The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (review)

Although railways loom much larger in the popular imagination, the creation of water and sewer systems arguably affected more people, more profoundly, than any other large-scale technologies in Victorian Britain. In an effort to keep up with massive increases in demand from industrial and residential consumers, urban leaders lay claim over ever more distant watersheds, a move that had enormous implications for such places and the people who lived in them—and ignited often bitter controversies. The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism explores the conflict that arose in the 1870s when the leaders of Manchester revealed plans to dam one of the highest bodies of water in the Lake District and connect it by pipeline to the industrial city a hundred miles to the south.

The “Thirlmere Scheme” provoked heated opposition, for “if Manchester was the icon of the Victorian future, the Lake District was the icon of nature, poetry, and heritage” (9). For this reason, the proponents of the scheme faced opposition not only from local residents, but also from more distant critics, some of whom undoubtedly had never even visited Thirlmere. This controversy, Harriet Ritvo argues, gave rise for the first time to assertions “that the citizens of a nation should have some say in the disposition of significant landscapes even if they held no formal title to the property in question” (104). Although the core of the book focuses on the fifteen-year period from the late 1870s to the early 1890s, Ritvo examines both the prehistory and the aftermath of the controversy on the Lake District and, to a lesser extent, on Manchester. A relatively slim volume, the book consists of five chapters, plus a brief introduction and epilogue. The first two chapters examine the history of Thirlmere and Manchester prior to the latter’s decision to acquire the former. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the political struggle over Thirlmere and the transformation of the lake into a reservoir. A final chapter explores the subsequent history of Manchester’s management of the lake, the surrounding trees, and the construction of a second reservoir in the Lake District at Haweswater.

The Dawn of Green may be seen as a British counterpart to Robert W. Righter’s The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (2005). In both cases, a rapidly growing city in search of water overcame the pleas of vociferous environmental campaigners and dammed a place that many regarded as one of outstanding natural beauty. The triumph of urban consumption over wilderness preservation galvanized environmentalists and served as a reminder of what could happen if they failed. Interestingly, Ritvo demonstrates that Thirlmere and Hetch Hetchy reveal not only a similar dynamic, but that they were connected. The American engineer John Freeman, who later designed the reservoir at Hetch Hetchy, visited Thirlmere and studied the political struggle that it had brought forth with the aim of helping San Francisco defeat the arguments of John Muir and his supporters in the Sierra Club.

A work of meticulous research, The Dawn of Green draws on over forty contemporary magazines and newspapers and is richly illustrated with a well-chosen selection of fifty-six images—historical and recent photographs, maps, lithographs, pamphlets, and ephemera. Ritvo’s greatest contribution here derives from her ability to unravel the complex and multifaceted perspectives of both the scheme’s proponents and its critics and to contextualize the Thirlmere conflict within the environmental and cultural history of the Lake District, including the tradition of “protest against technological incursions” within it (21). Like William Wordsworth (who had fought to keep the railways out of the Lake District before his death in 1850), those who later opposed the Thirlmere Scheme saw the area as a place untouched by humanity. Ritvo demonstrates, however, that centuries of human habitation and intervention, including forestry and sheep grazing, had altered it profoundly. “Both Thirlmere in particular...