BIB_ID
188244
Accession number
MA 14338
Creator
Ruskin, John, 1819-1900, sender.
Display Date
London, England, between 1857 and 1880
Credit line
Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987.
Description
1 item (1 page) ; 17.7 x 11.2 cm
Notes
Possible years of writing inferred from content. The letter would have been written after Tom Taylor began writing criticism for the Times in 1857 and before his death in 1880. The Times covered proposals for decimal coinage throughout this period, particularly in the 1850s and at the end of the 1860s. Ruskin may be referring to debates in the Times about coinage reform in August 1869. Ruskin was himself proposing decimal coinage for the Guild of St. George at this time, and Ruskin and Taylor were both under consideration for the Slade Professorship of Art at Oxford at that time as well.
Ruskin included a system of decimal coinage in the early description of the Guild of St. George that he gave in an 1869 letter to Lady Mount-Temple, included in The Letters of John Ruskin to Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, ed. John Lewis Bradley.
Ruskin included a system of decimal coinage in the early description of the Guild of St. George that he gave in an 1869 letter to Lady Mount-Temple, included in The Letters of John Ruskin to Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, ed. John Lewis Bradley.
Provenance
Gordon N. Ray.
Summary
Ruskin agrees to come with pleasure. Beneath a line drawn across the page: Ruskin asks Taylor to explain to anyone connected with the Times the indignation that he felt at their jesting attitude about proposals to switch to decimal coinage. Ruskin says that a switch to decimal coinage would be a decimal lengthening of every human life connected with that measure. It is preeminently the honest man's versus the knave's, and the wise and kind man against the ignorant and selfish. And the Times jests at it. Anything so futile as their reasoning Ruskin has never yet read on any matter.
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