Ruskin in the 1830s: Emerging Authorship and the Print Culture of Travel

Abstract

On the basis of his family’s first major Continental tour (1833), John Ruskin composed and illustrated a handmade verse and prose travel narrative, “Account of a Tour on the Continent” (1833–1834). What he later dismissed as an “unfinished folly” scholars have treated as a foundation of his critical project in the 1840s, revealing his first engagement with J. M. W. Turner and the sister arts of painting and poetry. This essay argues for situating the “Account” more aptly in the 1830s, as an engagement with the decade’s burgeoning illustrated travel publications describing scenes on the Continent. Ruskin’s study of new print technologies led him to regard the sister arts as cooperative, working cumulatively to illustrate a subject, rather than competitively, as the artist’s and writer’s roles were defined by tradition and theory. Tensions arose in these composite-genre topographic and ekphrastic poems, essays, and pictures, but not between representational modes. The narrative reopened problematic encounters on the Continent with Roman Catholic art and with signs of poverty and disease in the picturesque landscape. As Ruskin looked to his models in 1830s print culture for strategies to cope with these disquieting subjects, he borrowed methods to deflect or suppress their representation.