Domestic Hybrids: Ruskin, Victorian Fiction, and Darwin’s Botany

John Ruskin’s famous castigation in “Fiction, Fair and Foul” (1880–81) of contemporary novels, particularly those of Charles Dickens and the “sensation school,” is frequently cast in the language of botany. Written at a time when Ruskin was immersed in Proserpina, his own botanical publication, this language points to Ruskin’s discomfort with hybridity, whether manifested in sensation fiction—a hybrid genre combining domestic realism with the gothic romance—or accounted for in the botanical studies of Charles Darwin, both of which were, in Ruskin’s eyes, unhealthily consumed with sex and violence.