Abstract
Modified rivers and canals were essential to the Industrial Revolution and to Britain’s global-colonial empire, and the transformation of rivers like the Thames, Tyne, and Wye throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals how waterways impacted every aspect of life. In addition to analyzing a wide range of writings on industrial rivers—some famous, some more obscure—this chapter also examines early conservation efforts linked to tourism in the Wye Valley and Lake District, a literature that counters the industrial writings that dominate depictions of the Thames and Tyne. But the lasting influence of the nineteenth-century river-writing tradition is the industrial, imperial, (post)apocalyptic mode carried on in contemporary climate fiction centered on catastrophic floods. This chapter locates the seeds of such thinking and aesthetics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature.
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Reno, S.T. (2020). Water: Rivers, Canals, and Commerce in the Early Anthropocene. In: Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53246-8_3
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