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For Ruskin, the satisfaction and beauty of nature had been tragically supplanted by a pernicious and 27
insatiable hunger for the ever-more morbid sensations provided by novelists.
Ruskin links the
accumulation of novelistic detail with utilitarian theories of value, and rejects the assertion that “the value of a representation is directly proportional to the amount of detail it includes about observable social reality” (Gallagher 115). Ruskin describes these industrial novels and Gothic horrors as “literature ‘of the prison house,’ because the thwarted habits of body and mind, which are the punishment of reckless crowding in cities, become, in the issue of that punishment, frightful subjects of exclusive interests to themselves” (“Fair” 948). It would seem, at first blush, that Ruskin would have unproblematically extended this critique to The Condition of the Working Class. The reality, however, is slightly more complicated. Intriguingly, in “Fiction – Fair and Foul” Ruskin unexpectedly reserves praise for a specific depiction of urban squalor. He argues that Oliver Twist is unlike the rest of Dickens’ work, for in it the author offers “an earnest and uncaricatured record of states of criminal life, written with didactic purpose, full of the gravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noble passion” (948). Ruskin continues, arguing that due to the text’s “definiteness of historical intention and forewarning anxiety,” it “may be accepted as photographic evidence” (948 italics added). It is tempting to situate Engels’ text within the confines of Ruskin’s definition; however, to do so would be to ignore the most enduring and intractable difference of all: their depiction of labour. Ruskin’s deep-seated fear of social anarchy meant that he was never prepared to subscribe to the wholesale incorporation of the working class into the political system. The radical egalitarianism that was the impulse behind The Condition of the Working Class is wholly absent in The Stones of Venice. In its place, Ruskin offers an idealized depiction of the Gothic labourer, for whom the creative expression of his limited imagination in communal projects such as the construction of cathedrals is adequate fulfillment. Ruskin’s organic conception of society seamlessly incorporates a discourse of natural difference. As many critics have pointed out, “The Gothic worker must be understood as a distortion or reduction of history useful to Ruskin in arguing for a state of naïve resistance to instruction, regularization, and cost-efficiency” (Maynard 117). This “arbitrary treatment of history” (Kruft 333) in large part explains why contemporary critics have been so quick to condemn Ruskin’s depiction of labour. Rob Breton argues that Ruskin sees Gothic architecture as “the one style that is supposed to have the true mimetic properties of an innate working-class disposition, balance[ing] freedoms with an almost transcendental desire for submission”, and that through the Gothic we can see Ruskin’s “inherent and intuitive understanding that political subordination yields contentment” (“Happiness” 215). In “The Nature of Gothic” Ruskin writes, “To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live is this world” (164). Ruskin
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In “Fiction – Fair and Foul,” Ruskin contrasts the appearance of Croxsted Lane, a location near where he was raised and to which he had ascribed an idyllic quality, with its degraded and befouled suburban appearance. The homogeneity of the new suburban environment was, in Ruskin’s mind, what occasioned the hunger for the variation of sensation provided for by “morbid” fiction. Dinah Birch’s “A Life in Writing: Ruskin and the Uses of Suburbia” has a useful treatment of Ruskin’s complex and evolving relationship with suburban English life.