central to this enterprise is the resuscitation of a pair of long-dead metaphors
(if indeed they ever lived) whereby we speak of the “atmosphere” of a work of
literature or the “climate” from which it is said to emerge. Tellingly, at the heart of
an ongoing critical discussion about fiction’s correspondence with the world lies a
meteorological instrument: the barometer in Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart,” on which
Roland Barthes anchored his discussion of the “reality effect” as those inconse-
quential, easily overlooked details that “say nothing but this: we are the real” (234).
Flaubert’s (or rather Barthes’s) barometer has in turn enjoyed a remarkable criti-
cal afterlife, becoming in turn a barometer of sorts for various approaches to the
relationship between realist fiction and the world.1 However, this discussion has
generally not engaged with its actual workings as a meteorological instrument. Bill
Brown acknowledges that the barometer has “a generic capacity to materialize . . .
an absent presence,” but in his account that capacity remains generic in that he
immediately turns to read it as historical artifact rather than examine its capacity
as a technology materializing a specific presence, namely, the atmosphere (16). This
refusal to take literary atmosphere and/or climate seriously as matters of concern
elides the fact that literary atmosphere is composed of the same elements with
which Barthes identified the reality effect: those largely intangible and diffuse
aspects of form and content that create the overall mood and experience of the text
without entering into conscious awareness (except perhaps on a dark and stormy
night). In this respect, Barthes’s reality effect can be reconsidered as an attempt to
formulate the function of literary atmosphere.
The novel provides a model not merely of the climate “as it is” but of the rela-
tionship between the climate as it is and the atmosphere as it is experienced. The
point is thus not simply to turn to the novel for concrete evidence of the ghosts of
climates past: we have other archives offering better evidence when it comes to
that. Ice cores, for example, reveal the actual chemical composition of the atmo-
sphere over a several-thousand-year span; dynamic computer models are able to
simulate and “see” climate change in action (Alley). What these models are unable
to do is perform the experience of the climatic encounter, which is never purely
material but is instead bound up with the linguistic and cultural construction
1
For example, in looking for instances of what she calls “strong metonymic reading,” Elaine
Freedgood points to Bill Brown’s reading of the barometer in response to Fredric Jameson’s
reading of Barthes (Freedgood, Ideas 11–12). Where Jameson contends that literature achieves
“imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions,” Brown reasserts the
importance of material things, in part by “indulg[ing] in the prestructuralist fantasy of lan-
guage’s material reference” (14, 15). Thus, in returning to Flaubert’s barometer, Brown effec-
tively refills the “empty sign” (Jameson’s term) of the barometer as a marker of the “bour-
geois cultural capital of the past” (16). However, he does so only as historical object, not as
instrument. Jen Hill’s recent work is an exception to such nonmeteorological readings of the
barometer, considering it alongside the development of the isotherm in Victorian meteorology.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, meanwhile, discusses barometers in Proust as dramatizations of the
necessity of a “dynamic interpretive context,” though she somewhat surprisingly bypasses
Barthes altogether (9, 7–13).

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inherent in the imaginative projection required to inhabit an abstraction. While,

as Morton argues, “atmosphere . . . is a phenomenological thing,” climate is not; it
cannot be experienced directly (Ecology 166). And yet we must find ways of open-
ing it to conscious habitation if we are truly to incorporate it into our worldview.
It is here that the novel comes into its own as a performative model of climatic
phenomenology—the experience of climate as climate—which is a contradiction in
terms except in and through such models. The ever-vexed debates over the extent to
which realism provides an accurate representation in the sense of a copy elide the
fact that what it actually does is stage a performance of that world, thereby reveal-
ing constitutive dynamics within it. Metaphor and metonymy are models, too,
after all: they are technologies that enable us to think through the way in which
one thing, concept, or idea corresponds to another and that thus help us concep-
tualize ideas, connections, and relationships that would literally not be possible
without them.2
Reading the novel as climate model involves reading the novel’s formal atmo-
sphere as a metonym “materializ[ing] . . . an absent presence” of the material cli-
mate in which it was written (Brown 16). That experience is in turn bound up in all
facets of the form: its language, length, and the materiality of its media (including
the volatile organic compounds responsible for that enticing “old-book” smell—the
atmospherics of decomposition in action). The novel, perhaps especially the Vic-
torian novel, is uniquely suited to the challenges of climate modeling because of
how its expansive scale and diffusive complexity intersect with the temporality of
reading (a dimension of which anyone who has read Bleak House is acutely aware).
The novel exists, in other words, in precisely the “phase space with many dimen-
sions” that is necessary for modeling the experience of climate as an aggregation
of atmospheric effects (Morton, Ecology 166). In the process, it also serves to model
the recursive, exponential feedback loops whereby the efficacy of any individual is
displaced even as the effluence of the human writ large encompasses the Earth, lit-
eralizing a metaphor first utilized in the nineteenth century: the greenhouse effect.
Reading the Greenhouse Effect
Mr. Punch’s proposal inverts the history whereby the glasshouse (aka “green-
house” or “hothouse”), a technology developed to grow plants far from their native
climates as European explorers returned home with flora (and fauna) from the dis-
tant reaches of the globe, found its most enduringly remembered manifestation as
a temple to the arts of manufacture: the Crystal Palace. Victorian glasshouses cre-
ated “fictive space” (Isobel Armstrong’s term [176]) that was nonetheless populated
by actual living organisms existing, adapting, and, in a word, performing the laws
of nature. As such, the glasshouse became “one of a number of practical or techni-
2
George Henry Lewes (companion of George Eliot) viewed the work of fiction in precisely this
manner: “Lewes called scientific models ‘fictions’ and considered them ‘potent’ and ‘welcome’
in science” (Otis 71; also see Menke 634). Bruno Latour makes a similar statement about scien-
tific maps, which do not offer “an exact copy of the world”; rather, through “successive stages
they link us to an aligned, transformed, constructed world” (78–79).

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cal means whereby a new kind of scientific truth—a new kind of visibility—was
made possible. It was a catalyst for novel ideas like the adaptation of living beings
to their surroundings” (Taylor 8–9). The glasshouse creates a space that is fictive
not merely in its artifice but also in its visibility, in the sense that everything that
occurs within it is staged, in the manner of a scientific experiment (Latour 124). It
is this experimental facet of the glasshouse as a model of the environment that
becomes most productive as a site for considering the emergence of the metropolis
and the urban novel as mutually constitutive social and literary forms.3 Each stag-
ing is an event, producing a new idea or even a new mode of thought and thus
performing a literal act of transformation (see Ortiz Robles). The “new kind of
visibility” rendered in the glasshouse is not based on its resemblance to the world
outside the walls but rather to its operational closure, allowing it to model proce-
dures analogous to the operation of that world precisely because of that closure.
This operational closure, literalized in the glasshouse, is what allows systems to
operate as systems and become legible as such. Close reading and fine-grained
analysis of a literary text’s internal dynamics are similarly dependent on a form
of operational closure, as is rendered most evident in New Criticism. However,
rather than making the text irrelevant to the world, that closure is precisely what
renders the text legible as a model rather than simply a representation. In the pres-
ent context, it enables me to relate the novel’s formal atmosphere to the city’s actual
climate: thus the fictional “greenhouse effect” operates not in spite of the division
instantiated in the glass but because of it.
Glasshouses were known as “artificial climates,” a somewhat paradoxical term
that highlights the degree to which they created a space in which nature could be
artificial, while plants that were in some sense unnatural—whether hybrid, grown
out of season, or far from their native habitats—could nonetheless be unequiv-
ocally real. They thus created what I call “abnatural” space (ab- meaning “away
from” or “beneath,” as in “abnormal” or “abjection”) wherein the reality of that
which appears to violate the laws of nature must be acknowledged. Whereas the
idea of the “unnatural” reifies the stability of the natural, the abnatural creates a
third term, forcing us to attend to the constant withdrawal of “nature” beyond
our conceptions of it.4 Plans for the full development of artificial climates in glass-
houses would have included, in the words of John Loudon (Paxton’s rival master
3
In a related argument, Deidre Shauna Lynch has recently advocated what she calls “green-
house Romanticism” in a reading of Jane Austen, in which she traces the influence of the
greenhouse—“romantic-period culture’s favorite scientific instrument for both apprehending
and augmenting Nature’s plurality”—on the botanical metaphors in Austen’s novels in order
to complicate the stability of “Nature” as invoked in “green Romanticism” (692). The key point
of divergence between Lynch’s argument and mine is the turn to the greenhouse effect as a
means of understanding the artificial climate of the metropolis outside the glasshouse walls.
4
Morton calls for doing away with “nature” altogether in the name of “ecology,” an idea I find
extremely productive but ultimately untenable. Among other things, when I read Morton’s
Ecology without Nature, the idea of nature is everywhere apparent (in fact providing much of
the book’s rhetorical force). Rather than disappearing, “nature” becomes all the more present
as an imagined absence conjured by the very attempt to unmask it as illusion. Furthermore,
the impossibility of “ecology without nature” is not merely a deep ecologist’s fantasy but a

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of glasshouses), “examples of the human species from different countries imitated,

habited in their particular costumes, and who may serve as gardeners or cura-
tors of the different productions” (qtd. in Taylor 67). Distinguishing between the
“examples of the human species” adapted (and bound) to particular climates and
the citizenry outside able to gaze on them, the thin film of glass thus literally crys-
tallizes the essential notion of the modern—a rupture as utter and complete as it
is transparent and invisible. Every nation has a climate, just as every nation will
have manufactures on display at the Great Exhibition, but it is only in London that
climate can be manufactured to order. The defining attribute of London’s climate
thus becomes neither its salubriousness nor its Englishness (or Britishness) but its
modernity.
In the process, Punch’s fantasy offers a useful point of departure for considering
Victorian London as a geohistorical location at which to trace the emergence of
anthropogenic climate change. Key to this idea is the sense in which the metropo-
lis emerges as a space that is, as Raymond Williams puts it, “beyond both city and
nation in their older senses” (Politics 44). The metropolis morphs space, rendering
it simultaneously compressed—as few thought over a million humans could be
within a relatively small geographic area—and expanded such that it encompasses
the globe. Indeed, as Tanya Agathocleous explains, for many Victorian writers
London was the world. What Agathocleous dubs “cosmopolitan realism . . . turns
to a man-made evolving organism—London—rather than the natural world for a
sense of unity” (15; emphasis added). The “cosmopolis” thus brought a nascent
planetary consciousness into being, as did the Crystal Palace: at once metonym
and metaphor for the world-as-glasshouse. The novel experience of the metropolis
is characterized by a new mode of seeing that Williams calls “metropolitan per-
ception,” characterized by “cosmopolitan access to a wide variety of subordinate
cultures” (Politics 44). What the Punch article makes readily apparent is the extent
to which metropolitan perception needs to be approached not simply in terms of
cultures and commodities but as an ecological vision as well, bound up with spe-
cies, habitats, and climates. It must thus also be open to the ways in which the new
cross-fertilizations, bred within the hothouse of modernity, refigure the relation-
ship between cultural and natural hybridity. This, in turn, is precisely the kind
of perception enabled in conservatories and glasshouses, in which exotic species
were cultivated far from their native climes. Such containment also renders visible
the contact and contagion entailed in sharing the air with others’ exhalations. For
example, an article in Dickens’s Household Words described the efforts to manage
“the condensed breath of all nations” within the Crystal Palace (Wills 344). The
fact that there is only one atmosphere—the membrane that encompasses Earth,
philological reality. The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology (drawn from
Greek oixos [“house” or “dwelling”]; literally, “knowledge of that in which we dwell” or simply
“knowledge of dwelling”) in 1866 and used it explicitly to refer to the “economy of nature”
(qtd. in Merchant, 178). Thus the idea of nature remains indelibly enmeshed in the residual
meanings of “ecology,” much the way notions of spiritual taint linger within environmental
conceptions of “pollution.” My use of the abnatural, then, is an attempt to capture precisely the
encounter with that residual presence, the remains of the natural after the so-called end of
nature.

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divides it from outer space, and contains our emissions—means that questions
of atmospheric disturbances aggregating into climatic change are in some sense
always already global. Ice cores taken at the poles show a sharp spike in carbon
content in the middle of the nineteenth century (Alley; Behringer). Thus the first
gathering of the “Works of Industry of All Nations” within the glass house of the
Crystal Palace is historically coterminous with the point at which the effluence of
industrial modernity begins to envelop the farthest reaches of the globe.
The plants contained in such artificial climates needed to be sheltered under
glass not only because they were far from their native habitats but also because the
smoke and soot-choked air of the metropolis rendered it impossible to grow much
of anything, native or otherwise, in the environs of London. Thus the artificial cli-
mate of the glasshouse offered a paradoxically more natural habitat than the soot-
laden fogs of the metropolis lurking outside the glasshouse walls. From elaborate
greenhouses to cheap boxes covered with a single pane in East End alleys, London-
ers from across the social spectrum grew plants encased in glass, illustrating what
I. Armstrong describes as the “absolute interdependence of the urban environment
and the conservatory” (141). This interdependence in turn reinforced the idea that
the city itself had long since become a space in which nature could be sustained
only through artifice. The glasshouse becomes a microclimate that renders visible
the contact and contagion of respiration in a contained atmosphere permeated
with the emissions of others even as it offers a respite from the smoky “exhala-
tions” of the metropolitan economy hovering outside the glass.
Perhaps the most striking correlation made between the contained urban envi-
ronment and the glasshouse was an argument about the dynamics of Earth’s atmo-
sphere itself, first advanced in 1822: “The effect,” according to meteorologist Wil-
liam Ferrel, “is similar to that of the glass covering of a conservatory of plants”
(qtd. in Fleming 52). By the end of the century, an additional factor began to be
discussed in relation to this greenhouse effect: “In 1899, Nils Ekholm, an early and
eager spokesman for anthropogenic climate control, pointed out that at present
rates, the burning of pit coal could double the concentration of atmospheric CO2.
This would ‘undoubtedly cause a very obvious rise of the mean temperature of
the Earth’” (Fleming 111). Svante Arrhenius would mount a similar argument in
Worlds in the Making (1908), where he presented the idea hopefully. Like the creators
of the glasshouses on which the theory was modeled, these scientists equated it
with control. The world would literally become like a greenhouse or conservatory,
in which climate could be regulated as a means to fend off a feared impending
ice age and expand the temperate and habitable areas of the globe. The point is
not to suggest (as some have done) that these theories represent the idea of global
warming as we now know it.5 Focusing too much on this largely speculative notion
because we know how true it would become runs the risk of obscuring the many
5
Spencer Weart, for instance, places these nineteenth-century debates within a teleology lead-
ing to the “discovery” of global warming (3–5). James Rodger Fleming (objecting to an ear-
lier article by Weart) argues that statements equating the Victorian understanding of atmo-
spheric dynamics with global warming as it would come to be understood are “misleading and
i ncorrect” (79).

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other important questions involved in the imaginative process whereby climate

and human society were beginning to appear as mutually influential. As the Punch
article amply evidences, the greenhouse effect proffered a far more complex and
fertile idea than a simple association with atmospheric warming would imply. For
instance, no sooner are the exotics placed under glass than they intimate threats
of hybridity and miscegenation through uncontrolled, accelerated, and abnatural
breeding. They thus raise the question of what exotic, hybrid organisms might be
bred within the artificial climate of London.
Among other things, drawing a correlation between realist fiction and the glass-
house suggests that we understand Victorian realism as a distinct participant in
“environmentalism,” in the nineteenth-century sense of the term as “an interpre-
tative framework: the proposition that crucial aspects of human life and history
are determined by distinct physical settings” (Winter 19). Rather than expressing
explicit concern about the vulnerability of the natural world, in other words, envi-
ronmentalism offered the Victorians a framework for understanding the relation-
ship between humanity and that world in dynamic interaction. As George Levine
has argued, the idea of “Nature” was of central importance to the realist impulse
across a wide range of nineteenth-century discourses, in which it served as both
subject and guarantor of the real: “While ‘Nature’ had become for Carlyle a ‘grand
unnameable Fact,’ poets and novelists were engaged in naming it. . . . The mystery
lay not beyond phenomena, but in them” (Realistic 12). However, things rapidly
become more complicated when the status of the natural is itself thrown into cri-
sis by an environment in which all facets of existence, including the weather, are
materially altered by human action: the metropolis. The greenhouse effect unset-
tles any easy divide between the “natural” and the “unnatural,” replacing it with
the apparent oxymoron artificial nature. In such a context, literature can only name
a “Nature” in crisis, morphing and mutating within the hothouse of modernity,
a grand fact in the midst of becoming fiction. And it is here that we can begin
to see the glasshouse’s relevance for the strangely hybrid and grotesque world
of Charles Dickens, in which people become objects, things become people, and
either may explode for no apparent reason. Where Barthes described the reality
effect as inhering in objects that say nothing but “we are the real,” Dickens’s works
abound with bizarre, grotesque, and unlikely creations who seem to say “we are
artificial nature; we are the unnatural real.”
Dickens’s ability to render the experience of the city, even as that city was con-
stantly reinventing itself, has long been recognized as the centerpiece of his genius.
Dickens imagined a city imagining itself into being. Exploring its nooks and back
alleys and teaching his readers how to see themselves within it, Dickens rendered
the metropolis visible to the mind’s eye. At least since Alexander Welsh dubbed
London “the city of Dickens,” numerous critics have identified the urban novel that
treats the city as a whole, rather than the elaboration of any human character, as
a Dickensian creation. However, critics have largely dismissed the importance of
Dickens’s representation of atmosphere and climate within this enterprise, treat-
ing these phenomena purely as figures or metaphors rather than literal elements
of urban experience. In the process, they have missed Dickens’s contribution to
the development of a more expansive version of “metropolitan perception” that

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encompasses the metropolis as a site not only of commodity culture and consump-
tion, mobility, intercultural contact, and semiotic overload, but also of the “ecocul-
tural” feedback loop of adaptation to an environment entirely pervaded by human
artifice.
If the glasshouse as a technology became central to making visible “the adapta-
tion of living beings to their surroundings,” being enclosed within the Dickensian
novel similarly reveals the vast web of adaptive interconnections that constitute
the metropolis as habitat. Thus it is hardly surprising that many of Dickens’s osten-
sibly minor characters reflect Victorian theories of urban degeneration in their
physical attributes, from Bleak House’s runtish Smallweed family to Mr. George’s
physically malformed assistant, Phil—who was “found in a gutter” and has dreams
about the country that he has never seen—to that “queer” creature Jenny Wren in
Our Mutual Friend. These characters have a kind of overblown, exaggerated, and
even unstable quality, and they have bodies that are frequently damaged, amor-
phous, and even explosive. They are akin, in this regard, to the hybrid, unnatural
growth produced in glasshouses where “the line between hybridity and miscege-
nation could not be fixed.” Hence, “a grotesque body lurked in the conservatory”
(I. Armstrong 167). Such grotesque bodies abound in Dickensian fiction. Dickens’s
key divergence from degeneration discourse is that such physical characteristics
do not necessarily correspond to moral malformation. Grandfather Smallweed is
a horrible (if entertaining) person, as is Fagin; but Phil and Jenny Wren are kind,
generous, and loyal.6
The grotesque, hybrid, and artificial bodies lurking in Dickensian London
encourage us to apprehend the metropolis as fictive space, the product of human
design, artifice, and aspiration. The bourgeois characters who ostensibly occupy
the central plotlines, on the other hand, are boring precisely in the degree to which
Dickens does not allow them to be affected by their environment, thus in a sense
abstracting them from his own method. The memorability of Dickens’s ostensibly
minor characters needs to be taken not as an incidental stylistic quirk or subse-
quent critical taste for the macabre but, rather, as a key innovation of his fiction.
Dickens does not give us a world filled with memorable minor characters; he
gives us a world in which there are no minor characters. Anyone, at any time, can
prove significant, often even more so than the nominal protagonists. Alex Woloch
addresses this dynamic in a productive reading of the “character system” in which
the centrality of a weak protagonist is destabilized to “subtly shift the agency of
the ‘scene’ from viewer or beholder to the viewed or beheld . . . which inscribes an
excess into the things we see, consider, or partially comprehend” (144). However,
Woloch retains a focus on the human linked to characters as “implied persons,”
while I contend that this very excess destabilizes the integrity of the human as the
6
Intriguingly, it is precisely this absence of moralizing the urban environment that John Ruskin
found most objectionable in Bleak House. Whereas Oliver Twist seemed to evidence “the power
of all surroundings over them [city dwellers] for evil; the incapacity of their own minds to
refuse the pollution, and of their own wills to oppose the weight, of the staggering mass that
chokes and crushes them into perdition,” Ruskin did not like the fact that death in Bleak House
does not come as just retribution for moral faults (944). In other words, he did not think that
Lady Dedlock deserved to die with her face in the muck.

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exclusive locus of subjectivity and agency altogether. Dickens gives us a world in

which all agency, whether on the part of human characters, animals, quasi-objects
or things, arises only in and through recursive interaction. It is thus perhaps more
accurate to say that all Dickens’s characters are minor by comparison with his
novels’ one true “subject”: the city itself. The central work of Dickens’s novels thus
becomes understanding the principles and processes of aggregation, of situating
character, interaction, and individuality within networks whose scale seems to
render individual agency irrelevant. The effort to apprehend the metropolis as a
space of human manufacture that dwarfs the human is thus not simply related to
the problem of understanding anthropogenic climate change; it is in many respects
precisely the same problem. Few texts foreground this intersection more readily
than Dickens’s Bleak House.
“Fog Everywhere”: Rendering Climate Visible
Beginning its serialization the year after the opening of the Great Exhibition, Bleak
House is woven of a very different kind of “exhalation” from the Crystal Palace,
that “magical glass, which the enchanters of our time have made to rise out of the
ground” to house the works of industry (Whewell 13). In the process, the novel
dramatizes the recursive feedback loops invisibly enshrouding the workings of
industrial modernity, by which the city, its atmosphere, and its inhabitants emerge
within a shared climatic system. Consider the novel’s famed opening, which must
be quoted at length for cumulative effect:
London. Michalmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s
Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters
had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet
a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn
Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with
flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might
imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely
better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrel-
las, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners,
where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since
the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust
of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at
compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows;
fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside
pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish
heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and
hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwhales of barges and
small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing
by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the
wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of
his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over

Novel
the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a
balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may,
from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the
shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a hag-
gard and unwilling look. (13–14)
The fog is pervasive, binding disparate elements of the city together. The narra-
tor’s description invokes the totalizing view enabled by the glasshouse, modeling
the metropolis and making its vast web of self-constituting phenomena visible in
miniature. The double narration of Bleak House, oscillating between the points of
view of the unnamed narrator and the orphaned housekeeper Esther Summerson,
enacts the double vision that Michel de Certeau has argued characterizes urban
experience, in which the panoptic point of view held by cartographers and city
planners serves as a counterpoint to the embedded vantage point of the pedes-
trian.7 In the process, this structure serves to demonstrate the relationship between
a situated experience of the fog, in which it embodies the obscurity of the institu-
tions and interactions that lead to its own production, and a systematizing vision
of it, in which it serves precisely the opposite effect of making those otherwise
invisible recursive interconnections visible.
This tension is encoded in the opening scene with its invocation of the balloon-
ist’s eye view, an iconic Victorian fantasy of rising above the literal and figurative
obscurity of urban experience. As Henry Mayhew, who followed his investigations
into the warrens of London’s slums with an account of a balloon flight over the
city, explained: “We had examined the World of London below the moral sur-
face, as it were; and we had a craving, like the rest of mankind, to contemplate it
from above” (8). Balloonists floating above the city marveled at the “plan-like” and
“map-like” view of the “great regularity” of the city, such that “the apparent chaos
which often presents itself to the ground-level viewer is . . . revealed as careful
planning” (Freedgood, Risk 89). But here the transparency of the glasshouse that
puts all within it on display is obscured, and the “grand view” that would lend the
appearance of order is mystified in the most literal of terms. The “balloon” hangs
in the midst of “misty clouds,” figuring a world turned upside down as people
stare into a “nether sky.” The image is doubly ironic given that balloonists explic-
itly cited the effort to rise above the polluted air of the city to the rarefied upper
atmosphere as one of their principal goals (81). Indeed, Mayhew’s aerial view of
the city was similarly confounded: “[W]ith a dense canopy of smoke hanging over
it . . . it was impossible to tell where the monster city began or ended . . . owing to
the coming shades of evening and the dense fumes from the million chimneys, the
town seemed to blend into the sky, so that there was no distinguishing earth from
heaven” (9). This vision of intangible boundaries is in keeping with the fact that
7
Agathocleous links this double vision, which she describes as “cosmopolitan realism,” to the
imagination of the global. Though she does not discuss climate or the weather in this context,
the connection reiterates the inherently globalizing, planetary ways of seeing both demanded
and facilitated by attention to the atmosphere.

Novel
the “great regularity” of the “leviathan Metropolis” did not actually exist, or rather
existed only through processes and interactions rather than plans and orders. Lon-
don was the product not of careful planning from above but of an emergent system
gradually taking shape out of the chaos through on-the-ground interactions.
The scene also presents a slippage between the language of science and that of
myth, rendering the modern metropolis the prehistoric realm of the Megalosaurus
(a recent scientific discovery and thus paradoxically “new”), while the “death of the
sun” echoes contemporary scientific visions of both the nebular hypothesis and
the heat death promised by the second law of thermodynamics (i.e., the beginning
and end of the world). We see the city buried beneath the mud of a fossil record
in progress, sinking into the “mists” of deep time that had become a prevalent
image in the scientific imagination as the Victorians grappled with the yawing
gulf of geologic time. The result is to detemporalize the modern city such that it
appears out of the unimaginable past and the unimaginable future simultane-
ously. Dickens depicts the city in climatic time, within which glaciers flow and
recede, species evolve and go extinct, and civilizations rise and fall. It is a time
scale on which change can be interminably slow or shockingly rapid, but in which
individual human agency appears laughably insignificant even while humanity’s
aggregated effluence has become a force of nature. Dickens’s phrase “waterside
pollutions” is similarly doubled, slipping between the environmental pollution of
dirty industries near the river and the moral pollutions of prostitution and opium
dens associated with the same environs, thus reminding us of the extent to which
the term itself remained in flux between its residual and emergent connotations
(spiritual taint and environmental impurity) throughout the nineteenth century.
Similar tensions emerge throughout the novel, perhaps most memorably when
Lady Dedlock, disguised as her maid and guided by Jo the crossing-sweeper to the
desolate gravesite of the mysterious “Nemo,” asks: “Is this place of abomination,
consecrated ground?” (262).
And yet, for all its slippage and obscurity, Bleak House’s opening scene depicts a
coherent system. As F. S. Schwarzbach has argued: “[T]he mud [on Holborn Hill],
made up of dirt, rubbish (dust in English idiom), and raw sewage, ends up in the
Thames and then oozes down-stream to the Essex marshes. There it rots and fes-
ters, soon producing infectious effluvia that are blown by the raw East Wind back
over the city.8 This is the stuff of the novel’s dense fog. . . . Dickens is pointing to a
literal economy of filth and disease” (95). If this is correct, it is an economy of filth
and disease based on miasma theory, which held that disease (most importantly
cholera) was carried by noxious vapors produced by decomposing organic matter
(Wohl 87). Thus swamps, marshes, bogs, and the fogs that they produced were
considered the least healthy of climates, which was unfortunate for an imperial
capital built atop numerous marshy rivulets feeding into the Thames. Among the
8
The “East Wind” is actually the one atmospheric phenomenon in the novel never depicted in
literal terms. Instead, Mr. Jaryndyce uses it figuratively to characterize any sense of discord or
ill omen. The wind is a telling metaphor in its evocation of the class geography of the city, but
it remains a metaphor nevertheless, whereas the fog, mud, soot, rain, snow, and so on are all
literal phenomena within the reality of the novel.

Novel
striking consequences of this theory was the idea that coal smoke could be bene
ficial in combating these noxious vapors, as its chemical components (especially
carbonic acid) would kill off the organic contaminants of miasma, sterilizing the
fog (Gilbert; Thorsheim).
Dickens speaks directly to miasma theory and its express link to cholera by
situating the slum “Tom-all-Alone’s” in an area of the city hard hit by the 1849
cholera epidemic (Gilbert 90). Tom’s “corrupted blood [which] propagates infection
and contagion” and the “pestilential gas in which he lives” will “work its retribu-
tion, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the
highest of the high” (710). In characterizing Tom-all-Alone’s contagious effects as
“fetching and carrying fever, and sowing . . . evil in its every footprint,” Dickens
offers what may be the first usage of the word footprint to characterize the range of
distinctly environmental effects (257).9 Furthermore, he does so by making “Tom”
a character, imbuing him/it with abnatural sentience and agency and highlight-
ing the paradoxical sense in which pollution appears to live. That which was once
“purely” an object becomes, in its impurity, a kind of subject: an active constituent
within the urban collective.
As the novel’s most notable figure for what Terry Eagleton dubs “negative inter-
dependence” (viii), the fog becomes, along with its viruses, another “radical demo-
crat” (ibid.) of a lethal character: “It is a fine steaming night to turn the slaughter-
houses, the unwholesome trades, the sewerage, bad water, and burial grounds to
account, and give the Registrar of Deaths some extra business” (Bleak House 506).
Indeed, Jo eventually dies not of the disease with which he apparently infects
both Charley and Esther but of a respiratory condition brought on by exposure to
London’s climate. Given this emphasis on disease and the environmental tenets
of miasma theory, I would like to return to Schwarzbach with the caveat that this
“economy” is in fact “ecology,” serving to embed the characters as living organ-
isms in the natural phenomena of an urban habitat. Though the term ecology itself
would not have been available to him (it was coined in 1866), Dickens turns to
the natural motif of the fog specifically to supersede the narrower discourse of
economy, which would externalize the city’s interaction with its environment.10
After all, what calls attention to the biology of the human organism more than its
susceptibility to disease, especially when these diseases are produced by the sur-
rounding climate?
Dickens embeds London, with its multitude of characters and institutions, in
the natural processes of climate and opens the novel with an ecological vision of
the city (a preoccupation also evident in a profusion of nature-inspired names,
from Summerson and Woodcourt to Tulkinghorn and Boythorn, the Smallweeds,
9
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the environmental usage of the term footprint
dates to the late twentieth century, when it was adopted first to describe the area affected by a
jet’s sonic boom, the range of toxic spills, and eventually the now familiar “carbon footprint.”
10
See note 5. The etymology of ecology and its link to “the economy of nature” complicates the
notion of either economy or ecology as external to or opposed to the other in ways often elided
by arguments on both sides of the environmental debate.

Novel
Messrs. Guppy, Weevle, and Vholes, the bird-keeping Miss Flite, Mr. and Mrs. Bad-
ger, and so on). This taxonomical vision would appear to align with what G. Levine
sees as the motivating force behind the novel’s plot: “The refrain ‘What connexion
can there be?’ which echoes implicitly through all of Bleak House is answered by
genealogy, just as Darwin’s question about the meaning of the ‘natural system’ is
answered: ‘All true classification is genealogical’” (Darwin 119). Genealogy only
answers one of the connections in the novel, however: the link between the sup-
posedly orphaned Esther and Lady Dedlock, who is revealed to be her mother.
However, the question “What connexion can there be?” is actually asked in rela-
tion not to Esther, but to Jo, the “outlaw with the broom,” whose genealogy remains
unknown and irrelevant (Bleak House 256). The ultimate answer to that question
will be provided not by genealogy but by the novel’s climate, which claims both
the crossing-sweeper and the great Lady for its own, as the two characters who die
explicitly from exposure. The fog, it seems, reveals a far more extensive means of
connection than even the legal reach of Chancery, drawing the city, its environs,
and its inhabitants together within a shared atmosphere and exposing the limits of
a purely genealogical vision of adaptation and ecological connection. “What con-
nexion can there be?”: an apt refrain for the era of anthropogenic climate change,
in which causes and effects are distributed across time and space in ways that defy
comprehension.
Miasmic ecology does not account for the entirety of the scene depicted, how-
ever. Bleak House’s opening shows us not only fog and mud but also smoke and
soot, issuing from innumerable domestic hearths fired to offer a comforting refuge
from the chilling, insidious fog that they in turn exacerbate and blacken. Smoke
and fog even intermix in the stem and bowl of the wrathful skipper’s pipe (though
he is hardly the only one inhaling the blend). In addition to the chimney pots and
pensioners’ hearths, we follow the fog into the “collier-brigs” laden with coal to
supply the voracious appetites of the city: more than a ton per resident in 1800
and twice that—coupled with an exploding population (literally, in the context
of Bleak House)—by 1913, when the city burned more than 15 million tons of coal
(Thorsheim 1, 5).11 While the bulk of this consumption fed industrial furnaces and
boilers, the majority of the smoke hanging over the city was produced by domes-
tic fireplaces, which burned far less efficiently. The hearth was the icon of Victo-
rian domesticity and comfort, however. Efforts to curb its smoke were repeatedly
rejected as an invasion of the Englishman’s castle, and such measures would not be
adopted until the 1950s. Hearths appear everywhere in Bleak House, whether exces-
sively stoked with coal (in the court of Chancery), burning wood in one of the few
disassociations from the city (Esther’s room at Bleak House), or both: “blazing fires
of faggot and coal—Dedlock timber and ante-diluvian forest” in the innumer-
11
Figures such as these describing per capita consumption are misleading in their image of
equality. To give some indication of the impact of an estate such as Chesney Wold, consider the
case of Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, first Duke of Westminster (and smoke abatement advocate).
Peter Thorsheim writes that “Eaton Hall, his country house near Chester, used over two thou-
sand tons of coal a year. To supply it with coal he constructed a narrow-gauge rail line to link
his property with the national rail network” (86).

Novel
able fireplaces of Chesney Wold (446). These are juxtaposed with hearths heaped
only with cold ashes, as an indicator of either poverty (Miss Flite, Nemo) or disre-
gard (Jellybys). Attention to hearths and the question of what, whether, and how
cleanly they burn emerges as a pervasive marker of character and station. Thus,
while the climatic connection between Jo and Lady Dedlock seems to anticipate
Ulrich Beck’s succinct “poverty is hierarchical, smog is democratic,” Dickens also
emphasizes the fact that however democratic smog’s effects, its causes are quite
the opposite (36).
The gaslights that struggle “haggard and unwilling” through the fog like reluc-
tant Promethean slaves, meanwhile, were an object of fascination for novelists and
journalists alike. Gaslights were celebrated both as tokens of technological prog-
ress and for their visual effects, which turned the city at night into a fantastical,
phantasmagoric wonderland. They were also the product of a dirty and dangerous
industry: despite the celebration of gaslight, the gasworks were synonymous with
unceasing fire, noxious smoke, and threat of explosion (Nead 84–87, 93–94). So
too, for that matter, were the glass factories, whose blast furnaces were compared
to the fires of Hell (I. Armstrong 25–27). The hearth, gaslights, and glass are thus
all examples of how the technologies that enabled the Victorian cult of visibility
and comfort also contributed to the polluted (and polluting) climate from which
they promised refuge. Even in its opening pages, the novel has already begun to
intimate what will be one of its most important themes: the interpenetration of
the city and the domestic home such that all dwellings and characters are drawn
into one great network (C. Levine). And it has done so through the climate of fog,
dramatizing the ways in which agency arises out of the recursivity of the feedback
loop, the primary operative mechanism of ecological change.
The structure of the novel’s double narration is crucial to understanding the
importance of observations of physical phenomena within it. The perspective of
the disembodied narrator that enables the rendition of the city as if under glass
is also the perspective that enables the systematizing view of the fog discussed
above. In the opening scene, this overarching perspective establishes where the
fog comes from, where it goes, and what it does. It distinguishes the fog from the
smoke and soot from the chimneys and enables the interpretive jump from fog
to the courts. But this viewpoint is not omniscient. The novel’s opening is laden
with “as ifs” and with observation and inference from physical details, an observa-
tional tenor made more evident by the juxtaposition of the disembodied narrator’s
account of the fog with Esther Summerson’s.
Bleak House performs the move described by Certeau, from the overarching,
bird’s (or balloonist’s) eye view to the situated point of view of the pedestrian,
offering a very different vision of the London climate. In the process, the novel dra-
matizes the essential disconnection between the systematizing viewpoint enabled
by the model and the actual lived, sensate experience of the individual.12 “I asked
12
Esther’s “domestic” perspective represents a distinct turn on what Lawrence Buell identifies as
the “Virgilian mode” (a term he borrows from Eric Homberger) in “toxic discourse,” in which
the narrator is taken on a tour of the polluted “underworld” by an experienced guide—a trope
that Buell identifies in both Bleak House and Hard Times and that appears frequently elsewhere

Novel
him [Guppy] whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full
of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen. ‘O dear no, miss’ he
said. ‘This is a London particular’ ” (42). What the narrator could characterize as
discrete phenomena comprising a coherent system are experienced at street level
as indistinguishable and confounding, having bonded together into what would,
in 1905, earn the portmanteau smog.13 Julian Wolfreys argues that Esther “misun-
derstands the nature of the fog,” that “London names the fog and determines it
apart from other fogs as being peculiar to the city,” and furthermore that “Lon-
doners know the name and it is this knowledge, knowledge of how to describe
the unspeakable which defines a Londoner as distinct from a visitor” (163). How-
ever, Mr. Guppy’s response—despite its wonderful evocation of the “particulates”
in London’s air—does not offer the accuracy proffered by the narrator.14 Guppy
names, but does not explain, the smog. Perhaps more accurately, he names and
thereby abdicates the responsibility to explain, suggesting that it is the “natural”
climate of the city, in the rhetorical move by which nature is evoked to preclude
analysis by ascribing social conditions to a timeless, noncontingent certainty. Gup-
py’s response begs (and receives) no further inquiry beyond, “Oh indeed!” And yet
Esther’s initial impression is actually the more accurate. There is a “great fire some-
where,” or at least a great many fires burning in the innumerable hearths, steam-
ships, locomotives, factories, and gasworks that make up the great conflagration
of the modern metropolis that Alice Meynell would later term the “smouldering
city.” That turn, however, becomes visible only through the disembodied narration
and the novel’s self-conscious status as a model.
Dickens provides his readers with a model of how to situate their own embod-
ied experience of the metropolis and its atmosphere within the climatic networks
that are visible only in the abstract, systematizing viewpoint made possible by the
novel’s overtly fictive status. The “work” of the novel, in other words, lies in the
process of aggregating the collective in relation to an imagined individual. This is
made explicit in the fact that the novel and the domestic haven within it not only
share a title, they are mutually permeated by the fog in which the text opens and
has its being. Esther Summerson, who provides the novel’s embodied narration
and becomes the closest thing it has to a human protagonist, is the housekeeper of
Bleak House—keeper of its keys and the guardian of the domestic space. If “[h] ouse-
work is a semiotics of boundary maintenance,” in Bleak House such boundaries are
in Dickens’s fiction, as when Jo escorts Lady Dedlock to Nemo’s gravesite or Rogue Riderhood
leads Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn to the Thames in Our Mutual Friend (Buell
42–44).
13
The OED dates the word smog to a paper that Dr. H. A. Des Voeux, treasurer of the Coal Smoke
Abatement Society, delivered to the Public Health Congress in July 1905 titled “Fog and Smoke,”
in which he proposed the term to describe more accurately the climatic phenomenon particular
to London.
14
The phrase “London particular” originally appears (at least in print) in an article attributed to
one C. Lamb, the C purported to be Charles’s. However, the essay was actually penned by Leigh
Hunt, who, in a telling coincidence, also served as the model for Bleak House’s Harold Skimpole
(Thomson 88).

Novel
consistently obscured by the fog, just as those of Bleak House are penetrated by it
both literally and figuratively (McClintock 170).15 Furthermore, the fog and associ-
ated climatic phenomena (rain, damp, wet, etc.) serve to extend the urban setting,
standing not simply for the insidious reach of Chancery, “which has its decaying
houses and its blighted lands in every shire,” but for the city drawing the country
into itself (Bleak House 15). Characters move from London to Bleak House (in Here
fordshire, near St Albans) to the Dedlock’s seat of Chesney Wold in Lincolnshire,
but never quite leave the city behind. This dynamic is made most evident by the
lawyer Tulkinghorn’s ability to “melt” from London to Chesney Wold “as if it were
next door to his chambers” (661). Such continuity and interpenetration is, again,
the work of the weather, as in narrative shifts such as: “While Esther sleeps, and
while Esther wakes, it is still wet weather down at the place in Lincolnshire” (103).
With this sentence, the narrative shifts both perspective and location, as the disem-
bodied narrator resumes after two Esther chapters set at Bleak House. The transi-
tion is routed through the clouds and “wet,” recalling the novel’s fog-shrouded
opening pages.
This atmospheric reading offers a new means of conceptualizing the subject
of the novel because it calls attention to the aggregated agency of those appar-
ently innocuous particulars often held responsible only for establishing mood or
the effect of the real. Perhaps the central strand in the development of the novel
put forward by critics ranging from Ian Watt to Nancy Armstrong is the con-
ceptualization and development of the individual subject. However, in the Dick-
ensian urban novel, that individual subject is not a human being but rather the
entity interpolated into being in Bleak House’s all-encompassing first sentence:
“London.” That opening sentence mounts an argument for a nonexistent unity,
however. London was not one coherent whole but rather a conglomeration, mul-
tiple municipalities growing and morphing together: an unstable metropolis, con-
stantly coming in and out of being, devouring the surrounding countryside and
its own shantytowns in the rapid development that continues to be evident on a
quickly urbanizing planet. Furthermore, the absence of an overarching governing
body responsible for “London” as a whole provided another obstacle to effective
smoke-abatement legislation (Thorsheim 112). Anthropogenic climate change is
similarly produced by the aggregation of emissions rather than the action of any
one individual, making a model of ethics grounded on the responsibility of the
individual an inadequate framework in which to address it.
In this respect, even Dickens’s use of the serial form becomes a factor in his
rendition of the city. The novel becomes mobile, fractured, iterative, and expansive;
it sprawls from issue to issue with no apparent end in sight. In the process, it mod-
els a condition of interdependence, in which connections are revealed between
even the most unlikely of its inhabitants, even in the absence of a vision capable
15
Esther’s “housekeeper” status also emphasizes the gendering of Bleak House’s narration. The
overarching abstracted viewpoint of the implicitly male narrator recalls Mary Louise Pratt’s
identification of the “monarch of all I survey” trope in travel writing by male explorers (197).
Esther’s female and overtly domestic viewpoint, meanwhile, offers us a situated perspective
that is closer to that of the often female reading audience’s experience of the city.

Novel
of encompassing the whole. Bleak House, like London, was an imagined totality,
experienced in bits and pieces and overwhelming in the scope and complexity of
its entirety. This process of aggregating the disparate individual elements together
into a complex adaptive system thus extends the modeling performed by Bleak
House to the formal atmosphere of the novel itself, which ultimately comprises
literally everything in the text, including the original part issues’ distinctive blue
jackets.16
This reading represents an important variation on the way in which many crit-
ics have read the fog’s function in this opening scene. In their eagerness to “see
through” the fog, many critics fail to see it at all.17 While nearly all readings per-
force focus on the scene’s atmosphere to some degree, they tend either to treat it as
mimetic representation or (more common in recent readings) to deny the fog any
correlation to the actual climate of London and to view it instead as a figure for
the obscurity of various social institutions or for epistemological and ontological
uncertainty. Either perspective, I contend, misses the fog’s central function, which
is to model the connection between atmosphere and ideology, weather patterns
and cultural institutions, such that the city’s material and cultural “climates” are
inscribed within a single system. To suggest that the fog is simply a figure for that
which we desire to see through is to deny its worthiness as a thing to be seen. The
focus on fog as obscurity leaps too quickly over what the scene makes visible, lead-
ing to an equation between the fog as fog and the fog as image such that the lat-
ter not only obscures the former but also obscures all that the atmosphere of the
novel enables us to see: most notably, the ways in which it binds the city and its
inhabitants together as a single complex adaptive system within the dynamics of
a shared atmosphere.
What the opening sequence achieves is at once simpler and more complicated
than most established critical descriptions of it let on. It attempts to create an accu-
rate rendition of the city’s climate as a means to render visible the cultural, insti-
tutional, and epistemological predicaments of life in the modern metropolis. As
16
The novel originally appeared in part issues from March 1852 to September 1853. The covers
of these part-issues were blue in keeping with the generally “bleak” atmosphere of the novel.
These part issues also included advertisements, including those by E. Moses & Son’s clothiers,
who claimed to be an “Anti-Bleak House” and warned “woe to the inhabitant of Bleak House
if he is not armed with the weapons of an OVERCOAT and a SUIT OF FASHIONABLE and
substantial Clothing, such as can only be obtained at E. Moses & Son’s Establishments” (from
the first number, March 1852).
17
For example, Raymond Williams describes the genius of Dickens’s method as the ability to
use figures such as the fog to “dramatise those social institutions and consequences which are
not accessible to ordinary physical observation” (Country 155). These, in D. A. Miller’s account,
hinge on the panoptical power of Chancery’s “institutional practice” (67). Meanwhile, Wolfreys
argues that “Miller sees the fog, without seeing through it, and takes it to be merely some quasi-
legal or judicial metaphor for the obfuscating nature of legal activity” (157). Several pages later,
however, Wolfreys himself writes: “The fog, then, is merely one disorganizing trope among
many within the city,” and he cites Thomas Richards’s view that the fog is “the very absence of
comprehensible order” (Wolfreys 162).

Novel
N. Armstrong argues, the fog obscures the boundaries that “give something a
visual identity” and thus demonstrates that to “see requires us to know what exists
on the other side of the mediation to be seen” (Fiction 145). However, by that very
mediation it also gives what cannot be seen a visual identity. The fog materializes
the networks, ideologies, and interconnections of the metropolitan economy that
are literally, but otherwise invisibly, responsible for its own material composition.
It thus becomes not so much a metaphor for the material but intangible systems of
the city as a metonym for them. The chain of signification does not move from the
city to the novel as copy but rather the other way around, in the manner of a model
making visible phenomena that are at once real and beyond direct human percep-
tion. This is where the fog is different from the mud and dust in London’s streets
(untraceable and intractable enough in their own right). Dickens played a long-
running joke on his critics: the fog obscures and confounds the central metaphor
by which they have attempted to understand the overarching narrative position
in which the novel opens, the panoptic. However, the fog only clouds the vision of
those who attempt to see through it rather than reading the texture of the fog itself.
Seeing the fog modeled in fiction encourages readers to ask whether the fog in
London’s actual physical climate might similarly be bound up with the vast array
of mystifying cultural institutions with which critics have identified it—whether
the fog might be more than simply a metaphor for those institutional relations.
In the process, the novel models the metropolis as an adaptive system of recur-
sive, ecocultural feedback, an aggregated entity inextricable from the climate of its
own manufacture. Materializing our reading of London’s climate, in other words,
does not diminish our engagement with its figurative dimension but rather extends
that reading to the meteorological phenomenon of the fog and the atmosphere of
the actual city. Dickens dramatizes the fact that the manufactured climate of the
metropolis is itself a product of human artifice and thus is open to critical inter-
pretation as such. In so doing, he charts a course for the Anthropocene in which
the work of the humanities, like the influence of humanity, must be reimagined as
a genuinely planetary enterprise.
In Conclusion (or Combustion): Realism in an Artificial Climate
Reading the urban novel in conjunction with the glasshouse highlights both the
centrality of climate in the effort to understand the modern metropolis and the
importance of the novel’s atmosphere in rendering it visible. Dickens’s fictional
greenhouse effect thus enables a new kind of novelistic truth, akin to that enabled
by the glasshouse, dramatizing the aggregation of the city’s disparate elements
into a single complex adaptive system and characters’ adaptation to the novel’s
urban environment. One might expect that a reading such as mine, which holds
that Dickens is actually interested in the material climate of London, would simply
attempt to demonstrate that the atmosphere of the novels is in fact an accurate ren-
dition of the climate of Victorian London and call it a day. Such an “ecomimetic”
reading would fit with the common ecocritical investment in the descriptive power
of realism and its links with scientific observation. And indeed, there are points at

Novel
which Dickens’s efforts at description of atmospheric conditions should be taken

seriously, as when he locates the pestilential breath of Tom-all-Alone’s in the region
of London hardest hit by a recent cholera epidemic. However, such an emphasis
on Dickens’s fog as a description of the real fog of London does not go far enough
and thus may actually further obscure the novel’s function as a phenomenological
model, dramatizing the encounter with climate as an abstraction that can never be
directly experienced as such.
The climate of Dickens’s novels might initially appear an unambiguous instance
of the “reality effect,” wherein the “fog everywhere” in the novel would essentially
say, “I am the real fog of London,” bestowing a sense of “reality” on the fictional
city and encouraging London readers familiar with the fog to identify with the
novel’s rendition of the city in fiction. The problem is that Dickens’s novel seems
so resolutely unreal, so strangely, abnaturally real, thus suggesting a reverse trajec-
tory, whereby the novel questions the nature of the real in the city itself. Indeed,
the principal effect of the climate of smog seems to be a breakdown in both the
real and our perception of it such that, as Dickens would write in Our Mutual
Friend, “inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being
visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither” (420). Staging a kind of reify-
ing chiasmus between “animate” and “inanimate” London, Dickens’s city seems
divided in purpose between being real and unreal, natural and unnatural, and
so becomes “wholly neither.” Replacing the people and animals that struggled up
Holborn Hill with “animate London” actually makes them seem inanimate, or at
least artificially animated objects or automata, while turning the city itself into a
specter offers it a form of un-, ab-, or even super-natural animation. Dickens thus
radically destabilizes the integrity of the human in ways that seem to anticipate
the recent theoretical turn toward “object-oriented ontology” as a response to eco-
logical crisis, wherein “there are only objects, one of which is ourselves” (Morton,
“Everything” 164–65).
We are unlikely to find a better illustration of this phenomenon than Krook’s
spontaneous combustion, an episode that literalizes the transubstantiation of char-
acter into atmosphere and (though Dickens defended its plausibility) unquestion-
ably tests the bounds of the real.
“Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night? Is there a chimney
on fire?”
“Chimney on fire!”
“Ah!” returns Mr. Guppy. “See how the soot’s falling. See here, on my arm! See
again, on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won’t blow off—smears, like black
fat!” (512)
The scene offers an ironic revisitation of the one much earlier in the novel when
Esther asks Guppy whether there is a “great fire somewhere” only to be told that
it is just a “London particular.” Krook has become a part of the urban atmosphere,
the import of which is rendered even more clearly a few pages on:

Novel
“What, in the Devil’s name,” [Guppy] says, “is this! Look at my fingers!”
A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight, and
more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil, with some natural repulsion in
it that makes them both shudder. (516)
Is it pure coincidence that Krook, combusted, is first perceived as an element of the

“London particular” and then, nauseatingly, as a substance that seems the very
definition of pollution, a substance as inescapable as it is revolting? Or is this pre-
cisely the reason that Dickens insisted on the reality of spontaneous combustion,
a literalized metaphor for a reifying, steam-driven industrial modernity powered
by the combustion of coal?
The realism of Dickens’s London does not lie in being a copy of London proper
that pretends to verisimilitude. Reading and/or objecting to it as such is an instance
of what Bruno Latour terms “naïve belief in the other’s naïve belief” (290). Dickens
does not assume that he can create an exact copy of the city within the pages of his
novel. Instead, he constructs a fictional urban environment that operates accord-
ing to the same principles as those of the real city and hence renders visible the
dynamics by which the city operates. In so doing, Dickens’s work attains (perhaps
surprisingly) something very close to George Eliot’s statement of the goal of art in
a review of Ruskin’s Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854): “The aim of Art,
in depicting any natural object, is to produce in the mind analogous emotions to
those produced by the object itself; but as with all our skill and care we cannot
imitate it exactly, this aim is not attained by transcribing, but by translating it into
the language of Art” (240). The key word here is “analogous.” While Dickens’s
London does not aspire to representational verisimilitude, it does entail a relational
one, in the sense that the city in the novel aspires to operate according to the same
principles and dynamics that operate in the actual city. The relation of text to city
is analogical. Its operative logic, like that of scientific instruments, maps, and other
models, is correspondence rather than referentiality. In the process, Dickens pro-
vides his readers with a mediating abstraction through which they will be better
prepared to encounter the realities of the urban climate that exist forever out of
reach.
Dickens’s novels are realist not because they are realistic—they rather obviously
are not—but because they render the artificial reality of London’s climate visible,
modeling the ecocultural feedback loops through which it operates. The climate
of London becomes one in which an abnatural event like Krook’s spontaneous
combustion can be represented as real, a scene written to provoke the very nausea
and revulsion it describes. In so doing, the novel renders such dimensions present
to sensate experience and subjectivity, transcribing the abnatural into the abject in
order to provoke the embodied revulsion and affective urgency that the distrib-
uted, diffuse, and invisible vectors of ecological crisis, which Rob Nixon describes
as “slow violence,” often do not. Reading the urban novel as climate model does
not do away with its figurative dimension in favor of a simple correlation between
the material and fictional climates of the metropolis. On the contrary, it extends
the interactions modeled in the novel to the material climate of the city itself. It is

Novel
thus that the Krook-besmeared climate of Bleak House helps us come to terms with
what it means to exist within a climate infused with the intractable remains of
human combustion.
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The Novel as Climate Model: Realism and

Novel: A Forum on Fiction 46:1 DOI 10.1215/00295132-2019092 © 2013 by Novel, Inc.

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the materiality of direct experience but rather on the “irreducible darkness” of a

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inherent in the imaginative projection required to inhabit an abstraction. While,

Reading the Greenhouse Effect

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of glasshouses), “examples of the human species from different countries imitated,

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other important questions involved in the imaginative process whereby climate

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exclusive locus of subjectivity and agency altogether. Dickens gives us a world in

“Fog Everywhere”: Rendering Climate Visible

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In Conclusion (or Combustion): Realism in an Artificial Climate

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which Dickens’s efforts at description of atmospheric conditions should be taken

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Is it pure coincidence that Krook, combusted, is first perceived as an element of the

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Bate, Jonathan. Song of the Earth. London: Picador, 2000.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1852–53. New York: Penguin, 2003.

———. Our Mutual Friend. 1864–65. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

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TAYLOR | THE NOVEL AS CLIMATE MODEL 23

Eagleton, Terry. Preface. Dickens, Bleak House vii–xii.

———. Reading the Mountains of Home. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Mayhew, Henry. The Great World of London. London: Bogue, 1857.

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