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of Venice, for to focus on disgust would be to meditate on the immoral, something that can only lead to further social and intellectual stultification. Against Ruskin’s paradigmatic instance of Gothic beauty stands Engels’ depiction of Gothic horror. Engels also relies heavily on images in the key chapter of his text, “The Great Towns”, where he writes, “To confirm my statement I have drawn a small section of the plan of Manchester. This drawing will suffice to characterize the irrational manner in which the entire district was built” (60). Engels also uses diagrams to substantiate his textual analysis of city spaces. The irrationality of urban design is, for him, symptomatic of the core paradox at the heart of liberal political economy. The practice of unchecked rationalism results in a mode of life completely antithetical to human health and contentment. Hyper-rationalism had come to produce ir-rationalism. In presenting his maps of the working-class cores of the industrial cities, Engels argues for an analogous mode of sight to that of Ruskin. Outward form is again indicative of inner value (or lack thereof). The buildings’ inner and outer appearances are directly analogous to the physical and moral suffering of the workers: “Enough! The whole side of the Irk is built this way, a planless, knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings” (63). Engels once again offers the inversion of the Ruskinian model. Instead of a connection between the beautiful and the moral, an unwavering line is drawn between the ugly and the immoral. This connection plays an unacknowledged role in the aesthetic judgment running through his text. It is precisely the ugliness of British cities that secures Engels’ judgment that they lack a moralistic core. The Stones of Venice and Condition of the Working Class can be aligned in productive ways if we see the balanced and harmonious images of Ruskin and the chaotic maps of Engels, not as separate entities, but as a bifurcated response aroused by a similar sentiment. It is a shared concept of vision, however, that marks the deepest affinity between Ruskin and Engels. In his 1872 text The Political Economy of Art, Ruskin famously made the case for the preeminent status of vision: You know we have hitherto been in the habit of conveying all our historical knowledge, such as it is, by the ear only, never by the eye; all our notions of things being ostensibly derived from verbal description, not from sight. Now, I have no doubt that, as we grow gradually wiser – and we are doing so every day – we shall discover at last that the eye is a nobler organ than the ear; and that through the eye we must, in reality, obtain, or put into form, nearly all the useful information we have about this world (82). Vision, or more accurately, active vision, was an abiding fixation with Ruskin throughout his life. As Caroline Levine writes, “Conventional ways of seeing dangerously cloud and corrupt our vision, and thus Ruskin exhorts us to work assiduously to counteract their influence” (78). But how was one to develop this requisite form of vision? And to what should one’s gaze be directed? For Ruskin, the answers to these questions are interrelated. First, visual acumen could be developed by training one’s sight on natural forms. In nature one