Books by Dr Mark Frost
The Literature and Politics of the Environment (ed. John Parham, RIP) (Boydell and Brewer), 2023
While industrial activity has long characterised the countryside, pastoral’s tendency to idealise... more While industrial activity has long characterised the countryside, pastoral’s tendency to idealise and valorise farming life often pushes other forms of economic activity to the representational peripheries. Although predominantly focused on the social life of the countryside, Victorian novels do, however, show some interest in industry, and its socio-environmental impacts. Examining Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839), Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), this chapter explores issues of environmental and social injustice in aesthetic, agrilogistic, and Anthropocene contexts. It situates the novels’ representations of rural industry in pastoral contexts to argue that they generally complicate the pastoral’s traditions division between favoured rural realms and negatively-figured urban realms, arguing that they reflect processes whereby urban- rural distinctions were placed under strain, and often rendered meaningless, by the expansion into the countryside of intensified capitalist networks of environmental violence and technological control.
The first definitive study of Ruskin's most important political experiment, this monograph offers... more The first definitive study of Ruskin's most important political experiment, this monograph offers a major re-evaluation of the early history of the Guild, and by drawing on a wealth of previously-overlooked primary sources provides a multivocal critique of Ruskin's politics and organisational approach. This work uncovers the stories of the Guild's 'lost companions', agricultural labourers whose exceptional contributions and tragic stories were occluded or suppressed by the early Guild.
‘This is an exceptionally important book which is startlingly original in its historical inquiry. The recovery of the “lost Companions” reveals a sharply different story that will have major significance for understanding Ruskin’s political work.’ —Francis O’Gorman, University of Leeds
http://www.anthempress.com/the-lost-companions-and-john-ruskin-s-guild-of-st-george
Articles and chapters by Dr Mark Frost
Victorian Environmental NIghtmares, 2019
This essay examines a distinctive corpus of late-Victorian environmental disaster narratives by R... more This essay examines a distinctive corpus of late-Victorian environmental disaster narratives by Richard Jefferies, William Delisle Hay, Grant Allen, and Robert Barr. The texts are analysed in relationship to the notions of ecocatastrophe and attritional violence; debates in the environmental humanities about collapsing boundary formations; and the concept of slow violence. While sceptical of approaches that neatly and anachronistically situate Victorian texts as green pioneers, I also argue that one of the texts, Richard Jefferies's _After London; or Wild England_ provides an unusually complex reading of anthropogenic impacts and the entanglements of civilization and environment.
See: https://www.routledge.com/Victorian-Writers-and-the-Environment-Ecocritical-Perspectives/W-M... more See: https://www.routledge.com/Victorian-Writers-and-the-Environment-Ecocritical-Perspectives/W-Mazzeno-D-Morrison/p/book/9781472454706
This chapter, part of an important new collection, examines the degree to which Ruskin participated in the emergence of nineteenth-century ecology and anticipated many of the leading features of modern ecology. Examining examples from the 1840s and 1850s of John Ruskin’s extraordinarily acute nature-reading this chapter underline his insistence that observers pay close attention to nature; that the environment represents a precious resource; and that environmental engagement offers opportunities for self-improvement, and collapses the distance between observer and observed by revealing what they share. While his nature-reading techniques were profoundly indebted to scriptural hermeneutics, his insistence on close scrutiny led him to discern the systematic connections of nature and to reach for explanations of environment that bore distinctive ecological markers. Acknowledging, scrutinising, and embracing an environment made up of endless connections and characterised by infinite variety led him to query the place of humanity within this newly-conceived realm. By turn, it led him at times to challenge (but ultimately never to reject or overturn) those hierarchical, anthropocentric readings of nature that he inherited from Evangelicalism. Like ecology, Ruskin’s approach to nature was complex, multiple, and in a state of productive tension. Having explored Ruskin’s nature-reading methods, and the ways this led him to think of nature as a helpful system, the chapter examines the manner in which he directed this towards nature conservancy. Ruskin’s activities in the 1870s are significant not merely as indicators of his environmentalist credentials but also for the manner in which they deployed the nature reading processes established early in his career. Uniquely gifted in reading the signs of healthy environment, Ruskin was also unusually sensitive in discerning environmental breakdown, partly because of his attentiveness to nature and partly because, as a religious thinker, the stakes could not have been higher. Focusing closely on his observations of moments in which the various “bodies” of nature begin to lose their ecological order, I will demonstrate that Ruskin’s environmental consciousness was informed both by Evangelical hermeneutics and materialist science. Committed to the preservation of divine nature, and to the salvational possibilities of environmental stewardship, Ruskin’s vision of nature-as-system also carried unmistakeable ecological markers.
See: http://representations.u-grenoble3.fr/spip.php?article38
This article offers a reading of th... more See: http://representations.u-grenoble3.fr/spip.php?article38
This article offers a reading of the role of pastoral in Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens, the great author of urban experience, is largely disinclined to describe natural scenes, often doing so in a lacklustre fashion. In travelling through the countryside Dickens and his characters barely glance out of the windows of their carriages or trains. Insulated in a bubble of their own urbanity, and carrying the city with them wherever they go, they find the countryside worthy of only passing remark. Because the purpose of travel is always to get from one urban location to another, the countryside functions, in economic and narrative terms, as a conduit connecting the main centres of action. This, I’d like to argue, is not merely because Dickens isn’t interested in nature. I would like to follow up on Lynn Pykett’s remark (2002, 62) that in The Old Curiosity Shop, ‘both Nell and the narrative make a move from the urban nightmare towards pastoral, and both moves are problematical and compromised’; and to go further by suggesting that while the countryside looks different to the city, it has become merely an extension of the social and economic nexus that has so transformed the metropolitan world. The Old Curiosity Shop exemplifies the way in which Dickens holds out, but then undercuts, the possibility of pastoral idyll. In the failure of the pastoral quest undertaken by Nell and her grandfather, a quest that also stands for the supposed values of a disappearing past, Dickens reveals the countryside as marked by quintessentially urban ills: poverty, violence, intrigue, death, and economic competition are powerfully at play in a novel that, I want to argue, places Dickens in the anti-pastoral tradition.
This article examines the problematical attempts of William Harrison Riley, a working-class Anglo... more This article examines the problematical attempts of William Harrison Riley, a working-class Anglo-American writer and political activist, to forge connections between two of his literary heroes, Walt Whitman and John Ruskin. It will explore literary celebrity in the UK and US in the 1870s, consider the ways in which literary figures created mystique by inaccessibility and withdrawal, think about the often competitive nature of transatlantic celebrity, and consider the ways in which working-class readers and writers who tried to access elite circles were often excluded and marginalised.
Long misunderstood and maligned in Ruskin Studies, Riley is principally remembered for his role one of Ruskin’s agricultural ventures of his utopian society, the Guild of St George.
Riley is also of interest in terms of his attempts to act as a conduit between Walt Whitman and Ruskin. Having encountered Whitman’s work during a period of residence in the States in the 1860s, Riley regarded himself as one of the poet’s disciples, and was also close to Edward Carpenter, the Derbyshire poet, educationalist, and human rights activist, who met Whitman in the 1870s. Riley blamed Ruskin for the failure of his attempts to act as a channel between Whitman and Ruskin. Close examination of the correspondence relating to this issue reveals that working-class figures like Riley faced exclusion, marginalisation, and suffering when encountering celebrity; and that their attempts at agency, whether as ‘fans’ or as writers were jeopardised by such encounters. I examine Riley’s difficulties in penetrating the world of Ruskin’s Brantwood home at Coniston, and the manner in which Brantwood became a semi-mythical realm of speculation, and will suggest that the establishment of celebrity status was as much reliant on exclusion and inaccessibility as it was on broadening public profile. In drawing attention to class issues within the construction of nineteenth-century celebrity, I wish to argue that celebrity culture is often dangerous in its exaltation of flawed figures and because of its ability to retrospectively occlude more troubling stories from the narratives of literary celebrities.
The days have passed in which John Ruskin's scientific writings were deemed secondary and separat... more The days have passed in which John Ruskin's scientific writings were deemed secondary and separate to his art, architecture, or politics, but his science still tends to be viewed predominately via the prism of his later natural history, with its characteristically virulent opposition to Darwin and materialism, and in relation to his application of typological exegesis to landscape study. I would argue that an approach is required that situates Ruskin's response to Darwin against the background of his entire career in scientific writing and that seeks to clarify the relationship between the various influences which informed his engagement with environment. While this article cannot pursue such an analysis in full, it outlines some key reasons for its necessity. Through examination of significant 1843 correspondence and related works, I will call in particular for a re-evaluation of the degree to which Ruskin engaged in modern scientific methods and approaches. In doing so, I will suggest that Ruskin's later anti-materialism did not represent a seamless continuation of a long-established attitude to science and nature, but something of a discontinuity, in which, faced with the implications of evolutionary theory, he attempted to reject not just Darwinism, but many of the elements that had made his own work in science distinctive, convincing, and attuned to modernity, materiality, and process.
This article examines critical responses to J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead... more This article examines critical responses to J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon Coming On (1840), and John Ruskin’s 1843 critique of the painting, in the years following the publication of David Dabydeen’s Turner (1994). The representation of drowning slaves in Turner’s painting, and in Ruskin’s art criticism, has resulted in the emergence of something of a critical consensus in which both figures are seen to either neglect or take pleasure in the subject of slavery. The purpose of this article is to explore available evidence and to argue that insufficient attention has been paid to Turner’s painting, to his politics, and to his purpose in Slavers; to Ruskin’s objectives in critiquing Turner; to distinctions between Ruskin’s imperialism and his position on slavery; and to his examination of Turner’s painting. In a corrective to recent critical assumptions, I hope to suggest that in these instances claims made on these issues often rest on shaky foundations, and that it is possible for more sustainable readings of Turner’s painting and Ruskin’s criticism to emerge.
Close readings of Ruskin's 'The Work of Iron' and 'Moss', used to argue that Ruskin's detailed an... more Close readings of Ruskin's 'The Work of Iron' and 'Moss', used to argue that Ruskin's detailed and moving engagements with quotidian features of environment (despised rust and overlooked moss) moved towards, and powerfully articulated, the ecological impulse in nineteenth and twentieth century science.
Examining “The Law of Help” and “Of Leaf Beauty” from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters V (1860), thi... more Examining “The Law of Help” and “Of Leaf Beauty” from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters V (1860), this paper argues that Ruskin used both botany and aesthetics to pursue an organic conception of organisation and creativity, and attempted to articulate a vision of harmonious order that could be equally applicable to art, politics, and society. Ruskin’s belief that composition consisted in the mutualistic relationships of parts within a whole was founded on his reading of environment, and then applied to human concerns, making his work a site of proto-ecological and biocentric enquiry, but at the same time his natural history was also marked by commitment to anthropocentric notions of hierarchy and design. The co-existence of these competing visions of environment made Ruskin’s natural history a realm of tension and unresolved conflict, but also generated a unique conceptualisation of nature that he sought to apply to politics. Through the botanical narratives of “Of Leaf Beauty” Ruskin created the most extended and profound of his social-environmental analogies, insisting that the “building” of trees rested on the sustained fellowship of leaves who are guided by an innate sense of duty, purpose, and co-operation. An extended exemplar of the Law of Help in action, ‘Of Leaf Beauty’ was motivated by clear political purpose. By analysing Ruskin’s later political work – in the theoretical realm of Unto This Last (1862) and in the practical arena of the Guild of St. George – I argue that the imprint of the dual impulse of his natural history is writ large in his social thought. I also suggest that he was unable to translate the unreflexive communitarianism of the tree communities of ‘Of Leaf Beauty’ into the field of utopian praxis, and that the Guild was caught between commitments to hierarchy and to decentralised interdependence.
Papers by Dr Mark Frost
This major work in Ruskin studies offers a timely re-evaluation of the origins, formation and wor... more This major work in Ruskin studies offers a timely re-evaluation of the origins, formation and workings of John Ruskin’s Guild of St George. Drawing on both significant and recently discovered archive material and existing research, this work looks afresh at the genesis of Ruskin’s ideas and their translation into practice. Since Ruskin criticism began, attention has been drawn to the Guild of St George, Ruskin’s attempt in the 1870s and 1880s to foster a series of self-sufficient, co-operative agrarian communities founded on principles of artisanal (non-mechanised) labour, and creativity and environmental sustainability. While endorsing previous accounts which point to the positive impact of Ruskin’s Guild, this book tempers such readings by considering the often destructive effect of Guild life on the Companions who worked in the communities. An astonishing wealth of previously unpublished correspondence reveals the extent to which Ruskin’s ideological position caused a failure to translate well-meaning idealism into effective social action, and often devastating consequences for those who worked St George’s land. By drawing on entirely new material, it is possible to reveal in detail for the first time the realities of Guild life over an extended period of time. This monograph provides an authoritative work on Ruskin’s utopian experiment, enriching ongoing discussions on sustainable community and bringing Ruskin’s work to a wider audience.
The Modern Language Review, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or ... more All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the Illustrations xi Preface to the Second Edition xiv Preface to the First Edition xvi Foreword by Brian Massumi xix Acknowledgments xxv 1 The Digital nature of Gothic 1 Ruskin: The nature of Gothic 6 Craft and Code 31 i Believe in Things 41 2 The Matter of ornament 53 Ruskin: Wall Veil and earth Veil 55 an abstract Materialism 65 Tessellation ornament and Ribbon ornament 75 Some Hints on pattern Designing 99 3 abstraction and Sympathy 107 The Mosaic of experience 109 The Fabric of Sympathy 117 Lipps's Sympathy and Worringer's empathy 131 The Veil is the anti-eidos 152 4 The Radical picturesque 157 Forms and Forces 159 Ruskin: The parasitical Sublime 169 Sublime Things 187 The Technological Wild 200 Contents
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2010
This article examines critical responses to J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead... more This article examines critical responses to J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying —Typhon Coming On (1840) and John Ruskin’s 1843 critique of the painting, in the years following the publication of David Dabydeen’s Turner (1994). The representation of drowning slaves in Turner’s painting and in Ruskin’s art criticism, has resulted in the emergence of something of a critical consensus in which both figures are seen either to neglect or take pleasure in the subject of slavery. The purpose of this article is to explore available evidence and to argue that insufficient attention has been paid to Turner’s painting, to his politics and to his purpose in Slavers; to Ruskin’s objectives in critiquing Turner; to distinctions between Ruskin’s imperialism and his position on slavery; and to his examination of Turner’s painting. In a corrective to recent critical assumptions, I suggest that in these instances claims made on these issues often rest on shaky foundations ...
Victorian Environmental Nightmares, 2019
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Representations, 2016
This article explores Dickens’ engagements with pastoral in The Old Curiosity Shop and other work... more This article explores Dickens’ engagements with pastoral in The Old Curiosity Shop and other works, arguing that Dickens’ urban gaze makes him a poor cousin amongst nineteenth century nature writers, but an insightful reader of rural affairs. Dickens pursues, but ultimately resists and rejects, pastoral and picturesque urges because the conventions of these traditions efface or ignore the conditions of rural labour. Facing the poverty, inequality, and scarcity of the privatised, post-enclosure countryside of the 1840s, Dickens rejects the essential pastoral contrast between urban and rural by recognising that the countryside and the city exists in a co-dependent relationship within a dominant liberal economic order, and that the possibility of idyllic retreat is therefore impossible.
Victorian Literature and Culture, 2011
The days have passed inwhich John Ruskin's scientific writings were deemed secondary and sepa... more The days have passed inwhich John Ruskin's scientific writings were deemed secondary and separate to his art, architecture, or politics, but his science still tends to be viewed predominately via the prism of his later natural history, with its characteristically virulent opposition to Darwin and materialism, and in relation to his application of typological exegesis to landscape study. I would argue that an approach is required that situates Ruskin's response to Darwin against the background of his entire career in scientific writing and that seeks to clarify the relationship between the various influences which informed his engagement with environment. While this article cannot pursue such an analysis in full, it outlines some key reasons for its necessity. Through examination of significant 1843 correspondence and related works, I will call in particular for a re-evaluation of the degree to which Ruskin engaged in modern scientific methods and approaches. In doing so, I w...
Critical Survey, 2015
In this special issue scholars from Britain, America, and Australia examine European interactions... more In this special issue scholars from Britain, America, and Australia examine European interactions between British and American celebrities, and between famous Americans and their British admirers, in order to address a deficiency in current scholarship on nineteenth-century celebrity that has been primarily nation-based in its approach
Critical Survey, 2015
This article focuses on the attempts of working-class intellectual, William Harrison Riley, to ac... more This article focuses on the attempts of working-class intellectual, William Harrison Riley, to act as a transatlantic bridge between two of his literary heroes, John Ruskin and Walt Whitman, and on what this reveals about the operations of nineteenth-century celebrity culture. Exploring the ways in which Ruskin and Whitman constructed public profiles as
Nineteenth-Century Contexts
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Books by Dr Mark Frost
see: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-richard-jefferies-after-london-or-wild-england-hb.html
‘This is an exceptionally important book which is startlingly original in its historical inquiry. The recovery of the “lost Companions” reveals a sharply different story that will have major significance for understanding Ruskin’s political work.’ —Francis O’Gorman, University of Leeds
http://www.anthempress.com/the-lost-companions-and-john-ruskin-s-guild-of-st-george
Articles and chapters by Dr Mark Frost
This chapter, part of an important new collection, examines the degree to which Ruskin participated in the emergence of nineteenth-century ecology and anticipated many of the leading features of modern ecology. Examining examples from the 1840s and 1850s of John Ruskin’s extraordinarily acute nature-reading this chapter underline his insistence that observers pay close attention to nature; that the environment represents a precious resource; and that environmental engagement offers opportunities for self-improvement, and collapses the distance between observer and observed by revealing what they share. While his nature-reading techniques were profoundly indebted to scriptural hermeneutics, his insistence on close scrutiny led him to discern the systematic connections of nature and to reach for explanations of environment that bore distinctive ecological markers. Acknowledging, scrutinising, and embracing an environment made up of endless connections and characterised by infinite variety led him to query the place of humanity within this newly-conceived realm. By turn, it led him at times to challenge (but ultimately never to reject or overturn) those hierarchical, anthropocentric readings of nature that he inherited from Evangelicalism. Like ecology, Ruskin’s approach to nature was complex, multiple, and in a state of productive tension. Having explored Ruskin’s nature-reading methods, and the ways this led him to think of nature as a helpful system, the chapter examines the manner in which he directed this towards nature conservancy. Ruskin’s activities in the 1870s are significant not merely as indicators of his environmentalist credentials but also for the manner in which they deployed the nature reading processes established early in his career. Uniquely gifted in reading the signs of healthy environment, Ruskin was also unusually sensitive in discerning environmental breakdown, partly because of his attentiveness to nature and partly because, as a religious thinker, the stakes could not have been higher. Focusing closely on his observations of moments in which the various “bodies” of nature begin to lose their ecological order, I will demonstrate that Ruskin’s environmental consciousness was informed both by Evangelical hermeneutics and materialist science. Committed to the preservation of divine nature, and to the salvational possibilities of environmental stewardship, Ruskin’s vision of nature-as-system also carried unmistakeable ecological markers.
This article offers a reading of the role of pastoral in Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens, the great author of urban experience, is largely disinclined to describe natural scenes, often doing so in a lacklustre fashion. In travelling through the countryside Dickens and his characters barely glance out of the windows of their carriages or trains. Insulated in a bubble of their own urbanity, and carrying the city with them wherever they go, they find the countryside worthy of only passing remark. Because the purpose of travel is always to get from one urban location to another, the countryside functions, in economic and narrative terms, as a conduit connecting the main centres of action. This, I’d like to argue, is not merely because Dickens isn’t interested in nature. I would like to follow up on Lynn Pykett’s remark (2002, 62) that in The Old Curiosity Shop, ‘both Nell and the narrative make a move from the urban nightmare towards pastoral, and both moves are problematical and compromised’; and to go further by suggesting that while the countryside looks different to the city, it has become merely an extension of the social and economic nexus that has so transformed the metropolitan world. The Old Curiosity Shop exemplifies the way in which Dickens holds out, but then undercuts, the possibility of pastoral idyll. In the failure of the pastoral quest undertaken by Nell and her grandfather, a quest that also stands for the supposed values of a disappearing past, Dickens reveals the countryside as marked by quintessentially urban ills: poverty, violence, intrigue, death, and economic competition are powerfully at play in a novel that, I want to argue, places Dickens in the anti-pastoral tradition.
Long misunderstood and maligned in Ruskin Studies, Riley is principally remembered for his role one of Ruskin’s agricultural ventures of his utopian society, the Guild of St George.
Riley is also of interest in terms of his attempts to act as a conduit between Walt Whitman and Ruskin. Having encountered Whitman’s work during a period of residence in the States in the 1860s, Riley regarded himself as one of the poet’s disciples, and was also close to Edward Carpenter, the Derbyshire poet, educationalist, and human rights activist, who met Whitman in the 1870s. Riley blamed Ruskin for the failure of his attempts to act as a channel between Whitman and Ruskin. Close examination of the correspondence relating to this issue reveals that working-class figures like Riley faced exclusion, marginalisation, and suffering when encountering celebrity; and that their attempts at agency, whether as ‘fans’ or as writers were jeopardised by such encounters. I examine Riley’s difficulties in penetrating the world of Ruskin’s Brantwood home at Coniston, and the manner in which Brantwood became a semi-mythical realm of speculation, and will suggest that the establishment of celebrity status was as much reliant on exclusion and inaccessibility as it was on broadening public profile. In drawing attention to class issues within the construction of nineteenth-century celebrity, I wish to argue that celebrity culture is often dangerous in its exaltation of flawed figures and because of its ability to retrospectively occlude more troubling stories from the narratives of literary celebrities.
Papers by Dr Mark Frost
see: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-richard-jefferies-after-london-or-wild-england-hb.html
‘This is an exceptionally important book which is startlingly original in its historical inquiry. The recovery of the “lost Companions” reveals a sharply different story that will have major significance for understanding Ruskin’s political work.’ —Francis O’Gorman, University of Leeds
http://www.anthempress.com/the-lost-companions-and-john-ruskin-s-guild-of-st-george
This chapter, part of an important new collection, examines the degree to which Ruskin participated in the emergence of nineteenth-century ecology and anticipated many of the leading features of modern ecology. Examining examples from the 1840s and 1850s of John Ruskin’s extraordinarily acute nature-reading this chapter underline his insistence that observers pay close attention to nature; that the environment represents a precious resource; and that environmental engagement offers opportunities for self-improvement, and collapses the distance between observer and observed by revealing what they share. While his nature-reading techniques were profoundly indebted to scriptural hermeneutics, his insistence on close scrutiny led him to discern the systematic connections of nature and to reach for explanations of environment that bore distinctive ecological markers. Acknowledging, scrutinising, and embracing an environment made up of endless connections and characterised by infinite variety led him to query the place of humanity within this newly-conceived realm. By turn, it led him at times to challenge (but ultimately never to reject or overturn) those hierarchical, anthropocentric readings of nature that he inherited from Evangelicalism. Like ecology, Ruskin’s approach to nature was complex, multiple, and in a state of productive tension. Having explored Ruskin’s nature-reading methods, and the ways this led him to think of nature as a helpful system, the chapter examines the manner in which he directed this towards nature conservancy. Ruskin’s activities in the 1870s are significant not merely as indicators of his environmentalist credentials but also for the manner in which they deployed the nature reading processes established early in his career. Uniquely gifted in reading the signs of healthy environment, Ruskin was also unusually sensitive in discerning environmental breakdown, partly because of his attentiveness to nature and partly because, as a religious thinker, the stakes could not have been higher. Focusing closely on his observations of moments in which the various “bodies” of nature begin to lose their ecological order, I will demonstrate that Ruskin’s environmental consciousness was informed both by Evangelical hermeneutics and materialist science. Committed to the preservation of divine nature, and to the salvational possibilities of environmental stewardship, Ruskin’s vision of nature-as-system also carried unmistakeable ecological markers.
This article offers a reading of the role of pastoral in Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens, the great author of urban experience, is largely disinclined to describe natural scenes, often doing so in a lacklustre fashion. In travelling through the countryside Dickens and his characters barely glance out of the windows of their carriages or trains. Insulated in a bubble of their own urbanity, and carrying the city with them wherever they go, they find the countryside worthy of only passing remark. Because the purpose of travel is always to get from one urban location to another, the countryside functions, in economic and narrative terms, as a conduit connecting the main centres of action. This, I’d like to argue, is not merely because Dickens isn’t interested in nature. I would like to follow up on Lynn Pykett’s remark (2002, 62) that in The Old Curiosity Shop, ‘both Nell and the narrative make a move from the urban nightmare towards pastoral, and both moves are problematical and compromised’; and to go further by suggesting that while the countryside looks different to the city, it has become merely an extension of the social and economic nexus that has so transformed the metropolitan world. The Old Curiosity Shop exemplifies the way in which Dickens holds out, but then undercuts, the possibility of pastoral idyll. In the failure of the pastoral quest undertaken by Nell and her grandfather, a quest that also stands for the supposed values of a disappearing past, Dickens reveals the countryside as marked by quintessentially urban ills: poverty, violence, intrigue, death, and economic competition are powerfully at play in a novel that, I want to argue, places Dickens in the anti-pastoral tradition.
Long misunderstood and maligned in Ruskin Studies, Riley is principally remembered for his role one of Ruskin’s agricultural ventures of his utopian society, the Guild of St George.
Riley is also of interest in terms of his attempts to act as a conduit between Walt Whitman and Ruskin. Having encountered Whitman’s work during a period of residence in the States in the 1860s, Riley regarded himself as one of the poet’s disciples, and was also close to Edward Carpenter, the Derbyshire poet, educationalist, and human rights activist, who met Whitman in the 1870s. Riley blamed Ruskin for the failure of his attempts to act as a channel between Whitman and Ruskin. Close examination of the correspondence relating to this issue reveals that working-class figures like Riley faced exclusion, marginalisation, and suffering when encountering celebrity; and that their attempts at agency, whether as ‘fans’ or as writers were jeopardised by such encounters. I examine Riley’s difficulties in penetrating the world of Ruskin’s Brantwood home at Coniston, and the manner in which Brantwood became a semi-mythical realm of speculation, and will suggest that the establishment of celebrity status was as much reliant on exclusion and inaccessibility as it was on broadening public profile. In drawing attention to class issues within the construction of nineteenth-century celebrity, I wish to argue that celebrity culture is often dangerous in its exaltation of flawed figures and because of its ability to retrospectively occlude more troubling stories from the narratives of literary celebrities.