“Storming at Heav’n and Thee!”: Ecological Wastelands from Addison to Johnson

This chapter re-examines Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713), which foregrounds eighteenth-century anxieties about environmental depletion. The play recounts the last day of the Roman Senator as he launches one last effort from Utica, in North Africa, to prevent Caesar from conquering the republic. Addison portrays Cato as repeatedly defying a powerful force in the drama, not Caesar, who attempts on numerous occasions to offer peaceful terms for Cato’s surrender and, ultimately, never appears on stage, but storm systems. The storms described in the play loom large and linger with its eighteenth-century readers; allusions to these storm images in Cato appear in the writings of Oliver Goldsmith, James Boswell, and Samuel Johnson.