Fixed Capital and the Flow

Abstract

This essay examines the temporal structure of George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss (1860) from the perspective of energy and ecology, arguing that Eliot’s well-established interest in epochal shift extends to a searching and prescient inquiry into the temporality of energy and energy regime transition. The novel is set at a water-powered mill in the historical moment that saw an unprecedented energy transition in British industry from water power to coal-fired steam power—the moment that saw the birth of what Andreas Malm calls “the fossil economy”—and it distinguishes between the variant temporalities of these two energy regimes. The essay connects The Mill on the Floss’s dual temporality to our present moment of ecological crisis and its demand that we, as critics, shift not so much from an eco-historicism to an eco-presentism, but toward a temporally doubled methodology that inhabits the present and the past dialectically.