While
Tinkerʼs scholarship was centered in
Boswell and
Johnson studies—at least initially, until difficulties with access to manuscripts
derailed his aspirations to continue editing
Boswellʼs papers—
Ruskin and the Pre‐Raphaelites held an important place
in his teaching, collecting, and writing. In
1908,
Tinker published
Selections from the Works of John Ruskin,
an anthology that he distanced from “such a volume as used to be entitled Elegant Extracts”, instead reprinting chapters and lectures
from
Ruskinʼs works in as complete a form as practicable in order “to insure a correct notion of the general complexion” of the criticʼs ideas.
For
Tinker,
Ruskinʼs thought and literary style constituted a unity, which must be studied as “one continuous development” (pp. iii, xii, xix).
Such a position would have favored the acquisition of
Ruskinʼs juvenilia and letters to his father, along with later manuscripts sampling the wide range
of
Ruskinʼs interests, that Yale gained from the
Sothebyʼs Sale of Ruskin Manuscripts and Library, 1930.
Tinkerʼs personal collection of
Ruskin included five autograph letters; and his rare and first‐edition printed
Ruskin,
while not aspiring to comprehensiveness, ranged widely across
Ruskinʼs interests and rhetorical styles
(see
Metzdorf, The Tinker Library, 371–74).
He and his students had access, moreover, to a comprehensive
Ruskin collection belonging to
R. B. Adam,
which
Adam donated to Yale University Library in
1929, in friendship and in support of
Tinkerʼs tireless advocacy
on behalf of the libraryʼs collections
(
Hyde, “Adam, Tinker, and Newton”, 304).
Equally beneficial to the libraryʼs
Ruskin holdings, if less happily in circumstances, the
Boston book dealer
Charles E. Goodspeed (1867–1950)
donated the manuscripts in his keeping, which had been damaged by his house fire in
1941.
Tinker, at that time still keeper of rare books and manuscripts, was
Goodspeedʼs correspondent during the salvage,
and presumably
Tinker helped oversee the care of the scorched items. A decade earlier,
Goodspeed had served as the primary,
if not perhaps the exclusive mediator for Yaleʼs acquisitions from the Sothebyʼs
Ruskin sales.
Goodspeed entrusted Yale University Library with the remains of his
Ruskin collection because, it was said, he wished “to complete Yaleʼs holdings of the available major
Ruskin manuscripts,
so many of which had passed through his hands on their way to
New Haven”
(
Hogan, “Yale Collection of the Manuscripts of John Ruskin”, 69).