ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the Charles Dickens's work in relation to the aesthetic and political writings of John Ruskin, and works of Carlyle. Yet Carlyle was a 'mutual friend' of Dickens and Ruskin, and the three were linked by many of their contemporaries as critics of political economy and laissez-faire capitalism. In The Poetry of Architecture, Dickens explores the grotesque, characteristically discriminating between alternative forms that are held to be 'true' and 'false' respectively. Work on The Stones of Venice began in the winter of 1849-50, with a period of residence in Venice; its first volume appeared in the spring of 1851 and its second and third, following another Venetian winter in 1851-52, in the spring and autumn of 1853, just as the serialization of Bleak House came to a conclusion. It is the third volume that contains the chapter on the 'Grotesque Renaissance', to which subject Ruskin also returned in chapter eight of Modern Painters III published in January 1856.
