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Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment

University of California Press

While workmen, entrepreneurs, inventors, and engineers were discovering new ways to apply the power of steam, a number of individuals began, at the beginning of the Victorian era, to voice alarm about the consequences of releasing so potent a force upon fragile nature. In 1848, when the second paroxysm of railway speculation was just beginning to subside, the noted geographer Mary Somerville confessed to having been astonished by the "successive convulsions" the "application of the powers of nature to locomotion" had caused. In her Physical Geography , she predicted that the new communication technology would radically shift the power balance toward man and away from nature, a shift that would force people to reconsider "the relationship between man and animate beings."1

This new relationship was the subject of Thomas Carlyle's "Signs of the Times," published some two decades earlier. Armed not only with steam but also with all manner of artifice, engineer mountain movers were, he announced, emerging everywhere victorious from their "war with rude nature." He announced that a new "Age of Machinery" had arrived and was consolidating its gains: "Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited and thrown aside." Increasingly calculated contrivances would, he thought, make sure that "nothing follows its spontaneous course."2

As we near the end of a millennium, pundits among us are similarly inclined toward prophecy; some of it hopeful, some angst-ridden. Either way, one notices that these predictions usually assume, as did those of Somerville and Carlyle, that technology, and the cast of mind that causes people to embrace it or at least accept it as inevitable, must transform society and its mechanisms as well as the material environment.

One example will suffice: an academic task force at one large North American university recently advised colleagues to recognize that "technological innovation is transforming education and exercising a significant influence on almost every aspect of daily life, including our leisure and cultural activities." This memorandum then expands on how computers are making jobs less office-centered; how they are reversing the long migration from the country to the city; how they, along with the use of automation, are undermining expectations of long-term employment and placing a premium on those skills that allow for occupational mobility; how they are rapidly constructing an electronic global village, a multicultural environment that will require that more attention be paid to cross-cultural studies and to foreign language training. Even in these post-Marxist times, it would seem, the proposition that the superstructure must eventually reflect changes in the material base can still be taken as a given.

The usual objections to this simplistic theory of causation will be raised in what follows. However, the focus will not be on a generalized future but on a particular past. Central to the enterprise will be a search for an answer to a question William Wordsworth posed in 1844 on hearing that engineers intended to build a railway line from Kendal to Windermere—into the heart of his beloved Lake District. Two lines of the sonnet he wrote on that occasion ask, "Is then no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault?"

Retrospect permits an answer but assures that it cannot be a straightforward yes or no. The sudden advent of new tools and methods for transforming and controlling nature, most of them worked out and applied first in Britain, did provide, directly or indirectly, the means and incentive to make large alterations and to do so almost everywhere. These mechanisms did not, of course, operate in a social, economic, or demographic vacuum. Intrusions into the fabric of landscapes and land surfaces happened when human beings were replicating at a dramatic pace relative to almost every other form of animate life, when the population scale shifted from rural to urban, when British entrepreneurs and manufacturers were leading the world in the process of industrialization, and

when British farmers were providing a model for those who wished to exploit land intensively. Under those circumstances, few nooks were likely to remain completely secure. There can also be no doubt that areas of English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish ground were indeed rashly assaulted and left in ruins during the age of steam.

The forces of change were formidable enough. Almost everywhere in the island kingdom formerly self-contained ecological systems needed to react to the pull of urban centers and to those distant markets around the globe that had been opened by a revolution in communications technology. Localities responded by specializing their land uses, exporting water, minerals, and energy and adapting to the influx of artificial products from the outside world.

Nevertheless, what strikes us is the degree of continuity in the Victorian land and landscape—the continually shifting balances that were worked out—not the amount of change. As subsequent chapters will attempt to show, Victorian and Edwardian arable agriculture remained "ecologically benign," as did woodlands, which resisted large-scale coniferization and, as a consequence, retained much of their ecological complexity. Concentrations of industrial blight were confined and closely hemmed in with natural scenery, and experiments were made in restoring derelict sites. Popular tourism transformed areas of the seacoast without inflicting serious damage on the hinterland. The process of greening cityscapes advanced at the same time as the country was leaving the city. Overall, a distinctive and celebrated landscape retained its health and unique beauty.

No single, overarching, theoretical strategy will be employed to explain why these tensions could be balanced during a time when "steam" became a metaphor for artifice and innovation of every kind—cultural as well as technological. Offered instead will be a complex of factors that, coming together and interacting, created in Britain (to borrow a rotund phrase from Oliver MacDonagh) "a peculiar concatenation of circumstances in the nineteenth century."3

One of these circumstances was the capacity to lead the rest of Europe in draining resources from less industrially developed parts of the world. The fact of empire, "the empire of free trade," also allowed Britain to use steamships and steam locomotives to export at least some of its environmental damage. In that sense, the new technology acted as a domestic conservator. We see this clearly in the agricultural and forestry sectors. Yet, paradoxically, this technology also assisted in developing a sheep-grazing monoculture on rough upland pastures, thus adding to

the forces that were depleting a meager stock of soil nutrients on upland hillsides.

By way of balance, these new forms of transport helped to promote highly intensive and, at the same time, sustainable arable farming. This achievement, surely one of early and mid-Victorian Britain's most impressive, was brought about, not primarily by...