The Victorian Return to Nature and the Simple Life

In the nineteenth century, industrialization, pollution, parliamentary enclosure acts, and the degradation of natural landscapes due to large-scale agriculture increasingly disconnected people from nature. This led to a spiritual disaffection notably expressed in the Romantic vision of William and Dorothy Wordsworth and John Clare. In the 1860s and 1870s, Ruskin urged readers to reject the industrialized marketplace in favor of the simple life and the holistic cultivation of art, community, and nature through gardening, reviving handicrafts, preserving landscapes, and implementing pedagogies fortified by the close observation of the environment. Susanna Beever, Albert Fleming, H.D. Rawnsley, and W.G. Collingwood were some of the most energetic practitioners of Ruskin’s ideas. Ruskin himself went so far as to counter what he saw as the narrow, soulless, Darwinian science of botany with a spiritual form of classification drawn in part from mythology and art. Despite his dark forebodings about anthropogenic climate change late in life in The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, Ruskin’s ideas reemerged in the twentieth century in Arthur Ransome’s nature-oriented children’s books, Gustav Stickley’s American Arts and Crafts furniture, and Back-to-the-Land movements like those led by Charles Robert Ashbee and Julius Augustus Wayland. Ruskin’s writing on the sanctity of green spaces, their vulnerability and potential in the face of industrialization and consumer excess, both reflected and shaped the Romantic impulse to return to nature.