The theme and scope of the Chronology focus on the life (in bare outline) and publications (in temporal order) of John Ruskin (1819-1900). As art-critic, social commentator, architectural scholar, geologist, botanist, water-colourist, lecturer, letter-writer and prose stylist, Ruskin stands forth as perhaps the pre-eminent Victorian polymath. His advocacy of art and artists, his courage in the face of hostile, uninformed criticism and his enlightened compassionate views of the human condition reveal Ruskin as 'not of an age but for all time'. These attributes the Chronology endeavours to...

The theme and scope of the Chronology focus on the life (in bare outline) and publications (in temporal order) of John Ruskin (1819-1900). As art-critic, social commentator, architectural scholar, geologist, botanist, water-colourist, lecturer, letter-writer and prose stylist, Ruskin stands forth as perhaps the pre-eminent Victorian polymath. His advocacy of art and artists, his courage in the face of hostile, uninformed criticism and his enlightened compassionate views of the human condition reveal Ruskin as 'not of an age but for all time'. These attributes the Chronology endeavours to...

John Ruskin first met Charles Eliot Norton in 1855. Norton was the American counterpart of a man of letters. With a common distaste for the industrial and scientific directions of modern civilisation, the two men became intimate correspondents and the letters they exchanged until shortly before Ruskin's death in 1900 reflect and express, often more vividly than his own public prose, the spiritual, amatory, artistic, and cultural preoccupations of Ruskin's life. The revelations were so candid that Norton, as one of Ruskin's literary executors, burned many of the letters, altered a number of...