Letter: How Ruskin saw Morris
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Tim Hilton represents William Morris as at odds with John Ruskin, at least in their later lives ("Paper Tiger", Review, 5 May). Why then did Ruskin, at the age of 64, agree to chair one of Morris's more inflammatory addresses, delivered at Oxford to an academic audience? Why did he endorse both its critique of capitalism and its attack on "the defilement of ... Oxford ... which has mostly been due to the plutocracy of learning"? Why did he, further, speak of the lecturer (according to a contemporary report) as "the great conceiver and doer ... and his old and dear friend"? Why did he subsequently describe Morris as "beaten gold" and "the ablest man of his time"?
Morris was no less fulsome in praise of Ruskin. "How deadly dull the world would have been 20 years ago but for Ruskin!" he wrote in 1894, two years before his death. Two years previously he had reprinted Ruskin's The Nature of Gothic at his Kelmscott Press, declaring it "one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century" and by no means suggesting that Ruskin had ceased to be of interest.
Clive Wilmer
Cambridge
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments