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Anxious Ruskin

Francis O’Gorman
Francis O’Gorman is Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds, an Honorary Visiting Professor at the Ruskin Centre of the University of Lancaster, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the author and editor of many books and articles on modern English Literature, most recently Victorian Literature and Finance (2007) and The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture. His work on Ruskin includes Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2001), Ruskin and Gender (2002), edited with Dinah Birch, and an edition of Ruskin’s Praeterita (2012) for OUP.

This study of John Ruskin (1819–1900) from The Stones of Venice (1851–3) to Praeterita (1885–9) examines Ruskin’s understanding of what it meant to write as an art and social critic in the 19th century. Anxious Ruskin is a study of authorship conceived at a personal level to a mind of exceptional intellectual ambition and of fragility, in an age with a shifting sense of what it desired from what we would now call ‘public intellectuals’, and who they were. Central in Ruskin’s writing in the second half of the 19th century is his involvement with failure, incomprehension, error, waste, and – against this – an increasingly fugitive but visionary apprehension of the fullness of life. Anxious Ruskin is, primarily, an alternative conception to the vision of a heroic man of letters, and an account of how faults, mistakes, and disappointments were creatively absorbed and turned to service.
… The book reads a sequence of major and less well-known works – The Stones of Venice; Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds (1851); Pre-Raphaelitism (1851); Modern Painters IV (1856); The Ethics of the Dust (1866); St Mark’s Rest (1877-84); the three science text books of the 1870s; the diaries and correspondence; and Praeterita – to present a unique account of the self-reflexive nature of Ruskin’s writing, and an account of turning inner apprehension into the critical terms in which to read both his own culture and the achievements of pre-Renaissance Italy. No other study of John Ruskin – pre-eminent analyst of art and culture in the Victorian period – has looked in such detail at this defining, and fretful, inner sense of what it meant to write, or considered the deep bond between Venice and Ruskin as an expression of his changing views of authorship, survival, influence, and rest.

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