JEVONS (William Stanley).
The Coal Question. An Inquiry concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-Mines.
The rare first edition of the book that made Jevons’s reputation, his pioneering work of environmental economics exploring Britain’s reliance on coal and the sustainability of basing the nation’s supremacy on a finite resource, with Jevons’s considerations of the limits of growth and sustainability ensuring it has retained its interest and relevance to the present day.
‘When it appeared in April 1865 The Coal Question was not an immediate success. … Then in April 1866 John Stuart Mill commended The Coal Question to his fellow MPs in a speech in the House of Commons, and endorsed Jevons’s own suggestion for ‘compensating posterity for our present lavish use of cheap coal’ by reduction of the national debt. W. E. Gladstone, then chancellor of the exchequer, followed up this suggestion in his budget speech in May and subsequently called Jevons to Downing Street to discuss it. Soon some of the newspapers were reporting a ‘coal panic’ and the last copies of the first edition of Jevons’s book were selling out’ (ODNB).
