The Advent of the Killer Fog in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of Great City

Abstract

In the age of the Anthropocene, literature and literary critics are asked to participate in discussions about climate change and its consequential disasters in the Earth’s ecological systems. Literary imagination is demanded in comprehending what is happening on planet Earth and its inhabitants and educating the general public about how effectively and efficiently we humans can prevent a climate change crisis. Meanwhile, Victorian scholarship accepts the suggestion and begins to produce inventive ideas about what the cultural realm can do. Some are to retrieve the hidden works, and others try to reassess the best-selling works. This article joins this critical trend of retrieving the relatively unknown climate change literature, for instance, William Delisle Hay’s novella The Doom of the Great City. This novella centers on late-nineteenth-century London’s apocalyptic days in which the narrator witnesses on the spot the advent of the killer fog that eradicates every living entity across the urban setting. This article argues that fin-de-siècle apocalyptic narratives like The Doom of the Great City tend to present their format as a historical record or scientific data. The novella, a Victorian cli-fi narrative, aims to persuade the reader that human activities break ecological systems and climate disasters are imminent. Hay’s imaginative writing can be considered a warning against human ignorance about a reciprocal relationship between humans and planet Earth’s ecosystems. However, his cli-fi narrative shows the lack of readability in the scale and scope of emergent ecological changes. As a result, Hay’s apocalyptic narrative is caught in a moral apocalypse frame. It tends to read smog causality in a sin-punishment relationship against the given scientific knowledge.