9
… it was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever … It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye …
(Dickens, Hard Times)
Along with increasing concern with the poor in post-1789 literature came outrage at the environmental conditions of the poor. Environmental issues as a major literary concern begin in the late 18th century with the Industrial Revolution and poets of the Romantic movement such as Blake and Wordsworth, who expose the adverse effects of industry, particularly in the lives of the poor. Until the French Revolution, the environmental ideal was theological: a biblical Eden lost to sin; a world sanctified by its creation by God; the glorious hymns to the natural world in the Psalms, recited daily in synagogue and church. The Bible, a creation of an agricultural world, remained relevant in a largely agricultural European world, being close to the seasonal cycle, of ploughing, sowing, and harvesting, rain, wind, and shine. The Bible teaches love of nature as God’s handiwork; destruction of nature, except for survival, is reprehensible. In the largely rural pre-industrial world, the environment was shared by rich and poor; with the rise of industry came environmental degradation, the pollution of air and rivers especially in and around growing cities, where the poor were trapped and the environmental advantages they had in their rural existence were lost. At the same time, their protection by Scripture was lost as the secular state grew, and secular education brought religion to the bar of reason; science discredited religious authority and lowered the authority of Church and Scripture. Yet, many writers, however secular, found inspiration in Scriptural awe for the environment, and were outraged by the destruction of the environment by industry.
Industry and the environment in literature
Prior to the industrial age, the human species had only limited capacity for ruining the environment. In a largely agricultural world, the population was sparse in most places; and there is little in pre-1789 literature showing concern for the future of the earth. The biblical law requiring that the land be left fallow in the seventh year (Exodus 23: 10–11) and the injunction against cutting down fruit trees in wartime – ‘for man is the tree of the field’ (Deuteronomy 20: 19) – are notable exceptions. Until the 19th century, most environmental problems were part of Nature, not man-made: drought, plague, crop-failure, and disease were largely uncontrollable. Infectious disease was often seen as divine punishment. The afflicted, as in the case of Job or the anonymous ‘Suffering Servant’ in the Book of Isaiah, could be found guilty of sin. Ignorance was frozen, as it were, in the dogma of specious religious ‘truth’. The notion that the environment could or should be controlled was limited. In ancient literature, Rome is the glaring monument to the environmentally challenged city.1 Rome, with its cheapness of life, its relative indifference to human suffering, its contempt for the poor and the slaves of the world, was a microcosm of the empire, the largest slave-society in history. As in later history, the rich were able to escape the pestilential foulness of the city into the countryside where they built their villas, with their colonnades and gardens, fountains and lakes, bath-houses, temples and theaters. The poor were mostly trapped where they were.
Long before the Industrial Revolution, factories and population density damaged the environment. Daniel Defoe and Edmund Burke were among those warning of the adverse environmental effects of pre-industrial mining, causing, among other things, deforestation and serious health hazards. As industry began to dominate the English countryside in the early 19th century, and cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Preston, and Nottingham grew, the mechanization and spread of industry created unprecedented potential for destruction. Environmental damage by industry chiefly harmed the poor. Enclosures and pollution robbed the poor further of the little they had, they were denied free access to land they had worked for centuries, to their open spaces, woods, rivers, and streams; they were banished and had no one to defend them. Law and government conspired with landowners to cheat them. Crabbe, in The Borough (1810), bewails ‘sewers from streets the road-side banks defile’ (Letter I); and Clare, in ‘The Moors’ (1820s?), mourns the privatized fields of England: ‘On paths to freedom and to childhood dear/ A board sticks up to notice “no road here”.’
As we have seen, literature from the late 18th century helped overcome resistance to improved sanitation and medicine, gave voice to increasing alarm over environmental issues, and in incalculable ways affected public opinion and legislation. Even prior to the discovery of germs by Pasteur in 1857, writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell in Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens in Hard Times (1854) described urban air and water pollution as serious health hazards, particularly among the poor. In France, too, both the advancements in environmental science and neglect or abuse of the environment enter literature, in Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), for example, and Zola’s Germinal (1885). In Russia, industry came later than in the West, but by the end of the 19th century Chekhov was writing, similarly, of looming environmental disaster even in largely rural areas.
In 19th-century literature, concern for the poor became increasingly a concern for the environment in which the poor lived. Both urban poverty and interconnected environmental problems were often, as in the past, out of control, though potentially masterable. As the Industrial Revolution polluted and disfigured the countryside, the natural world – often depicted in the past as ugly or frightening – was idealized in contrast with the city, spoiled by poverty, disease, and ugliness. The modern state both ideologically and in its practical advances in science and technology moved toward the eradication of extreme poverty, largely achieving the capability to do so by the latter half of the 19th century. The American and French revolutions lifted on high the chief ideological models for the modern secular state with equal rights and opportunities for all citizens – including in theory the poor. Even before these revolutions, conditions in Europe were improving in some respects: better agricultural machinery and techniques, better knowledge of soil, crops, and livestock, more specialization and productivity; the dismantlement of medieval institutions; better drainage and more arable land, with enclosures for raising more sheep and better breeding methods; the growth of towns and cities, with more markets and jobs as well as schools, hospitals, and centers for research by which medicine and public health could be improved; the expansion of overseas markets; better transport, with famine rarer and more local.
Yet, industry and capitalism also spurred exploitation of the poor. Clare, Turgenev, Zola, Hardy, Chekhov, Silone, and Steinbeck, among others, are outraged at landowners, banks, or local governments motivated by profit alone, oblivious to the human cost: the poor lose land they lived and worked on for centuries, they are denied free access to their open spaces, woods, rivers, and streams, they are banished and have no one to defend them as the law and government conspire with landowners to cheat them. The world of Nature had a richness of its own, for rich and poor alike. Now, enclosures and pollution robbed the poor further of the little they had, and the Church stood idly by. The Industrial Revolution was ‘catastrophic’ to the poor.2 In conditions of war, famine, and population growth, the clergyman Thomas Malthus published Essay on Population (1798), arguing that population increase was an impossible burden on society, to be dealt with through population control and stringent legislation.3 Blake mocks Malthusian theory in lines laced with sarcasm: when children sicken, ‘let them die. There are enough/ Born, even too many, & our earth will be overrun’.4 Wordsworth was appalled at the sufferings of the poor and the damage done by industry to the rural poor, destroying their local agricultural and cottage economy that had sustained them for generations, ruining the English countryside and driving its inhabitants into a new kind of mass impoverishment in the cities. In the poem, Michael (1800), he describes the end of a centuries-old way of life amid a landscape of unspoiled God-given beauty and the start of a city life as much morally as environmentally polluted.5 To Wordsworth, Nature was the great healer for the sicknesses of civilization. In ‘The Excursion’ (1814), Wordsworth attacks the Industrial Revolution as an ecological disaster:
… I grieve, when on the darker side
Of this great change I look; and there behold
Such outrage done to nature as compels
The indignant power to justify herself;
Yea, to avenge her violated rights.
For England’s bane.6
Until the time of Victoria, whose husband, Albert, was evidently a victim of poor sanitation at Windsor Castle, rich and poor alike shared the consequences of ignorance. Prior to the 1840s, there was much resistance to sanitary improvements: the emergence of scientific and statistical evidence that urban overcrowding was a health hazard for all made reform a moral imperative. The poor were especially vulnerable in their overcrowded slums. Landlords did not willingly pay for the removal of waste, and tenants were too poor to pay for it. Until the 1840s cholera was still seen as ‘a disease of the poor’. Even the epidemic of 1832, by which time it was clear that the mixture of drinking water and sewage was toxic, left ‘no lasting sanitary improvement’.7 Engels, in The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844, is outraged that the poor in Manchester are crowded in slums alongside pigs and cattle, and must wash and drink directly from the polluted river water, while the rich live in the better part of town, with pumps and water pipes. A major change in the 1840s was increasing public awareness that existing sanitation was a danger to public health. Dr. John Snow’s famous pamphlet written during the cholera epidemic in London in 1849, ‘On the Mode of Communication of Cholera’, is revolutionary in separating disease from morality and emphasizing measures such as separating drinking water from sewage, washing hands before touching food, and boiling water before drinking – without reference to moral squalor and Christian beliefs. From the mid-1850s, improvements in sanitation by engineers such as Haussmann in Paris and Bazalgette in London showed that some of the worst symptoms of poverty could be fought, perhaps overcome.8 The discoveries of Pasteur and Lister at the same time led to further advances in hygiene, sanitation, medicine, and life expectancy, and also to an enhanced tragic awareness of death as the survival rates of infants improved and life expectancy increased. Uncontrollable pain was no longer a normal fact of life for all. With increasing awareness that the poor were victims of environmental degradation, the perception of the poor became more realistic and sympathetic. Literature, including novels of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, was a vital part of the spirit of the age, in enhancing awareness of environmental factors in public health, and in creating a more positive image of the poor.
The Industrial Revolution killed rural society as it had existed, setting the poor on the frigid tide of supply and demand, letting them drown when too weak to swim. Average life expectancy in the mid-19th century was 39.5 – lower than in Shakespeare’s time (in Gaskell’s Manchester it was about ten years less); about one-third of children aged 10–14 worked; and childhood mortality was about 30%.9 Most of the population was crammed in dismal town slums, breathing filthy air, drinking filthy water, about one-third in towns of over 50,000, coal-dependent, built for utility and profit, with inadequate waste disposal, and chronic mass respiratory and intestinal disease, the two main 19th-century urban killers. The Industrial Revolution, materially divorcing poor from rich as never before, married them in its pollution – the rich, too, had to breathe dirty air, drink dirty water, and smell the odor of the dead and the open sewers. Though the poor suffered most from environmental problems, rich and poor alike shared the same environment and were therefore mutually interdependent; what affected one affected all.
Writers from the time of Dickens, with varying degrees of irony, affection, and rage, explored the ‘cesspool’ of London as capital of the most powerful empire in history, and England the wealthiest and most industrially advanced country in the world. In Dickens’ London, the Thames, like the rivers of other great European cities, was ‘a vast open cloaca’ into which 200 sewers ran, to be drawn, unfiltered, for domestic use.10 Cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, epidemic diarrhoea, dysentery, and smallpox were frequent visitors, with no cure. In 1852, Henry Mayhew, author of the recently published London Labour and the London Poor, went up in a hot air balloon over London and described what he saw: though exhilarating, it was like being above a huge open sewer and garbage dump, a hell of noxious fog and smoke, the breath of death. Government reform had to apply to all; pollution and disease had to be fought, sewers built, better diet, housing and education made available, for the population as a whole. The message was driven home in the ‘Great Stink’ of the polluted Thames in 1858, which drove Parliament into recess; and, in 1861, the death of Prince Albert from disease evidently caught from polluted water: ‘The sanitation of Windsor Castle was as bad as the slums of London.’11
In the early years of Victoria’s reign, infant mortality – the chief marker of poverty in post-1945 development studies – was still about 50% in London, affecting rich and poor alike, ignorant of hygiene and sanitation. As industry spread in Western Europe, air and water pollution reduced life expectation; and by 1900 the quality of life in Eastern Europe was similarly poisoned, with the benefits of industry slower to come.12 Literature reflects the reality of multiple infant deaths – for example Dickens’ Great Expectations or Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych – as well as the transformation by which improved sanitation and hygiene brought about an unprecedented fall in infant mortality.
The environment and the poor in Dickens, Gaskell, and Marx
Dickens is concerned not just with the physical effects of industry but also with the psychological and moral effects, as increasing numbers of the rural poor began to work in factories, exchanging one despair for another. Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) is a picture of the dullness and uniformity of Coketown, a typical smoky industrial town in the north of England, buildings black with soot, a river purple with dye from the factories, streets all alike, and a corresponding air of educational limitation and loss of individualism on an industrial scale.13 Clear days are rare. The foggy, hazy air mirrors the moral muddle by which large numbers of people work themselves to death to make their employers rich. The industrialists who have become rich though the Coketown workers see their employees as functional operatives, ‘something wholesale, of which vast fortunes were made’, not much different than the ‘animated tools’ in the ancient Greek slave system.14 The industrialists are allegedly unconcerned with the ruin their factories bring to the lives of their workers, only with their own ‘ruin’ as Parliament passed laws to limit the damage.15
Dickens wrote Hard Times at a moment of radically changing perceptions of poverty and the poor. Neither he nor his contemporaries foresaw the extent of change for the better brought by the Industrial Revolution coupled with improvements in sanitation, hygiene, and medicine. Nor did he appreciate fully that statistics (‘Facts, sir; nothing but Facts’) could and did give unanswerable arguments for social reform.16 Literature itself rose in significance in giving voice to unprecedented concern for the poor. Poverty in Victorian England was a more pressing issue, in legislation as in literature, than at any time previously, in any country. Literature to some extent compensated for the lack of representation of the poor in government – and for lack of compassion in Poor Law. Workers’ conditions became central in political debate, and the plight of the poor entered the literary mainstream.
Among 19th-century novelists, Elizabeth Gaskell had an exceptionally clear view of environmental degradation in the lives of the poor. As a minister’s wife in Manchester, she often visited her poor fellow-parishioners. Her observations of their living conditions are laid out in almost-nauseating detail in her novel Mary Barton (1848). Having recently lost a child of her own, she was appalled to find that her tragedy was practically the norm among the poor; and this too enters her novel – as a motive for murder.
Gaskell and Charles Kingsley follow Dickens in their critique of slum conditions and unrest in the industrial city. Both saw the ‘condition of England’ from a Christian viewpoint, Gaskell as a prominent minister’s wife in Manchester, and Kingsley as a minister in the Church of England, rector of Eversley, Hampshire. Gaskell was well-placed to observe the mutual antagonism of capital and labor. Her Unitarianism drew her to a life of service to the poor, but her social position brought her into close contact also with wealthy industrialists who worshipped in her husband’s church. In her frequent charitable visits to the poor, Gaskell was shocked by their conditions. Her novels, including Mary Barton (1848), draw on this experience. Manchester factory workers had unusually high mortality rates.17 In Mary Barton, Gaskell depicts factory workers whose wage-slave torment provokes natural resentment against the carefree luxurious lives of those who live parasitically on their labor. Though the two classes are dependent on one another, the rich and the poor live lives of dangerous alienation from each other, and the rich have no understanding of the lives of the poor. Gaskell takes us down a typical Manchester street filled with human waste and garbage, into a dark cellar in which an entire family lives: ‘The window panes are broken and stuffed with rags, the smell is enough to knock one down, several children are rolling hungrily in the dark on the damp floor, and their mother weeps in helplessness’ (ch. 6).18
John Barton, a Chartist leader who has seen his movement crushed, conceives a murderous hatred of the Poor Law system which allows such conditions to continue: ‘Damn their charity and their money!’ (ch. 10).19 Barton is sorely tormented by the vast wealth of the factory owners at a time when laboring people and their children (including Barton’s own child) die of hunger. In an act of revenge, he murders the son of a factory owner. It is of great social and psychological interest that Gaskell’s sympathies lie primarily with John Barton – despite his being a murderer: he is ‘sadly put about to make great riches and great poverty square with Christ’s Gospel’ (ch. 37). Gaskell links conditions of the workers to the sharp rise in prostitution in the 1840s;20 and, in her Preface of October 1848, suggests that the Continent-wide revolutions of 1848 stemmed from the injustice and unkindness suffered by the workers. Her views, though not revolutionary, are not far from those of Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto (1848), published in the same year as Mary Barton. Gaskell constantly observes striking inequalities in the lives of the rich and the poor: the comfortable houses and good food and warmth, the luxuries and leisure and superfluities of the rich, attended by their servants; the damp fetid cellars of the diseased and starving poor. In slack times, the rich cut back on salmon and flowers; the poor on bread and coal. Gaskell writes with empathy of the rage against the rich and the desire for revenge. She dispels any illusion that the workers and factory owners are fellow capitalists, sharing the risk: the power is all on one side; market fluctuations make life a lottery for the poor; when a worker loses his job, he cannot feed his family and pay the rent; the owners risk capital; the workers risk lives. A Manchester song quoted by Gaskell (ch. 6) describes the ignorance of the rich man about the poor: ‘He never heard the maddening cry,/ “Daddy, a bit of bread!”’ The poor watch their children die of hunger, the rich do not: ‘Han they ever seen a child o’ their’n die for want o’ food?’ The rich abandon the compassion of the Gospels and use economic ‘law’ to persecute the poor with the relentlessness of the Furies in the Eumenides.21
Kingsley’s novel Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet (1850) dates from the same period as Mary Barton and describes similar shock at workers’ conditions, but offers Christian faith as a remedy. For Kingsley, the novel extended his clerical role. Alton Locke, like Mary Barton, appeared at the nadir of workers’ fortunes in England, when industrial growth and population increase had not yet brought about real improvement in conditions. Yet, the outrage in both novels represents a significant change. Gaskell and Kingsley describe overcrowding, hunger, high infant mortality, poor education and life chances; but these had always been the conditions of the poor. An entire literature, created by some of the best 19th-century writers, was devoted to the poor, with the aim of reform.22 Kingsley wrote Alton Locke at the time when Dr. John Snow was beginning to make the connection between cholera and contaminated water, leading to his intervention in the 1854 epidemic when he broke the pump in Broad Street, Soho: this was a crucial moment in a revolution in social health.23 No one reading Alton Locke, published four years before this breakthrough, could doubt that dirty water spread disease. This new apprehension, backed by science, that something could be done to reduce deaths created a moral obligation. The novel is one of the first to express anger at polluted water. The London tailor Jeremy Downes is furious that his wife and children have been poisoned by the open sewer running through their home. He would like to drown his sorrows with gin but is given the tactless advice that water is better:
‘Curse you and your water! If you had had no water to drink or wash with for two years but that – that,’ pointing to the foul ditch below – ‘if you had emptied the slops in there with one hand, and filled your kettle with the other – ’
‘Do you actually mean that that sewer is your only drinking water?’
‘Where else can we get any? Everybody drinks it …’
(ch. 35)24
Industry and the environment in Zola’s Germinal
Zola’s Germinal exposes the environmental damage done by the French mining industry, its ruin of the countryside, the earth pocked with slag-heaps and ruins, coated with soot from the blast-furnaces, hardly a tree in sight, pollution of air and water, and destruction of the health of the inhabitants.25 The novel is told chiefly through the eyes of Étienne Lantier, a young man, unemployed and hungry, who finds work in a mine in Normandy. He sees the effects of dreadful work conditions in the person of Bonnemort, a dead man walking, 50 years a miner, since age seven, spitting out gobs of black phlegm, fruit of his toil and of environmental pollution. Maltreated youth meets maltreated old man, uniting an unschooled socialist hope and experienced labor determined to survive. The sparse, cramped living conditions of the Maheu family are typical of mining village 240. The Maheus have worked in the mine since it opened a century earlier. The mine has given them little other than poverty, suffering and sickness.
In this landscape of environmental disaster, people are little better than animals, and animal imagery is repeatedly used to describe them, overcrowded in their tiny homes as though they were cattle in a pen: ‘the fetid air gave out a living warmth, the suffocating warmth of even the most comfortable living quarters, with their smell of human cattle’; the miners, who include women and children, are like wandering, miserable cattle, and when Jeanlin blows his horn to call them, it is like rounding up cattle;26 or the miners are like ants on an ant-hill or worms eating into wood, ‘human insects’;27 the atmosphere in the pit is ‘bestial’, full of animal desire, as with animals in a shed, there is extreme physical proximity, no privacy, and a lack of inhibition in bodily functions; children under 12 work alongside their parents and older siblings.
The socialist hope in the novel is expressed in imagery of environmental healing. Though the miners are defeated, they are unbroken. Armed with new self-knowledge and set on a revolutionary career, Étienne imagines his comrades germinating underground, pushing outward in revolutionary pregnancy, a symbol of human and environmental revival combined:28
All around him seeds were swelling and shoots were growing, cracking the surface of the plain, driven upwards by their need for warmth and light. The sap flowed upwards and spilled over in soft whispers; the sound of germinating seeds rose and swelled to form a kiss. Again, and again, and ever more clearly, as if they too were rising towards the sunlight, his comrades kept tapping away. Beneath the blazing rays of the sun, in that morning of new growth, the countryside rang with song, as its belly swelled with a black and avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon their ripening would burst open the earth itself.29
Mendele, the environment, and Eastern European Jews
The Jews shared all the environmental problems of other Europeans, but there was the added taint of anti-Semitism, by which they were themselves held responsible for their poverty, ignorance, and squalor: they were inherently disease-carriers, and ‘Jewish hygiene’ represented their allegedly corrupt moral condition. The growth of the Jewish population in the Pale outpaced the general population, from about one million to five million during the 19th century, and subject to discriminatory laws and violence. Residence restrictions, which forced many Russian Jews to move to the cities, meant that by the late 19th century about a third of the urban population of the Pale and nearly three-quarters of all those engaged in commerce were Jews. Jewish poverty was little different from that of the majority of Russians, especially peasants after emancipation in 1861.30 A small number were educated; and as the Yiddish and Hebrew press grew there was increasing understanding of the unhealthy environment in which the majority lived, and that, following the West, it was possible to make significant improvements.
The Yiddish and Hebrew novelist and social reformer, Mendele Mocher Sefarim, writes about the poor hygienic conditions among the Russian Jews, which led to high infant mortality.31 As Russian cities and population were growing rapidly, these conditions were in some respects worse than those described in the Talmud over 1,500 years earlier;32 but, unlike the Talmud, Mendele is outraged. Jewish houses were often overcrowded, several families in one small house, three or four to a room. Houses were sometimes little more than caves or holes, reminiscent of prehistoric dwellings, and were usually rated dangerous. Entire towns were sometimes wiped out by fire. Mendele portrays the filth in Russian towns, the garbage dumped in the streets among carcasses of cats and dogs, of pigs drowning in mud. In The Travels of Benjamin the Third (1878), set in the early 1850s, Mendele describes in detail the sewage ‘system’ of a small Russian town, consisting of 30 or 40 swamps linked through underground channels with the river. Disease and epidemics were frequent. The absence of plague in any year was miraculous, ‘not that the river and streets were cleaned or that the householders prohibited the throwing of slops into the streets … it was a plain miracle. Actually, many Jews caught dysentery and died, but that wasn’t the fault of plague – it was bad cucumbers’.33
In The Beggar-Book (ch. 23), Jewish houses are identified by the slops and garbage outside, and inside by the dilapidation, the broken windows, walls and roofs. The poorhouse (hekdesh) is omnipresent as are beggars and cripples in the villages and in Odessa, many wandering lame, blind, crippled, diseased; the frauds, too, are mostly desperately poor, unable to find work to support themselves and their families. The poorhouse is typically a dilapidated, leaky structure in danger of collapse. Many of the poor prefer to take shelter in the House of Study at night, with the goats.
Mendele links the unhygienic conditions in the mid-19th-century Jewish shtetls to the lack of education and the need for reform, yet such conditions were the norm, even in advanced countries, at the time. Agnon, too, in And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight (Ve-Haya he-Akov le-Mishor, 1913) describes the abysmal sewage system characteristic of small Jewish towns in 19th-century Eastern Europe, but which were probably better than many of the growing West European industrial cities of the time. In fact, the mortality rate among children and the elderly was lower in the Jewish than in the general population.
Poverty was the main factor in driving large numbers of East European Jews to emigrate, mostly to America. Initially their conditions were in some respects worse than in Europe. Upton Sinclair, in The Jungle (1906: ch. 2), describes in nauseating detail the polluted environment of c. 1900 Chicago, hog-butcher to the world, worse than Gaskell’s Manchester 60 years earlier, the skies dark with soot, the air rancid, the water dangerous – and the city, too, is polluted throughout with fraud mostly directed against the unsuspecting, unprotected poor, literally threatening their lives. Among the cries of accusation that make up this novel, there is the practice of mis-selling to ignorant, impoverished immigrants seemingly affordable houses, but with enormous hidden costs, on streets as yet unpaved, unconnected to the sewage system: ‘there were no pavements – there were mountains and valleys and rivers, gullies and ditches, and great hollows full of stinking green water. In these pools the children played, and rolled about in the mud of the streets’. Sometimes they would drown in the sewage. New York, too, at this time also had open sewers, and its disease-ridden slums were among the worst in the world, as Joseph Roth writes in his novel, Job (1930). In public health at this point, prior to World War I, the major Western European cities, notably London and Paris, were still ahead of major American cities whose conditions in some respects recalled those described by Edwin Chadwick in the early Victorian era, in his Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842). In literature of the interwar years, these conditions largely vanished; rather, it reflects a steep improvement in life expectancy and a decline in infant mortality.
Ibsen, Chekhov, and the environment
By the late 19th century, Norwegian and Russian literature took up environmental themes, in the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov. Both explore environmental problems as conflicts of interest, in which morality is set aside for economic reasons. In An Enemy of the People (1882), Ibsen sets the environmental damage caused by industry to the water supply against economic interest; a doctor, Thomas Stockmann, discovers that the spa waters in his town are polluted and a health risk. The town faces a huge expense to rebuild its water system, which would take at least two years. The town leaders, including Stockmann’s brother, the mayor, are less concerned that they are poisoning their clients than with the economic ruin of the town. Initially, they pretend to support Stockmann, but in the end personal interests win out; they deny that the problem exists and condemn Stockmann as ‘an enemy of the people’. Stockmann calls a public meeting to expose the scandal, and he condemns the ‘compact majority’ which denies the truth: it is not just the water that needs purification, but the moral life of the town, poisoned by its parasitical citizens, and by ignorance and ugly impoverished conditions. Truth and conscience cannot be compromised; a free man has no right to become corrupted, to spit in his own face; better that the community be destroyed than to live on a lie. The strongest man in the world, he declares at the end of the play, faced with his own ostracism, is the one who stands alone.
As environmental damage in Ibsen’s play is tolerated as it is seen as secondary to the town’s welfare, so also in Chekhov’s first great play, Uncle Vanya (1897): the peasants destroy the forests as this is their sole means of subsistence. Though it (like Chekhov’s other plays) tells of wealthy or middle-class educated Russians,34 Uncle Vanya is unusual in the drama of its time in confronting the environmental damage caused by poverty. Mikhail Lvovich Astrov, like Stockmann a doctor, is an environmentalist shocked at the destruction of the forests by peasants desperate to survive.35 This concern marks Astrov in his time as a crank, except to Sonya, Vanya’s young plain daughter, who loves and understands him. The forests mirror human nature: if they flourish, so do people; if they are cut down, all humanity suffers: and indeed, the cut-down forest (like the trees in The Cherry Orchard) is on one level symbolic of a fall in the quality of human relationships. Astrov has prepared detailed maps showing how in the past 50 years half the forest in the district has been cut down, to no one’s benefit, and is likely to vanish completely in another 10 or 15 years. Chekhov’s ‘In the Ravine’ (1900) takes a similar environmental stance, again treating human destruction of the natural world as a form of self-destruction. It recalls the ‘Condition of England’ novels a half-century earlier in its exposé of the environmental damage caused by Russia’s fledgling industry. (In Turgenev’s pre-industrial stories of the often-impoverished, persecuted Russian peasantry, in Sketches from a Hunter’s Album [1852], the air and rivers are still clean and the countryside is beautiful.) The village of Ukleyevo has four factories, three cotton-mills and a tannery, which pollute the air and water and bring disease to humans and animals. As in An Enemy of the People, the tannery is the chief polluter: ‘The water in the river often stank of the tannery; its refuse infected the meadows, and then the stock of the peasants would suffer from the plague.’36 Bribery keeps the tannery working even when ordered closed. Its stench proclaims the moral character of the village.37
Environmental blunders in Mussolini’s Italy
As in the American Midwest, where the ploughing up of grazing land to plant cash-crop wheat was a major ecological blunder, the draining of the Italian swampland in the Mussolini era and the concentration on wheat, also as a cash crop, for government benefit (the ‘Battle for Grain’) had the effect of worsening the hardships of the local peasantry. In particular, the draining of Lake Fucino in central Italy made the climate hotter and ruined the soil. Wheat or beets replaced citrus fruits, wine and olive oil, crops and products better suited to the hot, dry climate of the south. The fascist government passed laws limiting peasant access to water, and preventing them from using land for grazing. Carlo Levi describes the result of neglect and bad planning in southern Italy, where he was exiled as a political prisoner in 1935: poor soil, a bare, dusty, almost moonlike landscape, malaria, malnutrition, villagers having to walk hours daily to reach fertile patches to till or graze their flocks.38 Levi sums up some of the environmental causes of poverty in the south:
The land has been gradually impoverished: the forests have been cut down, the rivers have been reduced to mountain streams that often run dry, and livestock has become scarce. Instead of cultivating trees and pasture lands, there has been an unfortunate attempt to raise wheat in soil that does not favor it.
(ch. 24)
The entire region, once forest-land, is now covered with white clay, ‘as if the whole earth had died and all that was left under the sun was a whitened skeleton washed by many suns’ (ch. 12). As there are no trees, there is no song of birds, nor do the peasants sing.
Environmental abuse in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
In the American Midwest in the late 19th century, vast stretches of land were converted in one generation from grassland holding the soil to ploughed-up earth growing wheat in a drought-plagued territory. The result – a huge man-made catastrophe, described by John Steinbeck in the opening of his novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939): ‘a walking man lifted a thin layer as high as his waist, and a wagon lifted the dust as high as the fence tops, and an automobile boiled a cloud behind it’ (ch. 1). The surface of the earth has crusted in the heat, and every moving thing lifts dust into the air. The sky is dark with dust, the sun gives little light, and the stars at night cannot be seen. The farmers and their families cover their faces from the stinging air with handkerchiefs and goggles as the dust settles on the roofs and trees, on their furniture and on their shoulders. An eerie silence settles too, even among the children. The thick dust rose so high that it reached Washington. Though Midwestern dust coated the White House, Roosevelt’s New Deal did not reach many poor Midwestern Americans. In Steinbeck’s novel, farmers in the Midwest struggle to escape the economic disaster caused by drought and crop failure, bankruptcy and dispossession by banks by migrating to California. The drought brought environmental damage but also seemed to signify – perhaps as in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – a form of moral pollution, perhaps of capitalist greed, alienating people from each other and from the land.39
The novel opens with the question: will the men break?40 Steinbeck answers this question eloquently: ‘Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments’ (c. 14). The Joads, though having little apart from one another, face one problem after another together, and become expert at finding solutions.
Out of the stark barrenness of the desert, the migrants emerge into the long valley of California, a paradise of orange groves, cotton and ripe corn, running brooks, willows and abundant fertile land. On the top of their jalopy, granma, worn out by the journey, lies dead. The beauty of this new country, as in the case of the Russian landscape in Chekhov’s ‘Peasants’, clashes with human suffering and privation. California proves less a promised land than a corrupt Eden after the fall, where people are treated worse than animals, hunger persists amid plenty, and deprivation amid wealth. Here capitalism has gone berserk. To the rich, land is no more than a source of income: ‘crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money’ (ch. 19).41 Precious food is destroyed in front of hungry people to keep the prices up. Here landowners are alienated from their land. They farm on paper in offices and, lusting for profit, spit on the consequences. As in Germinal, the downtrodden are strengthened by the injustice and violence against them, justifying their cause. The poor uphold Christian principles. They help each other while the rich, particularly the absentee landlords, are guilty of criminal neglect.42 The book ends with no material improvement, but a spiritual transformation, an affirmation of the ‘one great soul’ of universal brotherhood, promising a future social revolution.
Like a modern prophet of doom, Steinbeck spells out the charge against America, land of plenty, and against the modern world in which economic law prevails, guilty of sin and crime beyond denunciation:
A homeless hungry man, driving the roads with his wife beside him and his thin children in the back seat, could look at the fallow fields which might produce food but not profit, and that man could know how a fallow field is a sin and the unused land a crime against the thin children.
(ch. 19)
Despite human ingenuity and the miracles of modern science producing the best and most abundant food in history, with ample means of distribution so that everyone could share, this food must be destroyed when landowners and banks make no profit. The country, cursed with human corruption, fills with the smell of rot, and anger ferments as children sicken and die: ‘The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic, and the pustules of pellagra swelled on their sides’ (ch. 21); ‘coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must rot, must be forced to rot’ (ch. 25). Guards are hired to stop the poor from fishing dumped potatoes from rivers, oranges are sprayed with kerosene to make them inedible, pigs are killed and buried – all to keep prices down: ‘in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage’ (ch. 25).43
Conclusion
Literature from ancient times has responded sensitively to environmental issues but these, prior to 1789, were mostly natural and largely beyond human agency: drought, disease, plague, crop failure were accepted as inevitable. As environmental control increased, through science and technology, the Industrial Revolution raised the spectre of man-made environmental disaster: the growth of cities and factories brought unprecedented water pollution and air pollution, affecting mortality and quality of life adversely. Changes in traditional agricultural practice led at times to disaster. Writers in the 1789–1939 period – including Dickens, Zola, Chekhov, Levi, and Steinbeck – respond to modern environmental evils in works which in some cases stimulated legislation aiming to reduce the harm. The peasants, who are closest to the soil, are generally depicted as having a better instinct than landowners and policymakers of how to achieve environmental balance, using methods and observation accumulated over the generations. The lust for gain is too often at the expense of the environment, with especially harmful consequences for the poor. Literary works of the 1789–1939 period, such as Hard Times, Germinal, Uncle Vanya, Fontamara, and The Grapes of Wrath, raise moral issues which remain relevant: the particular responsibility of governments toward the poor, generally the ones most adversely affected by environmental damage; the need to balance capitalist enterprise with due consideration for the quality of life; and increased awareness of mutual dependence of human societies and the need to cooperate internationally to reverse the harm that has been done and prevent future injury to the environment.
Notes
1 On the poor in the Roman empire, particularly in Rome, see Whittaker (1993), Parkin (2006), Harris (2007), and Beard (2016: ch.11).
2 Thompson (2013: 217).
3 Influenced by Malthus, David Ricardo, the leading English economist of the early 19th century, opposed spending on the poor as he opposed all forms of public spending, fearing this would encourage excessive population growth and force more expenditure at the public expense (King 2013). As the English system of poor relief, unlike elsewhere in Europe, was based on local taxation, debate in England over Poor Law was exceptionally fierce and bitter, though the amount involved was never more than 2% of the GNP and far less than military spending (Mokyr 2009: 440, 444–5). Resentment at the obligation to give evidently goes back to the time of the Bible (e.g. Malachi 3: 8).
4 Vala, or The Four Zoas (‘Night the Seventh’ 118–22). See p. 97.
5 On Wordsworth’s poem, ‘Michael’, see p. 117.
6 Other poets, including Crabbe and Clare, were similarly outraged. See p. 185.
7 Jackson (2014: 61).
8 In 1860, as Hugo completed Les Misérables, about a quarter of young Frenchmen were rejected for military service as medically unfit; beggars abounded, and the old were often treated as parasites; as late as 1914, as in 1820, most French people left little, if anything, of value on their deaths. See Price (1981: 206, 209–10, 239). Yet, by the late 19th century, extreme poverty in France and other developed countries could be largely overcome.
9 For details of English working conditions in the 1840s, see Voth (2004: 271, 279, 283, 286, et seq.). Until 1850 in England, the Industrial Revolution tended to worsen the living conditions of the poor, which were inferior to those of practically any country 150 years later. The key industrial product at this time was cotton: an estimated one-tenth of the population worked in cotton mills.
10 Ackroyd (1993: 404). On the extraordinary improvements in public health in 19th-century London, when its population rose from one to six million, see Jackson (2014).
11 Daunton, in Matthew (2000: 62).
12 Compare Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) with Chekhov’s ‘In the Ravine’ (1900) for descriptions of 19th-century industrial pollution in Western and Eastern Europe.
13 Compare Gaskell’s description of Manchester in Mary Barton (1848), with its endless identical streets, the dust giving everything ‘a dark shade of indian ink’ (ch. 5). In contrast with the mid-19th-century world of uncontrolled industrial pollution in Hard Times, Tsarist Russia was slow to industrialize, an environmental advantage which it steadily lost in the latter half of the century. For a literary portrait of the pollution of a small Russian town in the late 19th century, similar to Coketown in Hard Times, see Chekhov’s story ‘In the Ravine’ (1897), discussed on p. 194.
14 Hard Times, Book 2, ch. 6. Compare Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath: ‘crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money’ (ch. 19). See p. 196.
15 Hard Times, Book 2, ch. 1. In An Enemy of the People, Ibsen depicts a town in which the townspeople are more concerned with the possibility of their financial ruin than with the spread of death and disease caused by their factories.
16 Dickens’ polarization of Fancy and Fact, heart and head, compassion and calculation, in Hard Times, might have been influenced in part by Gaskell’s Mary Barton, particularly the moral summing-up by the old Manchester laborer, Job Legh: ‘them that is strong in any of God’s gifts is meant to help the weak – be hanged to the facts!’ (ch. 37).
17 Voth (2004: 284). At the time Mary Barton is set, around 1840, life expectancy in Manchester was under 30. On Gaskell’s use of her own experiences and observations of the poor in her fiction, see Uglow (1993).
18 Gaskell, like many others, sees the atrocious sanitation among the poor as inseparable from hunger, overcrowding, and disease. Mary Barton is closely linked to the work of men such as Edwin Chadwick and John Snow, who established these links on a statistical basis and brought about wide-ranging reforms in public health.
19 Gaskell’s Mary Barton is set in 1839–42, at a time of initial high hopes of Parliament and consequent disillusionment and despair as it became clear that Parliament mainly represented the interests of the middle and upper classes, and the ‘economic laws’ that benefited these classes, and seemed indifferent to the sufferings of the working-class poor. The alienation and rage of the poor was stoked by the feeling that legislators, magistrates, employers, even ministers of religion, were ‘their oppressors and enemies; and were in league for their prostration and enthralment’ (ch. 8).
20 Gaskell shared with Dickens a commitment to helping ‘fallen women’, Gaskell as wife of a prominent clergyman, Dickens as administrator of a home for such women in London; and prostitutes in their fiction (e.g. Nancy in Oliver Twist and Esther in Mary Barton) are presented with much sympathy.
21 Mary Barton, end ch. 18. Gaskell’s image of the avenging Furies to describe Christian charity is borrowed by Dickens in Our Mutual Friend (1856: Book 1, ch. 8) to explain Betty Higden’s refusal to fall into the vise of Charity: ‘It is a remarkable Christian improvement, to have made a pursuing fury of the Good Samaritan.’
22 In the Victorian era, sympathy for the poor began to enter children’s literature: the hero of Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863) is a chimney sweep.
23 On Dr. John Snow, see p. 187.
24 Kingsley’s novel Yeast (1851: ch. 13) returns to the subject of water pollution, in country villages, where open drains run in front of the doors and stinking waste lies in the roads until the rain washes it away. Similarly unsanitary conditions in Chicago c. 1900 are described in Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle (1906).
25 On Germinal in the context of 19th-century literature on the working class, see Chapter 6, this volume.
26 On animal imagery to describe the miners, See Zola (1998: 24, 44, 160, 190, 326, 370). Mayhew, in London Labour and the London Poor, describes the homeless as ‘a herd of the most wretched and friendless people in the world’ (II 429).
27 Ibid., 38, 65. In Dickens’ Hard Times, similarly, Louisa Bounderby, a native of Coketown, knows the workers there as ants or beetles, passing to and from their nests (Book 2, ch. 6).
28 This image of the workers’ indomitable power of renewal, as a force of nature, made a deep impression even on those who did not read Germinal. Zola’s funeral cortege in 1902 was followed by miners chanting, ‘Germinal! Germinal!’ Hugo, too, was loved in part because he took the side of the poor: at his funeral in 1885, prior to interment in the Pantheon, he was carried from the Arc de Triomphe on a pauper’s hearse; an estimated two million people lined the route.
29 Zola (1998: 524).
30 On poverty in Russian literature, see pp. 126–36.
31 Among the largely impoverished oriental Jews, poor sanitation was the norm until well into the 20th century, as Orwell observed of the Jews in the Marrakesh ghetto in 1939.
32 Talmudic passages depicting hygienic conditions in daily life include Berakhot 23a, Shabbat 81a.
33 See Mendele (1947: 98).
34 The split perspective between Chekhov’s plays and stories is striking: the plays consider problems of the better-off – overly large estates, too little productivity and profit, isolation, boredom, lack of purpose – whereas the stories confront problems of the poor – their subsistence economy, poor housing, difficulties in employment and support of their families, and hunger. The language of the rich nevertheless parallels that of the poor, for each class in its own way has a hard life, prone to despair. Uncle Vanya has an income a peasant would envy but he regards himself as a ‘beggar’.
35 Concern for the effects of deforestation precedes the Industrial Revolution; Defoe, in A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), complains of the loss of precious forest land in the Weald, in Kent, to the iron industry. In Russia, despite slash and burn practices, such as those described in Uncle Vanya, the absence of industry allowed much of its countryside to survive relatively unharmed for longer than in Western Europe.
36 Chekhov (2002: 149).
37 Stench as moral judgment on a society appears in Zola’s novel, Pot-Bouille (1882), describing the inequality of the inhabitants in a Parisian apartment block, the rich in clean, warm, comfortable apartments on the front, and the poor in cold, filthy rooms at the back or in the upper floors, many overlooking the courtyard, with its incessant smells of drains and rotting garbage. Imagery of ‘moral stench’ seems to originate in the Hebrew Bible, e.g. ‘The wicked man stinks’ (Proverbs 13: 5).
38 On effects of centuries of neglect and ruinous Italian government policy as reflected in Silone’s Fontamara and Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, see Chapter 10.
39 Earlier literary associations of environmental with moral pollution appear in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. See pp. 193–4. In The Grapes of Wrath, the brutal image of the tractor sent by the bank to destroy the Joads’ farm recalls the critique of America by early 20th-century German thinkers such as Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger: America was flawed in its combination of technological and material sophistication, its greed and spiritual emptiness.
40 In L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Dorothy’s uncle and aunt struggle to survive on their Kansas farm, indebted to banks and threatened with dispossession.
41 For similar criticisms of capitalism, in Dickens’ Hard Times and Zola’s Germinal, see pp. 98–9, 142–45.
42 The contrast between the indifference of the rich and the compassion of the poor has been a staple of popular literature for centuries. See, for example, Watson’s ‘A Ballad of Semmerwater’ in which a hungry beggar, turned away by a royal castle but fed at a poor herdsman’s cottage – ‘They fed him of their oatcake,/ They gave him of their ale’ – curses the castle, turning it into a deserted ruin, ‘Deep asleep till Doom’.
43 On the relationship in The Grapes of Wrath between fiction and social documentary, see the articles by Taylor and McWilliams in Steinbeck (1997: 457–89). Although most of the scenes in the book are based on fact, Steinbeck (like other writers before him with socialist sympathies, such as Upton Sinclair) failed to grasp the power of capitalism to solve problems it creates.