Analyzing Proserpina's floricultural subtext will not only recover La Touche's letters from the shadow of Ruskin's love life but also underscore an unexplored facet of Ruskin's antipathy toward Darwin, who celebrated florist flowers in his own botanical writings. is living with his parents, writing and traveling, and tutoring-among other pupils-Rose La Touche, a girl of ten, with whom he slowly falls in love. Rose La Touche Biographer Quentin Bell has this to say: 'He lived on terms of sentimental intimacy with an entire girls' school and the modern readers knows not whether to blush or snigger at the romps and oglings, toyings and teasings which were conducted with perfect candour under the benevolent eye of the headmistress at Winnington. Various authors describe the death as arising from either madness, anorexia, a broken heart, religious mania or hysteria, or a combination of these. Rose died in 1875 at the age of 27, in a Dublin nursing home, where she had been placed by her parents.
#Rose la touche series#
Flower-breeding motifs figure prominently in a series of letters written for Proserpina by Rose's mother, Maria La Touche, whose contributions to this book have long been overlooked. Rose La Touche, as sketched by John Ruskin on her death bed in 1875. My reading draws together the history of nineteenth-century flower breeding with recent inquiries from the field of critical plant studies in order to illuminate how Ruskin's botanical prose dovetails with present-day debates on vegetal ethics.
In this article, I argue that beneath these scientific and personal imperatives, Proserpina urges readers to resist the consumption of floral commodities engineered by Victorian nurserymen and florists. Past studies have primarily interpreted Proserpina as a testament to Ruskin's disquiet about Darwinism and as a memorial to his late love, Rose La Touche. However, the eco-political stakes of this text have received limited attention. Filled with caustic statements on artificial plant breeding and florist flowers, John Ruskin's botanical essay collection, Proserpina (1875–86), advances a cogent argument against commercial floriculture and, by extension, the commodification of vegetal life.
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