An authoritative work interspersed with nearly one hundred of John Ruskin’s Swiss drawings recounts his lifelong interest in Switzerland. Hayman provides a chronological account of Ruskin’s visits to Switzerland from his earliest travels in 1833 and 1835 and his frequent tours of the 1840s to the final visits in the 1880s. Of particular concern is Ruskin’s intention between approximately 1855 and 1865 to engrave his own drawings of Swiss towns for a work illustrative of Swiss history. Drawings of the historic Swiss towns in which Ruskin was most interested — Baden, Bellinzona, Brugg, Fribourg, Geneva, Laufenburg, Lucerne, Neuchâtel, Rheinfelden, Schaffhausen, and Thun — are introduced by excerpts from John Murray’s A Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland (1856). Hayman has traced a great many Swiss drawings Ruskin referred to in his letters and diaries and has located twenty-three previously unpublished ones which appear in his book. Ruskin’s well-documented defence of J.M.W. Turner is also brought to light as the author has juxtaposed reproductions of Turner’s sketches of Swiss towns with drawings by Ruskin. This work will not only interest scholars and students of Ruskin but should also pique the interest of Turner scholars.

John Ruskin, one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century, was also one of the most prolific. Not only did he publish some 250 works, but he also wrote lectures, diaries, and thousands of letters that have not been published. This book draws on the original source material to give a moving account of the life of this brilliant and creative man.

Praeterita is perhaps the best-loved of all the fruits of Ruskin's many-sided and tormented genius. This exceptional biography - the first of Ruskin's works in the Whitehouse edition - simultaneously presents a deeply reflective portrait of an early 19th-century Protestant family - its genuine piety, its severities, its suffocating possessive affections - and the product (at once intellectually brilliant and emotionally damaged) of its educational system.

The first detailed treatment of Switzerland in British literature and culture from Joseph Addison to John Ruskin, this book analyzes the aesthetic and political uses of what is commonly called the 'Swiss myth' in the parallel development of Romanticism and liberalism. The myth merged the country's legends going back to the Middle Ages with the Enlightenment image of a happy, free nation of alpine shepherds. Its unique combination of conservative, progressive, and radical associations enabled writers before the French Revolution to call for democratic reforms, whereas those coming after could refigure it as a conservative alternative to French liberté. Integrating intellectual history with literary studies, and addressing a wide range of Romantic-period texts and authors, among them Byron, the Shelleys, Hemans, Scott, Coleridge, and, above all, Wordsworth, the book argues that the myth contributed to the liberal idea of the people as a sublime yet sleeping sovereign.