2021/05/28 by Dinah Birch, Birch, Dinah
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Art and Culture Studies #Joseph Conrad and Literature #Travel Writing and Literature
paper · pdf · doi:10.48352/uobxjah.00003407
openalex publication_date 2021/05/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
soon outgrew its polemical origins, becoming a monumental five-volume study of landscape art, aesthetics, cultural politics, natural history, and much else besides, published over a period of 17 years.The third volume, published in 1856, was subtitled 'Of Many Things', as Ruskin wryly conceded the runaway expansion of the interests reflected in what had begun as a work in defence of a new generation of painters.His recurrent attempts to discipline the proliferation of his ideas, observations and admonitions into a structured framework were never wholly successful.Modern Painters, a profoundly Romantic work, became a Victorian reflection of the impulse that had led to Wordsworth's Prelude (begun in 1798, and posthumously published in 1850), Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817) or even De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).It was a version of what Wordsworth described as the 'The Growth of a Poet's Mind', shared with the reader as an exercise in spiritual and aesthetic autobiography.The epigraph to each volume, drawn from Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814), is a justification of what Ruskin understood to be the authority of his writing, rooted in the divinity of nature and truth, and distinct from solipsistic self-indulgence.The Wordsworthian reference assured his aspirational readers that they were not simply entertaining themselves with an opinionated book about painting, but acquiring a moral education.Ruskin had won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry as a twenty-year-old undergraduate at the University of Oxford in 1839, receiving the prize from Wordsworth's own hands.Four years later, in the year in which Ruskin began his career as a published author, Wordsworth became Poet Laureate.