SOURCE: Parham, John. “Was There a Victorian Ecology?” In The Environmental Tradition in English Literature, edited by John Parham, pp. 156‐71. Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002.

In the following essay, Parham outlines the environmental concerns of Victorian authors and goes on to discuss, from an ecocritical point of view, works of several writers of the period, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin.

Despite its attempts to re‐write the canon, ecocriticism, to some extent, has only succeeded in creating a canon of its own. The centrality, in the US, of Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination, which establishes Thoreauvian Romantic nature writing as the origin of ‘ecocentric’ thought, and the dominance in the UK of Jonathan Bate's book on Wordsworth, Romantic Ecology, has installed ‘Romanticism’ as pivotal within this ecocritical canon. Yet even its most literal statement, Bate's, is somewhat paradoxical. Bate argues that it...