| This dissertation examines the ways in which the rhetoric of energy conservation and dissipation was used in the representation of the city in the literature of Victorian England. The first and second laws of thermodynamics formalized in scientific language a newfound concern with the phenomena of heat flow, irreversibility, and waste, and represented a conceptual overhaul in the description of the physical universe. This profound shift in thinking involved a new understanding of the direction of natural processes that was also being registered in the work of urban reformers, city novelists, poets, and "men of letters." The city, as both a center of industry and activity, and a location built and unbuilt by market forces, called for a vocabulary that could express the intertwined economic and physical determinants that defined its patterns of growth and its relationship to the natural world. More importantly, the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law, which described the waste inescapably generated in any transformation of energy, was the formal correlative to the manifest, experiential confrontation with waste as expressed in the physical condition of the city.; This dissertation also tracks the city's development and corresponding shifts in the deployment of the imagery of energy and entropy. As the century wore on, and techniques of waste disposal and management grew more sophisticated, the city increasingly appeared to be a system of channeled forces and manageable trends. In time, waste and disorder could be seen as realities of life that were too easily concealed by city experience, and urban artists used thermodynamic imagery with an eye towards uncovering the persistence of natural forces beneath the facade of human domination, including imperial domination. The city thus functioned as a complex cultural mediator that connected technological innovation, economic ideology, environmental conditions, and evolving concepts of the nature of the physical universe. |
