John Ruskin, D.H. Lawrence and an idea of Italy

Abstract

In spite of the clear evidence of Ruskin's presence in D.H. Lawrence's works, critics and biographers alike have never sufficiently acknowledged the genealogical link between the two writers. For Ruskin was not only an important influence on Lawrence's critical views of industrial society and his condemnation of the consequent destruction and degradation of the English landscape, but also on his ideas concerning the relationship between art and the modern world as well as the transformation of aesthetic taste. Indeed, in the numerous pages he dedicates to Lawrence in Culture and Society, even Raymond Williams fails to mention Ruskin, although he is quick to point out that 'Lawrence is very close to the socialism of a man like Morris' as far as his critical attitude towards property rights is concerned. At the same time, however, ignoring the fact that many aspects of Morris's social thought and ideas on art are drawn from Ruskin, Williams traces Lawrence's ideas directly to the antitechnological medievalism of Carlyle: 'Lawrence takes over the major criticism of industrialism from the nineteenth-century tradition, one point after point, but in tone he remains more like Carlyle than any other writer in the tradition, then or since.