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

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

• Maps the emerging view of soil and humanity in British authors Mary Shelley, Anne Brontë, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker, and Beatrix Potter, and scientists James Hutton, Erasmus Darwin, and Charles Darwin
• Pairs recent work in environmental humanities with a broad survey of writers and scientists in a new academic focus on soil in literature
• Makes the case for kinship as a new natural order replacing older hierarchies that set humans apart from nature
• Shows that a new view of humanity’s place in the world required new genres such as science fiction, gothic horror, children’s literature, and literary realism
• Chronicles the unfolding complexity of soil, as revealed by the science of James Hutton, Humphry Davy, Justus von Liebig, Charles Darwin, Vasily Dokuchaev, and others

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