Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment (review)

Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment, by James Winter; pp. xi + 342. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999, $35.00, £24.95.

This is a welcome addition to the literature that explores the shifting relationships between humanity and nature. James Winter's main argument is that, despite all the forces that threatened to corrupt natural harmonies, it is the "degree of continuity" (3) and the survival of a uniquely beautiful British landscape that is striking. Recognizing that there were concentrations of industrial blight in Victorian Britain, he argues nonetheless that these were "confined and closely hemmed in with natural scenery" (3). He acknowledges the passionately articulated concerns of many contemporaries, but nevertheless emphasizes that which was restorative in Victorian ways of working natural resources.

The book, based on an impressive range of sources, takes the reader through a variety of terrains in a stimulating manner. Winter's purpose is not to search for nineteenth- century roots of modern environmentalism, nor is it primarily to study those problems about which the Victorians were particularly vexed, including those posed by urban growth and industrial pollution. The principal intention is to explore people's interactions with the land and how they "expressed their values in the landscapes they helped to make" (39). He eloquently emphasizes that rural landscapes constitute "an ambiguous and layered text whose meaning will alter with the culture as well as the political and social circumstances of the reader" (xi). However, the narrative engages only to a limited degree with those debates, exemplified in the works of cultural geographers such as David Matless and Peter Bishop, who delve deeply into these very themes. Yet there is a bonus in Winter's book as the discussion extends well beyond any narrow focus on farming landscapes.

Arguably the author is at his most original in the opening, mainly rural- orientated, chapters: Victorian Britain was able to contain the pressures generated by industrialisation and largely preserve environmental harmonies, in part because of the effects of estate policies and in part because the transition to a coal-based industrialism was less damaging than it might have been, as steam-powered machinery was mostly limited to heavy industry and transport. Winter does not feel the need to employ a "single, overarching, theoretical strategy" (3) to explain how environmental tensions could be balanced over time. Indeed, so many factors were involved, and the book covers so many areas--largely through a series of case studies--that to burden the narrative with such a framework might well have been impractical.

Winter's main proposition is illuminated most convincingly by the fate of "lowland fields": Victorian high farming, characterized by sophisticated crop rotations and mixed farming, constituted an environmentally benign and sustainable agriculture. Such ways of working the land "painted the countryside with a kaleidoscope of colours and patterns" that came "to be thought of, even at the time, as the 'traditional landscape'" (52). Rather more problematic were environmental changes affecting the Highlands. Subsistence crofting or variants of communal farming gave way to commercial sheep rearing and increasingly, by the late-nineteenth century, to grouse moors and deer forests. A tiny number of the extremely rich paid handsomely for the privilege of killing "wild" animals. This gave landlordism an economic reprieve, although those with scientific, artistic, or recreational interests were excluded from the mountains. At least the "substitute of gillies and stalkers for shepherds and crofters" allowed ecologies to recover from the degenerative effects of sheep farming and helped to preserve remnants of wilderness (79). Of course, some landowners ran their estates sympathetically, especially those with lowland woodlands. Consequently the "landscape of open heather hillsides and patchwork fields, softened with borders of scattered hardwood trees and rounded off with hilltop copses, survived largely intact" (83). Regimented, commercial forestry made insignificant inroads due to low timber prices and the effects of landowners' preferences--an amateurish approach to woodland management, aesthetic sensibilities, and a commitment to blood...