John Ruskin | Autograph article signed, letter to the editor of the Manchester Evening News, 13 April 1884

John Ruskin

Autograph letter signed to the editor of the Manchester City News,

a lengthy epistle written for publication, expounding on the beauties of Derbyshire's Peak District ("...Derbyshire is a lovely child's alphabet, an alluring first lesson in all that's admirable, and powerful chiefly in the way it engages and fixes the attention. On its miniature cliffs a dark ivy leaf detaches itself as an object of importance; you distinguish with interest the species of mosses at the top...") and protesting against both industrialisation and mass tourism ("...the disgrace of the gifts of nature, and the wreck of her order..."), 11 pages (numbered as ten), the first two folio, the remainder smaller fragments cut into sections, Brantwood, Easter Day [13 April] 1884, smudges and inky finger marks from the printing house, some spotting

"...But the question of today is not for the crone, but the babe. What favours of high destiny has England to promise to her children, who have been reared in mephitic fume instead of mountain breeze; who have had for playground, heaps of ashes instead of banks of flowers; whose Christmas holidays brought them no memory, whose Easter sun, no hope: and from whose existence of the present, and the future, Commerce has filched the Earth and Science shut the sky?..."

JOHN RUSKIN ON THE ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATION OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM IN THE NAME OF PROGRESS. This letter to the editor was part of a correspondence on a new trans-Pennine railway line between Dore in Yorkshire and Chinley near Manchester, which would "open up" the northern Peak District when completed. A letter signed "Progress" (later identified as S. Bramwell) had made the claim that enraged Ruskin: "We have no more right to poison the air than we have to destroy the scenery. Yet it is done, and must be done to an increasing extent every day." The current letter followed on from his letter of 7 April (sold in these rooms, 20 July 2021, lot 124) which had written of the effect of mass tourism in the Lake District. Ruskin's letter came at a time when the importance of England's remaining natural beauty was increasingly acknowledged. 1884 saw the first "freedom to roam" bill come to Parliament, which was a first step towards the creation of National Parks a lifetime later. Ruskin's full-blooded defence of England's greatest landscapes were distinctive, however, in being based fundamentally, and unapologetically, on the sheer beauty of nature: "once your snowy cliff [is] blasted away, and your trout-pool filled with potsherds, - Nature herself has no healing in all her compassion for you".

PROVENANCE:

Phillips, London, 13 November 1998, lot 410