The Dawn of Green

“The tensions between the needs of cities and the protection of rural landscape were defined in the late Victorian struggle between the Manchester City Council and defenders of the English Lake District. The iconic industrial city eventually harnessed one of the treasured lakes as a reservoir, so water could be piped a hundred miles to increase supplies for factories and for homes in the poorer districts. Harriet Ritvo has beautifully analyzed this classic confrontation, setting it in context, but also showing its importance for continuing debates around the use of the earth. For historians and conservationists alike, this will be a much valued source.”—John V. Pickstone, Wellcome Research Professor, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and  Medicine, University of Manchester

“Harriet Ritvo has uncovered a key event in the history of the environment and its local meanings. Her brilliant and pithy account of the arguments surrounding the transformation of a lake into a reservoir has resonance for more than Thirlmere in the nineteenth-century British Lake District. She probes public records and tracks the overlaps between aesthetic and utilitarian anxieties, and she never loses sight of the people involved in digging, surveying, planning, and visiting this contested place. The result is an immensely readable and provocative study.”—Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge

“With its swirl of politics, economics, aesthetics, class conflicts, and quarrels between city and country, and between region and nation, the damming of Thirlmere was a template for environmental controversies in the industrial era. Harriet Ritvo tells the story with grace and insight, keeping the particularities always on parity with the generalities, and narrating with full sensitivity to the episode’s ironies and quirkiness, and the ambiguities of its meaning for its many successors.”—Stephen J. Pyne, Arizona State University

“A closely researched, sensitively observed, and handsomely illustrated study. . . . This is a gem of a book, enhanced by prose as crystal clear as Thirlmere’s fabled waters.”—Environmental History