1. The Romance of Nature in the Age of Industry Lecturer: Sarah Hodges
NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Lecture 1:
The Romance of Nature in the Age of Industry
Lecturer: Sarah Hodges

2. melting ice, rising sea levels, storms
Global Warming:
melting ice, rising sea levels, storms
Environmental modernity?

4. How did the relationship between humans and nature change in the modern age?

5. Defining and questioning nature
‘Perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language.’ (Raymond Williams)
What is nature?
Are humans part of nature?
Does nature transcend history?
This much is clear: nature has a history

6. Lisbon earthquake, 1755

7. Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster
‘Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world’

8. Nature as a site of relaxation

9. Nature… … is profoundly historical …changes over time
…is bound up with “human” history
…has no fixed meaning
Environment a better word to use? Greater emphasis on human-nature interconnectedness

10. Lecture outline
Nature and the scientific revolution
Arcadianism
Romanticism
The Reaction to Industrialisation

11. Scientific Revolution
Isaac Newton
( )
and the
Scientific Revolution

12. René Descartes ( )

14. The “March of Progress” from caveman to factory worker

15. ‘The ideal of a simple rural life in close harmony with nature.’
Arcadianism
‘The ideal of a simple rural life in close harmony with nature.’
Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, p.378

16. Claude Lorrain: Landscape: Cephalus and Procis reunited by Diana (1645)

17. Jan Van Gool, Pastoral Scene (1719)

18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755)

19. A Natural History of Selbourne (1789)
Gilbert White
( )
A Natural History of Selbourne (1789)

23. Romanticism Thinkers Goethe (1749-1834)
Henry David Thoreau ( )
Poets
William Blake ( )
Lord Byron ( )
William Wordsworth ( )
John Keats ( )
Percy Bysshe Shelley ( )
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( )
Painters
Casper David Friedrich ( )
Joseph Turner ( )

24. Wordsworth:
One impulse from the vernal wood
Will tell you more of man,
of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

25. Caspar David Friedrich
( )

26. Friedrich, The Cross in the Mountains (1807-08)

27. Thomas Gainsborough, ‘Mr. And Mrs. Andrews
( )

28. Friedrich, The Cross in the Mountains (1807-08)

29. Friedrich, The Wanderer above the Mists (1817-18)

30. The sublime
Romantic reinvention of mountains from feared and loathed places to awe-inspiring landscapes
The sublime – intermingling of beauty and fear
The sense of the sublime one of the most elevated emotional states a human could attain

31. Turner, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810)

32. Turner, Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps (1812)

33. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

34. Thoreau: ‘The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass; it is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me.’

35. Thoreau in 1842:
‘The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organisation; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction, and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy... The most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian [Native American] wisdom.’