Current Research

My PhD research takes a hybrid creative-critical approach to historical study in the form of a neo-Victorian novel with an accompanying thesis. Centring around Brantwood house in Coniston, the Lake District, the novel dramatizes dynamics of care and control in both the last ‘silent decade’ of Victorian polymath John Ruskin, 1890-1900, and the experience of Mack, Brantwood’s Head Gardener, over one hundred years later. Themes of mortality, legacy, and stewardship come to the fore in the rhyming action of these stories.

The research has sought to answer the following research questions through its fiction and its criticism, which function together:

1. How have other novels and audio-visual media represented John Ruskin, and in what ways have they dismantled or problematised boundaries of fact and fiction? Do these fictions evince a suitably robust ethical imperative to the creation of ‘new’ histories?
2. How does my research convey the spirit of Ruskin’s final, ‘silent’ decade when details are sparse about historical events? Drawing inspiration from the Jewish exegetical practise of midrash, how do I find ‘more story in the story’?
3. If my proposed ‘Ruskinian novel’ were to become its own genre, what would be its central tenets and ongoing contribution to literature?

Alongside portrayals of complex care relationships, the research dramatizes the controversial pressure to future-proof historic estates in the face of climate change (portended by Ruskin in Crown of Wild Olive, 1866); how ‘Artificial Intelligence’ can be used as a heritage tool; and Ruskin’s personal experience with what was likely frontotemporal dementia (Thorpe, Alty, and Kempster’s conclusion, 2019). The result, it is argued, is a distinctly ‘Ruskinian’ novel that represents a unique contribution to fiction and literary study.