John Ruskin letter to Ellen Heaton, 1855 late November

Ruskin asks Heaton if she could arrange for a photographer to go to Bolton and take a photograph of the scene depicted in Turner's Bolton Abbey, and to collect bits of rock from the area. Ruskin praises both Arthur Hughes's painting and Robert Browning's recently published poem "An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish the Arab Physician", expressing his surprise that he should agree with the Athenaeum's review of the text. In a postscript, Ruskin makes a sketch depicting the size of the rocks he wants to be collected from Bolton and remarks that Dante's Leah and Rachel are the "action" of life and that he has dedicated an entire chapter to them in his forthcoming book (Modern Painters III). [Date provided by Surtees: Late November 1855]