Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment Book

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 Read More