This dissertation reveals how formal structures within the Victorian novel serve as techniques of enclosing – and thus rendering representable – large-scale climatic systems. These structures make legible an increasingly capacious vision of the environment in Victorian culture, a crucial context for tracing the history of anthropogenic climate change. By examining forms of scaling down, this project aims to address the conceptual problem of representing vast, seemingly intangible, entities: the terms “climate,” “atmosphere,” and “weather,” which often prove murky, and even interchangeable, in contemporary discourse. The chapters evaluate these meteorological terms through close readings of novels that immerse us, perhaps unexpectedly, in the environmental: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Between the Acts. Ultimately, Victorian Microcosms argues that the enclosing structures within nineteenth-century British novels (as well as their modernist successors) entangle the human and more-than-human worlds, circumscribing literary ecologies that challenge assumptions of human dominance.