From Henry David Thoreau to Bill McKibben, critics and philosophers have long sought to demonstrate how a sufficient life—one without constant, environmentally damaging growth—might still be rich and satisfying. Yet one crucial episode in the history of sufficiency has been largely forgotten. Green Victorians tells the story of a circle of men and women in the English Lake District who attempted to create a new kind of economy, turning their backs on Victorian consumer society in order to live a life dependent not on material abundance and social prestige but on artful simplicity and the bonds of community.
           
At the center of their social experiment was the charismatic art critic and political economist John Ruskin. Albritton and Albritton Jonsson show how Ruskin’s followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from hand spinning and woodworking to gardening, archaeology, and pedagogy. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for there was a dark side to Ruskin’s community as well—racist thinking, paternalism, and technophobia. Richly illustrated, Green Victorians breaks new ground, connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin’s utopian community with the problems of ethical consumption then and now.

Vicky Albritton has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Colorado State, and the University of Chicago. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is associate professor of British history and history of science at the University of Chicago. He is author of Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism.

— Christopher Otter, Ohio State University

— Mark Frost, University of Portsmouth

— Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame

— Mark Fiege, Colorado State University

— Times Higher Education

— The British Society for Literature and Science

— American Historical Review

— Environment and History

— Environmental History

— Victorian Literature and Culture

— Journal of Modern History