Last year, the Ruskin Research Blog published Ruskin’s Faithful Stewards, Stuart Eagles’s prize-winning biography of Henry and Emily Swan, the curators of Ruskin’s museum in Walkley, Sheffield. In the next few blog entries, our attention turns to the Swans’ successor,...

Remembering Clive Wilmer Clive Wilmer (10 February 1945—13 March 2025) Poet, Cambridge academic, critic, Master of Ruskin’s Guild of St George (2009—2019), and my friend I was both shocked and saddened to learn on Friday morning that my friend, Clive Wilmer, had died...

In the course of the summer, the Ruskin Research Blog, now four years old and boasting 40 entries, published Ruskin’s Faithful Stewards. It is the first book-length biography of Henry Swan (1825-1889) and his wife Emily, née Connell (1835-1909). Here are 27 reasons...

In his latest Ruskin Research Blog, Stuart Eagles reveals the story of the keen Ruskin collector, progressive and philanthropist, Thomas Thornton, whose family woollen business helped spark a revolution that changed the world … RUSKIN & REVOLUTION: THE CASE OF...

In the previous Ruskin Research Blog Stuart Eagles explored how Ruskin helped to inspire the Garden City Movement. In this second and final part, he focuses on the Ruskinian credentials of the men tasked with planning and designing Letchworth, Raymond Unwin and Barry...

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”,...