E NV I RO NM E N T 681

15. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10.
16. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (New York: Penguin, 1998),
683–84.

Environment
ALLEN MACDUFFIE

T HE story of the coinage and popularization of the word environment

in its modern sense runs through some of the towering intellectual
figures of the Victorian period—Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, G.
H. Lewes, and Herbert Spencer—and their continental influences,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Auguste Comte. In some ways, it is a
story that bears directly upon the wholesale rethinking of the conven-
tional divide between nature and culture that went on in many disci-
plines over the course of the century, a conceptual shift that has roots
in German and British Romantic thought, and finds scientific theoriza-
tion in the work of Charles Darwin. But it’s also a story about the compli-
cations and difficulties involved in reimagining the relationship between
these two crucial categories, and the way racial, imperial, and economic
ideologies blunted or even subverted the new conceptual possibilities for
ecological thinking that the term environment both reflected and helped
generate.
It seems fitting that the word “environment” would first appear in its
modern guise in 1828, at the dawn of the period that would produce the
factory town and the railroad, the Coal Question and the Great Guano
Rush, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Wuthering Heights, and, for many contem-
porary critics, the first observable signs of the Anthropocene. Carlyle first
uses it in his essay Goethe to translate the master’s original German
Umgebung and to signify not merely surroundings or context (as it had
been commonly used before) but rather the vital, ongoing influence of
those surroundings upon a person or thing.1 As Ralph Jessop argues,
this coinage arises from the “counter-Enlightenment” stance Carlyle
took against the forces of mechanization and mechanical thinking: envi-
ronment is an attempt to convey something of the holistic, “dialogical

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[and] open-textured” set of influences—physical, social, intellectual,

spiritual—at work upon someone.2 We can thus see in it the stirrings
of an interdependent, “green” sensibility, though always filtered through
Carlyle’s peculiar metaphysical division of “substance” from “semblance”
and his quasi-reactionary politics.
Despite the usefulness of the word—its flexibility, its capaciousness, its
ability to suggest the porous and shifting boundaries of self—Carlyle
employed it relatively sparingly in his writing, and the term did not
catch on. For its popularization, we have Herbert Spencer to thank. As his-
torian of science Trevor Pearce argues, Spencer was introduced to the
term via Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive as translated by Harriet
Martineau, who herself may have been drawing on Carlyle.3 Spencer’s
switch from the word circumstances to environment, and his reliance on
the latter in his popular Principles of Psychology, Pearce argues, initiated a
crucial shift: “The successive transitions from individuated particular fac-
tors (e.g., ‘climate’), to a general plural term (e.g., ‘circumstances’), to
a general singular term (e.g., ‘environment’), correspond to a progressive
concealment of the different elements that make up the world outside the
organism and the relations between these elements . . . [T]he singular
term ‘environment,’ like ‘organism,’ is an important heuristic for biologists,
insofar as it gives them a way to talk about general causes without exploring
the details of micro-level complexity (the term ‘natural selection’ is a par-
allel case). Hence, the word ‘environment’ does metaphysical work.”4
One of the ironies of the term, then, is that it was precisely in its
abstraction from the material details of actually existing environments
that it became most useful to thinking ecologically about those environ-
ments. Although binaries like organism/environment can themselves be
problematic, as Timothy Morton has argued, they were conceptually pro-
ductive for the nascent science of ecology, and Spencer’s work had a tre-
mendous influence upon many significant early twentieth-century thinkers
in this field, including Frederic Clements and Victor Shelford.5 From here
we are but a short distance to the next, encompassing level of abstraction,
“the environment,” which the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1948, and
which signifies something like “the natural world” but always with the
added implied possibility of human activity and disruption.
Spencer’s “environment” included not only physical and biological
factors, but social and political ones as well; as he makes clear in essays
like “The Social Organism” and throughout Principles of Psychology, his
aim was to break down the distinctions between the human and the
“natural” world. As recent ecological criticism and philosophy has

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 E NV I RO NM E N T 683

shown, questioning the conceptual divide between nature and culture is

necessary, because (among other things) it helps make clear the extent
to which a civilization’s cultural forms and practices depend entirely
upon natural resources, processes, and conditions, and gives the lie to
mystifying fantasies of human transcendence of the material world. But
although Spencer is second perhaps only to Darwin among nineteenth-
century thinkers who helped undermine this binary, it’s also true that the
encompassing abstraction “environment” allowed him to reinforce other
kinds of problematic distinctions. The natural world and human civiliza-
tion may both be considered “environments,” but in Spencer’s system the
latter is at a further stage of evolutionary “complexity,” and thus it func-
tions as a stimulus to even more profound kinds of intellectual, moral,
and social growth.6 And civilization, as Raymond Williams has shown,
had not yet been relativized by the widespread adoption of its plural
form: for Spencer, it means Western civilization.7 Thus, such develop-
mentalist arguments reflect the way the concept “environment” was
inflected by assumptions of racial and cultural superiority; indeed, as
George Stocking notes, to be an “environmentalist” in Victorian anthro-
pological circles was to believe in the profound shaping power of external
forces upon human characteristics and capacities and, more often than
not, to uphold the ascendancy of European culture on such grounds.8
Moreover, the complete continuity of nature and civilization also
makes Spencer—at least in his early writings—famously wary of any “arti-
ficial” human intervention in economic and social processes. It is thus a
rather bleak irony that this important “environmental” writer was also
England’s most well-known advocate for laissez-faire capitalism, an
approach to markets, natural resources, and social relations that had,
and continues to have, environmentally catastrophic consequences.

NOTES
1. Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambience: An Essay in Historical Semantics,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3, no. 2 (1942): 169–218, 204;
Lowell Frye, “History as Biography, Biography as History,” in Thomas
Carlyle Resartus: Reappraising Carlyle’s Contribution to the Philosophy,
History, Political Theory and Cultural Criticism, ed. Paul Kerry and
Marylu Hill (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010):
133–147, 144.

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 684 VL C • VO L. 46, N O. 3/4

2. Ralph Jessop, “Coinage of the Term Environment: A Word Without

Authority and Carlyle’s Displacement of the Mechanical Metaphor,”
Literature Compass 9/11 (2012): 708–20, 713.
3. Trevor Pearce, “From ‘Circumstances’ to ‘Environment’: Herbert
Spencer and the Origins of The Idea of Organism-environment
Interaction,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and
Biomedical Sciences 41 (2010): 241–52, 247–48.
4. Eliot, Middlemarch, 249.
5. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 214–15.
6. Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” in Essays, Scientific,
Political, and Speculative (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), 51.
7. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 58–59.
8. George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968), 48, 64.

Ethics
DUC DAU

T HE late 1980s witnessed the ethical turn in literature, with notable

scholars being J. Hillis Miller, Wayne Booth, and Martha
Nussbaum.1 Recent studies of Victorian narrative have explored ethics
as a relation between self and other through a lens of sociality and open-
ness to otherness. In this essay, I would like to focus on studies on the
ethics of care, sympathy, hospitality, and empathy before turning to
underexplored areas of research.
In the past few years, scholars have turned their attention to the
analysis of ethics and the marriage plot, with the coming together of
wife and husband “marking a larger reconciliation between individual
and society.”2 Talia Schaffer’s study, Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage
in Victorian Fiction, explores, among other things, the marriage of a phys-
ically disabled person through the theory of ethics of care, which asserts
that human relations should be understood as interdependent
exchanges of caregiving and care-receiving. By drawing attention to a

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