Ecological Sensibility: Dorothy Wordsworth’s and John Ruskin’s Harmonious World

Abstract

Dorothy Wordsworth’s “Floating Island” (1832) has widely been read as the text that expresses her concept of the self. In the poem, as Anne K. Mellor mentions in Romanticism and Gender, Dorothy regards a self as “composed of organic fragments” and tries to understand it within its relationships with others in the community. This image of organic and relational self in nature invokes the image of dust in crystallization in John Ruskin’s The Ethics of the Dust (1866), where he urges the reader to apprehend the larger universal harmony by observing various types of crystallization as a small universe.

  Although Dorothy and Ruskin have scarcely been discussed together, this paper argues that it is ecological sensibility that connected Romantic Dorothy and Victorian Ruskin and that enabled them to envisage a harmonious world. Ecological sensibility is considered to be developed through the literary tradition from James Thomson to William Collins, Thomas Gray, and William Cowper, along with the critical heritage of fellow-feeling in philosophy. Both Dorothy and Ruskin were in line with this long tradition, and their sensibility was also cultivated in religious and natural surroundings. A close reading of “Floating Island” and The Ethics of the Dust leads us to understand that their eyes were turned even to the smallest existence of the universe and that they believed in its reciprocal role in the harmonious whole. The paper also pays attention to some gendered aspects of their works to highlight how they saw the image of dust in relation to the natural world. By doing so, the paper demonstrates how ecological sensibility was inherited and revised with the times from the Romantic to the Victorian Age when social changes for improvement were cried out with more intensity.