Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin's Lake District by Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson (review)

In London in 1884, John Ruskin delivered a lecture titled "The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century," which focused on the deteriorating air quality he witnessed in England and Europe, including strange winds and dull skies. The poor weather in 1884 was largely due to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, but that was not Ruskin's central theme. Ruskin's cloud was as much metaphysical as atmospheric, as Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson explain in Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin's Lake District, spanning "the whole range of the physical world and of human civilization" (36). The "storm cloud" of our present period is only different from Ruskin's in that we are now able to recognize the truth of its global spread, its diffuse influence and its uncanny presence as the future in which we have always lived. If Ruskin could see us now, "I told you so" would be his first response. Green Victorians is a localized and historicist interpretation of Ruskin's apocalyptic vision against the background of "sufficiency" contrasted with mass production (22). The reference in the book's subtitle to "the simple life" indicates not only Ruskin's determination to protect his beloved Lakeland countryside from pollution and the "fossil fuel economy," but also the lives and productions of some of his students and friends gathered in the English Lake District (12). A poignant illustrative story, involving Ruskin in a shopping spree, is told toward the book's beginning, although it occurred at the end of Ruskin's career. In 1887, Ruskin went down to the Kent seaside, booked himself into a so-called fashionable hotel in Folkstone, and ordered coats, waistcoats, and champagne. This was a man who had spent decades "blasting the excesses of nineteenth-century affluence" (22). The pull of the market was at the root of excessive growth and the subsequent reliance on mass-made consumer goods, together with that incessant storm cloud.

A community of like-minded artists, artisans, writers, and local craftspeople were encouraged to promote the development of self-sufficient industries, using naturally grown and locally sourced materials; this would surely provide a better life than one obscured by industrial smoke. Albritton and Albritton Jonsson have explored fascinating backwaters, liberally illustrated, in order to bring to life a story of connection and environmental reciprocity on several levels. And yet, as they disclose it, the tale is full of snags and rough edges, like some of the early Lakeland linen. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the mental instability that lay behind Ruskin's retail indulgence in 1887, he was, we now know, prescient in many ways. His understanding of the results of industrial pollution, and the benefits of limiting national consumption and waste, are part of our own community debates. His followers, though, were idiosyncratic and ready converts; the majority of English consumers met his diatribes with indifference, if they came across them at all. Egbert Rydings started the Laxey Woollen Mill on the Isle of Man; eccentric Albert Fleming, formerly a barrister, formed the Langdale Linen Industry with his housekeeper, Marian Twelves, an expert spinner. Susanna Beever, Ruskin's "Queen Susan," was a skilled and sensitive gardener, growing native plants at the Thwaite in Coniston, and the Collingwood family were inspirations for Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons (1930) (70). Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, Vicar at Crosthwaite, Keswick, is pivotal to this narrative, in part because his own enthusiasm for local industry, self-sufficiency, and the formation (eventually) of the National Trust is balanced by his determination to understand other ways of "taming the steam dragon" and persuading the local Lakelanders to appreciate what was special about their way of living (96). In this he presents a paradox, as do they all, of trying to maintain the landscapes and lifestyles of people who might prefer nothing better than...