Uprooted Geographies. Microclimates in E. Marlitt’s ›Die Zweite Frau‹ and Charles Dickens’s ›Bleak House‹

Botanical practices constitute an essential and revelatory aspect of nineteenth-century transimperial culture, as studies by Richard Grove, Sujit Sivasundaram, and Lynn Voskuil, among others, have demonstrated. In order to scrutinise the cartographically constructed spatial ‘realities’ that underpin most research in this field, our paper introduces microclimate into the discussion—as both material formation of and heuristic for empire. Microclimate refers to local atmospheric conditions that differ significantly from those of the surrounding area. As such, microclimate is statistical (as is climate). Looking at Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3) and Marlitt’s Die Zweite Frau (1874) we are thus particularly interested in how these novels—about a century before ecologists first formulated the concept—materialise microclimates. We suggest that both texts rely first and foremost on descriptions of vegetable life to index otherwise imperceptible changes in mean temperature and/or humidity. Significantly, Dickens’s and Marlitt’s novels both employ Southeast-Asian flora to allow their characters—and through them their readers—to experience microclimates. These discrete vegetable worlds set themselves apart as substantially hotter than, and substantially other to, the surrounding area, allowing characters to travel to distant climes without travelling any distance. Dickens’s and Marlitt’s strategically (mis)placed microclimates certainly confirm current understanding of imperialist geographical imaginations. However, we argue that these microsettings also raise
important questions about the material formations through which geography comes to matter, especially climate and funga, flora and fauna. Superposing onto a spot on the map the atmospherical conditions that are ‘proper’ to another—and in fact render that other place interesting—Dickens’s and Marlitt’s nineteenth-century microclimates complicate and challenge the more static geographies that much of our thinking about empire takes for granted.