Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment - Hardcover

Winter, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520216091 ISBN 13: 9780520216099

Publisher: University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

Nineteenth-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.

About this title

Review:

At the onset of the Industrial Revolution, many chronicles have it, England went from being an idyllic land of meadows and rivulets to a nightmarish place of "dark, satanic mills." James Winter challenges that view in this scholarly yet highly readable study of English technological and environmental history. The English landscape suffered its share of ravages, he writes, with polluted streams, smoggy air, and mine-torn hillsides; yet, paradoxically, much of the country came under protection, with the creation of parks, wildlife preserves, and other havens. It helped, Winter adds, that England was able to draw on a far-flung empire for much of its raw materials. Yet it helped more that England enjoyed a culture that, now as then, celebrated its rural settings, and that it engendered a group of men and women who worked to protect them. "Thoughtful Victorians sensed that their space was shrinking and losing substance," Winter writes, and they did something about it--opposing, for instance, dam projects that would have flooded remote valleys, and closing mining operations that damaged the nation's fragile coastline. As Winter's narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that the argument between "beauty" and "utility" is a very old one indeed, and that "the environment" is not a recent discovery. --Gregory McNamee

From the Inside Flap:

"This book is both learned and readable, at once an environmental, economic, and technological history. Actually about the whole length and breadth of Britain, it is never so technical that a lay reader gets lost and never so accommodating that it flattens the complexities of his subjects."—Michael Dintenfass, author of The Decline of Industrial Britain 1870-1980

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0520216091
• ISBN 13: 9780520216099
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 353