This study explores the large-scale transformation occurring British Romantic period—one that saw the entire British and global economic framework convert from a land-based agricultural system into a subterranean, carbon-dependent energetic grid, driven by inorganic coal extraction. I explore how, in face of nascent coal mining, Romanticism’s literary and artistic engagements articulate and substantiate the social, phenomenological experience, rather than to disconnect fossil fuels and the human actor from spatiotemporal registers and the geologic consequences of the coal industry. In my study of mining’s relationship to larger epistemological shifts, I incorporate formalist and phenomenological frameworks to understand the embodied experience of coal and its effects for Romantic-era artists, and the role of contingency in the dialogic relationship between the human actor and the industrial landscape. I use this embedded relationship between phenomenology and geology to elucidate how coal mining played a crucial role in exposing a perceivable mineral world, and the way the Romantics used embodiment, new generic forms, and narrative techniques directly drawn from geology. This project also draws upon the tenets of New Historicism and neo-Materialism to track the interplay between extraction and geological discourses at the locus between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Throughout Romantic-era literary productions, coal is depicted in strikingly ambivalent terms. Yet the major theme that emerges throughout the constellation of coal’s effects, is how the knowledge of coal and its impact, and its subsequent uptake in the literature and visual arts pushes the British public toward a more expansive and visual understanding of landscape and temporality.