How does The Awakening Conscience elucidate its Views of John Ruskin?
The Victorian art theorist John Ruskin praised The Awakening Conscience as an example  of a new direction in British art in which the narrative was created from the artist's imagination rather than chronicling an event. Ruskin's reading of the painting was also to a moral end.  In an 1854 letter to The Times defending the work, he claimed that there is "not a single object in all that room...but it becomes tragical if read rightly". He was struck by both the stark realism of the room — Hunt had hired a room in a "maison de convenance" (where lovers would take their mistresses) in order to capture the feeling — and the symbolic overtones and compared the revelation of the subjects' characters through the interiors favourably with that of William Hogarth's Marriage à-la-mode. 
The "common, modern, vulgar" interior is overwhelmed by lustrous, unworn objects that will never be part of a home. To Ruskin, the exquisite detail of the painting only called attention to the inevitable ruin of the couple: "The very hem of the poor girl's dress, at which the painter has laboured so closely, thread by thread, has story in it, if we think how soon its pure whiteness may be soiled with dust and rain, her outcast feet failing in the street".  The idea of a visual morality tale, based on a single moment, influenced Augustus Egg's 1858 series of three paintings, Past and Present.
Past and Present right Marriage à-la-mode John Ruskin The Times Augustus Egg morality tale William Hogarth