Melvin Van Akin Burd, who has died aged 101, devoted most of his academic career to the study of John Ruskin. The author of around 50 scholarly articles on the Victorian thinker, artist and philanthropist, and the editor of four editions of his writings, Burd was by common consent the towering figure in modern Ruskin studies. In 1951, he took a position at the State University of New York at Cortland, where, despite attractive offers from elsewhere, he remained for his whole career.
Perhaps his greatest discovery came one day in the early 1960s when, while reading Ruskin on JMW Turner at the Pierpont Morgan library in New York, Burd happened to consult a collection of letters written by Ruskin for the headteacher and pupils of an experimental school for girls at Winnington in Cheshire. The girls were known to have inspired The Ethics of the Dust (1866), perhaps the strangest book in the Ruskin canon. It dawned on Burd that he had unearthed an unpublished book of Ruskin’s, one that anticipated the modes of inquiry he adopted in much of his later work.
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