This collection of essays turns to the nineteenth century in order to weigh the legacy of its holistic conception of systems and to resurrect alternative discourses of openness, permeability, and indeterminate relation. If modern ecocriticism has sometimes been hobbled by a restrictively organic, harmonious conception of how ecologies work, we wager that a return to Victorian interrogations of natural and social collectives can furnish more open, less integrated models for how assemblages operate. The nineteenth century saw both the first acceleration of anthropogenic climate change and the birth of a host of sciences-economic, social, geological, energetic, and (yes) ecological-that now struggle to address the planetary implications of that acceleration. Our growing awareness that we are now living in the long tail of this conjuncture and at the birth of the Anthropocene has prompted a re-evaluation of what we think we know about how nature and society work, and how they might work together.

This essay examines Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through the defining historical mode of the nineteenth-century historicism: comparative history. An under-appreciated response to the failure of stadial and progressive accounts to explain the French Revolution, comparative history drew from a range of allied disciplines, including comparative philology, mythology, and anatomy. This investigation tracks comparatist inquiry through a range of nineteenth-century theories of society and nature, and--by addressing the novel’s concern with historiography, secularism, melodrama, alterity, and multiple modernities--locates Dickens’s sensational account of Revolutionary France as a key text in the emergence of comparative history as an independent Victorian discipline.

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Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789–91) notoriously synthesizes scientific knowledge, poetry, and radical politics. The poem illustrates Darwin’s theorization of analogy in Zoonomia (1794–96) as a complex mental faculty that underwrites the coherence of experience and sensation. This facultative analogy is Darwin’s answer to empirical skepticism, and it forces a critical reevaluation of his poetics, one that situates The Botanic Garden squarely within the tradition of Romantic naturalism and indicates his influence upon nineteenth-century comparative history and science.

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