Ruskin's Method of Publication

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 5, Chapter 11, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

Ruskin's method of publication was complex. Much of the material was adapted from lectures given at Oxford and elsewhere and was incorporated into a series of new queries, arguments, memories, and denunciations. It was then published in eight octavo volumes of "parts," containing two or three "chapters" apiece, extending from 1875 to 1883. The following synopsis gives an idea of the book's contents and their heterogeneity. A discussion of glacier flow in chapters 2-4 is interrupted by a personal reminiscence (chapter 5), then continues; chapter 7 is a lecture on the relation of precious stones to heraldry; chapters 8 and 9 are on crystallography; chapter 10 is a memoir of Forbes; chapter 11 returns to mineral classification; chapter 12 is a lecture on the streambeds of Cumberland; chapter 13 contains certain notes on silica sent by a friend; chapter 14, among other things, makes promises for the next volume that are not fulfilled. Volume 2 opens with a lecture on snakes, continues with a restatement of Ruskin's moral and religious principles to date, and ends with a poetic description of the forms of ice.

Last modified December 2000