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The Architecture of Empire: “Oriental” Gothic and the Problem of British Identity in Ruskin's Venice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Daryl Ogden
Daryl Ogden
Affiliation:
Georgia Institute of Technology
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Extract

On january 13, 1858 — a few months after the eruption of the Indian Mutiny — John Ruskin addressed an audience at the South Kensington Museum in London with a lecture entitled “The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations” (published the following year as Lecture I of The Two Paths). Commenting on the dearth of artistic talent to be found in Scotland as opposed to the artistic abundance of India, Ruskin decrees that Indians are a “race rejoicing in art, and eminently and universally endowed with the gift of it,” whereas with Scots one is faced with “a people careless of art and apparently incapable of it” (16: 262).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 109 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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