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25 - The rural scene: Victorian literature and the natural world

from PART IV - MATTERS OF DEBATE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2012

Kate Flint
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

In one of John Ruskin’s most celebrated passages of elegy, he recalled the pleasures of Croxted Lane, Dulwich. ‘In my young days’, he said, in Part 1 of Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880):

Croxted Lane was a green bye-road traversable for some distance by carts; but rarely so traversed, and, for the most part, little else than a narrow strip of untilled field, separated by blackberry hedges from the better-cared-for meadows on each side of it: growing more weeds, therefore, than they, and perhaps in spring a primrose or two – white archangel-daisies plenty, and purple thistles in autumn. A slender rivulet, boasting little of its brightness, for there are no springs at Dulwich, yet fed purely enough by the rain and morning dew, here trickled – there loitered – through the long grass beneath the hedges, and expanded itself, where it might, into moderately clear and deep pools, in which, under their veils of duck-weed, a fresh-water shell or two, sundry curious little skipping shrimps, any quantity of tadpoles in their time, and even sometimes a tittlebat, offered themselves to my boyhood’s pleasured, and not inaccurate, observation.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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