William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City imagines the destruction of London as a result of human-induced environmental devastation, the threat of which is becoming increasingly visible today. This first critical edition of Hay’s novella makes available his account of one man’s tale of survival amidst a toxic fog—a survival that includes his relocation to Maoriland in New Zealand. The editors foreground the relevance of the story to present and future pandemics, the persistence of environmental disasters, and the global population’s ongoing migration to cities. They place the narrative in dialogue with nineteenth-century concerns about climate change, pollution, natural resources, health care, empire, and (sub)urbanization that have remained significant challenges as we come to terms with the lasting impacts of the Anthropocene in the twenty-first century.
We asked editors Michael Kramp and Sarita Jayanty-Mizin to reflect on their aims, processes, and discoveries in the development of this important critical resource by interviewing one another this past January.
Sarita: I’d like to start by sharing that it was Michael who first invited me to join him on this project, as he was the person who initially identified The Doom of the Great City as a text in need of a critical edition. This text has not received much attention since its initial publication in 1880, so I’d like to invite him to say a little more about how he first located this story and what he found compelling enough to consider proposing the first critical edition of the text.
Michael: I was researching materials for a different project (Patriarchy’s Creative Resilience, 2024) in the British Library, and I was trying to locate late-Victorian examples of speculative fiction that included compelling examples of patriarchal masculinity. I was taken aback by the pathetic performance of the male narrator of The Doom of the Great City, especially how his sentimentality and pronouncements of nostalgic remorse allow him to garner sympathy from his family and readers.
Sarita: Speaking of the late-Victorian era, for today’s readers who might or might not be familiar with nineteenth-century literature and culture, the themes of the story that we emphasize in our introduction—particularly “patriarchal masculinity” as you point out, as well as industrialization and humanity’s impact on the climate—might seem unexpectedly modern. What ideas do you think modern readers associate with the concept of “the nineteenth century,” and how do you this text challenges or confirms some of those expectations?
Michael: Perhaps the most obvious ideas of industrialization and urbanization will be familiar to contemporary readers, regardless of their familiarity with nineteenth-century literature. Modernity promotes industrialization and urbanization, and The Doom of the Great City certainly points to these cultural realities and their consequences. But The Doom of the Great City also invites us to imagine how these phenomena of modernity are neither limited to the nineteenth century nor Great Britain.
Sarita: I remember being struck by the text’s incisive observation of the dire social and economic consequences of London’s development into an imperial metropolis. For example, the narrator concludes, “There was money in London; for the swollen city was at once the richest and the poorest in the world: side by side with the direst degradation of poverty there existed the superbest opulence.” However, the narrator then manipulates observations like these into implications that the impending disaster (no spoilers), which inevitably kills many of the most vulnerable, is somehow a deserved punishment!
These kinds of transpositional moves that identify problems but then offer solutions that result in displacing blame and consequences onto vulnerable populations rather than the forces responsible for the problems reveal the narrative’s thread of what we refer to as the “anthropocenic logic” of the text. Do any passages from the text come to mind as we think about how the text emphasizes this “anthropocenic logic”?
Michael: Early in the story, the narrator recalls his migration from Great Britain to New Zealand and reports: “It was from this same reason that I came here so many years ago—came to what was then almost a solitude, almost a virgin wilderness, though now one of our most populous rural districts.” This passage has stuck with me throughout our work on this project because I think it both complicates how we think about the processes of modernity and points to the global processes and realities of human impacts on the planet.
Sarita: Moving away from the primary text, our edition also includes an introduction that engages with scholarship from Indigenous, Anthropocene, postcolonial, and Victorian studies, as well as several appendices with excerpts from other nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts. How would you describe some of our goals in assembling the edition in this manner?
Michael: Our goals were always collaborative, and what I mean by this is that we were always hoping to invite ongoing collaboration with future readers, scholars, and teachers. I don’t think we offer all that many definitive statements or discover findings that determine how the novella ought to be read or studied. But I think we share possibilities that allow teachers, students, and all readers to pursue different ideas and generate new kinds of knowledge.
Sarita: I agree with this characterization. We included so many scholarly and historical voices that we both retain as a way of holding true to the editorial vision Michael described. We wanted to make space for the diverse and interesting collaborations that become possible when teachers, scholars, and readers are able to access a wide range of thinkers who are addressing and contesting colonial narratives like these.
This goal overwhelmingly influenced our editorial approach and the choices we made along the way and is, I think, one of the features that sets our edition apart from other critical editions of similar texts.
Michael: Yes, one of the ideas we talked about in the introduction—and we discussed openly from the start of our work—is that we did not want to reproduce materials that are widely available (e.g., Darwin, Freud, Galton, etc.). We wanted to include materials in the appendices and ideas in the introduction that might invite readers, teachers, and scholars to pursue alternative directions. Victorian scholars have established a definitive critical archive around stories of industrialization, urbanization, and the Anthropocene. We tried to expand this archive and demonstrate the reach of a text like The Doom of the Great City.
Sarita: This text is certainly of interest to Victorian scholars, but I can also imagine it appealing to readers of popular postapocalyptic fiction. Are there other audiences this text might appeal to or, more specifically, courses or modules outside of the usual “Victorian Literature” designation that could be designed around this text?
Michael: This text could be useful in courses on gender. Many scholars have talked about the roles of women and the depictions of femininity within disaster narratives; Hays’s narrative helps us rethink the concepts of pathetic men and masculinity and how they function in such stories. This text is also relevant to classes in health humanities and literature and medicine. Finally, given the work of our introduction, I hope the text can also be taught in courses on the fiction of the Global South.
Sarita: Yes, that’s an interesting thought to end on, as I remember how many times we talked about clarifying the text’s cultural deployment and ideological “use” of New Zealand toward colonial ends. We deeply engaged with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s iconic Decolonizing Methodologies to indicate this as she so clearly delineates how these colonial discourses contribute to processes that elide and obscure discussions of the real people and material conditions of the Global South.
In a course about fiction on the Global South, I could envision the text as representative of the long history of climate disaster discourses and solution-finding from the perspective of the colonial center. By highlighting this discourse, instructors could use our edition as a starting point for diving more deeply into the wealth of scholarship and creative texts that offer critical and contrasting perspectives. The concept of the Global South itself provides such potential for the formation of transnational solidarities, and the theme of collaboration, present and future, seems to be a fitting place to end our discussion of this Victorian climate disaster narrative.