Nothing Romantic about environmentalists

The great nineteenth-century English poets waxed lyrical about nature, but they still believed in humanity – unlike today’s eco-pessimists.

Among Britain’s cultivated middle classes, nothing inspires yearning and sentiment as nineteenth-century Romantic poets like John Clare, Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Well, nothing except the protection of Britain’s land from those who would build new houses there.

So put together poetry about the countryside with the rural environment itself and you’re likely to raise tempers. Thus, in England’s Lake District at Dove Cottage, Grasmere – William Wordsworth’s home between 1799 and 1808 – the Wordsworth Trust museum and gallery is showing photographs taken at night that highlight how innocent streetlamps and house lights today impose what one environmentalist believes is ‘needless damage’ to the environment (1).

But would Wordsworth, John Ruskin, William Morris or William Blake really be turning in their graves at the alleged despoliation of the countryside today? In his book The Song of the Earth, Jonathan Bate, professor of English literature at Warwick University, establishes the Romantic poets as Britain’s first environmentalists (2). There is much to suggest that Bate is right – as long as we realise that these writers were rather fonder of man and his works than contemporary environmentalists are.

As Meredith Veldman has written in a brilliant study, the Romantics were neither irrationalists nor escapists. While not hostile to science, they rightly refused to deify it; but their chief target was Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, ‘with its smug assurances that human reason could weight the pleasures and pains of human society and thus calculate the greatest good for the greatest number’ (3).

Their protest was not the sweepingly misanthropic hatred for man’s works that we encounter in today’s greens, but rather a response to the alienation brought about by grinding Victorian capitalism. Their effort was not to diminish ambition, but rather to uplift people’s imagination. As Juliet Barker, author of William Wordsworth: A Life (4), told me in a radio interview, Wordsworth was ‘not totally blindly opposed’ to everything industrial: he did actually celebrate a railway bridge that had been built in the northern end of the Lake District – because it fitted in to the landscape and was a beautiful structure.

Footnotes and references

(1) Dr Phil Leigh of the Crichton Carbon Centre, quoted in Photos by night illuminate Lake District light pollution, Guardian, 14 July 2008

(2) Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth, Harvard University Press, 2002

(3) Meredith Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protests, 1945-1980, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p13

(4) Juliet Barker, William Wordsworth: A Life, Harper Perennial, 2006

(5) Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time, Alfred A Knopf, 1995

(6) Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie, Ponsonby, 1595