Reviewed by: William Morris & John Ruskin: A New Road on Which the World Should Travel ed. by John Blewitt Marcus Waithe (bio) William Morris & John Ruskin: A New Road on Which the World Should Travel, edited by John Blewitt; pp. x + 187. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2019, £30.00, $40.00. John Ruskin and William Morris come as a set in Victorian studies: even allowing for their differences, it is hard to address one without invoking the other. These differences are not superficial by any means, but even among them there subsists a basis for affinity. Morris the socialist tolerated Ruskin’s radical Toryism because it was anti-capitalist; and while each approached medievalism from opposite political poles, they arrived at a mutually coherent emphasis on human potential and creative impetus. Nor is the urge to put them together simply a matter of retrospect, or pedagogical convenience. As middle-class theorists of the craft tradition, each compensated for a lack of apprenticeship by constructing an apostolic succession. While Ruskin spoke of Thomas Carlyle as his master, Morris conferred that designation on Ruskin, and later canonized him by republishing “The Nature of Gothic” from The Stones of Venice (1851–53) in a Kelmscott Press edition (1892). The field still lacks a sustained investigation of their interrelation, one that extends beyond a biographical and political accounting of distinguishing facts. William Morris & John Ruskin: A New Road on Which the World Should Travel, edited by John Blewitt, represents a welcome development in that direction. Though published by University of Exeter Press, it is not a conventional academic offering. With a few exceptions, the chapters are drawn from the pages of the William Morris Society’s Journal of William Morris Studies, making this more of an in-house anthology than an exercise in commissioning new material. In formal terms, the approach is miscellaneous: alongside contributions [End Page 469] in a standard article format, we find a book review and a Notes and Queries-style stub. A further peculiarity is that one contributor has two chapters to their name. This might disappoint readers hoping for the latest research in the field. Dates of first publication range mostly between 1977 and 2012. A case in point is Chris Brooks’s review of three separate works on Ruskin. Among them, he discusses the first volume of Tim Hilton’s biography, which appeared in 1985. He cannot discuss the second volume because at time of writing it was not yet published. That much longer installment, as Ruskin scholars know, proved a major event in the field when it appeared in 2000. Another case where a more recent perspective would help concerns the occasion at University College Oxford, in 1883, when Morris publicly declared for socialism. In William Morris: A Life for Our Time (1994), Fiona MacCarthy follows the usually reliable May Morris, who states in The Collected Works of William Morris (1910–15) that Ruskin was in the Chair at that event. If not an endorsement of Morris’s conversion, that circumstance implies at least some avuncular oversight. By contrast, one contributor here quotes Norman Kelvin, the editor of The Collected Letters of William Morris (1995), who asserts that it was Benjamin Jowett in the Chair. Yet, as Tony Pinkney demonstrates in William Morris in Oxford (2007), neither statement seems to be correct: though Ruskin was present, the lecture reports in the Oxford Magazine (1883-present) and the Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate’s Journal (1866–83) state that A. H. Hawkins was the person presiding. This is the kind of thing that a book about relations between the two men should be able to address and clear up. Questions of coherence also arise. Several essays discuss Morris or Ruskin individually, without any attempt at comparison. A few mistakes are carried across as well: at one point, a typo makes John Batchelor’s John Ruskin: A Life (2000) into a biography of Morris. These issues are distracting, of course, but they do not spoil the volume’s substance as a celebration of one of the more enduring and important author-society journals. All of the contributors are deeply immersed in the field, among them Peter Faulkner, Lawrence Goldman...