Soils, Science and Reimagined Humanity in British Writing, 1785–1929

Presents an ecocritical consideration of soil and soil science in nineteenth-century British literature and the materialist self-understanding it signalled.

This book tracks the way soil study in the period 1785 to 1929 links to a new sense of human kinship with the material environment in the work of the imaginative writers Erasmus Darwin, Mary Shelley, Anne Brontë, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker and Beatrix Potter, and scientists James Hutton and Charles Darwin. Through compelling biographies and close textual study, the book develops a story of the increasingly complex understanding of soil, its use and its abuse, through the sciences of geology, botany, agriculture, sanitation, early ecology and mycology, and across poetry, realist and gothic fiction and children’s literature. It provides a startling angle on some of the best-known British authors and literature, introducing readers to the complexity of soil: a basic and essential element abused or ignored at humanity’s peril.