Ruskin's rewriting of Darwin

Abstract

This article presents an important discovery: "Modern Painters 5" (1860) is a sustained - though coded - rewriting of "The Origin of Species" (1859). Because it is thus the first book to confront Darwin's paradigm shift, we must radically rethink our understanding of it, and of the ready manner in which Victorian culture assimilated Darwinism. For Ruskin's sage prose mediates the reception of Darwin's famously literary science text in the Victorian periodical press and fiction, both generically and chronologically. "Modern Painters 5" covertly subverts "The Origin" by elaborating an alternative account of "the origin of wood" that targets Darwin's profane, presiding "great tree" image for Natural Selection both verbally and pictorially. But the book concludes with a paleontological apocalypse which dramatizes the triumph of the protean dragon - a Satanic type of the dinosaurs that had recently been resurrected at nearby Crystal Palace park. This article suggests why Ruskin's momentous rewriting of "The Origin" - which was a catalyst for his contemporaneous assault on political economy in "Unto This Last" - has hitherto gone unnoticed!