ABSTRACT
There is much that warrants our attention in an emerging discourse of sustainability in the nineteenth century and by examining some of these early ideas and debates concerning sustainability, we may enhance our own thinking about the challenges of everyday life in the twenty-first century. This chapter considers two Victorian writers whose ideals of sustainability were grounded in the centrality of culture and everyday life. William Morris (poet, designer and socialist) and Edward Carpenter (poet, essayist and socialist) advocated an alternative approach to daily life and work in which the values of nature, beauty, and creativity were championed against the alienation, standardisation and increased social disparities they attributed to the industrial mode of production and the growth of Victorian consumer society. Celebrating the handmade and the artisanal, Morris and Carpenter variously began to formulate ideals of sustainability that they believed would enhance everyday life and restore the natural environment. It may now be easy to dismiss some of these ideas as naïve idealism but if we look more closely at some of the writings of Morris and Carpenter, we may discern a radical and complex response to the problem of sustainability in Victorian modernity that still resonates today.
