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This is the reading of The Ruskin Library Transcript T7B. The manuscript is unclear, and there are insertions to complicate the reading. A possible reading of the last three words is ‘founded on Negro’. If that emendation is accepted then the first form seems to have been: ‘Monstrous heads with long ears forming brackets, founded on Negro'. Later insertions are: ‘Two in each bracket’ at the beginning; ‘smooth’ as a qualification of ‘ears’; ‘half idiot’ (not ‘idiotic’ as in The Ruskin Library Transcript T7B) after ‘Negro’.
For Ruskin's views about race see, for example, Works, 4.69 [n/a], Works, 10.393, Works, 11.111, Works, 18.550 [n/a]. Compare the similar approach taken by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, first published in 1845, the chapter on Irish Immigration and the references there to Carlyle, on the ‘physiognomy’ of the Irish, and their intellectual and moral character. Ruskin’s views are irrational, but he was not alone in holding them.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]