Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T19:01:55.476Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

RUSKIN, DARWIN, AND LOOKING BENEATH SURFACES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2017

Katelin Krieg*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

Extract

John Ruskin and Charles Darwin shared a desire to change the way their readers looked at both nature and art. However, when considering them together, we typically remember their failure to see eye to eye on man's place in nature. Examining Ruskin's responses to Darwin's work, sexual selection in particular, or Ruskin's late dissatisfaction with Victorian science more generally, scholars have emphasized their conflicting worldviews. Yet this tendency to focus on conceptual disagreement fails to consider a shared intellectual background between the two men: the science of geology.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. “On Translating Homer.” Essays Literary and Critical. London: Dent, 1906. 210–69.Google Scholar
Ball, Patricia M. The Science of Aspects: the Changing Role of Fact in the Work of Coleridge, Ruskin, and Hopkins. London: Athlone, 1971.Google Scholar
Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Birch, Dinah. “Ruskin and the Science of Proserpina .” New Approaches to Ruskin: Thirteen Essays. Ed. Robert Hewison. Boston: Routledge, 1981. 142–56.Google Scholar
Buckland, Adelene. Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013.Google Scholar
Burd, Van Akin. “Ruskin and His ‘Good Master,’ William Buckland.” Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008): 299315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christ, Carol T. The Finer Optic: the Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.Google Scholar
Costelloe, Timothy M. The British Aesthetic Tradition from Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge: MIT P, 1990.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882. Ed. Barlow, Nora. New York: Norton, 1958.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. Notebook M [Metaphysics on morals and speculations on expression (1838)]. CUL-DAR125. Trans. Kees Rookmaaker. Ed. Paul Barrett. The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Oct. 2009. Web. 3 May 2016.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. Notebook N [Metaphysics and expression (1838–1839)]. CUL-DAR126. Trans. Kees Rookmaaker. Ed. Paul Barrett. The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. March 2009. Web. 3 May 2016.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. “To Leonard Horner.” 29 Aug 1844. Letter 771. Darwin Correspondence Project. Darwin Correspondence Database. Web. 28 Aug 2015.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. “Old & useless notes about the moral sense & some metaphysical points (1838–1840).” CUL-DAR91.4-55. Trans. and ed. Paul H. Barrett. The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Oct. 2009. Web. 3 May 2016.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. 1859. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. “To Fox, W. D..” 9-12 Aug 1835. Letter 282. Darwin Correspondence Project. Darwin Correspondence Database. Web. 28 Aug 2015.Google Scholar
Darwin, Sir Francis. “Reminiscences of My Father's Everyday Life.” Charles Darwin's Autobiography. Ed. Darwin, Sir Francis. New York: Collier, 1961. 77118.Google Scholar
Depew, David J.The Rhetoric of Evolutionary Theory.” Biological Theory 7 (2013): 380–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dewitt, Anne. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Dolk, Lester. “The Reception of Modern Painters .” Modern Language Notes 57.8 (1942): 621–26.Google Scholar
Donald, Diana, and Munro, Jane, eds. Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Flint, Kate. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. New York: Cambridge UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Frost, Mark. “‘The Circles of Vitality’: Ruskin, Science, and Dynamic Materiality.” Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011): 367–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garratt, Peter. Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain, Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Gillispie, Charles Coulston. Genesis and Geology: a Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain 1790-1850. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay. Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Helsinger, Elizabeth. Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Hewison, Robert. John Ruskin and the Argument of the Eye. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.Google Scholar
Klaver, J. M. I. Geology and Religious Sentiment: The Effect of Geological Discoveries on English Society and Literature between 1829 and 1859. New York: Brill, 1997.Google Scholar
Knight, David. Science and Spirituality: The Volatile Connection. New York: Routledge, 2004.Google Scholar
Kohn, David. “The Aesthetic Construction of Darwin's Theory.” The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science. Ed. Tauber, Alfred I.. Boston: Kluwer, 1996. 1348.Google Scholar
Kort, Pamela, and Max, Hollein, eds. Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins. Köln: Weinand Verlag, 2009.Google Scholar
Krasner, James. The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.Google Scholar
Lennox, James G.Darwinian Thought Experiments: A Function for Just-So Stories.” Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy. Ed. Horowitz, Tamara and Massey, Gerald J.. Savage: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991. 223–45.Google Scholar
Levine, George. Darwin the Writer. New York: Oxford UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Levine, George. “Ruskin and Darwin and the Matter of Matter.” Realism, Ethics, and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science. New York: Cambridge UP, 2008. 7599.Google Scholar
Love, Alan C.Darwin's ‘Imaginary Illustrations’: Creatively Teaching Evolutionary Concepts & the Nature of Science.” The American Biology Teacher 72.2 (2010): 8289.Google Scholar
Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. 3 vols. 1830–33. New York: Johnson, 1969.Google Scholar
Morus, Iwan Rhys. “Illuminating Illusions, or, the Victorian Art of Seeing Things.” Early Popular Visual Culture 10.1 (2012): 3750.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Gorman, Francis. “Ruskin, Science, and the Miracles of Life.” The Review of English Studies 61.249 (2009): 276–88.Google Scholar
Prodger, Phillip. “Ugly Disagreements: Darwin and Ruskin Discuss Sex and Beauty.” The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture. Ed. Larson, Barbara and Brauer, Fae. Hanover: Dartmouth UP, 2009. 4058.Google Scholar
Rudwick, Martin J. S. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.Google Scholar
Ruskin, John. The Complete Works. (Library Edition). 39 vols. Ed. Cook, E. T. and Wedderburn, Alexander. London: G. Allen, 1903–12.Google Scholar
Secord, James. Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Shires, Linda M. Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Smith, Jonathan. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Smith, Jonathan. “Domestic Hybrids: Ruskin, Victorian Fiction, and Darwin's Botany.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 48.4 (2008): 861–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Van Wyhe, John, ed. The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Web. 3 May 2016.Google Scholar
Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky. Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Wheeler, Michael. Ruskin's God. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Willis, Martin. Vision, Science, and Literature, 1870–1920: Ocular Horizons. Brookfield: Pickering and Chatto, 2011.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William and Taylor Coleridge, Samuel. Lyrical Ballads. Ed. Stafford, Fiona. New York: Oxford UP, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar