1. “He has done with Hanuman but Hanuman has not
done with him”: Coal and Fossil Fuels as Religious
Violations of Nature
Your Gods and my Gods--do you or I know which are the
stronger? --proverb
In an excellent article entitled “Irreversible Transformations: Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Scottish Energy Science”, Allen MacDuffie
finds extensive parallels between the coal-based economy of Victorian England and Dr.
Jekyll’s difficult situation:
In its emphasis on material resources, (Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde) expresses neo-Malthusian anxieties of scarcity
articulated in William Stanley Jevons’s influential 1866 work
“The Coal Question”, which itself draws upon advances in
thermodynamics to warn of the eventual exhaustion of
England’s resource base. The chemical formula used to effect
Jekyll’s transformation changes over the course of the novel
from a frothing beaker, a kind of prop, to a substance
dependent upon a specific salt drawn from the inventories of
chemical retailers. Jekyll simply has it is his possession at
the beginning; he has “London ransacked” (JH, 102) to try to
acquire it by the end. If Stevenson’s vision for Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde came out of a deep mine”, the particular salt
needed for the transformation does not.1
Although MacDuffie is much too diplomatic to say that ‘Mr. Hyde is actually coal’ (i.e.
in a sort of allegory or symbolic representation of humanity grappling with a monster
through time, where Mr. Hyde is therefore the dark and hidden (“Hyde/Hide”)
underbelly of the British colonial civilization represented by Dr. Jekyll), I will say with
1 Irreversible Transformations: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and
Scottish Energy Science. Representations, vol 96, no.1 (Fall 2006) pp 1-20

2. complete confidence that ‘Mr. Hyde is coal’; after all, the line “Dr. Jekyll thought of
Hyde, for all his energy of life, as something not only hellish but inorganic” (JH, 100)
(my emphasis) and the other images of fire, burning, flames and sweating that are
closely connected to Mr. Hyde would also point to such a logical, simple and elegant,
though a bit heretical (since academia as an industry relies on fossil fuels too)
conclusion.
It is so interesting that another Victorian novel, Great Expectations (1861), written
25 years before Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, features another dark, troubled and negative
character, Miss Havisham, who has undergone a hideous transformation of sorts too (a
psychological one) so that she “has never seen the sun since before (Pip) was born”. She
is associated, like Mr. Hyde, with dark rooms, darkness, and an absence of sunlight and
although she is not called “inorganic”, she is also explicitly twinned with coal in a
stunning way when Pip, after waking up from a delirious fever, wonders
…whether there had been a closed iron furnace in a dark corner of
the room and a voice had called out, over and over again, that Miss
Havisham was consuming within it. (Great Expectations, 461) (my
emphasis)
Upon the death of Miss Havisham (the depletion of fossil fuels), Pip (really mankind)
can be united his “star” (our sun is also a star, as Giordano Bruno realized in the late
1500s), Estella, who may be seen in the allegory as the sun-based economy, which has
been held captive by the coal or fossil-fuel based economy (or we can playfully refer to
this fossil-fuel based economy as ‘capitalism’, a leap following Karl Marx’s observation
in Das Kapital of a geological ‘metabolic rift’ in the earth, which is very probably fossil
fuels, a massive surplus of energy temporarily available, a rift in the availability of
supply.)
One more Victorian writer can now be added to this list of British writers who
seemed to have mulled over and portrayed, artfully and circumspectly, the
desperate, gloomy, dark, hidden, and human side of the coal-based (and by
extension, the fossil fuel-based) economy. Like Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, the main
character, Fleete, undergoes a terrible transformation into a beast or sub-human
figure. Like Miss Havisham, Fleete is associated with darkness and he even begs
“No lamps--no lamps”2 as he asks his friends not to order the servants to light the
lamps as darkness falls in his garden.
2 All quotes are from “The Mark of the Beast” by Rudyard Kipling, accessed on July
4, 2015 at www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/2420)

3. However, this short story “The Mark of the Beast” (1891), by Rudyard Kipling,
adds another interesting dimension: the coal economy also becomes a violation of
religion, but this violated religion is definitely not Christianity.
The story wittily begins:
East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence
ceases; Man being there handed over to the Gods and Devils of
Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an
occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.
The plot is very simple; a foolish British man named Fleete, (“a big, heavy,
genial and inoffensive man”), living the British colonizer’s life in India (he has
“limited knowledge” of the local language), gets drunk one night at a party of fellow
colonial British men (“planters”, or owners of colonial plantations) and then on his
way home “through the bazaar”, intentionally stubs out his cigar on the forehead of
a “red stone” statue of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey deity:
Before we could stop him, Fleete dashed up the steps, patted
two priests on the back, and was gravely grinding the ashes of
cigar-butt into the forehead of the red stone image of Hanuman.
Strickland tried to drag him out, but he sat down and said
solemnly, “Shee that? Mark of the B-beasht! I made it. Isn’t it
fine?”
These “ashes of the cigar-butt” can be readily seen, along with the black rosette
mark that later develops on the left breast of Fleete and his subsequent
near-hysterical preference for the dark, as imagery that summons up coal ashes,
coal smoke and coal fires. Like Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson,
Rudyard Kipling could also accurately see what lay darkly hidden underneath the
veneer of the cultivated and genteel hierarchical British society: fossil fuels. Of
course, the air of London during Victorian times was famous for the “foggy pea
soup”3, a sulfurous and noxious mixture of coal smoke and moist air.
After this violation of the statue of Hanuman, a leper, referred to as a Silver
Man, runs up to Fleete and rubs his head on Fleete’s left breast. Then
one of the priests came to Strickland and said, in perfect
English, “Take your friend away. He has done with
Hanuman, but Hanuman has not done with him.”
This chilling moment passes and at first all seems well, except that over the
3 The Big Smoke: a History of Air Pollution in London. Peter Brimblecombe. Pages
108-131.

4. course of the next day Fleete slowly becomes a wolf-man who “shrank from the light”
of the lamps when they are finally lit against his wishes. (Like Miss Havisham and
Mr. Hyde, other characters embodying or personifying coal, Fleete loves the dark
and is most active in it.) The transformation is complete by dusk and when he howls,
a real wolf in the neighboring hills answers his cry. By evening, the frightening and
aggressive wolf-man that was Fleete has to be tied up with straps. (“We were
dealing with a beast that had once been Fleete.”)
Soon, the Silver Man, the same leper who was in the temple, approaches
Fleete’s house and Strickland and the unnamed narrator of the story catch him and
tie him to wolf-man/Fleete. Strickland and the narrator then perform some sort of
mysterious and completely undisclosed magic (“…and we got to work. This part is
not to be printed”: this may be a reference to the hidden and symbolic way that
literature works) on the leper and the wolf-man/Fleete. The leper is then requested
to “take away the evil spirit”, and subsequently Fleete awakens, cured.
The end of the story is delightful, as Strickland returns to the temple to “offer
redress for the pollution of the god”, (notice the double meaning of “pollution” which
can refer to coal smoke as well and an impure religious violation) but is….
solemnly assured that no white man had ever touched the
idol and he was laboring under a delusion.
“What do you think?” asked Strickland.
I said “there are more things….”
But Strickland hates that quotation. He thinks I have
worn it threadbare.
“There are more things….” is, of course, a reference to Hamlet, Act I, scene 5,
when Hamlet says to Horatio “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy” when Horatio says (of the ghost that has
come to communicate with Hamlet) “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!”
Horatio belongs to the rational, Christian, white-dominated world that was just
starting to colonize parts of Asia and Africa as fossil fuels drove maritime trade,
economies, the growth of cities like London, populations and even warfare and
missionary activity. Under the Christian theology, of course, there can be no ghosts
and spirits (such as the “evil spirit” that takes over Fleete) because there is a
monotheist idea in Christianity.
Is it a coincidence that Hamlet is also about the problem of coal?4
4 See my presentation “Who is Prince Hamlet?” at Shakespeare 450, sponsored by
Societe Francaise Shakespeare, Paris, France, April 26, 2014.

5. Writers, I suppose, are sort of professionally shamanistic and naturalistic in
their approach to humanity, and look beneath the surface of civilization and
elegance and sophistication that people, especially a colonizing force like Britain
was, would like to present on the surface. But the frightening wolf-man that Fleete
becomes, the violent criminal Mr. Hyde that Dr. Jekyll turns into, the fact that King
Claudius, who represents coal, is actually a cold-blooded killer, and the harmful lies
and cruel behavior of Miss Havisham, show that writers are onto the polluting and
temporary nature of the fossil fuel-based economy and stage serious, withering and
heroic literary attacks on it with their pens after disguising it behind some
extremely clever and witty masks.
Under some Asian religions, which follow nature gods like a monkey god, a sun
goddess, a hawk, or tree, or so forth, it may perhaps sometimes be considered a
violation to pollute nature or damage it and the intrinsic wisdom of this message
may become clearer to us as we see massive and mind-blowing environmental
damage and vast species extinction caused by climate change and industrialization,
which was most heavily promoted by countries such as Britain and America, which
have had massive fossil fuel reserves.
To return to William Shakespeare (my specialty), I’d like to end by presenting
his Sonnet 7, in which he demonstrates some knowledge ofAsian ways of
worshipping nature (“the orient”), especially the sun:
Lo! in the orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty;
And having climb'd the steep-up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage;
But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day,
The eyes, 'fore duteous, now converted are
From his low tract and look another way:
So thou, thyself out-going in thy noon,
Unlook'd on diest, unless thou get a son.

6. It is quite possible that the numerous phrases and words such as “Lo!” “gracious light”,
“lifts up” ,“homage”, “sacred majesty”, “up”, “heavenly hill”, “adore”, “beauty”, “golden
pilgrimage”, “highmost”, and “converted” may in aggregate point to Shakespeare’s own
religious loyalties. He has---just perhaps--confessed his religion in a poem….. and his
methods are quite devious, as usual.
And, in fact, in his eagerness to covertly sing the praises of nature and proclaim his
spiritual bond with the cosmos and our planet, he is not alone, either as an artist or as a
human being.