A career-long project for Emerson was the attempt to understand and seize upon the historical moment, or what he often called “the present hour,” in which he lived. But Emerson’s interest in “the Times” was also, fundamentally, an interest in time. This chapter examines “Emerson’s times” in this dual sense: his abiding investments, philosophical, social, and political, in the historical present – the time of now – and in its temporalities – the time of now. Emerson’s commitment to the present as the bedrock of historical experience and the sphere of ethical action was shaped by the new conceptions of time and the new temporal experiences afforded by the technological, scientific, and political developments of his era. Thus, if the “practical question” with regard to “the times” was, as Emerson states it in “Fate,” an immediate one – “how shall I live?” – that question was complicated by the heterochronicity of the times.

Although the theatres officially remained closed between 1642 and 1660, from 1656, William Davenant staged entertainments, first at his home in Rutland House, then at the Cockpit theatre in Drury Lane. Chapter three shows how Davenant, a prominent writer and producer of court masques in the 1630s and 1640s, reinvented the Stuart court masque to make it fit for the protectorate stage.Through his protectorate entertainments, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) and The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659), Davenant celebrates Cromwellian foreign policy and provides a counter-narrative to the image of Cromwell as the scheming politician that is present in many contemporary play pamphlets. The chapter also addresses James Shirley’s Cupid and Death, performed for the Portuguese Ambassador in 1653. By drawing on John Ogilby’s royalist translation of Aesop’s Fables (1651), Shirley writes a masque that is ambivalent about kingship and mediates much of the royalist bias present in Ogilby’s text.

What happens when we shift our critical attention away from bourgeois subjectivity and the development of the modern individual toward the land and its centrality within British realism? In readings of a diverse range of works from Cobbett’s Rural Rides and Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels to the emigration novel and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, this chapter focuses on three key forms of land use, all of which undergo major transformations over the course of the long nineteenth century: the farm, the common, and the wild. From this perspective, it argues, a new narrative about the environment emerges that brings to the fore the integral relations among labor, land, and nature that Victorian literature narrates and that are very much on the agenda today as we grapple with the legacy of these changes and their ongoing consequences for the myriad political-environmental crises we now face.

This introductory chapter briefly charts Pater’s difficulties and importance as a literary theorist and philosophical thinker, with directions for thinking critically about his works and life. It is organised in three sections: (1) Pater in Context outlines how Pater’s relationship with, and writing about, the late-Victorian period is singular with the period refracted through his aestheticism; (2) Pater, ‘himself’ explains the difficulties of looking for Pater in his writings; (3) Pater Today looks at his late-twentieth century critical history and Pater studies today.

This chapter asks what it was that marked the young Pater’s philosophy out as so radical and potentially dangerous in the 1870s. It addresses how his singular attitude to referencing, originality, and artistry in philosophy put him at odds with his contemporaries at Oxford. In its sections, it addresses (1) Pater’s reading of philosophy, and the importance of this reading to his intellectual development; (2) the ways in which Pater’s treatment of philosophy is part of his wider commitment to interdisciplinarity, and how his engagements with philosophers and their ideas shape diverse and perhaps unexpected aspects of his writings; and (3) the philosophical significance of Pater’s own aestheticism.

Chalk white cliffs form an edge of Britain: a starting, and finishing point. The white cliffs provide a memorable example of how the imagination of nations is grounded in rocks. Like the cliffs, inhabitants of Dover and England more generally attempt to fight off 'darkness' in the form of immigrants, who are either damaged, die or are driven out of the town. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers how the geological substance of national territory itself is used to support ideas of nationhood. It reflects how the categories of science and literature were only beginning to take shape in the nineteenth century. The book builds on well-established connections between these fields to show how geology and poetry together engage with rocks as a basis for perceiving Celtic nations and native races as distinct from England.

Chapter 6 analyses the ironies of multi-scalar focalisation. I read Margaret Atwood’s ‘Torching the Dusties’ (2014), T. C. Boyle’s The Terranauts (2016), and Ali Smith’s Winter (2017) as ironic exercises in ‘bringing the biosphere home’ which satirise their focalisers’ limited perception. The difficulty of biosphere perception is highlighted in each of these texts through visual hallucinations and blind spots, which represent ethical failure. These stories respond satirically to the difficulty of perceiving a planetary ecological crisis, and question the idea of enlightenment as a step towards environmental responsibility. This fiction does not work didactically, but neither does it endorse the cynical perspective. Instead, it explores an ironic mode of multi-scalar attention which holds together incompatible perspectives. This leads me to define scalar irony as an epistemic and ethical tool which offers a way forward for Anthropocene response-ability.

Victorian literature translated the systemic organization of extraction-based globalization into aesthetic structure. This chapter shows how literary forms like the multiplot novel and lyric poem strained and changed shape to account for the world-spanning mechanisms of imperialism, colonialism, and an extraction-based fossil capitalism that reshaped “the environment” across the nineteenth-century British imperium. Describing a “supply-chain sublime,” it shows how the improvement and development valorized by John Stuart Mill (and before him, John Locke) had material corollaries in scarred and abandoned zones that rarely focalize canonical works. Seen in this context, exhibits like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873), and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) recode extractive globalization into signals we can detect, but only with an “environmental” reading practice that construes ecological matters to inhere in sociopolitical conditions, and that sees environmental issues as finally moral ones too.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Walter Pater’s elusive personal life and his works. Addressing how the dynamics between the two have been a touchstone in criticism of Pater, it asks how we can reasonably read the autobiographical and self-reflexive dimensions of Pater’s writings. It illustrates how writers who encountered Pater – from Oscar Wilde to Edmund Gosse – reflected on the difficulties of knowing him beneath his courteous exterior. It considers how Pater himself figured personal life of writers and artists of whom he wrote. Addressing Pater’s ‘tact’ and ‘reserve’, quoting from the unpublished manuscript ‘The Aesthetic Life’, it considers Oxford Hellenism and the revelation of Pater’s involvement with William Money Hardinge.

Geoffrey Chaucer's and William Shakespeare's fictional Troys are shadowed and abetted by each poet's experience of London. Both imaginary Troys reduplicate London's public and, especially, private gardens. Shakespeare's city is similarly gossip-filled. Gossip is, in fact, the Trojans' favourite game. Troilus's stewe seems as a place of mounting and almost debilitating erotic excitement, functioning like one of Wilhelm Reich's twentieth-century orgone boxes to feed and stoke desire. Pandarus's 'gear' comprises his own connivance and also the crucial fittings of erotic encounter, bed and chamber: a fusion of place and purpose. The chamber promises to become a privileged erotic arena by fostering privacy even as it protects reputation but it turns out to be a highly permeable line of defence. The chamber is not just a place of solitude but, equally often, a putatively private social space.

Chapter 3 discusses how surgical treatment was used to ‘correct’ women who had strayed from their traditional gender role. This forms a subtext to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a novel reflecting the social and political instability of gender during the fin de siècle. Several members of Bram Stoker’s family were doctors and surgeons, from whom he acquired clinical and surgical details for the writing of Dracula. Cases from the history of sexual surgery, including those conducted by Stoker’s brother Thornley Stoker, parallel readings from the novel, where the destruction of the female vampire will be viewed as a deconstructed narrative of surgical horror and medical tyranny visited upon the female hysteric, along with other women deemed sexually perverse. As Andrew Smith expresses it, for the female hysteric, doctors were ‘Gothic figures, inflicting pain and distress either through neglect or through a misplaced sense of surgical bravado.’