Dickens’s description France of 1775 in the opening paragraph of his A Tale of Two Cities, could also accurately describe Mid-Victorian Britain, at the start of Ruskin’s critical career. His was also a time of great contradictions between extreme poverty and wealth, extravagance and squalor, with the world of the upper-classes seemingly existing independently and in ignorance of the world of the impoverished. The decade in which Ruskin penned The King of the Golden River was one which saw many social and economic changes; the effects of the 1832 Reform Act were still in the process of making themselves clear and Chartism was on the decline, after almost a decade of protest and social and political battles.
According to Ruskin himself, it was against a backdrop of studying, coupled with ‘cornflowers, thistles, and hollyhocks’ that he began writing The King of the Golden River. In his autobiography, Praeterita, he paints a rather rosy picture of a young boy who was enjoying the countryside, fishing and studying botany rather than recuperating from recurring illnesses, as suggested by other scholars. He cites Dickens as an influence on the work: as a caricaturist, both in the studied development of his own manner, and that of his illustrative etchings, [Dickens] put himself out of the pale of great authors; so that he never became an educational element of my life, but only of its chief comforts and restoratives.
Ruskin claims that The King of the Golden River was written ‘merely to amuse a little girl’, and looking back in retrospect, was ‘nicely pleasing to nice children, and good for them.’. He dismisses the work as one which was ‘totally valueless’ believing that he was no more able to ‘...write a story than compose a picture.’. Ruskin says that the work was a ‘fairly good imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with a little true Alpine feeling of my own’.
Ruskin wrote The King of the Golden River after having been on an extended excursion to Italy in an attempt to restore his health following a rather difficult year at Oxford. In March, 1840, Ruskin had repeatedly taken ill with throat infections and it has been suggested that these infections stemmed from psychological causes rather than physiological ones. Ruskin had been in his last year at Oxford and was under great pressure to gain a first. He was then expected to enter the clergy, a profession towards which he had no real inclination. Abse therefore suggests that Ruskin’s illness was psychosomatic; his body had responded defensively attempting to destroy that part of him that he needed most if he were to enter the clergy: his voice. Ruskin was immediately advised by his doctors to take time off from his studies and it was suggested that he spend the winter in Italy, as a precaution against his developing a more serious illness.
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