715 How Did George Eliot and the Victorians Respond to Climate Collapse? (with Nathan Hensley) | People at Museums Are Losing Their Brains! | My Last Book with Stephen Browning and Simon Thomas

Summary

The History of Literature Podcast - Episode 715 Summary

Title: How Did George Eliot and the Victorians Respond to Climate Collapse? (with Nathan Hensley) | People at Museums Are Losing Their Brains! | My Last Book with Stephen Browning and Simon Thomas
Host: Jack Wilson
Guest: Nathan Hensley, Stephen Browning, Simon Thomas
Release Date: July 7, 2025

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Introduction and Overview

In Episode 715 of The History of Literature, host Jack Wilson delves into a profound discussion on how Victorian writers, particularly George Eliot, grappled with issues akin to modern climate collapse. Joined by author and academic Nathan Hensley, the episode explores the intersection of literature, environmental anxiety, and societal responses during the Victorian era. The conversation also pays tribute to the late Stephen Browning and features insights from Simon Thomas on their collaborative works.

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Victorian Climate Anxiety and Literary Responses

Nathan Hensley opens the discussion by painting a vivid picture of contemporary environmental despair, likening society to a sinking ship:

"We're on board the ship and the water's pouring in through the portholes we're spinning into oblivion with no chance of turning things around." ([00:55])

Hensley posits that the Victorian era was not immune to such anxieties. He argues that examining how Victorian novelists addressed their environmental and societal fears can offer valuable lessons for today's climate crisis.

George Eliot and the Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty

Hensley's new book, Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse, serves as the focal point of the discussion. He elaborates on how Victorian literature, through authors like George Eliot, reflected deep concerns about industrialization and its environmental repercussions.

"Victorian novelists dealt with their feelings of anxiety about resource extraction and the potential damage for the planet and society…” ([16:55])

Eliot's Middlemarch is highlighted as a prime example, showcasing how she interwove themes of industrial impact and societal transformation within her narratives.

Artistic Reflections of Industrialization

Hensley broadens the conversation to include visual arts, specifically the works of J.M.W. Turner. He discusses how Turner's paintings serve as both aesthetic and critical records of industrialization:

"Turner's work really is an archive of responses to the transformation in the physical and social life of England during this highly turbulent period..." ([19:53])

Turner's evolving landscape paintings, from classical mountaintops overshadowed by smokestacks to abstract expressions of motion and industrial chaos, encapsulate the era's conflicted relationship with progress.

Consciousness of Finitude and Environmental Limits

The podcast delves into the Victorian awareness of resource limitations and environmental degradation. Hensley references significant works like William Stanley Jevons' The Coal Question (1865) and literary pieces such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to illustrate the period's preoccupation with finitude and sustainability.

"Victorians were quite conscious of the idea of finitude in various registers..." ([28:37])

This consciousness manifested in both overt critiques and subtle incorporations within literature, highlighting the era's nuanced understanding of environmental constraints.

Action Without Hope: A New Framework for Engagement

Hensley introduces his concept of "action without hope," which seeks to move beyond both naive optimism and passive fatalism. Instead, it emphasizes small-scale, community-based actions that foster solidarity and incremental change.

"Instead, the writers and artists that interest me looked at the languages and available templates for thinking and doing that they had and tried to rework them from the inside." ([42:34])

This framework advocates for sustainable, localized efforts over grandiose, unattainable solutions, drawing inspiration from Victorian practices of resilience and adaptability.

Guest Insights: Stephen Browning and Simon Thomas

In a poignant segment, the episode honors the memory of Stephen Browning, who passed away on June 30, 2025. Joined by co-author Simon Thomas, Browning discusses their collaborative work, The Real Charles Dickens, and shares personal reflections on literary legacies.

Choosing a Last Book

The guests engage in a lighthearted yet meaningful discussion about their choices for the last book they would ever read. Simon Thomas opts for War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, citing its profound exploration of history and human experience. Stephen Browning, on the other hand, selects A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens for its uplifting narrative and timeless moral lessons.

Simon Thomas: "War and Peace… the first great book I read and it'll be the last great book I read." ([61:09])

Stephen Browning: "A Christmas Carol… you can't read A Christmas Carol without being uplifted and questioning yourself and your own selfishness." ([65:04])

Lessons for Modern Society

The episode concludes with reflections on how Victorian literature can inspire contemporary responses to climate challenges. Hensley emphasizes the importance of community action, solidarity, and the recognition of systemic issues over individual heroics.

"Processes of intervening in the world, even though they can seem small, really do matter because things that you do to help other people or to work with other people… develop the resources of solidarity that enable durable activity to transpire in the future." ([55:28])

Conclusion

Episode 715 effectively bridges the past and present, illustrating how Victorian literature offers enduring insights into environmental and societal crises. By examining the nuanced responses of authors like George Eliot, listeners gain a deeper understanding of sustainable, community-driven approaches to contemporary challenges. The heartfelt tribute to Stephen Browning and engaging dialogue with Simon Thomas enrich the discussion, underscoring the timeless relevance of literary reflections on human resilience and adaptability.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Nathan Hensley ([00:55]): "We're on board the ship and the water's pouring in through the portholes we're spinning into oblivion with no chance of turning things around."

• Simon Thomas ([16:54]): "I came to grad school and... I read... adventure novels by H. Rider Haggard... like she and King Solomon's Mind."

• Nathan Hensley ([19:53]): "Turner's work really is an archive of responses to the transformation in the physical and social life of England during this highly turbulent period..."

• Simon Thomas ([28:37]): "Victorians were quite conscious of the idea of finitude in various registers."

• Simon Thomas ([42:34]): "Writers and artists looked at the languages and available templates for thinking and doing that they had and tried to rework them from the inside."

• Simon Thomas ([61:09]): "War and Peace… the first great book I read and it'll be the last great book I read."

• Stephen Browning ([65:04]): "A Christmas Carol… you can't read A Christmas Carol without being uplifted and questioning yourself and your own selfishness."

• Nathan Hensley ([55:28]): "Processes of intervening in the world, even though they can seem small, really do matter..."

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Further Listening: Stay tuned for upcoming episodes featuring discussions on Dostoevsky, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf, and more, as The History of Literature continues to explore the rich tapestry of literary history.

For more details, visit historyofliterature.com or follow the podcast on Facebook.

Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature Podcast is a.

[Nathan Hensley]

Member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.

[Stephen Browning]

If you went on a road trip and you didn't stop for a Big Mac or drop a crispy fry between the car seats or use your McDonald's bag as a placemat, then that wasn't a road trip. It was just a really long drive.

[Simon Thomas]

Ba da ba ba ba at participating McDonald's.

[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Nathan Hensley]

Raise your hand if you feel like you live helplessly in a world that's coming undone Doomed, with no hope on a crash course. We're on board the ship and the water's pouring in through the portholes we're spinning into oblivion with no chance of turning things around. I see that you, well, it looks like all of you have your hands raised. Some of you have even put both hands in the air. I sympathize. I'd have both my hands in the air too if I wasn't busy clutching my chest with panic.

[Jack Wilson]

I would love to have an answer.

[Nathan Hensley]

For you, to tell you that we're going to turn around this ship before we hit the iceberg. That politicians will magically develop consciences and that we, the public, will set aside short term interests and manage to persuade our leaders that it's time to make changes that will save our planet from doom. I don't have that answer. But what I can tell you is that we're not the first society to feel this way. And maybe looking at a past society to see how they muddled through these feelings of angst and anxiety and fear, to see how novelists tackled this feeling in the population, maybe there are some lessons for us, especially when the novelists are as intelligent as the Victorians, chief among them George Eliot. What did they do? What did they face? And how did they cope? Are there any lessons for us today? Author Nathan Hensley will give us some answers today on the history of literature. Okay. Hello everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. I'm glad you're here.

[Jack Wilson]

Today. And thank you to everyone who has.

[Nathan Hensley]

Expressed interest in our big new project, the Trip Through Literary English.

[Jack Wilson]

I kind of can't believe we're doing this.

[Nathan Hensley]

This all happened suddenly. It's exciting. It's a trip through Literary England for the History of Literature podcast in May of 2026. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to try to record some conversations and have some podcast content for you. For those of you who aren't able to make it, you'll get to hear what we were up to in May of 2026, but I'm looking forward to going. I can't wait to meet some of you and spend some time together at these restaurants and pubs and on these walks and and seeing the homes of these illustrious authors. And so on May 2026. I've got goosebumps thinking about it, but I'm also a little anxious when people tell me how much they're looking forward to going because spots are limited and I don't want anyone to be cut off or left out. So put down that deposit and secure your position and I won't have to feel heartbroken that you wanted to come and there wasn't room. I prefer my heart to be unbroken to the extent possible.

[Jack Wilson]

So you can find out more at.

[Nathan Hensley]

John Shors Travel S H O R S Travel or visit historyofliterature.com and follow the links to the England tour with Jack Wilson Shores spelled without an e. And Jack of course is spelled with an e. Maybe that was a mix up at the hospital by some tired nurses who through his e My way. Okay, this week it turns out, is going to be Victorian Week with we had Dickens on Monday and Victorians and Climate Change today and it is also Stephen Browning and Simon Thomas week as we mourn the loss of Stephen Browning who passed away suddenly on June 30th of this year not too long after we recorded an interview with him. You can hear that interview in the show that we posted on Monday. Our hearts are with Stephen's family and friends and with Simon, who is one of Stephen's good friends, as you'll hear if you listen to that conversation. I was very struck by the pair of them, how much good natured affection there was between them, how close they were for co authors. You heard all that if you listened to our episode and you'll hear another dose of it today as we present their selection of their last books. They chose one another's or they attempt to do so and we'll Hear how that goes. But first, we've been talking about travel because we're so excited about the History of Literature podcast tour and how to travel, how we'd like to travel. Here's a pair of articles from the Guardian about how not to travel. What people? What on earth is going on? What are we doing? These are almost hard to pass along. That pit in the stomach. Oh, boy. That pit in the stomach that only humanity can create when it's trying to do something and failing miserably. Oh, I have a pit in the stomach today. I have two pits. One for each article. It's a double pit day. Maybe this will be the case for your stomach as well. First article, headline 300-year-old painting in the Uffizi Gallery damaged after visitor trips while trying to, quote, make a meme. End quote. Oh, no. The Uffizi, one of the greatest museums in the world. And maybe, maybe that will. Maybe Italy is going to need to be our next literary tour. Although we've got a bunch. We've got a bunch of ideas. We have England, and if that works out, of course there will be Scotland and Ireland. I'd love to go to all of those places. Buenos Aires would be fun. And Italy is very dear to my heart, to the Uffizi Gallery Sacred. It's a hallowed artistic ground. You see what I mean by a pit in the stomach? What did that headline do for you? 300 year old painting and a visitor trips. A 300-year-old painting hanging in the U should be treated with respect and awe and reverence and distance, not damaged by some meme maker. The subhead is the Uffizi Gallery in Florence is considering imposing restrictions on visitor behavior after the incident, which follows a similar mishap earlier this month. Yikes. Yes, impose those restrictions. We clearly can't govern ourselves. What was this meme maker doing? Let's keep reading. A 300-year-old painting in Florence's Uffizi Gallery has allegedly been damaged after a visitor tripped while posing for a photo with the artwork. Uffizi said the painting, a portrait of Tuscan Prince Ferdinando de Medici painted by Anton domenico Gabbiani in 1712, was damaged after a visitor fell backwards while attempting to make a meme in front of it by mimicking the prince's pose. Ah, awful. Awful. If you've been to museums lately, I was at the Musee d' Orsay in Paris not long ago, and you see that people don't just want to see the art, they don't want to take it in they want to. They immediately turn around. They want to stand next to it. They hold out their phone. They want to take a picture of themselves standing next to the painting so they can post it. And they kind of, you know, even after they stumble away from the painting, they're running into people staring at their phone with their thumbs furiously working so they can post it to their website. No wonder they're crashing into things. And guess what? That's not even the worst story we have for you today. Prepare your stomachs, people. Bit number two headed your way. It's about to get worse. Article number two headline Tourists damage crystal covered chair in Italian museum by sitting on it. Palazzo Maffei in Verona contacts police after visitors cause Van Gogh's chair to buckle while posing for photos. Article begins. An Italian museum has contacted the police after two clumsy tourists almost wrecked a work of art while posing for photos. Video footage released by Palazzo Maffei in Verona showed the hapless pair photographing each other pretending to sit on a crystal covered chair made by the artist Nicola Bola. Described by the museum as an extremely fragile work, the woman squats and does not seem to touch the work called Van Gogh's Chair and covered in Swarovski crystals. But the man is not so careful sitting and and then stumbling backwards as the seat buckles under his weight. The pair can. The pair can then be seen fleeing the room. In footage that went viral over the weekend, Palazzo Maffei described it as every museum's nightmare and said on Monday it had made a complaint to the police without specifying when it was filed. It would be ridiculous if it hadn't actually happened. A museum's worst nightmare, the museum's director, Vanessa Carlon, said. Sometimes we lose our brains to take a picture and we don't think about the consequences. Sometimes we lose our brains to take a picture. Of all the reasons, of all the possible reasons to lose your brains. Our brains are better. There are better reasons to lose your brain. Someone people tourist meme maker pictures. It's nice to have nice pictures. They don't have to be you posing like the prince in front of the painting and then crashing into it and tearing it, or sitting in a artwork chair and stumbling and collapsing it and then running out of the museum. Actually, the artist of Van Gogh's chair, Nicola Bola, actually he took kind of a glass half full view. It was an idiotic thing to do, bola told Italian magazine Fan Page. But the artist said he could see a positive side to the incident. It's like a kind of performance. Ordinary people can do it too. Not just artists, end quote. Ordinary people can perform. That's a nice way of thinking about it. The brainless picture taking ordinary people crashing into artworks and fleeing the scene. That's a little life. You know what? That's a little life advice for you. If you find yourself sprinting out of an art museum, something in your life has gone very, very wrong. That's where the movie does the record scratch and the voiceover right? Here I am fleeing the museum. Speaking of very, very wrong. That's kind of our topic today.

[Jack Wilson]

Our treatment of the world is going very, very wrong.

[Nathan Hensley]

We humans are brainless in lots of ways. Not just in the art gallery taking pictures of ourselves, but in our decisions about how to burn up resources and superheat the atmosphere while we're at it. Well, how did Victorian novelists deal with their own feelings of anxiety about resource extraction and the potential damage for the planet and society, the fabric of society? How did they deal with it when they faced something similar that felt similar to them? Let's ask Nathan Hensley after this. This is an ad by BetterHelp. Hey, it's Summer. But that can come with a lot of stress, especially for those of us who work.

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[Simon Thomas]

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So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing.

[Jack Wilson]

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[Nathan Hensley]

Foreigning me now is Nathan Hensley, who is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University.

[Jack Wilson]

His previous works include Forms of Empire.

[Nathan Hensley]

The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty, and he's here today to discuss his new book, Action Without Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse. Nathan Hensley, welcome to the History of Literature.

[Simon Thomas]

Thanks so much, Jack. I'm really excited to be here. It's an honor to be invited. Thank you.

[Jack Wilson]

So you clearly have an interest in Victorian literature. Were you interested in that era or in the books?

[Nathan Hensley]

How did you come to specialize in Victorian literature?

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, that's a good it's a question I ask myself sometimes. I came sort of late to Victorian literature, actually. I guess I had, growing up and in college, even a kind of stereotype of what Victorian literature was, the sort of doilies and drawing rooms and stuff like that. I kind of got to grad school and, you know, I knew when I was starting grad school that I wanted to study what I thought of then as kind of the relationship between narrative form and ethics. And I was really interested in kind of experimental books like Nabokov and, you know, Melville and stuff like that. And so I got to college, though, and took a class, class that was called Victorian Literature, Colon, Sexuality and Empire, taught by the person who became my mentor, Kathy Somiades. Anyway, and I was exposed to this this kind of like, incredible archive of formally dynamic literature that was really fundamentally concerned with an enormous sociopolitical and ethical problem, which was essentially another name for the British Empire. So I this exposure to this whole set of really experimental and ultimately very strange works that were enchanting and beautiful and also weird and very interested in thinking through some of these dilemmas that I had associated with sort of later periods of literature. I really just was really into it. And so this sort of combination of this complex and formally inventive alongside this sort of philosophically engaged type of literature really blew my mind. So, like, I read, for instance, the stuff that you wouldn't expect and to be described in those terms, the kind of adventure novels by H. Rider Haggard, for example, ones like she and King Solomon's Mind.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, yeah, right.

[Simon Thomas]

They're unusual novels, you know, but they have, for instance, all these kind of like falsified prefaces and nested footnotes and things like that, and various kind of unreliable narrators that are nested in. And so this reminded me of books like, you know, Pale Fire by Nabokov that has sort of like elaborate footnote apparatus on top of a poem that he basically made up as the. And so these kinds of like nested stories and complicated narrative forms really put me on to Victorian literature. And I still find it something that I continue to quite love and go back to all the time.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, That's a great explanation. And I think you were right about the stereotype of the drawing rooms and doilies. And then when you get into the literature, you think this is literature being written by some of the smartest, most engaged authors who have such a wide range of interests and what they're bringing to it, the works that they seem to be engaged with in reading. It really is a fertile era for this kind of book. On the other hand, your book begins with the painter JMW Turner. So how does he help you kick off your topic?

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, it's true. And I love that your point about Victorian writers sort of knowing everything is a really good one. Yeah, maybe we can talk about later. But yeah, like George Eliot, when the first time I read. You read Eliot and you realize that she essentially sort of knows everything and your effort is to try to make yourself adequate to these experiments as a reader. I love that idea of sort of humility in the future.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, it. Virginia Woolf, who said you feel like you're finally reading a grown up.

[Simon Thomas]

Yes. Yeah, it's sort of a slur. Woolf is sort of using it at this point. But yeah, so, yeah, like Eliot's Middlemarch notebooks, which exist in an old edition, I think, from the 70s, I think, anyway, you can get a kind of facsimile of her notebooks for Middlemarch, and it's just like an astonishing tour of someone learning everything. But yeah, okay, you asked about Turner and. Yeah, you know, I guess I. You know how people say they're visual learners? I sort of feel like in some, despite being a literature professor, I'm kind of a visual person and so I found that in my first book, actually. I realized only after the fact that it starts with photography, and so this one starts with painting. I got really into Turner. I mean, he's obviously like the kind of most canonical British painter of this period. He's kind of conventionally associated with something that people call modernity, and they often mean different things by that, you know, but he was born in 1775. He died in 1851, which is the, the year also of the Great Exhibition in London, which is the kind of Crystal palace, which celebrated like the achievement of the modern British Empire with this huge, you know, exhibition. And so in that sense, Turner's life sort of tracks across this period of early modernization in England. And because he was such a canny diagnostician, he was a sort of very keen observer, obviously by profession. His work really is an archive of responses to the transformation in the physical and social life of England during this highly turbulent period of fossil fueled transformation. And so he was very interested in, you know, the thing that 18th century painters called landscape was really a name for the kind of terraformed earth that was transformed according to aesthetic tastes of the period. And so you see in Turner's early landscape paintings the kind of residual and emergent signals of a fossil fueled industrial society. So there'll be a kind of classical 18th century view from a mountaintop, but in the background there's a bunch of smoke coming up from these newly built smokestacks. And so there are ways in which this kind of like transformation in this sort of built environment and even like chemical makeup of the earth that Turner's sort of witnessing obliquely becomes really evident in his amazing paintings across this long period. And so that becomes like, these early landscape paintings transform into his more famous, like, later works, which are kind of predecessors of a kind of very experimental, almost abstract expressionist style, where it just becomes these kind of like incredibly swirled, turbulent evocations of motion in a painting, like rain, steam and speed, for instance. That's the painting of the famous painting of a railroad. That's really this kind of smeared darkness that you can't really tell what you're looking at. So he really was a kind of canny, but ultimately oblique observer of these huge transformations. And I got very interested in that. I say more about it too, because he also got super into like new paints. He was experimental painter in terms of the pigments that he used. And it turns out that a lot of these pigments were sourced from early extractive enterprises. For example, some of the chrome yellows that he was Infamous for using were sort of derived from industrial processes. And if you start looking into the history of pigments, as many art historians have, whom I have learned from, you start seeing that the paintings themselves then in this sense become kind of like physical records of an advanced extractive system. So chemical byproducts, crushed earth, burnt sienna. You know, the famous Crayola color is literally the. Is called that because it's the paint made from the earth around that town in Italy that's been excavated and heat treated and now is a paint. So the way in which these things become kind of physical archives of an extractive process or set of processes really interested me in addition to Turner's more famous kind of witness status to industrialization.

[Jack Wilson]

So you get this sense of progress and even of beauty. I was struck by the other day. I was looking at a photograph of. It was kind of taken at night or at dusk. And it was a helicopter view of a city. And there were all of these smokestacks that were. With flames coming out because it burns off a type of gas. And I was thinking, oh, it's so.

[Nathan Hensley]

Beautiful, those orange and yellows against that blue smoke sky.

[Jack Wilson]

But, but of course it also fills me with, with this sense of doom and, and foreboding of oh my God, what are we, what are we doing? You know, obviously that's just, that's not good. That's not going to be good for the earth and for the air that we breathe and, and so on. And it, it's kind of this, you.

[Nathan Hensley]

Know, the way you're describing it, you.

[Jack Wilson]

Get these new colors and these new paintings that you would love to have hanging in your home because of their beauty, but against a backdrop of potential disaster and maybe a kind of Promethean getting ahead of ourselves and doing something.

[Nathan Hensley]

That we're not going to be able to undo.

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, that's really well put, Jack. Yeah, it is. Those burn off towers are really fascinating. There was one when you take the train. I started grad school at Notre Dame, which is, as you know, in northern Indiana. You take the train into. You go through Gary, Indiana on the way to Chicago. And that would be the sort of like all the burn off towers at those refineries that are right there. And that exact vision of this sort of lambent, disastrous glow that's actually quite enchanting to look at. Yeah, I mean, I'm really interested in that effect that you describe of this fundamental and I think irresolvable ambiguity that's to do with these kind of documents of the transforming Earth. And there's a famous phrase by the critic and theorist Walter Benjamin where he kind of says, you know, every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. And that there's a kind of like, way in which this irresolvability of the way beauty and disaster kind of go together and you really can't have one without the other. And that the ability to kind of see that interplay is part of what it means to understand and really get into the core of art. And I think that's something that matters a lot to me because I think that the sort of more simplistic formulas of where the beautiful things are beautiful and the ugly things are ugly tend not to make the most interesting art. And so. So I think instead the works that I'm interested in are exactly that. I mean, Turner is a great example. If you go to the Tate, you can go see his sketches in like a private viewing. All you have to do is email the people and they'll let you go have like an audience with these undisplayed things. And so he has all these sketches of like burning blubber and wailing and some of them become became canvases later. But they're these really, to me, apocalyptic looking images of sort of smeared burning and like the kind of afterglow of this intensive extractive process of whaling in the 19th century. But it turned out, I learned later that these paintings were commissioned by whaling magnates. You know, they were paid for to hang in the houses of people that got rich off of whaling. So they're so the idea of this art that looks to me like very critical of industrialization and some particular extractive process is actually being produced to kind of celebrate it. And there's something in Turner's work that hovers in that really ambiguous space that I think is kind of very generative for thinking about, you know, the aesthetic record of the emergence and maturation of a fossil fueled imperial society, which is really like what I'm interested in, in.

[Jack Wilson]

Now when we think of climate collapse, we think of climate change and the greenhouse effect and so on, but we're 150 years or so after the Victorians.

[Nathan Hensley]

What were they concerned about?

[Jack Wilson]

What were they noticing?

[Nathan Hensley]

What were they predicting?

[Jack Wilson]

I mean, was it soot in London or what was kind of the. What were the warning signs for them?

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think that we've been talking about painting already and that's a really easy and good. Not easy. It's a fascinating. But it's a sort of ready example of the way that sort of particulate matter in the air was a very obvious way in which the kind of residue of industrialization became palpable for people. So I talk about the great poet Christina Rossetti had these like racking fits of lung disease and coughing that were directly related to soot in the air. You know, we know of these things that were the, you know, the famous London fogs, which are actually kind of like toxic air events where many, many people died, sometimes hundreds, even thousands, you know, Monet would travel to London, of course, to like paint this sort of shimmering air of the incipient climate disaster, you know. But other things too, you know, like if you read Alice in Wonderland, you know, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and you've got the dodo and the mock turtle and a whole cast of characters that are essentially like aesthetic relics of a kind of extinction based society. So mock turtle of course comes from mock turtle soup, which was a kind of delicacy for the moneyed middle classes who could enjoy a fancy kind of soup after actual turtles had been like hunted to the point of extinction or near extinction in the British Caribbean. And so you get this. Carol, of course was interested in the kind of linguistic effect of the idea that there would be a word that didn't have a referent related to it. So the moth turtle doesn't like really exist. It's really made out of boiling a big, you know, hogshead for many hours and making some fake version of turtle soup. But so anyway, you have this character in the book that in the illustrations looks like a kind of a weird turtle and has the name mock turtle, but really refers to a kind of like cultural relic of extinction. So we have a 19th century that's incredibly conscious of what is at the far end of extractive processes. So you have extinction, you have exhaustion, for instance, of coal reserves or animal stocks. And so people were quite conscious of the idea of this idea of finitude. And they also knew at some level that they lived in a society whose economic model was predicated on a kind of essentially infinite expansion. But in the end, the world is finite. And so that produces all kinds of fascinating thought experiments about what will happen at the end of when coal runs out. For instance, as was asked by this guy, William Stanley Jevons in the Coal Question, a big book that was written explicitly about the idea that, hey, if we keep burning this stuff stuff, it's going to run out. And that's from 1865, which is the same year of Alice in Wonderland. So people were quite conscious of this idea of finitude in various registers. And at the same time, you have, as we have now, this idea that comes up when you start thinking very hard about this, which is like, well, what does it mean to really be aware of something? What would it mean to be aware that we live in a society that's predicated on a kind of unsustainable use of energy, for instance? And then it's funny because you have people that are in some ways writing directly about coal exhaustion, say, or extinction, for instance. But then you have other people who are sort of, like, soaking this in as a kind of mood or like an ambient affect of just living in a place that is built this way. And it produces sort of strange insights that don't really answer to the name of knowledge. And so I got really interested in these kind of, like, uncanny or incipient forms of knowing that I kind of argue become legible in aesthetic forms like literature.

[Jack Wilson]

Can you give us an example of one of those?

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, there's lots of them that I cover in the book. But I think that one way is if you read a very strange and amazing novel like Wuthering Heights, for instance, you have all sorts of explicit markers of extreme distractive processes in the book. So Emily Bronte is very careful about describing the differences in the fires of the different houses, for example. So some of them burn, you know, wood and others burn coal. And you describe poor Lockwood has to wander through the landscape that is described by Bronte as being marked by quarries. So, like, exhausted quarries that are all around Thrushcross, Grange and Wuthering Heights. And you also have things like game laws, where you have these little sort of tiny descriptions that you don't really pay attention to when you're reading the book because you're paying attention to the plot. But Bronte's very aware of the fact that, for instance, new forms of the enclosure of land meant that people would be called poachers if you were to capture game on land that is owned by another person. So obviously, the plot of Wuthering Heights, which is this elaborate plot by which Heathcliff tries to kind of like, take over the land of the people he imagines as his enemies, is really also about the enclosure of property and the transformation of life into commodities that you can own. And so Bronte, in other words, is kind of annotating at a very small scale the transformation in social life in this, like, very elaborately, you know, it's very confusing plot. It's like backdated in the chronology, right. But that kind of like temporal nesting of the book really shows us this jumbled up story of British modernization whereby the kind of landscape that used to be held in common is slowly enclosed into private property and then extracted to the point where it becomes exhausted. And so you have people like wandering through these quarry pocked landscapes or you know, even there's a part where Kathy comes home from Thrushcross Grange and she puts on a hat that's made out of beaver. Bronte notices and tells us. And we know that a beaver hat in this period was also a relic of a mass extinction event essentially happening in British Canada. And so there's just these small notations in the novel where people obliquely are aware that there are processes of capture and enclosure and and use that are happening kind of behind the scenes of like what we would think of as the main event. And I'm kind of interested in that dynamic.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, let's take a quick break and.

[Nathan Hensley]

Come back with more from Nathan Hensley.

[Simon Thomas]

Sounds great.

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[Jack Wilson]

Okay, we're back. So, Nathan, you've given some great examples, and we've been talking about this sense of we are going too far, we're doing too much, we're ruining things. But who did they?

[Nathan Hensley]

Did they blame someone? Did they blame capitalism?

[Jack Wilson]

Did they blame the greedy landowners who were trying to close everything up? Who did they. I mean, does it vary among writers, or is there some kind of general villain that they seem to feel like was causing these kinds of problems?

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, it's a great question. It does vary. You know, it absolutely varies. But I think the ones, the sort of writers and thinkers that kind of interest me the most, I guess, are the ones who are able to kind of, like, detach their analysis from individual people and start to see how systems are arranged. So there's actually like a. There's a kind of critique in some ways among the authors and writers that I'm kind of interested in of the storylines that would enable us to find, like, a clear villain, because these are narrative structures. So if you have a. You have the kind of old Western structure of the guy in the white hat and the guy in the black hat, and they face off against each other, and the kind of evil is able to be personified in a single figure to defeat that figure, you're off and running and you're, you know, you've saved the world. And so this kind of melodrama of salvation is something that the writers, like Emily Bronte, for instance, who we were just talking about, really sees quite through and sees as a kind of. Almost a kind of. What would you call it? Like, a distraction or a kind of. Almost like a childish diversion from the true analysis, which would see the idea more accurately that people are playing roles in systems that they often don't even understand. And so what really, we have to think about are these large, larger, nested, networked effects that are really the product of multiple different actors working together inside of a system. So that sounds very abstract, but I think that a lot of the. Another great example that I find myself coming back to in the book is Christina Rossetti, who I mentioned before as having this kind of health effects that are conditioned by basically what we would call fossil capitalism. You know, the kind of air effects of combustion, combusting fossil fuels. But, you know, she became really interested in using, for instance, the sonnet form, which she associated with, like, massive constraint. Like, you live inside of an aesthetic structure that you don't invent and for her, invented by Petrarch in order to describe a kind of conservative form of heteronormative love. With Laura and Christina. Rossetti inhabits this aesthetic structure of constraint in order to think about what can happen when you live inside of a verbal and intellectual structure that is not your own, but you have to kind of rework it from the inside. And so that's a highly mediated example of an author who's thinking very, very hard about constraint. And Rossetti was a kind of very religious poet, as you know, and she was interested in doom and gloom. And her favorite book of the Bible is Revelation. And she's really thinking quite hard about the end of the world and, like, very apocalyptic, literal senses and biblical senses altogether. But instead of talking about it at that register, she really goes to these aesthetic ways of thinking about constraint that enable her to get away from the idea that you can sort of transcend the world by, like, beating the guy who's your enemy and instead think through the much harder question of what happens when we live inside of systems that we can't really control or change. So that's really what interests me about the authors that I've sort of selected to kind of engage with here, is they kind of get past the idea of simple fixes or what climate people now call solutionism. You know, the idea of, like, we hear it all the time beating climate change or defeating climate change. So these kind of fictions of transcendence are what people like George Eliot, for example, see right past right.

[Jack Wilson]

It does seem like. And different people are predisposed to different types of solutions. You can see that. That, you know, the Bill Gates of the world will look to some kind of innovation that's going to allow us to. To take carbon out of the air, for example, you know, that it seems as if we're looking for narratives that.

[Nathan Hensley]

Will make sense to us. How do we solve this problem? How do we address it? The difficult thing for us to wrestle with is the idea that maybe we.

[Jack Wilson]

Are living in a way that is so unsustainable, that the problem is unsolvable because we don't want to give up these fabulous lifestyles that we have, and we're not ready to face sort of.

[Nathan Hensley]

The hardest of the choices.

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, I mean, there's something really profoundly upsetting about that idea of being immersed so fully inside of unlivable systems that there feels like there's no way out. And so, you know, when I. The title of the book, Action Without Hope, is really kind of a response to that I think very contemporary feeling, the idea that we're inside of something that is definitely not working, and people have that intuitive understanding that that's the case, and they don't. We don't really have a vocabulary for thinking about what we can do to alter it. And we often feel we move through these kind of, like, you know, spasms of transcendent thinking, like we said, like we were talking about before. We can beat it, we can defeat it. And then often we get a whole language of, like, you say, technological solutionism or carbon capture or these essentially fanciful dreams of escape, or we just withdraw and say, forget it. We can't do anything. And so then you have a kind of naive escapism on the one hand and then a kind of passive fatalism on the other. And those are really two alternative responses to this. This idea that we're describing, that neither of which will work at all. And so part of what I'm interested in is a kind of different way of approaching that scenario, which refuses the kind of naivete of false transcendence, but also doesn't kind of give up the ghost into a kind of fatalism, or what we often hear in climate discourse described as doomism. And so instead, the writers and artists that interest me again looked at the languages and available templates for thinking and doing that they had and tried to rework them from the inside. They tried to link up with other people who were doing similar kinds of experimental thinking, and they tried to develop practices of solidarity and connection at very local and small scales where they could make small alterations in the structure of their world that would eventually add up and create durable change. So that's really. If people on your podcast have read Middlemarch, they will have discovered that I just gave, like, a plot summary of Eliot's great novel, which is about the aggregating coalescing quality of small changes. And in. In Eliot's novel, you know, Dorothea Brooke, that. Dorothea Brooke is at the center of that, and she experiences that attenuation of her capacity as a kind of tragedy, that the dreams that she has are. Are sort of foreclosed and that she ultimately can't escape. And there's something really brutal and sad, and I cry every time I read that book with my students. You know, it's like, really, really intense. However, Elliot understands, too, that those movements of Dorothea's that are so small as to feel tragically foreclosed to us actually develop some practice of gathering and connection making and slow change that will ultimately, as she says, result in what Elliot calls the growing good of the world. So there's something really appealing to me about this sort of rescaling of action away from these dreams of huge transformation. Even though it can be very gutting to read that.

[Nathan Hensley]

Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

You know, the other example that is taking us outside of Victorian literature, but I can't get it out of my mind as we've been talking, is It's a Wonderful Life, where, you know, on the one hand, we have a good guy, George Bailey, and a villain, Potter, but the movie is a little more sophisticated to suggest that every town is going to have a potter. It's not just that he's such a bad guy, but that this is kind of what the system is. Is producing, and we get a solution, which is that the community together can be stronger than the individual force that's trying to destroy life as they know it for them, and they can overcome it and so on, and do so through these small gestures that accumulate, you know, the helping each person get a home and working together to make life a little better along the way. At the same time, it always feels to me like, well, isn't it a.

[Nathan Hensley]

Shame that George Bailey had to do.

[Jack Wilson]

That, where what he wanted was to go build bridges and do things, and instead he got stuck in this town his whole life and he kind of. Yeah, it turned out in this wonderful.

[Nathan Hensley]

Ending scene that there's this moment of.

[Jack Wilson]

Triumph, but at the same time, he kind of had to destroy a lot of his dreams along the way.

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, that's a great. I mean, it's such a good description of this kind of. I don't know, what would you call it? A kind of rescaling of your scope of possibility. And I think that for me, I mean, this is going a little bit in the weeds, and maybe it's too much, but for me, I started to realize as I was thinking, doing this research on action and theories of action and this concept of possibility, and we often get it described in philosophy as agents, the category of agency. You know, do you have agency? And I realized that a lot of those theories were developed in essentially, like, first world context, essentially rich countries, where the theorists had developed a kind of, what I call in the book, a kind of bourgeois theory of action. Like a theory of action that's essentially conditioned by historical victory. You think that you can accomplish things because you've run empires and you've been on the winning side of things. And I found that those theories of action were the ones that were the least compelling in the contemporary situation. Instead, you have Theories of action that are developed by minoritized subjects in conditions of historical defeat. Or women writers, all of. Almost all of the writers in the book that are women. And that's because I think that these people have a particular insight into what it means to kind of try to think about a scope of possibility when the table has essentially been set against you. And so that means you don't have these kinds of, like, heroic dreams of, like, Wild west gun fighting and beating the enemy. You have. Or, you know, again, like, going off and building all your bridges and experiencing the kind of transcendent resolution that is associated with completion. You have incomplete projects, fragmented capacities, and, like, attenuated possibility. And you try to do within those things what you can. And that's. We have a robust archive of people thinking about that. It's just that they're not usually the people who are given the microphone to talk about agency.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, right. And it's the women who knew that life is going to be about understanding limits and living within those limits and trying to accomplish something in spite of those limits that are set around you. And some of the captains of industry were maybe coming at this from a framework of, well, why should there be any limits for me? Why can't I achieve things to the highest level? And I don't want to. By the time this episode comes out, it's going to be a couple of months down the road. But it's hard not to compare that with people we see individually today who seem to want to live outside the rules and to say, I'm wealthy enough, I can change the world to suit me and to live forever and to do all of these things that. That we know they're more deluded than the people who would say, let's figure out how to make the world better in a smaller way. But for lots of people.

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, it's really well put, Jack. The analogies make themselves. You're absolutely right. And I think that kind of naive individualism is itself. That we see today quite a lot, you know, is its own sort of fiction of the 19th century. And when we have these kind of mythologies of individualism and transcendence and this idea of a kind of endless expansionism where, for instance, today we have people wanting to have mineral rights to the moon and things like that, you see people thinking about this infinite expansionism, and that's itself a version of the 19th century that derives from the 19th century, too. But the 19th century that interests me in the book is a kind of alternative to that and really emerged in the shadows of that developing ideology of transcendent individualism. And so it's communitarian, it's focused on solidarity, and it's focused on kind of adjustment and elaboration rather than kind of like beating everything.

[Jack Wilson]

Does it give you hope for society at large? Or is this hope for how an individual can find a meaningful way to live within a society that's going in a different direction?

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, that's the big dollar question, you know, does it make you hopeful? I mean, in the book, I have to spend some time redefining that term alongside many others who have done that, too. And I mean, hope in its normal senses, that we use it, and it gets used today in the press and stuff like that, and in climate journalism, for instance, presumes that you can, like, achieve an outcome, you know, that hope will be satisfied. But there are other versions of that idea that don't really rely on the idea of achievement. You know, I talk in the book about this guy, Ernst Bloch, who wrote a big weird book called the Principle of Hope, and he kind of describes this sort of false version of hope as that. As the desire for transcendence and achievement. And he describes against that this idea of a kind of impulse towards the future that you almost can't really get rid of or really control. Like, no one does anything unless they sort of implicitly understand that they want to make the future slightly better than the past. Otherwise you would just sit there in your recliner and do nothing. But people are constantly living out a kind of vernacular version of hope in the sense that they are working to try to make their lives slightly better. And so, really, for me, that inexhaustible human capacity to develop and create and elaborate is the kind of, like, motor of something that I do feel really positively about, because that really can't be expunged. And you see that in the record of, you know, repressive societies throughout history. Like, you cannot get rid of people's ability to work within the systems that you've set up for them, no matter how repressive or smothering they might be. I think in the book, I look at the archive of, for instance, the British Sugar Islands in the period of Atlantic slavery, and you have systems of domination there that are almost entirely total. They're so brutally total. And yet you have people living in those systems that are elaborating ways of making and doing together that are often lost to history or barely discernible to us. But we know that people are always working towards making things better. And that those, those gestural movements inside of systems can create possibilities that are often small and sometimes you can barely notice them or scarcely recover them. But the book is a real effort to try to honor those vernacular experiences among people living in the kind of shadows of these larger systems that they didn't themselves produce.

[Jack Wilson]

And what lesson does that have for us today as we deal with our own climate potential disasters here, and I guess the large scale climate disaster, but also the disasters that we see around us that are probably resulting from the bigger movement, the wildfires and the floodings and the different things that we're seeing along the way. Can we learn from the Victorians?

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I really do think so. And the thing that I learned from them in the process of writing this book is that these processes of like, intervening in the world, even though they can seem small, really do matter because things that you do to help other people or to work with other people, or to alter the shape of the world for the better in even really tiny ways, because they are real, they matter. And so there are activists like Mariame Kaba, for instance, is an activist who's, I've learned a lot from online and things, and she's developed a list that is like a kind of big, huge Google Doc that's called things you can do that aren't protesting or voting. And it's a kind of exhaustive list and it's from big to small. It includes things like print out a poster and put it somewhere, start a group that talks about an issue with your neighbors there. And it goes up and down the scale of things that seem so small as to seem ridiculous to things like join a union league with others to develop a protest strategy, for instance, or a boycott. And so things that in other words, things that we recognize as classic actions in the political sense, but then also things that don't really go by that name that we would instead call, like connections with people, you know, call somebody you've lost touch with, have a conversation with somebody, stay longer after an event and chat with someone else and see if it's possible you guys have something in common that you can work on together. Stuff like that, which seems so out of scale with the problems that we face. Nevertheless, those are concrete and real things that in the process of creating connections among people, develop the resources of solidarity that enable like, durable activity to kind of transpire in the future. And so that really gives me hope and helps me learn from the Victorians who are interested in small scale alterations in the hand that they were dealt.

[Jack Wilson]

And who just by their example, kind of in some ways had it easier than we do for doing things like that. They didn't have streaming services and smartphones and all of the potential. You know, they were very interested in going to meetings and staying until the end.

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah, that's true. That's a good point. You know, but they also didn't have the ability to reach quite as many people. They didn't have, you know, the capacity to develop like creative works that would meet, that would algorithmically reach larger audience. You know, there's, so there's, there's a plus side and a minus side to those technological changes, which I definitely hear what you're saying, but I was listening to your, you know, your great podcast on the Brontes, which I think was from some years ago, and there was a part in that podcast where you just said that the Brontes created a small revolution a long time ago in literature. And I really appreciated that phrase, a small revolution, because what we realize when we read these old books or engage with these old ideas is that if we're thinking about them now, that means that they have transformed the world in some, some way. And so this idea of a kind of resonance effect of the past where our actions, however small, or as you say said back to then, small revolution can transform something so that new ideas become thinkable for others or new configurations of political reality become available in the future. Those are real things and they often don't give us the satisfaction of what you get. For instance, if you destroy a federal agency in two days because you've transformed the world in an obvious way. But these smaller community based solutions really do create things that are durable.

[Jack Wilson]

The book is called Action Without Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse. Nathan Hensley, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[Simon Thomas]

Thanks so much, Jack. It's been fun.

[Jack Wilson]

And finally today we hear from Stephen.

[Nathan Hensley]

Browning and Simon Thomas. After the three of us discussed their book, the Real Charles Dickens, I ask them a special question.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay. We're joined now by Stephen Browning and Simon Thomas, co authors of the Real Charles Dickens. Stephen and Simon, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you.

[Nathan Hensley]

Want your last book to be?

[Jack Wilson]

This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written. And because I don't usually have two guests here, and especially two who have known each other as long as you have, I wondered if you might indulge me in something a little bit different. Where I was wondering, Steven, if you want to take a guess at what Simon is going to choose and vice versa, and then we'll hear what the actual choice is.

[Nathan Hensley]

Oh, my God.

[Stephen Browning]

No. Simon's is going to be something by Proust, no question.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay.

[Stephen Browning]

Simon's son said the other day, simon, you have to forgive me for this, Simon. But Simon's son said no matter what his dad starts talking about, he always ends up talking about Proust. So my guess is it's going to.

[Jack Wilson]

Be In Search of Lost Time. Okay, let's have the reveal. Simon, what is your choice for the last book you will ever read?

[Simon Thomas]

Right. Now if this was a slightly different question and it was the desert island one of what would you take away with you? It would be Proust, because you'd want something of that length to sustain you for a long period of isolation, wouldn't you? And Proust is just wonderful. And I'm not going to say any more about him, but I'm not going to say that on this occasion it's the last book. I am going to bookend my life and pick the first great classic that I read when I was about 15 years old. And I would be very happy if that were the last book I read as well. I've read it a number of times in between and that's War and Peace. So, yes, I couldn't do much better than that.

[Jack Wilson]

What gives that the nod over a book you love like Proust?

[Simon Thomas]

Well, I'd probably. If there were three books, it would be between Ulysses, Proust and War and Peace. Call me pretentious, but those are my three favorite books. And I think War and Peace on this occasion because it's the last book I'm going to read. And as I say, I, I like symmetry. I like the fact that it was the first great book I read and it'll be the last great book I read. But yes, it could. It could have easily been either of the other two books as well. But yes, for that reason, I'd. I'd go for War and Peace.

[Jack Wilson]

Do you think you will read it differently at that stage in your life than how you read it when you were 15?

[Simon Thomas]

Yes, undoubtedly. I mean, I've read it a good half dozen times since, including, actually fairly recently. And yes, I mean, you do respond to things differently as you get older and your appreciation of time, which means that Proust might actually be the best thing to do that you're such a. Time changes and history. I mean, you know, War and Peace is so much about history as Much as a wonderful story. You've got all that stuff about, you know, basically Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which is fascinating. Maybe the most difficult parts of the book because they're a little bit dry in places, but he did have a specific view of history, and, you know, it gives you plenty to think about. And I think that I've appreciated more as I've got older and as I become history myself, probably that will change again.

[Jack Wilson]

I was going to say, I feel like when I first read War and Peace when I was a teenager, I probably identified with Andre and Pierre, and as I get older, I probably identify more with Tolstoy himself.

[Simon Thomas]

Yeah. Yes, it does change, doesn't it? And, I mean, the thing about all the books we've talked about here, you can read them again and again. You have to read them again and again, I think. Yeah. You don't read Ulysses once, do you? It's something you have to keep returning to. And Proust as well. And certainly because of the time aspects. You know, time is so much an important part. Time and memory, an important part of that book that you had to keep returning to it. And it's incredibly rewarding doing that. I'm a great believer in rereading. I've rarely read a book once I return to it at some point, and, yeah, I find that incredibly rewarding.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, Simon, do you want to guess at what Stephen might choose?

[Simon Thomas]

Well, it could be something by Dickens. It could, but I've got a feeling he might go for a Sherlock Holmes. I've got a feeling it. So I'm going to jump in there and say Hound of the Baskervilles.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, let's have the reveal.

[Stephen Browning]

Well, I'm absolutely thrilled to say you're wrong, Simon. No, it's a Dickens, and it's got to be, for me, a Christmas Carol.

[Nathan Hensley]

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Stephen Browning]

Because although it's very, very short, it's a story of human beings, how evil they can be and how they can be redeemed. And it's uplifting. It's wonderful. You can't. Wasn't it Thackeray? You said it was an. To everybody who. Who read it, it was a personal blessing. You can't read A Christmas Carol without being uplifted and questioning yourself and your own selfishness. And it's. It's just phenomenal. Imagination involved as. And. And just fantastic. I watch everything that comes around in England at Christmas. You've got several Christmas carols on television, and I. I'd never tire of them, really. So that was Going to be my only answer. But Simon got two, so I thought.

[Simon Thomas]

Really, I had to plump for one, didn't I?

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, you.

[Stephen Browning]

Yeah, yeah. You went. You went for proofs, of course. Anyway, I'm gonna say, can I have a play? It will be Shakespeare's Macbeth to go with Christmas Carol. Because Macbeth is all about evil manipulation and getting your comeuppance for being a thoroughly bad person. Is it? Almost the direct opposite of A Christmas Carol. So if I may have two, I will have Macbeth, the play, and, yeah, Christmas Carol.

[Jack Wilson]

Now, I wonder if knowing that A Christmas Carol would be your last book, if it might also help inspire you. Because I could think of nothing worse than to finish the book. And to think I've been an unrepentant Scrooge all my life and I never had the moment. Instead, it would encourage you to. I should live the way Scrooge faces the world at the very end of the book so that I don't read this and regret some of my life's choices.

[Stephen Browning]

Well, that's the trouble with it, isn't it? If you're saying it's the last book, I might decide I have been like Screech, and it's all doom and gloom and tombstones.

[Simon Thomas]

But it's a wonderfully optimistic ending, isn't it? So you go into the. You'd go into the afterlife or whatever there is with that. With that feeling that things are going to be better from now on.

[Stephen Browning]

Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. And I probably don't have a period in my life when I'm more open to the idea of joy than I do at Christmas time. So even if I'd be reading that book in the middle of July or August, I would probably still be able to summon forth my. My memories of the times when I've enjoyed Christmas as much as I have.

[Simon Thomas]

That's true.

[Stephen Browning]

You can read Any Sign of the year, can't you, really?

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, well, those are excellent choices. Stephen Browning and Simon Thomas, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.

[Simon Thomas]

Thank you.

[Stephen Browning]

Thank you very much. A great pleasure.

[Nathan Hensley]

Literature as a human blessing. Stephen Browning passed away on June 30, 2025. May he rest in peace.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, that's going to do it for.

[Nathan Hensley]

This episode of the History of Literature. In addition to Stephen and so, Simon, my thanks to Nathan Hensley for joining me today. Very interesting subject for a book. I enjoyed that conversation quite a bit. We're looking forward to some more good episodes coming up soon. We'll have some Dostoevsky and some Emily Bronte.

[Jack Wilson]

And some Charlotte Bronte, some Christopher Isherwood.

[Nathan Hensley]

And Huck Finn's Gym. We'll also have John Keats, Virginia Woolf and some old folks French epics. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. SA.

[Stephen Browning]

Hi, this is Zibby Owens, host of Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books in my daily show I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at any everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to stay in the know. Get insider insights and connect with guests like Grammy Award winning singer Alicia Keys, critically acclaimed author Judy Blume and Academy Award winning screenwriter John Irving every single day. With Totally Booked, you aren't just listening, you're part of the story. So don't miss out. Follow Totally Booked with Zibby on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now.

[Courtney Act]

I'm Courtney Act. Many of you may know me from RuPaul's Drag Race, celebrity Big Brother, Dancing with the Stars, or probably my hit album Kaleidoscope. Well, guess what? I have got a brand new show called R and R with Courtney act and I want you to check it out. You know I hate small talk. I want to go deep and I want to go quickly and on my show we do just that. In today's world it feels really polarised and we're more connected than ever, but really we can feel isolated and I don't like that. I want the story shared here on R and R to make us realize that our similarities are greater than our differences. So join me and my fabulous guests like Nicole Byer, Tom Daly, Margaret Cho, Katia Adore Delano, Jackie Beat, and many more. If you're looking for some rest and relaxation, you've come to the wrong place because we are peeling back the layers of superficiality and we're getting down to the real stuff. Follow R and R with Courtney act on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you're listening now.