“‘For you, pollution’: The Victorian Novel and a Human Ecology. Disraeli’s Sibyl and Gaskell’s Mary Barton”

Catherine Gallagher, in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel locates the interest of Victorian literature in its deconstruction of boundaries. Her notion of a ‘dialectical synthesis’, in the novel, between Victorian political economy and ‘the unique, nonfungible properties of things’ and ‘noninstrumental nature of people’ (2006: 1) might, in turn, inform a less dichotomous ecological theory that would substitute (broadly) romantic, deep ecology with a more dialectical understanding in which the now recognised complexity of ecological systems would extend to encompass the human realm including, ultimately, issues around environmental injustice.