The sky of our manufacture: Literature, modernity and the London fog from Charles Dickens to Virginia Woolf

The dense, smoke-laden fog of London in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries provides an originary moment at which to explore the imagination of an artificial climate both in terms of a climate physically modified by human action and its aesthetic representation in literary texts. The London fog, which would earn the neologism "smog" in 1905, blurs the boundaries between the real and the artificial, the natural and the unnatural. It shows the breakdown of "nature" even in that which is proverbially furthest from human influence---the weather. Imagining an artificial climate entails a crisis in the very idea of the natural as the ultimate guarantor of the real. This crisis in the natural corresponds to a fascination with artifice, artificiality, and the unnatural in aesthetics at the end of the nineteenth century.;Reading the fogs of late-Victorian fiction as smog, a literal meteorological product of human modernity, rather than purely figures or metaphors (as literary critics have been apt to do), provides crucial insight into the ways in which industrial modernity is haunted by a climate of its own manufacture. Studying the climate of literature in both its cultural and meteorological terms demands what I term "atmospheric reading," which fuses the ethical commitments of ecocriticism and cultural materialism with a resurgent interest in aesthetics, form, and the work of imagination within literary and cultural studies.;While touching on a range of imaginative forms, from poetry and narrative prose to painting, cartoons, and technological inventions, my primary focus is the novel, from Dickens's sprawling urban fiction to the late-century gothic revival, from Conan Doyle's fictions of detection to Joseph Conrad's cosmopolitan impressionism. The theoretical and historical concerns are introduced via a discussion of John Ruskin's The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century juxtaposed with the lawsuit filed against Ruskin by James McNeil Whistler, whom Oscar Wilde credited with inventing the London fog. Virginia Woolf's Orlando anchors an Epilogue on eco-apocalyptics and aesthetic modernism.