SOURCE: "On Reading John Ruskin," in The Victorian Experience: The Prose Writers, edited by Richard A. Levine, Ohio University Press, 1982, pp. 150-73.

In the following essay, Townsend discusses the inspiration for and logical inconsistencies in Ruskin's work, particularly Time and Tide.

I first made the acquaintance of John Ruskin in January, 1946, about a month after I had been honorably discharged from the United States Marine Corps. Ruth and I had chosen Ohio State because we had heard of its general strength in nineteenth-century literature. On the first day of class at my new institution, I found myself in a Victorian seminar conducted by one Charles Frederick Harrold, who was a stranger to me. The first day he gave a long lecture, in which he outlined all of Victorian literature, and told the five of us that from then on we would read books and report to one another...