Department of English

Imperial Waste Management: A Victorian Fantasy of National Regeneration and Reform

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Professor Tim Carens
In summer 2006, Daniel Powell and I received a SURF grant to conduct archival research at the British Library.  We set off to London hoping to further understand a Victorian reform narrative centered on the trope of waste.  Victorian novelists and social critics obsessively remark upon the filth that accumulates in the streets of urban slums and rural towns, invades the homes of the poor, and defiles their bodies.  Belying the nation’s self-proclaimed identity as the locus of progressive civilization, England’s waste lands emerge in novels and journalism of the period as ominous symbols of national decay and imperial decline.  In response, reform-minded writers imagine a waste management system designed to recycle sewage, spiritually and physically cleanse the contaminated slum-dwellers, and recapture the imperial vigor of the nation.  

Our work in the British Library was a great success.  We thoroughly established the broad presence of the reform narrative, traced its heritage back to certain religious and secular discourses, and discovered many graphic illustrations of the Victorian preoccupation with urban waste.  Daniel and I collected material that will fuel my scholarship and teaching for many years.

Daniel Powell
London, England always seemed a place which other people visited, but that was decidedly outside my own college experience.  To a College of Charleston student from the public school system in Sumter, South Carolina, New York city seems remote; as to foreign countries, they may not even exist.  It was quite surreal, then, to find myself in the city of Eliot and Woolf, Rushdie and Amis, Dickens and Thackeray, in a city immortalized and re-imagined in countless texts, doing research at possibly the most prestigious library in the world.  The British Library was the vital center around which our project was built, an invaluable resource that allowed us to explore in great depth our topic, Imperial Waste Management.  Through countless hours bent over the desks inside the Rare Books & Manuscripts room, we gradually amassed a substantial body of information in which we began to detect the outlines of a complicated cultural narrative mingling ideas of sewage, the poor, emigration, and the British Empire.  Fascinatingly,  these disparate concepts mingled and merged to form a cohesive idea of imperial recycling, in which the poor of English society were dehumanized into an abstract resource (sewage) which could be exported to the colonial periphery through policies of emigration.  This exportation of "fertilizer" both solved the domestic "Social Question" and promoted the expansion of empire, which in turned enriched the imperial center through resources and trade.       

Although the literary aspect of our SURF project was central to our visiting London, the opportunity it afforded to experience another culture cannot be overstated.  Due to our initial, quick success in locating and transcribing a great deal of information, I was able to visit many of the landmarks of the British capital.  The National Gallery, St. Paul's Cathedral, Oxford St., the Imperial War Museum, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, and the Tate Gallery all provided a rich (if slightly overwhelming) barrage of cultural experiences.  I was able to jog on the tumultuous streets of London and through the pastoral greenery of Regent's Park in the evenings, and then to ride the Tube to Notting Hill for an Indian dinner. The experience, both in terms of the British culture I experienced, and the intellectual experience of taking part in an extended research project that spanned several months, provides me with an experience that I had never previously considered to be within my grasp.  I have to  thank Dr. Carens, the SURF project, the Honors College, and the College of Charleston for opening my eyes to the possibilities within my reach.