‘Do you, good reader, know good style when you get it?’: Learning to read with Ruskin

Abstract

The thirty-nine volumes of Ruskin’s Collected Works comprise a significant body of literary commentary, covering a wide range of writing, from the classical to the contemporary, and reflecting a lifetime of deep engagement with literature. His discussion of the nature and role of imagination; his explanation of the Pathetic Fallacy; his analysis of changing attitudes to the natural world and their expression in art and literature; his consideration of “The Nature of Greatness of Style” and the “two orders of poets”; his description of contemporary fiction as literature “of the prison house”; his explorations of the function of taste; and his examination of the work of numerous writers, are examples of Ruskin’s thoughtful attention to the craft and function of literature. A full study of Ruskin’s remarks about literature could easily fill a volume (or volumes) of its own; his wide-ranging ideas, on literature as on other subjects, resist narrow classification or definition. This essay explores the conceptual framework that shapes and supports Ruskin’s critical method, examining where his approach is most successful.