EDITORS’ TOPIC: VICTORIAN AESTHETICS AND AESTHETICIANS
VISUAL LABOR: RUSKIN’S RADICAL REALISM
Caroline Levine a1 a1 Rutgers University in Camden
Abstract
CRITICS HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING about Ruskin’s inconsistencies since the 1840s. In 1856, Elizabeth Rigby wrote contemptuously of Ruskin’s “crochety contradictions and peevish paradoxes” (187). Marshall Mather lamented in 1897 that the critic’s “so-called inconsistencies roused the laughter and sneer of superficial readers” (xi). By 1933, R. H. Wilenski simply affirmed that “Ruskin’s art criticism . . . is an appalling muddle” (192). And in our own time, scholars as various as John Rosenberg, Elizabeth Helsinger, and Gary Wihl have pointed not so much to the connections as to the shifts, gaps, and breaks that interrupt the succession of Ruskin’s first nine major volumes — Modern
Painters,
The
Seven
Lamps
of
Architecture, and The
Stones
of
Venice.1
