This book tells the story of an extraordinary social experiment in the English Lake District at the end of the Victorian era. Here, a small group of women and men sought to forge a society based on renewable resources and handicrafts, dedicated to an ethos of artful simplicity. This culture of sufficiency was inspired by the writings of the brilliant polymath John Ruskin who had come to the Lake District in search of a refuge from industrial society and mass consumption. Green Victorians offers a pioneering account of John Ruskin as a prophet of anthropogenic climate change and the ethics of c ... More

This book tells the story of an extraordinary social experiment in the English Lake District at the end of the Victorian era. Here, a small group of women and men sought to forge a society based on renewable resources and handicrafts, dedicated to an ethos of artful simplicity. This culture of sufficiency was inspired by the writings of the brilliant polymath John Ruskin who had come to the Lake District in search of a refuge from industrial society and mass consumption. Green Victorians offers a pioneering account of John Ruskin as a prophet of anthropogenic climate change and the ethics of consumption. It also explores in vivid detail how Ruskin’s followers turned his social ideal into practice through a series of local projects ranging from linen weaving and the preservation of landscape to historical fiction and family magazines. These men and women succeeded in establishing a thriving handicraft industry and protecting the Lake District from over-development, but they paid a price for their success. There was a dark side to Ruskin’s vision of sufficiency, including apocalyptic anxieties, hostility to new technology, and a conservative defense of social inequality. The book examines how Ruskin’s followers came to terms with these tendencies in different ways. By recovering the place of sufficiency in the origins of environmentalism, Green Victorians offers a valuable mirror for the ideology of sustainability and limits to growth in our own age.