Listening to Deep Time: Nineteenth-Century Reconstructions of Carboniferous Soundscapes

This article investigates how nineteenth-century British writers imagined the soundscapes of ancient environments, focusing on the Carboniferous period as a case study. Often framed as the geological era that birthed coal – and by extension, industrial modernity – the Carboniferous served as fertile ground for textual reconstructions of prehistoric environments. While such reconstructions have traditionally privileged the visual, this study foregrounds the auditory, analysing depictions of silence, vegetal rustling and insect sounds in both scientific and popular Victorian writing. Methodologically, the article draws on concepts from sound studies to integrate the auditory into environmental history – proposing ‘Carboniferous silence’ as a rhetorical tool for evoking absence, estrangement and deep temporal distance. Tracing the shift from imagined stillness to the post-1860s integration of fossil-based insect acoustics, it argues that soundscapes functioned as affective and epistemological bridges between the primeval past and the industrial present. KEYWORDS