It is possible that Ruskinʼs poem reflects his parentsʼ memory of an unsettled period during the beginning of their long courtship. In 1803, with the collapse of the Peace of Amiens Napoleon began to mass troops on the French coast of the English Channel along with a flotilla of rafts and boats in port cities, ready to carry the invading force across the Channel into England. The threat threw the United Kingdom into a state of high alarm, prompting calls to organize, arm, and drill volunteer militias in cities, towns, and villages throughout England and Scotland. During this tense period, which held until Horatio Nelsonʼs victory at Trafalgar in October 1805, Margaret Cock was living in the Edinburgh residence of her uncle on her motherʼs side, John Thomas Ruskin (1761–1817), serving as a vital household support to her aunt, Catherine Ruskin (1763–1817). Margaretʼs cousin, John James Ruskin, had recently set out for London in search of a career. In 1803, Margaret was twenty‐two and John James was eighteen—the latter a dreaming, bookish youth, as captured in the 1802 portrait by George Watson (1766–1837). The cousins had already established an understanding, as characterized by John Jamesʼs 1801 poem addressed to Margaret:

In 1803–4, the unsettled state of the nation was mirrored by John Jamesʼs uncertainty about his future. In 1801, he had gone to London with letters of introduction in search of a position, only to be called back to Scotland to toil for a druggist in Fife while awaiting an opening in London. By 1804–5, he had finally gained a position with a London merchant firm, but the firmʼs future was unpromising. An 1805 letter by his mother suggests a complex tangle of emotions—on his part, a guilty sense of “undutifulness” in leaving home, combined probably with resentment of his fatherʼs irrational “temper” that apparently wanted him neither in London nor at home; and on his motherʼs part, self‐recrimination as a “poor selfish being who for her own gratification”—presumably, in wanting to keep him at home—“would ruin the prospects of her Child and perhaps condemn him to a life of misery forever”. Now, however, Catherine perceived her duty in propping up her sonʼs “habits of Industry”, “God requir[ing] that man should be accountable for his time” and “active in doing good to his fellow Creatures” (Catherine to John James Ruskin, 18 April 1805, Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 5–6, and see 7 n. 2).

As John James labored under conflicted feelings of guilt, resentment, and duty toward his parentsʼ home in Edinburgh, while dreaming of establishing a more stable future home of his own with Margaret, his conflicted emotions were writ large by British evangelicals whose assurance of Godʼs protection was thrown into question by the prospect of French invasion. As a correspondent in Knaresborough, Yorkshire, cautioned readers of the Evangelical Magazine in 1804: “a supposed confidence in God in the season of apparent security, may not produce all the effects expected, in the hour of difficulty and distress. It is indeed arguing according to the promise, when we try to persuade ourselves that, ‘As our day is, so shall our strength be’: but unless we take into the account an habitual concern to please him and to walk with him, such a persuasion will prove presumptuous, rather than the fruit of a lively active faith, and will leave us in want of the consolation and support we expected” (H., “French Invasion, and Capture of the Duff”, 73). Another correspondent with the magazine sent a poem pleading forgiveness for whatever “sins” and “crimes” had brought on this threat from abroad:

These fears and doubts would prove at variance with the spirit that Wordsworth roused in 1807 with the series, “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty”. In the sonnet “October, 1803”, Wordsworth, unlike the Yorkshireman, reassures the reader with the promise, “as thy days, so shall thy strength be” (Duet. 33:25), arguing that, for “Sound, healthy Children” of God and Britain, “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matt. 6:34) since their minds are “untilled” by the worldliness that causes “rich men” to quail with “apprehension and despair”:

As Richard Matlak remarks, this position represents a change of heart in Wordsworth, as he, Dorothy, and S. T. Coleridge appeared at first to have shunned the summons for militia volunteers by departing home for a tour of Scotland in August–September 1802. Immediately on their return, however, Wordsworth signed up with the Grasmere Volunteers, his mind changed, Matlak argues, by a meeting with Walter Scott during the tour. Scott was an ardent militarist, and his zeal was answered not just by British countrymen but also by London merchants—those “monied Worldlings” whom Wordsworth condemns for cowardice, but whom Matlak reads as straw men in the poem (Matlak, “Wordsworth and the ‘Great Terror’ of 1803–05”). The temptation to construct straw men would have been strong in a time when patriotism was feverish, yet some were apt to “taint the air” with “apprehension and despair”—not because they feared for their riches, but because as evangelicals they read divine retribution into the events. For John James Ruskin, the conflicting signs must have mirrored his own despair even of locating a home much less of defending it.

Attitudes to invasion were no less conflicted for British women. Children who grew up in Britain during the Napoleonic and immediately post‐Napoleonic eras were exposed to the anxieties of women who, as Linda Colley remarks, “seem to have believed that their own security and the security of the family unit were at stake in this French war as they had not been in earlier conflicts. In part, this was because the risk of a French invasion of Britain was so much greater in this war than ever before. But crucial, too, as an ingredient in female anxiety was the destruction of Marie‐Antoinette and the rest of the French Royal Family”—a regicide that Edmund Burkeʼs Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) taught the elder Ruskinsʼ generation to stigmatize specifically in terms “of a queen who was also a wife and mother being driven by force from her home” (Colley, Britons, 254, 253).

One source of womenʼs anti‐war writing to which Ruskin had access was Evenings at Home by the Unitarian educationalists, Mrs. Barbauld and her brother John Aikin. While it is impossible to specify when and with what extent of supervision Ruskin dipped into this miscellaneous “juvenile budget” of dialogues, fables, and poems, its anti‐war pieces were vividly prominent. For example, in the dialogue “Things by Their Right Names” (traditionally ascribed to Barbauldʼs authorship rather than Aikinʼs), a Father obliges the wish of his son, Charles, for a story about “bloody murder“; however, in place of the generic props and characters of romance that Charles anticipates, the father substitutes unexpected “right names” for elements in the story. As Charles pieces together these words, he realizes his father is not relating a thriller but describing a battle: “‘I do not know any murders half so bloody’”, the Father concludes. Implicit in the fatherʼs lesson is the real threat that war poses to the English home, as the family has gathered “‘round the fire quite ready to hear”’ a good story, only to find their expectations invaded by graphic images of violence (Barbauld and Aikin, Evenings at Home, 1:154–56).

Other anti‐war dialogues and tales in Evenings at Home—probably by Aikin, or perhaps by Aikin and Barbauld collaboratively—include the dramatic sketch “The Two Robbers”, which uses a strategy similar to that of “Things by Their Right Names” of substituting blunt definitions for the evasions of self‐glorifying warriors. The pretensions of Alexander the Great are mocked by a lowly Thracian, who has been captured for stealing. Alexanderʼs conquests, the Thracian explains, are no better than the robberies committed by the captive (2:152–56). Later, in “True Heroism”, the actions of Alexander and other alleged heroes are attributed to mere selfishness, while true heroism is bestowed on a common lad who protects his family from the abuse and neglect of his father—“of all the tyranny and cruelty exercised in the world, . . . that of bad husbands and fathers [being] by much the most frequent and worst” (5:85–90, 88).

Another dialogue that deflates the gains of war, “The Price of a Victory”, opens with a boy bursting into “his fatherʼs house” to proclaim the “glorious news” of “a complete victory”, only to be cross‐examined by his father. Rationally, the father unpacks the news by weighing the illusory benefits of the victory against its hugely painful costs. The father closes his case with a story illustrating the sufferings of a soldier, who returns home from battle grotesquely wounded, and whose death causes the decline of his fiance and parents. Again, the greatest cost of war is pictured as the fall of the peaceful and prosperous home (4:52–63). In a sequel dialogue, “The Cost of a War”, the father describes the notorious destruction of the German Palatinate by Louis XIV of France to reveal the effects of imperial aggression on unoffending villagers whose homes and crops are burned (5:54–63; and see, in Account of a Tour on the Continent, the essay “All has yielded to it from time immemorial” [“Heidelberg”] and associated glosses).

Barbauld and Aikinʼs anti‐war rhetoric in Evenings at Home has been shown to be consistent with discourse shared among Radical reformers during the Revolutionary period. The language for the childrenʼs lessons is simpler, and their ironies less biting than what Barbauld indulged in her anti‐war political pamphlets. The simplicity, however, potentially increased the risk of censure for sedition during the height of the governmentʼs alarm in the 1790s, since the arguments could be construed as leading unsophisticated folk astray (Trethewey, “Lady Defender of the Revolution”, 163–65, 161). Certainly, Barbauldʼs mastery of a shared Radical discourse drew censure because her rhetoric was indistinguishable from that of male writers. In her own time, she was accused of having “unsexed” herself. Famously, John Wilson Croker attacked her in his review of her poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, for “wander[ing] from the course in which she was respectable and useful”—as an educator and writer for children—and mistaking “her power and her duty” as a “lady‐author” by presuming to comment on the affairs of empire (). (see Mahon, “Sermon and Story”, 29–30; McCarthy, “‘A High‐Minded Christian Lady’”, 179–80).

The anti‐war pieces for children in Evenings at Home avoided scrutiny as subversive perhaps because, as Aileen Fyfe has found, the book was initially well received primarily among liberal Dissenter families. The book proved objectionable to Anglican Evangelical readers, but primarily for what it did not say, such as connecting scientific topics explicitly with religious commentary. In any case, controversy had waned by the 1820s, when Ruskin encountered the work, and Evenings at Home achieved the status of a classic, reprinted in thousands of copies (Fyfe, “Tracts, Classics and Brands”, 220–21). Aikin and Barbauld may also have steered clear of sedition by confining the anti‐war pieces to historical examples—the ancient Macedonia of Alexander the Great, the seventeenth‐century Europe of Louis XIV. However the implications of the anti‐war arguments were apprently muted for most readers, just as in Ruskinʼs “The Defiance of War” Barbauld and Aikinʼs discourse appears largely ignored in details. One can perhaps glimpse the Radical contention that only the ruling class benefits by war in Ruskinʼs remark that war “like[s] better a king to be”. Overwhelmingly, however, the poemʼs pacifist message is not only unsupported by argument but even contradicted by a discordant militarism, such as the threat that any invading army “here shall suffering die”. Moreover, the gender positioning seems aggressively masculine, with the promise that war will in its turn be conquered by “he” who is “the strongest of us”—presumably referring to the patriarch of the household, or to a military hero of the nation.

This contradiction in the poemʼs tone might be categorized with the conflict in work by women writers who ventured to raise their voices against war, while confessing themselves drawn to the glamour of the military (see Saunders, “Louisa Stuart Costello and Womenʼs War Poetry”). Ruskinʼs imagination was keenly fixed on the romance of Waterloo, just as Charlotte and Branwell Brontë made Wellington the hero of their sagas. The hero worship had its origin at least a year earlier than his compiling “The Defiance of War” along with other poems in “Poetry” [MS I Poetry Anthology], when the Ruskins visited Waterloo Field during the Tour of 1825 to the Continent. He returned to the theme throughout the late 1820s, in works such as “The British Battles”, “Battle of Waterloo: A Play in Two Acts”, “Ballad on Waterloo”, and “Trafalgar”.

War poetry that was more conflicted than Barbauld and Aikinʼs rational dialogues may have been available to Ruskin in work by Felicia Hemans, which he certainly knew to some extent at this time. In Hemansʼs early poems about the Napoleonic Wars, the idea of a peaceful British home, which stands invulnerable to warfare that Britain itself wages, appears as a trope with specific uses within a larger argument. In “War and Peace—A Poem, Written at the Age of Fifteen”, published in 1812 when the poet was still Felicia Dorothea Browne, the nation, “Albion”, is figured as the invulnerable home:

In Evan Gottliebʼs analysis of another juvenile war poem by Hemans, England and Spain; or, Valour and Patriotism (1808), which he reads against Barbauldʼs Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Hemans seeks in the end to privilege peace over warfare; however, in order to do so, she puts “herself in the awkward position of anticipating the end of freedom‐loving violence . . . for the sake of perpetual peace”, despite having all along valorized Britainʼs imperial aggression as the means to prosperity and spread of democracy. Barbauld perceives the contradiction in this oblivious optimism and predicts that Britainʼs paradoxical pursuit of peace and prosperity through imperioalistic aggression—regardless of particular, seemingly justifying circumstances—will ultimately collapse (Gottlieb, “Fighting Words”, 334, 338).

The near‐eschatological terms with which Hemans needs to represent the peaceful English home at the end of England and Spain, as well as in the paean to Albion in “War and Peace”, may explain the gap between military aggression and desire for a peaceful sanctuary that Ruskin fails to bridge in “The Defiance of War”. Even when Hemans at least acknowledges a contradiction in her somewhat maturer poem, “The Domestic Affections” (1812), by asking rhetorically whether “warʼs dread scenes [can] the hallowʼd ties efface” and whether “fields of carnage, days of toil, [can] destroy / The lovʼd impressions of domestic joy?” (lines 111–14), she still insists that home is an “ark of refuge” and a “fane of rest [that] no raging storms invade” (lines 76, 61). Triumphantly, the poem asserts the “mystic power” of domestic affections (line 252) to overcome all trials of adversity, just as domestic joy will outlast any competing sources of joy such as fame and genius. Doubt emerges only when evocation of “maternal love” prompts the question of “who may charm her sleepless pang to rest” (lines 341, 343) (Hemans, Selected Poems, ed. Wolfson, 4–15).

The latest credible threat of invasion of British shores had ended, of course, in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo, which closed the Napoleonic Wars. Soon thereafter, in London in 1816, the Peace Society was founded as a coalition of Quakers and other Dissenters, such as Congregationalists—the Ruskinsʼ church at this time—Baptists, and Unitarians, as well as Anglican Evangelicals. Peter Brock characterizes the society as marking the emergence of an organized peace movement as compared with earlier, sporadic assertions of Christian pacifism by individuals, and as partaking of the reform optimism of the 1820s–30s generally. A middle‐class movement, and never a broadly populist one, the society was intent initially on converting British opinion through pamphleteering. As the flush of optimism surrounding the Vienna Settlement gave way to rising nationalism on the Continent, accompanied by friction between reactionary state policies and republican movements, the Peace Society advocated nonintervention. It finally found a political platform through alliance with free‐trade internationalists (Brock, Pacifism in Europe, 376–86).

In late 1826, near the time of Ruskinʼs poem, an international incident that had the potential to affect trade occurred in the East, in connection with the Greek War for Independence from Turkish domination. While no threat to Britain, the war would have interested the Ruskins for its associations with Lord Byron, who had died in Missolonghi in 1824. In the Greek conflict, Britain was striving to avoid an outbreak between Turkey and Russia, whose new tsar, Nicholas I, was willing to push hostilities. In October 1826, Britain pressured Turkey to accept Russian conditions in the Convention of Akkerman. This assured Russian influence in the Caucasus and the opening of the Straits of Bosphorus to trade, which might have interested the Ruskinsʼ mercantile household. As it turned out, Russia continued to press hostilities in the name of the Greek cause, and Britain joined France and Russia to declare joint mediation, according to a treaty signed in London in July 1827. (In the subsequent history, the Turks refused mediation but were defeated by allied fleets at Navarino in October 1827. The Treaty of Adrianople, rendering Greece autonomous, was signed two years later, in September 1829.)