ABSTRACT

Why Muir and Ruskin? “Among the pantheon of American environmental writers, no single figure looms larger than John Muir (1838-1914),” wrote James C. McKusick in his pioneering book Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (171). Although Thoreau scholars might be at the front of a long queue to challenge such a claim, it is easy to understand why an American ecocritic, making the first study of the transatlantic influence of Romanticism upon canonical American environmental writers, would write this of John Muir, the founding father of the American conservation movement, “inventor” of national parks in the popular American imagination and founder of the Sierra Club. Partly because McKusick is concerned with the influence of Romantic poets on Muir’s work and vision, he makes no mention of John Ruskin. But there is a strong and complicated claim for the influence of Ruskin’s writings on Muir’s vision, and particularly on one of his early but neglected works, Studies in the Sierra (1874). 1

That John Muir came to be reading Ruskin in a little cabin in the Yosemite Valley of California in 1872 should not come as a surprise. Ruskin’s works were obviously creating quite a frisson of interest in America, as perhaps is indicated by the fact that Muir’s first reading of Ruskin was in copies loaned to him by his friend, the Oakland superintendent of schools, J. B. McChesney (Muir, Life and Letters 186). Another Californian nature writer of the next generation, Mary Austin, records in her autobiography that her father bought first editions of Ruskin’s works as they were published (Austin 34). In the “Conclusion” to Ruskin and Environment (Wheeler 187-194), I first suggested that Ruskin’s influence upon the environmentalism of John Muir deserved further research, Ruskin’s notion of the earth as “a great entail” (Ruskin 8.233), for example, being similar to Muir’s conception of national parks. In the chapter titled “Muir’s Mode of Reading Ruskin” in Reconnecting with John Muir (Gifford, Reconnecting 75-85) I argued from the evidence of Muir’s annotations in his own volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters IV (1856) that Muir’s repeated dismissal of Ruskin in his letters was a strategic distancing from what had actually been a major influence. A straw man had been created by a deliberate misrepresentation that might provide a classic example of what Harold Bloom characterized in his book title as The Anxiety of Influence .