1. Intuiting Ecology: Malthus and the Matter of Interconnection

Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population has a reputation for inhumanity. “In the decades-long debates the Essay sparked,” Emily Steinlight has recently observed, “there is one consistent refrain: Malthusian theory is an assault on humanity itself.”Footnote ⁸ This preoccupation with the Essay’s inhumanity was quite literal: early critics were concerned not simply with the metaphorical inhumanity of Malthus's views—his supposed hard-heartedness—but with his refusal to enforce conventional distinctions between humans and other animals. Much of the backlash against the Essay responded to its animalistic depiction of humans subject to a sex drive so insatiable that it resulted in a surplus population destined for hunger, illness, and death.Footnote ⁹ This pessimistic view of a world that routinely purged its excess inhabitants would later prompt the young Charles Darwin to develop his theory of natural selection, a theory that decisively confirmed the fears of critics who felt that Malthusian ideas undercut human dignity.Footnote ¹⁰

The relatively well-known influence of Malthus on Darwinian biology is only half the story, however. A focus on Malthus as a theorist of scarcity has emphasized his contributions to the theory of natural selection at the expense of the underlying vision of interspecies community beneath the population principle. Indeed, the Essay’s understanding of interconnection made it central not only to Darwin's development of modern biology but to his ecological insights as well.Footnote ¹¹ The Essay attacks human uniqueness on two fronts at once—one psychological, the other sociological. As Steinlight notes, Malthus's work depicts human individuals as subject to irrational instincts and thus effectively yoked to our own animalized bodies. But it also depicts human communities as subject to the material resources of their environments, and thus actually yoked to other animals’ bodies. Rather than respecting the species barrier by imagining human societies closed off from their nonhuman environments, Malthus stresses the inextricable interdependence of the two. The Essay’s social imaginary thus extends far beyond the bounds of society in any anthropocentric sense of the word, producing a proto-ecological vision of community that reaches across both class and species barriers. By speculating that the consequences of individual behaviors ripple through a vast network of human and nonhuman agents in unpredictable and unsettling ways, the Essay massively complicated ethics and politics alike. In the process, it provoked discomfort by replacing Enlightenment dreams of an elevated, transcendent humanity with a vision of human societies at once defined and constrained by our material entanglements with other inhabitants of the earth.

The key insight that enables Malthus's “sketch of the state of society” to look past anthropocentric notions of the social is his recognition that the growth of human communities depends on the nonhuman communities that sustain them.Footnote ¹² This argument did not originate entirely with Malthus. An earlier group of French political economists, the Physiocrats, had placed a similar emphasis on food and agriculture as the origin of all forms of wealth. This focus led the Physiocrats to develop a marked mistrust of currency, which they saw as a dangerous and unhelpful abstraction that made it possible to assign nominal values to goods and services that were useless to sustaining human life.Footnote ¹³ From the Physiocrats, then, Malthus inherited his conviction that the only sound basis of value lay in material things capable of producing and maintaining life—what he called “real funds for the maintenance of labour,” funds comprising either literal food or currency that was directly “convertible into a proportional quantity of provisions” (Essay, 125).

What set Malthus apart from the Physiocrats was his realization that such material funds were finite. As Fredrik Albritton Jonsson notes, other Enlightenment political economists and social theorists persistently slipped into a utopian mode in their imagination of “the benign system of nature” and the future potential of human society.Footnote ¹⁴ Malthus, by contrast, “diverged from [both Adam Smith and the Physiocrats] in stressing the feebleness of technology and knowledge in the face of geographic restraints and demographic forces.”Footnote ¹⁵ The restraints Malthus identified were not forces in any invisible, abstract sense of the term. They were concrete, physical limits to growth—limits defined by the material structures of plant and animal bodies.

Throughout the Essay, Malthus brings William Godwin, Condorcet, and other theorists of progress down to earth in a very physical sense, countering their airy claims of social perfectibility by returning to matters of soil, vegetation, and animal bodies. So, in order to refute a central tenet of Enlightenment utopianism—namely, that human science and technology have improved dramatically and promise to continue improving indefinitely—Malthus turns away from humans entirely. He focuses, instead, on wheat, cabbages, carnations, and sheep. By selective breeding, he notes, the features of these living beings—like human technology—are subject to inspiring improvements:

Taking the Enlightenment fantasy of infinite progress to its (il)logical conclusion, the Essay imagines a laughably impossible world whose standard carnation is “the size of a large cabbage,” where swollen ears of corn stand beside giant oaks, and a breed of headless, legless sheep rests among them (Essay, 71).

Malthus's point is abstract and philosophical—a critique of the epistemological fallacy of conflating a failure to fully know something (here, the limit of progress) with its nonexistence. But the vehicle of the metaphor does important ideological work in proving this argument. By reframing claims of lofty human perfectibility in terms of lowly animal bodies, Malthus displays those claims in all their naked absurdity, shorn of their anthropocentric appeal. Moreover, treating questions of the perfectibility of man in terms of the perfectibility of wheat and sheep underscores Malthus's larger argument that these are not truly separate questions at all: a human society's capacity for growth and development ultimately rests upon the growth and development of the plants and animals on which it depends. Indeed, the crux of Malthus's argument is precisely this inseparability, which is registered through the devastating material finitude of “room and food” (Essay, 49). Food, he reminds his readers, is really just another name for a group of edible plants and a few animals that eat them. Those plants, in turn, require a certain amount of soil and light to exist—finite resources that impose material limits on growth. Because humans depend on meat and vegetables, both of which finally depend on plants, which in turn depend on soil and sunlight, all of human society depends on the geographically specific patterns of the apportioning of soil and sunlight among plants. Our material entanglements ensure that the fates of humans and nonhumans are never fully extricable from each other.

The “thought experiments and imaginative journeys” that comprise so much of Malthus's argument are exercises in clarifying these material entanglements.Footnote ¹⁶ They reconnect nominal indicators of wealth, prosperity, and progress to the physical resources that actually sustain human life, driving home the ways economic quantification fails to capture the actual flows and obstructions of vital resources moving through a community. Imagining the effect that higher wages might have on the diet of the hungriest members of the working classes, for example, Malthus begins by acknowledging the increased purchasing power afforded by higher wages. He goes on, however, to consider the effects of that power on short-term market prices and then, over the longer term, on land usage in England—always with the final emphasis on the distribution of life-sustaining energy across human, plant, and animal bodies:

It would be wrong to assume (as many have) that Malthus is weaponizing this environmentally attuned argument to defend the power structure and resist socioeconomic reform.Footnote ¹⁷ The upshot of the Essay’s argument is not a quietist acceptance of the status quo, but an insistence on the need to think through the ramifications of apparently ameliorative policies as they ripple through the network of institutions and resources on which society depends.

This vision of society supported and extended across interspecies energy exchanges marks a new chapter in British social thought. Indeed, Catherine Gallagher has argued that the Essay’s vision of vital energy transfer “radically reconceptualized the social organism,” elaborating a new form of collective imagination in which “the gross organic entity is less a metaphorical individual, such as ‘the nation’ or ‘the population,’ than what we now call an ‘ecosystem.’”Footnote ¹⁸ But the language of organicism and the idea of “ecosystem” are both too definite, closed, and totalizing to apply to the worldview sketched out in the Essay. Although Malthus is typically depicted as a theorist of competition in an insular and claustrophobic world, his radical insight hinged not on closure but on openness, on a reimagination of community as a still mostly unmapped network of material exchanges across classes and species. What Malthus made available, in short, was not the holistic idea of the ecosystem but an early Western version of what Timothy Morton calls “the ecological thought”—the open-ended recognition “that everything is interconnected” and that conventional distinctions between nature and society partition our entangled world in inaccurate, unhelpful ways.Footnote ¹⁹

If Malthus has become associated with gloom rather than blissful attunement to a greater unity, that is only appropriate: the consequences of the entanglement he elaborates are not always uplifting. They are humbling in the original, etymological sense—they return us to earth, often with a rocky landing. As Stacy Alaimo warns, “Attention to the material transit across bodies and environments may render it more difficult to seek refuge within fantasies of transcendence or imperviousness.”Footnote ²⁰ Alaimo associates such fantasies with Enlightenment humanism and proposes what she calls “models of trans-corporeality”—methods of “attending to the material connections between the human and the more-than-human world … emphasizing the movement across bodies”—as a means of getting beyond these outdated, self-destructive ontologies.Footnote ²¹ Careful attention to Malthus's Essay, however, suggests that challenges to this vision of transcendent humanity were already emerging among major thinkers within the Enlightenment itself. In fact, by emphasizing the convertibility of plant and animal matter into other kinds of flesh and bodies, the Essay offers an early model of trans-corporeality, one that throws cherished notions of the human and the social open to question.

A well-known passage discussing livestock and horseback riding illustrates the radical transformative potential of this proto-ecological thinking—its power to redraw the contours of politics and ethics. Building on his earlier consideration of the pricing of meat, Malthus speculates that the densely interconnected circuits of energy exchange that constitute English society mean that two of England's national passions, a love of meat and a love of horseback riding, may be working together to starve and oppress the nation's poor:

Such passages show that Malthus must be understood as an important figure not only to the history of political economy but also to the twenty-first-century field of political ecology. In Bruno Latour's formulation, political ecology is a discipline that “suspends our certainties concerning the sovereign good of humans and things, ends and means. … This is its great virtue. It does not know what does or does not constitute a system. It does not know what is connected to what”—though it aims, through careful analysis, to find out.Footnote ²² Indeed, Latour hints at an underlying kinship between economic analysis and political ecology. “Through the circulation of its tracers,” he writes, economics “makes the collective describable.”Footnote ²³ By choosing to follow the circulation of food resources through some of the many humans, plants, and animals involved in the modern market system, then, Malthus inadvertently develops a strategy of social analysis that expands beyond the social to describe something like a Latourian collective, a truly interspecies community of entangled persons and things. The Essay effectively made ecology thinkable.

Given this depiction of interspecies entanglement, it may come as a surprise that the Essay’s ethics remained so unshakably anthropocentric. In addition to being a political economist, however, Malthus was an ordained clergyman. He never wavered in his doctrinal commitment to the sanctity of the human soul and “the importance of improving the happiness of the human species” (Essay, 113).Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, his redescription of society as part of an interspecies network of material flows had profound implications for the stories human beings told about the world and our place within it. Those implications revolutionized the scientific community in 1859, when Darwin finally unveiled his Malthusian revision of natural history in The Origin of Species. But Malthusian thought entered the world of literary discourse even earlier. There, too, it fomented a kind of quiet revolution that would extend the sense of who participated in the stories of living communities, destabilizing traditional notions of society by reminding readers of the complex, often inconvenient intimacies between humans and the nonhuman world.

2. Affording Ecology: Narratives of Interdependence in Martineau and Darwin

On October 15, 1833, Susan Darwin penned a letter to her brother Charles—then an unknown naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle—that linked his scientific curiosity with her recent leisure reading. “I have just been reading an account of Ceylon in a kind of novel called ‘Cinnamon & Pearls,’” she wrote. “[T]he descriptions of the vegetation are so beautiful that I don't wonder you have a great desire to go there[,] as of course you have read some more faithful history of it in Humboldt.”Footnote ²⁵ Susan's choice of reading was rather conventional: the novella “Cinnamon and Pearls” constitutes one installment in Harriet Martineau's wildly popular Illustrations of Political Economy, a monthly series begun in 1832 that ultimately extended to twenty-two tales issued in twenty-five parts and collected in nine bound volumes. The overnight success of the Illustrations turned Martineau into a household name.Footnote ²⁶ Her sheer omnipresence is clear from the fact that, less than two weeks after Susan's letter, another of Darwin's sisters independently sent him several of Martineau's novellas so that he could read them himself.Footnote ²⁷ Martineau's cultural prominence soon launched her into the Darwins’ social circle, where she became close friends with Erasmus Alvey Darwin, Charles's brother.

If Susan's reading material was commonplace, however, her remarks on it are not. In her brief notice of the Illustrations, she identifies an innovative aspect of the novellas that has otherwise escaped critical analysis: their extraordinary attention to setting. In fact, Martineau's settings are so meticulously described, and so thoroughly incorporated into her narratology, that it hardly seems fair to call them settings at all. They are more like parties to the plot. Their aggregations of plant and animal life become crucial intermediaries in human endeavors, proving just as capable of recalcitrance, spontaneity, and transformation as the human characters engaging with them. Martineau's interweaving of plot and setting—really, her eradication of setting itself—constitutes an unrecognized innovation in narratology, an ecological plot structure that traces chains of causation across class and species lines to reveal humanity's entanglement in a far larger biotic community.

In its implications, then, this new narrative mode should sound familiar. It unspools and explores the ecological intuitions on display in Malthus's Essay, a work Martineau admired intensely.Footnote ²⁸ The Illustrations thus occupy a unique crossroads of intellectual history. They are situated at the forgotten intersection of several forms of nineteenth-century communal thought that were already beginning to break from one another on the way to becoming the distinct discourses of economics, ecology, and the Victorian novel. Reading Martineau's novellas in this interdisciplinary light clarifies just how much later novelists borrowed from the kinds of proto-ecological discourse circulating in the early nineteenth century. It also suggests that those same novelists went to great lengths to disavow and reject the sort of interspecies imaginary afforded by the narrative forms they adapted from political economy.

Martineau's tales expand on the promise of Malthus's Essay by showing human and nonhuman lives hopelessly entangled at every narrative level. “Cinnamon and Pearls,” the story that left Susan Darwin dreaming of Ceylon, is a case in point. It begins with Marana and Rayo, a young Sinhalese couple living on the island's northern coast and hoping to marry as soon as Rayo can afford Marana's bride price. Their frustrated marriage plot is a function of the equally frustrated relationship between the Sinhalese and the natural resources of their island. Martineau is at pains to emphasize the natural wealth of Ceylon, a “luxuriant region … where Nature seemed to intend that all things should flourish.”Footnote ²⁹ That wealth is not simply an abstract backdrop; it is particularized and materialized in the community of nonhuman creatures distributed around the island. The north is rich in chanks (locally prized shells found in shallow beds off the coast) and pearls (global commodities drawn from banks farther out to sea), while the southern jungles abound with salt deposits, coconuts, peppercorns, cardamoms, and cinnamon trees. But the proper relationship between the Sinhalese—“the natural owners of all the native wealth of their region”—and their environment is disturbed by a series of interlopers associated with British imperial forces.Footnote ³⁰ The plot follows Marana and Rayo as they try to harvest assorted resources to accumulate wealth, only to be stymied by greedy imperialists and inefficient bureaucrats. The fate of Marana and Rayo thus hangs on a series of vexed engagements with the nonhuman world around them, mediated by an assortment of inhuman institutions that shape the couple's disastrous decision-making.

The locale of “Cinnamon and Pearls” lends it an orientalist exoticism that may help explain Susan Darwin's heightened awareness of its landscapes. Indeed, as Richard Grove has shown, “the seeds of modern conservationism developed as an integral part of the European encounter with the tropics,” because Western excitement over non-European flora and fauna rendered the disappearance of these exotic resources far more visible, more troubling, and more actionable than local damage done by culturally entrenched European forms of environmental exploitation.Footnote ³¹ As Jonsson explains, however, Enlightenment concern over the mismanagement of natural resources was not confined to the tropics. Similar concerns arose far closer to home. The Scottish Highlands and Hebrides, in particular, provided the backdrop for many proto-ecological thought experiments because of the region's history of unsuccessful attempts at land “improvement,” which “gave rise to precocious anxieties about environmental degradation and resource scarcity.”Footnote ³² Malthus wrote such concerns into the second edition of his Essay, which “singled out the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides as the region most burdened by overpopulation in Great Britain.”Footnote ³³ Martineau, in turn, borrowed these stark settings for the novellas she used to illustrate Malthusian themes most explicitly. So, while Malthus's proto-ecological insights underlie the plots of many of the Illustrations, his demographic doctrines take center stage in “Weal and Woe in Garveloch,” a story set on a fictional island in the Hebrides.

The narrator of “Weal and Woe” characterizes Garveloch as an especially useful laboratory for demonstrations of Malthusian principles because of its isolation and its limited resources. “[T]heir society was not like the population of an overgrown district,” the narrator remarks, “where there may be mistakes in ascribing effects to causes, and where the blame of hardship may be laid in the wrong place. The people of Garveloch might survey their little district at a glance, and calculate the supply of provision grown, and count the numbers to be fed by it, and by this means discern, in ordinary circumstances, how they might best manage to proportion their resources to labor and food.”Footnote ³⁴ This apparently straightforward Malthusian math is belied, however, by the ecological plotting that structures the story. As the narrator elaborates the material relationships binding islanders to herring, shellfish, wheat, seaweed, potatoes, and rainstorms, Garveloch proves to be anything but a closed and calculable system.

The island's troubles begin after almost a decade of prosperity. Awakened to the abundance of unexploited resources around the Hebrides, a fishing company has bought rights from the local laird and built up a moderate industry, transforming the landscape. Disaster strikes when a set of interrelated developments in the Hebridean community—an abundance of children, an influx of immigrants looking for work, sabotage among jealous fishermen, and the replacement of labor-intensive grain with potatoes as the cottagers’ staple crop—suddenly combine into a crisis, catalyzed by an unusually cold and stormy summer that ravages the sensitive potatoes and drives away the shoals on which the fishery depends. Deprived of their staples, the locals scavenge shellfish and seaweed to survive, while opportunistic military recruiters swoop in to lure able-bodied men away from their impoverished community and ship them off to war. Many islanders do not live to see another prosperous summer.

At a simple thematic level, the story effectively illustrates the implications of Malthusian population theory for individual decision-making. “The increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence,” Martineau flatly concludes in the “Summary of Principles” that follows the tale: “By bringing no more children into the world than there is a subsistence provided for, society may preserve itself from the miseries of want.”Footnote ³⁵ While some degree of reproductive restraint is obviously advisable, the story's ecological plot undercuts the simplicity of such messaging with its exemplification of just how contingent and incalculable the fates of the islanders truly are. Though they inhabit what seems like a closed system, the story shows them to be caught within intertwining natural and social networks that extend to encompass the entire globe. The timing of a revenge plot in the story, for example, hinges on the staggered fishing seasons in the Hebrides, which in turn reflect the oceanic migrations of “herring shoals … and the cod which follow to make prey of them.”Footnote ³⁶ In this mesh of unpredictable entanglement, prudence may generally pay off and improvidence may often be punished, but no characters come across as central or agentic in any straightforward fashion—they cannot, because their paths hinge on an astonishing array of intermediaries, both human and nonhuman.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, the narrator admits as much. Interspersed with her emphasis on the simple arithmetic of sustainability is another message that highlights the utter unpredictability of life, prompting meditation on the ways individual successes or failures lie open to a sprawling set of contingencies that may include “[a] single bad season, the opening of a few more fishing stations, a change in the diet of the West India Slaves,—any one of these.”Footnote ³⁸

Even those stories not explicitly devoted to Malthusian lessons preserve this essentially Malthusian technique of tracing flows of food and resources to reveal the open, precarious web of interconnection on which human communities depend. These plots use literary form to inculcate a kind of ecological literacy, encouraging readers to look beyond conventional distinctions between human and nonhuman, the social and the natural, by rejecting analogous aesthetic distinctions between foreground and background. Indeed, the invalidation of background as an aesthetic category has become something of a commonplace of ecocriticism. As the ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood observes, “The natural world and the biosphere, have been treated as … the unconsidered, instrumentalized, and unimportant background to ‘civilised’ human life; they are merely the setting or stage on which what is really important, the drama of human life and culture, is played out.”Footnote ³⁹ Ecological awareness amounts to the surprising realization that—in Timothy Morton's words—“there is no definite background and therefore no definite foreground.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The ecological provocation of the Anthropocene in particular, Alaimo writes, lies in the way that it “muddles the commonsensical assumption that the world exists as a background for the human subject.”Footnote ⁴¹ Latour, too, understands this as the pedagogical upshot of the Anthropocene: “This may appear paradoxical, but, to gain in realism, we have to leave aside the pseudo-realism that purports to be drawing the portrait of humans parading against a background of things.”Footnote ⁴²

Although they were composed two centuries before such observations, the Illustrations function as early, instructive experiments in ecological form that suggest what stories-without-backgrounds might look like. The novellas repeatedly underscore the importance of learning to see through pretty landscapes to the communal relations in which the land participates. Some tales, such as “Sowers Not Reapers,” explicitly thematize the need for this kind of ecological literacy, highlighting the danger of treating the setting as a stable, asocial surround. The title of the story's first chapter, “Midsummer Moonlight,” might seem to promise the kind of pastoral scene-painting that opens so many nineteenth-century fictions. Martineau begins instead with a rejection of the peace and quiet her title promises, revealing a world of hidden but violent material-economic exchange permeating the landscape: “During the nights we speak of, repose did not descend with the twilight upon the black moors of Yorkshire, and the moon looked down upon something more glittering than the reflection of her own face in the tarns of Ingleborough. … Some of the polished and sharpened ware of Sheffield was exposed to the night dews in the fields, and passed from the hands of those who tempered to the possession of those who were to wield it.”Footnote ⁴³ This brewing class warfare remains invisible to “those sober people who shut themselves in” and write off the night landscape as a calm, uninteresting periphery to human activity (“Sowers Not Reapers,” 297).

Several characters watch this revolutionary fervor from spots of concealment around a dry upland spring, united by their shared desperation for a trickle of water that never comes. The second chapter follows these characters back to their village, examining the effects of that water when it finally does arrive in the unwelcome form of thunderstorms. These storms are no mere mood piece: they provide an opportunity to carefully examine the differentiated socioeconomic impacts of a sudden downpour on the lives and livelihoods of a range of interrelated beings, including “horned sheep”; “the shepherd”; “young plantations, where a thousand saplings stood, dry enough for firewood”; the local estate's “[t]rees of loftier growth”; “[e]very washerwoman … who happened to be pursuing her vocation that day”; “the millers and their men”; “careful housewives”; “thatch or tile” roofs; “the ducks”; and “the straggling oats” (304–5).

The climatic event gathers all these entities together, connecting each to each, but—as in Malthus—not in a blithely holistic fashion. Indeed, the entire plot of “Sowers Not Reapers” unfolds from the discrepant effects of the same wind, rain, and fiscal policies on this heterogeneous catalog of beings. It's a complex plot with many actors and agents, only a few of whom are human. But that is precisely the point. Near the end of the story, the local squire's decision to cut down his stately oaks to pay for his children's schooling prompts an extended consideration of the ways that even so-called scenery is surprisingly fungible in Martineau's ecological plots. The narrator lingers over the transformations in the landscape, praising those who learn to read or see such changes and denigrating anyone who cannot. “The woodmen who sat on the fallen trunks thought little, while enjoying their meal and their joke, of all that was included in the fact of these trees having fallen,” she observes (358). Properly seen, however, all the features of a distant landscape reveal not peaceful repose but an extended narrative arc. The right kind of reading can connect the dots and see change cascading through this network of humans, animals, plants, and machinery: “[Y]et others had eyes wherewith to look beyond the green slope where they were sitting, and to mark signs of the times in whatever they saw;—the whirling mill, with one or two additional powdered persons on the steps, or appearing at the windows;—the multiplication of the smokes of Sheffield;—the laden lighters below Kirkland's granaries;—Anderson's fields, waving green before the breeze;—sheep and cows grazing where there was to have been corn;—and, above all, Chatham [the stone-cutter] taking his way to the accustomed quarry, in a very unaccustomed manner” (358). The ability to read story where others see only a serene, unchanging rural scene is the basis of ecological literacy. Those who acquire this kind of literacy begin to see the extended networks of agency on which human fates depend.

To a student of Victorian literature and science, this networked plot structure feels uncanny—at once alien and deeply familiar. It shares with the sprawling novels of Dickens, Eliot, and others a basic commitment to unfurling the material relations that weave society together, to answering that Dickensian question, “What connexion can there be … ?” by showing how apparently inconsequential decisions at one node in the network can have life-altering effects elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Illustrations differ from the work of subsequent novelists, however, in that Martineau's answers are not constrained by anthropocentric ideas of society; her treatment of these questions does not presume that material entanglements end neatly at the species barrier. Martineau seems all but alone among fiction writers in her readiness to follow circuitous loops of causality through human and nonhuman beings. Nevertheless, she has some distinguished company: the same plotlines of surprising, wide-ranging entanglement appear in Darwin's The Origin of Species.

The Origin of Species is best known as the text where Darwin explained the theory of natural selection that became central to modern biology, but it played an equally pivotal role in solidifying the vision of interspecies relations central to ecology. The two fields are themselves hopelessly entangled in Darwin's writing. So, in a famous passage from chapter 3 (“Struggle for Existence”) of The Origin, Darwin establishes the basis for both natural selection and ecological ideas by narrating interactions “showing how plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In one such micronarrative, he begins with a set of observations of grazing cows devouring evergreen saplings on English scrubland, proving that “cattle absolutely determine the existence of the Scotch fir” in the heath landscape.Footnote ⁴⁶ Building on this relationship between grazers and tree growth, he observes that “in several parts of the world insects determine the existence of cattle” because insects—flies mostly—kill many calves shortly after birth by laying eggs in their tissues.Footnote ⁴⁷ But such flies, in turn, are eaten by birds, so that a change in the population of “certain insectivorous birds (whose numbers are probably regulated by hawks or beasts of prey)” would lead to a change in the population of insects, leading to a change in the fates of cattle, and, finally, to a dramatic transformation in the vegetation of the landscape itself—“and so onwards in ever-increasing circles of complexity.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The depiction of interspecies community in these micronarratives so struck the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel that he coined a new word, Oecologie, to describe the study of “those complicated mutual relations which Darwin designates as conditions of the struggle of existence.”Footnote ⁴⁹

What I am calling the ecological plot—the mode of storytelling that traces material processes of cause and effect across conventional boundaries of space, class, and species to reveal the webs of reciprocal relations that structure the fates of living beings—thus emerges in the writings of both Darwin and Martineau, a fact that registers their profound intellectual affinities. As family friends, the pair met and exchanged ideas with some regularity from the late 1830s onward.Footnote ⁵⁰ Some scholars have even speculated that Darwin's famous 1838 reading of Malthus's Essay—the event that crystallized his idea of natural selection—was prompted by his encounters with Martineau.Footnote ⁵¹ The precise nature of the intellectual traffic between these two figures is finally less important, however, than the storytelling strategies they shared, which follow naturally from Malthus's emphasis on material interconnection.

Martineau and Darwin seem to have recognized the Essay’s potential to offer the scaffolding of a new kind of narrative. Despite their different disciplinary affiliations, what they both produced was a narrative form that afforded ecological thought—a strategy of storytelling that made it possible, even easy, to see how human beings were materially inextricable from the nonhuman world around them.Footnote ⁵² As was the case with Malthus, however, the visions of interconnection that Darwin and Martineau produced did not radically shake their own understandings of ethics, which were largely dictated by disciplinary commitments. Thus Darwin, a natural historian, allows himself a certain aesthetic admiration for the complexity of interspecies relations, but the ecological micronarratives in The Origin of Species remain descriptive rather than prescriptive, avoiding any serious engagement with the moral repercussions of interconnection. Martineau, by contrast, has no problem freighting her tales with moral teachings. But those teachings, conveniently cataloged at the conclusion of each of the Illustrations, double down on the ethical injunctions of classical political economy, with its admiration for economic deregulation and prudent self-interest.

Martineau's fictions thus fail to grapple with the radical entanglements that her stories skillfully illustrate, downplaying the complications of the world she depicts in order to highlight a set of comparatively simple economic principles drawn from Adam Smith, Malthus, and David Ricardo.Footnote ⁵³ Critics have long decried this feature of the Illustrations, arguing that Martineau's adherence to the prescriptions of political economy compromises the project by turning “complex problems into happy fables … [written] in a mechanistic prose analogous to the immutable laws governing the ultimately benevolent workings of such economic systems.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Later novelists did not share Martineau's confidence that a providential moral order would emerge from the combination of free markets, foresight, and our innate instincts for self-preservation. As a result, they had to face the disorienting ethical uncertainties of ecological interdependence—and, somehow, to overcome them.

3. Occluding Ecology: The Closure of Community in the Social Novel

In spite of their unabashed didacticism, the Illustrations proved to be useful models for early Victorian authors aspiring to write socially committed fiction. As Eleanor Courtemanche has shown, Martineau's novellas possess a strong claim to being “the first secular industrial novels,” and their popularity, combined with their broadly sociological aims, laid the groundwork for later social novels by establishing a wide readership that learned to accept “fiction's power to reveal social truth.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Moreover, the narrative strategy of the Illustrations had both aesthetic appeal and political utility to recommend it. By emphasizing the unexpected material and moral consequences of individual choices as their effects traveled through a community, Martineau's plot structures offered a template for how storytelling might persuade readers to revise their own views of moral responsibility, encouraging them to imagine themselves as part of a collective that was larger and more densely interconnected than they thought possible. But the social novelists who followed in Martineau's footsteps made at least one significant alteration to her methodology: they rejected the dogma of political economy, refusing to impose its ethical prescriptions on a world whose newly apparent interconnectedness seemed to resist facile moral formulae.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the process, these novelists faced a new and disconcerting question: How was it possible to highlight or prioritize the needs of certain groups of human beings using a narrative mode that always threatened to wander far beyond such groups—and even beyond the human—in its drive to chart a world of open-ended interconnection?

What Victorian novelists confronted, in short, was the moral conundrum that had escaped Malthus, Darwin, and Martineau alike: the inherent conflict between the anthropocentrism of Western ethics and the centerless collectives revealed by circuits of ecological exchange. Indeed, some of the most famous Victorian reflections on novel-writing wrestle with this ecological dilemma. If their ecological import has been overlooked, that is because Victorian writers do not treat the issue in terms we immediately recognize as ecological; rather, they describe the dilemma in the aesthetic register in which they encountered it, as an essentially narratological question—an issue of balancing between comprehensiveness and closure. So, in the preface to Roderick Hudson, Henry James figures the fundamental challenge facing the novelist in terms so formal as to be almost mathematical in nature. Novel-writing, he explains, is an artistic struggle to impose the fiction of a bound and centered circle on a reality of endless connection:

Given that he is meditating on novels toward the end of his own career and at the dawn of literary modernism, it is perhaps unsurprising that James aestheticizes the issue. He treats the decision about where to truncate any given representation of the endless web of relation as a matter of personal style, the idiosyncratic product of an artist's particular temperament. Yet long before James addressed the issue in his preface, certain practices had arisen that established conventional places to foreclose connection. Some forms of closure proved so practical—and so necessary to developing a coherent ethical vision within the confines of the novel—that they became de rigueur. Chief among these conventional forms of closure was a tendency to ignore almost all material relations that suggested that interdependency and ethical community might transcend the species barrier—a habit of exclusion that saved novelists the trouble (and terror) of facing the extent of ecological openness and of deciding how to respond to it.Footnote ⁵⁸ To see just how vital such exclusions became to the narratology of the social novel—and how aware novelists were of such exclusions—we need look no further than Middlemarch.

Although Eliot's text is often invoked as the apotheosis of the Victorian novel's sprawling, networked plot structures and ambitions toward inclusiveness, it is better understood as the most earnest, sustained, and philosophically nuanced exploration of the need to abandon such ambitions.Footnote ⁵⁹ After all, the narrator of Middlemarch guiltily apologizes not for the staggering length and breadth of the story but for its omissions and its silences. In one well-known passage, the narrator remarks that “I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The question of what or who populates this “universe” that must be ignored in order to prioritize “human lots” is left unanswered for the moment. The answer becomes clear, however, in the novel's later meditation on the squirrel's heartbeat, which reiterates the need to tune out certain aspects of the world in order to achieve focus and clarity. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” the narrator observes, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”Footnote ⁶¹

Eliot's famous metaphor offers an earlier, more ethically attuned version of James's geometric depiction of the problem of relation. Eliot insists on the impossibility of fully seeing, hearing, and understanding the lives of all other members of our communities: the intensity and sheer volume of ethical claims that such a vision would reveal to us would overwhelm our capacities; we would be destroyed. It is thus not only necessary but even good to limit our awareness of others, to shield ourselves from the sublime knowledge of those relations that really, universally stop nowhere, and to focus instead on some manageable section of the web that makes it possible to engage in meaningful attention and action. Tellingly, the vehicle of Eliot's metaphor emphasizes the particular benefits of shutting our eyes and ears to the doings of nonhumans. The growth of the grass and the pulsating heart of the squirrel are mentioned not to lament their material absence from the text's metonymic mapping of collectivity, but to serve as metaphors for the assorted forms of human experience that even this most ample of social novels must pass by in silence as it pursues coherence, focus, and closure. The metaphor of the squirrel's heartbeat classifies wild animals and plants as lying so far beyond the range of plausible subjects for the novel's ethical attentions that they are not seriously worth considering. They enter the text only at the extradiegetic level as useful illustrations of the accepted, unproblematic exclusions already implicit in the social novel—exclusions that can now be reintroduced, symbolically, to remind the reader of the necessity of exclusion itself.Footnote ⁶² As Helen Kingstone puts it, “[Eliot] views some calibrated ‘dullness’ of our emotional hearing as essential so that we may prioritize communication with fellow humans and function in the world.”Footnote ⁶³

Eliot's turn to grasses and squirrels is thus a sign that by the 1870s, the exclusion of nonhumans from the novel's communal imaginary was thoroughly uncontroversial, despite the form's continued reliance on ecological plot structures that obsessively traced webs of material interconnection. From the far end of the Anthropocene, this apparently untroubled excision of the nonhuman from such webs may seem disappointing—even tragically short-sighted. It raises the tantalizing specter of an alternate trajectory for the social novel, a history in which writers might have used the power of narrative to explore the ethical significance of chains of cause-and-effect that extend beyond the human. Such novels might have laid the groundwork for an ecologically informed imagination of moral community.

But that never happened. Instead ecology, political economy, and the social novel largely parted ways after Martineau's Illustrations, producing three distinctive discourses that espoused divergent, often incommensurate understandings of what it means to be a responsible member of a collective. Still, the brief genealogy sketched out here offers more than an opportunity to lament missed opportunities. It presents a case study of the way that one form—the ecological plot structure popularized by Martineau—can cross discursive boundaries, generating different kinds of insight in different contexts. It also provides a useful reminder that anthropocentrism is not always a mark of ignorance or arrogance. In the case of the social novel, anthropocentrism provided a valuable tool for navigating the staggering complexity of the world at a time when the fact of interconnection was becoming undeniable, even though the precise nature of the material traffic between bodies and species was still largely uncharted.

With this emerging vision of interconnection came a new set of ethical perils. On one hand, this expansion of knowledge could foster an overconfident scientism that promised to systematically solve questions of ethics by rooting them in the natural order. The natural-cultural entanglements charted in Martineau's Illustrations provide a case in point: they seem to offer newly rigorous explanatory grounds for the obdurate ethical prescriptions of political economy. On the other hand, the sublime extent of interconnection could also generate a sense of insuperable ethical ambiguity: faced with the astonishing expanse and unknowability of interrelatedness, it is difficult to ascertain all the consequences of any individual action and decide its ethical import—making it easy to justify a quietist resignation, a refusal to do anything at all. The novel's commitment to the human offered a mode of moral triage that, however imperfect, made it possible to strike a balance between overconfidence and inaction. It offered a practical way of facing the excitement and terror of the interconnections that were just beginning to be disclosed by ecological thinking—a way to adjudicate competing ethical claims and attend to the needs of overlooked human beings despite a growing sense of the vastness of the world, and a new humility about humanity's place within it.