EDITORIAL

The Volume 2 Issue 1 of The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today is finally online. The journal is shaping up as we hoped, as it is simultaneously a platform for sharing information and generating content. The journal is advertised in Taylor & Francis’s Nineteenth-Century Contexts . Ruskin scholars continue to support emerging yet serious scholarship by contributing their valuable time towards refereeing of papers, and in this issue, we would like to thank Dr Anita Grants (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada) and Dr Jed Mayer (Assistant Professor, State University of New York – New Platz) for their time and effort.

Six international conferences in 2008 address the nineteenth century and Ruskin, of which two are devoted solely to Ruskin. 2009 opens with a two day conference John Ruskin’s posterity: Ruskinian legacy through literature and art writings in June which is organized by Maison de la Recherche, Salle des colloques, Université de Lille 3. However, while 2008 was the year of major conferences on Ruskin, 2009 is the year of key publications. I am referring to Anselm Heinrich, Kate Newey and Jeffrey Richards’s Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture (Palgrave); Rachel Dickinson’s John Ruskin's correspondence with Joan Severn: sense and nonsense letters (MHRA); and Robert Hewison’s Ruskin on Venice: ‘The Paradise of Cities’ (Yale University Press, expected October). We hope to feature reviews of these publications in the forthcoming issues.

In this issue, we have had the opportunity to review Cynthia Gamble’s John Ruskin, Henry James and the Shropshire Lads (2008), and we thank Professor Francis O’Gorman for providing a personal, knowledgeable, and generous evaluation of the book. Dr Mark Frost (Centre for European and International Studies Research, University of Portsmouth) has written an insightful and well researched paper titled “The Organic Impulse: Ruskin, trees, architecture, and society (1843-60)”. This paper explores the centrality of the allegory of trees in Ruskin's writings, and it concludes that trees “acted as a multivalent analogy for creative process, so that the organic impulse Ruskin described in his work on trees extended to all of his discourses”. The section on creative scholarship features an excerpt from a novel in progress by Octavia Randolph. The working title is Ruskin: A Novel. Octavia specializes in historical fiction and she is a member of the William Morris Society, the Pre-Raphaelite Society, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Bibliographic Society, and the Authors Guild. The novel begins in the final decade of Ruskin’s life, when insanity, which had plagued him periodically for decades, has confined him to his Cumbrian home, Brantwood. Subsequent chapters will deal with some of the major episodes of Ruskin’s long and eventful life. The novel is organized in a reverse chronological order, bringing the reader at the end of the book to the dawn of Ruskin’s brilliant and vigorous career.

In the forthcoming issue, we hope to feature reviews of Yvonne Markowitz and Elyse Zorn Karlin, Imperishable Beauty: Art Nouveau Jewelry (Lund Humphries, 2008) and Jason Camlot Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic: Sincere Mannerisms (Ashgate, 2008). We will also feature a refereed paper by our deputy editor Dr Carmen Casaliggi titled “A Study of ‘Water Beauty’.” We would like to feature a review of the Ruskin, Venice, and 19th Century Cultural Travel conference and we are currently inviting expressions of interest. In terms of creative scholarship, we have made two discoveries. One is Grace Andreacchi, a US born author known for her blend of poetic language and modernism with a post-modernist sensibility (Wikipedia). Andreacchi is active as a novelist, poet and playwright and she has written ‘Sesame and Roses’ (http://sites.google.com/site/graceandreacchi/short-fiction-index/sesame-and-roses), a short story that explores Ruskin's preoccupation with Rose La Touche and Venice. We have invited her to contribute to the creative section of our journal. Another intriguing discovery has been Alain Bruner. Alain is an architect working in Paris. His final year thesis at Victoria University of Wellington (2007, School of Architecture) involved a contextual interpretation of Ruskin's Seven Lamps, in order to resurrect the New Zealand Institute of Architects (which unknowingly sports the Lamps inside a banner of its logo). His project was awarded the national student prize. In the forthcoming issues, we will be able to bring you a glimpse into architectural manifestations of Ruskin’s teachings.

We hope you enjoy this issue and we look forward to bringing you the next one.

Dr Anuradha Chatterjee (Editor)
Sessional Academic, University of New South Wales, Australia
and
Dr Carmen Casaliggi (Deputy Editor) Lecturer in English, School of Education, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff