Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802)

Scientist and poet. In the juvenilia, Ruskin shows his exposure to Darwinʼs poetry in “When furious up from mines the water pours” [“The Steam Engine”], which he based on lines from Darwinʼs The Botanic Garden (1789–91). Darwin was among the founding members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. His extended circle included writers whose progressive educational dialogues and poetry and stories for children were imitated by Ruskin in MS I and other manuscripts—the Rousseauvians, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744–1817), Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), and Thomas Day (1748–89); and the Unitarians and members of the publisher Joseph Johnsonʼs (1738–1809) circle, Anna Letitia Barbauld and Jeremiah Joyce (1763–1816) (see Priestman, Poetry of Erasmus Darwin, 10–20).

Apart from his early adaptation of Darwinʼs lines on the steam engine, Ruskinʼs juvenilia reveals no further interest in Darwinʼs poetry. Ruskinʼs exposure to Darwin may have been limited by his parents owing to opposition to his ideas by the philosopher and physician, Thomas Brown (1778–1820), who was a friend and mentor of both John James Ruskin and his cousin, Margaret, in their Edinburgh days. In 1798, Brown challenged the “materialist” foundations of evolutionary theory in Darwinʼs Zoonomia (1794, 1796)—a book that decisively turned the tide of critical opinion against Darwin in the increasingly reactionary years following the outbreak of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleonic France (Garfinkle, “Critical Response to the Work of Erasmus Darwin”; Viljoen, Ruskinʼs Scottish Heritage, 120–22).