Alexander Barty (KCL) - 2024-25 Students
alexander.barty@kcl.ac.uk

Rewriting Britain's waterways: Literary interventions in water policy 1848-1909

Contemporary debates surrounding river restoration frequently present the environmental consequences of Victorian and Edwardian water management as problems first recognised through late-twentieth-century environmental science. This thesis argues instead that the social, environmental, and economic consequences of interventions including weirs, dams, and embankments, drainage schemes, and urban water systems were extensively debated as they were conceived and implemented. Focusing on contemporaneous prose, it reconstructs the disagreements that accompanied the development of water policy while examining how literary writing contributed to public discussion at a time that produced much of the historic water infrastructure now under review through river restoration programmes.

The project challenges the tendency to separate literary responses to ecological change from the political and administrative processes that produced it. Writers including Charles Dickens and John Ruskin, William Morris and Thomas Hardy, participated directly in public debate by contributing evidence to parliamentary inquiries, addressing specialist groups and committees, publishing proposals for reform, and campaigning for or against particular environmental interventions. Their literary works were treated with all seriousness in parliamentary inquiries and were cited as evidence to reinforce official reports. Pairing each writer’s public engagement with their literary treatment of the same policy questions, the thesis examines how imaginative writing recorded, interpreted, criticised, and, in some cases, informed the formulation, implementation, and reception of the policies that reshaped British waterways during the long nineteenth century.

Methodologically, the project combines literary criticism with elements of social, environmental, and economic history, placing literary texts alongside legislative and administrative developments, associated press coverage, emerging methods of environmental and social impact assessment, reports and proposals for reform, and evidence of landscape change preserved in historical maps and illustrations. Informed by eco-criticism’s readings of Serhiy Podolynsky and environmental accounting, György Lukács’s work on representation in the nineteenth-century realist novel, and Michel Foucault’s conception of discourse and cultural production, it argues that literature formed part of the wider production of environmental knowledge. It holds that literary history can recover perspectives often absent from administrative and technical records, contributing to our understanding of historical policymaking and to contemporary discussions surrounding river restoration, water infrastructure, and the future of cultural heritage.

Primary supervisor: Dr Brian Murray