ABSTRACT
N i c k S h r i m p t o n , in ‘ 4‘Rust and Dust” : Ruskin’s Pivotal Work* argues that the lecture ‘The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art and Policy’ (1858) rather than Unto This Last marks the crucial shift of emphasis in Ruskin’s work: he ends his essays by suggesting that the example of Dickens in the 1850s ‘seems . . . likely to have encouraged Ruskin in his endeavour to find emblems for contemporary life and thought’ and that ‘the link between the two men is . . . to be found in Dickens’s descriptions, above all in the moralized landscapes of his later work.’ 1 Iron, dirt and dragons (all exemplified by the railway) are, for him, the most significant examples. One reason for the neglect of this area for investigation is, he says, ‘the good and simple reason’ that Ruskin’s comments on Dickens seem ‘so dismissive’ (p. 61). Among the evidence he adduces is ‘the late and peculiar “Fiction, Fair and Foul” ’ (p. 65). ‘Dismissive’ is far too weak a word for Ruskin’s invective therethough, as Shrimpton notes, he begins his attack with a highly Dickensian description of the degradation and squalor of Croxted Lane (a description to which I shall return). Does Ruskin protest too much? ‘Fiction, Fair and Foul’ is clearly based on an intimate knowledge of Dickens’s work as the notorious list of deaths in Bleak House and the grotesque plot summary of Barnaby Rudge sufficiently indicate. (It is, incidentally, equally clearly not based on an equivalent knowledge of The M ill on the Floss. There may be much to be said against the novel but to claim that the action hinges on the heroine forgetting herself in a boat and to describe the rest of the cast as the sweepings of the Pentonville omnibus is as wrong as it is vivid. Many a reader must have wished that Maggie had forgotten herself a bit more in the boat-and thought the characters display if anything the idiocy of rural life rather than the degrading consequences of public transport in the city).
