Fors Clavigera (Volume 6 of 8): $b Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great BritainRuskin, John
General
Fors Clavigera (Volume 6 of 8): $b Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain
Ruskin, John
Aesthetics; Conduct of life; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems; Working class -- Great Britain
I did not think to tell you, when speaking of the fatality of broken
limbs in our little dressmaker and her family, that when in St.
Thomas’s Hospital with a broken thigh, the doctors said in all
probability the tenderness of her bones was owing to the manufacture of
sulphur by her mother’s grandfather. Dr. Simon knows her family through
operating on the brother of our dressmaker, and often gave them kindly
words at the hospital.
I am, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully.
FORS CLAVIGERA
LETTER LXII.
There were more, and more harmful misprints in last ‘Fors’ than usual,
owing to my having driven my printers to despair, after they had made
all the haste they could, by late dubitation concerning the relative
ages of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, which forced me to cut out a sentence
about them, and displace corrected type. But I must submit to all and
sundry such chances of error, for, to prevent them, would involve a
complete final reading of the whole, with one’s eye and mind on the
look-out for letters and stops all along, for which I rarely allow
myself time, and which, had I a month to spare, would yet be a piece of
work ill spent, in merely catching three t’s instead of two in a
“lettter.” The name of the Welsh valley is wrong, too; but I won’t
venture on correction of that, which I feel to be hopeless; the reader
must, however, be kind enough to transfer the ‘and,’ now the sixth word
in the upper line of the note at page 38, and make it the fourth word,
instead; to put a note of interrogation at the end of clause in the
fourth line of page 35, and to insert an s, changing ‘death’ into
‘deaths’ in the third line of page 27;—the death in Sheffield being
that commended to the Episcopic attention of York, and that in London
to the Episcopic attention of London.
And this commendation, the reader will I hope perceive to be made in
sequel to much former talk concerning Bishops, Soldiers, Lawyers, and
Squires;—which, perhaps, he imagined me to have spoken jestingly; or it
may be, in witlessness; or it may be, in voluble incipient insanity.
Admitting myself in no small degree open to such suspicion, I am now
about to re-word some matters which madness would gambol from; and I
beg the reader to observe that any former gambolling on my part,
awkward or untimely as it may have seemed, has been quite as serious,
and intentionally progressive, as Morgiana’s dance round the captain of
the Forty Thieves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account