1. Robert Browning was an English poet, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue.

Browning was long unsuccessful as a poet, but finally became a great Victorian poet.
Robert Browning was born in London as the son of Robert Browning, a wealthy clerk in
the Bank of England, and Sarah Anna Wiedemann, of German-Scottish origin. He
received scant formal education, but had access to his father’s large (6,000 vols) library.
In his teens, Browning discovered Shelley, adopting the author’s confessionalism in
poetry. Browning wrote his first poems under the influence of Shelley, who also inspired
him to adopt atheist principles for a time. At the age of 16 he began to study at the nev.ly
established London University, returning home after a brief period.

In 1833, Browning published anonymously Pauline: A Fragment Of A Confession. Browning’s

early works attracted little attention until the publication of Paracelsus (1835), which deals with
the life of the Swiss alchemist. From 1837 to 1846 he met Carlyle, Dickens, and Tennyson, and
formed several important friendships. Between 1841 and 1846 Browning works appeared under
the title Bells And Pomegranates, which contains several of his best-known lyrics, such as How
They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, and Pippa Passes (1841).Among his earlier
works is Sordello (1840). In 1846 Browning married the poeters Elizabeth Barrett (1806-
1861.When Elizabeth died in 1861, he moved to London with his son. There he wrote his
greatest work, The Ring And The Book (1869), based on the proceedings of a murder trial in
Rome in 1698. It consists of 10 verse narratives, all dealing with the same crime, each from a
distinct viewpoint. Browning made poetry compete with prose, and uses idioms of ordinary
speech in his text. A typical Browning poem tells of a key moment in the life of a prince, priest or
painter of the Italian Renaissance. In the 1850s and 1860s Browning’s reputation began to
revive. 1855 saw the appearance of the masterpiece of his middle period, Men And Women.
With Dramatis Personae (1864) and The Ring and the Book he was back in the literary scene.
In the 1870s Browning published several works, including The Inn Album (1875), a. dramatic
poem in which two couples use the visitors’ book to convey messages, and a translation of
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Browning Society was founded in 1881 as an indication of the poet’s
status as a sage and celebrity.Robert Browning died in his son’s house in Venice, on December
12, 1889. Various difficulties made the poet’s requested burial in Florence impossible, and his
body was returned to England to be interred in Westminster Abbey.

2. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN was born in London, February 21, 1801. Going up to Oxford at
sixteen, he gained a scholarship at Trinity College, and after graduation became fellow
and tutor of Oriel, then the most alive, intellectually, of the Oxford colleges. He took
orders, and in 1828 was appointed vicar of St. Mary’s, the university church. In 1832 he
had to resign his tutorship on account of a difference of opinion with the head of the
college as to his duties and responsibilities, Newman regarding his function as one of a
“substantially religious nature.” 1
Returning to Oxford the next year from a journey on the Continent, he began, in cooperation
with R. H. Froude and others, the publication of the “Tracts for the Times,” a series of pamphlets
which gave a name to the “Tractarian” or “Oxford” movement for the defence of the “doctrine of
apostolical succession and the integrity of the Prayer-Book.” After several years of agitation,
during which Newman came to exercise an extraordinary influence in Oxford, the movement
and its leader fell under the official ban of the university and of the Anglican bishops, and
Newman withdrew from Oxford, feeling that the Anglican Church had herself destroyed the
defences which he had sought to build for her. In October, 1845, he was received into the
Roman Church.
The next year he went to Rome, and on his return introduced into England the institute of the
Oratory. In 1854 he went to Dublin for four years as rector of the new Catholic university, and
while there wrote his volume on “The Idea of a University,” in which he expounds with wonderful
clearness of thought and beauty of language his view of the aim of education. In 1879 he was
created cardinal in recognition of his services to the cause of religion in England, and in 1890 he
died. Of the history of Newman’s religious opinions and influence no hint can be given here. The
essays which follow do, indeed, imply important and fundamental elements of his system of
belief; but they can be taken in detachment as the exposition of a view of the nature and value
of culture by a man who was himself the fine flower of English university training and a master
of English prose.

3. When Arthur Hugh Clough was three years old, his family moved from Liverpool to
Charleston, South Carolina. During the six years he spent in the United States, he lived
under the constant influence of his mother’s evangelical piety. In spite of a subsequent
religious disillusionment, the concerns and temperament of the evangelical disposition
marked Clough’s poetry for the rest of his life.
In 1828, Clough was sent back to England for his education. The following year, he entered
Rugby and so fell under another of the dominant influences on his life and work—namely, the
family of the headmaster, Thomas Arnold. Arnold and his two sons Tom and Matthew Arnold
(who became a poet) fostered in Clough the ideals of a commitment to reason, rigorous
self-discipline in pursuit of high goals, and a deep moral sobriety in contemplating public affairs.
At Rugby, Clough was editor of the Rugby Magazine and head of the School House.
Clough won a prestigious scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, which he entered in 1827. In
1841, he earned a second-class degree, to the considerable surprise of friends who had
expected more, and he was denied a fellowship in his own college after his graduation.
Nevertheless, he was elected to a fellowship in Oriel College and so remained at Oxford, where
he became one of the most popular tutors.
Throughout Clough’s years at Oxford, he had watched the progress of the Oxford Movement.
The polemical context of religious discussions on the Oxford campus at the time may have
contributed to a growing skepticism, which culminated in Clough’s resigning the Oriel Fellowship
in 1848 as an act of conscience. He could not endorse the Thirty-nine Articles (the Creed of the
Anglican Church), as Oxford dons were expected to do. The soul-searching struggle of his
departure from Oxford may be intimated in his poem The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, written
shortly thereafter.
Clough was not “ruined” in English education, however, and in 1849, after a trip to Italy during
which he witnessed the French suppression of Giuseppe Mazzini’s Roman Republic, he
became the principal of University Hall, University College, London. From the Italian trip came
his Amours de Voyage. He returned to Italy the following year and, while there, began his long
and perhaps best-known poem, Dipsychus (first published in Letters and Remains, 1865).
In 1852, Clough resigned his duties at University Hall in a dispute over the manner in which
religious instruction should be administered and over his refusal to actively recruit students in
this prototype of a modern university. He set sail for the United States, where he enjoyed some
reputation for his The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, and the favor of such American literary figures
as Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Charles
Eliot Norton. Nevertheless, he could not find a position that would allow him an income sufficient
to marry the girl he had left in England—Blanche Smith. Thus, he returned to England when
Thomas Carlyle secured for him a position with the Education Office.
Clough and Blanche Smith were married in June, 1854, and for the remaining seven years of
his life, he continued his rather routine work as a bureaucrat. This employment, compounded by
the increasing duties he performed for Florence Nightingale, Blanche’s cousin, crowded out his
efforts at poetry. This busy employment helps to account for the fact that Clough’s most prolific
period of creativity was confined to a single decade of his life.
During 1859, Clough was stricken ill with scarlatina. Traveling about the Continent in an effort to
recover his health gave him opportunity to think of poetry once again. He had written a good
deal of the unfinished Mari Magno (first published in Poems, 1862) when he died in Florence in
1861. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery there, just four months after Elizabeth Barrett
Browning had been interred in the same place.

4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, christened Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, was born in
London, May 12, 1828. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian political exile with
pretensions as a poet, who had published an eccentric commentary on Dante’s La divina
commedia (c. 1320, 3 volumes; The Divine Comedy, 1802) and supported himself
teaching his native language. Rossetti’s mother, Frances Polidori, although of
Anglo-Italian background, was staunchly English in her severe moral standards and
religious beliefs. The opposing views of life represented by his father and mother
determined a conflict from which Rossetti was never able to free himself. Like his
amiable, self-indulgent father in many ways, he was never able to exorcise the accusing
voice of his mother’s puritanism. He led the bohemian life of an artist, but felt guilty for
doing so. In 1845, Rossetti entered the Academy Schools of the Royal Academy of Art.
There he associated himself with a group of young artists—notably, John Everett Millais
and Holman Hunt—who were dissatisfied with the style and subject matter of
Establishment painting, but eager to make names for themselves with the Establishment.
Because the effects of light and naturalistic detail they sought were also to be found in
late medieval art (prior to the painter Raphael), they called themselves the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and began initialing their more daring paintings “P.R.B.” In
1849-1850, the Brotherhood published a journal, The Germ, which included several
poems by Rossetti, including “The Blessed Damozel” and the prose piece “Hand and
Soul.” Also in 1850, Rossetti publicly exhibited a painting for the first time, Ecce Ancilla
Domini! Reviews of the painting—as well as of works exhibited simultaneously by Hunt
and Millais—were hostile. Stunned, Rossetti determined never to exhibit his work again
(a determination which, on the whole, he maintained). The art critic John Ruskin,
however, defended the Pre-Raphaelites, first in a series of letters to The Times, then in a
pamphlet “Pre-Raphaelitism,” and subsequently became Rossetti’s patron, although
 Rossetti’s contempt for what he perceived as Ruskin’s bourgeois dilettantism prevented
them from ever becoming close friends.
In 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, a sixteen-year-old shopgirl who began serving as a
model for members of the P.R.B. By 1852, Rossetti and Siddal were informally engaged.
Despite her beauty and the limited artistic ability she developed under his influence, they were
poorly matched. It is characteristic of Rossetti that he nevertheless married her in 1860. Their
child was stillborn in 1861, and the next year Elizabeth committed suicide.
During the 1850’s, while the Brotherhood itself was dwindling away, the reputation of its
individual members had begun to grow. Rossetti never became a popular artist (as did Millais),
but he began to receive commissions for his work and to attract a circle of younger
admirers—two of whom, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, joined him in painting
“frescoes” on the interior walls of the Oxford Union Society in 1857. There, Rossetti met Jane
Burden, the woman he loved off and on for the rest of his life. Burden married William Morris in
1859 but seems to have become Rossetti’s mistress in the late 1860’s.
Fanny Cornforth was the third woman in Rossetti’s life. They met sometime in the late 1850’s,
and after the death of Siddal, she became Rossetti’s “housekeeper.” Fanny was illiterate and
lowborn, but with a striking voluptuous beauty very different from that of Elizabeth or Jane.
Generally detested by Rossetti’s friends, she was probably Rossetti’s most loving companion.
Remorseful at the death of his wife, Rossetti had buried the manuscript of his poems with her
and given up verse until at least 1866, when his relationship with Jane Morris prompted him to
return to writing love poetry. In 1869, the manuscript of his earlier work was exhumed, and these
poems, together with his later work, were published as Poems in 1870. By that time, Rossetti
had a fairly steady income from his paintings. In 1862, he had leased Tudor House, 16 Cheyne
Walk, the London home that was to become notorious for his eccentric hospitality and collection
of exotic animals. However, his life during these years was not happy. He had become morbidly
sensitive to criticism, and with the unfavorable reviews of his poetry (notably, Robert Buchanan’s
essay “The Fleshly School of Poetry” in 1871), he began to suspect a conspiracy against him. In
1872, he attempted suicide, and the last decade of his life was characterized by poor health,
desultory work, and indulgence in the mixture of whiskey and chloral that became his favorite
narcotic. A year after the publication of his second collection of poems, Ballads and Sonnets in
1881, he died at the seaside town of Birchington, where he had gone hoping to recover his
health.

5. Algernon Charles Swinburne was born into two of England’s proudest old aristocratic
families, the Swinburnes and the Ashburnhams. His father was Captain (later Admiral)
Charles Henry Swinburne; his mother, the former Lady Jane Henrietta Hamilton, the
daughter of the third earl of Ashburnham. He enjoyed a privileged childhood, dividing his
time between the estate of his parents, East Dene on the Isle of Wight, and Capheaton
Hall, the Swinburne family seat in Northumberland near the Scottish border. For the rest
of his life, he would be fascinated by Scottish history and myth, using it as subject matter
for works of such diverse merit as the early poem “The Queen’s Tragedy” (1854) and his
dramatic trilogy centering on Mary Stuart. He was never close to his father—a
conventional man who was away much of the time—but he was pampered by his
mother, to whom he remained close until her death in 1896. His paternal grandfather, Sir
 John Swinburne, was a surrogate father to the boy, treating him with an affection and
respect that the poet never forgot.
Although he was the eldest of six children, young “Hadji” Swinburne was a lonely child, made,
from early childhood, to feel like an outcast. He was at best unusual in appearance, with bright
red hair, a too-slight build, and a perpetual nervous twitch. In the midst of a notably red-blooded
extended family, Swinburne appeared effeminate, reared as he was in the company of his
mother and four sisters. As a hedge against solitude, he turned to books. Taught to read by his
mother, Swinburne at a young age mastered the Bible, Sir Walter Scott’s novels, and the plays
of William Shakespeare.
In 1849, Swinburne was enrolled at Eton, a move that ultimately proved disastrous. The
sensitive boy did not fare well in the restrictive and patriarchal public-school atmosphere, where
conformity and team spirit reigned. Always a rebel, young Swinburne was at once terrified and
enraged by the oppressive discipline that characterized the place. Though a brilliant
student—he was able to profit at least from Eton’s heavily classical curriculum, which
emphasized Latin and Greek—he was a social failure and a constant source of embarrassment
to the school’s administration. In the summer of 1853, Swinburne left Eton for good, at least two
years earlier than expected.
Swinburne had begun writing even while at Eton, turning out heavily Elizabethan tragedies and
even a mock eighteenth century poetic tribute to Queen Victoria entitled “The Triumph of
Gloriana.” On entering Oxford in 1856, he continued his literary career, falling naturally and
almost instantly into membership in Old Mortality, a literary group that later published the
short-lived literary magazine Undergraduate Papers. A more important and farther-reaching
influence came in 1857, when Swinburne met Dante Gabriel Rossetti , who, along with his
disciples Sir Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, was down from London decorating the
Oxford Union Society building with murals. Swinburne, already seriously questioning religious
and political orthodoxy and the hypocrisies of official Victorian morality, was immediately drawn
to Rossetti’s Svengali-like personality and to the doctrine of art for art’s sake. In Swinburne,
Rossetti had found his newest disciple.
Rossetti’s influence on Swinburne cannot be overstated, and it is generally considered an
unhealthy one. Rossetti seems to have cultivated an apostlelike devotion from the young men
who constantly surrounded him, often then publicly ridiculing them or dropping them altogether.
In addition, Swinburne found Rossetti’s bohemian lifestyle much too enticing. Rossetti practiced
to a remarkable degree the decadent doctrine that he preached. His life was riddled with
alcoholic bouts and heterosexual affairs, and under this master’s influence, Swinburne learned
to give free rein to the sadomasochistic sexual urges that had been festering in him since his
Eton days. Swinburne’s love of bondage and flagellation figures prominently in some of his best
poetry; indeed, such poems as “Dolores” and “Laus Veneris” are anomalies of English literature:
They are poetic works of the highest order that until recently could not be candidly or openly
discussed by the literary establishment.
Whatever else Rossetti’s aesthetic doctrines accomplished, they at least succeeded in
prompting Swinburne to take up writing more seriously than ever before. While at Oxford,
Swinburne produced a number of poems, plays, and essays, among them the “Ode to Mazzini,”
a tribute to the leader of the fight for Italian democracy (later to become a friend and admirer of
Swinburne); the long poem “Queen Iseult,” a treatment of the Tristram and Isolde legend; and
the two tragedies mentioned earlier, The Queen-Mother and Rosamond. As a result of
Swinburne’s intense literary activity, his academic standing suffered. In 1860, he left Oxford as
he had left Eton—for reasons never made public.
The story of Swinburne’s subsequent life in London is one of personal dissipation, literary
acclaim (and notoriety), and sexual liberation to the point of excess and beyond. Through the
offices of Rossetti and his friends—the politician and biographer Richard Monckton Milnes, the
explorer Richard Burton, the painter Simeon Solomon—Swinburne led a life of unrestrained
bohemianism, as if to make up for years of repression and conformity at Eton and Oxford. He
discovered the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the sexually explicit writing of the Marquis de
Sade. Both of these writers he championed through editorials and reviews in the British popular
press in a deliberate attempt to shock the staid literary establishment. The publication of
Atalanta in Calydon in 1865 met with official approval, but in the same year Chastelard, the first
of the Mary Stuart plays, brought condemnation, scandalizing, among countless others, the poet
laureate Tennyson. Poems and Ballads (1866), which includes such “abnormal” poems as
“Anactoria” and “Sapphics,” gave Swinburne the reputation that he had long craved. He would
forever be known as the British Baudelaire, the deviant rebel of English letters.
Swinburne’s physical frailty was never quite able to withstand his excesses, and from time to
time, his father would quietly come to London and fetch Swinburne home to recuperate. One
such rescue occurred in 1871 during a long and bitter public battle in which the minor poet
Robert Buchanan attacked Rossetti and Swinburne as members of the amoral “Fleshly School
of Poetry.” Naturally, Swinburne mounted a counterattack. The peevish and juvenile mudslinging
continued for five years, culminating in a libel suit in 1876—a suit that Buchanan won. In 1877,
Swinburne’s father died, and the poet returned to London, hell-bent on spending his inheritance
on liquor and sexual pleasure. In June, 1879, his friend Walter Theodore Watts (later
Watts-Dunton) did what Admiral Swinburne had so often done: He rescued the poet from a
collision course with death and installed him at The Pines, Watts’s home in suburban Putney.
Swinburne never left The Pines, and little is known of the last thirty years of his life. He
continued to write and to publish, with Watts-Dunton acting as a shrewd literary agent. The poet
who everyone thought would die young died at the age of seventy-two on April 10, 1909.

6. John Ruskin was the most influential critic of art and architecture in the nineteenth
century, promoting the notion that art had a moral purpose; as a social critic, he worked
to undercut notions of laissez-faire economics and utilitarianism, championing the dignity
of individual workers and the need for national programs of education and welfare.
Ruskin’s emergence into the public forum came as a result of his passion for art. Long
an admirer of the iconoclastic painter J. M. W. Turner, in 1842 Ruskin found himself
compelled to undertake a systematic defense of the artist to rebut a savage review of
Turner’s work. At the same time, his family moved to Denmark Hill, which was to be
Ruskin’s home for three decades. There he wrote diligently what eventually became the
first of a multivolume work explaining the principles that characterize great art: power,
imitation, truth, beauty, and relation. The first volume of Modern Painters was published
in 1843; Ruskin identified himself on the title page simply as “A Graduate of Oxford,”
ostensibly to mask the fact that he was so young to write so authoritatively.
Modern Painters was favorably received, and Ruskin set about immediately to continue his
study. In 1845, he was allowed to travel to the Continent without his parents for the first time. In
Italy he studied the works of antiquity and the Renaissance, a period for which Ruskin had great
antipathy. He also spent considerable time studying the architecture of the cities through which
he traveled. As a consequence, the second volume of Modern Painters did not follow slavishly
the plan set out in the first volume and implied in its title; instead, Ruskin digressed to discuss
the art he had observed during his more recent trips.
The success of his work made Ruskin popular socially, and his parents hoped he would
eventually marry Charlotte Lockhart, granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott. Ruskin, however, had
other ideas; he fell in love with Euphemia (“Effie”) Gray, daughter of a Perth businessman. After
some months of awkward courtship, they were married, on April 10, 1848.
Marriage did not change Ruskin’s life-style greatly; he continued his travels and writings,
preparing studies of architecture that appeared in 1849 as The Seven Lamps of Architecture.
Further investigations, and deeper thought about the relationship between great buildings and
those who built them, resulted in the three volumes published in 1851-1853 as The Stones of
Venice. In the work, Ruskin argues that one can read a city’s history in its architecture, and
make judgments about a society based on the kind of buildings it erects. During this same
period, Ruskin began what was to be a lifelong defense of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and
poets.
Meanwhile, relations between Ruskin and his wife deteriorated, as John’s parents found their
daughter-in-law an interloper in their close-knit family, a view their son came to share. By 1854,
Effie could no longer stand the constant upbraiding and mental harassment; she fled back to her
family, initiating a suit for annulment on the grounds that the marriage had never been
consummated. Ruskin did not contest the suit. Two years later, Effie married the painter John
Everett Millais, with whom she had a large family.
Freed from the constraints of married life, Ruskin returned to his parents’ home and resumed
work on Modern Painters. The third volume appeared in January, 1856; the fourth followed in
April. In these books, Ruskin stated clearly his belief that great art can be produced only by men
who feel acutely and nobly. At the same time, he began developing what was to become an
important thesis in his later works: the inextricable relationship between art and the economy.
In 1857, Ruskin spent considerable time cataloging the nineteen thousand drawings that Turner
had bequeathed to the nation upon his death in 1851. That same year, Ruskin delivered a
series of lectures in Manchester. In them, he argued for public patronage of the arts, straying
from strict commentary about art to remark on the status of Great Britain’s economy and the
ways in which the masses were being exploited and impoverished.
By 1860, Ruskin had finally finished Modern Painters. In the seventeen years during which he
worked on this magnum opus, he had grown significantly in the appreciation of various artists,
developed a moralistic theory of art and architecture, and suffered several personal setbacks.
Never one to deal well with women, Ruskin found himself associating often with young ladies,
even girls; his affiliation with Margaret Bell’s girls’ school at Winnington was one way in which he
satisfied his psychological needs to share such company. A chance meeting in 1858 led to his
infatuation with ten-year-old Rose La Touche. For more than a decade he pursued her affection,
eventually proposing marriage when she turned eighteen (he was forty-seven at the time). Her
continual rejection brought anguish to Ruskin, an anguish that found its way into his public
writings through a series of private symbols and obscure autobiographical references.
Though he had spoken publicly and written often about the state of the economy for some time
before 1860, in that year Ruskin emerged as a major critic of current economic and social
programs. In the fifth volume of Modern Painters, he launched what would amount to a crusade,
with himself cast in the role of Saint George against the dragon of a country obsessed with
money and unwilling to recognize the dignity of its laborers. Meanwhile, Ruskin composed a
series of essays on political economy for the new Cornhill Magazine; unfortunately, these were
too controversial, and the editor, William Makepeace Thackeray, was forced to cancel them after
several had appeared. Undaunted, Ruskin published the complete set in 1862 in a volume titled
Unto This Last.
Ruskin’s father objected to his son’s new field of inquiry, and the early 1860’s were difficult
years. The senior Ruskin’s death in 1864 freed Ruskin from constant criticisms but left him to
care for his mother until she died in 1871. To help at Denmark Hill, Ruskin’s cousin Joan Agnew
came for a brief visit—and stayed almost constantly for the rest of the century, first assisting with
Mrs. Ruskin, then serving as a younger companion and later nurse for Ruskin himself. Their
relationship, which became quite intimate in its own way, survived Joan’s marriage to Arthur
Severn.
Throughout the 1860’s Ruskin devoted himself to writing about economic issues, trying to relate
the disparate branches of his studies into a coherent vision of human society. In 1867, he began
writing “open letters” on a variety of social and economic issues. The first series he collected in
1872 as Munera Pulveris. A year earlier, he had initiated a monthly series of letters (which
slowed in frequency after several years) addressed to the workingmen of Great Britain. Titling
his series Fors Clavigera (1871-1884), a name he said implied “force” or “fortune” in the first
word and “strength” or “patience” in the second, Ruskin wrote on a wide variety of topics,
mingling autobiography and private symbology in tracts about art, politics, and economics. Many
were considered incomprehensible by even the most astute Ruskin devotees; the intended
audience was undoubtedly confused, even bewildered, by this strange mixture of personal
narrative and public pronouncement.
His commitment to social issues did not keep Ruskin from pursuing his work in art. In 1870, he
assumed the Slade Professorship of Art at Oxford, the first professor of art appointed in Great
Britain. For several years, he used that forum to further his ideas concerning the relationship
between art and religion, and art and morality. He also assembled a fine collection of works to
illustrate his lectures, eventually bequeathing them to the university. In 1871, he funded a new
school of art at Oxford, the Ruskin School of Drawing, still among the most prestigious of such
institutions.
Meanwhile, Ruskin tried to implement some of the social theories about which he had written. In
1871, he officially founded the Guild of St. George, a Utopian society to promote humanistic
living. Though the project eventually failed, Ruskin worked diligently to obtain land to establish
ideal communities where men could share the products of their labors, and where they could
enjoy the beauties of art (much of which Ruskin himself obtained for these planned
communities).
The death of Rose La Touche in 1875 may have been responsible for the frenzy of work in
which Ruskin engaged for the next several years. He continued to visit the Continent, to write
new works or revise those which he thought required a change of focus, and to promote social
causes. In the late 1870’s, he began to suffer from intermittent fits of mental instability. Fighting
the effects of this illness, Ruskin worked on a host of projects, including his autobiography,
Praeterita, left unfinished in 1889 when his condition worsened to the point that he lost all
capacity for work. In effect, he spent the last eleven years of his life totally incapacitated, simply
existing at his home under the care of Joan Agnew Severn. He died in 1900 and was buried in
the churchyard at Coniston.