Abstract:

“Introduction” by John Ruskin (1819–1900), a famous Victorian art expert, poet and art critic, the author of the story “The King of the Golden River” (1841) that is considered to be one of the bright examples of protofantasy, is, first of all, interesting as a precedent: a brief but deep immersion into the world of children’s literature as an early manifesto that appeared on the dawn of its “golden age”. Ruskin sums up the features of contemporary book market, notes the main tendencies prevailing there, makes some critical remarks that will be considered, unconsciously or taken as a piece of advice, by his contemporaries. Equally important is Ruskin’s attitude toward a child inheriting the Romantic tradition of a “wise child” but not detached from Victorian realiae and directly related to the époque when the text was written — the “mid-Victorian well-being”. Also we can see on his essay some vectors of a new pedagogy, a new attitude to a little reader that will have a tremendous impact on the pedagogical and literary thought of the second half of the 19th and the whole 20th centuries. The paper is first published in Russian.