81

This article sets out to test the relevance of the notion of “energy heritage" (patrimoine energétique) for studying the place of coal in English society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using a cultural and social history approach, it shows that coal can be considered an “identity resource” for Victorian England, in other words, an element that was deemed indispensable to its economic development but also central to the symbolic construction of its national identity. It is precisely this conception of coal as a paradoxical heritage (since it is obviously constantly being diminished by energy consumption) that was at the root of the country’s existential anxieties at the end of the nineteenth century.