[Chapter 6, note 6, of the author's Carlyle and the Search for Authority, which the Ohio State University Press published in 1991. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright. indicates a link to material not in the original print version. GPL]

Some of the rhetoric is new, but Carlyle's most incisive criticisms owe more to his friend Ruskin than to his own insights. While the early Ruskin had been profoundly influenced by Carlyle, the influence was by this time running in the other direction. For example, he had not for a long while, if ever, been concerned, as he is in "Shooting Niagara," with the soot and squalor of industry and the pollution of streams, but these were major themes of Ruskin's criticism of industry (see CME, 5:31, 47). By this date, Carlyle had read the first volume of Stones of Venice (Cate, 6 1), the third and part of the fourth volumes of Modern Painters (Cate, 72-73, 75), Unto This Last (Cate, 89), the "Essays in Political Economy" (Cate, 100, 103-4), and Ethics of the Dust (Cate, 113)


John Ruskiin Contents

Contents last modified 26 October 2001