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Another Light on the Writing of Modern Painters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

Van Akin Burd
Van Akin Burd*
Affiliation:
State University of New York State Teachers College Cortland, N. Y.
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Extract

An unpublished diary which Ruskin kept during the summer of 1842 when he was conceiving the plan of Modern Pointers furnishes new information on the development of his mind at that time. Writing of this year in Praeterita, Raskin was obliged to rely on a memory weakened by age and disease. “To my sorrow, and supreme surprise,” he noted in his autobiography which he had begun in 1885, “I find no diary whatever of the feelings or discoveries of this year.” He apparently had forgotten that in 1872 he had given such a diary as a Christmas present to his American friend, Charles Eliot Norton. This important manuscript, which remained in the Norton family until 1936 and was then donated to the Yale University Library as a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Whitredge, seems to have been unknown to Ruskin's editors and succeeding students of his ideas. As reliable and recent a work as Derrick Leon's biography of Ruskin makes no mention of it and follows instead the account of the events of 1842 offered in Praeterita. A comparison of the manuscript with Praeterita shows that Ruskin's memory had dramatized this year of his youth in a way that misrepresented the state of mind in which Modern Painters was begun.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1953 , pp. 755 - 763
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

1 The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderbum (London, 1903-12), XXXV, 315. References to this edition will hereafter appear In the text.

2 C. B. Hogan, “The Yale Collection of the Manuscripts of John Ruskin,” Yak Univ. Lib. Gazette, XVI (April 1942), 64.

3 Cook and Wedderbum write: “Of the tour of 1842, and of the studies at Chamouni immediately preparatory to the first volume of Modern Painters, no diary k now extant; perhaps little or none was written” (Works, III, xxv). For a list of Raskin's diaries known to the editors, see Works, XXXVIII, 204.

4 “Essay Supplementary to the Preface, 1815,” Prose Works, of William Wordsworth, ed, William Knight (London, 1896), II, 226.

5 “Preface to the Edition of the Poems (1815),” Prose Works, ii, 209.

6 “Expostulation and Reply,” 1.24; “Preface to Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800”; Prose Works, I, 48; “Tintern Abbey,” 1. 49.

7 “Preface to the Edition of the Poems (1815),” Prose Works, II, 209.

8 Letter to W. H. Harrison, 28 May 1844 (Works, m, xxii).

9 Letter to Osborne Gordon, 10 March 1844 (Works, III, 666).

10 Letter to Edward Clayton, 19 Aug. 1842 (Works, I, 471).

11 Poetry and Prose by William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1927), p. 989.