VICTORIAN STUDIES, Volume 58, Number 3, pp. 464–92.

Ruskin’s Dust

LLA

ERSHON

A person turning to stone is usually bad, while a stone coming to life is desirable.

But perhaps it is the confusion of the two realms that is really, and unavowedly,

attractive.

—Barbara Johnson,

Persons and Things

(20)

ust was on the Victorian mind in 1865. This year saw the pub-

lication of two notable texts centered on the intimacies of

dust and human life: John Ruskin’s

The Ethics of the Dust

and

Charles Dickens’s

Our Mutual Friend

. Exploring the circulation of

dust according to principles of chemical and social economy, Ruskin

and Dickens insert their human characters into complex systems of

inorganic exchange. Presented as mineralogical lectures on “The

Elements of Crystallization,” delivered in the form of a Socratic dia-

logue between an Old Lecturer and a group of schoolgirls,

The Ethics

of the Dust

constructs an ethical system modeled upon the ceaseless

movement of elements in a chemical economy. Meanwhile,

Our

Mutual Friend

plots the relations that emerge through the perpetual

BSTRACT

This essay traces the connection between the aesthetics and ethics of self-for-

mation in John Ruskin’s

The Ethics of the Dust

(1865) and mid-century debates about

inorganic matter’s “vital” forms. Offering a reappraisal of dust’s role in Ruskin’s oeu-

vre and Victorian culture more broadly, this essay argues that “dust” signifies decay’s

release of chemical potentiality, which thus encodes inorganic matter’s formative

power as it ceaselessly morphs and moves through myriad forms. Introduced through

Ruskin’s conversion of girls into particles of dust, the essay ends with a meditation on

the gender of changefulness by turning to another great Victorian text on dust,

Our

Mutual Friend

(1864–65), and to Lizzie Hexam’s unique relationship with that precious

chemical agent: coal.

LLA

ERSHON

(ellamershon@berkeley.edu) completed a PhD in English at the

University of California, Berkeley in 2016. She is currently revising her dissertation,

“Passing Forms: Decay and the Making of Victorian Culture,” into a monograph on

decay’s temporality and its role in the period’s conception of development. This fall she

begins an appointment as an A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and

Humanistic

Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[165.123.34.86] Project MUSE (2024-10-20 22:40 GMT) University Of Pennsylvania Libraries

RUSKIN’S DUST

465

SPRING 2016

exchange of dead matter in a social economy, as epitomized by the

protagonist’s inheritance of giant mounds of dust. This essay brings

these two texts together through a sustained study of the chemistry

of decomposition that informs Ruskin’s ethical system and, as we shall

see, Dickens’s social economy.

In his conception of dust as elemental particles, Ruskin asks us to

imagine crystals not only as unyielding stones, but also as dynamic sys-

tems that move through states of dissolution and decay, solution and

confluence.

In “Form Things: Looking at Genre Through Victorian

Diamonds,” Stefanie Markovits finds in the crystalline diamond a

unique test case for an analysis of “form” and “thing,” as the diamond’s

material structure encompasses both lyrical compression and nar-

rative duration. Following the elements of crystallization through

periods of disintegration and recombination, this essay explores the

crystal’s long geo-narrative in order to develop a conception of form

that can account for the shaping power of subtraction, dissolution,

and latent repose. Namely, this essay envisions diamonds as dust—as

amorphous slurries of carbon molecules—so as to consider specific

shapes and forms, patterns and structures, as the products of an envi-

ronmental dynamism that draws the not-yet-formed and the recently

un-formed into new combinations and arrangements.

Tracing the connection between dust and form in the Victorian

era, I place Ruskin’s scientific writings on decomposition’s chemis-

try in dialogue with contemporary debates about inorganic matter’s

self-formation.

In the 1860s, contentious debates erupted over the

status of the

Foraminifera

, an animal confused with a mineral, and the

Eozoön Canadense

, a mineral mistaken for an animal. These two cases

reveal that Ruskin was not alone in locating formative power in rocks;

such scientific disputes were part of a larger cultural debate about the

persistence of form in a world of molecular flux. I therefore turn to

the mid-century revival of Lucretian atomism as an index to Victorian

attitudes toward molecular science’s ascent and, thus, toward the prob-

lem of form as it became increasingly pixelated, fluid, and unstable.

Ultimately, the turn to contemporary science reveals that, while

surprisingly conversant with the science of his day, Ruskin outstrips

his contemporaries in revealing the aesthetic and ethical implica-

tions of decay—a topos which many Victorians and Victorianists

take to be the terrain of moral corruption or immoral fascination.

Nevertheless, I argue that an examination of the scientific study of

466

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

decay produces a new framework for understanding the ethical value

of dissolution—a reappraisal of forms of unwilled undoing that chal-

lenge the idea that ethics must be understood in terms of will or moral

energy.

Attending to decay’s ceaseless agitations,

The Ethics of the Dust

chronicles the “earth-agonies” of geomorphic decay (331), claiming

that it is only through the earth’s “torture and grieving” (329) that the

dust “finds in its weakness the first rudiments of a perfect strength”

(358). In lieu of moral action, dust awaits the recombinant affinities

that will transform grief into resplendent form.

In this way, dust not only serves a moral purpose but also takes on

a socio-political dimension: the promise of mineralogical renewal

assuages fears about resource depletion. Decay’s recycling of elemen-

tal matter provides Ruskin with proof of nature’s provision against

exhaustion. Matter is not destroyed. It is recombined. Dust holds out

the slim hope that the earth’s scant supply of resources can be renewed.

I say slim because Ruskin’s belief in the regenerative power of dust

was short-lived—a brief burst of enthusiasm in the 1860s, bracketed

on either side by skepticism and despair. Nevertheless, Ruskin’s dust

flickers into form at a key moment in the history of science and liter-

ature, revealing the Victorians’ desire to reassess their relationship to

what is least—but, hopefully, not lost.

At the nexus of these debates about form and futurity is the fig-

ure of the young girl. Through its constant personification of crystals

and petrification of girls,

The Ethics of the Dust

genders dust’s endless

rearrangement of matter. Signifying inorganic matter’s feminized

capacity for “infinitude of change” (311), the young girl becomes the

vehicle for Ruskin’s vision of geochemical renewal and sociopolitical

regeneration. Taking carbon’s ability to manifest as diamonds, graph-

ite, and coal as a prime instance of dust’s “infinitude of change,” this

essay moves from Ruskin to Dickens as it tracks the affinities between

the figure of the young girl and Britain’s “black diamonds” (“Black”

246). The essay closes with a meditation on the gender of changeful-

ness as it examines mid-century debates about resource depletion by

looking at Dickens’s

Our Mutual Friend

and Lizzie Hexam’s unique

relationship to that precious chemical agent: coal.

I. Girl-Dust

At the beginning of the second lecture, the Old Lecturer estab-

lishes the central conceit of

The Ethics of the Dust

: girls are “dust,” and

RUSKIN’S DUST

467

SPRING 2016

dust represents inorganic matter’s formative power.

The lecture

opens with a lesson drawn from life. The girls have just run in from

the garden, jostling each other in the hallway, jockeying for position,

and eventually settling into their proper places. According to the min-

eralogist, when they sat in their “orderly rows,” they became “crystal-

line” (221). Each schoolgirl, however,

an atom: the girls’ movement

from “a state of solution” to “gradual confluence” is explained by

molecular attraction. The girls are “arranged by atomic forces” (221).

Musing on the atom’s power for self-organization, the Old Lecturer

reconsiders his choice of diction: “I will not call you atoms any more.

May I call you—let me see—‘primary molecules’? (

General dissent indi-

cated in subdued but decisive murmurs

.) No! not even, in familiar Saxon,

‘dust’?” (222).

Dust was a freighted word for Ruskin and his Victorian audi-

ence. Kate Flint has shown that dust occupied an ambivalent place

in Victorian culture, suggesting ideas about disease, hygiene, class,

waste reclamation, and atmospheric effects (47). Intensifying its neg-

ative cultural associations, Ruskin’s Evangelical faith endowed dust

with a gloomy significance: dust is proof of humanity’s corruption

and God’s punishment as pronounced in Genesis 3:19. Even after

his 1858 “unconversion,” the Biblical formulation of “dust to dust”

continued to give Ruskin his essential coordinates: dust describes

the fate of material existence (decay) and the form that fate takes

(the molecular).

Although the Old Lecturer calls the girls “dust” as

a “familiar” substitute for “primary molecules,” dust is more than a

mere synonym for other, equally serviceable terms. Dust taps into a

wellspring of unstable cultural, social, and religious significations

that complicates the text’s apparent investment in purity as an eth-

ical objective. It is, after all,

The Ethics of the Dust,

not

The Ethics of

Crystalline Purity.

Indeed, the text weds its “ethics” to the dust when

the Old Lecturer commands the girls to “always behave at least as

well as dust” (222).

Despite critical attempts to read the girls as occupying a state of

absolute purity, the text makes a vivid and voyeuristic exhibition of

the girls’ decay when the Old Lecturer asks the girls to imagine what it

would be like to have transparent skin:

L. It would not at all be good for you, for instance,

whenever you were washing

your faces, and braiding your hair,

to be thinking of the shapes of the jawbones,

and of the cartilage

of the nose, and of the jagged sutures of the scalp?

(Resolutely whispered “No’s.”)

468

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

L. Still less, to see through a clear glass the daily processes

of nourishment and

decay?

(No.)

L. Still less, if instead of merely inferior and preparatory

conditions of structure,

as in the skeleton,—or inferior

offices of structure, as in operations of life and

death,—there

were actual disease in the body; ghastly and dreadful. (271–72)

Stripping the flesh from the girls’ pretty faces, the passage exposes

“the shapes of the jawbones,” “the cartilage of the nose,” and “the jag-

ged sutures of the scalp.” In exposing their skulls—the archetypal sym-

bol of death and the consummate

memento mori

—the passage, at first,

makes the usual connection between death and decay. But the passage

also exhibits the girls’ internal organs—those “offices” of digestion,

respiration, and circulation that aid in “the daily processes

of nour-

ishment and decay.” In other words, the passage disrupts the notion

that decay is something that happens to the body only after it dies.

Decay is with us every step of the way. It is a “daily” process, as much an

“operation” of life as of death. In this way, the girls’ status as “dust” sig-

nifies the fact that molecular organization cannot be separated from

processes that are simultaneously vital

and

moribund.

Because the girls embody the text’s project of self-formation,

the biochemical flux of their bodies has immediate implications

for

the

ethical assumption that triangulates the good, the beautiful,

and the formed. Ostensibly, the text is committed to precisely this tri-

angulation, in which crystallization exemplifies the beauty and virtue

of formation. Here, this constellation breaks down. Beautiful form

does not just hide ugly instabilities. Beautiful form derives its struc-

ture from processes that are subtractive and negative. As seen in the

concurrent processes of absorption and excretion, formation entails

contemporaneous making

and

unmaking. Hence, the command to

“behave at least as well as dust” implies more than to “get into order.” It

intimates the ethical value of the erosive unmaking that precedes and

accompanies the act of making.

II. Elementary Ethics

While the principle of molecular attraction endows dust with a

virtuous capacity for attachment and orderliness, the ethical import

of dust’s “bonds of affection” actually lies in the dissevering of those

bonds. Such dissevering not only generates the raw stuff from which

[165.123.34.86] Project MUSE (2024-10-20 22:40 GMT) University Of Pennsylvania Libraries

RUSKIN’S DUST

469

SPRING 2016

crystalline form emerges but also evinces the fortitude of that for-

mation (222). By tracing the influence of Justus von Liebig’s organic

chemistry on Ruskin’s conception of dust, I show that Ruskin’s knowl-

edge of decomposition’s chemistry elucidates his attribution of eth-

ical value to the process of dissolution. Several letters, along with

an accompanying “Essay on the Fall,” written in 1843 and addressed

to Reverend Edward Clayton, display Ruskin’s early knowledge of

decay’s chemistry. As Mark Frost demonstrates, these little-known let-

ters establish Ruskin’s embrace of dynamic processes, challenging the

critical history that views Ruskin’s science as a descriptive taxonomy

derived from a typological view of nature.

While Frost reveals the

influence of Charles Lyell’s geology and Georges Cuvier’s compara-

tive anatomy on Ruskin’s “dynamic materiality,” he virtually passes

over Ruskin’s use of Liebig’s chemistry.

Drawing upon Liebig’s research on decay and agricultural pro-

ductivity, Ruskin’s “Essay on the Fall” argues for death’s prelapsarian

existence, claiming that decay releases dead matter’s chemical poten-

tial into a system of complex exchanges that replenish food supplies.

Figured as an economy, inorganic chemicals circulate and trade with

other chemicals. Take, for example, the case of ammonia. When ani-

mal bodies decompose, ammonia is released into the atmosphere,

where it combines with “carbonic acid,” which is then “dissolved into

rain water and presented in this form to the root of the plant” (482).

But the release of carbonic acid requires a previous chemical interac-

tion: “

are machines for turning carbon and oxygen into carbonic

acid; the plant is a machine for turning carbonic acid into carbon and

oxygen.” In the economy of decomposition in which “the inorganic

constituents of the earth are left in a state of perpetual circulation

from death to life, and

vice versa,

” plant and animal life are held in bal-

ance by the ceaseless rearrangement of inorganic matter (483).

Crucially for

The Ethics of the Dust

, in Ruskin’s treatise on mountain

geology in

Modern Painters

(1856) he locates the same chemical poten-

tial in rocks as he does in plants and animals. Crystalline rocks are “a

kind of storehouse” (136). When these stones are “ground down into

impalpable dust” (157), their cache of “sandstone and clay, together

with potash, magnesia, and the metals of iron and manganese” is

released and “the plants and animals which require them [are] sus-

tained in health” (136). Like the “perpetual circulation” of inorganic

matter in “Essay on the Fall,” the friable mountain enters into a system

470

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

of “perpetual renovation.” “Cast down in sheets of massy rock,” moun-

tains undergo violent spasms of mass wasting. Aqueous erosion then

pulverizes and distributes the crushed rocks: “each filtering thread

of summer rain” carries with it an allotted portion of the substances

“necessary for the nourishment of plants” (125).

Modern Painters

thus

brings the geomorphic agencies of slope movement and erosion to

bear on Ruskin’s earlier articulation of “perpetual circulation.”

The Ethics of the Dust

brings decay’s agencies to fruition. When

Mary asks, “what is [Tourmaline] made of” (325), the Old Lecturer

responds: “there’s always flint, and clay, and magnesia in it; and the

black is iron .

. and there’s boracic acid .

. potash, and soda” (325–26).

Crystals are made of dust: crystallization begins when the rock’s raw

materials are “slowly wrung, or ground to pieces,” releasing the chem-

ical potential of decomposed matter (328). From the fragments of

pulverized dust, crystals slowly emerge:

The soft white sediments of the sea

draw themselves, in process of time, into

smooth knots of

sphered symmetry.

. The dark drift of the inland river, or stag-

nant slime of

inland pool and lake, divides, or resolves itself as it dries, into

lay-

ers of its several elements; slowly purifying each by the

patient withdrawal of it

from the anarchy of the mass in which it

was mingled. Contracted by increasing

drought, till it must

shatter into fragments, it infuses continually a finer ichor

into the

opening veins, and finds in its weakness the first rudiments of a

perfect

strength. Rent at last, rock from rock, nay, atom from

atom, and tormented in lam-

bent fire, it knits, through the fusion,

the fibres of a perennial endurance. (358)

At first, the passage plots an uncomplicated movement from decay

to formation. Pulverized oceanic remains coalesce into “knots of

sphered symmetry.” “Stagnant slime” resolves into elemental purity.

But this movement from decay to formation is overturned in the next

sentence when these forms suddenly “shatter into fragments” and

are “rent at last, rock from rock, nay, atom from atom.” In the perpet-

ual circulation of matter, the broken dust “infuses

continually

” (my

emphasis). As Anne-Julia Zwierlein argues, Ruskin presents crystal-

line formation as “alternately assimilating and repelling materials”

(321). Like the girls’ decaying-growing bodies, crystals are simulta-

neously undergoing processes that are expulsive and incorporative.

Indeed, the “ichor” which pours into the “opening veins” can either

signify a “bloodlike fluid that flows through the veins of the gods”

or a “watery, fetid discharge from a wound” (“Ichor”). Both meanings

are operative. The Old Lecturer insists that the “crystalline power

RUSKIN’S DUST

471

SPRING 2016

principally exerts itself” in the earth’s wounds: “wherever the earth

is torn, it heals and binds; nay, the torture and grieving of the earth

seem necessary to bring out its full energy” (329). While

The Ethics of

the Dust

proffers crystallization as a model of virtuous self-formation,

it exposes the “pure” self’s enmeshment in processes that are fetid and

suppurative and, therefore, curative and shaping.

Viewed through the lens of decay’s chemistry, dust’s ethics comes

into focus. Ceaselessly undergoing geomorphic decay, dust with-

stands the “torture and grieving” of dissolution, and thereby models

the patient endurance of rocks. But geological torture is only one

half of the equation. Although decay shreds and grinds the earth, its

dissevered atoms recombine to produce exquisite crystalline forma-

tions, and, thus, through chemical recombination, dust “finds in its

weakness the first rudiments of a perfect strength.” Ultimately, dust’s

ethical value inheres in matter’s susceptibility—its vulnerability to

the erosive effects of wind and water; to the sudden and unexpected

violence of landslides; and to the subtle, insidious effects of contam-

ination—since this “weakness” becomes the “rudiment,” literally the

unwrought element, that defines its strength. To behave as well as the

dust is, thus, to emulate the patient suffering of the elements of the

earth, which “must passively wait the appointed time of their repose,

or their restoration” (360).

Although Ruskin tries to counterbalance dust’s passivity with

the vigor of human action, his call for human vitality is subverted

by his blurred intermingling of personified stones and petrified

girls. Besides the archetypal “wicked” and “good” crystals, the text

moralizes on “indulged crystals” (334), “fat crystals” (335), “converted

crystals” (334), “foolish crystals,” “impatient crystals” (335), and, sig-

nificantly, “little child crystals put to school like school-girls” (334). As

Barbara Johnson suggests, it is a text that finds “the confusion” of girls

turning to stones and stones coming to life “attractive” (20). Analyzing

this attraction, Catherine Robson argues that the crystalline girl is not

only “an object of desire” but also the figure for Ruskin’s “lost self of

childhood” (14). Indisputably, erotic desire inflects the depiction of

the schoolgirls, who give the Old Lecturer kisses, crawl into his lap,

and engage in coy coquetry.

But Ruskin’s identification with the

crystalline girl shades into another erotic impulse: a desire to become

stone, to experience the petrification that redeems dissolution.

It is

this desire for passive restoration that undermines the Old Lecturer’s

472

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

attempt to define crystalline virtue through its vitality, and leads him

to the conclusion that ethical value inheres in the dust’s “weakness.”

Hence, when it comes to the gender politics of vulnerability, Ruskin’s

sympathy for the rocks challenges our critical reception of his notori-

ous chivalry. I think we can approach Ruskin’s idealization of female

self-sacrifice in “Of Queens’ Gardens” (1865)—or, closer to our sed-

imentary terrain, his idolization of the dust of female perseverance

The Cestus of Aglaia

(1865–66) as “Patience .

. the submission to the

eternal laws of Pain and Time, and acceptance of them as inevitable,

smiling at the grief” (86)—as deflection or misdirection from his mas-

culine identification with passivity.

Ruskin’s respect for the grieving

earth intimates a desire to validate forms of passive expectancy and

silent suffering that did not easily square with Victorian notions of

manly vigor.

So, while Ruskin tries to preserve humanity’s “nobler,” more

vigorous life, his identification with stoniness leaves us with a frail

sphere of action: Ruskin calls for “the activity of our hope [and] our

labour, for the time when the Dust of the generations of men shall be

confirmed for the foundations of the gates of the city of God” (360).

Modeled upon the ethics of dust’s “repose,” the text transfers ethical

action to the realm of affect, while it figures seemingly active labor

as a species of apocalyptic waiting. In the erotic confusion of animate

stones and inanimate girls, dust’s passive suffering joins together the

“restoration” of geochemical recombination with that of divine res-

urrection. In this way, girl-dust merges the erotics of objectification

with the ethics of passive suffering through dust’s unwrought ele-

mental potential.

III. Animal or Mineral?

The possibility that dead matter possesses life comes to a head

when Dora declares that the Old Lecturer “talks as if the crystals were

alive” (340). He responds that “things are not either wholly alive, or

wholly dead. They are more or less alive” (346). The Old Lecturer’s

belief in a spectrum of liveliness echoes the tenets of vitalism, the idea

that “life” inheres in a superadded principle that cannot be reduced

to physical and chemical forces.

While the object of vitalistic study

is, by definition, organic, Ruskin’s extension of vitality to crystals

reflects the “flexible” location of life in the Victorian period, in which

[165.123.34.86] Project MUSE (2024-10-20 22:40 GMT) University Of Pennsylvania Libraries

RUSKIN’S DUST

473

SPRING 2016

life could be “latent in the whole of inorganic, or inanimate, matter”

(Gallagher and Greenblatt 189). Although Denise Gigante argues that

the rise of cell theory in the 1830s “killed off” living form, organicism

survived cell theory’s compartmentalization of life into semi-auton-

omous citadels (35).

Similarly, vitalism survived Friedrich Wöhler’s

artificial synthesis of urea in 1828.

Both notions persisted well into

the latter half of the nineteenth century. This is especially true in

Britain, where T. H. Huxley, the Victorian scientist most associated

with scientific materialism, criticized German cell theory and pro-

moted an epigenetic view of the organism derived from Caspar

Friedrich Wolff’s vitalistic

Theory of Generation

(1759).

But, along vitalism’s newly broadened frontier, it became increas-

ingly difficult to distinguish between organic and inorganic forms.

While the watchword for organic life was “self-formation,” the presence

or absence of form, as perceived under the microscope, could not always

adjudicate between animate life and inanimate matter.

While expand-

ing the domain of the visible, microscopic science blurred the boundary

between organic and inorganic since, as John Tyndall notes, it brought

“into view a world of life formed of individuals so minute—so close

as it seemed to the ultimate particles of matter—as to suggest an easy

passage from atoms to organisms” (“Spontaneous” 23).

Foraminifera

are single-celled animals with jellylike bodies that “suggested an easy

passage” to mud.

Eozoön Canadense

is a rock with reticulated tubular

formations that was mistaken for an organism. If the “vital” power of

self-formation is at stake in

The Ethics of the Dust

, these two cases reveal

that self-formation was no longer the exclusive domain of the living.

Dust and its inorganic fellows also possessed the power of form.

In 1863, a review of William Carpenter’s

Introduction to the Study

of the Foraminifera

(1862) sparked a rapid-fire exchange of articles in

the

Athenaeum

between two prestigious Victorian scientists: Richard

Owen and Charles Darwin.

Carpenter, an expert in invertebrate

zoology and physiology, describes the

Foraminifera

as “a little particle

of apparently homogeneous jelly” capable of “laying hold of its food

without members, swallowing it without a mouth, digesting it with-

out a stomach, [and] moving from place to place without muscles”

(vii–viii). In his review of 28 March 1863, Owen seizes upon these blobs

of jelly to put forth his own belief that “the exuviations, ejections,

and decay of organisms” provide the “raw materials” for “the ooze

or mud” which manifests “the vital form of force” (417). In an angry

474

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

retort published on 25 April 1863, Darwin censures Owen for conflat-

ing living jelly with dead slime: “a mass of mud with matter decaying

and undergoing complex chemical changes is a fine hiding place

for obscurity of ideas” (“Doctrine” 554). But Owen was not the only

Victorian scientist who speculated upon slime’s formative potential.

In 1868, T. H.

Huxley championed

Bathybius haeckelii

as providing

the link between inorganic and organic matter.

In samples of what

proved to be nothing more than deep-sea mud, Huxley observed

“granule-heaps” embedded in a “transparent gelatinous matter”

(“On Some” 210). He proposed that this “colourless and structureless

matrix” (205) represented “masses of protoplasm” which “very nearly”

resembled the Urschleim proposed by Ernst Haeckel (210).

Both Owen and Huxley identified a formal potential in formless

goo. For Owen, rotting slime provides the raw materials for the “mani-

festation” and “modification” of atomic form (417). Similarly, Huxley’s

“matrix,” derived etymologically from “womb,” conveys the latency of

formlessness to give birth to form. Even Darwin speculated upon the

generative potential of inorganic matter. While in the article Darwin

ridicules the idea that inorganic matter could produce a living crea-

ture, several years later in his private correspondence he imagines a

“warm little pond” where “all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts,

light, heat, electricity etc.” interact such that “a protein compound [is]

chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes”

(“Letter” 202). In the 1860s, the study of microorganisms decoupled

life from form and located a powerful formative drive in living jelly

and

dead ooze. In this light, the suppurative “ichor” of Ruskin’s crys-

tals was yet another strangely vital substance that revealed the organ-

ic-inorganic borderland to be a murky shadowland populated by

amorphous jelly, vital slime, womblike ooze, and incubating ponds.

While

Foraminifera

exposes the problematic formlessness of

organic structure, the

Eozoön Canadense

’s intricate inorganic forma-

tion offers a convenient counterpoint. In 1864, John William Dawson

and William Logan announced to the Bath meeting of the British

Association for the Advancement of Science that they had discov-

ered, in fossil beds of Laurentian limestone, the first signs of life on

earth with the

Eozoön Canadense

, or the “dawn animal of Canada.” The

London-based scientific establishment quickly embraced their dis-

covery. Charles Lyell concluded his Presidential Address at Bath with

glowing remarks about this discovery and confirmed Dawson’s view

that the Laurentian limestone contained “organic remains” (lxxv). In

RUSKIN’S DUST

475

SPRING 2016

the 1866 edition of the

Origin of Species

, Darwin describes the discov-

ery of the

Eozoön

and concludes that “it is impossible to feel any doubt

regarding its organic nature” (371). Called upon to verify Dawson

and Logan’s findings, Carpenter confirmed their assessment that

the

Eozoön Canadense

was a “gigantic

Foraminifera

” (“Additional” 66).

Meanwhile, William King and Thomas Rowney, professors of geol-

ogy and chemistry at Queen’s College, Galway, who attended the

Bath meeting, disputed Dawson’s claim that the

Eozoön

was fossilized

organic remains. They insisted that the specimens in question were

“solely and purely of crystalline origin” (“On the So-Called” 215).

The debate over the status of the

Eozoön

hinged on the inter-

pretation of microscopic tubules found in several limestone speci-

mens. Describing the tubes, Dawson seized on organicism’s tropes of

elegance and complexity: his prose highlights the branching intri-

cacies of “numerous minute tubuli,” arranged “in bundles of great

beauty and complexity, diverging in sheaf-like forms, and in their

finer extension anastomosing so as to form a network” (“On the

Structure” 51). Meanwhile, veins of carbonate of lime, “in their

entire

absence of structures

other than crystalline, present a striking contrast

to the fossil” (52). King and Rowney, however, claimed that, “every

one of the structures diagnosed for

Eozoön Canadense

by Dawson and

Carpenter is purely of inorganic origin” (“On

Eozoön

” 508). They

argued that the “chamber casts” are “simply granules of serpentine”;

that the “intermediate skeleton” is a “calcareous matrix”; that the

canal system is “nothing more than forms of metaxite”; and that the

“nummuline layer” is “a film of chrysotile” (508). Serpentine, metax-

ite, and chrysotile are minerals. According to King and Rowney, the

Eozoön

was a rock.

How could minerals create such complex organic structures?

King and Rowney theorized that the

Eozoön

’s structure could be

explained by two mineralogical phenomena: allomorphism and

pseudomorphism. Allomorphism (

allo

– “other” +

morphe–

“form”)

describes how the same chemical composition can manifest in differ-

ent crystalline forms. Serpentine’s ability to morph into metaxite and

chrysotile explained the

Eozoön

’s “organic” tubular formations. But

allomorphism could not account for the presence of the “calcareous

matrix.” King and Rowney proposed that “the replacing carbonate .

is likewise nothing more than a pseudomorph after serpentine” (530–

31). A pseudomorph is a mineral with a “false” form resulting from a

substitution process in which one mineral replaces another. In this

476

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

case, calcium carbonate replaced the serpentine, producing a form

that was doubly “false”: the calcite mimics the form of the serpentine,

and it also mimics the “organic” skeletal form of

Foraminifera

The

Eozoön

debate was not settled swiftly or politely. “The contro-

versy outlived all of the original participants,” writes Charles O’Brien,

“and the decorum lasted only a few months” (209). Attacks from both

sides became increasingly personal and nasty. Dawson accused King

and Rowney of “defective observation—in failing to distinguish in

the Canadian limestones themselves, between organic and crystalline

forms” (“On New” 252). But if the protracted debate over the

Eozoön

proves anything, it is the difficulty of distinguishing “between organic

and crystalline form.” Scientists from Britain, Europe, and the United

States bickered for over fifty years about the structure of branching

tubes and canals that were deemed organic by some and crystalline by

others. In the end, King and Rowney were right. The

EozoönCanadense

was not “the dawn animal.” It was a rock—a gorgeous, lifelike crystal-

line formation.

As the cases of

Foraminifera

and

Eozoön

illustrate, the Old

Lecturer has good reason for giving Dora an ambiguous answer to

her query about crystals’ vitality. In the 1860s, it was not always clear

whether something was dead or alive. While living jelly was virtu-

ally bereft of the differentiation necessary to lay claim to the title of

organ-ism, crystalline rocks branched into beautiful reticulations that

vibrantly suggested the living powers of self-formation. With its min-

eralogical ability to mimic organic structures, the

Eozoön

provides a

striking scientific precedent for Ruskin’s girl-dust analogy, especially

since dust makes this mimicry possible. Allomorphism and pseudo-

morphism owe their formal transformations to decay: continuous dis-

solution affords continuous recombination and, thus, constitutes the

capacity for endless reformation. As I will discuss below, the Victorian

public followed the developments of microscopic science with min-

gled awe and trepidation as form became increasingly mutable and

unstable.

IV. Lucretius’s Falling Forms

While advances in molecular science worked to establish the for-

mative power of inorganic matter, this power increasingly appeared

a little promiscuous. Inorganic matter could enter into endless

[165.123.34.86] Project MUSE (2024-10-20 22:40 GMT) University Of Pennsylvania Libraries

RUSKIN’S DUST

477

SPRING 2016

rearrangements—shifting, kaleidoscopically, into many forms. The

title of Lindley Kemp’s 1855 treatise on modern chemistry,

The Phasis

of Matter

, summarizes this idea. While crediting Liebig for the idea’s

inception, Kemp declares that “what is now understood by chemis-

try” depends upon “the ascertained fact” that all bodies “consist of a

variety of elements which, by continually changing their combina-

tion, constitute all the substances cognisable to our senses, living or

dead” (10). Thus far, I have considered individual cases of inorganic

self-formation. Ruskin’s dust, Owen’s slime, King and Rowney’s min-

erals: these substances reveal inorganic matter’s ability to move and

morph into seemingly vital forms. But these individual cases were part

of a larger cultural debate about the persistence of form in a world of

molecular flux, and this debate came to a head with the mid-century

revival of Lucretian atomism.

Lucretius’s epic poem,

De Rerum Natura

(c. 55 BCE), describes

Epicurus’s atomic theory, which posits that the world is composed of

atoms that fall through a void; their falling occasions chance collisions

that bring atoms together; and these atomic combinations explain the

forms of the world. The world of

De Rerum Natura

is one of constant

mutability. Atoms are continually coming together and drifting apart.

Everything is perishable except the atoms, which are indestructible

and eternal. This, I think, should sound familiar. With the advances of

molecular science in the nineteenth century,

De Rerum Natura

gained

credence as more than a poetic description of an ancient philosophy;

it was also seen as an accurate description of scientific principles.

One Victorian reviewer enthusiastically remarked that, “the first two

books of the

De Rerum Natura

read almost like a modern treatise on

the atomic and kinetic theories of matter!” (Adams 190). The poet and

literary critic J. A. Symonds claimed that “modern theories of evolu-

tion and of molecular structure may be stated in language which .

. is

singularly like that of Lucretius” (58).

More specifically, the Lucretian principle that “nothing is ever

annihilated, but simply dissolved into its first bodies” speaks directly to

the “perpetual circulation” of inorganic matter that this essay has been

tracing (Jenkin 213). In his article for the

Gentleman’s Magazine

(1894), E.

W. Adams refers to this principle as “a statement which modern chem-

istry has done so much to illustrate” (191), since it confirms Lucretius’s

view “that the atoms can accomplish a vast deal by a mere change of

arrangement” (192). Anticipating Liebig’s findings, Lucretian atomism

478

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

maintained that a body resolved “into its constituent elements” is

reformed “into fresh compounds” such that “the death of the one

combination is the birth of a new order of things, the case being one,

not of annihilation, but of transformation” (191).

While Adams takes

a sanguine view of this incessant change, other Victorians were ruffled

by this world of ceaseless turmoil. One Victorian reviewer summarizes

Lucretian atomic theory as “one vast simultaneous shuffle” (Benn

321). Another reviewer emphasizes the “fearful shocks” and “the strain

of eternal combinations from atoms to things, and dissolution from

things back to atoms” (Masson, “The Atomic” 344). More prosaically,

Fleeming Jenkin describes “the great wear and tear” of material exis-

tence (215). In Tyndall’s lyrical description, the Lucretian atom stands

“amid the wreck of composite matter” (“Atoms” 30).

While Tyndall takes solace in the indestructability of the atom,

other Victorians experienced the ascent of molecular science as a

tumultuous upheaval. Writing about Lucretius in 1882, John Masson

reflects upon the recent past as a time when people “felt old truths

almost slipping from beneath their feet and, along with this, a unique

sensation of universal unsteadiness and falling like that of men in an

earthquake, when the solid earth which they have known all their lives,

and which has ever been firm under their step, even the earth begins to

be unsteady and shake under them” (“Lucretius” 333). While Masson’s

“earthquake” symbolizes the psychological disturbance inflicted by

scientific materialism, his depiction of the earth as a slippery, shifting

substratum literalizes the atomism he critiques. Masson’s prose mani-

fests the “falling” flux of Lucretian atomism. This contentious revival

of Lucretian monism provides us with an index to Victorian attitudes

toward the advancement of molecular science. While Tyndall and

his scientific brethren marveled at the indefatigable might of the

tiny atom, the Victorian public reeled as they tried to get their bear-

ings amid the “shuffle,” “shock,” and “strain” of molecular instability.

This, then, is the world of Victorian dust. Form atomized into quaking

drifts. Humans scrambling without traction. Girls and dust, alike, fall-

ing in a void.

RUSKIN’S DUST

479

SPRING 2016

V. A Fragile Hope

While the ascent of molecular science revealed form’s troubling

instability, this same molecular flux held out the promise of regen-

eration. Before turning to the gendering of dust’s formal mutability,

I want to stress that the stakes for Ruskin’s aesthetic and ethical recla-

mation of decay are nothing less than the expenditure of planetary

resources and the annihilation of the human species—stakes that

shape Dickens’s representation of Lizzie Hexham and her coal-in-

spired narratives in

Our Mutual Friend

. In

Modern Painters

, Ruskin

was convinced that the constant process of decomposition would lead

to planetary ruin:

For us the intelligible and substantial fact is that the earth has been brought, by

forces we know not of, into a form fitted for our habitation: on that form a gradual,

but destructive, change is continually taking place, and the course of that change

points clearly to a period when it will no more be fitted for the dwelling-place of

men. (179)

While Ruskin acknowledges that other geologists have attempted “to

prove that destruction and renovation are continually proceeding

simultaneously in mountains as well as in organic creatures” (177), he

“cannot assent to such a conclusion” (178). Despite his belief in moun-

tain erosion’s “perpetual renovation” of the soil, Ruskin could not

imagine the renovation of the mountains themselves.

However, in the 1860s Ruskin began to imagine the redemption of

these losses. Specifically, he reversed his previous opinion that “no ret-

rospection can raise [the mountains] out of their ruins” (

Modern

210).

In his article “On the Forms of the Stratified Alps of Savoy,” published

in the

Geologist

in 1863, Ruskin concludes with an optimistic spec-

ulation: “immeasurable periods of time would be required to wear

these [Alps] away; and to all appearances,

during

the process of their

destruction, others were rising to take their place, and forms of per-

haps far more nobly organized mountain would witness the collateral

progress of humanity” (11). Published two years before

The Ethics of

the Dust

, Ruskin’s contribution to the

Geologist

foregrounds the rev-

olution in his thinking about decay’s temporality: formation occurs

“during” the process of decay. In

The Ethics of the Dust

, Ruskin pursues

this logic, locating the mechanism for the simultaneity of decay and

formation in the geochemistry of dust:

480

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

The great laws which never fail, and to which all change is subordinate, appear such

as to accomplish a gradual advance to lovelier order, and more calmly, yet more

deeply, animated Rest. Nor has this conviction ever fastened itself upon me more dis-

tinctly, than during my endeavor to trace the laws which govern the lowly framework

of the dust. (357)

By applying the chemical principles he learned from the economy of

decomposition, Ruskin reconciles the losses of environmental deg-

radation through the commensuration of “the lowly dust.” Decay’s

recycling of elemental matter provides Ruskin with proof that

decomposition leads to re-composition—that the loss of form is not

absolute, and form will come again.

But Ruskin’s vision of planetary regeneration is short-lived. Ten

years later, in

Deucalion

(1875–83), Ruskin jettisons principles founda-

tional to his earlier geological writings and reverts to his view of an

irremediably decaying earth. Confining himself to what is percep-

tible to the naked eye during the course of a human life,

Deucalion

refuses Lyell’s deep time and the geological principle of “denudation,”

or aqueous erosion.

Forgetting or suppressing his 1850s fieldwork in

which he attempted to calculate the rate of Mont Blanc’s denudation,

Ruskin supplants his belief in erosion’s regenerative potential with a

linear logic of decay.

Ruskin argues: “there are, broadly, three great

demonstrable periods of the Earth’s history. That in which it was crys-

tallized; that in which it was sculptured; and that in which it is being

unsculptured or deformed” (117). With illogical bravado, Ruskin

rejects deep time and denudation’s gradual processes, because he has

not, in his geologically long life, witnessed them.

Deucalion

, Ruskin’s personal geological record collapses into

geological view of the self. In this way, the authority derived from his

accretive collection of materials dovetails with his own senescence and

with the earth’s equivalent decrepitude. It is precisely this unbounded

identification of corrupted self, corrupted times, and corrupted

earth that produces the staggeringly cataclysmic tone of

The Storm

Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

(1884)

However,

Storm Cloud

stands

apart from Ruskin’s earlier work not because he apocalyptically blurs

human industries and natural economies, but rather because he can

no longer foresee the transformation of that admixture into a beauti-

ful, synthetic whole (162).

My point here is neither to call into doubt

the reality of industrial pollution, nor to question Ruskin’s meticu-

lous observation of that reality. Rather, by placing

Storm Cloud

in a

[165.123.34.86] Project MUSE (2024-10-20 22:40 GMT) University Of Pennsylvania Libraries

RUSKIN’S DUST

481

SPRING 2016

genealogy of Ruskin’s writings on geochemical decomposition, we

see that his dire pronouncements about industrial pollution coincide

with his schismatic rejection of modern geological principles and

his vision of the earth as

naturally

tending toward ruination. That is,

without the assurances of dust’s regenerative potential, Ruskin loses

his aesthetic and ethical foothold on the putrid and the corrupting.

Moreover, this genealogy reveals that Ruskin’s writings about dust

in the 1860s are fragilely poised between his youthful dismissal and

his aged refusal of decay’s formative potential. Their value lies in this

fragility—a fleeting flicker of hope held against the wreckage of the

world.

VI. Coal, Graphite, Diamonds

Whether the earth shall renew itself or fall into total ruination

was a question as pressing to the Victorians as it is to us. While else-

where in his oeuvre Ruskin squarely engages with Victorian Britain’s

economic reliance upon coal,

The Ethics of the Dust

explores neither

the rapacious rate of coal consumption nor its potential exhaustion.

Rather, coal appears in relation to the chemical properties under-

writing its mineralogical existence. As I have argued,

The Ethics of the

Dust

constructs a formal model based on dust’s infinite recombina-

tion. Routed through the girl-crystal analogy, the text’s formal ideal

is expressed by the girls, “who are crystalline in brightness, as well as

in caprice, charm infinitely, by infinitude of change” (311). Taking up

coal’s “infinitude of change,”

The Ethics of the Dust

represents coal in

relation to the principle of allotropy (the “other” forms an element can

take): carbon can manifest as coal, graphite, or diamonds. Accordingly,

this final section surveys mid-century coal debates from the perspec-

tive of mineralogical otherness. As we shall see, Ruskin and Dickens

gender coal’s geochemical history, such that debates about the future

of Britain’s coal-dependent economy affix to the figure of the young

girl and her allotropic possibilities.

For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, allotropy reveals matter’s one-

ness: “so water and flame, the diamond, the charcoal, and the man-

tling champagne are convoked and fraternized by the theory of the

chemist” (471). Even from the practical perspective of the

Library of

Useful Knowledge

, allotropy instills wonder: “that the diamond should

be made of the same material with coal .

. these surely are things to

482

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

excite the wonder of any reflecting mind” (Brougham 241). In

The

Ethics of the Dust,

wonderment attends carbon’s ability to “make itself”

into pointedly dissimilar forms:

L. Some say it was once a vegetable gum; it may have been charred wood; but what

one would like to know is, mainly, why charcoal should make itself into diamonds

in India, and only into black lead in Borrowdale.

SIBYL. Are they wholly the same, then?

L. There is a little iron mixed with our black lead; but nothing to hinder its crystal-

lization. Your pencils in fact are all pointed with formless diamonds, though they

would be HHH pencils to purpose, if it crystallised.

(219)

But wonder blends with disappointment: the Old Lecturer wants

to know why carbon “only” makes itself into lead in his native land.

Cheated of carbon’s “other” form, the Old Lecturer sounds a mel-

ancholic note when he tells the girls that their pencils are “pointed

with formless diamonds.” Since graphite is a legitimate form of

carbon, calling a pencil a “formless diamond” speaks to the felt loss

of form that attends dust’s kaleidoscopic rearrangement of ele-

mentary particles. Dust’s morphic ability to take on “other” forms

conjures a negative space, the empty outline of what is not—but

might have been—present. Given Ruskin’s investment in girls as

symbols of dust’s formative potential, I want to conclude this essay

with a meditation on the gender of changefulness. To do so, I turn

to another great Victorian text about dust, Dickens’s

Our Mutual

Friend

, in which the connection between gender and mineralogi-

cal change intersects more pointedly with the question of resource

depletion.

The plot of

Our Mutual Friend

revolves around the inheritance of

giant dust heaps. Like Ruskin’s dialogue,

Our Mutual Friend

explores

the transformative potential of dust, symbolically keyed to the novel’s

many resurrections, as characters die to be reborn into better lives. In

large part, the metamorphic quality of Dickens’s dust inheres in its sta-

tus as inherited wealth, through which it represents the power of dead

matter to circulate perpetually in an economy of scavengers, scam

artists, social climbers, and leeches—that is, an economy that exploits

the absolute fungibility of all matter and trades in dust as the true uni-

versal solvent. Dust thus comes to embody the abstract interchange-

ability of animate and inanimate matter so characteristic of Dickens’s

novels.

RUSKIN’S DUST

483

SPRING 2016

Critics have long noted Dickens’s habit of turning people into

things and things into people: John Bowen calls it a “key signature of

Dickens’ works” (207) and John Carey claims it is “the hallmark of his

imagination” (101). While critics have interpreted these transforma-

tions in psychoanalytic, economic, and, most recently, energetic terms,

inorganic matter’s transformative potential has been under-theo-

rized.

Rather than describing the taxonomic collapse of “person”

and “thing,” which often only reinscribes the taxonomic order it pur-

ports to overturn, chemistry can account for the amalgamations and

expulsions that merge matter into conjoined person-things. While

dust’s sinuous flux describes

Our Mutual Friend

’s world of abstract

interchangeability, it is, as Catherine Gallagher argues, a man’s world:

“only the men are capable of holding ‘Life in abeyance’ .

. Bella and

Lizzie have no such out-of-body possibilities, and hence they are

debarred from the process of releasing value and being released as

value, as pure vital potential” (116). Since Ruskin intimately connects

girls to the “vital potential” of dust, I want to consider how a chemical

reading of dust might change our view of the novel’s gendered econ-

omy of transformation.

While the female characters in

Our Mutual Friend

may not

undergo the rituals of drowning and rebirth endured by their male

counterparts, Lizzie’s kinship with coal links her to its transforma-

tive chemical potential. As Adelene Buckland argues, “Dickens often

based plots of fictional transformation on the fantastic metamor-

phoses embodied in the lump of coal itself” (n.p.).

Household Words

and

All the Year Round

featured many articles on coal and its transfor-

mations.

In “The True Story of a Coal Fire,” published in

Household

Words

in April 1850, a dissolute young man named Flashley is pro-

pelled through a fireplace to an “antediluvian forest” to witness its

transformation into coal (95); he is jammed into a modern mine to

observe its cramped working conditions; he boards a collier and

works as a cabin boy; he lands on a wharf and works as a coal-sifter;

and, in this manner, he travels the full circuit of coal’s history. Like

The

Ethics of the Dust

, “True Story” relies upon the perpetual circulation

of inorganic matter to enact its tale of self-formation. Just as all liv-

ing things “undergo a gradual transmutation into other bodies and

things of the most opposite kind,” the indolent Flashley transforms

484

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

into a toiling laborer (28). Specifically, Flashley learns to mimic coal’s

chemical potentiality:

Under the chemical process of ages .

. these huge ferns, these trunks, and stems,

and towering fabrics of trees, shall all crash down—sink deep into the earth with

all the rank enfolding mass of undergrowth—there to be jammed and mashed

up between beds of fiery stone and grit and clay, and covered with oozy mud and

sand .

. not rotting in vain, nor slumbering uselessly in darkness, but gradually,

age after age, undergoing transmutation by the alchemy of Nature, till verdure

becometh veriest blackness, and wood is changed to coal. (30)

Coal is given a similar, albeit briefer, chemical introduction in

Our

Mutual Friend

when Charley reminds Lizzie that coal contains “gas”

that is “coming out of a bit of a forest that’s been under the mud that

was under the water in the days of Noah’s Ark” (37). In both “True

Story” and

Our Mutual Friend

, coal represents decay’s transformative

potential. Thanks to “the chemical process of ages,” the superabun-

dant foliage of the geological past does not “rot in vain”: wood becomes

the coal that warms Lizzie’s impoverished hearth and fires her imagi-

nation. Gazing into a transmuted forest, Lizzie’s coal-narratives insert

her into this erstwhile male history of chemical transformation.

But Lizzie’s narratives also locate her at the center of debates

about coal’s depletion. In “True Story,” exhaustion will be forestalled

by exhaust: when coal is burned, the same gases that fed antediluvian

forests “are liberated” into the atmosphere, where they “form a portion

of those elements which are again to assist in the growth of forests”

(95). In Dickens’s journal, the coal-forest cycle repeats itself and futu-

rity is guaranteed a bright, warm existence. Not all Victorians shared

this optimistic assessment. By the 1860s, the “inexhaustible” coal-

fields had come up against the rapacious scale of human consump-

tion (“True Story” 30). Published in 1865, dust’s banner year, William

Stanley Jevons’s

The Coal Question

predicted that Britain had reached

peak coal production.

To write about coal in 1865 was to enter into a

debate about abundance and scarcity, resource renewal and depletion.

While Allen MacDuffie argues that

Our Mutual Friend

“stages a con-

flict” between cyclical renewal and an “entropy-centered economy” in

which waste represents “the end of transformation itself” (126), I think

Buckland is right in suggesting that Dickens refused to “countenance

either coal exhaustion [or] its economic consequences” (24). Amid

the panic, Dickens refused to relinquish coal’s transformative power.

[165.123.34.86] Project MUSE (2024-10-20 22:40 GMT) University Of Pennsylvania Libraries

RUSKIN’S DUST

485

SPRING 2016

Accordingly, Lizzie’s coal reflects fears about resource scarcity even as

it continues to materialize fantasies about renewal.

Like Ruskin’s pencils that shadow forth “formless diamonds,”

Lizzie’s coal conjures lost forms—antediluvian forests, layers of sedi-

mentation, the Deluge—in the negative. Reinforcing the connection

between chemical potentiality and empty space, Lizzie narrates pos-

sible futures by gazing at “the hollow down by the flare” (38). This

hollow is a world of narrative plenitude, or, as Charley styles it, “there

seems to be the deuce-and-all in the hollow down by the flare” (38).

The connection between the “hollow” and its infinitude would seem

to confirm Gallagher’s reading: Lizzie imagines transformations for

her brother, not herself. However, later in the novel Lizzie narrates

another tale in the hollow, imagining a lady who will love Eugene

Wrayburn and will announce her love with a curious phrase: “only

put me in that empty place” (344). The “empty place” ostensibly refers

to the vacuous Wrayburn. But as Lizzie narrates her tale, she ventril-

oquizes her longing to put herself in the “empty place” carved out

by the imaginary “lady rich and beautiful that [she] can never come

near” (344). In the capacious fullness of the “empty place,” Lizzie taps

into the pure potential of dust’s changefulness.

Even though the text does not convert Lizzie into coal (or dia-

monds), Lizzie’s affinity with coal gives her access to the “empty place”

that allows her to imagine her allotropic other. She accesses Gallagher’s

“out-of-body” possibility. But, like the Old Lecturer’s melancholic

attachment to the pencil’s absent other, Lizzie’s narrative internalizes

her attachment to that which she can “never come near.” That is, dust

creates a formal model that can only ever be a melancholic fetishi-

zation. When form echoes all the forms it ever was and bespeaks all

those it could still be, our attachment to form can only be partial, a

fragment that substitutes for an overabundant whole. That the fig-

ure for the melancholic fetishization of form should be the young

girl seems predictably to confirm the commodification of the female

body. And yet the melancholia that attends Lizzie’s coal and Ruskin’s

graphite is less a sexualized longing and more an environmental

yearning for abundance in a world of finite scarcity. Indeed, both

Our

Mutual Friend

and

The Ethics of the Dust

enact fantasies wherein scant

resources are limitlessly recycled and reborn. Girl-dust represents

Victorian dreams of resource plenitude, fueling sociopolitical desires

486

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

for rebirth, or that the “Dust of generations of men” will lay the “foun-

dation” for a redeemed “city” (Ruskin,

Ethics

360).

In this light, Lizzie’s “hollow” would seem to activate the tradition

that views the female body as a receptacle.

But in the end, neither

Ruskin nor Dickens simply recapitulates girl as organic fecundity.

Lizzie is, after all, childless at the end of

Our Mutual Friend

, and

Ruskin weds his nubile girls to inorganic matter. While Ruskin’s erotic

interest in girls suggests an implicit embrace of procreative domestic-

ity, girl-dust subverts heteronormative expectations by emphasizing

the aesthetic and ethical value of asexual, inorganic recombination.

In this way, dust disrupts biological reproduction and the

politi-

cal structures invested in reproducing the state as such, or what Lee

Edelman has termed the politics of “reproductive futurism.” Although

Edelman argues that heteronormativity structures

any

fantasy of

reproduction, dust regenerates through ambient, inorganic affilia-

tion, a mode of propagative futurity that challenges organic duplica-

tion’s hegemony. Girl, then, is the apt figure for dust less because she

breeds from a hollow within, but more because her hollow prefigures

the combination and containment of unruly materiality that holds

dust’s restless transformations in a state of “animated Rest.” “There’s

no music in a ‘rest,’” advises the Old Lecturer, “but there’s the making

of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life-mel-

ody; and scrambling on without counting” (247). It is easy to miss the

“rest” in

The Ethics of the Dust

and to discount the streaming dust in a

rush toward crystalline form. But by tracing dust’s formative power

and its ceaseless circulation, we may bring the pause between making

and unmaking into focus. Or rather, as I have argued, form is itself

a pause, a transient coming together in the whirligig of molecular

life. Both are true. Form is a pause (a compositional respite between

decompositions); form emerges in the pause (decomposition nour-

ishes composition). Hence, “the ethics of the dust” should not be sum-

marized as “get into order”; rather, its motto is better stated as: “mind

the Rest.” Mind that empty place—that melancholic girl—where dust’s

infinite combinations lurk.

University of California, Berkeley

RUSKIN’S DUST

487

SPRING 2016

NOTES

1. While my thinking about form springs from nineteenth-century science, espe-

cially Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s concept of

Bildungstrieb

(formative power), my

work also engages with critics’ recent return to formalism. In my conception of form’s

shifting contours, I draw upon Leighton’s insistence on

“the dynamics of form itself”

(16). In my conception of decay’s latent formal potential, I draw upon Caroline Levine’s

use of design theory’s notion of “affordances,” which describes “the potential uses or

actions latent in materials and design” (6).

2. Ruskin’s idiosyncratic science has been a topic of much critical debate. For a

general overview, see Alexander. For Ruskin and Tyndall’s glacier debate, see Sawyer,

“Poetry.” For Ruskin’s use of Biblical typology, see Spear 40–51. For Ruskin’s natural his-

tory textbooks of the 1880s, see Birch, “Ruskin and the Science” and Kirchhoff.

3. My reading of decay is indebted to a number of studies on dirt, filth, and the

abject. These include Douglas, Kristeva, Hamlin, Nead, and McClintock. My work

takes up this critical tradition—which has established the Victorian obsession with

the taxonomic classification of waste and dirt, as well as the Victorians’ transgres-

sive desire to revel in such foulness—and uncovers an alternative discourse about

Victorian decay that embraced disintegration for its aesthetic, ethical, and environ-

mental affordances.

4. George Levine argues that Ruskin “bows to Lamarckian evolution” because it

allows for “will, intention, love, and hate” (243). Similarly, Zwierlein stresses the con-

nection between Ruskin’s “moral concept of energy” and Victorian debates about

willpower (322).

5. In addition to the connections among coal, dust, and gender performed by

Lizzie’s fireside narratives,

Our Mutual Friend

also links the economies of coal and dust

through the figure of the dustman, who, in Henry Mayhew’s

London Labour and the

London Poor

(1851), collects waste “principally from the residuum of fires, the white ash

and cinders, or small fragments of unconsumed coke” (345).

6. While scholarship on

The Ethics of the Dust

emphasizes the girl-crystal analogy,

it pays little attention to dust’s role in facilitating this transformation. See Sawyer 246,

Robson 115, and Weltman 46.

7. Even in Ruskin’s pagan exploration of Greek mythology in

The Queen of the Air

(1869)

dust continues to derive its authority from Genesis 3:19: Demeter’s rule is over the

earth “as the receiver of all things back at last into silence—‘Dust thou art, and unto dust

shalt thou return’” (304).

8. With the exception of Frost’s essay, the scientific content of these letters has

received little critical attention. Other scholars have commented almost exclusively on

Ruskin’s unorthodox interpretation of Genesis. See Conner 19 and Spear 372

9. Ruskin refers to Liebig later in the essay: “Liebig says that the source of

this ammonia is sufficiently evident by its peculiar odor” (486). While Cook and

Wedderburn do not footnote this reference, it seems likely that Ruskin read Liebig’s

Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology

in its 1840 English trans-

lation by Lyon Playfair. See Brock 94–114.

10. Ruskin’s “girls” have received much scholarly attention. See Robson 94–129;

Weltman,

Performing

111–19; and Birch, “Ruskin’s Authorities.”

488

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

11. Chen defines “stone butch” as an erotic economy of affect “in which the butch’s

sexual pleasure can emerge from the touch instigated by her, whereas she prefers not

to be touched by her lover” (216) and argues that it is “simply wrong” to see the stone

butch as “affectless” (217). Similarly, it would be wrong to read Ruskin’s desire to petrify

little girls (or himself) as a deprivation of affect. Rather, this desire for objectification

curiously probes the affective life of stones and their geomorphic traumas.

12. See Millet for a scathing critique of “Of Queens’ Gardens” and Ruskin’s “com-

pulsive masculine fantasy” about “insipid goodies” (64). For a sympathetic reading that

places “Of Queens’ Gardens” in dialogue with the historical context of Queen Victoria’s

reign, see Weltman,

Ruskin’s Mythic Queen

103–23.

13. My reading of Ruskin’s dust concurs with Birch’s reading of Ruskin’s “womanli-

ness” and his feminized critical voice. See “Ruskin’s Womanly Mind.”

14. For the vitalist debate in the 1850s and ‘60s, see Geison.

15. Otis also reads the advent of cell theory as ushering in new concepts of self-en-

closure. See 1–8 for an overview of her “membrane model” of identity

16. Rocke emphasizes that there were artificial syntheses of “organic” materi-

als before 1828 and that “total” syntheses were only performed long after that date:

“Wöhler’s accomplishment in no way refuted vitalism at a stroke” (239). Hilton argues

that Wöhler’s synthesis of urea “might even have given vitalism ‘a new lease on life’”

(182).

17. In “The Cell Theory,” Huxley declares that he has “maintained the broad doc-

trine established by Wolff” (243). Richmond argues that Huxley’s conception of the

organism is “developmental and epigenetic rather than reductionist and morpholog-

ical” (270).

18. While Gigante argues that the Romantic rejection of preformation meant “life

now denoted power, rather than structure” (16), vital power was certainly not divorced

from structure in most Romantic accounts of life, especially since Blumenbach’s

Bildungstrieb

was a touchstone for Kantian aesthetics.

19. The review was anonymous, but Darwin and his circle immediately suspected

the author’s identity. J. D. Hooker made some inquires and concluded that it was Richard

Owen. Hooker’s sleuthing has since been confirmed by the editors of Darwin’s corre-

spondence (754). After Owen’s review on 28 March, Carpenter responded swiftly on 30

March, distancing himself from Darwin. Darwin’s angry retort appeared on 25 April, to

which Owen responded on 2 May. Darwin responded again on 5 May. But in a letter to

Darwin dated 7 May, Hooker begs him to acquiesce. For an overview of this debate, see

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin

, 745–55.

20. For a full account of the

Bathybius

, see Rehbock.

21. Even the public entered into the debate. In “Some Aspects of Mud,” the anon-

ymous reviewer ventures his opinion that “earth and water in combination, and acted

on by the heat of the sun, seem in truth to contain the germinating principle of vitality”

(199).

22. According to Priestman, “the first great Lucretian moment in Britain was the

end of the seventeenth century,” while a flurry of new editions between 1790 and 1820

marked “the second British Lucretian moment” (289). But, as Priestman acknowledges,

scholars have traditionally placed the “epicenter” of Lucretius’s nineteenth-century

[165.123.34.86] Project MUSE (2024-10-20 22:40 GMT) University Of Pennsylvania Libraries

RUSKIN’S DUST

489

SPRING 2016

influence “firmly after

The Origin of Species

in 1859” (289). For Lucretius’s influence

on British Romantic poetics, see Goldstein. For his influence on Victorian writers, see

Turner.

23. Victorian interest in Lucretius began with H. A. J. Munro’s new translation of

De Rerum Natura

in 1860 and W. Y. Sellar’s

The Roman Poets of the Republic

in 1863. Turner

argues that the publication of Alfred Tennyson’s “Lucretius” in 1868 marks “the begin-

ning of a new appreciation for Lucretius” since that year also witnessed the publication

of Fleeming Jenkin’s “The Atomic Theory of Lucretius,” the first article linking “the

ancient writer to contemporary scientific thought” (335).

24. See also Jenkin 213.

25. For Ruskin’s refutation of the geological concept of denudation in

Deucalion

see 121–22 and 247–55.

26. In

Modern Painters

, Ruskin collects the runoff water from an Alpine stream

in order to measure Mont Blanc’s rate of decay. He calculates a staggering loss: “eighty

thousand tons of mountain must be yearly transformed into drifted sand” (176).

27. In

Deucalion

, Ruskin makes multiple references to his agedness: he began his

geological work “thirty years ago” (101); his dabbling-places “have not changed in fifty

years” (122); he has returned to Switzerland and revisited the same scenes “forty years”

later (126); the scenes he has revisited in Switzerland are “unchanged since I knew it

first, when I was a boy of fifteen, quite forty years ago” (151); and he has gathered “fifty

years’ experience of brooks” (250).

28. “The Work of Iron” (1858) is a paradigmatic example. In this lecture, he declares

that rusted iron is “Living” and folds the chemical decomposition of this industrial

product into a natural economy (376).

29. For an economic account of vitality, see Gallagher 86–117.

For an energetic

account of entropic loss, see MacDuffie 114–36.

30. I am indebted to Adelene Buckland for pointing me to these articles.

31. For the historical origins of the peak coal debate, see Jonsson 168–87.

32. The long literary-scientific tradition that views the female body as a recepta-

cle takes on a new significance in the nineteenth century when Georges-Louis Leclerc

Buffon theorizes “moules intérieures,” or “internal molds,” a hollow container that

impresses each life with its characteristic form. See Gigante 14–15.

WORKS CITED

Adams, E. W. “Lucretius and His Science.”

Gentleman’s Magazine

Aug. 1894: 188–99.

Alexander, Edward. “Ruskin and Science.”

Modern Language Review

64.3 (1969): 508–21.

Benn, Alfred. “Epicurus and Lucretius.”

Westminster Review

1 Apr. 1882: 299–346.

Birch, Dinah. “Ruskin’s Authorities.”

Prose Studies

12.2 (1989): 147–58.

————. “Ruskin and the Science of Proserpina.”

New Approaches to Ruskin: Thirteen Es-

says.

Ed. Robert Hewison. London: Routledge, 1981. 142–56.

————. “Ruskin’s Womanly Mind.”

Essays in Criticism

38.4 (1988): 308–24.

“The Black Diamonds of England.”

Household Words

8 Jun. 1850: 246–50.

Bowen, John.

Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit

. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

Brock, William.

Justus Von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper

. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

1997.

490

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

Brougham, H. “The Library of Useful Knowledge.”

Edinburgh Review

Jun. 1827:

225–44.

Buckland, Adelene. “‘Pictures in the Fire’: the Dickensian Hearth and the Concept of

History.”

Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net

53 (2009).

Carey, John.

The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination

. London: Faber, 1973.

Carpenter, William. “Additional Note on the Structure and Affinities of

Eozoön

Canadense

.”

Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society

23 Nov. 1864: 59–66.

————.

Introduction to the Study of the Foraminifera

. London: Hardwick, 1862.

Chen, Mel.

Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect

. Durham: Duke UP, 2012.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Essay VI.”

The Friend

The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge

. Vol. 4. Ed. Barbara E. Rooke. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969. 464–71.

Conner, Patrick.

Savage Ruskin

. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1979.

Darwin, Charles. “The Doctrine of Heterogeny and Modification of Species.”

Athenae-

25 Apr. 1863: 554–55.

————.

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin

. Vol. 11. Eds. Frederick Burkhard and Syd-

ney Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

————. “Letter to J. D. Hooker.” 1 Feb. 1871.

The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin

. Vol. 2. Ed.

Francis Darwin. New York: Appleton, 1911. 202.

————.

On the Origin of Species

. London: Murray, 1866.

Dawson, J. W. “On new specimens of

Eozoon Canadense

, with a reply to the objections of

Professors King and Rowney.”

American Journal of Science

Sep. 1868: 245–55.

————. “On the Structure of Certain Organic Remains in the Laurentian Limestones of

Canada.”

Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society

. 23 Nov. 1864: 51–59.

Dickens, Charles

. Our Mutual Friend

. Ed. Adrian Poole. London: Penguin, 1997.

Douglas, Mary.

Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo

. New

York: Routledge, 2002.

Edelman, Lee.

No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.

Flint, Kate. “‘The Mote Within the Eye’: Dust and Victorian Vision.”

Rethinking Victorian

Culture

. Eds. Juliet John and Alice Jenkins. New York: St. Martin’s P, 2000.

Frost, Mark. “The Circles of Vitality: Ruskin, Science and Dynamic Materiality.”

Victori-

an Literature and Culture

39.2 (2011): 367–83.

Gallagher, Catherine.

The Body Economic: Life, Death and Sensation in Political Economy

and the Victorian Novel

. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008.

Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt.

Practicing New Historicism

. Chicago: U

of Chicago P, 2000.

Geison, Gerald L. “The Protoplasmic Theory of Life and the Vitalist-Mechanical De-

bate.”

Isis

60.3 (1969): 273–92.

Gigante, Denise.

Life: Organic Form and Romanticism

. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.

Goldstein, Amanda Jo. “Growing Old Together: Lucretian Materialism in Shelley’s ‘Po-

etry of Life.’”

Representations

128.1 (2014): 60–92.

Hamlin, Christopher. “Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Nat-

ural Theology of Health and Disease.”

Victorian Studies

28.3 (1985): 381–411.

Hilton, Boyd. “The Politics of Anatomy and an Anatomy of Politics c. 1825–1850.”

History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950.

Eds. Stefan

Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

179–97.

Huxley, T. H. “The Cell Theory.”

British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review

Oct. 1853:

221–43.

————. “On Some Organisms Living at Great Depths in the North Atlantic Ocean.”

RUSKIN’S DUST

491

SPRING 2016

Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science

1 Oct. 1868: 203–12.

“Ichor.”

The New Oxford American Dictionary

. 3

ed. 2010.

Jenkin, Fleeming. “The Atomic Theory of Lucretius.”

North British Review

Mar. 1868:

211–42.

Johnson, Barbara.

Persons and Things

. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010.

Jonsson, Fredrik Albritton.

Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Ori-

gins of Environmentalism

. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013.

Kemp, Lindley.

The Phasis of Matter; Being an Outline of the Discoveries and Applications of

Modern Chemistry

. London: Longman, 1855.

King, William, and T. H. Rowney. “On

‘Eozoon Canadense

.’”

Proceedings of the Royal Irish

Academy

Vol. 10 (1866–69): 506–51.

————. “On the So-Called ‘Eozoonal’ Rock.”

Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society

Jan.

1866: 185–218.

Kirchhoff, Frederick. “A Science Against Science: Ruskin’s Floral Mythologies.”

Na-

ture and the Victorian Imagination

. Eds. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson.

Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.

Kristeva, Julia.

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Leighton, Angela.

On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of the Word

. Oxford: Ox-

ford UP, 2008.

Levine, Caroline.

Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network

. Princeton: Princeton UP,

2015.

Levine, George. “Ruskin, Darwin, and the Matter of Matter.”

Nineteenth-Century Prose

35.1 (2008): 223–49.

von Liebig, Justus.

Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology.

Lon-

don: Taylor and Walton, 1840.

Lucretius.

De Rerum Natura

. Trans. W. H. D. Rouse. Rev. Martin Ferguson Smith. Cam-

bridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Lyell, Charles. “Address of the President.”

Report of the Thirty-Fourth Meeting of the Brit-

ish Association for the Advancement of Science Held at Bath in September 1864

. London:

Murray, 1865.

McClintock, Anne.

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context

New York: Routledge, 1995.

MacDuffie, Allen.

Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination

. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge UP, 2014.

Markovits, Stefanie. “Form Things: Looking at Genre Through Victorian Diamonds.”

Victorian Studies

52.4 (2010): 591–619.

Masson, John. “The Atomic Theory of Lucretius.”

British Quarterly Review

Oct. 1875:

335–77.

————. “Lucretius, Tyndall, Picton, Martineau: Some Theories of Matter and Its Rela-

tion to Life.”

British Quarterly Review

Apr. 1882: 324–51.

Mayhew, Henry.

Selections from London Labour and the London Poor

. London: Spring, 1851.

Millett, Kate. “The Debate over Women: Ruskin versus Mill.”

Victorian Studies

14.1 (1970):

63–82.

Nead, Lynda.

Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London

New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

O’Brien, Charles F. “

Eozoön Canadense

‘The Dawn Animal of Canada.’”

Isis

61.2 (1970):

206–23.

Otis, Laura.

Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science

and Politics

. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

492

ELLA MERSHON

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 3

[Owen, Richard]. “Introduction to the Study of the Foraminifera.”

Athenaeum

28 Mar.

1863: 417–19.

Priestman, Martin. “Lucretius in Romantic and Victorian Britain.” Eds. Stuart Gillespie

and Philip Hardie.

Cambridge Companion to Lucretius

. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

2007. 289–305.

Rehbock, Philip F. “Huxley, Haeckel, and the Oceanographers: The Case of Bathybius

haeckelii.”

Isis

66.4 (1975): 504–33.

Richmond, Marsha L. “T. H. Huxley’s Criticism of German Cell Theory: An Epigenetic

and Physiological Interpretation of Cell Structure.”

Journal of the History of Biology

33.2 (2000): 247–89.

Robson, Catherine.

Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman

Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.

Rocke, Alan J.

The Quiet Revolution: Hermann Kolbe and the Science of Organic Chemistry

Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Ruskin, John.

The Cestus of Aglaia

Works

19: 49–159.

————.

Deucalion: Collected Studies of the Lapse of Waves and Life of Stones

Works

26: 95–370.

————. “Essay on the Fall.”

Works

1: 480–87.

————.

The Ethics of the Dust

Works

18: 209–368.

————. “Letter to Rev. Edward Clayton.” 8 Jan. 1843.

Works

1: 475–79.

————. “Letter to Rev. Edward Clayton.” Jan. 1843.

Works

1: 488.

————.

Modern Painters

Works

6: 3–466.

————. “On the Forms of the Stratified Alps of Savoy.”

Works

26: 3–11.

————.

The Queen of the Air

Works

19: 291–420.

————.

The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

Works

34: 7–80.

————. “The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Poetry.”

Works

16: 375–411.

————

. The Works of John Ruskin

. Eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London:

Allen, 1903–12.

Sawyer, Paul L. “The Poetry of Matter and the Poetry of Spirit.”

Victorian Science and Vic-

torian Values: Literary Perspectives

. Eds. James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait. New

York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1981.

————.

Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works

. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Sellar, W. Y.

The Roman Poets of the Republic

. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1863.

“Some Aspects of Mud.”

London Review

27 Feb. 1869: 198–99.

Spear, Jeffry L.

Dreams of an English Eden: Ruskin and his Tradition in Social

Criticism

New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Symonds, John Addington. “Lucretius.”

Fortnightly Review

1 Jan. 1875: 44–62.

“The True Story of a Coal Fire.”

Household Words

6 Apr. 1850: 26–31; 13 April 1850: 68–72;

20 April 1850: 90–96.

Turner, Frank. “Lucretius Among the Victorians.”

Victorian Studies

16.3 (1973): 329–48.

Tyndall, John. “Atoms, Molecules, and Ether Waves.”

Longman’s Magazine

Nov. 1882:

29–40.

————. “Spontaneous Generation.”

Nineteenth Century

Jan. 1878: 22–47.

Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky. “Gender and the Architectonics of Metaphor: Ruskin’s

Pathetic Fallacy in

The Ethics of the Dust

.”

Prose Studies

16.2 (1993): 41–61.

————.

Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science and Education

Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007.

————.

Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture

. Columbus: Ohio

UP, 1998.

Zwierlein, Anne-Julia. “‘Standing out like a Quartz Dyke’: Self-Formation, ‘Energy,’ and

the Material Environment in John Ruskin and Charles Dickens.”

Arbeiten aus An-

glistik und Amerikanistik

34.2 (2009): 315–31.

Ruskin's Dust Essay

Prompt to Clone This Ruskin's Dust Essay

Apply this example's core structure, strategic pacing, and structural hierarchy directly to your own topic.

What are you generating today?