Until 1860 John Ruskin's writings were primarily about art and architecture; but his belief that good art can flourish only in a society that is sound and healthy led him inevitably to a preoccupation with social and economic problems, the dominant concern of his later writings. James Clark Sherburne provides in this volume a detailed and long overdue re-examination of Ruskin's social and economic perceptions and, for the first time, systematically places these perceptions in their nineteenth-century intellectual context.

Ruskin's eloquence and the strength of his moral, aesthetic, and social convictions established him as one of the most influential of Victorian writers. His writings, however, are not easily categorized and many of his important insights occur as digressions in discussions of other topics. Mr. Sherburne succeeds in ordering and clarifying the rich chaos of Ruskin's social thought without denying that wholeness which is, paradoxically, its salient feature. He discovers the source of Ruskin's social criticism in his early writings. He then follows Ruskin's interest as it shifts from economic theory to the problems of exploitation, war, imperialism, the means of social reform, and the construction of the welfare state.

Ruskin's remarkably early vision of the possibility of economic abundance, his anticipation of its social and personal implications, his much disparaged critique of classical economics, his pioneering attention to the role of the consumer and the quality of consumption, his anxious portrayal of the effects of industrialism on the environment, his critique of English educational methods, and his farsighted proposals for public management of industry and transport are among the many aspects of Ruskin's thought examined by Mr. Sherburne. What emerges is an original and exhaustive study of a dimension of Ruskin's work which, though much neglected, is particularly relevant to contemporary concerns.

"This book seems to give me eyes," wrote Charlotte Brontë of Ruskin's Modern Painters. Elizabeth Helsinger here explores theprofound changes Ruskin induced in theway nineteenth-century viewers looked atnature and at art.

Helsinger argues that Ruskin transformedthe artist- or poet-oriented aesthetics ofromanticism into a beholder- or reader-oriented criticism. Combining critical attention to Ruskin's prose with her ownwide-ranging scholarship, Helsinger placesRuskin's perceptual reforms within previously unexplored intellectual and culturalcontexts. She connects his thought withWordsworth's poetry, Turner's landscapeart, and Carlyle's history, and shows theeffect on his ideas of romantic literary andart criticism, associationist psychology, historicism, contemporary travel art andliterature, and Victorian philology.

This illuminating study of Ruskin's criticism should be welcomed by students ofnineteenth-century intellectual, literary,and art history.

This series of letters written between 1859 and 1868 by John Ruskin to Miss Bell and the girls of her school in Cheshire and discovered in a Brighton house in 1952 reveal for the first time the extent of the friendship between Miss Bell and Ruskin. She was a sympathetic listener, with whom he could discuss the spiritual crisis that marked his life during his important middle years, when he was completing Modern Painters and his earlier books on political economy. Van Akin Burd studies the letters as an expression of this struggle. He also develops a portrait of the unorthodox schoolmistress, and suggests her reasons for turning to the art critic.

Besides the charming pictures of Ruskin with the children, the correspondence provides new sources for his ideas on art, education, and religion, as well as additional insight into his tragic love for Rose La Touche. Most of Ruskin's letters to Winnington have been collected by the Pierpont Morgan Library. Of the 542 letters in this volume, 497 have not been published before.