Interglacial Victorians: Ice and the Natural End of Time

This paper explores how naturalists in the nineteenth century used ice to understand geologic timescales. Further, it considers the broader cultural representations of the past and future of the planet, in which ice was deployed as a register, index, and interlocutor of geologic time. I focus on Britain in the late-nineteenth century, when the temporal agency of ice was leveraged by geologists, physicists, and authors of popular literature to make claims about the past—and future—of the earth. As geologists read the earth and imagined a world that had once passed through an Ice Age, physicists, wielding the second law of thermodynamics, asserted an inevitable and final return of ice: as energy dissipated, the universe would cool, rendering earth a frozen and barren place. Victorians were thus positioned as ‘interglacial beings,’ existing precariously in a fortuitous moment of melt, and ice was cast as an apocalyptic threat that—unlike earlier theist prognostications—was based on laws of nature (Wood, 2018). These scientific assertions had wide cultural ramifications: the trope of ice as a natural enemy of humanity proliferated, particularly in the nascent genre of Scientific Romance, the precursor to science fiction. These early Scientific Romances, normally seen as evidence of industrial optimism or anxiety, reveal a growing popular preoccupation with environmental threats operating on deep temporal scales. I thus argue that ‘Interglacial Victorians’ were deeply engaged with the relationship between human and geologic temporalities—a relationship that is often seen as unique to late-twentieth century environmental consciousness.