SOURCE: Carroll, David. “Pollution, Defilement and the Art of Decomposition.” In Ruskin and Environment: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Wheeler, pp. 58-75. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Carroll comments on how Ruskin's portrayal of an Eden defiled by humanity reflects his ambivalence about modern life. Carroll employs the insights of anthropologist Mary Douglas on pollution and the sacred while critiquing excerpts from several of Ruskin's nonfictional works.

I

Ruskin is one of the great Victorian systematisers in an age of comprehensive, at times eccentric, system-making. From Comte's Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830-42) at one end of the period to Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890-1915) at the other, the multi-volume synthetic philosophies, sociologies and anthropologies poured from the presses. The Victorians were both fascinated and sceptical. George Eliot's description in 1852 of a field-trip with another incurable Victorian synthesiser is typical...