Chapter 18 - Environmental Degradation

Summary

This chapter explores Hopkins’s responses to the environmental degradation he witnessed in the 1870s and 1880s – from the time of his earliest professional assignments in the industrial north to his final years in Dublin – when the destructive effects of manufacturing industry, mechanization, and urban expansion were becoming increasingly apparent. Drawing on select poems, journals, and letters especially those to his family and friends when he relocates and describes his new surroundings, the chapter compares his views to those of his contemporaries such as John Ruskin and the industrial ‘Lanarkshire poets’ near Glasgow, Scotland. It focuses particularly on the pollution of air and water by mines and mills, and the emphasis Hopkins places on the purity of these elements for the well-being of both human and non-human life. It also notes Hopkins’s awareness of the damage done to whole ecosystems in the name of social and economic ‘progress’.