Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian EnvironmentNineteenth-century Britain led the world in technological innovation and urbanization, and unprecedented population growth contributed as well to the "rash assault," to quote Wordsworth, on Victorian countrysides. Yet James Winter finds that the British environment was generally spared widespread ecological damage. Drawing from a remarkable variety of sources and disciplines, Winter focuses on human intervention as it not only destroyed but also preserved the physical environment. Industrial blight could be contained, he says, because of Britain's capacity to import resources from elsewhere, the conservative effect of the estate system, and certain intrinsic limitations of steam engines. The rash assault was further blunted by traditional agricultural practices, preservation of forests, and a growing recreation industry that favored beloved landscapes. Winter's illumination of Victorian attitudes toward the exploitation of natural resources offers a valuable preamble to ongoing discussions of human intervention in the environment. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 7 | |
| 19 | |
Lowland Fields | 40 |
Upland Moors | 62 |
Woods and Trees | 83 |
Cutting New Channels | 104 |
Holes | 124 |
Greening the City | 189 |
The Environment of Leisure | 209 |
The Hungry Ocean | 231 |
Conclusion | 249 |
List of Abbreviations | 259 |
Notes | 261 |
Bibliography | 309 |
Index | 333 |
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acres Afforestation Agriculture areas beach beauty began Black Country Britain British Builder building Cambridge canal clay coal Coast Erosion Commons Preservation Society Conservation countryside culture David derelict early earth ecological economic effect embankment England English environment environmental exploitation farmers farming fertilizers fields Forestry garden Geographical George George Perkins Marsh Godwin golf grass grazing green groynes Hallsands Herne Bay Highland Hill History human Ibid improved industry John John Ruskin Journal Lake Lake District land landlords landowners landscape London Lower Swansea Valley managed Manchester Manchester Ship Canal Marsh ment mining nature nineteenth century Oxford Park pastures planting production protect quarry railway RC on Coast reclamation recreation Report reservoir river Robert rural Ruskin sand Savernake Forest Scottish Scottish Highlands seaside sheep slate social Society soil Southport supply surface Thirlmere tion town trees University Press upland urban valley Wales waste
Popular passages
Page 1 - Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word ; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand ; all is by rule and calculated contrivance.
Page 189 - We are forced, for the sake of accumulating our power and knowledge, to live in cities: but such advantage as we have in association with each other is in great part counterbalanced by our loss of fellowship with Nature. We cannot all have our gardens now, nor our pleasant fields to meditate in at eventide. Then the function of our architecture is, as far as may be, to replace these; to tell us about Nature...
Page 8 - Recalling in tranquility the slow possession of Britain by its people, I cannot resist the conclusion that the relationship reached its greatest intimacy, its most sensitive pitch, about two hundred years ago. By the middle of the eighteenth century, men had triumphed, the land was theirs, but had not yet been subjected and outraged. Wildness had been pushed back to the mountains, where now for the first time it could safely be admired. Communications were good enough to bind the country in a unity...
Page 26 - But man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.
Page 143 - Huddersfield and Rochdale, Keighley and Nelson, may look grim, but the high lands that still separate them look even grimmer. But here in these Midlands, the countryside is mild and friendly. It is on the border of Arden itself. Industry has ravished it ; drunken storm troops have passed this way; there are signs of atrocities everywhere; the earth has been left gaping and bleeding; and what were once bright fields have been rummaged and raped into these dreadful patches of waste ground. And nothing...
Page 27 - But we are, even now, breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling, for fuel to warm our bodies and seethe our pottage, and the world cannot afford to wait till the slow and sure progress of exact science has taught it a better economy.
Page 27 - Purely untutored humanity, it is true, interferes comparatively little with the arrangements of nature, and the destructive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and unsparing as he advances in civilization, until the impoverishment, with which his exhaustion of the natural resources of the soil is threatening him, at last awakens him to the necessity of preserving what is left, if not of restoring what has been wantonly wasted.
Page 36 - It was a narrow view of geography which confined that science to delineation of terrestrial surface and outline, and to description of the relative position and magnitude of land and water. In its improved form, it embraces not only the globe itself, but the living things which vegetate or move upon it, the varied influences they exert upon each other, the reciprocal action and reaction between them and the earth they inhabit.
Page 8 - ... years ago. By the middle of the eighteenth century, men had triumphed, the land was theirs, but had not yet been subjected and outraged. Wildness had been pushed back to the mountains, where now for the first time it could safely be admired. Communications were good enough to bind the country in a unity lacking since it was a Roman province, but were not yet so easy as to have destroyed locality and the natural freedom of the individual that remoteness freely gives. Rich men and poor men knew...
Page 65 - American common law are the work of the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century.