2
Nature as Sublime
England was the first country where human labor was replaced by machines on a grand scale, and the changes triggered by the invention of new spinning and weaving machines actually altered the landscape. The new machinery increased demand for high-quality iron. The development of canals and railways allowed the ingredients to make iron—iron ore, coal, and limestone—and other heavy goods to be transported at a reasonable cost. There were improvements in the banking, transportation, and communication systems and increased iron production, fuel use, and trade. All of these factors contributed to the Industrial Revolution, and paradoxically a newfound appreciation for nature.
In the old order, peasants had provided their lord with food, crafts, and services in exchange for military protection. This social arrangement was upended by the Industrial Revolution. When workers shifted from rural agriculture to urban industry, nature was transformed from the 1611 King James Bible’s “waste howling wilderness” to a Romantic expression of the sublime. After factories replaced agricultural society and cottage industries, nature became a way for people to connect with God.
To a peasant farmer, wilderness is unimproved land lacking in food and water, apt to harbor bandits and to be avoided when possible. In 1620, William Bradford wrote of the New World’s “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” Thomas Hobbes, no fan of nature, wrote in 1651 that the life of man in nature is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes argued that people should enter into a contract with a powerful leader and exchange some freedom for security. Nature was not a healthy state to be in.
An agrarian society is characterized by wealth inequality and a lack of social mobility: like unfettered capitalism, it’s a winner-take-all society. When land is the major source of wealth, the social hierarchy is based on landownership rather than labor, and a handful of people usually end up owning everything. The country of El Salvador, for example, was owned by fourteen families (Las Catorce). In Europe, an underclass of vassals were bound to cultivate their lord’s land, often for generations, and the upper class kept landownership to a small fraction of the population. Britain enjoyed centuries of primogeniture, where estates were deeded to the eldest son, and the second Domesday list of 1873 showed that all the land in England was owned by less than 5 percent of the population.
British landowners adopted a series of agricultural reforms that created a landless and hungry workforce long before the Industrial Revolution. Although British laborers didn’t own land, they had traditionally augmented their diet in the common forests by fishing and hunting small animals. Villagers could scavenge their firewood there, taking any dead limb that could be broken off with an iron hook or a shepherd’s crook (by hook or by crook), and people could graze a few animals or grow a small garden on common fields. Gleaning, where people gathered up the useful remnants of a crop after harvest, was allowed on the commons and provided up to a quarter of the year’s grain for the poor.
The 1723 Waltham Black Act claimed deer, rabbits, hares, and fish as private property and barred British laborers from harvesting them. Poaching became a hanging crime, and the enclosure movement followed, literally fencing off land from the peasantry with hedges or stone fences. Private owners took over about one-sixth of England between 1760 and 1870, enclosing vast acreages of common pasture and forestland. In many parts of England, villagers lost access to land where they could fish, hunt, pen a pig, and graze a goat or gather wood or peat for fuel, willows for basketry, or reeds for thatching. Gleaning was outlawed, and the living standard of commoners took a nosedive.
There was no doubt that large enclosed farms were more productive than scattered peasant plots: fewer hands worked the same acreage and yields increased. Unfortunately this left landless peasants with no way to grow or gather food. Instead, they needed cash to buy it. Home textile production and soon factory jobs provided work for the whole family. By the nineteenth century, England had become an industrial society where people were paid to make things, and bought most of their food with money.
This societal shift worried Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that, in nature, humans were fundamentally good and lacked the passions that generate vices. He held that vices start to develop as soon as people organize themselves into societies. He deplored the “fatal” concept of property, and described the dystopia that results from individuals owning the Earth. Civil society, as Rousseau describes it, provides order and ensures the right to property, which is good for the rich. Rousseau saw inequality as a feature of the long process by which people become estranged from nature.
The shift to industrial production may have made Rousseau wish for the days of the noble savage. For workers, the new industrial social order brought crushing poverty and a lack of social mobility. Before collective bargaining, industrial society exploited a population whose access to common land had disappeared with enclosure, and whose cottage industries had been eradicated by new inventions. Factory owners used the military to quell protests.
Humans have been weaving for at least 9,000 years, and fine fabric has been traded abroad for millennia. The Industrial Revolution was based on new weaving and spinning machines as well as laissez-faire capitalism, the end of rural life, and globalization. It’s fair to say that textile manufacturing is a reflection of our complex relationship with nature.
Cloth is a useful, complicated product that requires a lot of specialized labor and knowledge and wildly diverse raw materials. Silk fiber is made by the spinneret on a caterpillar’s lip that loops a cocoon around its body before it pupates; the cocoon has to be carefully unwound before the fiber is spun into thread. Wool fiber, sheared from sheep, has a natural crimp that allows it to be spun (unlike hair or fur), but you need to feed a whole flock year-round. Plant fibers from flax and hemp stalks need to be cultivated and harvested before being fermented for a week or two to make the fiber usable, while cotton fibers are plucked directly from the boll that protects the seeds.
Collecting and harvesting the fibers was just the first step. By the 1700s, fabric making required the skills of many guild-regulated artisans. After farmers grew and harvested the raw fiber, retters soaked the flax or hemp while sorters washed and graded the fleeces. Then rovers and carders cleaned, separated, and combed the fibers parallel; spinners made these processed fibers into thread; dyers colored the thread; weavers made it into cloth; and fullers or walkers finished the fabric after it was woven. As a sector of the economy, fabric making was ripe for incremental improvements in many areas.
In England, cottage fabric production had been based on artisans working at home for a master who provided the raw materials. In 1760, the production for English fustian, a strong cotton-and-linen twill, was described as follows: The master gave out linen warp and raw cotton to the weaver and received woven cloth back, paying the weaver for both spinning and weaving. In two weeks, a family would spin almost seventy-five miles of thread to weave a twelve-pound piece of linen-cotton fabric.
According to a 1780 description of Lancashire, home weaving was a good life. The weavers kept their
dwellings and small gardens clean and neat,—all the family well clad,—the men with each a watch in his pocket, and the women dressed to their own fancy,—the church crowded to excess every Sunday,—every house well furnished with a clock in elegant mahogany or fancy case,—handsome tea services in Staffordshire ware.
The workshop of the weaver was a rural cottage, from which … he could sally forth into his little garden, and with the spade or the hoe tend its culinary productions. The cotton wool which was to form his weft was picked clean by the fingers of his younger children and was carded and spun by the older girls assisted by his wife, and the yarn was woven by himself assisted by his two sons.
Industrialization transformed cottage weavers into factory workers, but it didn’t happen all at once. Each step in the cloth-making process had to be improved, invention by invention. We think of industrialization as a matter of machines replacing handwork, but it is a cumulative process that includes transportation systems, social and economic systems, as well as machinery.
The first major improvement to cloth making came in 1733, when John Kay patented the flying shuttle at the age of twenty-nine. The basics of weaving on a loom are: A loom holds the long warp threads under tension and heddles raise or lower the warp threads to create a shed. The shuttle holding the horizontal weft thread is slipped through from one side to the other. Pulling the beater towards you pushes the weft into place, and foot or hand pedals reverse the up-and-down threads of the warp. Throw the shuttle through to your left hand, pull the beater towards you to smash the thread into place, and use pedals to reverse the warp threads again, all day long. Weaving was traditionally men’s work because it takes significant upper-body strength to beat the threads together on a wide piece of cloth.
Since the shuttle had to be passed from hand to hand, cloth could only be as wide as the weaver’s arm span, no more than sixty inches. For wider cloth, the weaver hired two people—often a child and an adult—to throw the shuttle back and forth while he operated the foot pedals and the beater. The flying shuttle was a tricky invention that allowed weavers to make cloth without throwing the shuttle hand to hand, from one side of the loom to the other. A weaver with a flying shuttle could make twice as much cloth in a day as a weaver using a hand shuttle.
Working people were not happy about it. According to Charles Dickens, the natural balance between spinning and weaving was so much disturbed that John Kay was “mobbed and nearly killed for his pain. He escaped, wrapped in a sheet of cotton wool, and was thus carried bodily through the mob.” Historian Paul Mantoux wrote that the flying shuttle took decades to appear in some districts, and violence against the “engine weavers” continued for thirty years. Kay moved to France and died in poverty in 1779.
The new flying shuttles created a thread shortage, because weavers could work twice as fast. Wages rose for spinning, carding, and roving, and a number of new machines followed. The spinning jenny, invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, was a spinning wheel with eight spindles, and later sixteen or more. Hargreaves built his machines in secret and used them for his own workshop. When neighboring spinners heard about his invention, they broke into his workshop and smashed the machines. Too late, though: by the time Hargreaves filed patent no. 962, many Lancashire spinners had already built bootleg copies.
People used spinning jennies at home, but the next spinning improvement was placed squarely in factories. Richard Arkwright’s 1769 water frames were powered by falling water and soon coal-powered steam engines. Four rollers drew out strands of cotton and a spindle twisted them into thread, allowing for continuous spinning. Arkwright built the first spinning mill three years later. His five-story building needed 200 people to tend the machines and ran twenty-four hours a day, in two twelve-hour shifts. Most of the workers were women and children, with the youngest just seven years old. Cromford Mill—now a UNESCO heritage site—was so successful that Arkwright soon built more mills, and eventually employed a thousand people. He built housing for the workers along with a market and company store, and was knighted in 1786. When he died in 1792, Sir Arkwright was the wealthiest self-made man in England.
Ten years after the water frame was invented, Samuel Crompton (who died a pauper) combined it with the jenny to make a spinning mule. The spinning mule had two long, parallel carriages on wheels, with bobbins of roving (aligned and lightly twisted fibers) on one side, and spindles for the spun thread on the other. Two hundred spindles was the norm in 1790, and eventually a single spinning mule turned more than a thousand spindles.
The spinning mule was operated by brute force. According to testimony made to the British Parliament, a carriage carrying 336 spindles weighed 1,568 pounds. The spinner used his hands and knees to return the carriage to the closed position. This action was described as requiring “the same mechanical exertion which would raise 160 lbs. the distance of six feet in the same time,” done 5,000 times a day. With a spinning mule, one brawny operator did the work of a thousand spinsters at their wheels.
In the new economy, traditional roles were reversed. Home spinning had been done by women and the elderly, but the strength needed to operate a spinning mule made it a man’s work. Handloom weaving had traditionally been a man’s occupation, but by 1788, two-thirds of the workers hired by cotton mills in England and Scotland were children.
Gender roles in fabric manufacturing were upended, and so were the professional societies that controlled the various artisans required to make cloth. Guilds had managed fabric manufacturing for centuries, but they had no power in the new economy. The entrepreneurs who built factories were industrialists, not artisans. A guild policed its members’ professional practices, investigated complaints of poor workmanship and unfair competition, fined masters who violated the guild’s rules and standards, and supported widows and orphans. The industrialists were not guild members: their products were not controlled by guild rules, and they emphatically did not provide support for widows and orphans.
Home spinning had been a commonly shared year-round task for many millennia, but by the dawn of the nineteenth century this job had disappeared entirely. Thanks to British spinning mules, no place on Earth made cheaper thread. In eighteenth-century India, spinners took 50,000 hours to spin a hundred pounds of raw cotton into fine thread. In 1795 Britain, they needed just 300 hours with the water frame to spin that same hundred pounds of raw cotton. Labor costs in England were suddenly much lower than in India.
Inexpensive, machine-made thread spurred artisan weavers, and thousands of villagers spent endless hours on their looms. But then the power loom was invented, and cottage weaving was gone in a generation. After the weaving mills were built, a home weaver couldn’t make enough cloth to feed his family.
Meanwhile, the pretty little weaving village of Lancashire had been transformed into a bleak collection of mills. An 1814 description of the area wrote of
hundreds of factories in Lancashire that are five and six stories high. At the side of each factory there is a great chimney which belches forth black smoke and indicates the presence of the powerful steam engines. The smoke from the chimneys forms a great cloud which can be seen for miles around the town. The houses have become black on account of the smoke. The river on which the Manchester stands is so tainted with colouring matter that the water resembles the contents of a dye vat.
The factories ruined the local environment, and they were filled with an entirely new class of laborers that had no access to nature—no land to pen a cow, no right to forage for rabbits and quail—and no way to earn a living by spinning or weaving at home. The new machines were clearly destroying a centuries-old economic system of home-based fabric production, and there was widespread regret at the disappearance of village life.
You’d expect people to be glad that the worst jobs disappeared. The carders and rovers, for example, who combed and prepared fibers for spinning, were so often afflicted with anthrax that it was called wool-sorter’s disease. But even the carders wanted to keep their jobs. In 1786, after 170 carding machines were installed in Leeds, four men wrote a petition on behalf of the carders and rovers:
A full four thousand men are left to shift for a living how they can, and must of course fall to the Parish, if not timely relieved.… How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their families; and what are they to put their children apprentice to, that the rising generation may have something to keep them at work, in order that they may not be like vagabonds strolling about in idleness?…
Signed, in behalf of THOUSANDS, by Joseph Hepworth, Thomas Lobley, Robert Wood, Thos. Blackburn.
Anthrax be damned; these men wanted their jobs.
Every newly invented machine made a whole class of jobs obsolete. After thousands of years of spinning, there were no more spinners. After carding since the dawn of civilization, the profession disappeared. Rovers? Fullers? Walkers? The surnames still exist, but these ancient trades disappeared with the new machinery of the Industrial Revolution.
Many weaving and framework knitting communities were on the verge of starvation. Their products could not compete against factory-made goods, and they sent petitions to Parliament, begging for help. These petitions were ignored. The government had embraced the new laissez-faire economic doctrine, and was relying on the market to solve the problems of industrialization.
Laissez-faire (which translates as “allow to do”) was a product of Enlightenment. Freedom of thought, free trade, and free competition were all related to the higher principle that the natural world is a self-regulating system, and that natural regulation is the best type of regulation. Laissez-faire was “conceived as the way to unleash human potential through the restoration of a natural system, a system unhindered by the restrictions of government,” wrote Lebanese economist Toufic Gaspard in 2004. Laissez-faire claims that individuals following their selfish interests ultimately contribute to the general good (provided you ignore air and water pollution). Adam Smith, author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, saw laissez-faire as a moral issue: the market is the way that men ensure the rights of natural law. According to Smith’s invisible hand, an individual’s pursuit of his own interest benefits society more than if his actions were intended to benefit society. It’s straight from Voltaire’s overly optimistic Pangloss in Candide: we live in the best of all possible worlds and it couldn’t possibly be any better.
In a laissez-faire economy, the government’s role is to protect private property, administer justice, and not interfere with business. Tuscany, Spain, and Sweden adopted laissez-faire economic principles, and British industrialists quickly realized how well this new economic system aligned with their own interests. After 1776, laissez-faire economics also became popular in the United States.
The global market had been unleashed, and the government protected the manufacturers, with soldiers when necessary. Machines had displaced labor, and the new industrial regime tore up the eighteenth-century social contract. This aggressive new class of manufacturers was not managed by the state.
People protested against the machines with petitions, marches, and machine-wrecking that historian E. J. Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot.” Workers had broken machines in disputes with factory owners for decades, but the Luddites were systematic about it.
Luddites were textile workers in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire whose jobs had been replaced by machines. They had no money and no food, and by rioting they risked hanging or deportation to Australia. These people were desperate. The first Luddite riot was on March 11, 1811, in Arnold, a village in Nottinghamshire. Stocking makers broke into shops, smashed the wide knitting frames, and used the name “Ludd” for the first time.
Ned Ludd was said to be an apprentice weaver who (the apocryphal story goes) had smashed a loom decades earlier in a rage after his master beat him. Whenever frames were sabotaged, people would say with a wink, “Ned Ludd did it.” Frame breakers were known as Luddites, with King, Captain, or General Ludd as their mythical leader. Letters and proclamations were signed “Ned Ludd.”
According to the Nottingham Journal, there were nearly nightly attacks on wide knitting frames in March and April 1811, with no arrests. Luddites warned knitting masters to remove the new frames from their shops, and if the masters left them in place the Luddites used massive sledgehammers to smash the machines. A letter to the Home Office dated November 13, 1811, requested that the government send the militia because “2,000 men, many of them armed, were riotously traversing the County of Nottingham.” These were artisans protecting their craft and their livelihood. They had nothing left to lose. Doggerel recorded in 1812 reads:
Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood,
His feats I but little admire,
I will sing the Achievements of General Ludd
Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire.
Lord Byron, poet and Nottinghamshire landowner, spoke in the House of Lords before they passed the 1812 Frame-Breaking Act that ruled frame breakers should hang. “These men were willing to dig,” said Byron, “but the spade was in other hands; they were not ashamed to beg, but there was none to relieve them. Their own means of subsistence were cut off; all other employments pre-occupied; and their excesses, however to be deplored and condemned, can hardly be the subject of surprise.” The other lords had less compassion, and 12,000 troops were sent to put down the protesters.
Luddites frequently joined people who were rioting for food and political reform, and their sabotage brought attention to the sad straits of people whose skills had become obsolete at the start of the Industrial Revolution. They enjoyed widespread support from their communities, but the movement was defeated by government troops. After a few dozen agitators were hanged, the attacks ended.
The destruction of the Luddites by the military established a principle that has been followed ever since: industrialists have the right to impose new technology without negotiating with society at large. Neither the public nor the operators have a say in whether or not the technology is adopted. Genetically modified foods, nuclear power, oil pipelines, and many chemicals, including pesticides, herbicides, and toxic household cleaners, have been introduced to society with the same principle.
In an agrarian society, large landowners often co-opted legal, religious, and military institutions to justify and enforce their ownership. As it turned out, industrial society is no better: industrialists co-opt civic institutions in order to make the rules, shape the landscape, and sell whatever they like.
Industrial society needed people to operate the machines, but factory jobs did not create strong and healthy workers. A tragic side effect of industrialization was that removing people from nature took away their vitality, health, and joy. Farm laborers had been hale, but people who worked in factories were sickly and weak. After the Luddites were crushed, generations of working-class men, women, and children worked twelve hours per day for very low wages, their lives metered out to the rhythm of the machines.
Any man who has stood at twelve o’clock at the single narrow door-way, which serves as the place of exit for the hands employed in the great cotton-mills, must acknowledge, that an uglier set of men and women, of boys and girls … would be impossible to congregate in a smaller compass. Their complexion is sallow and pallid.… Their stature low—the average height of four hundred men, measured at different times, and different places, being five feet six inches. Their limbs slender, and playing badly and ungracefully. A very general bowing of the legs. Great numbers of girls and women walking lamely or awkwardly, with raised chests and spinal flexures.
The workers did not thrive, but the mills did. By the 1830s, nearly all the cotton in the world was woven in South Lancashire, and the charming village of home weavers had become an industrial wasteland.
About sixty miles away, William Wordsworth and his poetry helped codify the romantic experience of Nature, where humans communicated directly with the divine.
The Enlightenment’s scientific concerns and rational thought was a natural companion to industrialization. Enlightened thinkers had demoted nature from an active creative agent to the inert product of creation. Instead of being seen as a divine generative power, nature was viewed as merely an aggregate of rocks, twigs, and clouds.
Romantic philosophy, on the other hand, embraced heightened emotion as a way to experience the mysterious and infinite. Individual communion with nature could provide experiences that utterly consume us, overwhelm rationality, and allow us to be humbled by the wonder of creation.
Wordsworth was born in 1770 and was sent to boarding school in Lancashire when he was eight, after his mother died. Lancashire was the epicenter of cotton manufacturing, and Wordsworth grew up as mills were constructed and nature disappeared. His father died when Wordsworth was thirteen, leaving him an orphan in care of his uncles. Wordsworth went to Cambridge University where he started the daily discipline of writing poetry, and took a walking tour of the Alps and their sublime scenery when he was twenty.
Wordsworth arrived in Paris on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, and was swept up in revolutionary fervor. He returned to Cambridge University for his degree and was back in France by November 1791, where he fell in love. Annette Vallon was pregnant in less than three months. In Paris that year, Wordsworth met John “Walking” Stewart, an English philosopher who had spent the last thirty years walking from India to Europe. Wordsworth was deeply impressed by Stewart and his philosophies on nature. He left France, penniless, just weeks before his daughter Anne-Caroline was born.
For the rest of his life, Wordsworth spent much of his day walking. He composed poetry during his daily ten-mile perambulation, and is believed to have walked about 175,000 miles in his lifetime. In 1795, he met the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they quickly developed a close friendship. They were both walkers, but Wordsworth preferred gravel paths while his friend Coleridge bushwhacked through the fields. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved just a few miles away from Coleridge in 1797, and the next year Wordsworth and Coleridge produced Lyrical Ballads, a collection that started the Romantic movement.
The poems were written in everyday language and presented Wordsworth’s philosophy of nature.
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity.
According to Wordsworth, nature brought joy and healed sorrow. Nature was an elevating influence, and there is a “mystic intercourse” between humans and nature, a spiritual communion. In his eyes, “Nature is a teacher whose wisdom we can learn, and without which any human life is vain and incomplete.” As he explains in the “Immortality Ode,”
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Rather than the biblical concept of a soulless wilderness, Wordsworth believed that nature was infused with a divine spirit, a kind of mystical pantheism. Like Rousseau, Wordsworth considered people who are raised in close contact with nature as purer and less corrupt than people raised in the city. Humans were essentially good, though humans in cities were suspect.
Wordsworth received his inheritance at thirty-two, and provided a lump sum for his daughter’s support in Paris before he married a childhood friend. They had five children in rapid succession, and Wordsworth kept walking and writing poetry. His poetry was panned by critics for decades, but Wordsworth had become nature’s foremost spokesperson by the time he died at eighty.
There was a perverse correlation between industry and the romanticization of nature. As Great Britain became an industrial nation and the lower classes were reduced to landless factory workers, western intellectuals embraced farming. According to Thomas Jefferson, a yeoman farmer who owned a modest farm and worked it with family labor was the ideal American. This concept of an honest, virtuous, hardworking, and independent citizen was an early force in American politics. The Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, promoted local government and an agrarian economy based on small independent farmers. (Since Jefferson and forty other signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves, they embraced the ideal of a yeoman farmer in theory but not in practice.)
Like yeoman farmers, artisans saw themselves as central figures in a republican order where competence in their craft provided an independent living, hard work brought success, and these virtues made them good citizens. Artisans made up half the urban population in the United States, from weavers and printers to silversmiths, including Paul Revere.
The Industrial Revolution spread to the United States shortly after it took root in England, and the first New World spinning mill was built in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1790. Francis Cabot Lowell opened his first mill in 1823, when he claimed in a bout of grandiosity to have invented the factory system “where people and machines were all under one roof.” Lowell wanted complete control of the fabric-manufacturing process, and his Boston Manufacturing Company built a complex of mills and factories along the Merrimack River. Two decades later, Lowell bought raw cotton and shipped out finished cloth from a series of buildings that were all staffed by Lowell employees.
As the number of factory jobs in northeastern cities grew, so did the focus on the natural world and nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson made his living lecturing about nature and Romanticism. His 1836 essay “Nature” laid the foundation of Transcendentalism, an idealistic philosophical and social movement that taught that divinity pervades all of nature and humanity (its members also held progressive views on feminism and communal living). Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Amos Bronson Alcott were neighbors and central figures in the Concord-based intellectual circle that defined Transcendentalism. God is in nature, they said, and God can be understood by studying nature.
In spite of Emerson’s fame, his writings don’t wear well. “The universe is composed of Nature and the Soul,” he wrote, which may have been insightful in the 1800s but seems oddly restrictive today. Many of his statements reflect the boundaries of New England village life: “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you.” A rhinoceros would disagree. In Emerson’s world, humans were made in God’s image, the Earth was created for our use, and nature was an inchoate spiritual force. “Nature is not fixed but fluid; to a pure spirit, Nature is everything.”
Nonetheless, Emerson and the Transcendentalists promoted an American perspective that nature held intrinsic value. Wilderness was not just home to wild beasts and men; it could act as an antidote to the corrupting influence of industrialization. Transcendentalism launched camping as a recreational activity, where people could escape the degradations of city life. Visiting the wilderness for a few nights cultivated manly qualities and provided young men with the opportunity to discover their true nature.
Henry David Thoreau, who loved nature with abandon, tutored Emerson’s children. Often called the father of American nature writing, Thoreau was thirty-four when he wrote “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” in his 1851 essay “Walking.” He lived for two years in a cabin on Walden Pond, and this experiment in simple living led to his Transcendental classic Walden; or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854. Simplicity, self-reliance, and the belief that humans were part of nature are the themes that infuse this book.
A century and a half later, Walden’s phrases have slipped into the vernacular: “Lives of quiet desperation”; “marching to a different drummer”; and his opening paragraph, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I have not lived.” Thoreau speaks right to my heart.
Philosophers and poets embraced nature as a spiritual force after the Industrial Revolution, as did artists. Thomas Cole was born in 1801 and moved from England to Philadelphia in 1819 to become a painter. Cole made three oil paintings on a steamboat trip up the Hudson River, and exhibited the paintings in a frame shop in New York City. They were seen by the president of the American Academy of the Fine Arts, who promoted Cole’s work and launched the Hudson River School of landscape painting.
According to Romantic philosophy, Nature was heavenly, and humans were an insignificant presence. Sublime experiences in nature and in art inspire awe and reverence, and an emotional understanding that transcends rational thought, words, or language. Thomas Cole’s paintings of the Hudson Valley and Niagara Falls present wilderness as tabernacle. These painting have a religious element to them: either God is in Nature, or Nature is God.
Niagara Falls became an American symbol of nature. It was possibly the most painted site in North America, appearing in advertisements as early as 1830 to hawk shredded wheat and baldness cures. Images of Niagara Falls were sold to the public through art and advertisements, literature and magazines, newspapers, dioramas, panoramas, and ceramics. Napoleon’s younger brother honeymooned at Niagara Falls in 1804, and soon a honeymoon tour with a stop at the falls was a defining American experience. Waterfalls, with their roaring waters, treacherous currents, and deadly whirlpools, could easily represent the dangers and delights of love. The falls were a visual spectacle, an auditory overload, newlyweds felt the pounding water reverberate through them, and were covered with spray. Niagara Falls, like marriage, was approached with a mixture of awe and dread. Women were allowed to be swept away by nature, presumably without loosening their corsets.
“I wept with a strange mixture of pleasure and pain,” wrote Mrs. Frances Trollope in 1832, “and certainly was, for some time, too violently affected in the physique to be capable of much pleasure; but when this emotion of the senses subsided … my enjoyment was very great indeed.”