Last week I was delighted to have the opportunity to give a paper at the Ruskin Library and Research Centre, based at Lancaster University. They run a weekly seminar series, which is well-attended and provides an excellent forum for discussing the life and works of Ruskin, and I had a marvellous time. On Friday, I took the morning to explore the Ruskin Library (pictured right), a fascinating building with some amazing things inside: I got quite excited by Ruskin’s poetry, some in manuscripts that have not been published. I feel another research project coming on…
The Library has a good range of manuscripts and books in their reading room, relating to Ruskin, as well as frequently running exhibitions. It seems incredible (and sad) to me that the significance of Ruskin isn’t more widely recognised, so this is a valuable resource not just for Ruskin scholars, but for those interested in the social and cultural climate of the nineteenth century. As Ruskin himself said, “All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time”. His are of all time.