In the first of a new pair of Ruskin Research Blogs, Stuart Eagles begins to explore how Ruskin helped to inspire the Garden City Movement. He starts by looking at the movement’s founder, Ebenezer Howard. RUSKIN & THE GARDEN CITY MOVEMENT: I. EBENEZER HOWARD &...

Asked in May 1886 to make a donation towards the building of the Duke Street Chapel in Richmond, Surrey, John Ruskin—on the verge of another serious breakdown in his mental health—replied with entertaining but instructive vehemence. Let us read it as an alternative...

Few people can rival Robert Hewison in the variety of his achievements. As a historian of post-war Britain he has interpreted, analysed and explained the cultural life of a nation to which he has made his own extraordinary contribution. As a broadcaster on the BBC, as...

War has been raging in Europe for nearly a year. In 1871, when Ruskin began writing Fors Clavigera (1871-84), his monthly letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain, and founded the Guild of St George, he was in part motivated by a powerful reaction against...

Though renowned and sometimes mocked for his pronounced moral earnestness, John Ruskin nonetheless loved the theatre, pantomime, the zoo and—as we consider a more festive Ruskin—   THE CIRCUS (for grown-up children everywhere). “People mutht be amuthed, Thquire”,...

Of all Ruskin’s many experiments—whether in gardening or weaving, publishing or estate management—one of the least well-documented is the tea-shop he set up in Marylebone, West London in the mid-1870s. Stuart Eagles invites you to sit back with your favourite brew as...

RUSKIN & LORD RONALD GIOWER AGAIN Following the publication of blog #29 on “Ruskin and Lord Ronald Gower”, I was delighted to hear from Bonhams in New York that they are auctioning a letter from Ruskin to Gower that provides further evidence of the nature and...

In the second part of his two-part Ruskin Research Blog looking at William Morris’s declaration for socialism in November 1883, Stuart Eagles surveys the contemporary reaction to Morris’s Oxford lecture and finds a connection to Shakespeare and Jack the Ripper (well,...

In his latest Ruskin Research Blog, Stuart Eagles looks back at the moment in November 1883 when William Morris declared for socialism in front of an audience at University College, Oxford. John Ruskin, the Slade Professor of Fine Art, responded warmly. Looking at the...

In his latest Ruskin Research Blog, Stuart Eagles stays local and discovers another intriguing and unexpected connection between his hometown of Reading and Victorian polymath, John Ruskin … THE LOVE OF BOOKS &THE JOY OF READING Yes, dear reader, my title is a...