William Henry Harrison was Ruskin 's 'literary godfather'. Ruskin wrote of his 'first editor', after Harrison's death:
many a sentence in Modern Painters, which I had thought quite beautifully turned out after a forenoon's work on it, had to be turned outside-in, after all, and cut into the smallest pieces and sewn up again, because he had found out there wasn't a nominative in it, or a genitive, or a conjunction, or something else indispensable to a sentence's decent existence and position in life. Not a book of mine, for good thirty years, but went, every word of it, under his careful eyes twice over - often also the last revises left to his tender mercy altogether on condition he wouldn't bother me any more. 'My First Editor: An Autobiographical Reminiscence', 1 February 1878. ( Works, 34.93)
There is no evidence, however, that Harrison was involved in Modern Painters I, even though he dined with the Ruskin family towards the end of the period of composition of Modern Painters I ( Evans and Whitehouse, Diaries I, p.244). When John James Ruskin has the opportunity to mention the book during its composition, in letters to Harrison, he does not (Ruskin Library, Lancaster L5). Ruskin wrote of
a friendship, and in no unreal sense, even a family relationship, between Mr. Harrison, my father and mother, and me, in which there was no alloy whatsoever of distrust or displeasure on either side, but which remained faithful and loving, more and more conducive to every sort of happiness among us, to the day of my father's death. ( Works, 34.97)