The library offers an apt metaphor for approaching MacDonald’s literary influences. As the narrator of The Portent (1864) remarks of the ‘neglected library’ he is asked to organise, even the outside of a book can serve as ‘a kind of sacrament – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. To read MacDonald is thus to enter the library of books he himself inhabited, for few writers so openly acknowledged their debts to earlier masters and their forms. This chapter traces the works that most shaped MacDonald’s development as a writer of fantasy, particularly the German Romantics and his contemporaries John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll. For MacDonald, the library of past and present writers was not a site of anxiety but a communal space of imaginative fellowship; by tending to it, he helped build a new wing for modern fantasy while extending the spiritual possibilities of the realist novel.

There is perhaps no greater anathema to the vocational attitude of George MacDonald than the concept of solitary genius. Implicit in the rural community of his youth, the explicit teaching and practice of such relational theology by key mentors further shaped MacDonald’s own practice. His web of friendships grew notably broad, a compendium of illustrious names from multiple countries, in addition to many obscure figures from a mix of classes and cultures. His keenness to share such friends – be they voices on a page or present in the flesh – is a signature of his craft and scholarship that warrants closer attention. This chapter considers a range of these relationships, from his mentors A. J. Scott and F. D. Maurice to Victorian critics John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and many more. A fundamental aspect of MacDonald’s significance to the Victorian era is that this commitment to relationships impacted not only his own work but the lives and works of many notable Victorians.

This chapter discusses Pater’s relationship with the aesthetic movement and its central principle of ‘art for art’s sake’, suggesting that he provided a philosophical basis for some key assumptions of the movement, spontaneously practised but not theorised before him. It illustrates how Pater’s first articulation of ‘art for art’s sake’ responds to the burgeoning aesthetic movement illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting, the art furniture industry led by William Morris from the 1860s, and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry, and in sharp response to the purism of John Ruskin. It goes on to trace the history of aestheticism back to philosophers including Immanuel Kant and the poet John Keats, and illustrates Pater’s understanding of this history via close reading of his essays including ‘Coleridge’ (1866) and ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877), with attention to the controversies around the movement, and Pater’s involvement.

This chapter argues that the discussion of pollution in Victorian environmental writing was often cross-wired with an oppressive and dehumanizing moral rhetoric. The confusion of the moral and material valences of words like “pollution,” “impurity,” “contamination,” and “filth” meant that, in practice, the very persons and communities that were suffering the most at the hands of extractive capitalism were imagined to be the cause of environmental breakdown, rather than its most grievously suffering casualties. In this way, the profound human cost of industrialism and the profit logic could be obscured under a victim-blaming rhetoric of social respectability, sexual purity, and moral righteousness. Drawing on key passages by Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the chapter shows some of the ways in which this troubling conflation of the moral and material was both critiqued and reinforced in the literature of the period.

This chapter looks at nineteenth-century visual arts with an ecological eye. The first section considers distance: the air, haze, clouds, and atmosphere in a painting. Next, closely observed detail in images, often influenced by John Ruskin’s beliefs, is related to the importance of close attentiveness, as well as to the global networks in the study and transport of plants. It then considers the use of visual material in publicizing environmental harms and in bringing home their emotional impact, as well as considering the long-term, as yet invisible effects of climate change on landscapes. Finally, it looks at the role of visual art in providing aesthetic escapism, whatever the realities of pollution and urbanization, as with James McNeill Whistler’s misty Thames views, or with nostalgic pastoral. All sections ask what environmental futures these images contain. The chapter highlights four images: John Constable’s View on the Stour Near Dedham (1823); Albert Goodwin’s A Sunset in the Manufacturing Districts (1884); Henry Warren, The Black Country Near Bilston (1869); and George Vicat Cole, At Arundel, Sussex (1887).

Why Gothic sensibility and aesthetics matters for Ruskin as he prevails against the broken world warranted by laissez-faire economics. Ruskin, in his concept of ‘plague clouds’, is one of the first to locate what has become known as the Anthropocene. The chapter details the characteristics of Gothic, which will then frame the inquiry into craft work.

This chapter considers models of conversation, and ideas about it, that can be recovered from the 1870s, as exemplary of ‘high’ Victorianism in the later part of the nineteenth century. Good conversation was represented as intellectual exchange, amiable and uncontroversial, and speaking to the like-minded, as opposed to the rise of the public intellectual (such as the ‘Sage’) and the emergence of professional specialisms, that did not rely on or expect listening; in other words, congenial discussion as opposed to the declamatory. The chapter gives examples of good conversation as modelled by The Athenæum Club and The Athenaeum weekly journal in the 1870s (including ‘Our Library Table’), and the lived example of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, as well as contrary examples from Middlemarch and John Ruskin.

The 1870s was a critical period for the transformation of British aestheticism into a mainstream phenomenon that both commodified and parodied its avant-garde origins. This transformation unfolds through three representative controversies: the 1870 publication of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems, which was savaged by Robert Buchanan in his review ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’; the appearance of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which pitted an avant-garde aesthetics against conventional art historical criticism; and the notorious libel trial of 1878, in which John Ruskin’s attack on James McNeill Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket led to a legal dispute that hinged on the definition of art itself. All three episodes reveal a doubleness at the heart of aestheticism: it is committed to both idealised abstraction and concrete embodiment. This doubleness underlies aestheticism’s status as an arcane philosophy that nonetheless manifests itself in highly recognisable and commmercialisable popular forms.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, like many of his contemporaries, was drawn as a young man to the lively visual arts scene in London in the 1860s and 1870s. From a family of professional and amateur sketchers and illustrators, he initially considered a career as an artist. What, then, did Hopkins see? What pictures did he look at, and what did he sketch? How did the careful cultivation of his eye, under the formative influence of John Ruskin, shape his later life as a Jesuit poet? How do we get from a visual culture that Hopkins shared with many others of his time and place to the powerful originality of his mature poems? Analyzing evidence from Hopkins’s surviving sketches, letters, and journals, this chapter explores the effects of Hopkins’s visual education on the language, the prosody, and the shaping force of grace in the poems.

Chapter 2 argues that syncretism, a form of eclectic union, is temporal as well as spatial. As a temporal form, syncretism consolidates historical events, daily individual experiences, and social practices onto a shared plane. This chapter analyzes syncretism in Risorgimento Florence, examining how the city adapts to serve modern Italy while maintaining its historical significance. I read Florence through the travel narratives of Susan Horner, two guidebooks (Walks in Florence, which Horner coauthored with her sister Joanna; and Mornings in Florence by John Ruskin), and a forgotten novel (Isolina, which I attribute to Susan Horner). Across these genres, syncretism emerges as a temporal form capable of defining liberty democratically so that Florence potentially serves as a model of egalitarianism internationally in response to nineteenth-century revolutions and wars.

This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.

A period of significant demographic, social, and political transformation produced essays marked by a deep seriousness of tone and a sense of weighty purpose that departed sharply from the playful quality of the periodical tradition and the lighter touch of the Romantic familiar essay. Essayists in criticism of this period (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, William Morris, Oscar Wilde) were deeply engaged in defining ideas of culture that could encompass an increasingly diverse and fragmented society. This chapter reflects on the publication contexts that shaped some of the best-known examples of the Victorian critical essay; examines Victorian critics’ emphasis on specific capacities in perception as a ground for pedagogical exposition with the aim of achieving social coherency; and highlights the deep historicism and awareness of mediation that informs the Victorian essayist’s approach to cultural criticism.

John Ruskin and Karl Marx – two heterodox economic thinkers writing in England in the 1860s – both considered production, circulation, and exchange in relation to the natural environment. After first discussing the imbrication of the economic and the ecological in their work, this chapter turns to George Eliot’s Felix Holt [GK19](1866) and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm [GK20](1861–62) to explore points of intersection between heterodox economic thought and literary realism. Focusing on soil fertility, an issue that evokes the uses of water, soil, and manure in service of capitalism, the chapter shows that Eliot and Trollope trace the ways in which ownership, labor, or trade transforms humans’ relations to animals, plants, and landscapes. Heterodox economic thought and literary realism in the 1860s took into account historical dimensions of the natural world, especially its economic involvement.

Environmentalism is a perspective that is usually portrayed in IPE textbooks as a relatively new one that has emerged in recent decades. But a number of thinkers in the pre-1945 period developed pioneering environmentalist ideas that gained considerable attention during the eras in which they lived. With differing degrees of commitment, these figures were united by their desire to curtail human-induced environmental degradation in order to foster more sustainable ways of living within the world economy. They disagreed, however, about the causes of, and solutions to, the environmental degradation they identified. Some combined their environmentalism with economic liberal views (Alexander von Humboldt, Stanley Jevons); others with neomercantilism (Henry Carey); still others with Marxism (Marx himself) and autarkism (Eve Balfour, Graham Vernon Jacks, Sada Kaiseki). Others promoted environmentalist ideas that did not fit well into any of those categories, such as the Lakotan cosmology of Black Elk, the “Cartesian” approach of Frederick Soddy, and the decentralist visions of Richard Gregg, Radhakamal Mukerjee, Lewis Mumford and John Ruskin.

The chapter takes a historical perspective and asks us to consider the long and overlapping concerns of both scientists and religious believers with truth, beauty and creative ordering. Science is no enemy of religion but a casual reductive materialism, often presented in the media under the auspices of ‘science’, and fails to see the sophistication and glory of religious belief that God created all that is (creation ex nihilo), and that this conviction is fully compatible with robust modern science.

Hobson’s mature welfare economics was less a product of Oxford liberalism than of a radical tradition going back to Paine. However, Hobson also strove to express that radicalism in qualitative terms, and here was more strongly influenced by the illiberal Ruskin, whose inspiration was pre-capitalist, than by liberal predecessors. By 1900, Ruskin was frequently interpreted in a socialist manner: the task Hobson set himself was to show that Ruskin’s insights were compatible with his version of New Liberalism. The outcome, with its stress on quality rather than quantity, was distinctly different from the liberal orthodoxy that established itself in his lifetime.

Beginning with the design competition for the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster in 1834, this chapter discusses the development of Gothic in architecture in the nineteenth century. It examines the work of three significant figures in the Gothic Revival: A.W. N. Pugin; John Ruskin; and William Morris, suggesting that, although each approached the issue in terms of their different religious and political convictions, all three were concerned with the relationship between architecture and society. Pugin’s contrasts of contemporary and fifteenth-century architecture illustrated the damaging social divisions of Victorian England and the need to return to medieval architectural forms and religious attitudes. Politically and religiously more ambiguous than Pugin, Ruskin proposed the special ‘Northern Gothic’ character of England where the artistic freedom of the artisan had expressed the coherence of its communities, now lost in industrial servitude. Morris, drawing from Ruskin, emphasised the freedom of labour and became convinced that Socialism was a crucial stage in the Gothic Revival.