Bodies of coal: extraction, environment and labour in realist literature, 1850-1939

This thesis examines how coal shaped realist novels between 1850 and 1939. Coal fuelled European life in this period, radically altering the industrial, literary and environmental landscapes and prompting deep consideration of the position of humanity in relation to machines, animals and environments. As increasing quantities of coal were extracted and burned, the coal mine developed as a complex symbol of immense wealth and progress, and at the same time of isolation, backbreaking labour and inhuman conditions. The distorted bodies of coal miners began to appear in literary texts which treat them variously with pity, sympathy and disgust as examples of the material costs of the Industrial Revolution.

I argue that the presence of coal in realist literature destabilises the conceptual and physical boundaries between different bodies: the bodies of human miners, pit ponies, coal mines and landscapes which melt into one another through the processes of mining and burning coal. My attention to the overlaps between bodies, landscapes and coal is informed by Stacy Alaimo’s theory of “trans-corporeality,” a feminist new-materialist approach which allows me to look closely at the material and cultural effects of extraction and pollution. Tracing the materiality of coal through industrial literature encourages a dialogue with the flourishing field of the energy humanities, positioning coal as the fuel of huge change during the Industrial Revolution and beyond and illuminating the role it plays in narratives about labour and progress.

Across four chapters I read four realist novels – Elizabeth Gaskell’s 'North and South' (1854-55), Émile Zola’s 'Germinal' (1885), D. H. Lawrence’s 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover' (1928) and Lewis Jones’ 'Cwmardy' (1937) – in order to reveal how humans and environments are materially and metaphorically altered by their relationships with coal, and how literary form adapts to the blurring of boundaries that this relationship exposes.