BIB_ID
188253
Accession number
MA 14328
Creator
Ruskin, John, 1819-1900, sender.
Display Date
Coniston, England, 1886 November 20.
Credit line
Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987.
Description
1 item (2 pages) ; 17.4 x 11.2 cm
Notes
The top right corner of the first page above the salutation has been torn out.
Mary Louisa Molesworth was a writer of children's stories active between the 1870s and the 1890s, and this letter concerns her new book The Four Winds.
The "schoolroom" referred to in the letter is probably the local Coniston school.
"Mrs. Bishop" is probably Mrs. W. H. Bishop. In 1883, Ruskin had delivered a lecture on Kate Greenaway and Francesca Alexander at Mrs. W. H. Bishop's house in Kensington (possibly the house "in town" referred to in Ruskin's letter).
Mary Louisa Molesworth was a writer of children's stories active between the 1870s and the 1890s, and this letter concerns her new book The Four Winds.
The "schoolroom" referred to in the letter is probably the local Coniston school.
"Mrs. Bishop" is probably Mrs. W. H. Bishop. In 1883, Ruskin had delivered a lecture on Kate Greenaway and Francesca Alexander at Mrs. W. H. Bishop's house in Kensington (possibly the house "in town" referred to in Ruskin's letter).
Provenance
Gordon N. Ray.
Summary
Ruskin cannot get the book [Molesworth's newly published Four Winds Farm] out of the schoolroom yet ("and I'm not allowed to go in--in my life"). But as soon as he can coax the children out of it, he will begin it. Only instead of four, he would have liked forty winds to begin with, like the forty thieves. "We have one [wind?] for every star that rises and a cross one for every start that sets." So many thanks for the word about Mrs. Bishop. She is ever so much better, and out of mischief, in Ireland, than in that house of Vanity Fair in town.
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