“Tread softly! All the earth is holy ground” : an environmental and materialist interpretation of selected works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins

This thesis examines selected works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins through a materialist rather than a philosophical approach. These writers lived at a time defined by Eric Hobsbawm as the “Long Nineteenth Century”, characterised by industrialisation, revolution, and commodification. Coleridge, Rossetti, and Hopkins represented a push against secularisation, and all held a degree of high church-leaning, orthodox views. This research highlights and analyses their response to the environment, religion, and society, which I argue was far more intricate than a clear, uniform understanding of good, bad, right, and wrong - all of which are fundamental aspects of Christian belief. Through an exploration of their writing, I demonstrate that they attempt to take account of the transgressions of society and apparent immoral activities that they witnessed by trying to understand it within their own personal parameters relating primarily to orthodoxy. In doing so, I argue that the comfort they found in the natural world was influenced by their religious leanings. The complicated relationship with the nineteenth century cityscape presents an opportunity to view Coleridge, Rossetti, and Hopkins through a materialist reconceptualisation of the human experience and human interactions with the environment. This is achieved by using the ecocritical and sociological framework offered in Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009), and Heather I. Sullivan’s article “Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism” (2012). This ecocritical and materialist approach allows for an investigation and interrogation of life as viewed and represented by Coleridge, Rossetti, and Hopkins against the backdrop of an increasingly complex and changing world.