The plant as spectacle and specimen loomed large at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which celebrated human innovation in horticulture and botany. In the decades that followed, writers responded to the images of plant life and floral motifs that saturated visual culture, from botanical illustrations and flower painting to the new decorative schema developed by the Bloomsbury circle. This chapter traces the ways in which plants were revealed in new and sometimes unsettling forms in the literature, science and art of the fin de siècle and first decades of the twentieth century. While some writers looked at plants as if they were artworks, discoveries about plant sentience challenged existing taxonomies and critiques of materialism encouraged alternative understandings of vegetal life to emerge. The plant literature explored here – ranging across poetry, fiction, and art writing– turns out to offer a mirror for its authors’ aesthetic, ethical, and botanical concerns.

Hopkins’s journals are usually read as source-books for his poems. Their fragmentariness smacks of the archive, seeming to position this material as purely of scholarly interest. These odds and ends are meant, it would seem, to be searched for aperçus, inscapes, what Whitman would call ‘go-befores and embryons’, later immortalized in verse. But it’s also possible to read the journals as literature in their own right: as a great poet’s utmost experiment with the possibilities of prose. Hopkins’s nature descriptions experiment relentlessly with the poetics of prose his letters assert piecemeal. He inherited an aesthetic of notation that, arising from the diaries of Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was made irreversibly self-conscious within the published prose of his Victorian precursor, John Ruskin. Revealing an apparently spontaneous, self-shaping spirit alive in plants, stones, clouds, and water, Hopkins’s self-conscious sentences illuminate – as well as transcend – Victorian habits of intellectual enquiry.

In place of a conclusion, I provide a Coda on John Ruskin, the last major British writer to devote so much attention to the Swiss myth. The myth’s belated iteration in many of his works is the culmination of a long cultural movement that idealized and ideologized the Alps. But Ruskin’s writings on Switzerland are also a reaction to modern transformations brought upon by organized tourism, industrialized capitalism, and liberalism, which made it Europe’s only modern democratic republic in 1848. Focusing on Ruskin’s earlier texts, I suggest that his reactionary vision of Switzerland marks the end of a century-and-half republican tradition in which the various, sometimes conflicting figurations of the Swiss myth contributed to a modern liberal discourse and helped imagine a republic for the moderns. Yet by showing how Europe’s elites romanticized the country as a simulacrum of happiness and freedom while at the same time ruining its proverbial virtue through tourism, Ruskin also brings to the fore the contradictions between liberalism and free-market capitalism, providing us with the most conservative, but perhaps also the most radical of all Romantic representations of Switzerland.

During his last days at Oxford in 1840, John Ruskin inscribed in a new notebook, ‘I have determined to keep one part of diary for intellect and another for feeling.’ There is no diary for 1845, when Ruskin made his first Italian tour without his parents. Instead, broadly speaking, what Paul Tucker calls Ruskin’s Résumé is for intellect and the letters home to his father for feeling. The emphasis in this chapter is not upon the letters as travel writing or as indices of Ruskin’s intellectual journal, but rather upon their intrinsic qualities as communications between a son and his father that, though written abroad and taking nine or ten days to arrive, sustain the intimacy of a connection between two difficult and complex personalities who have a ‘strong desire to be speaking’ to one another. Whereas Browning and Barrett are embarking upon a new relationship, John Ruskin seeks to maintain an established connection with a beloved father whose demands are testing.

Victorian nature writing vacillated between escapist pastoral idealism and hands-on georgic realism. Its narrators were at once labourers and idlers, scientists and aesthetes. The genre’s hybridity allowed it to mediate between mechanistic paradigms of nature and religious beliefs and experiences. Natural environments were constructed as realms of both Darwinian struggle and spiritual revelation. Imagining nature appreciation as a form of self-culture sometimes encouraged a nascent ecological and humanitarian sensibility. However, Victorian nature writing remained generally anthropocentric, centring the human mind. Yet, some authors, particularly later in the period, also framed wild environments and organisms as radically alien and unknowable. These different tendencies were often expressed through rhetoric of strangeness and estrangement, which dovetailed with ambivalences about identity, place and belonging. While authors classified objects, creatures and plants as alternately native or foreign, these categories frequently became blurred or uncertain. Authors also equivocated on where to locate ‘nature’, tracing it through rural, coastal and urban areas, in the great outdoors and human homes. Authors discussed include John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, Philip Henry Gosse, Margaret Gatty, Hugh Miller, Eliza Brightwen, Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson.

On the surface, the ethical vocabulary of stylistic virtue reflects the fact that moral and stylistic virtues overlap. A “manly” style may connote masculine strength, just as an “honest” author may promise fidelity in representation. However, the “aesthetic” critics of the mid- to late-nineteenth century did not disavow this seemingly moralistic lexicon. Instead, Chapter 2 shows how the doubleness of stylistic virtues made them appealing to critics who sought to provide an ethical justification for formalist methods. By tracing the theory of stylistic virtue in the four Victorian critics most influenced by Aristotle – John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde – it reveals a process of “ethico-aesthetic drift” whereby “ethical character” was increasingly understood as an aesthetic phenomenon that had autonomous value. As literary criticism came to be seen as a creative act on a par with the production of art, it too became an ethically valuable act, investing style and its appreciation with an unprecedented level of attention and esteem.

From Kant's "aesthetic ideas" to Ruskin's seven "lamps" of architecture, the Vitruvian conception of aesthetic appeal was expanded to include a range of intellectual and emotional content. Gottfried Semper shifted the discussion to the fundamental components of architecture – hearth, mound, roof, and walls – but what is done with these elements remains subject to the general goals of good construction, functionality, and aesthetic appeal.

Chapter 1 argues that Victorian studies of animal mimicry and camouflage (known collectively as crypsis) resisted the hardening dichotomy between science and the arts. Researchers drew on their subjective perceptions, and art theories and techniques, to represent crypsis and recreate its illusions for readers. The first theorisers of ‘protective mimicry’, Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, laced their writings with personal anecdotes of being deceived by animals’ appearances. Such narratives substituted for the imagined experiences of these animals’ predators and prey. It is proposed that these texts followed a pattern of perceptual self-scrutiny and suspended judgement that had been articulated by the art critic John Ruskin. Bates, Wallace and, even more, the Oxford zoologist Edward Bagnall Poulton also sought to simulate experiences of crypsis through illustrations. Accompanying text guided readers through the trompe l'oeil much as Ruskin’s ekphrastic prose guided the consumption of paintings. The tension between such artistic science and the rising ideal of objectivity came to a head in the controversial work of the American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer. Although Thayer made some lasting contributions to crypsis studies, his approach to nature as an artwork that only artists could understand provoked strong attacks from some zoologists.