[Rarebooks] FS: Ruskin on The Oxford Museum -1859

[Joslin Hall Rare Books, ABAA]

Ruskin, John & Henry W. Acland.  "HE OXFORD MUSEUM"

London; Smith, Elder and Co.: 1859.

An interesting discourse touching on the principles of the Gothic Revival,
handwork and the dignity of workmen, and the proper decoration of
buildings, as they were related to the architecture of Oxford’s famous
Museum of Natural History, popularly known as the Oxford Museum.

Championed in the 1850s by Sir Henry Acland, who felt that Oxford was
ignoring the natural sciences, the Museum brought all those disciplines,
including geology, astronomy, geometry, chemistry, and zoology under one
roof. And quite a neo-Gothic roof it was... The building was designed by
Deane and Woodward of Dublin, with assistance of one sort or another from
Ruskin, who notes here-

“In the competition [for the design] scarce any limitation was imposed,
and to style none. Thirty-two designs by anonymous contributors were sent
in; the majority of the judges, after a thoroughly English battle, in
which some professed advocates of Gothic architecture deprecated the
application of Gothic Art to secular purposes, -thereby denying to their
own style that malleability which is, perhaps, its highest prerogative,
-the design, ‘Nisi Dominus oedificaverit domum,’ was accepted”.

The Museum was the scene of the famous 1860 debate during which Samuel
Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, asked Thomas Huxley whether he was
descended from a monkey on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side, to
which Huxley replied that he had "no need to be ashamed of having an ape
for his grandfather, but that he would be ashamed of having for an
ancestor a man of restless and versatile interest who distracts the
attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent
digression and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."

Hardcover. 4.75”x7.5”, 111 pages plus a 4-page list of other titles by the
authors; steel-engraved frontispiece of a pillar with fern carvings; a
full-page woodblock plate of decorative tracery; folding plan of the
museum; publisher’s pebbled & embossed cloth with gilt titles; spine
slightly faded, else a very nice, fresh copy.

With the handsome engraved bookplate of Herbert John Gladstone
[1854-1930]. Lord Gladstone was the son of Prime Minister William
Gladstone, and after lecturing on history at Keble College, Oxford, he
embarked on a long political career which culminated in his appointment as
Home Secretary under Asquith from whence, after some controversy over
domestic policy, he was booted “upstairs” and sent to South Africa as the
first Governor-General and High Commissioner of the Union of South Africa.
 [30336]  $350.00

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