Adena Rosmarin's comment is part of a wider discussion of E. H. Gombrich's idea of the role of “schema” in perceptions of art—a concept he uses to explain, among other things, how it is that observers can perceive a face in a collection of lines and dots, and, more generally, why it makes sense to say that all art begins not with nothing but with something. A snowman starts with the schema that is snow, for example, and we “work the snow and balance the shapes till we recognize a man.” And not only do we work the snow to achieve some approximation of human faces and bodies, but we find human characteristics in—or, more accurately, make characters out of—all sorts of things, living and not. Certainly, we project character onto living nonhumans, such as cats, dogs, birds, and plants, imagining that they share our feelings of love, loneliness, and desire, but we also assign character and characteristics to inanimate objects and assorted phenomena: ships, cars, and hurricanes all get names; we may talk to the toaster, or grumble at a shoelace that, we imagine, stubbornly refuses—refuses!—to untie. Thus it is hardly surprising that literary characters, intended expressly as vehicles for imaginative occupation, take on a similarly outsize quality in our psyches. Words on a page, constructions of language, they invite us to consider them as soulmates and doppelgängers; nightmare—or perhaps ideal—versions of parents, brothers, sisters, friends, and selves: the families we might have chosen if we could; the me (or not me) nobody knows.

It has been a long time since the poetry of Adelaide Anne Procter, a favorite of Queen Victoria, captured much interest from readers of poetry, whether they be anthology aficionados, scholars, or students. Now considered a minor poet of the period, she was nevertheless a quintessential poet activist of her day, raising money for and working with the Providence Row Night Refuge, editing and contributing to the English Women's Journal alongside the Langham Place Feminists and the Society for the Employment of Women. She published volumes of her own poems, one of which ran to as many as nineteen editions between 1858 and 1881, and her work was featured regularly in Charles Dickens's periodical Household Words. Her legacy stands as a powerful testimony to the way ideas and tastes change over time. Full of angels, Christmases, quietly suffering children, and pious nuns (she converted to Catholicism in 1851), her poetry is often dismissed as sentimental and clichéd. A glance at her forms reveals many straightforward tetrameters with expected alternating, end-stopped rhymes, an easiness that seems to ally form and content. If Adorno had ever taken the time to read her poetry, he probably would have hated it, not just for its Catholic faith and its frequent focus on sin and redemption, but for its attempt “to work at the level of fundamental attitudes,” typical of committed art. Consider these lines from her frequently anthologized “Homeless,” which asks readers to recognize that their society takes better care of animals, criminals, and commodities than of the homeless poor:

It's March 2020 as I write this, and the theaters are closed. Broadway is dark, and the Globe is once again shut due to a plague. Perhaps “self-isolation” is a strange condition under which to be thinking about crowded Victorian playhouses. As I make dates to watch movies with friends hundreds of miles away on the Netflix Party app, the media environment in which I pursue entertainment has perhaps never felt more dissimilar to that of nineteenth-century theatergoers. But, then again, maybe the photos of empty auditoria and deserted streets are the best demonstration of the space that public culture has taken up in our lives. The vacuum shows us that what's missing mattered. And if scholars of Victorian theater have shared a primary goal, it's to insist on how deeply the collective experience of playgoing influenced the everyday practices and beliefs of the period—even when theater and drama may not always appear on Victorian syllabi or conference programs. This essay considers three recent studies in Victorian theater—The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama (2018), edited by Carolyn Williams; The Drama of Celebrity (2019), by Sharon Marcus; and Everyone's Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914 (2019), by Michael Meeuwis—to register the force that theatrical performance exerted on Victorians and to explore how that force could change our sense of the field. By dwelling with archives and objects that might otherwise get classed as cultural “ephemera,” these studies push us to acknowledge that the run of Victorian theater hasn't ended. In the collective pause before a moment of intense feeling, or in a contradictory attachment to a public figure who is both imitable and extraordinary, they find a repertoire of spectator behavior from which many of our own modes of attention derive.

This essay returns to the early nineteenth-century prehistory of ecology to argue that the anthropocentrism of Victorian social novels should be understood as a deliberate, pragmatic response to the ethical dilemmas of ecological entanglement—dilemmas visible by the late eighteenth century. Interspecies entanglement and its discontents provided the cornerstone of Malthus's infamous arguments about overpopulation in the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Inspired by Malthus's proto-ecological vision of endless interconnection, Harriet Martineau adopted it as the plot structure of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34), some of the earliest and most influential examples of industrial fiction. Later social novelists borrowed Martineau's narrative technique of disclosing community by tracing material interdependence, but they excluded relations that crossed the species barrier. Those exclusions arose not from arrogance or ignorance of humanity's dependence on other species but from the decision to bracket often unanswerable questions arising from interspecies collectivity to foreground the practical importance of attending to the urgent needs of human beings.

This essay recasts the central locale of The Mill on the Floss in order to show how the geography and society of George Eliot's novel function together as a conjoined ecological system. I show that the port at St. Ogg's is set on an estuary, and from this observation, I claim that the entanglement of multiple estuarial waters provides a formal model for the overall ecology of the novel. Referring to this system as “ecological form,” the essay shows how the characters’ misunderstanding of the estuarial nature of the St. Ogg's hydrography is the primary source of the communal divisions with which the novel is so famously riven. In so doing, this essay makes two methodological interventions, one local, and one slightly more global. In the first, I show how unsticking the progression of our criticism from that of a novel's plot—especially one with such a catastrophically strong telos as Mill’s—can allow us to view form and, particularly, geography as newly vital to literary history. This leads to the second intervention, in which I suggest that reading practices in an age of environmental collapse should look beyond disaster itself and toward affected communities’ systemic ties to those extraneous systems—economic, legal, imperial—that aid and abet disasters elsewhere and even ignore the potential for catastrophic reoccurrence in the near future. In other words, reading for water readily yields a wide-ranging map of global capitalism perhaps unexpectedly centered on a small town in Lincolnshire.

In these times of ours, whither art? What is the use of the defamiliarizing and the sublime amidst cataclysmic conflicts over identity and belonging, resources and institutions, climate and extinction? Understandably, many defenders of art have lately come to frame their defenses in terms of messaging: artists make art to convey messages otherwise excluded from official discourse (ideology, policy, history, social science), to testify and self-express, to achieve recognition and elicit identification. Spectators and readers in turn look to art in order to see themselves mirrored, their experience confirmed, their truth avowed.

This article argues that Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor articulates a mid-nineteenth-century urban ecology that resonates with the “open” and “unfinished” form of midcentury London and Mayhew's London Labour itself. Mayhew's extensive elaboration of midcentury recycling, repurposing, and reusing practices is put into dialogue with the volumes’ print innovations and, in particular, print recycling practices. Drawing on the passage in which Mayhew describes his ecological vision most compactly—itself recycled from an earlier work—it illustrates how these volumes unite “the ragpicker” and the writer in the production of open and usable forms generative of social change.

This article proposes a way of linking textual form and the social world. The forms in question are the notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins, specifically those he kept between 1866 and 1875, a period that begins with his conversion to Catholicism, initiation into Jesuit training, and rejection of poetry. These five notebooks (A1–A5) have struck some readers as intensely asocial. Their creator was famously resistant to circulation and readership, on one hand (“Please not to read,” he inscribes on the inside front cover of the first), and more concerned with natural than human phenomena, on the other. I show instead that the notebooks project networks of relation between humans, objects, and the natural world. My hope is that what follows will refresh some of the ways we think about and navigate online social forms in the twenty-first century.

Studies of symbiosis have been instrumental in recent thinking about bodies and ecologies as open systems. But even before the invention of symbiosis toward the end of the nineteenth century, parasitism helped scientists conceive of open ecologies marked by complex, interdependent intimacies. This essay shows how the invention of symbiosis as an umbrella term for “true parasitisms” and “non-parasitisms” helped to close off previously existing (if precarious) possibilities for reciprocality within the older concept, and suggests that the time has come for a revitalization of parasitism as a conceptual tool in the face of social and ecological crisis

Snagsby's paper shop in Bleak House (1853) deals in “all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper—foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape, and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacks, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands—glass and leaden, penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention.” While one might imagine this stifling bookish environment as especially inviting for an object-oriented reading, this passage has recently attracted what I might call a newly inflected kind of subject-oriented reading. This description from Bleak House makes an appearance in two recent critical monographs concerned with how the reader's cognitive capabilities meet words on the page to transform them into a felt reality. How does a passage like this act on our minds, creating mental images or offering a sense of embeddedness in an unreal “reality”? How does fiction become phenomenological?

Taking a long view of mycological history, this essay considers how studies of fungal life have modeled fugitive, cryptic, and queer forms of belonging that open the body and the body politic to modes of collectivity that trouble the equation of ecology with holistic closure. Turning to Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams, this essay shows how the geographies of desire and belonging created through fungal intimacies make it impossible to speak of either the self-contained individual or ecology in the singular. Open and plural, selves and worlds proliferate, contaminate, and interpenetrate through the infectious touch of fungal relations.

This article explores the ecology of form presented in George Eliot's novel Silas Marner. Though many have read the novel as a tight-knit account of an organic society, this author reads a more disorienting, emergent, and conflicted study of the coproduction of lives and environment. George Henry Lewes's account of physiology, particularly his discussion of epigenesis, is foundational to this disorganizing turn in Eliot's fiction. Finally, the author explores how the contingent relation between Eppie and Silas Marner underlines the recent convergence between discussions of queer futurity and the agential turn in ecocriticism.