ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that a change there was in the Victorian period too: a similar seminal shift that is a pendant for, but also a portent of, that which Virginia Woolf identifies. Since, as Woolf suggests, one must be arbitrary, let us date it on or about July 1877. On the first day of that year, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. Extending her dominion not only in name, four months later the British annexed Transvaal. In science, Emile Berliner invented the microphone, Thomas Edison perfected the phonograph, and the first public telephone was introduced. By 1877, John Ruskin was something of a grumpy old man. He had at least earned the right to be so. Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice had changed the way a generation appreciated art and architecture. Clive Wilmer's choice of the word apocalyptic for Ruskin's rage is precisely right.
