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James Winter is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of British Columbia and author of London's Teeming Streets, 1830-1914 (1993).

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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 mechanization (steam or otherwise) or specialization, but by sophisticated crop rotation and a mixed-farming regime that relied heavily on the use of animal fertilizers and on skilled labor to increase productivity. This labor gave polish to the fields. Hedgerows in such a farming regime retained their utility and remained arguably the single most distinguishing feature of the "traditional" British (especially English) visual landscape—a landscape that had actually been remade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

As the first chapter will argue, some of the inherent limitations of steam machinery must be added to the factors that caused this landscape to retain much of its variety and characteristic pattern. To a certain extent because of these limitations, agriculture, forestry, mining, and quarrying never were as fully rationalized as enthusiasts for applying the model of advanced industry to those sectors would have wished. Furthermore the inflexibility of rail transport, the prime mover of popular tourism (itself the product of rapid urban growth and some relaxation of work discipline), directed the flow of day trippers and vacationers along narrow channels to resorts and recreation grounds built purposely for leisure.

Yet it would be difficult to find a single instance in which technological advances alone are sufficient to explain either change or continuity. Mechanisms worked inside cultural contexts that, more often than not, valued customary ways and familiar vistas. Because, for example, so few owned so much of the land surface and rented or leased it out to capitalist employers of labor, an elite could remain at some distance from day-to-day encounters with the exploitation process. Being interested in using their estates to sustain their social and political privileges as well as to line their pockets, squires and aristocrats often promoted efficiency, yet resisted making that value into an obsession. "Improvement" and amateurism remained restlessly companionate. Most landowners responded in ambivalent ways to the idea that the soil they had responsibility for arranging or the products their tenants produced from it were simply commodities. When opportunities opened, landowners were quick to accept offers from mining or quarrying interests who wanted to dig up parts of their properties, even though all parties to such agree-

ments knew that, when leases expired, the land to be repossessed would be seriously ravaged. But sometimes estate owners did go to considerable lengths to repair the visual and ecological damage left behind.

Landlords could afford to behave this way because, in many cases, their income sources were diversified. Their investments would probably include resource-exploiting ventures located in one or another part of the direct and indirect empire. Given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that they were more inclined to listen attentively to the estate gamekeeper than to the estate forester, especially when cheap, easily available foreign softwood made heavy investment in the latest silviculture methods problematic.

Paternalistic attitudes toward the estate and its surroundings, including the animate and inanimate inhabitants, were perfectly compatible with a sentimental attitude toward nature—a sense that particular trees, woods, streams, and valleys had intrinsic value, that they were infused, as Wordsworth perceived them, with a "deep power of joy." Preservationists—those who wanted to protect nature from exploitation—were the lifeblood of the opposition to what they usually described as ruthless utilitarianism, by which they meant the impulse to systematize, rationalize, standardize, innovate, and develop. Conservationists—those who would control exploitation, limit waste, and increase productivity in sustainable ways—had a part to play but tended not to stand at the barricades or supply the rhetoric. Surface tensions could be contained or counteracted as well as they were because sense and sensibility so often interacted. It seems evident then that consideration of one aspect of the changing face of Britain must lead, although seldom in a straightforward way, to a consideration of all the others.

The argument that follows will have a topography that conforms to the folds and undulations found in so much of the British countryside. Straight lines will not converge to a clearly discernible, distant horizon as they might in Kansas or Saskatchewan. At the outset, we approach a complex of pathways, and as we stride along, we note that we are moving forward through familiar countryside, never losing sight of where we have been. We ask ourselves why there seems to be so much continuity and for a while follow one of the many lines of explanation: the social, cultural, and geographic limitations on the use of new machinery and the intrinsic limitations of steam power itself. But then we remind ourselves that reciprocal relationships always exist between culture and technological innovation. Farther on, we pause to ask about the attitudes Victorians held about the environment and wonder why British subjects

should have been alert and concerned about the role of humans in geo-morphology when posted abroad but relatively complacent about such matters when safe at home.

Around the next corner lie lowland fields, beyond them highland moors, and then woods and trees. In these places the themes of ecological balance and imbalance come directly into view. Machinery, its potential and its limitations, provides the pathway and directs us to a discussion of projects where railway and canal builders experimented with the use of mechanical power to dig into the earth and pile up the leavings. We notice how rail transportation affected travelers' perceptions of the countryside as it flashed by. Leaving behind cuttings and embankments, we discover other, more toxic, heaps—and some of the holes they arose from. We perceive the effects on the earth's surface of the methods miners and quarrymen used to extract salt, slate, and granite. Then we enter into the Black Country and the Lower Swansea Valley to observe how reformers attempted to deal with the blemishes, scars, and poisons mines and smelters inflicted on the land. We look for balance there between dereliction and reclamation but are able to locate only a few uncoordinated attempts to bring about such a difficult reconciliation.

We will need to look closely at the next turn to discover the connections between railway building, the concentration of industry in cities, urban density and urban expansion, the need for cities to reach out into the country to dispose of wastes and tap new supplies of water, the consequent birth of the organized countryside protection movement, and the campaign by reformers to return green nature to ever more congested urban centers.

After that, the track leads, as it must in an island kingdom, to the seashore. We will note how steam transport concentrated at spots along the coast much of the rapidly developing popular recreation industry. A brief digression will allow us to factor in advances in the making of concrete and show how recreation and construction interests raised the level of concern about ocean defenses and stimulated a search for ways to prevent coastal erosion. These destination resorts and their defenses will remind us of what we have noticed before only in passing: that tourists and tourism were beginning to enter into serious competition with farmers, foresters, grazers, diggers, and developers for the use of the land. In each case, we will measure the tensions these developments and innovations created against the forces of containment and balance. Finally, at journey's end, we will reflection the direction our chosen path has taken.

Excerpted from Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environmentby James Winter Copyright © 1999 by James Winter. Excerpted by permission.
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