ABSTRACT
Ruskin's work is a plenitude of returns. He returns to places, pictures, books; he makes of his life a pattern of revisiting, a pattern he symbolizes when he writes the Preface (1885) to his autobiography in what was once his own nursery at Herne Hill. This chapter considers a specific act of return in 1878 when Ruskin, in the pages of the Nineteenth Century, goes back to consider Pre-Raphaelitism and to revisit a subject of so many years' concern. I exam ine The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism (published in two parts, November and December 1878) and analyse the terms of Ruskin's rhetoric, firstly by comparing it with features of the 1853 Edinburgh lecture on Pre-Raphaelitism. I suggest ways in which the vocabulary of visual description in The Three Colours is embedded within Ruskin's politics of the 1870s and, in considering the constitutive features of Ruskin's gaze there, I also analyse the implications of his reading of the female body for the transmission of ideology and the performance of gender roles. I conclude, firstly by considering another return to Pre-Raphaelitism, in the 1883 Oxford lectures later published as The Art of England (1884), and their related investment in a gendered politics of ordinary, orderly living explored in The Three Colours, and secondly by suggesting a way of looking not simply at the inscription of politics in the text but at the politics of inscription.
