Ruskin and Gender

Ruskin and Gender Edited by Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman Ruskin and Gender W.G. Collingwood, Ruskin in his Stud...

Author: Dinah Birch | Francis O'Gorman

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Ruskin and Gender

Edited by Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman

Ruskin and Gender

W.G. Collingwood, Ruskin in his Study at Brantwood (1882) (by permission of the Ruskin Museum, Coniston)

Ruskin and Gender Edited by

Dinah Birch and

Francis O’Gorman

Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman 2002 Chapter 1 © Francis O’Gorman 2002 Chapters 6 and 7 © Dinah Birch 2002 Chapters 2–5, 8–10 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–96897–2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ruskin and gender/edited by Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman. p. cm. Based on contributions presented at a conference held in Trinity College, Oxford University, Sept. 22, 1999. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0–333–96897–2 1. Ruskin, John, 1819–1900 – Views on sex role – Congresses. 2. Sex role – Great Britain – History – 19th century – Congresses. 3. Feminism and literature – Great Britain – History – 19th century – Congresses. 4. Masculinity in literature – Congresses. 5. Femininity in literature – Congresses. 6. Sex role in literature – Congresses. I. Birch, Dinah. II. O’Gorman, Francis. PR5267.S48 R87 2002 828⬘.809–dc21 2001058804 10 11

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

To Dr James S. Dearden with thanks for a lifetime’s generous contribution to Ruskin studies

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Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Notes on the Contributors

xi

Textual Note

xiii

Introduction Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman

1

1 Manliness and the History of Ruskin in Love: Writing Ruskin’s Masculinity from W.G. Collingwood to Kate Millett Francis O’Gorman 2 The Stones of Childhood: Ruskin’s ‘Lost Jewels’ Catherine Robson 3 The Foxglove and the Rose: Ruskin’s Involute of Childhood Lindsay Smith

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4 Ruskin, Gautier, and the Feminization of Venice J.B. Bullen

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5 The Feminist Origins of ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ Linda H. Peterson

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6 Ruskin’s ‘Womanly Mind’ (1988) Dinah Birch

107

7 ‘What Teachers Do You Give Your Girls?’ Ruskin and Women’s Education Dinah Birch

121

8 ‘Any Day That You’re a Good Boy’: Ruskin’s Patronage, Rossetti’s Expectations Joseph Bristow

137

vii

viii Contents

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Pantomime Truth and Gender Performance: John Ruskin on Theatre Sharon Aronofsky Weltman Images of Proustian Inversion from Ruskin Emily Eells

159 177

Selected Bibliography

201

Index

206

List of Illustrations W.G. Collingwood, Ruskin in his Study at Brantwood (1882) (by permission of the Ruskin Museum, Coniston)

ii

James Northcote, Ruskin, aet 31/2 (1822) (by permission of the National Gallery)

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Athena, photogravure from a statue at Herculaneum (Library Edition, 19, plate 14)

181

Giotto, Charity, photogravure from the fresco in the Chapel of the Arena, Padua (Library Edition, 27, plate 3)

184

Abraham Parting from the Angels (from Ruskin’s drawing of the fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli) (Library Edition, 4, plate 10)

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Acknowledgements We thank the delegates of our co-organized Ruskin and Gender conference on 22 September 1999 in Trinity College, Oxford for their contributions to the debate. We are grateful to the following institutions for their financial support for this conference, which was the origin of some of the chapters collected here: Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, the English Faculty of the University of Oxford, and Trinity College, Oxford. Additional thanks are due to Professor Robert Hewison, Professor Michael Wheeler, and Professor John Carey. Dinah Birch thanks Sid, Rowena, and Joe for their generosity and patience. Francis O’Gorman thanks Jane for her support and lively interest in the book. Thanks to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint Dinah Birch’s ‘Ruskin’s “Womanly Mind”’ from Essays in Criticism, 38 (1988), pp. 308–24; to the Ruskin Museum at Coniston for permission to reproduce W.G. Collingwood’s Ruskin in his Study at Brantwood (1882); Princeton University Press for permission to publish a version of ‘The Stones of Childhood: Ruskin’s “Lost Jewels”’ from Catherine Robson’s Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (2001), and the National Portrait Gallery for permission to reproduce James Northcote’s John Ruskin, aet 31/2 (1822). DINAH BIRCH

Trinity College, Oxford School of English, University of Leeds

FRANCIS O’GORMAN

x

Notes on the Contributors Dinah Birch is Stirling Boyd Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Trinity College, Oxford, and a University Lecturer in English. She has recently edited a selection from Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera (2000), and Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (1999). Joseph Bristow is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he edits (with Thomas Wortham) Nineteenth-Century Literature. His recent publications include two edited volumes: The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (2000) and Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions (2002). J.B. Bullen is Professor of English at the University of Reading; he has written widely on Ruskin, who plays a significant role in his current study of the history of the Byzantine Revival in Europe and America. Emily Eells is maître de conférences in the English Department of the University of Paris X–Nanterre. Her research on Proust and the Victorians is the subject of her forthcoming book entitled Proust’s Cup of Tea: Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture. Her numerous articles include ‘Ruskin, Proust et l’homotextualité’ (Etudes anglaises, 1999) which presents and analyses Proust’s manuscript pastiche of Ruskin’s style. Francis O’Gorman is Lecturer in Victorian Literature in the School of English in the University of Leeds. He has written widely on Ruskin, including John Ruskin (1999) and Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2001). Linda H. Peterson is Professor of English at Yale University. She first published on Ruskin in Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self Interpretation (1986) and recently has written Traditions of Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (1999). Her current project focuses on women’s entry into the profession of letters. Catherine Robson is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Her areas of interest include nineteenth-century British literature and cultural studies. Her book, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman, was published in 2001.

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xii Notes on the Contributors

Lindsay Smith is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. She works on the intersections between nineteenth-century literature and visual culture, particularly painting and photography. She is the author of Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites (1995), The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth Century Photography (1998), and essays on Victorian culture. She is currently working on Lewis Carroll as a photographer. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, and has written extensively on Ruskin and gender, including Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (1998). She has also published on Christina Rossetti, Robert Frost, and Jane Ellen Harrison. Currently she is working on two book projects: first, a new book on Ruskin; second, Victorians on Broadway, a study of the cultural work accomplished by late twentieth-century musical adaptations of Victorian materials.

Textual Note All references to Ruskin’s works, unless stated otherwise, are to The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: Allen, 1903–12), and are given in the main text as volume: page number.

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Introduction Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman

Ruskin’s identity is always multiple, and so is his gender position. Accounts that do not hear the plurality of his voices, both public and private, miss a crucial dimension. Matters ‘of any consequence’, Ruskin told his audience in his Cambridge Inaugural Address in 1858, ‘are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal’ (16.187). The words are peculiarly apt for the subject of this book, which considers afresh aspects of Ruskin’s complex contribution to gender debate. It is only in recent years that ‘Ruskin and gender’ has become a serious subject. Previously – and especially for those readers influenced by Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) – critics interested in Ruskin were unlikely to be interested in gender, and vice versa. But the last fifteen years have seen important changes. Ruskin’s complicated relationship with Victorian gender politics is now being recognized and explored. Assessments of his interventions that stop at a hasty reading of ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ (1864) are becoming fewer. Ruskin’s polygonal literary persona meant that he was heard and read differently by diverse audiences. He was also peculiarly performative. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman considers a dimension of his response to the theatre. Yet Ruskin was theatrical himself in the strategically various crafting of his persona. Because he was sharply aware of audiences and contexts, and because he enacted different parts of his identity, his work quickly breaks beyond the limits of arguments that try to confine him to single positions. Ruskin had many faces, metaphorically. In portraits, he had many faces, literally. Here, in the visual, is a glimpse of the plurality of his gendered persona. Francis O’Gorman discusses W.G. Collingwood’s masculinization of Ruskin in portraiture. But, prior to Collingwood, there was a substantial body of visual representations that suggested Ruskin’s 1

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Introduction

femininity or emphasized his composite gender characteristics. The first of Ruskin’s own verbal self-portraits in his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89), revealingly feminized his childhood. Speaking of the 1822 portrait by James Northcote (p. 30) of Ruskin aged 31/2, Ruskin said that it ‘represents a very pretty child with yellow hair, dressed in a white frock like a girl, with a broad light-blue sash and blue shoes to match’ (35.21). Lindsay Smith and Catherine Robson both consider how this picture connects with Ruskin’s meditations on girlhood in Praeterita. Certainly, the visual association between Ruskin and the feminine, to which Praeterita drew such explicit attention, described other visual and textual representations across his career that imagined him in nonnormative gender terms. John Everett Millais’s sketches, made between 1853 and 1854, emphasized a sensitive and feminized figure, as did George Richmond’s in 1857.1 The caricaturist of Fun in March 1876 saw another side to Ruskin’s apparent femininity. He depicted Ruskin as ‘Saint Rusty’, a high-church priest, affected and snooty, and daintily avoiding looking at the black mass of industrial Sheffield behind him. Ruskin, the caption said, was the exemplum of ‘superfine, often superficial, criticism’.2 The caricature expressed anxieties about the effeteness imagined to be a consequence of Paterian Aestheticism, straightforwardly linking Ruskin to a movement with which his relations were, in reality, complicated.3 It also caught the widespread concern about his religious sympathies in the 1870s, figuring them in culturally commonplace terms of gender dissonance. Ruskin’s pro-Catholic sentiments in the 1870s – he declared in Fors Clavigera (May 1874) that ‘the worship of the Madonna has been one of [Catholicism’s] noblest and most vital graces, and has never been otherwise than productive of true holiness of life and purity of character’ (28.82) – prompted concern among his Protestant readers and friends. For severer critics of his new sympathies, the language of effeminacy was a ready-made weapon. Charles Kingsley’s view in 1851 that ‘there is an element of foppery—even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy’4 among Romanists and Tractarians still had pertinence in the 1870s, and it was this unsympathetic gendering that shaped Fun’s visual satire of Ruskin’s effete priestliness. Another anonymous caricaturist played with a more ambiguous gender representation in 1874. This Oxford artist, satirizing Ruskin’s Hinksey Road project and his rhetoric of land reform in the Inaugural lectures at Oxford (1870), offered an image of a spade and pick-bearing Ruskin in labourer’s boots as one of the ‘Great Guns of Oxford’. But the link between Ruskin and normatively masculinist manual work was

Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman 3

blurred by the caption that named him the ‘President of the Amateur Landscape Gardening Society’.5 The caricature poked fun at Ruskin’s road building, and queried his association with straightforwardly strenuous male labour. In his own life, Ruskin maintained a distance from dominant modes of normative masculinity. ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ celebrated a domestic life that was hardly Ruskin’s. Its account of wifeliness was no account of Ruskin’s own experience, as most readers must silently have recognized. The annulment of Ruskin’s marriage on the grounds of nonconsummation had separated him from a familiar ideal of heterosexual manliness; childless, it also deprived him of the securely masculinist position of pater familias and left him vulnerable to accusations of sexlessness. Francis O’Gorman considers the efforts of early biographers to counter suggestions of diminished manliness caused by the marriage’s failure. But even while married, there were elements of unconventionality in Ruskin’s gender position. Especially during the Venetian visits of 1849–50 and 1851–2, he kept out of Effie’s company. He rarely appeared as part of a couple in public. He did not identify normative maleness with heterosexual union. Effie, it might be added, was, if anything, more unorthodox. Independently of her husband, she kept male company, and refused to allow Ruskin’s aloofness to interfere with her visits and socializing. She flirted. She was actively her own woman in Venice. But Ruskin’s gender unorthodoxy extended far beyond his marriage. It is evident in the formulation of his literary authority. Ruskin’s performativity, his capacity to adopt new voices, included his use of female subject positions. As Dinah Birch has pointed out, he defined a woman’s business as praise (18.122) in Sesame and Lilies (1865).6 Yet his whole career as an art critic, in which, he said, he ‘praise[d] without scruple’ (29.586), fulfilled this womanly task. He implied his own calling was distinctively female. More locally, Ruskin used a culturally-determined woman’s place to enable aspects of his literary persona. The Saturday Review complained bitterly of Unto this Last (1860), saying that the world was not going to be ‘preached to death by a mad governess’.7 Ironically, five years later, Ruskin literally adopted a governess’s role, or at least that of a teacher in a girls’ school, to write The Ethics of the Dust (published in 1865 with 1866 on the title page). This text, which has recently begun to attract critical attention, was a series of lectures on the moral lessons of crystallography, partly based on Ruskin’s experience of real teaching at Margaret Bell’s innovative Winnington Hall School in Cheshire.8 In the 1870s, Ruskin continued to explore the possibilities of fresh forms of authority. In the three science textbooks, Love’s Meinie

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Introduction

(1873–81), Deucalion (1875–83), and Proserpina (1875–86), this included the further appropriation of female subject positions to critique the exclusively male authority of modern empirical science. In Deucalion, for example, which was an attempt to produce an ‘absolutely trustworthy foundation for […] geological teaching’ (26.197), Ruskin challenged one of the most prominent figures in the Victorian scientific establishment, John Tyndall, Professor at the Royal Institution, geologist, physicist, and agnostic. Tyndall’s theories of glacial movement irritated Ruskin, and his apparently materialist explanations of natural phenomena appalled him. Ruskin thought the soulless conclusions Tyndall championed had ‘thrown foolish persons into atheism’ (28.541). Deucalion contested the professional natural philosopher’s glacial science, partly through conventional factual argument, and partly through female role-playing. Ruskin said that he had borrowed Lady Mount-Temple’s kitchen, and, with the help of her ‘infinitely conceding, and patiently collaborating cook’ (26.232), used kitchen implements, blancmange, flour, hot water, sugar lumps, and ice cream to test Tyndall’s supposedly scientific conceptions of glacial movement. Ruskin demonstrated more in this way, he said, than in a ‘year’s worth’ of orthodox empirical investigations (26.177). He criticized modern geology from a woman’s space, acting out a woman’s role, revealing that modern science had missed truths visible in ordinary domestic kitchens. The female subject position did not diminish the authority of the provocatively alternative science: adding another layer to Deucalion’s dissonance, it enhanced it. Ruskin’s literary voice, especially in his later work, was not a solidly masculinist one. In turn, Ruskin, in the second half of his career, was restless about many conventional masculine roles available in nineteenth-century society. In Unto this Last, he urged the competitive capitalist to understand the concepts of service and duty, suggesting an eighteenth-century model of gentlemanly commerce was more admirable than the individualist values of modern political economy. In his Inaugural lectures at Oxford, he bid the aspiring colonialist remember that it was chiefly England that needed to be colonized and made fruitful. While Slade Professor, he disliked the cult of athleticism as previously he had criticized the competitive spirit of the Alpine club in Sesame and Lilies. At Oxford, he used the Hinksey road-building project to divert the muscles of his undergraduates from sport to useful work of benefit to the local community. He was impatient with men who consumed their time rowing on the river, just as he thought little of the conventional upper-class male pastimes of shooting and foxhunting.


Ruskin did not find that many of his culture’s gender roles suited him. He remained in this respect, as in so many ways, on the margin. Ruskin’s physical appearance – his old-fashioned frock coat and blue stock – was always noticed in his later years, by those who met him, as different from that of most men. Such difference was the least important, if the most visible, part of Ruskin’s tendency not to conform, and non-conformity defined his gender position. *** Some of those who were most deeply influenced by Ruskin’s thinking were persistently uneasy about the complexities of his gender identity. Francis O’Gorman’s essay considers the long tradition of biographical interpretations of Ruskin, and traces the legacies of attempts to place him more securely in the cultural boundaries of masculinity. He shows how W. G. Collingwood, the earliest and one of the most significant of Ruskin’s biographers, placed his representations of Ruskin as a Carlylean hero in a tradition of vigorous male public writing, and began the process of repositioning Ruskin in relation to constructions of manliness. Much of this subsequent activity was related to assessments of the failed marriage. Those wishing to defend Ruskin’s reputation from the gossip and speculation that lingered around the annulment often did so by attempting to affirm assertive masculinity. As O’Gorman explains, it was a strategy that turned out to have unforeseen consequences. The rise of feminism in post-war Anglo-American culture meant that Ruskin, if seen as the unqualified voice of Victorian patriarchy, made a tempting target. Kate Millett’s powerful and hostile reading of Ruskin’s lecture ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ in Sexual Politics became for many readers in the academy a central statement of his significance, in terms both of Victorian gender politics, and in the broader sense of his place in twentiethcentury thought. O’Gorman argues for a more clearly focussed overview of the ideologically weighted battles that have been fought over Ruskin’s relations with models of gender, as a means of moving towards a more fully realized understanding of the multiplicity of his work. Catherine Robson’s essay on the concept of the feminized child as it relates to Ruskin’s sense of his own identity investigates one of the areas where these complexities find their subtlest forms. The representations of ideal girlhood in Praeterita, where the death of young girls suggests the closure of his own development, attempts to unite the old man and the young girl into a single image of the lost self. What emerges is a crystallized and prefect figure of femininity, frozen and unreachable,

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alive only in the past. In this way, the memory of Rose La Touche, who died in 1875, becomes the focus of an imaginative pattern that was central to Ruskin’s work. Ruskin’s thinking about his own history, especially as it was expressed in his autobiography Praeterita, is further explored in Lindsay Smith’s essay on ‘The Foxglove and the Rose: Ruskin’s Involute of Childhood’. This considers Ruskin’s images of female children in Praeterita in relation to his wish to ‘botanize’, or ‘to see into the life of things’. Smith argues that Ruskin’s longstanding interest in flowering plants, developed most fully in Proserpina, is inextricably bound up with his experience of a feminized childhood. The perspective of the child, and of the female child particularly, allows for a creative spontaneity lost in adulthood. Ruskin is to some extent inclined to identify himself with this gendered perception of childhood, but the repeated and painfully remembered deaths of girl children in Praeterita, losses which prefigure the later defining loss of Rose La Touche, also suggest an imaginative pattern that assimilates his understanding of memory and mortality into a strangely botanical construction of girlhood. J. B. Bullen expands his consideration of Ruskin and gender to include a comparison with the French poet, novelist and critic Théophile Gautier (1811–72). Both Ruskin and Gautier were in Venice, with female companions, in 1850. Bullen argues that the city, whose image was traditionally feminized and eroticized, played an important part in the sexual identity of both men. Gautier’s life in Venice was one of passionate carnality. But Ruskin, haunted by the sense of elegy that had defined his responses to Venice since his adolescent and Byronic early love for Adèle Domecq, saw Venice in the light of his failing relationship with his wife Effie. Bullen suggests that Ruskin’s writing about Venice was shaped by his anxieties about his marriage, and his readings of Venetian history, with is emphasis on the fall from Gothic virtue to Renaissance vice, and then to eighteenth-century debauchery and corruption, was conditioned by his disquiet about femininity in general, and his marriage to Effie in particular. Despite these anxieties, Ruskin was by no means oblivious to what women were contributing to contemporary intellectual life. Linda Peterson’s essay on ‘The Feminist Sources of “Of Queens’ Gardens”’ argues that the ideas of Ruskin’s lecture, so often cited as antagonistic to progressive ideas about women’s employment and education, were in fact influenced by leaders of the women’s movement in the 1850s and early 1860s – notably Anna Jameson, a prominent figure in a group that included Barbara Leigh Smith, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Adelaide Procter,


and Anna Mary Howitt. These women frequently read and discussed Ruskin’s work, and Ruskin knew many of them both professionally and personally. Peterson shows that the influence of Anna Jameson, whom he had met in Venice in 1845, was particularly important, and can be traced throughout ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’. His thinking about the need for a serious moral education for girls runs parallel to work that other members of the circle published in the 1850s – Bessie Parkes’s ‘Remarks on the Education of Girls’, for instance, which prefigured Ruskin’s wish for a more liberal education for girls, including elements of physical training and unrestrained reading. Peterson demonstrates that progressive Victorian women did not see Ruskin’s position as opposed to their own. We should revise the traditional view of his work being antagonistic to the liberal views of Mill, she argues, replacing the concept of ‘Mill versus Ruskin’ with that of ‘Mill and Ruskin, with Mill as the champion of women’s legal rights and Ruskin, of educational reform’ (p. 102). The idea that Ruskin’s relations with the ideals of femininity, and with the real women whom he knew, were both more complex and more positive than has always been recognized continues to be an important theme in the essays contributed by Dinah Birch. In ‘Ruskin’s “Womanly Mind”’, first published in Essays in Criticism in 1988, she argues that, in addressing the social roles of women in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, and their shortcomings, Ruskin is thinking of himself. What he identifies as the proper cultural functions of women – praise, reverence, social responsibility – are also what he perceives as his own duties as a critic. In castigating the weakness of women in failing to move unflinchingly into the world in order to take on the social abuses of the age, he is voicing his own sense of guilt, and nerving himself to confront the difficulties inherent in the public work of social criticism, which was absorbing his time and energy in the early 1860s. Ruskin’s interest in the pre-Christian female divinities of Egypt and Greece – Neith and Athena – was at its most intense at this stage of his career, and helped him to find models for thinking about the authority of femininity in different ways. His friendship with many intelligent and active women, and his collaborative work with a number of them, belies any suggestion that he did not take them seriously. More to the point is the fact that his feminized critical voice made it that much harder for many of his contemporary readers to take him completely seriously. Like Linda Peterson, Dinah Birch focuses on Ruskin’s work for women’s education as being central to his cultural interests. This is the subject of her second essay, ‘“What Teachers Do You Give Your Girls?” Ruskin and Women’s Education’, which examines the nature and extent

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of his contribution to the development of women’s education in the period. His support for the progressive Winnington Hall, and his friendship with its energetic headmistress, Margaret Bell, emerges as a pivotal feature of his life and work in the late 1850s and early 1860s. His knowledge of the school had long-lasting consequences for his writing, not least in the publication of The Ethics of the Dust, a book which reflects the experience of teaching the schoolgirls of Winnington in ways which look forward to the development of new critical strategies in the later 1860s and beyond. His interest in institutions founded to further women’s education was given new impetus with his election as Oxford’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art in 1869. Ruskin performs differing and sometimes troubled gender roles in his life as an art critic, and these are demonstrated in his complex relations with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Joseph Bristow suggests that differences in cultural influence and financial resources were eventually to come between the two men, wrecking their hopes of building a fraternal homosocial intimacy on their shared interest in new forms of art. The concept of an aesthetic ‘brotherhood’, of the kind that had motivated the heady days in which the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been formed, could not contain the deep-seated differences that divided Rossetti’s restless mind from Ruskin’s wish to exercise a directive patronage. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman’s essay, ‘Pantomime Truth and Gender Performance: John Ruskin and Theatre’ shows how an interest in dramatic performances of many different kinds, from pantomime to tragedy, runs through his work. It provides a productive means of approaching his gender identity. Theatre offers what Judith Butler has called ‘morphological possibilities’ for the performance of gender. Ruskin was deeply drawn to the imaginative freedoms suggested by these possibilities, while he was also often repelled by the threat they could represent to the clarity of gender distinctions that he wanted to maintain. His response to troubling dreams, often related to stage performances that he had witnessed, demonstrate an urgent reaction to gender ambivalences that he found both liberating and disturbing. Emily Eells’s essay on ‘Images of Proustian Inversion from Ruskin’ considers the importance of the multiplicity and ambivalence of Ruskin’s images of gender in the formation of the literary identity of one of the most central voices in early twentieth-century fiction – Marcel Proust (1871–1922). Proust’s knowledge and admiration of Ruskin’s work was profound, and it helped to shape his lifelong exploration of creativity and memory. Proust was responsible for the translation of Sesame and Lilies and The Bible of Amiens (1880–85) into French.


Eells suggests that, in A la recherche du temps perdu, he persistently associates Ruskin’s work with homosexuality. His homosexuals are often androgynous figures, and his distinctive reading of Ruskin’s criticism, especially his work on the early Italian Renaissance, enables him to find precedent and authority for the construction of complex redefinitions of gender boundaries in his own fiction. The multiplicity of Ruskin’s gender identity was what made Proust’s subtle interpretations of his legacy possible. Proust’s work is a reminder of what generations of readers and critics have affirmed and reaffirmed: that the richness of Ruskin’s thought is inseparable from the fruitful challenges it offers to conventional definitions of gender.

Notes 1 See James S. Dearden, John Ruskin: A Life in Pictures (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 50–1, pl. 11. 2 Dearden, p. 102. 3 For a recent analysis of this relationship, see Nicholas Shrimpton, ‘Ruskin and the Aesthetes’, in Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 131–51. 4 Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, ed. Frances Kingsley, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), I.201. David Hilliard considered the dissident gender implications of Anglo-Catholicism in ‘Unenglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies, 25 (1981–2), [181]–210. Lori M. Miller revised some of Millard’s ideas in ‘The (Re)Gendering of High Anglicanism’, in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, ed. Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 27–43. 5 Dearden, John Ruskin, p. 96. The unidentified caricaturist worked under the name ‘INO’. 6 See pp. 110–11 below. 7 Quoted in 17. xxviii. 8 The Winnington context is further discussed in Dinah Birch, ‘The Ethics of the Dust: Ruskin’s Authorities’, Prose Studies, 12 (1989), 147–58. A fresh contextual dimension is suggested in Francis O’Gorman, ‘“To see the finger of God in the dimensions of the Pyramid”: A New Context for Ruskin’s The Ethics of the Dust (1866)’ forthcoming in Modern Language Review. Both these essays consider different ways in which The Ethics tested ideas and practices of writing that Ruskin fully developed in the 1870s.

1 Manliness and the History of Ruskin in Love: Writing Ruskin’s Masculinity from W.G. Collingwood to Kate Millett Francis O’Gorman

W.G. Collingwood’s portrait of Ruskin in his Study at Brantwood (1882, p. ii) is at once a thoroughly detailed painting of Ruskin’s writing room, a study in greens and browns, and a painterly construction of Victorian literary manliness. The setting is, as Collingwood noted, some time before breakfast, but Ruskin sits already well into the morning’s labour, the signs of his literary energy lying in the wastepaper basket behind him, and carefully arranged on the floor beside it. On the left, the second drawer of the chest is open, containing business papers – this is where Ruskin filed them – of the Guild of St George.1 Ruskin’s writing on this early winter morning concerned his public work with social reform. Although he sits solitarily, with a favourite tortoise-shell and white cat for his only audience, he is engaged, through the Guild, with the wider world. The globe in the corner hints the furthest extent of his grasp. Ruskin, whose white-bearded presence is repeated by the whitecapped Old Man of Coniston visible through the window, is a figure of rocky strength. His sitting position is almost a running one. He is not lost in dreamy thought, nor racked by the pains of authorship, but writing firmly and confidently on matters of national policy. ‘I’m working vigorously,’2 Collingwood told his fiancée as he painted the picture on 17 February 1882, and he was portraying Ruskin in the same way. Collingwood, who served as an assistant at Brantwood 1881–2, offered a visual image of the Professor as a spirited, Carlylean figure, a hero-as-man-of-letters, energetic and confident, intervening in the social and spiritual organization of the nation. His image employed distinctly masculinized codes. Yet it is almost certain that Ruskin never sat 10

Francis O’Gorman 11

for this portrait. The end of 1881 and beginning of 1882 had seen Ruskin severely depressed: in February 1882 he went to Herne Hill and was away from Brantwood until 4 January 1883. In the meantime, Collingwood had planned the portrait as a surprise. Undaunted by the absence of his subject, he used Laurence Hilliard, who had become Ruskin’s secretary at Brantwood at the end of the 1870s, as a model. ‘Hilliard[,] who is such an actor,’ he told his fiancée in February, ‘is going to sit for the Professor – and I’ll do the face out of my head – I think I can.’3 The vigorous man at the study desk was almost certainly a stand-in, and Collingwood’s codes of masculinity gathered around a figure of heroic literary labour that was not Ruskin. W.G. Collingwood is the villain of this chapter. His picture lingers over my argument as a visual allegory of what happened to the matter of Ruskin and gender in print, from Collingwood’s extensive writing on Ruskin and onwards, through to the women’s movement of the 1960s. He is responsible for commencing a process of aggressive masculinization of Ruskin, spurred partly by his own difficult ideas of masculinity, which has worked both directly and indirectly against a full understanding of Ruskin’s gender position, sometimes disastrously. Collingwood’s legacy and its various consequences are still with us, and still in need of revision. My focus throughout this essay is the subject of Ruskin’s marriage to Effie Gray, which suggested to Collingwood and other early writers, in the most forceful way, his distance as an individual from orthodox models of manliness.4 My chapter starts by surveying Collingwood’s rhetoric for the representation of Ruskin’s gender position, considering its relation to the assumptions about manliness evident in Collingwood’s fiction. An account of the speculation about Ruskin’s marriage from the 1920s to the 1940s – well after the decline of Ruskin’s public reputation as a thinker – follows and I propose this ultimately produced a new debate that revived Collingwood’s masculinizing terms as a form of defensive rhetoric. Cumulatively, this protective language left a troublesome heritage for later readers of Ruskin. It formed the context in which Kate Millett read Ruskin in the 1960s and assisted in urging her feminist critique of a small sample of his work taken as representative both of his attitudes about gender roles generally and of ‘patriarchal’ Victorian culture altogether. Millett’s analysis of Ruskin, while important in itself, added to the problematic legacy for readers of the present and continues to influence contemporary efforts to decode the subject of Ruskin and gender. Collingwood’s response to Ruskin and gender proved a factor, via a Darwinian set of links, in building the context that eventually gave energy to feminist outrage in the 1970s

12 Manliness and the History of Ruskin in Love

over what was taken to be the sum of Ruskin’s gender politics. What is needed now is an effort to banish this difficult discourse, with Collingwood at its point of origin, and begin to think of Ruskin’s complex position as man and writer in relation to models of masculinity afresh. *** Ruskin’s gender position, as early critics and biographers implicitly recognized, chafed against acceptable and conventional models of manliness in a number of ways. As an art critic, and later a Professor of Art, he championed a subject that was by no means clearly defined as masculine.5 His intensely affective and richly autobiographical prose, placing in the foreground a subjectivity that constructed arguments from intuition and feeling, not from unimpassioned reason, struck many early biographers as more female than male, and Ruskin was often described in early accounts as a gender composite. J. Marshall Mather, in his popular Life and Teaching of John Ruskin (1884), was not alone when he presented his subject as an amalgam of knightliness and Nightingale: ‘In him’, Mather said, ‘is the spirit of chivalry: fearless when fronting or exposing wrong, he is tender as a child to all in weakness, sympathetic as a woman to all in pain.’6 Moreover, even within the boundaries established by his own definitions of manliness, in, for example, Unto this Last (1860), Sesame and Lilies (1865), Fors Clavigera (1871–84), A Knight’s Faith (1884), and Valle Crucis (written in the early 1880s but published in 1896), Ruskin was suggestively dissonant, transgressing those borders that his own culturally prestigious words were endeavouring to enforce.7 But it was the question of sexuality and gender (and their relationship) that caused the most significant difficulty for both early and later critics of Ruskin. His failed and sexually inactive marriage (and chaste, emotionally destructive love for Rose La Touche, a girl nearly thirty years younger) were episodes that challenged the masculine identity of their subject and energized efforts to frame him in culturally secure gender terms.8 W.G. Collingwood’s compensating endeavours to hail Ruskin in a rhetoric that was confident in its masculine credentials, and, in particular, to affirm his life’s labour in the language of manly exertion, were visible in paint in 1882. They were also visible in prose from his very first essay in Ruskin biography, John Ruskin: A Biographical Outline (1889). This pamphlet, in Virtue’s, the London publisher’s, ‘Celebrities Series’, set some of the defensive masculinizing terms that were generously amplified in his later The Life and Work of John Ruskin (1893), a highly


influential biography that would prove consequential in the twentieth century. The pamphlet also extended, or at least translated into the verbal, the painterly vocabulary of the 1882 portrait. Collingwood began with a description of Ruskin (as well as a preliminary etching)9 that strengthened the reader’s sense of the heroic energy he had suggested in the 1882 painting. He observed that Ruskin, like a new Moses, had ‘the still undimmed fire of eyes which, from their overhung caverns, seem to miss nothing’, as well as the ‘unabated vigour in hair … and … the spring and strength of a frame which, though stooped and bent as if with poring over papers always laid flat upon his table, is competent even now for cutting faggots in the wood, or rowing his boat across the lake in half a gale of wind.’10 This verbal portrait of masculine energy and physical vitality (Ruskin was 70 in the year the pamphlet was published) is an unsurprising prose gloss to the gender rhetoric of the portrait, as, indeed, the Outline is more generally. Collingwood’s first biographical approach presented the narrative of a conflictual life, in which Ruskin, who ‘naturally provoked opposition’11 in his radical views, was situated in an explicitly masculinized scene of conflict. The language of war served Collingwood as a serviceable rhetoric for his gender claims. Ruskin ‘busied himself in the pursuit and defence of truth’,12 he concluded, framing his subject as a chivalric warrior who fought many ‘Battles … with crass Boeotians’.13 This presentation of a combative life, where Ruskin periodically ‘came into collision with everybody’,14 was fashioned as replete with heroic labour. Social action and altruistic reform, rather than art, were affirmed by Collingwood as the real centre of Ruskin’s heavily masculinized work. Illness, and in particular the periods of Ruskin’s depression and insanity, were emphasized as the result of great physical outlay. The ‘enormous press and variety of work he had undertaken’ was always public-spirited and altruistic. The illness at Matlock in 1871 was ‘a consequence of the distressful exertions of mind he had undergone when on the Mansion House Committee for the victualling of Paris after the siege’.15 Ruskin was manfully spending his life for others. Collingwood’s approach to the key stories of Ruskin in love in the Outline, with their potentially troubling implications for normative masculinity, was simple: he entirely ignored them. Of Effie and Rose he said nothing, though he briefly noted that, when Ruskin’s ‘nursery was invaded by a bevy of pretty girls’ (that is, when he was visited by the Domecq daughters, though hardly in his nursery), he ‘of course … fell in love’.16 The only indication of sexual desire permitted in the text plainly stressed heterosexual normativity. Language that affirmed this – where it


was possible – was extensively marshalled in Collingwood’s other biographical accounts of Ruskin’s youthful love in both the Life and Ruskin’s Relics (1903). In the former, for instance, he preserved his image of Ruskin the heroic champion, calling him an art critic who had ‘beaten down opposition, risen above detraction, and won the prize of honour’,17 while narrating the story of Adèle Domecq in a way that amplified the strategy of the Outline by stressing Ruskin’s healthy sexual desire. Collingwood presented him as a young man ardently intense about Adèle, falling ‘passionately in love’ with her ‘graceful figure and that oval face’.18 The end to his hopes, which Collingwood indicated was chiefly due to parental influence, not to any fault in his own attractiveness, did not dispirit him utterly. He ‘[took] his punishment like a man’, he concluded.19 Collingwood’s efforts to insist on healthy manliness and sexual desire, visible in his use of the Adèle Domecq story, aimed to detract from the problems generated for a biographical representation of masculinity by Ruskin’s dissonant gender position and, especially, the implications of his marriage. This latter was a problem E.T. Cook solved in his influential two-volume The Life of John Ruskin (1911) by taking a hint from the Outline and barely mentioning the subject of Ruskin and Effie at all. But Collingwood’s approach to the sexual life of Ruskin, his attempts to defend any implication of unmanliness by hearty masculinization, sit uncomfortably, or so it first appears, besides the implications of his surprisingly frank exploration of sexuality and sexual relationships in his now forgotten fiction. Collingwood’s scholarly interests in Old Norse culture resulted partly in two historical novels, now lost in the oubliette of Victorian literature, Thorstein of the Mere: A Saga of the Northmen in Lakeland (1895) and The Bondwoman: A Saga of Langdale (1896). The second of these has implications for his work on Ruskin.20 Set in the Lake District and reissued in 1932 with the pluralized title of The Bondwomen, the novel candidly explored a sexual triangle between Oddi, a statesman and Lakeland settler of northern origin, his wife Groa, and a beautiful Saxon captive called Deorwyn. Groa, unhappy with her husband’s sexual longing for his expensively bought domestic slave, eventually decides to allow him to sleep with her and agrees to let them live together in a threesome to preserve domestic harmony. ‘So master Oddi’, Collingwood wrote, ‘had his heart’s desire, and a bit over; and a proud and happy man he was.’21 This remarkable arrangement (remarkable, that is, for respectable fiction of 1896), which began with a ‘honeymoon of three’,22 lasts for some time before Deorwyn sets up a new home with a separate partner. Such controversial exploration of the


pleasures of bigamy perhaps suggested Collingwood’s view of sexuality was liberal. The book caused a storm for this reason23 and it might have indicated a willingness to read another man’s ‘unorthodox’ sexual history, however that unorthodoxy was enacted, more openly and less defensively. But The Bondwoman in fact suggests nothing of the sort, and its depiction of masculinity clearly indicates the roots of Collingwood’s gender politics and provides part of the explanation for his aggressive masculinization of Ruskin. Collingwood’s notion of masculinity in The Bondwoman was focused on Oddi as uncompromising sexual predator, and sexual desire and performance were precisely the indices of his manliness. Masculinity emerged in The Bondwoman as a category primarily suggestive of barely containable sexual desire where women were literally a commodity (Oddi buys Deorwyn), as well as the passive and voiceless object of male aggression, physical violence, and murder. The book makes uneasy reading in its privileging of male sexual potency with disregard for the woman’s perspective. The fact that unrestrained penetrative sex, apart from anything else, was such an obvious and emphatic indicator of masculinity in The Bondwoman is entirely consistent with Collingwood’s defensive strategies in his biographical work on Ruskin to preserve a sense of his vigorous manliness in the absence of sexual performance.24 While Collingwood’s fictional explorations of masculinity were peculiar to him, his visual and verbal portraits of Ruskin in masculinized terms and his efforts to erase implications of aspects of his dissident gender position determined many early approaches, a plurality of turnof-the-century efforts, to protect Ruskin with a manly vocabulary. Collingwood’s Outline began a powerful biographical practice. And as that practice developed, embracing writers including Frederic Harrison, J. Marshall Mather, Alice Meynell, R.E. Pengelly, and Ashmore Wingate, an especially sensitive issue continued to be Ruskin’s gender position in the light of his sexual history. A sustained correspondence was silently made between sexual activity and gender, where success in one correlated with normativity in the other. I have discussed these writers and their defensive gendering strategies in Chapter 5 of my Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2001). The subterranean anxieties about Ruskin’s gender position went beyond Collingwood’s generation into the new century. But the unconsummated marriage, as the century moved on, became a subject of more open discussion, long after the decline of major interest in Ruskin’s life and work, and it began to form the focus of increasingly obvious gender


claims. Various debates, after the Library Edition, were sustained about responsibility and blame, and they went on for years. Kenneth Clark noted wearily as late as 1964 that concern about Ruskin had long been only a ‘malicious interest in the story of his private life’.25 Ruskin’s marriage was, at a popular level, what was chiefly known about him, just as, now, with a different sense of what is sexual scandal, Ruskin’s relationship with Rose dominates one picture of his sexuality. The interest in the marriage and the scandalous claims it prompted in the years between the two world wars eventually caused the intervention of Sir William James and John Howard Whitehouse at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. Their bitter argument – Whitehouse was ‘incandescent’26 about James’s views – involved Whitehouse’s re-activation, with a new force, of the defensive gender terms that had been given wide currency by Collingwood and absorbed by his generation. After Ruskin’s death (Effie had died in 1897), some who had known Ruskin, or had been loosely connected with the Ruskin–Effie circle, commented on the collapse of the marriage and variously laid blame, implied improper action, or suggested a frisson of scandal. Ruskin’s marriage was a subject for public debate in the twentieth century to a greater extent than, say, Emilia Dilke’s (first) or Carlyle’s problematic marriages were, and a considerable corpus of opinion was gradually constructed that would provide the tinder for a conflagration in the mid-point of the century. An early contribution to the debates about the rights and wrongs of the two partners before or after the annulment was William Michael Rossetti’s important Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870 (1903), which, while not devoting a great deal of space to the Ruskin marriage, did include a potentially damaging statement about Effie. Rossetti, repeating the evidenceless claim he had heard from the unreliable Charles Augustus Howell,27 wrote that at Ruskin’s marriage £40,000 was settled on Mrs R[uskin]; and that, as far as he [Howell] can trace out in the accounts, this sum has remained with her, spite of the nullity-of-marriage suit. He regards this as intentional generosity on R[uskin]’s part, but does not seem to have ascertained whether R[uskin] had really any power of revoking the settlement.28 The clear implication of this narrative, intended or not, was that there had been a degree of injustice on the part of Effie, tactfully indexed as Lady Millais throughout the book. Rossetti implied that she had profited financially by the marriage and acted dishonourably by keeping the


huge sum of money settled on her in 1848. This was a claim that greatly annoyed the Gray family. In 1912 the Effie–Ruskin marriage became the subject of a more remarkable claim, emphasizing the sexual strangeness of Ruskin and the emasculating effects of literary labour. This view of Ruskin’s wasted manliness, together with other versions of his sexual ‘abnormality’, began to grow alongside the Collingwood-inspired defensive rhetoric, to be finally assimilated in Millett’s attack in 1970. The original suggestion was made in the new medium of black and white moving film: a silent movie from the Vitagraph Company of America, starring Earle Williams as Ruskin, called The Love of John Ruskin. This cinematographic work, now lost, from the most successful US film producer in the early years of silent movies, apparently represented Ruskin as a man who was unable to give Effie the affection she deserved because, as the advertisement phrased it, ‘His mind was absorbed in his literary effusions’29 too much to notice her. Work impeded sexual fulfilment in this reading, and it turned Ruskin into a erotically diminished man. The advertisement claimed that he ‘loved his wife intensely, but he was not demonstrative. His heart was bowed down with a great sorrow, he would not deny his wife that love which he could not enjoy himself. He willingly gave her freedom and released her from her marriage vows. He not only consented to the marriage with Sir John Millais, but acted as best man at their wedding.’30 Clearly, while the film was broadly sympathetic to Ruskin, it constructed him as a sexually and emotionally enfeebled (and actually impotent?) man, whose passion for a beautiful woman was withered by his commitment to writing and his lack of sexual drive. The film’s absurd claim that Ruskin was the best man at Millais’s wedding was to prove only one of the extraordinary statements made in twentiethcentury efforts to tell the history of Ruskin in love. Vitagraph’s view of an emasculated Ruskin was one of the perceptions Collingwood had wanted to counter. It would dramatically reappear in the work of Admiral James in 1948. In print, some biographers discussed the relationship on both sides of E.T. Cook’s and Alexander Wedderburn’s Library Edition of the Complete Works of John Ruskin (1903–12). Amid conflicting claims, they found this remarkably difficult to do. Eda Earland in her Ruskin and His Circle (1910), for example, noted with surprise Ruskin’s friendly support of Millais’s art even after he had become the lover and later the husband of Effie. ‘What were his real feelings in the matter?’,31 Earland asked with some incredulity. The Love of John Ruskin had been intended as a cinematographic reply to precisely such a question. After the Library Edition,


when the first phase of Ruskin enthusiasm and scholarship had passed, speculation continued among those who were still writing on him about the details of the unconsummated marriage. Amabel Williams-Ellis, in The Tragedy of John Ruskin (1928), lamented the ‘difficulties in the way of a biographer’s finding out what really happened and why’.32 She noted with frustration that different commentators took different lines, with Collingwood regarding Effie as ‘reprobate’33 and John G. Millais, in his two-volume life of his father, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1899), endeavouring to erase the figure of Ruskin-as-husband altogether by never mentioning that his mother had previously been married to him.34 Despite her comments on the difficulties of discerning fact from fiction in the story, however, Williams-Ellis added in a small way to the myths that were growing around the relationship herself, declaring, with no stated evidence, that Effie’s way of leaving Ruskin was not a little heartless. ‘Effie left without a word’, she wrote, ‘save the traditional note on the pincushion.’35 Sir William Rothenstein made a more dramatic claim in his account of the marriage in 1931, continuing to add to the pile of imaginative and salacious speculation. Rothenstein’s Man and Memories (1931–2) repeated a story apparently from F.J. Furnivall, who regarded Ruskin as having wickedly endeavoured to trap Effie into adulterous falsehood. ‘There was no pretence of affection,’ Rothenstein wrote, recalling Furnivall’s words, ‘or of sympathy even, betwixt Ruskin and her. Ruskin, according to Furnivall’s story, had hoped that she would elope with an Italian count who had stayed in the house; but it was the count who eloped, not with Mrs Ruskin, but with all her jewels.’36 This narrative is confusing. The ‘Italian count’ is not identified, and perhaps Furnivall referred to Effie’s friendship with Charles Paulizzi, an Austrian first lieutenant, on her and Ruskin’s first trip to Venice during the winter of 1849–50. If this is so, then Paulizzi is perplexingly misidentified in Furnivall’s or Rothenstein’s mind, firstly as a count, and secondly because he merges with Captain Foster, an Englishman in the Austrian service, who actually was suspected of stealing Effie’s jewels from a Venetian hotel room at the close of their stay in 1852.37 Whatever the case, Rothenstein’s contribution to the debate about the marriage fanned flames. Among Ruskin biographies, there can be few so unpopular as R.H. Wilenski’s judgmental and begrudging volume, a study of a ‘manicdepressive invalid’,38 published as John Ruskin: An Introduction to Further Study of His Life and Work (1933). Wilenski’s approach to Ruskin, whom he saw as having ‘an abnormal constitution of … mind’,39 was relentlessly to


blame John James and Margaret – ‘a religious bigot’40 – for Ruskin’s problems. The man who emerged from this volume was a mixture of dandy, genius, eccentric, and depressive, who was unable to stand up to parental interference in his life: he was also profoundly self-indulgent. On the question of Ruskin and love, Wilenski saw his subject as characterized by unspecified ‘Sexual obsessions of a personal kind’ that ‘were persistently with him in adolescence and from just before forty to the end.’41 These apparently inhibited his relationships and his sexual maturity. Wilenski’s interest in Ruskin’s sexual nature led him to offer some hints of secret sexual liaisons, and to suggest that Ruskin pursued his self-indulgence in a new direction around the time of his unconversion. In Turin in 1858, Wilenski said, Ruskin enjoyed the ‘pleasures of urban life’: he ‘gave a £5 tip to a ballerina; he nearly ogled the Italian ladies round the bandstand on a Sunday morning; and there possibly (and elsewhere possibly in the next few years) he indulged himself in other pleasures of which we have no records and which possibly he never confessed.’42 The freely acknowledged absence of evidence for the last point did not inhibit Wilenski from adding a remarkable hint of what he presumably meant his readers to believe was secret sexual activity to his view of Ruskin as wayward and self-indulgent. The distinctive representation of the sexually unorthodox (though far from impotent) Ruskin in Wilenski’s Introduction encouraged the notion of his apparently malformed sexual nature. Here, one sees the blossoming of the gender discourse that Collingwood had tried so vigorously to oppose and that would infuriate Whitehouse. Ruskin was variously being understood, by those who configured him as abnormal, as imperfectly male because he did not enjoy normative heterosexual pleasures in a sustained relationship. Amabel Williams-Ellis had put the gender question in her study, writing with the full force of early twentieth-century heterosexual notions of middle-class gender roles, in plain terms. Ruskin’s separation from Effie was, she said, nothing other than ‘an ever-present symbol of his inability or unwillingness to live the life of normal men.’43 Such judgements, grounding admirable manliness in domestic and long-term sexual union, were made in various biographical accounts of Ruskin in love and appeared as late as Lord Clark’s assertion in Ruskin Today (1964) that one of Ruskin’s problems was that he was ‘incapable of normal relations with a grown-up woman’.44 These statements powerfully occluded any more serious thinking about Ruskin’s gender position and they are still present in popular perceptions of it today. But the gender issues that were sustained, though often hidden, beneath the narrative surface of biographical accounts of the


1920s and 30s became prominent in the conflict over Ruskin’s married life enacted in print between Admiral Sir William James in The Order of Release (1948) and John Howard Whitehouse in Vindication of John Ruskin (1950). This was a clash about Ruskin’s role in the breakdown of his marriage that gave central place to the matter of gender, though this has not been recognized. Connecting with Collingwood’s strategies of masculinization at the end of the nineteenth century, this remarkable instance of attack and defence – the military metaphor is more than appropriate – gave, in Whitehouse’s book, additional force to what would prove a problematic legacy for readers of Ruskin in the second half of the twentieth. Admiral Sir William James (1881–1973) was Effie’s grandson and the boy in Millais’s A Child’s World, later Bubbles (1886). This picture suggested a form of effeminate masculinity from which James himself, as an adult, consistently endeavoured to escape. Looking over the biographical accounts of his grandmother’s first marriage, Sir William concluded, unsurprisingly, that there had been a good deal of unwarranted speculation and a large number of ‘fantastic stories’.45 The film, W.M. Rossetti, and William Rothenstein struck him particularly as offering indefensible fictions about the sensitive history of his own family. Sir William’s The Order of Release, rather ironically taking its title from Millais’s 1853 picture of Effie as a highlander’s wife securing the release of her husband and their consequent reunion, offered, he said, ‘The true story … for the first time’.46 James defended Effie’s name, portraying her as dignified throughout the break-up of the marriage, and a beautiful woman, enduring with superhuman self-control until the end a ‘martyrdom’47 of sexless union. Ruskin, while a ‘genius’,48 was an unnatural man for James, and James’s defence of Effie, which involved a good deal of unprincipled editing of documents, sponsored recurrent criticism of his sexual nature. Where Collingwood and others had endeavoured to distract from any querying of Ruskinian manliness as a result of what James called the ‘unnatural’49 marriage, James himself continued much more bluntly: Ruskin’s biographers, Cook and Collingwood, were not incompetent; on the contrary, they understood their work only too well. They realized that the British public are exceedingly frightened of any form of sexual abnormality and that to admit that Ruskin lived for six years with a beautiful woman, in intimacy at first lover-like, and yet refused to consummate the marriage, would be presenting him as an abnormal being and probably frighten away a large number of readers and damage his publicity value.50


James’s attack on Ruskin corralled elements of previous rhetoric about sexual irregularity from the biographical tradition and fashioned them into an onslaught, a portrait of sexually impoverished manhood. Against the standard of normative heterosexual masculinity, Ruskin emerged as an emasculated figure, whose sexuality – James assumed there should be a straightforward link between physical beauty and physical desire – could not be stirred even by Effie’s notable beauty. John Howard Whitehouse repudiated James’s book and in doing so revived Collingwood’s discourse, reproducing with a fresh urgency the pattern indicated by the Outline and the highly popular Life. Whitehouse, a major force in the preservation of Ruskin’s papers, house, and reputation in the first half of the century, proposed in his Vindication of Ruskin (1950), published two years after The Order of Release, that James was misled and grossly unfair, that his facts were erroneous, and that he had made an error in failing to discuss Ruskin’s own Statement to his proctor in the nullity suit (this was printed in the Vindication). Whitehouse was courteous to James, but highly critical of the biases in his narration, his omission of details from letters, and of the ‘multitude of offensive epithets’51 used to describe John James and Margaret. He defended Ruskin’s name as James had defended Effie’s, and as he did so he contested the emasculated image of the ‘abnormal’ Ruskin by reaffirming the masculinizing language he had been applying to Ruskin for more than half a century. Whitehouse’s Vindication – more or less his last work on Ruskin52 – was the conclusion of fifty years of rhetorical masculinizing of the man whom, with characteristic military vocabulary, he called the ‘solitary warrior’.53 Whitehouse’s version of Ruskin’s manliness was articulated in poetry and prose and continually mobilized tropes of knightliness. Ruskin was a chivalric figure in his many works, his labours framed in terms of the knight’s selfless and noble endeavours. Whitehouse, as a young man, had established and edited what was initially the journal of the Birmingham Ruskin Society in 1898 and named it Saint George: the association between Ruskin and the paragon of (supposedly) English knightliness – obviously invited by Ruskin himself – was characteristic and it set a model for Whitehouse’s life’s energies. In The Solitary Warrior, he fashioned his image of Ruskin, like Collingwood, as a new knight, speaking of him as ‘the most chivalrous of men’,54 and imagining him as a soldier fighting against the unreceptive world. ‘The appeal of “Fors Clavigera”’, he said ‘is the appeal of one splendid soul addressed to a world mainly hostile.’55 Whitehouse also imagined Ruskin’s social and educational policies in terms of a revived chivalry (spurred by this he


tried to put into practice chivalric ideas in his own extensive educational work),56 and had typically declared in a centenary memorial address in 1919 that, for Ruskin, ‘Education was not the acquisition of knowledge; it was primarily the cultivation of noble character’.57 The vocabulary of chivalric manliness served Whitehouse throughout his career. Aspects of it were operative in the Vindication and readers who knew Whitehouse’s earlier work would have found it entirely familiar. Whitehouse was defensive about Ruskin’s sexuality and unsurprisingly presented it in a totally different light from The Order of Release. Far from offering an account of ‘abnormality’, Whitehouse, trying to use Ruskin’s and Effie’s own words as far as possible, denied any sense of sexual strangeness, cruelty, or failure of desire. He emphasized how content the couple were at the beginning, quoting Effie’s letter written the day after their wedding night (‘John and I are as happy as two people can possibly be and he is exceedingly kind and thoughtful’)58 and, while not denying the marriage had been unconsummated, robustly contested the claim of the nullity suit that Ruskin was incurably impotent. Ruskin’s sexuality was affirmed in the Vindication as healthy, and no sexual querying of normative heterosexual manliness was allowed.59 The impotence charge was, Whitehouse said, ‘false’,60 but since it was better for both if the marriage was annulled, Ruskin ‘had … no option except to withdraw his opposition to the suit’ though it ‘prevented him from disproving the allegation upon which the suit was based’.61 Ruskin emerged in this rebuttal of James as sexually ‘normal’ and admirably noble in his acceptance of a bogus claim that permitted the best decision to be made about the annulment. Whitehouse, approvingly quoting Clement Shorter’s words, reaffirmed more characteristic knightly language when he observed that Ruskin had generously ‘“permitted – out of chivalry to the woman he had married – his reputation to be traduced on all hands for the whole period of his life, whereas his intrinsic nobility of nature at no point shines more brightly than in his own attitude towards his ill-fated marriage”’.62 Chivalry, nobility, and knightly courtesy, as well as sexual potency, were the terms set to work in defence of Ruskin’s gender identity in the Vindication, articulating Whitehouse’s conception, once again, of what was dependably male about the man he called, with language suitable for an Arthuriad, his ‘Noblest friend’.63 The Vindication intervened in the debate about the marriage, and gave new life to the defensive masculinizing rhetoric that had been a feature of Ruskin biography since Collingwood inaugurated it. These biographers, across more than half a century, had aimed to defend Ruskin as securely male, to protect his reputation by guarding his manliness. They


were resolutely on his side. But history had a surprise in store that would see the language employed to defend Ruskin become part of a reason for assailing him. Via a major change of perspective, the terms aggregated by this corpus of writers, given fresh prominence in 1950, helped fashion the context in which feminists would unsympathetically read Ruskin in the next decades. The Ruskin who had been protectively imagined as an exemplum of nineteenth-century chivalric manliness, an epitome of admirable masculinity, became, when seen from the perspective of the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the Ruskin who was the eloquent spokesman of unadmirable masculinity, of Victorian middle-class patriarchal subjugation, the voice of an oppressive gender politics, a deplorable archetypal Victorian man. At the edge of this was the shadow of Collingwood, author of The Bondwoman with its aggressive sexual politics, and the first architect of the defensive rhetoric of Ruskinian manliness. It was, of course, Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970) who found Ruskin the most unpardonable of Victorians. In her influential work, the relevant part of which was also published in Victorian Studies in 1970,64 Ruskin was presented as the spokesman of patriarchy par excellence. The text on which Millett concentrated was ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’.65 Her analysis of it framed Ruskin as the voice of an oppressive national ideology of gender, understanding him to speak the ‘normative beliefs of the Victorian middle class’.66 ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ presented a view of female duty and education as well as the doctrine of separate spheres that comprised, to Millett’s mind, a ‘compulsive masculine fantasy one might call the official Victorian attitude’.67 The ideology articulated there dramatically restricted the power and freedom of women, while, in a ‘tidy duplicity’ of rhetoric, she said, insisted that they were ‘“better” than men’.68 It was a dangerous mixture of oppressive politics eloquently disguised in ‘chivalrous posture[s]’.69 Chivalry, the word so often applied to Ruskin by Collingwood and his tradition, now became in Millett’s critical discourse a focus for antagonism. As David Sonstroem rightly remarked, ‘To [Millett] “chivalry” [was] a pejorative term, implying only “nostalgic mirage” or “sentimental vapors”’.70 Millett’s critique of Ruskin hailed him as a spokesman for patriarchal society at large, and Sexual Politics acknowledged that his position in Victorian gender politics was clear: he was, as Collingwood had tried to suggest, a sure representative of the middle-class male. But, for Millett, this meant that he was espousing a gender ideology that led to the confining of women through narrowing doctrines of cramped education and limited public power. Ruskin in Sexual Politics was once more


situated firmly again in a hegemonic model of masculinity – and deplored. Millett’s denunciation of Ruskin included yet another an attack on his sexuality. At one level, Millett associated him with dominant modes of Victorian masculinity, but at another she deployed the rhetoric of sexual abnormality prominent in the film and Sir William James’s reading, to discredit his aims and expose the seemingly dubious nature of his regard for women that infected his utopian writing. Speaking on behalf of ‘normal’ men in one way, he was imperfectly male in others. Millett was scornful of Ruskin’s ‘middle-aged infatuation over Rose La Touche’, for instance, and thought it gave a tint of ‘senile eroticism’71 to the plans in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ (Ruskin was 39 when he met Rose and 45 when he delivered Sesame and Lilies). Such language of sexual shortcoming came to a dramatic conclusion in Millett’s final words about the ideals represented in the Rusholme lecture. Ruskin’s notion that the ‘salvation of the world’, she said, ‘… should come from its subject women is a concoction of nostalgic mirage, regressive, infantile, or narcissistic sexuality, religious ambition, and simplistic social panacea.’72 The discourses I have been tracing in eighty years of Ruskin criticism and biography thus formed themselves into a new shape in the rhetoric of this influential text from the Woman’s Movement. One of those discourses had energetically hailed Ruskin as securely masculine and an embodiment of forms of normative Victorian manliness. In Millett, such a claim gave energy to her view of Ruskin as the spokesman for patriarchy and hegemonic male middle-class gender values. The other discourse censured him by revealing his emasculated sexuality, writing a question mark over his manliness as it was enacted (or not) in sexual performance. In Millett, this strategy was revised and put to her own purposes, as she disclosed her preconceptions of what normal heterosexual relations should be, suggesting that patriarchy was built in Ruskin’s case on infantile sexuality and revealing that the supposedly regressive nature of his love was one of the contaminating forces of his generally intolerable views of women’s place. Millett’s analysis mattered, and no one could deny the challenges for modern readers considering aspects of the gender politics of Sesame and Lilies. Nonetheless, her case has, of course, been rethought, by David Sonstroem (1977),73 Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Sheets and William Veeder (1983),74 as well as by Dinah Birch in ‘Ruskin’s “Womanly Mind”’ (see pp. 107–20 below), and by my chapter in Late Ruskin.75 Yet specifically revising Millett’s reading of Sesame and Lilies in such ways is only part of the task of contemporary Ruskin readers looking for the


fuller picture of Ruskin’s complex and complicated relationship with ideas and ideals of gender. Millett was significant but not alone in helping skew the picture of Ruskin and gender. Behind her was a substantial tradition that she had silently absorbed and reconfigured, a view of Ruskin in terms of normative Victorian manliness that emerged from a tradition of over half a century of writing and which had Collingwood at its root. What is now needed is to recognize this tradition and, in naming it, to begin to defuse its power. Collectively, it has put major impediments in the way of grasping the complexity of Ruskin’s gender position and its consequences for understanding his life and writing.

Notes This chapter is something of an answer to a question Professor Andrew Wawn asked me on 23 April 1999. 1 Collingwood noted ‘The open drawer holds the St George’s Guild business papers (in connection with which he was then at work)’, quoted in James S. Dearden, John Ruskin: A Life in Pictures (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1999), pp. 131–2. 2 Quoted in Dearden, p. 132. 3 Ibid. 4 The argument of this chapter builds on the ground I covered in ‘“Just the thing for Girls – Sketching, Fine Art and So On”: Ruskin and Manliness (1870–1920)’ in Francis O’Gorman, Late Ruskin: New Contexts (Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 118–42. See also my ‘“Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do”: Ruskin’s Aesthetic of Failure in The Stones of Venice’, forthcoming in Review of English Studies. 5 See O’Gorman, Late Ruskin, pp. 59–60. 6 J. Marshall Mather, Life and Teaching of John Ruskin (Manchester: Tubbs, Brook & Chrystal/London: Simpkins & Marshall/Hamilton & Adams, [1884]), p. 23. 7 See O’Gorman, Late Ruskin, pp. 120–4. 8 Historians have commented on the increasing scrutiny of male behaviour in marriage towards the end of the nineteenth century. A. James Hammerton, the most authoritative writer on this subject, has argued that, following the 1857 Divorce Act, male conduct was increasingly spotlighted in marriage breakdown and that ‘by the late nineteenth century men’s unreasonable and selfish behaviour was being identified and debated as the chief cause of failing marriages’, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 166. See also John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 145–69. This changed legal climate put an additional pressure on Collingwood and others to defend Ruskin’s own position in his marriage. 9 It is an etching that, again, reveals the active man of letters: Ruskin at his desk, pen in hand.

26 Manliness and the History of Ruskin in Love 10 W.G. Collingwood, John Ruskin: A Biographical Outline (London: Virtue, 1889), p. 5. 11 Ibid., p. 4. 12 Ibid., p. 29. 13 Ibid., p. 32. Boeotians were legendarily dull and stupid. 14 Ibid., p. 11. 15 Ibid., p. 20. 16 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 17 W.G. Collingwood, The Life of John Ruskin, 7th edn (London: Methuen, 1911), p. 147. 18 Ibid., p. 48. 19 Ibid., p. 65. 20 W.G. Collingwood, The Bondwoman: A Saga of Langdale was first published by Edward Arnold in 1896 and re-issued as The Bondwomen: A Saga of Langdale by Heinemann in 1932. I quote from the re-issued text. 21 W.G. Collingwood, The Bondwomen: A Saga of Langdale (London: Heinemann, 1932), p. 117. 22 Ibid., p. 118. 23 Collingwood’s ‘Preface’ acknowledged ‘the little stir it made among a few friends’ (ibid., unnumbered front papers), and Andrew Wawn, discussing the hostile critical reception of the novel in The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth Century Britain (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp. 337–41, notes that the Spectator called it ‘a book which ought never to have been written’ (p. 338). 24 Collingwood’s Thorstein of the Mere was less focused on sexual gratification but it did emphasize another descriptor of masculinity that excluded Ruskin, namely fatherhood. The book is about the establishment of a family line of succession in the Lakes – Thorstein is Thurston Water, which is, appropriately enough, the modern Coniston Water – from the medieval to the present. The Blawith house, Collingwood says at the end, endured at Coniston as ‘a great family, for many generations, and thereabouts they dwell even to this day’ (W.G. Collingwood, Thorstein of the Mere: A Saga of the Northmen in Lakeland (London: Arnold, 1895), p. 304). Collingwood accented the book’s focus on paternity by dedicating it to Robin, his five-year-old son, with a tribute to his youthful combative manliness: ‘Thorstein is yours. You’ve made him yours/By masterful appropriation:/As long as right of might endures/I dare no other dedication,/Whatever name allures’ (ibid., unnumbered front papers). Robin (R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943)), was later a distinguished Idealist philosopher at Oxford University. 25 Kenneth Clark, Ruskin Today (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, first published 1964), p. xii. 26 Letter from James Dearden to the author, 8 March 2001, recalling memories of Whitehouse. 27 Ruskin employed Charles Augustus Howell as secretary and assistant for some years after 1865. Cook observes politely in the Introduction to vol. 36 of the Library Edition that Howell’s tales from his adventurous life, which included, Howell claimed, living in Morocco as the sheik of an Arab tribe, ‘lost nothing in his telling of them’ (36. li).

Francis O’Gorman 27 28 William Michael Rossetti, Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870, first published 1903 (New York: AMS, [1970]), pp. 225–6. This is a diary entry from W.M. Rossetti’s diary, 5 March 1867. 29 Quoted in Sir William James, ed., The Order of Release: The Story of John Ruskin, Effie Gray and John Everett Millais Told for the First Time in Their Unpublished Letters (London: Murray, 1948), 2. I have been unable to find any other printed material from this film and William James was no accurate transcriber, so there must be some doubt as to the exact wording of this advertisement. 30 Ibid. 31 Eda Earland, Ruskin and His Circle (London: Hutchinson, 1910), p. 82. 32 Amabel Williams-Ellis, The Tragedy of John Ruskin (London: Cape, [1928]), p. 171. 33 Ibid. 34 See ibid. 35 Ibid., p. 170. The most famous speculation about the marriage – that Ruskin was so shocked by Effie’s pubic hair that he could not consummate the marriage – was made much later than Williams-Ellis’s book. As far as I can see, it first occurs in print, though somewhat coyly expressed, in Effie in Venice: Unpublished Letters of Mrs John Ruskin between 1849 and 1852, ed. Mary Lutyens (London: Murray, 1965), pp. 20–1. Lutyens made her point plainer in her The Ruskins and the Grays (London: Murray, 1972), p. 108. There is no evidence for this view (it is difficult to imagine what might constitute evidence), and it has been contested. See, for instance, Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 119–20. 36 William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein, 2 vols (London: Faber, 1931–2), I.367–8. 37 Details of this crime are given in Derrick Leon, Ruskin: The Great Victorian (London: Routledge, 1949), pp. 166–8. 38 R.H. Wilenski, John Ruskin: An Introduction to Further Study of His Life and Work (London: Faber, 1933), p. 11. 39 Ibid., p. 29. 40 Ibid., p. 38. 41 Ibid., p. 32. 42 Ibid., p. 35. 43 Williams-Ellis, The Tragedy of John Ruskin, p. 174. 44 Kenneth Clark, Ruskin Today, p. 8. 45 James, The Order of Release, p. 2. 46 Ibid, p. 1. 47 Ibid., p. 3. 48 Ibid., p. 6. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., p. 2. 51 J. Howard Whitehouse, Vindication of Ruskin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950), p. 35. 52 Whitehouse died in 1955. Between 1956 and 1959, Clarendon Press published the three volumes of The Diaries of John Ruskin, as edited by J.H. Whitehouse and Joan Evans. Whitehouse’s involvement in their


53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75

preparation was minimal: his contribution was chiefly in buying the mss on which the text was based in the 1931 Brantwood sale. See the title of his letter collection The Solitary Warrior: New Letters (London: Allen & Unwin, [1929]). Ibid., pp. 13–14. Ibid., p. 24. See O’Gorman, Late Ruskin, pp. 127–8. J. Howard Whitehouse, ed., Ruskin Centenary Addresses: 8 February 1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1919), p. 49. Whitehouse, Vindication of Ruskin, p. 19. George Allen & Unwin, the pro-Ruskin publishers who published the Vindication, assisted Whitehouse’s defence of Ruskin’s sexual potency by publishing, three years later, a special edition of The Gulf of Years: [Love] Letters from John Ruskin to Kathleen Olander (London: Allen & Unwin, 1953), edited by Rayner Unwin and with a commentary by Kathleen Olander, now Prynne. Ruskin proposed marriage to Kathleen in 1888 and she certainly had no doubt that this meant children (see p. 80). Whitehouse, Vindication of Ruskin, p. 18. Ibid. Ibid., p. 31. J.H. Whitehouse, ed., Poems to Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 23. Kate Millett, ‘The Debate Over Women: Ruskin Versus Mill’, Victorian Studies, 14 (1970), 63–82. Millett mis-punctuates this as ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ throughout Sexual Politics. She also says it was delivered in Manchester Town Hall (it was Rusholme Town Hall). Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1977, first published 1970), p. 89. Ibid. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 97. David Sonstroem, ‘Millett Versus Ruskin: A Defense of Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens”’, Victorian Studies, 20 (1977), 289. Millett, Sexual Politics, p. 90. Ibid., p. 107. Sonstroem, ‘Millett Versus Ruskin’, 283–97. See ‘John Ruskin and “Of Queens’ Gardens”’, in The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883, ed. Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder 3 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), I.77–102. See O’Gorman, Late Ruskin, pp. 31–49.

2 The Stones of Childhood: Ruskin’s ‘Lost Jewels’ Catherine Robson

Ruskin’s Praeterita (1885–9) devotes much of its early energy to the depiction of a secure, protected, and enclosed childhood. The passive child at the centre of this high-security Eden is, not surprisingly, frequently feminized. Although no special pains are taken to avoid masculine nouns in the references to his younger self, Ruskin draws attention to the fact that both his natural sensibilities and his sequestered upbringing made him different from other boys. The difference is apparent both to his own eyes – ‘I don’t know what delight boys take in cricket, or boating, or throwing stones at birds, or learning to shoot them’ (35.293) – and to the eyes of his few male associates in childhood, who, ‘[f]inding me in all respects what boys could only look upon as an innocent, … treated me as I suppose they would have treated a girl’ (35.83). This last quotation includes a feature which appears often enough in Praeterita to constitute a stylistic tic: the expression ‘as … a girl’ and its variant ‘like a girl’ are frequently drafted into service in Ruskin’s representations of his child self. The earliest instance occurs in the description of Mr Northcote’s painting of the three-year-old Ruskin, which provides the first, and practically the only, picture we are granted of his physical appearance: ‘The portrait in question represents a very pretty child with yellow hair, dressed in a white frock like a girl, with a broad light-blue sash and blue shoes to match’ (35.21, p. 30). Given that boys of Ruskin’s age and class were habitually dressed in frocks at this period, the simile ‘like a girl’ here is by no means as significant as later rhetorical turns, which find the author repeatedly comparing himself to girls, and indeed, intensifying the construction by placing himself in the more feminine than feminine position. For instance, when the teenaged Ruskin is brought into relation with the entrancing French Catholic daughters of his father’s business partner Juan Pedro Domecq, his 29

30 The Stones of Childhood: Ruskin’s ‘Lost Jewels’

James Northcote, Ruskin, aet 31/2 (1822) (by permission of the National Gallery)

unworldly ways are attributed not, as they could have been, to a masculinized monastic existence, but to his being ‘[v]irtually convent-bred more closely than the maids themselves’ (35.179). Similarly, in order to represent his first tentative days of social acclimatization at Oxford, Ruskin makes use of a comparison drawn from the world of débutantes or the pages of a genteel novel and once again renders himself more girlish

Catherine Robson 31

than the girl described: ‘[P]oor Clara,’ we read, ‘after her first ball, receiving her cousin’s compliments in the cloak-room, was less surprised than I by my welcome from my cousins of the long-table’ (35.196). Such rhetorical constructions, intriguing though they are, are perhaps less significant in their contribution to Praeterita’s feminization of Ruskin’s childhood self than the vividly remembered girls who people the text. Ruskin said in the autobiography that he was ‘in nothing whatsoever changed ’ (35.220, italic original) from his earliest youth. The denial of the possibility of maturation that Ruskin insists on here is made real in Praeterita by a seemingly endless procession of lovely young lasses who fail to make it across the river to adulthood. Dark-eyed little Jessie, Ruskin’s vivacious Scottish cousin, is the first to go, when she and John are ‘about eight or nine,’ and she is soon followed by a host of others. Sometimes the deaths are imagined, rather than literal: the lives of formerly beloved girls who are lost to Ruskin in one way or another are effectively truncated by Praeterita’s refusal to grant their adulthood any representation. Thus Ruskin’s wife Effie appears only parenthetically as the ‘little girl’ for whose amusement The King of the Golden River was written (35.304). In a similar fashion, Adèle Domecq, his first love, ceases to have any real existence after the incandescent presence of her fifteen-year-old self had reduced young Ruskin ‘to a mere heap of white ashes’ in his seventeenth year (35.179). On occasion, even when the beloved female does indeed die at a relatively early age, she is remembered and depicted primarily as a much younger being. Here the most important figure is the love of Ruskin’s middle age and early old age, Rose La Touche, through the lens of whose loss all the girl-deaths of Praeterita are filtered. Although Rose died at twenty-seven of brain-fever, she lives in the autobiography primarily as a highspirited nine-year old, even commandeering the text with her own precocious expressions and orthographical oddities when Ruskin reproduces her first cherished letter to him in what ended up being Praeterita’s penultimate chapter. Most often, however, death comes to the maiden just as she gives up that maidenhood: we only have to learn that some delicate blossom is to be swept up into an ill-advised marriage, or otherwise oppressed by the demands of adulthood, to know that in a few lines’ time, she will be gone. ‘Roslyn Chapel’ provides us with three examples of this phenomenon. The aptly named Miss Withers is ‘a fragile, fair, freckled, sensitive slip of a girl about sixteen; graceful in an unfinished and small wildflower sort of a way, extremely intelligent, affectionate, wholly rightminded, and mild in piety’ (35.222). Yet instead of being allowed to


bloom in the young Ruskin’s presence, Charlotte Withers and the ‘possibility of meek happiness vanish[ ] forever’: her coal-merchant father ‘“negotiated” a marriage for her with a well-to-do Newcastle trader, whom she took because she was bid. He treated her pretty much as one of his coal-sacks, and in a year or two she died’ (35.222). Nine pages later we encounter Miss Wardell, ‘an extremely accomplished, intelligent, and faultless maid of seventeen; fragile and delicate … a slender brunette, with her father’s dark curling hair transfigured into playful grace around the pretty, modest, not unthoughtful, gray-eyed face’ (35.231). This time the girl is carried off by over-zealous education rather than matrimony, but the outcome, as we learn in this deliberately exhausting sentence, is just the same: [A]t Hampstead they went on teaching the tender creature High German, and French of Paris, and Kant’s Metaphysics, and Newton’s Principia; and then they took her to Paris, and tired her out with seeing everything every day, all day long, besides the dazzle and excitement of such a first outing from Hampstead; and she at last getting too pale and weak, they brought her back to some English seaside place, I forget where: and there she fell into nervous fever and faded away, with the light of death flickering clearer and clearer in her soft eyes, and never skipped in Hampstead garden more. (35.232) With a brief mention of the ‘loss of the sweet spirit’ of yet another graceful maiden, Miss Sybilla Dowie (35.232), Ruskin concludes the chapter and the volume. The opening of the next volume of Praeterita would appear to announce a new era in the writer’s existence: the first chapter is entitled ‘Of Age’. Ruskin may literally have attained his majority, but it has already been made clear that his development, as surely as that of the three lost misses, has come to a definite full-stop.1 Praeterita, then, seems to provide the case-book example of a Victorian fantasy of original femininity: Ruskin not only represents his childhood as if it had been a feminine, rather than a masculine, era in his existence, but also, through the repeated invocation of truncated feminine lives, implies that this girl self does not evolve in or into adulthood. *** But girls do not play a part in Praeterita alone. By considering the full implications of the representations of girls in texts other than the autobiography, we extend our appreciation of their significance to Ruskin

Catherine Robson 33

and the gendering strategies of his self-writing, as well as revealing how his modes of representation are in accord with the symbolic meanings that the Victorian age was generally attributing to the figure of the little girl. As we shall see, the girl and the perfect past she represents in the autobiography cannot be properly understood without reference to the oppositional figures of the old man and to the desolate present day. The most relevant text is The Ethics of the Dust, published in 1865 with 1866 on the title page. As Dinah Birch has discussed on pp. 123–6 below, the immediate context of this was Winnington Hall in Cheshire, a school for well-to-do girls. Even in the company of the many genredefying oddities of Ruskin’s oeuvre, The Ethics of the Dust makes a strong claim to be the most curious work of all. Subtitled ‘Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallisation’, The Ethics was intended, Ruskin maintained, to function as a gloss on the chapter entitled ‘Compact Crystallines’ in the fourth volume of Modern Painters (1856). The work, however, is both more and less than a mineralogical treatise. Carlyle, one of the few admirers of the text in its own time or any other, attempted to give an idea of its range by claiming that the author ‘twisted geology into morality, theology, Egyptian mythology, [and made] fiery cuts at political economy’.2 The form of this work, moreover, is just as strange at its content: The Ethics of the Dust is written as a series of quasi-Socratic dialogues between an ‘Old Lecturer’ (a figure who is never named ‘Ruskin’ in the text but who is self-evidently the author of Modern Painters and his other books) and twelve ‘girls’ between the ages of nine and twenty. Yet if its scope is broad and its form unusual, the central conceit of The Ethics of the Dust can be expressed quite simply: girls are crystals and crystals are girls. ‘My dear children,’ pronounces the Lecturer, ‘if you knew it, you are yourselves, at this moment, as you sit in your ranks, nothing, in the eyes of a mineralogist, but a lovely group of rosy sugarcandy, arranged by atomic forces. And even admitting you to be something more, you have certainly been crystallising without knowing it’ (18.221). Pinning in their crinolines the better to approximate the form of rose quartz as they dance the Lecturer’s ‘Crystal Quadrille,’ Ruskin’s young ladies, at their best, share the finest qualities of jewels, just as ‘a well-brought up mineral,’ in ‘its pretty ways of behaving’ is imagined to emulate the high standards of English girlhood (18.314–5). As Paul Sawyer notes in his excellent chapter on this work,3 The Ethics of the Dust organizes itself around a series of connected antitheses that ultimately reduce to the opposition between active purity and the foulness of decay. As the highest type of active purity in the world of minerals,


crystals, formed from the co-operation of innumerable atoms, parallel the potential excellence that is to be aspired to both by individual human beings, formed from particles of dust, and by societies, ideally composed, like the perfect girls’ school, of mutually considerate members. For Ruskin, girls and rocks are identical in their purity of energy and the resultant beauty of their form. Maintaining that ‘[i]t is just as true for us, as for the crystal, that the nobleness of life depends on its consistency, – clearness of purpose, – quiet and ceaseless energy’, Ruskin insists that girls are ‘crystalline in brightness’ and ‘charm infinitely’ (18.264, 311). If both his wide-eyed pupils and the crystals of which they are the type stand for pure and active beauty, the Lecturer and the sin-blemished vacillations of his own damaged maturity represent the loss of the principle of straightforward vitality: ‘[A]ll doubt and repenting, and botching, and retouching, and wondering what it will be best to do next, are vice, as well as misery’ (18.264). As it is worked out in the text, this formulation relies heavily on a double conception of age. While The Ethics of the Dust takes great pains to point out the difference between the vivacious newness of its twelve young girls and the weary elderliness of the Lecturer, it nevertheless associates the former with antiquity, and the latter with the present day. Ruskin deliberately widens the gulf between the students and their teacher: although the age distribution of the girls in The Ethics of the Dust exactly reflects that of the pupils at Winnington Hall, the Lecturer appears to be freighted with many more years than the writer himself, who was only forty-six at the time of composition. Listed in the ‘Personae’ as ‘OLD LECTURER (of incalculable age)’, the male presence in the text is doubly superannuated. In a letter to his father written from the school two years before he began The Ethics of the Dust, Ruskin had commented that his association with these young girls gave him an exaggerated sense of his own elderliness: It is curious that I feel older and sadder, very much, in now looking at these young children—it is especially the young ones between whom & me I now feel so infinite a distance,—and they are so beautiful and so good, and I am not good, considering the advantages I’ve had, by any means. The weary longing to begin life over again, and the sense of fate forever forbidding it—here or hereafter—is terrible. I daresay I shall get over it in a day or two, but I was out in the playground with them this afternoon, and the sun was on the grass, and on them— and the sense of loveliness in life, and of overbrooding death, like winter, was too strong.4

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Ruskin’s enervated conviction here of the opposition between blighted maturity and the girls’ spring-like perfection pervades the world of The Ethics of the Dust: for the Lecturer, who claims to be perpetually ‘tired, and cross’, the girls in all their morning gaiety are unlikely to be able to comprehend the miseries of old age. The radical difference of perspective is revealed in a conversation ostensibly about an imperfect crystal, described by the Lecturer as ‘sadly tired’. When one of the girls asks what events have led to this pass, the dialogue runs as follows: L. Trials much like our own. Sickness, and starvation; fevers, and agues, and palsy; oppression; and old age, and the necessity of passing away in their time, like all else. If there’s any pity in you, you must come to-morrow, and take some part in these crystal griefs. DORA. I am sure we shall cry till our eyes are red. L. Ah, you may laugh, Dora; but I’ve been made grave, not once, nor twice, to see that even crystals ‘cannot choose but be old’ at last. It may be but a shallow proverb of the Justice’s; but it is a shrewdly wide one. DORA (pensive for once). I suppose it is very dreadful to be old! But then (brightening again) what should we do without our dear old friends and our nice old lecturers? (18.324) ‘I am not myself afraid of death – but I am afraid – bitterly afraid of old age,’ wrote Ruskin to a correspondent in 1861.5 In choosing to endow the Lecturer with the decrepitude he dreads, Ruskin consigns man and girl, the only two categories of human beings The Ethics of the Dust really recognizes, to wholly incommensurate universes. Diagnosis of decay is not limited to the Lecturer’s own personal condition in the text. The Ethics of the Dust takes considerable pains to show us that the present day world is a tawdry affair, a sadly diminished version of an earlier splendour. Ruskin evokes a familiar mid-Victorian nostalgia for the bygone idyll of rural England; the meretricious glitter of Crystal Palace, for example, is invidiously compared to the simple neighbourhood fairs of the Lecturer’s youth. Elsewhere, summoning up the classical, rather than a personal, past, the Lecturer tells the girls that contemporary urban depredations plumb depths that would be almost unimaginable for the ancients: ‘[T]he vice existing among certain classes, both of the rich and poor, in London, Paris and Vienna, could have been conceived by a Spartan or Roman of the heroic ages only as possible in a Tartarus, where fiends were employed to teach, but not to punish, crime’ (18.355). Citing newspaper stories about child-murderers


like Charlotte Winsor, and ‘sons like that one who, the other day, in France, beat his mother to death with a stick,’ the Lecturer seems convinced that in today’s world ‘[t]here is a peculiar horror about the relations between parent and child, which are being now brought about by our variously degraded forms of European white slavery’ (18.354). Whichever way we turn in The Ethics of the Dust, the immorality of modern life captures our attention. As the work draws to its close, the Lecturer tries to introduce a more uplifting perspective, claiming that ‘the great laws which never fail, and to which all change is subordinate, appear such as to accomplish a gradual advance to a lovelier order’ (18.357). Altogether too much has been said on the other side, however, for this to ring true. Although a pessimistic opinion from the fourth volume of Modern Painters is called up only to be negated, its sentiments, and the Lecturer’s explanation of their origin, still seem to express an abiding conviction that the incremental degeneration of the world is readily apparent to the eye: L. … I said that the earth seemed to have passed through its highest state: and that, after ascending by a series of phases, culminating in its habitation by man, it seems to be now gradually becoming less fit for that habitation. MARY. Yes, I remember. L. I wrote those passages under a very bitter impression of the gradual perishing of beauty from the loveliest scenes which I knew in the physical world; not in any doubtful way, such as I might have attributed to loss of sensation in myself—but by violent and definite physical action … I am still under the same impression respecting the existing phenomena; but I feel more strongly, every day, that no evidence to be collected within historical periods can be accepted as any clue to the great tendencies of geological change. (18.357) Belief that ‘the great tendencies of geological change’ are actually moving the world towards a higher perfection for the generations yet unborn requires an act of faith: a simple act of observation tells a completely different story. In the book’s last pages, when the Lecturer has Mary read aloud seven paragraphs from the fifth volume of Modern Painters (1860), he is once again illustrating the difference between ‘government and co-operation,’ which are ‘the laws of life’ and ‘anarchy and competition,’ which are ‘the laws of death’ (18.359). This has been the work’s organizational antithesis. At first glance, we imagine that Ruskin is ordering us to perform an experiment, the results of which we

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ourselves will be able to observe. ‘Take,’ we are told, ‘merely an ounce or two of the blackest slime of a beaten footpath, on a rainy day, near a manufacturing town. That slime we shall find in most cases composed of clay, (or brickdust, which is burnt clay), mixed with soot, a little sand, and water. All these elements are at helpless war with each other, and destroy reciprocally each other’s nature and power: competing and fighting for place at every tread of your foot; sand squeezing out clay, and clay squeezing out water, and soot meddling everywhere, and defiling the whole’ (18.359). So far we may follow in our imaginary laboratories. But as the passage proceeds, the time-frame of observation undergoes infinite expansion: Let us suppose that this ounce of mud is left in perfect rest, and that its elements gather together, like to like, so that their atoms may get into the closest relations possible. Let the clay begin. Ridding itself of all foreign substance, it gradually becomes a white earth, already very beautiful, and fit, with the help of congealing fire, to be made into the finest porcelain, and painted on, and be kept in kings’ palaces. But such artificial consistence is not its best. Leave it still quiet, to follow its own instinct of unity, and it becomes, not only white but clear; not only clear, but hard; not only clear and hard, but so set that it can deal with light in a wonderful way, and gather out of it the loveliest blue rays only, refusing the rest. We call it then a sapphire. (18.359) As the clay turns into a sapphire, so the sand ‘proceeds to grow clear and hard’ and transforms itself into an opal, the soot becomes a diamond, and the water crystallizes into a star of snow. The achievement of such perfection of form may be projected into the future here, but the condemnation of the present moment that has been such a besetting tendency of The Ethics of the Dust (and, indeed of all Ruskin’s writing from the 1860s onwards) makes it hard to imagine that such beauty can originate in the midst of the contemporary industrial pollution belched forth from that ‘manufacturing town’. The diamonds and sapphires, the flawless crystals that the Lecturer’s girls have examined in the preceding nine lectures, have been explicitly presented as the creations of a longlost past, the distant triumphs of a process of temporal change that has now foundered into decay, corruption and confusion. The Lecturer may maintain in his final words that ‘the seeming trouble,—the unquestioned degradation,—of the elements of the physical earth, must passively wait the appointed time of their repose,’ but the energies of the


text as a whole affirm that the time of crystals, the time of ‘perfect peace,’ is securely in the past, not the future (18.360). The Ethics of the Dust, then, a work specifically organized around the encounter of young girls and an old man, not only insists upon an absolute split between these two parties, but also extends the terms of this division to radically opposed conceptions of past and present. The beginnings of time radiate the light and purity of the perfect crystal, while the corruption of the present day can only look back in wonderment to the glory of long ago: sin is not to be found in our origins but in the world’s contemporary maturity. Inasmuch as it unequivocally links girls with a perfect lost past, then, this text quite clearly follows the line I have discussed at greater length elsewhere.6 And yet the gemmological presentation of this familiar formula subtly alters the exact placement of its elements and demands further attention. For Ruskin and The Ethics of the Dust, the girl is the past and the crystal even as she is physically present. But what happens when the lovely young girl is close enough to touch? *** Up to now this consideration of Ruskin’s girls’ school book has evaded any real examination of the erotics of the text. Material for such a discussion is, however, not hard to find: nine-year-old Florrie, eleven-yearold Isabel, and twelve-year-old Lily may be diamonds and sapphires and crystals of quartz, but they are also living, breathing, squirming little girls. Not only teasing exchanges, but stage directions indicating physical contact between the girls and the Lecturer punctuate the text with regularity: on the very first page we read that ‘FLORRIE reappears, gives L. a kiss’; fourteen-year-old Kathleen is caught in the act of ‘stopping his mouth’; Isabel ‘climbs on his knee’ as she utters the words ‘Oh you naughty—naughty’ (18.292). The girls that Ruskin creates in The Ethics of the Dust are completely fascinated by the Lecturer, not only hanging on his every word, but often, in the case of the younger girls, hanging off his person too. Although it is always quite clear who is in control – a desire to supplicate, never to challenge, underlies every advance made by Ruskin’s fantasy children – the text presents us with girls who continually initiate moments of touching even as the uncertainty in their half-sentences displays their subjugation. Furthermore, while the Lecturer is largely unviewed himself, we witness him in the act of scrutinizing the girls’ physical features – ‘Nay, if you blush so, Kathleen, how can one help looking?’ and ‘You want to ask something, Florrie, by

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the look of your eyes’ are but two of the many instances in which we see the pupils through the eyes of their male observer (18.222, 223). The pleasure of looking, and sometimes even of being touched, is also apparent in the letters Ruskin wrote from Winnington. As he tells his father, the girls’ dancing is ‘a beautiful thing to see’7 while the arrangement of the students at dinner, the sober shades of their dresses contrasting nicely with the white of the tablecloths, puts him in mind of certain beloved works of art: the scene is ‘like one of the pictures of a “marriage in Cana,”’ and ‘gives the kind of light and shade one sees in the pictures of the Venetians’.8 In letters to his mother, Ruskin conveys considerably more excitement, as the following description of a wild romp in the ‘new playroom’ reveals: [T]he little ones had determined to wait for me to have the first game with them in it. So we began with a grand game at cat and mouse— and then at dropping the handkerchief and then we had Irish quadrilles, which end with a wonderful dance in a labyrinth of rings, and as I was to have Lily for a partner, I put my coat on wrong side before, to look like an Irishman; Lily highly approved of this arrangement, and was buttoning it for me as far awry as she could at the back; but Maud and Isabelle wouldn’t have it awry, and buttoned it right, as fast as she put it wrong; so Lily at last pulled it off me altogether, and put it on herself over her frock, and tied her hair up in a hard knot, and then we had an Irish quadrille to purpose, till I had no more breath left.9 At other times, the mood is calmer as he tells her how much he enjoys sketching the girls (‘I told her she must not stir for ten minutes till I had drawn a curl of hair by chance astray’),10 or watching them as they listen in rapt attention to Charles Hallé’s piano performance of a variation of ‘Home, Sweet Home’: ‘It was beautiful too to see the girls’ faces round, the eyes all wet with feeling and the little coral mouths fixed into little half open gaps with utter intensity of feeling.’11 A few months later, in a work entitled The Cestus of Aglaia, he was to write of this vision again: The wet eyes, round-open, and the little scarlet upper lips, lifted, and drawn slightly together, in passionate glow of utter wonder, became picture-like,—porcelain-like,—in motionless joy, as the sweet multitude of low notes fell in their timely infinities like summer rain. Only La Robbia himself (nor even he, unless with tenderer use of colour


than is usual in his work) could have rendered some image of that listening. (19.78–9) Ruskin may make frequent gestures in these passages towards aesthetic appreciation (the implied reference to Veronese, the direct one to Della Robbia, even to ‘coral’ and ‘porcelain’), but the erotic charge of these moments is nevertheless unmistakable. Endless gazing and coquettish conversations; kisses, laps and wriggling; the breathless excitement of the playroom; little fingers and buttons; most of all, perhaps, the wetness of those eyes and those ‘little scarlet upper lips,’ ‘halfopen gaps with utter intensity of feeling’ – all of these elements have enormous power to disturb, to alert our already highly attuned sensibilities to the unacceptable presence of the pervert. It is of course an open secret that Ruskin the famous Victorian sage is also Ruskin the infamous Victorian paedophile, but quotations like these make it all too naked. There is no evidence that Ruskin sexually abused little girls: the exact dynamics of his historical encounters with real girls – with Rose La Touche, with the pupils at Winnington, with girls in London, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Lake District – remain essentially unknowable. All that we can do at this distance is understand a little more clearly the lineaments of the fantasies which manifest themselves in Ruskin’s writings. Such an investigation reveals not only that Ruskin participates in a cultural myth about one sort of relationship between adult men and little girls, but also that the depictions of his desire for girls demonstrate a very particular form of erotic attraction. The world of soft and flexible moistness which I have summoned up in the last few pages would appear to confirm everybody’s worst fears about Ruskin’s delight in the loveliness of little girls. Such representations, however, are in the minority in his writing, in fact are hugely outnumbered by evocations of rock-like impenetrability and adamantine brilliance. I make this point not to mount a desperate rearguard defence of the great man’s reputation, nor to close down the discussion of desire in Ruskin’s writings about girls, but to extend it. As we shall see, this writer’s besetting habit of viewing the beloved as both a hard and an aesthetic object is not a defence against the erotic, but a component of it. Reversing the Pygmalion myth, Ruskin transforms the mutable girl into stone. Though its examples are particularly clear-cut, The Ethics of the Dust is by no means the only text in Ruskin’s œuvre that illustrates this tendency: both published works and private writings persistently relate girlish beauty to unyielding stone. Most notable are the depictions that ally the living, breathing form to the snowy marble of classical statuary.

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As might be expected, the bodies in question are often naked, but the introduction to Rose La Touche’s older sister from the third volume of Praeterita forms a Ruskinian paean to stony loveliness which falls securely within the realm of well-dressed decorum: Emily was a perfectly sweet, serene, delicately-chiselled marble nymph of fourteen, softly dark-eyed, rightly tender and graceful in all she did and said. I never saw such a faculty for the arrangement of things beautifully, in any other human being. If she took up a handful of flowers, they fell out of her hand in wreathed jewellery of colour and form, as if they had been sown, and had blossomed, to live together so, and no otherwise. (35.526) Here two arresting conjunctions – the sculptor’s chisel on white marble and that soft, dark eye; static serenity and graceful movement – set the tone for the subsequent movements between artifice and nature in the celebration of the artless art of Emily’s flower-arranging: the ‘wreathed jewellery’ she creates (itself a combination of the organic and inorganic) paradoxically displays the blooms at their most natural, inasmuch as they appear to have simply grown into form. Similar combinations are created when Ruskin defines his favourite type of feminine beauty elsewhere in Praeterita: ‘I like oval faces, crystalline blonde, with straightish, at the utmost wavy, (or, in length, wreathed) hair, and the form elastic, and foot firm’ (35.231). Recognizing that these descriptions are characterized by complex interconnections of apparently oppositional terms serves a useful purpose when we turn to more problematic passages from the same pen. Consider, for example, the following words from The Cestus of Aglaia which record a moment from 1858: Ruskin saw a dark-haired Turin girl of around ten years old, ‘half-naked, bare-limbed to above the knees, and beautifully limbed … her little breasts, scarce dimpled yet,—white— marble-like—but, as wasted marble, thin with scorching and rains of Time’ (19:83). If one were analysing this sentence-fragment in isolation, it would seem plausible to argue that the relatively late introduction of ‘marble-like’ into the description functions as a defence against the troublingly erotic implications of the sight of naked flesh: the aestheticization of the vision, the transformation of the body into a marble statue, appears to allow Ruskin to move from the dangerous position of a man talking about a particular girl, to the safe haven of an art historian who is musing generally on the relative qualities of sculptors’ materials, and on Time. Arousing natural flesh, in this reading, would thus


be exchanged for unarousing artistic stone. The fact, however, that the girl’s attractiveness elsewhere in Ruskin’s writing is so definitively intertwined with her identity with the most beautiful stones of the earth, and that the natural and the artificial are so frequently wreathed together, should make us suspicious of any simple antitheses here. Far from being a defence against arousal, imagining the girl’s naked body in rocklike terms is often a necessary condition of the erotic in Ruskin’s vision. One last example, drawn from an unpublished letter, brings together these same components in a markedly different stylistic form. In 1869 fifty-year-old Ruskin is writing from Italy to Joan Agnew, his twentytwo-year-old second cousin: Mammy di—the wee girlies must have looked very fit, in Verona in tummer time—me see by itty tat-tatues and me wish ice statues would come ive again—They haven’t got anything on ta speak of mammy di—dust a wee Bedgowny tied about waisty with a band of jewels. If me get oo nice band of boo beads, mammy, will oo let me see oo wear oos bedgowny ike at?—12 Such regressive baby-talk, in all its mock-Scottish tweeness, invokes a welter of responses: this is of course private correspondence, never intended for the scrutiny of eyes other than Joan’s, but it is startling, to say the least, to know that the author of some of the most challenging and beautiful passages of Victorian prose also wrote these sentences (and indeed many others like it in this period). More germane to the present discussion, however, is the recourse, once again, to ‘itty tat-tatues’ and bands of ‘jewels.’ This time the movement is properly Pygmalion-like, from the stone art object to the imagined naked body of the real girl (who, in this case, is actually a young woman), rather than vice versa, but the juxtaposition of elements remains the same. Ruskin’s favourite things – girls, precious stones, and frequently precious stones as art objects – are bound up into a single tantalizing form. In Ruskin’s particular case, the paedophile and the petrophile are one. *** To return to our starting point and Ruskin’s final work, Praeterita: the lovely girls who drop out of life before maturity also tend to be seen in some relation to the precious crystal. Indeed, when Ruskin first wrote of the tragedy of these extinguished lives in the autobiographical passages of Fors Clavigera, he called them so many ‘Lost Jewels’. In the letter bearing

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this title, Ruskin holds forth in an unsettling amalgam of maudlin selfpity and strained comic bitterness on the problem of ‘the annual loss of its girl-wealth to the British nation’: I think the experience of most thoughtful persons will confirm me in saying that extremely good girls, (good children, broadly, but especially girls,) usually die young. The pathos of their deaths is constantly used in poetry and novels; but the power of the fiction rests, I suppose, on the fact that most persons of affectionate temper have lost their own May Queens or little Nells in their time. For my own part of grief, I have known a little Nell die, and a May Queen die, and a queen of May, and of December also, die;—all of them, in economists’ language, ‘as good as gold’, and in Christian language, ‘only a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honour’. And I could count the like among my best-loved friends, with a rosary of tears. (29.424–25) It is Ruskin’s habit in Praeterita not only to feminize his childhood, but to use the death of young girls to represent the cessation of his development. Given that girls in this man’s imagination are frequently associated with jewels and rocks, it comes as no surprise to find that Ruskin’s young self is as stony as it is girlish: the lost jewels strung throughout the autobiography symbolize Ruskin’s own crystallized identity just as much as they commemorate Jessie, Rose, Charlotte, Sybilla and all the other Little Nells. One of the clearest images of the gemlike quality of Ruskin’s childhood appears in the description of his childhood’s Edenic garden: the hard-edged brilliance of this retrospectively constructed idyll finds apt representation in its sparkling fruit. Gooseberries, pears, white-currants and cherries are not tender, succulent consumable foods but rather transfigured jewels, ‘fresh green, soft amber, and rough-bristled crimson bending the spinous branches; clustered pearl and pendant ruby joyfully discoverable under the large leaves that looked like vine’ (35.36). Elsewhere, a ‘spring of crystal water’ (35.19) often accompanies the depiction of the childhood self. It should never be assumed, however, that Ruskin’s celebration of rushing waters reveals a fondness for spontaneous motion: as The Ethics of the Dust rejoices in what it calls the ‘active purity’ of the perfect jewel, so Praeterita’s rivers combine movement and stasis to form a ‘perpetual treasure of flowing diamond’ (35.66). Vital energy always crystallizes into tangible form, and fluidity is frozen into a single moment of beauty.


Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ruskin’s description of the improvements he worked upon his Denmark Hill garden, ostensibly for the delight of his cousin Joan and Rose La Touche, then eighteen and seventeen years old respectively. As he explains in the penultimate paragraph of Praeterita, a feat of engineering enabled him to bring a sparkling river into his domain: I draw back to my own home, twenty years ago, permitted to thank heaven once more for the peace, and hope, and loveliness of it, and the Elysian walks with Joanie, and Paradisiacal with Rosie, under the peach-blossom branches by the little glittering stream which I had paved with crystal for them. I had built behind the highest cluster of laurels a reservoir, from which, on sunny afternoons, I could let a quite rippling film of water run for a couple of hours down behind the hayfield, where the grass in spring still grew fresh and deep … And the little stream had its falls, and pools, and imaginary lakes. Here and there it laid for itself lines of graceful sand; there and here it lost itself under beads of chalcedony … ‘Eden-land’ Rosie calls it sometimes in her letters. Whether its tiny river were of the waters of Abana, or Euphrates, or Thamesis, I know not, but they were sweeter to my thirst than the fountains of Trevi or Branda. (35.560–1) Ruskin’s conception of the vital yet circumscribed childhood he experienced in his other South London garden thus finds representation not only in his crystalline prose, but also in a rippling brook – no natural, uncontrollable torrent this, but a constructed and contained stream, which courses, under his control, over an artificial bed of quartz. In this instance, the child seen in relation to the garden she dubs ‘Eden-land’ is not the young Ruskin, but the young Rose, captured in all the poignant immediacy of the present tense, though she had been dead for many years when these lines were written. Here, as at so many points in the autobiography, the most vital being is a child in a jewel-like setting, a young girl who is present and lost at the same time. If we cast our minds back to another key image of waters in Praeterita, to that ‘brook shore of 1837’ at the close of volume I, we remember that Ruskin not only insisted that all significant development ceased before he attained maturity, but that the crystallized identity of childhood persisted as the true self throughout his life and into old age. Just as the perfect maidens who failed to live beyond their teens stand as so many examples of Ruskin’s essential, end-stopped being, so too does the continuing existence of this self find representation in a young girl. Once the childhood

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years are past, Praeterita would much rather scrutinize a beloved landscape than the man who is perceiving it. However, on the very few occasions that the autobiography does allow brief sights of an adult Ruskin who is in a rare state of happiness or contentedness, Praeterita once again makes use of the ‘feminine simile’ it employed in its depiction of the child-self. When the forty-one-year-old man becomes the owner of a fourteenth-century missal, ‘no girl of seven years old with a new doll is prouder or happier’ (35.491). Perhaps the most fascinating of these moments occurs when Ruskin represents his own creative process: My own literary work … was always done as quietly and methodically as a piece of tapestry. I knew exactly what I had got to say, put the words firmly in their places like so many stitches, hemmed the edges of chapters round with what seemed to me graceful flourishes, touched them finally with my cunningest points of colour, and read the work to papa and mamma at breakfast the next morning, as a girl shows her sampler. (35.367–8) Here, on the sole occasion in Praeterita when the author presents himself as an author, the adult writing self is not only depicted as a child, but very specifically as a little girl, the competent and compliant daughter. Ruskin makes a thorough-going and heart-breaking investment in the myth of original girlhood. Although any dalliance with the paradigm obviously involves a wilful disregard for objective, logical ‘truth,’ Ruskin, in the last years of his writing life, attempts to hold together a truly impossible vision which refuses to countenance the unbridgeable distances between self and other, the living and the dead, and the bodies of the mature male and the immature female. The structure of The Ethics of the Dust at least allowed the writer to keep a safe distance between the constituent parts of his identity, but Praeterita’s attempt to conjoin the little girl and the old man, the past and the present, into a single figure is ultimately unbearable. In the final estimation, Ruskin’s extension of the Victorian fantasy of the gentleman’s lost girlhood into a fantasy of the essential girlishness of the true self proves not to be a source of sentimental solace, but a torment.

Notes 1 For more discussion of these lost girls, see pp. 50–60 below. 2 J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: His Life in London, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1884), II.298.

46 The Stones of Childhood: Ruskin’s ‘Lost Jewels’ 3 See Paul Sawyer, Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 4 The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall, ed. Van Akin Burd (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 438–40. 5 Ibid., p. 338. 6 In Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 7 Winnington Letters, p. 104. 8 Ibid., 104, 105. 9 Ibid., p. 500. 10 Ibid., p. 518. 11 Ibid., p. 527. 12 Letter to Joan Severn, 29 July, 1869. Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster.

3 The Foxglove and the Rose: Ruskin’s Involute of Childhood Lindsay Smith

Towards the beginning of Praeterita, published in twenty-eight parts between 1885 and 1889, Ruskin reflects on an instance of his extreme acuity of vision as a young child. He relates how in 1822, on the occasion of going to have his portrait painted at James Northcote’s studio, he questioned the artist about holes in his carpet (35.21). Ruskin sets this memory of the three-and-a-half year old child alongside his deprivation of having virtually no toys to play with and thus introduces a specific character of his exceptionalism. Such a denial of amusements, he believes, led not only to his contemplation of the visible world but to his routine scrutiny of it. As imaged by Northcote (p. 30) in white frock and blue sash, the boy is set in a landscape with two blue hills that Ruskin tells us are there as the result of his own request to the painter. Northcote’s painting encapsulates for Ruskin a certain artifice together with a brief period of self-conscious narcissism prior to the infamous dog-bite. Here in the portrait, landscape replaces the studio furnishings of Ruskin’s memory and the scampering dog in the foreground, traditionally in portraits of children a symbol of levity, could not be more unlike that inauspiciously named dog ‘Lion’ that will shortly afterwards ruin what Ruskin refers to as the ‘pretty’ mouth.1 We might read Ruskin’s rhetorical device of fixing the reader’s attention on the humble materiality of a carpet as a way of demystifying the genre of eighteenth-century portraiture by making familiar ‘old Mr. Northcote’ (28.273), as Ruskin calls him. After all, not only was Northcote Joshua Reynolds’s assistant but also his biographer. But equally, the singling out by Ruskin of an everyday domestic object, a carpet, as signalling the artifice of the studio environment, is significant in another sense since it introduces the different perspective of the child as prior to culture; the child as representative of a spontaneity lost, or attenuated in adulthood. 47

48 Ruskin’s Involute of Childhood

When Ruskin thinks about his childhood he thus tells the reader about his precocity with regard to visual matters. Ruskin’s memory of himself as a child sitting for this painting is one in which an almost hallucinatory relationship to vision constitutes also an undoing of its mystique. Yet, perhaps most crucially, his account of Northcote’s portrait marks out Ruskin as feminized; he dwells on the significance of the mouth here, recorded, for posterity, and thereafter spoiled by a dog-bite. He regards the image of himself in idealized terms as if situated prior to a fall from grace. In a general sense this fall represents a loss of the perceptual processes of childhood, what he famously refers to as the innocent eye, an eye that is undaunted by the possibility of error, an eye that can be irreverent or indeed frankly impertinent as in its assessment of Northcote’s carpet. But in a more specific one it involves a loss of, or a distance from, a fundamental desire to botanise that is in an important sense to see into the life of things. For Ruskin, essentially these are childish qualities, capacities lost on the educated adult, but he believes they are consummately developed in female children. In Ruskin’s aesthetic the innocence of the eyes belongs most specifically to a condition of girlhood. An aptitude for studying botanical specimens acquires a complex feminine association in Ruskin’s work such that the flowers of his narratives and Ruskin’s dissections of plants, that represent his profound impulse to scrutinize them, undergo a process of gendering. Big, as well as little, girls become intervolved with flowers. At its most overt level in Ruskin’s writing the connection of flower with girl child is played out in the symbolism of Rose La Touche’s name as it permeates his writing following their meeting in 1858. Yet, by the time of the composition of Praeterita, what has become in the case of Rose La Touche a familiar symbolic, emotional and intellectual correspondence between a flower and the loss of a girl/woman, has acquired a troubled history in Ruskin’s life. A connection of flower and girlhood that might seem to have begun with the child Rose, who bears that most beautiful of flower names, has a perplexing origin in Ruskin’s autobiographical account of his childhood in relationship to a different flower. That connection arises in a powerful conjunction of the death of his young cousin Jessie and the symbolically over-determined foxglove plant. From early in his life, Ruskin’s experience and understanding of childhood is linked with flowering plants (or so the narrative of Praeterita would have us believe). There exists an irrefutable connection for him between flowers and childhood as expressed, for example, in its most general terms, in his references to the influences of wild flowers ‘on childish and innocent life’ (19.374). But there also develops a very personal and idiosyncratic

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relationship between Ruskin’s childhood, as he articulates it, girlhood and flowers. For his own conditions of adversity and prosperity are signalled in the conjunction of flower with girl child. In the autobiography Ruskin records what appears to be a rather unremarkable incident of a childhood fever believed to have been caused by the dissection of foxgloves. More tellingly, Ruskin’s memory of this illness as brought on by an association with foxgloves, comes to him entangled with the death of his Scottish cousin Jessie (35.70–71). Ruskin’s rather ill-defined malady that shortly preceded Jessie’s death from hydrocephalus, his sense of the chronology of these events, is vital to the way in which memory works in Praeterita. It suggests larger patterns for the inter-relationships among recollections in Ruskin’s mind. In the manner of the involute, as earlier defined by Thomas De Quincey,2 the Jessie incident sets up a paradigm for understanding the ellipses and veiled dealings of Praeterita. In so doing, it provides a way of approaching difficult questions of the gendering of the child in Ruskin’s autobiographical narrative. Indeed, his construction of girlhood provides a shape for the larger ways in which connections form themselves in Ruskin’s aesthetic theory. The tragedy of Rose La Touche becomes in retrospect one that repeats those of other girls in the autobiography: Adèle Domecq, Charlotte Withers and Miss Wardell.3 In Ruskin’s story of his life we find a perplexed combination of the deaths of girls with flowering plants in a representation and a simultaneous displacement of a particular version of childhood. He keeps coming back to the figure of a child who, like Rose, is without agency. It is a child with whom Ruskin identifies and the threat to whose precarious safety is linked with a threat to his own. His relationship to such a girl is characterized not only by a failure to save her but also by the fact that she will be one whom, in memory, he has already failed to save. Botanising, in the form of dissecting flowers, becomes linked in complex ways in Praeterita with the appearance and disappearance of girl children. Botany was often seen to be a feminine science. Ruskin, aware of this fact and fond of referencing sources of scientific enquiry outside those of the mainstream, self-consciously registers this gendering of the discipline when he praises Dr Lindley’s Ladies’ Botany (1834), expressing the hope that a text intelligible to ladies may also be clear to him ‘their very humble servant’ (25.272).4 As scholars are aware, the rose, in particular, as connected with the girl child, has potent associations for the author of Praeterita as it did for Wordsworth in his ‘Lucy’ poems, and there exists for Ruskin in the myriad representative potentialities of the rose a happy coalescence of his deepest love and that most lovely of flowers. According to his classification of flowers, Ruskin’s wild rose could not


have been blessed with a more appropriate name, but the symbolism of that name gains in complexity following Rose’s premature death in 1875.5 By the time of the composition of Praeterita the rose has found a malign counterpart in the foxglove; the two flowers have become intervolved. In Praeterita, we can further pare down that feminized quality of sight as encapsulated in botanizing, as a renewed sense of the mystery of empirically observable phenomena. Ruskin exercised the impulse to botanize throughout his work but in relatively late texts such as The Queen of the Air (1869) and Proserpina (1875–86) we find a complex interest in botany resolving itself into intricate narratives about the lives of flowering plants. Such narratives have a spiritual emphasis, with plants existing, Ruskin writes, under conditions ‘representative’ of those which ‘induce adversity and prosperity in the kingdoms of men’ (25.294). In The Queen of the Air, what Ruskin calls ‘the breathing of spirit’, which is ‘continually creating its own shell of definite shape out of the wreck round it’, is ‘strongest’, he maintains, at the moment of a plant’s flowering, such that ‘the flower is the end or proper object of the seed, not the seed of the flower’ (19.357). Ruskin concludes, ‘the reason for seeds is that flowers may be; not the reason of flowers that seeds may be’ (19.357). Ruskin’s bold resolution of the chicken and the egg is instructive; he privileges the decorative bloom over the perpetuation of a species through its seeds. He is largely interested in reading and interpreting the most obviously visual metamorphosis of the flower as a manifestation of invisible spirit. But in the second chapter of Praeterita that ends with the familiar image of Herne Hill almond blossoms, Ruskin reflects on this principle of preferring flowers over fruit as justifying a larger autobiographical narrative whose seasonal change is marked out most intensely by its flowers: ‘the first joy of the year being its snowdrops, the second, and cardinal one, was in the almond blossom,— every other garden and woodland gladness following from that in an unbroken order of kindling flower and shadowy leaf’ (35.50). In keeping with The Queen of the Air and Proserpina that combine, in so many discursive forms, social and psychological issues, the tale of Ruskin’s childhood so artfully shaped by Praeterita, and the value it places on seeing with the eye of the child, has, as a psychic pivot, a correlation between flowers and the loss of girls. When, early in Praeterita, Ruskin documents the death of Jessie, of whom he was very fond, he alludes to her slow death from water on the brain as foreshadowed by his aunt’s dream, a portent of tragic events: Before her illness took its fatal form,—before, indeed, I believe it had at all declared itself—my aunt dreamed one of her foresight dreams,

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simple and plain enough for any one’s interpretation; that she was approaching the ford of a dark river, alone, when little Jessie came running up behind her, and passed her, and went through first. Then she passed through herself … And so it was, that Jessie immediately afterwards, sickened rapidly and died; and a few months, or it might be nearly a year afterwards, my aunt died of decline. (35.70) The memory of his aunt’s prophetic dream links in turn with Ruskin’s recollection of his own aforementioned feverish illness, which occurred a little while before Jessie’s hydrocephalus, and which he recalls as connected with the foxglove plant. The fever came on, he writes, ‘after a long walk in which I had been gathering quantities of foxgloves, and pulling them to pieces to examine their seeds; and there were hints about their having poisoned me, very absurd, but which extended the gathering awe from river eddies to foxglove dells’ (35.70). In the process of remembering it, there is a sense in which Ruskin regards his inexplicable fever (even while signalling the absurdity of such a suggestion) as the price paid for the violation (dissection) of a wild flower. The relationship between cause and effect in Ruskin’s memory clearly is not a simple one, but it emerges here in a structure that will repeat itself throughout the autobiography. It is a structure that brings together in various configurations the death, or loss of a girl, a flowering plant, and a threat to himself, with his own lack of agency in a girl’s fate. Bearing in mind this pattern, the links between the death of the nineyear-old Jessie from hydrocephalus, his own illness, and the foxglove flower are not as tenuous as first they might seem. Hydrocephalus is a disease of the brain, and not only was the poisonous purple foxglove used in the treatment of the disease, but also from the decades around 1800 death from hydrocephalus seems invariably to have been followed by dissection.6 Digitalis, a medicine prepared from the leaves of the foxglove, situates the plant within scientific practice,7 but a reference to the foxglove in Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake (1810) anticipates the troubled symbolic status it will acquire for Ruskin: Foxglove and nightshade, side by side, Emblems of punishment and pride, Grouped their dark hues with every stain The weather-beaten crags retain. (Canto 1, xii.7–10) Here, Scott’s reference to the flower as an emblem of punishment makes vivid the association between foxglove and loss realized in Ruskin’s


autobiography. The concurrence between foxgloves and child death is established as having a powerful psychic status for Ruskin from the point of Jessie’s death. As a consequence, foxgloves become one of the most vilified of flowers. Or, we might say that, having studied plants in so much detail, and in the light of his intense investment in the Rose, when Ruskin comes to write Praeterita, he realizes, as if for the first time, the significance of the foxglove as a negatively emblematic flower that finds in the death of Jessie its negative origins. It is as if in recalling his childhood he sees in the oblique connection of the foxglove with Jessie’s end a prophetic conjunction, the existence of which had always been there, if he had only been alert to it. The coming together of foxglove and Jessie suggests larger patterns for the ways in which inter-relationships come to Ruskin’s mind, but especially for the way in which he reads his personal development through a narrative of girlhood. Of course, perhaps more than any other incident in his life, the death of Rose La Touche comes to inform in all sorts of complex ways Ruskin’s relationship with retrospection. And the prophetic nature of his aunt’s dream becomes all the more significant when interpreted in the context of Ruskin’s later loss of Rose. It is as if Ruskin cannot accept that there was not some equally prophetic sign of her impending death. In ‘The Nature of Gothic’ chapter of The Stones of Venice (1851–3) Ruskin had been drawn to the imperfection of the foxglove as a symbol of natural process, in which one may perceive, simultaneously, states of decay and nascence: ‘the foxglove blossom,—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,—is a type of the life of this world’, he writes (10.203). In Modern Painters IV (1856), in the chapter ‘Of Turnerian Light’, Ruskin had found the foxglove a problematic flower in his desire to prove that nature presents the best things in the brightest colours. For the ‘gay [poison]’ (6.68) did not confirm but rather confounded such a rule. Later, and most strikingly, in the ‘Athena in the Earth’ chapter of The Queen of the Air Ruskin singles out the foxglove as one of ‘a great tribe of plants separate from the rest’, which ‘give the impression, not so much as having been developed by change, as of being stamped with a character of their own, more or less serpentine or dragon-like’ (19.376). These draconidae, he writes: All agree in a tendency to decorate themselves by spots, and with bosses or swollen places in their leaves, as if they had been touched by poison. The spot of the Foxglove is especially strange, because it draws the colour out of the tissue all around it, as if it had been

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stung, and as if the central colour was really an inflamed spot, with paleness round. Then also they carry to its extreme the decoration by bulging or pouting the petal;—often beautifully used by other flowers in a minor degree, like the beating out of bosses in hollow silver, as in the kalmia, beating out apparently in each petal by the stamens instead of a hammer; or the borage, pouting inwards; but the snapdragons and calceolarias carry it to its extreme. (19.376) In this extract, Ruskin is seeking evidence of the poison of the plant as visible in its colour and markings. He is fascinated by the physical makeup of the flower. This meditation on the ‘spot’ as having the appearance of a ‘sting’ is remarkable not only in the vehemence of Ruskin’s reaction to the flower, and in the extreme length to which he goes to interpret it, but in the author’s attribution to the foxglove of a familiarly childish tendency to pout. Ruskin’s reference to ‘the bosses or swollen places’ in the leaves of foxgloves, which look ‘as if they had been touched by poison’, suggests an oblique connection to the swollen brow caused by hydrocephalus. But, equally, it implies an extreme antipathy to the sexual nature of these ‘swollen’ parts of the plant. Although such pestilent spirit of the draconidae may affect other flowers to differing degrees, ‘it never strongly affects the heaths’, Ruskin maintains, and ‘never once the roses’ (19.376). Even though it might have been in the retrospect of adulthood that Ruskin had knowledge of the medicinal application of foxglove to hydrocephalus, it becomes a potent connection which informs his study of plants and binds itself in his mind both with the premature loss of girls, and with a threat to himself. This is a key point throughout the autobiography, namely, that he cannot separate the premature loss of girls from a fear of a threat to himself, and from a sense of complicity in their fates. Praeterita is full of the loss of young girls. Jessie is the first, followed by Adèle Domecq, and differently by Charlotte Withers and Miss Wardell. In one important sense and through Jessie, flowering plants and girl children are forceful reminders of Ruskin’s own mortality. His aunt’s dream, ‘simple and plain enough for any one’s interpretation’ (35.70), as he describes it, is clearly about children predeceasing parents and about a lack of agency on the part of the subject to avert premature death, to save the child. Ruskin’s aunt does not prevent her daughter from passing her. She thus countenances, in the dream state, a negligence, which results in her child’s death. That death represents an unnatural order where children predecease parents. Yet, there is more than a touch of irony in Ruskin’s comment here; the dream proves far


from ‘simple and plain’ in its later incarnations. Ruskin is clearly affected by the apparent significance of his aunt’s dreams as related to him by his mother. It is not the first of her dreams to have such significance: a previous one, Ruskin notes, had prefigured the deaths of two more of her children. The impact of these earlier losses, together with that of a third child, make the death of Jessie, as a further repetition, much more tragic, and ripe for symbolic interpretation. As Ruskin relates the trauma, trying to account for the unexpected death of his cousin, he experiences, in memory, the inexplicability of it as a threat to himself in the form of the canker of the foxglove. His autobiographical narrative obliges its readers to connect girls with flowers. Ruskin’s inability, like that of his aunt, to prevent Jessie’s death returns in various ways, much as the circumstances of Thomas De Quincey’s sister Elizabeth’s death return to him. She too died of hydrocephalus, in 1792, and De Quincey believed she had contracted the illness while walking in a field from which the dew had not yet evaporated. For De Quincey, it was as if his sister’s swollen cranium had been caused by the direct absorption of moisture. As John Barrell has shown, De Quincey is haunted by the loss of his sister and by his belief that the disease would have meant the dissection or, what De Quincey refers to as, ‘the laying into ruins’ by physicians of her skull.8 The loss of Elizabeth in childhood returns to De Quincey entangled with other experiences, though it acquires the recognizable status of a repetition. In his autobiographical work, Suspiria de Profundis (1845), De Quincey coins the term ‘involute’ to account for the way in which ‘our deepest thoughts and feelings’ pass to us ‘through perplexed combination, of concrete objects … in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled’, rather than reaching us ‘directly’.9 Ruskin forges an autobiographical narrative that draws on a series of conglomerate forms corresponding with those of the involute. While Ruskin interprets his fever as an effect of dissecting foxgloves, there is the further oblique suggestion of an undeveloped connection between his destruction of the plant and the death of his cousin. Such a perplexed combination, to use De Quincey’s phrase, suggests a shape for the larger ways in which connections form themselves in Ruskin’s aesthetic, especially in the later works, and provides a way of newly thinking about his own story of childhood, and how that story is inseparable from an account of girlhood. It is popular to speak of the omissions in Praeterita, to stress its frequently guarded tone, and to suggest that the key to understanding Ruskin might be attempt to retrieve those things omitted. But equally, if

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not more interesting, are those processes by which, in the autobiography, Ruskin constructs memories of formative experiences. Such processes are compromised or made difficult by Ruskin in Praeterita by his claim that he will only remember or include those ‘outlines of scenes and thoughts’ that to his mind are ‘perhaps worthy of memory’.10 Such an admission of self-consciously controlled editing, which is at the same time marked paradoxically by hesitancy and deferral of intention, puts the reader in a difficult position with regard to what Ruskin includes and what he omits. Such admission raises the question as to whether or not we should take Ruskin at his word. Or rather, of what it would mean to do so in this context. Remembering the good times only would be a little like having dreams which were always wishfulfilments; but dreams do not comply so easily and neither does memory. Ruskin knows this well, hence the extremely provisional tenor of the subtitle of Praeterita. The Jessie/foxglove incident, however, offers a way of approaching Ruskin’s autobiographical narrative that is faithful to its hesitant nature, and that allows us to ask different questions. What we find in the conglomerate form of the foxglove and the death of a girl is the key to a representation and a simultaneous displacement of particular attachment to girlhood. If we approach the text in this way, we find in the place of that most conspicuous textual absence (Ruskin’s relationship with and six-year marriage to Effie Gray) an involuted presence of Effie. Retrospectively the threat to himself that Ruskin articulates in Praeterita, as mixed up with endangered girls, comes in the form of Effie Gray. For she too has been touched by the foxglove. On 21 June 1853, Ruskin, Effie, John Everett Millais and his brother, and Crawley, Ruskin’s new servant, set off on the Scottish visit during which Millais began the portrait of Ruskin at Glenfinlas while simultaneously beginning a close emotional association with his wife. Millais also started to paint Effie, sitting on rocks downstream from the place at which he posed Ruskin, but in place of jewels she wears wild flowers. In one portrait, she appears in a hat, sewing; in another, in which the figure is presented in greater close-up, she wears a rather subtle dogrose along with blue harebells at her neck. But her hair is garlanded with a stem of purple foxglove blossoms that curves around her head. What might at first appear a seemingly benign image, a portrait of contentment, is compromised by the appearance of the foxglove. The symbol of punishment worn by arguably the major, though absent, female protagonist of Praeterita (Effie Gray is present only in passing as the girl for whom he wrote the fairytale The King of the Golden River), is deeply troubling, the portrait originating as it does, in Scotland, a key point in the


break-up of the marriage. In thinking about his past life Ruskin would require little more than rudimentary training in symbolism in order to read this portrait as already foreshadowed in his childhood. We should recall that Scotland was the home of Jessie and the place where she died. That Millais paints Effie in 1853 with foxgloves in her hair must represent for Ruskin, if only in a moment of passing association, the trouble with foxgloves. Seen in retrospect, a foxglove could not be further from his wild rose. In sexual terms, the foxglove appears overly fecund, swollen in its potency/pregnancy. But it is also an ambiguous plant in terms of gendering – the draconidae are troubling because they are overtly masculine flowers yet feminine in their habit of temporarily engulfing insects. In The Queen of the Air, some flowers are corrupted by ‘serpent nature’ and take on serpentine qualities and in that text, as Sharon Aronofsky Weltman has written, ‘Ruskin details the serpent as a symbol of degeneration or devolution’.11 Encapsulated in this portrait is that prospective (and now already past) threat of draconidae to the rose. There reverberates throughout Praeterita a retrospective interpretation of the troubling significance of Ruskin’s dissection of foxgloves in Scotland as a child. But what happens to this association in thought is further indicative of the inseparability of girlhood, memory and flowering plants. The foxglove is deeply symbolic by the time of the autobiography, but its malignant, serpentine qualities cannot be thought or written outright, or acknowledged in an adult context so they are consigned to the realm of childhood or, more accurately, to that provisional realm of the recollection of childhood, to those ‘outlines of scenes and thoughts’ that might be ‘worthy of memory’. Ruskin uses this method to deal with other troubling instances in adulthood, consigning them to childhood as a mental space exempt from the status of determinacy he would find disturbing. The symbolism of the foxglove is part of what Dinah Birch in her discussion of Ruskin’s myth-making has termed an ‘obsessive inward language’.12 We know that as early as 1864 Ruskin began a process of writing to Rose, composing his works in an allegorical language with her readership in mind. Following Rose’s death in 1875 and in the writing of Praeterita he reads back his past relationships with little girls as a consequence of this later tragedy. In retrospect, Ruskin finds the death of Rose already writ large. Praeterita has as an anchor-point the loss, in childhood, of a girl child and the displaced implication of Ruskin in that death. The representation cannot but require a displacement, it seems, such is the vague dream-like connection which cannot be spoken for what it is. In this context, the difficulty for Ruskin of the later death of

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Rose la Touche derives not only from the loss of the beloved object but from the guilt attached to it in the form of a repetition of this earlier incident. The memory of the loss of Jessie returns to him bringing with it strategies acquired to effect its displacement. Ruskin implies that the reliability of his aunt’s prophetic dreams ought also to have been available to him in adulthood in some form, such it appears has been the predictability of the pattern of his loss. That pattern begins with the death of Jessie and is followed fairly closely in the autobiography by the appearance of three other young girls, two of whom die young. There is a suggestion that the deaths of these young women are a consequence of Ruskin’s failure to act, or to realize his potential to save them. They are Adèle Domecq, Charlotte Withers and Miss Wardell. Considering them in turn, I point out their intervolvement for Ruskin as involute. Adèle Domecq is a major disappointment in Ruskin’s life, and she comes to occupy, through later losses, a key place in his childhood development. Though she does not die, it’s as if, in the narrative of his recollection, the misplaced affection or worship of Adèle (she is never described as possessing the warmth of her sisters) results in the death of more worthy child subjects with whom he subsequently associates. Ruskin’s account of his first meeting at the age of fourteen with Adèle Clotilde Domecq, inserted in the midst of a description of her four sisters, is distinguished by its brevity and want of affection (35.178). In spite of the fact that we later learn, in the description of the dark looks of Miss Wardell, that Ruskin prefers oval faces and what he refers to as ‘crystalline blondes’, (35.231) the account of Adèle as a ‘graceful and oval-faced blonde’ (35.178) appears oddly codified beside the more individually affectionate descriptions of her sisters. Of course, in Ruskin’s memory Adèle would come to embody the prototypical qualities of idealised beauty as later realized in Rose La Touche, and Adèle’s place and persona in the story of Praeterita are inextricable from those of Rose. Ruskin’s relationship with Adèle is characterized by an extreme desire to please her in spite of her contempt or indifference towards him. From the first, his preference for one of her forenames over the other might be seen to distinguish Ruskin’s affection for her from that of her siblings. But the reasons he gives for favouring the name ‘Adèle’, notably, ‘because it rhymed to shell, spell, and knell’ (35.180), signal more profound and inscrutable interconnections. The rhyming relationship of these three evocative words reveals Ruskin’s mind as partial to the form of the involute, quite consciously so, here, it seems. An involute suggests complexity in the form of that which is ‘rolled or curled up spirally, an interwoven manifold’.13 De Quincey took the term originally from


conchology, and such an origin, describing the complex forms of shells, makes it all the more apt a term for articulating what for Ruskin has the resonance of an unconscious, or profoundly dreamlike association. Since the unhappy story of Ruskin’s unrequited love for Adèle is a familiar one it is unnecessary to rehearse it. Instead, we might consider two incidents, which demonstrate the ways in which memories or thoughts of his relationships with girls are passing as involutes for Ruskin in the recording of his life story. The first is that of the return of the Domecqs to England and Ruskin’s visit to them at the convent with his mother. The second concerns the Christmas visit of the Domecqs to Herne Hill, which extends to a torturous five weeks. Of the first occasion Ruskin writes: ‘And so began a second æra of that part of my life which is not “worthy of memory,” but only of the “Guarda e Passa”’ (35.228, italic original). Of the second he remarks: And day followed on day, and month to month, of complex absurdity, pain, error, wasted affection, and rewardless semi-virtue, which I am content to sweep out of the way of what better things I can recollect at this time, into the smallest possible size of dust heap, and wish the Dustman Oblivion good clearance of them. (35.229) The image of ‘Oblivion’ as dustman here, clearing up the refuge of the Adèle episode directly prefaces the introduction of Mr Wardell and his daughter. Miss Wardell, in turn, recalls Charlotte Withers whose father returns to the Ruskins’ neighbourhood on what he refers to as ‘some small vestige of carboniferous business’ (35.221). In the form of an involute, coal and dust come to Ruskin associated with Adèle Domecq, Charlotte Withers and Miss Wardell. The smallest possible dust heap in Ruskin’s memory of Adèle provides an involute for the wasted possibility he enjoyed with Charlotte. Charlotte Withers entered Ruskin’s life in the ‘Spring of 38’ for a week when she stayed with the Ruskins while her widowed father attended to his coal business: Ruskin introduces her into Praeterita with a botanical allusion: ‘Charlotte Withers was a fragile, fair, freckled, sensitive slip of a girl about sixteen; graceful in an unfinished and small wild-flower sort of way’ (35.221–22). Relating the deep affection that developed between them during the course of her stay Ruskin dwells on the pain of their parting and on his utter lack of agency in the situation: And, as I said, if my father and mother had chosen to keep her a month longer, we should have fallen quite melodiously and quietly

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in love; … I don’t suppose the idea ever occurred to them; Charlotte was not the kind of person they proposed for me. So Charlotte went away at the week’s end, when her father was ready for her. I walked with her to Camberwell Green, and we said good-bye, rather sorrowfully, at the corner of the New Road; and that possibility of meek happiness vanished for ever. (35.222) Their parting results indirectly in her premature death: ‘A little while afterwards’, Ruskin tells us, ‘her father “negotiated” a marriage for her with a well-to-do Newcastle trader, whom she took because she was bid. He treated her pretty much as one of his coal sacks, and in a year or two she died’ (35.222). Parental control results in tragic loss here, just as it does in the slightly later case of Miss Wardell, an account of whom Ruskin introduces as ‘the epitaph of one of the sweetest shadows of the field of romance’: Miss Wardell was everything that a girl should be … She herself had been brought up in a way closely resembling my own, in severe seclusion by devoted parents, at a suburban villa with a pretty garden, to skip, and gather flowers, in. The chief difference was that Miss Wardell had had excellent masters, and was now an extremely accomplished, intelligent, and faultless maid of seventeen; fragile and delicate to a degree enhancing her beauty with some solemnity of fear … I very heartily and reverently admired the pretty creature, and would fain have done, or said, anything I could to please her. Literally to please her, for that is, indeed, my hope with all girls[.] (35.230–31, italic original) After a second meeting with her at Herne Hill, Ruskin writes: my father and mother asking me seriously what I thought of her, and I explaining to them that though I saw all her beauty, and merit, and niceness, she yet was not my sort of girl,—the negotiations went no farther at that time, and a little while after, were ended for all time[.] (35. 232) Ruskin goes on to explain how in pursuit of a fine education her parents took her to Paris and ‘she fell into a nervous fever and faded away, with the light of death flickering clearer and clearer in her soft eyes, and never skipped in Hampstead garden more’ (35.232). He then proceeds to link the deaths of the two young women in a more general reflection


on his relationship to such loss: I cannot be sure of the date of either Miss Withers’ or Miss Wardell’s death … I had never myself seen Death, nor had any part in the grief or anxiety of a sick chamber … But I had been made to think of it; and in the deaths of the creatures whom I had seen joyful, the sense of deep pity, not sorrow for myself, but for them, began to mingle with all the thoughts, which, founded on the Homeric, Aeschylean, and Shakespearean tragedy, had now begun to modify the untried faith of childhood. The blue of the mountains became deep to me with the purple of mourning … and all the strength and framework of my mind, lurid, like the vaults of Roslyn, when weird fire gleamed on its pillars, foliage bound, and far in the depth of twilight, ‘blazed every rose-carved buttress fair’. (35.232–233) In one sense, the losses experienced by Ruskin in the early part of his autobiography, these pitiful deaths of young women, operate as a means by which he maintains the centre of his narrative. Not only do they compound Ruskin’s sense of his own lack of agency in the parental home, but they feminise him by attributing to him the status of the lover who must wait and who is acted on. These remembered incidents of his own powerlessness allow Ruskin vicariously to experience a legitimate feminine position of the lover who waits. But it is precisely the appearance of such examples in the form of the involute that encapsulates Ruskin’s psychic investment in particular formal structures which themselves signal the difficulty of representing, in narrative, such an investment. John Barrell puts this well in relation to De Quincey when he writes: If narrative could always repair our psychic wounds simply by telling the story of our sufferings in the way we would like them to be told, we would hardly need to tell them, or never the same one twice. But we cannot be sure what story it is that we ‘want’ told, and if we could be, narrative could never tell it ‘simply’.14 Such difficulty of ‘telling the story’ arises from the fact that the parts of agent, victim, and spectator constituted by narrative do not remain static but shift their positions. This mobility is characteristic of Praeterita, and of Ruskin’s attempts to realize psychic wounds by telling a particular story of suffering. It is perhaps for this reason that Effie is so absent in terms that we would expect to be able to locate her. She could

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not be made to occupy a simple position of agent or victim in Ruskin’s story of his life but she is inseparable from the complex pattern of recollection I am describing. The form of the involute helps us to read those shifting patterns within which work and life are intricately inscribed by Ruskin. Ruskin’s life remembered becomes such a vivid account of childhood not only because it is within a nineteenth-century literary tradition that placed a great premium on childhood as a state prior to civilising education, prior to reason. But also because the psychic wounds, which shaped his adulthood, promise to find a convincing story in childhood, as a realm that countenances the production of different versions of a story. Childhood is a legitimate phase in which to test out the feasibility and attractiveness of different stories, or more specifically a phase of development in which it is acceptable to maintain an imprecise hold on language. The foxglove and female child come together in Ruskin’s memory, oddly mixed at a formative time in his development. The admixture of foxglove and little girl is presented as resisting childish understanding at the time of its occurrence, just as the involute perplexes an adult consciousness. Flowers like shells conform to curled and rolled structures. One only has to think of Ruskin’s description in Proserpina of the poppy’s crumpled petals, which never manage to shake off their creases but bear evidence of their complex folding as they bloom, to find a perfect type of the way thoughts pass for Ruskin: Gather a green poppy bud, just when it shows the scarlet line at its side; break it open and unpack the poppy. The whole flower is there complete in size and colour,—its stamens full-grown, but all packed so closely that the fine silk of its petals is crushed into a million of shapeless wrinkles. When the flower opens, it seems a deliverance from torture: the two imprisoning green leaves are shaken to the ground; the aggrieved corolla smooths itself in the sun, and comforts itself as it can; but remains visibly crushed and hurt to the end of its days. (25.260) It is tempting to read the poppy as Ruskin himself. He regularly anthropomorphises flowers15 and certainly this extract provides an allegory of his troubled upbringing, but I’d rather read it, here, as an emblem of the ways in which thoughts and feelings come to Ruskin. That is to say, as a revelation of the indelibility of hidden, or unconscious, processes, not simply of conscious ones. Ruskin’s point is that there is a time in the stage of the poppy’s development when the crushed petals are invisible,


prior to what he calls ‘a deliverance from torture’, but they are crushed none the less, and the flower ‘remains visibly crushed and hurt to the end of its days’. To break open and unpack a green poppy, a premature flower, is to make visible the incipient nature of childhood, to make visible the full indelibility in later life of the infant state. And so the conjunction of child and flower comes to occupy a crucial symbolic space in the narrative strategy of Praeterita, not simply because memories of childhood are so central to autobiography as a genre, but because in their entanglement they provide for Ruskin a type of the complexity of memory. In the story Ruskin makes of his life, the object changes, if only in the sense that every object is an obscure object of desire. But the entanglement of the involute comes forth again and again in the autobiography. It provides for Ruskin a tantalising sense of the possibility of recapturing childish feelings while simultaneously signalling, afresh, his repeated loss of them. The involute encapsulates thoughts in outline that assume the rolled or curled structure of the shell. Unlike the vulnerable poppy, the involute adopts a form that refuses to display on its surface the complexity of its internal regions.

Notes 1 Ruskin relates the way in which the servant Thomas disobeyed ‘strict orders’ that Ruskin, a child of five, ‘was not to be allowed within stretch of the Newfoundland’s chain’. As a consequence, ‘the bitten side of the (then really pretty) mouth, was spoiled for evermore’ (35.67–8). 2 Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols (Edinburgh: Black, 1889–90), I.39. 3 Catherine Robson makes good use of Kenneth Clark’s original observation about the persistence of girls in Praeterita. Her book explores the larger questions of the investment in little girls of middle-class Victorian gentlemen such as Ruskin, and their desire to re-locate in female children those feminine selves they have had to abandon in order to enter adulthood. See Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Chapter 2, above, pp. 29–46. What interests me most about the premature deaths of girls in Ruskin’s narratives are the links of those deaths with flowering plants, and with what becomes more emphatically in his aesthetic classification a contest between a foxglove and a rose. In his first reference in Proserpina to foxgloves Ruskin writes: ‘Don’t confuse the beautiful consent of the cluster in these sprays of heath [the cistus and wild rose] with the legal strictness of a foxglove’ (25.253). 4 See Dinah Birch, Ruskin’s Myths (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), in particular, the discussion of the hawthorn blossom, pp. 177–8. 5 Ruskin found many ways in which to weave complex associations with Rose La Touche’s name. For a discussion of Ruskin’s infantilization of Rose

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6

7

8

9 10

11

12 13 14 15

through the figure of St Ursula, see Lindsay Smith, ‘Infantia’, New Formations, 42 (2000), 85–98. See John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), esp. Chapter 2: ‘Hydrocephalus: The Death of Elizabeth’, 25–36. See Abraham Rees et al., The Cyclopaedia; or, Univeral Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, 39 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1819), article 18. There is a further pertinent connection with De Quincey here. Following Kate Wordsworth’s death, De Quincey in his grief-sticken state ‘continued to see her usually emerging out of “wild plants, such as tall ferns or the purple flowers of the foxglove”’, Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, p. 40. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, I.39. The sub-title of Praeterita, ‘Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in my Past Life’, is interesting not only for the way in which it defers the object of its study but also for its syntactical ambiguity. Those ‘thoughts perhaps worthy of memory’ to which the author alludes could be both ‘of’, in the sense of thoughts about Ruskin’s past life, or ‘of’ as implying ‘at the time of’ his past life. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, ‘Myth and Gender in Ruskin’s Science’, Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 170. Birch, Ruskin’s Myths, p. 4. Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, p. 32. Ibid., p. 80. Dinah Birch discuses in detail Ruskin’s relationship to the poppy as Proserpina’s flower. See Ruskin’s Myths, pp. 181–4.

4 Ruskin, Gautier, and the Feminization of Venice J.B. Bullen

Venice is one of the most written-about cities in the world. It has been constructed, deconstructed, represented, and mis-represented many times, but never more so than in the nineteenth century. The power of the nineteenth-century vision of Venice derived from the fact that it united the romantic and the scientific. It inherited from Byron an image of Venice imbued with magical decay and combined it with the scientific historicism and the empirical observation of the mid-nineteenth century. The two texts which most intensified the Venetian myth were Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Théophile Gautier’s Italia which appeared in 1851–3 and 1852 respectively, and which were written or begun in visits made between 1849 and 1852. Speaking of St Mark’s in particular, Henry James told the readers of Italian Hours (1909) that it is ‘surely the best-described building in the world. Open the Stones of Venice, open Théophile Gautier’s Italia, and you will see.’1 Ruskin, who was thirty-one, had been to Venice several times; Gautier, who was thirty-nine, was making his first visit. Both men had with them female companions and their response to Venice was coloured by the preexistent myths about Venice and by their relations with their respective women. In 1850 Gautier was the unofficial poet-laureate of French aestheticism. He was the flamboyant author of the notorious Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), he was known as the eccentric poet who would have no truck with the explosive politics of the French state, he was the author of the libretto of a well-known opera Giselle (1841), but above all he had a huge reputation as a critic and reviewer of art, theatre, and ballet. In spite, however, of his public standing he was not well off, and one of his motives in going to Venice was to make money by sending back a series of letters about his travels to La Presse. His other and more urgent 64

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motive was to meet a woman, Marie Mattei. The history of Théophile Gautier’s private life, even by French standards, was chequered. His first partner, Eugenie Forte he had abandoned after the birth of their child in 1836. He finally left her in 1841, having fallen in love with Carlotta Grisi as she danced her way through the first performance of Giselle. He also admired the beauty of her cousin, Giulia, but it was Ernesta, Carlotta’s sister, who remained with him for two decades, and by whom Gautier had two more children. By 1844 he had become the lover of this passionate contralto, who offered him not only Italianate beauty but also domestic security. Judith was born in 1845; in 1849 his second daughter, Estelle, was born. Restless, romantic and faithless, in 1849 Gautier was swept off his feet by another Franco-Italian beauty, Marie Mattei. He met her in London when she was recovering from an unhappy marriage and was wandering rootlessly around Europe. Elegant, intelligent, and religious, she threw herself into a liaison with Gautier, and after many secretive meetings in Paris in that year the couple agreed to spend time together in Venice. She left Paris sometime before him, and went to stay with her father in Marseille. During the period of separation they exchanged many letters charged with sexual longing, frustration, and the anticipation of relief. ‘Tell me that when I come back,’ Marie wrote from Marseille, ‘that you will stay all night until morning so that you can sleep beside me! It is so good to be next to your body, the very idea troubles my mind and my vision. … In spite of myself I feel a desire, and inexplicable thirst to see you again. … all my life I have dreamed of love and its pleasures …’2 They met in Venice in August 1850. The period of hectic sensual abandon was accompanied by a series of vivid, vibrant, and powerful essays from Gautier. Henry James, who was full of admiration and praised Gautier’s ‘appetite’, said that his account of Venice was marked by its ‘unfaltering robustness of vision’, making him, in James’s eyes, ‘not only strong but enviable’.3 Gautier’s arrival in Venice was dramatic. He loved train journeys, and often volunteered to cover the opening of new lines in the press, but this was indeed an exceptional one. A storm was blowing hard as the engine pulled the carriages uncertainly across the newly opened Ponte della Libertà like a ‘hippogriff in a nightmare’.4 Venice was illuminated like a city in a Gothic novel ‘by Lewis or Ann Radcliffe, illustrated by Goya’, as Gautier put it.5 He was soon in the arms of Marie Mattei in the palazzo Vendramin-Calergi6 and was shortly to begin his account of the art, architecture, and the life of Venice suffused with its carnal intensity. He asked the readers of La Presse: ‘How can we express the rosy shades of the ducal palace that seems like living flesh; the snowy whiteness of

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statues, drawing their contours in the blue of Veronese and Titian; the blushes of the Campanile caressed by the sun; the flashes of distant gold, the thousand aspects of the sea, sometimes mirror-clear, sometimes seething with sequins like a dancer’s dress?’7 ‘Who’, he continued, ‘will paint this vague, luminous atmosphere filled with sunshafts and vapours?’ The answer, for Gautier, was the masters of the Venetian Renaissance augmented with images from Canaletto. Only they could replicate the kaleidoscopic profusion of human life which filled the quays and canals – ‘the coming and going of gondolas, barges, argosils, galiots; the red or white sails … the sailors loading and unloading boats, the crates being carried, the barrels rolled, the motley strollers on the moles, Dalmatians, Greeks, Levantines and others, that Canaletto would indicate in a single stroke’.8 Marie remained with Gautier from 17 August to 4 September, and in Gautier’s mind her identity merged with that of the city and its artistic treasures. The palazzi and museums of Venice glowed with the naked flesh of paintings by Titian; ‘Le Musée Secret’ of their liaison glowed with the power of Marie’s body. Gautier confesses in this poem that he loves the naked women of Titian, but points out to the painter: Maître, ma gondole à Venise Berçait un corps digne de toi. [Master, my gondola in Venice Cradled a body worthy of you] Gautier offers to ‘paint’ this mistress in verse. He details her corporeal attractions but dwells with special delight on her pubic hair. Addressing that ‘sweet feminine beard,’ as he calls it, ‘which art always wishes to erase’, he implores it to, ‘take [his] verse like a kiss placed on your delicate and bristling silk’.9 As September approached Gautier was forced to part from the mistress and the place. ‘Some towns’, he said, ‘one leaves like a beloved mistress, one’s breast heaving, and tears in one’s eye’; in Gautier’s response the city and the mistress are charged with a similar erotic power and the legacy of the interval of passion with Marie is contained in the text of Italia. The departure from Venice of Théophile Gautier and Marie Mattei was preceded five months earlier by another departure from the same city – that of John Ruskin and Effie Gray. The Ruskins had spent the winter of 1849–50 in Venice while he collected material for The Stones of Venice, and as Gautier’s experience of the city and his record of that experience had been strongly coloured by his liaison with Marie, the

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language and structure of The Stones of Venice was as deeply affected by Ruskin’s relationship with his wife, Effie. Gautier’s affair with Marie predated (if only by a short while) his visit to Venice; Ruskin’s ‘affair’ with Venice began long before he met Effie Gray. When he first visited the city with his parents in 1835, Byron’s image of Venice as ‘a paradise now lost’10 was firmly implanted in his adolescent mind. He tried writing about the city in a Byronic manner,11 and his response to Venice, even at this early stage, was closely linked in his mind with erotic experience. In 1836 he fell in love with Adèle, the fifteen-year-old daughter of his father’s Spanish colleague, Pedro Domecq, who was visiting the Ruskins in London. When the Domecqs left, the young Ruskin immediately wrote Marcolini, a play set in Venice, full of violence and passion and centred around a heroine, Bianca de Carrara, whose love, says the eponymous hero, ‘is to my spirit as the breath to the body’ (2.479). The conventional conjunction of love and death is developed in a conversation between Marcolini and his servant Maso. When questioned as to why ‘place you love so near to death … ?’ Maso replies: ‘and if it be akin to death on the one hand … it is akin to folly on the other’ (2.477). In the light of subsequent developments in Ruskin’s life, Marcolini also makes a sinister, if less conventional, connection between marriage and death in Venice: Upon my marriage day, lady Upon my marriage day, My couch will be of clay, lady, Cold, cold clay. When the hymn is chaunting slow Through the abbey door, lady, I shall go, I shall go, With my feet before, lady. (2.493) Ruskin idealized Adèle Domecq and his experience with her was extremely painful. She was physically near and in every other way remote. Able to address him only in broken English, she was a girl who, as Ruskin himself put it, was ‘Spanish-born, Paris-bred, and Catholichearted’ (35.180). ‘It was a pity,’ said his mother, that he had not ‘seen enough of Adèle to cure the romance and fever of the passion’,12 but at this stage in his life, Ruskin knew romantic love, as Tim Hilton puts it, ‘only as a literary convention’.13 During a second visit of the Domecqs in 1838, Adèle rejected him and shortly after married a Spaniard. This threw Ruskin once again into


frustrated despair and the effect upon him was psychologically and physically damaging; he became depressed and, much to the consternation of his parents, began to spit blood. A convalescent holiday in 1841 took him back on a second visit to Venice where the passion for Adèle was displaced onto the city itself. ‘Thank God I am here!’ he wrote in his diary, ‘It is the Paradise of cities.’ The ‘folly’ of Marcolini now becomes a healing madness: ‘there is a moon enough to make half the sanities of the earth lunatic … I am happier than I have been these five years’ [i.e. from the date he met Adèle].14 For Byron Venice had been created by an ‘enchanter’: ‘I saw from out the wave her structures rise/As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand’,15 but, for Ruskin, the creator is the enchanting but idealized woman. ‘The outlines of St Mark’s’, he wrote, ‘thrill me as if they had been traced by A[dèle]’s hand,’ adding: ‘This and Chamonui are my two bournes of earth; there might have been another but that has become all pain. Thank God I am here!’16 The ‘home’ that he failed to find with Adèle he found in Venice, and he thought that he had found Paradise. Though the ‘hand’ of the woman who seemed to have traced the lineaments of St Mark’s was lost to him for ever, Ruskin eventually sought and obtained the hand of another woman, Effie Gray, but not before he had extended and deepened his experience of the body of that other mistress, Venice. He returned there in 1845, but the experience was one of disillusion rather than fulfilment – Paradise had been lost. ‘I cannot draw here for the tears in my eyes,’ he wrote to his father. ‘Tyre,’ he added, echoing Byron, ‘was nothing to this. I was never so violently affected in all my life by anything not immediately relating to myself … Venice is lost to me.’17 His mood of 1841 had changed. Italy itself was no longer ‘a dream to be interpreted’, since, ‘all the romance of it is gone …’ 18 Romance had gone too, from Venice. The reconstruction of the city, the opening of the Ponte della Libertà, the building of the railway station, the introduction of gas light but above all the demolition of ancient buildings had maimed the Venetian body for ever. ‘The decay of the city of Venice’, Ruskin said, ‘is, in many respects, like that of an outwearied and aged human frame’ (10.36) and ‘there is no single spot east or west, up or down, where her spirit remains—the modern work has set its plague spot everywhere.’19 What had happened to Venice, the Paradise of his late adolescence, now the leperess of his manhood? Certainly it had changed materially during a brief period of prosperity in the 1840s, but historians agree that Ruskin exaggerated.20 The greater change had taken place in Ruskin himself, and in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843) he formulated

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the Venetian decline in a telling series of images. ‘Let the reader’, he urged, ‘restore Venice in his imagination to some resemblance of what she must have been before her fall.’ This ‘restoration’, however, is not material but moral and the symptom of that ‘fall’ is couched in language suggestive of her gaining sexual experience: ‘Let him sheet her walls with purple and scarlet’ he tells his reader, in order to ‘cleanse from their pollution those choked canals’ and to ‘withdraw from this scene … such sadness and stain as had been set upon it by the declining energies of more than half a century’ (3.213–4). Many critics have noticed that Ruskin follows in a tradition that feminizes and eroticizes Venice.21 In the mid seventeenth century, for example, James Howell wrote of how ‘this beauteous Maid had bin often attempted to be deflowrd, som have courted Her, som would have bribd Her, and divers wold have forcd Her, yet she still preserv’d her chastity entire.’22 In the eighteenth century the tradition was continued in the writing of Addison, of Mrs Piozzi, of William Beckford, of Goethe23 and into the nineteenth century with Wordsworth’s ‘maiden City, bright and free’.24 But it was Byron’s account of Venice which most affected Ruskin. ‘My Venice’, he said, ‘had been chiefly created by Byron’ (35.295), and it was Byron, who in the words of Childe Harold, claimed to have ‘lov’d her from [his] boyhood—she to [him]/Was a fair city of the heart.’25 ‘To Ruskin’, Richard Ellmann pointed out, ‘Venice is always she … and the gender is not merely a form of speech but an image to be enforced in detail.’26 Only Ellmann and Cosgrove have attempted to link Ruskin’s compulsive feminization of the city with some of the irrational elements in The Stones of Venice. Cosgrove notes how Ruskin wrote of Venice ‘with a passion which betrays more than an intellectual interest’ and how ‘the organic, pulsing, female nature of Venice communicated itself strongly to him’.27 Ellmann suggests a connection between the failure of Ruskin’s marriage and the writing of The Stones of Venice. He speaks of how Ruskin, in the course of his history, ‘dwells … on the virtues and defects of the feminine character’ and of his insistence on medieval Venice as virgin and Renaissance Venice as whore.28 Though Ruskin has not yet identified the Renaissance as the seducer of Venice, he has begun to construct a binary typological history for the city which involves a period of purity followed by a sudden decline from grace, and it was at this point he becomes involved with Effie Gray. Ruskin fell in love with Effie when she came to stay with the Ruskins in the spring of 1847: she was nineteen and he was twenty-eight. Like Adèle, she was connected to Ruskin through the parents. She was a


distant cousin, and the Ruskins and the Grays had long been known to each other. But in Effie’s case, Mrs Ruskin, seeing what might develop, attempted to thwart the liaison by lying to Ruskin about Effie’s age (she told Ruskin she was seventeen), by exaggerating to Effie Ruskin’s involvement with another woman, and by urging her husband to make Effie return earlier than planned to her parents in Perth. One of the greatest obstacles to Ruskin’s commitment to any other person, friend or lover, was the psychologically vice-like grip of his parents. They were to him what he called ‘visible powers of nature’ (28.350) and the triangle which the three established between them was adamantine in its strength. It was also one which explicitly excluded Effie before and after marriage. Ruskin’s persistent, infantile submissiveness to parental authority was quite extraordinary. ‘I never disobeyed my mother,’ (28.81) he told the readers of Fors Clavigera, and the daily letters from Italy in 1845 bear witness to his unbounded need for parental approval. After his marriage in 1848 their intrusion became even more obtrusive and was exacerbated on all sides by a correspondence between the Ruskin parents and the Gray parents on the state and nature of the relationship of their respective children. The tensions this created first came to a head early in July 1848 soon after their marriage in April, and it produced a response in Effie which Ruskin cited as one of the reasons for the marital breakdown. It happened in Salisbury, where Effie and Mrs Ruskin competed to minister to John who had caught a bad cold. Effie was openly critical of the mother’s behaviour and was sternly rebuked by Ruskin.29 Though Ruskin recognized the interference on his parents’ part he justified it in the most extraordinary terms. ‘Grant they had interfered,’ he wrote to Mr Gray a little later, ‘have they not every right? Having nourished and brought up their child with every care and thought and energy of their lives devoted to him—have they not the right … to be obeyed in such as they may think it wise to command?—have they not every right also to expect that his wife should aid her husband in this, as in every other duty—and to be borne with by both if sometimes differences of temper should render that duty less than a delight?’30 Ruskin wanted a wife who would not challenge the authority of the parental triangle: ‘I look’, he said, ‘for meekness and gentleness in a woman,’31 and he looked, too, for someone like his mother, who did not question a husband’s authority. The terms in which he described Effie’s insubordination, however, are interesting in that they anticipate his account of the rebellion of Venetian Renaissance culture against scriptural authority. Ruskin said of Effie: ‘I hope to see her outgrow with

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her girls frocks [sic]—that contemptible dread of interference and petulant resistance of authority which begins in pride—and is nourished in folly—and ends in pain.’32 And in The Stones of Venice he claimed that ‘this unhappy and childish pride in knowledge, then, was the first constituent element of the Renaissance mind, and it is enough, of itself, to have cast it into swift decline’ (11.73). In contrast to Effie, Ruskin himself was inclined to comply with parental authority. Much later, in 1851, Effie was still complaining that he saw her as someone who might undermine parental influence. His obedience was, she said, ‘sans bornes’33 and that Ruskin had told her that ‘he never intended as long as they live to consult [her] on any subject of importance as he owed it to them to follow their commands implicitly.’34 When Ruskin first became involved with Effie, however, this was still in the future and what is perhaps of greater importance to our understanding of his construction of femininity is the series of passionate letters written to her between November 1847 and February 1848 during the six-month period of their engagement. These letters suggest that, as in the case of Adèle, he was projecting onto the absent female desires and fears of his own, and out of that correspondence emerge two contradictory images of her. One centres on the notion of the child bride, ‘girlish’ and ‘youthful’ as he calls her,35 innocent, intelligent, and compliant; one who, under his direction would become entirely and unquestioningly absorbed in his own interests and who ‘would gradually be led to examine and to feel the relative beauty—propriety—or majesty’36 of architectural form and historical detail. Though he told her: ‘I must not make an idol of you’,37 he actually constructed an ideal female with her sexuality well under control. Frequently this took the form of long discussions of her sartorial appearance, and in these discussions Ruskin was concerned that she should not appear too obviously attractive to other men. One image must stand for many, but it is a powerful one. He imagines her with him at the opera in a situation where females felt themselves to be the specific object of male observation. ‘Fancy us’, he writes, ‘at the Opera again, together—We two—and you with a little—just a bud—of orange blossom in your hair—no more—And I shall see every one gazing at you—and think—“Yes— you may look as much as you please, but she is mine now, mine, all mine.”’38 In this scene Ruskin dresses Effie in the floral emblems of virginity – buds of white orange blossom – where she is the object of male gaze and envy, but entirely encapsulated within his intense possessive protectiveness. After the breakdown of his marriage Ruskin confessed: ‘I married her, thinking her so young and affectionate that


I might influence her as I chose, and make of her just such a wife as I wanted.’39 What he wanted was that Paradise which he had first thought he had found in Adèle and he now thought he had found in Effie. In the Venetian section of Childe Harold Byron wrote of such idealization in terms of an unreachable Paradise, but only after six years of marriage to Effie and two winters in Venice did Ruskin arrive at Byron’s maturer, more cynical view. Byron wrote: Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, And fevers into false creation:—where, Where are the forms the sculptor’s soul hath seized? In him alone. Can Nature shew so fair? Where are the charms and virtues which we dare Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men, The unreach’d Paradise of our despair.40 So what Ruskin demanded in Effie was not just a virgin bride, but a virgin wife resembling his mother with her ‘supernatural … purity of heart and conduct’ (35.128). As Richard Ellmann pointed out, ‘in Ruskin’s mind his mother had immaculately passed from maid to mother without ever becoming a wife’.41 That is, she was a wife who had never undergone the violation of the sexual act. Ellmann’s evidence for this lay in the memorial inscription which Ruskin attached to a well formerly named ‘Margaret’s Well’ in her honour. This spring or source had become ‘polluted’ – and one remembers the importance which Ruskin attached in the second volume of Modern Painters (1846) to ‘cleansing’ the ‘polluted’ canals of Venice – so in memory of his own biological spring or source he attached a new epitaph which read, ‘In memory of a maid’s life as pure, and a mother’s love as ceaseless’ (22.xxiv) When he was in Venice Margaret Ruskin wrote to her son ‘in a style almost of amatory tenderness, calling John her beloved and Heart’s treasure and a variety of other terms which’, Effie believed, ‘only a lover would do in addressing a Sonnet to his Mistress’,42 providing him with an erotic life devoid of the shame of sexuality. Dinah Birch points out how many friends Ruskin had amongst women, yet as she notes, they were ‘usually married’ and represented ‘no sexual threat’ to him.43 Consequently the fear of sexuality was displaced onto Effie, and in spite of Ruskin’s attempt to dispel that fear by infantilizing her, his premarital letters suggest that he also saw her as devouring, threatening and resented, a female whose sexuality would not be subject to his control. ‘You saucy—wicked—witching—malicious—merciless—mischief

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loving—torturing—martyrizing—unspeakably to be feared and fled— mountain nymph’, he called her.44 This and similar outbursts were occasioned by Effie’s male conquests in Perth and the fear that Ruskin, like them, might suffer the betrayal of her sexual rejection. The imagery is telling as he likens her power to a series of traps culminating in an allusion to that myth which Freud and others have subsequently linked with the male fear of castration—the myth of the Medusa and the clothing of Athena.45 ‘You are’, he said, ‘a very sufficient and entire man trap—you are a pitfall—a snare—an ignis fatuus—a beautiful destruction—a Medusa.’46 The potentially castrating power of Effie, however, was most disturbingly and graphically expressed in a letter of 15 December 1847 where Ruskin said: ‘I don’t know anything dreadful enough to liken you to’: You are like a sweet forest of pleasant glades and whispering branches— where people wander on and on in its playing shadows they know not how far—and when they come near the centre of it, it is all cold and impenetrable—and when they would fain turn, lo— they are hedged with briers and thorns and cannot escape, but all torn and bleeding—You are like a wrecker on a rocky coast—luring vessels to their fate—Every flower that you set in your hair—every smile that you bestow—nay—every gentle frown even—is a false light lighted on the misty coast of a merciless gulf—Once let the ships get fairly embayed and they are all to pieces in no time … You are like the bright soft—swelling—lovely fields of a high glacier covered with fresh morning snow—which is heavenly to the eye—and soft and winning on the foot—but beneath, there are winding clefts and dark places in its cold—cold ice—where men fall, and rise not again.47 Now, the virgin buds in her hair have been displaced by flowers which create a deceptive beauty and which, in turn, incites penetration and entry but is essentially cold and brings death and destruction to the male. It is hardly an auspicious beginning to a marriage where Ruskin contrasts the cold but winning appearance of his future wife with the dark places below where ‘men fall, and rise not again’. Yet the ‘cold but impenetrable’ temperament of Effie was endorsed even by her own parents. ‘She never had an endearing manner neither in words nor actions,’ her mother was forced to admit. Mr Ruskin actually admired her ‘coldness’ and her ‘superiority—to all the kissing and flattering nonsense of School Girls’,48 while during Effie’s exploitation of the affection of the


Austrian Paulizza in Venice, she herself confessed ‘I am a strange person and Charlotte [Ker] thinks I have a perfect heart of ice.’49 Speaking of the ‘character’ of the fallen Venice, Ruskin used terms which were strikingly similar. ‘Venice stands,’ he said, ‘like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable … she calculated the glory of her conquests by their value … [and] at once broke her faith and betrayed her religion’ (9.24). In this sense Venice is like Athena, who as Dinah Birch points out, is for Ruskin, ‘an authoritative expression of the sexual ambivalence in his own work’,50 and one in Freud’s words who ‘is unapproachable and repels all sexual desires’.51 With his marriage to Effie in 1848, Ruskin was faced with a sexual crisis in contrast to whose proportions the affair with Adèle paled into insignificance. The first few months of that marriage were characterized by outer gaiety and inner stress and it must have become rapidly apparent to the pair that they were incompatible both in temperament and interests. They were rarely alone since the Ruskin parents persistently dogged their footsteps, but eventually in the winter of 1849–50 they went together to Venice. This gesture of independence was not welcome to Ruskin’s mother and father. John James, employing an extraordinary, but revealing metaphor, told his son that ‘the first news of your going … away now for 6 months struck like a Knell on your mother’s heart’, but, he added that the parents could ‘bear any privation’ for their son’s fame and happiness.52 During this visit to Venice, Ruskin familiarized himself with its architecture while Effie was left to get to know the Austrian officers and write lengthy letters home. Ruskin largely ignored his wife. His true labour of love was with the city, and as Tanner points out he ‘seems to have literally crawled and climbed over the whole ruined body’.53 The first volume opens with ‘The Quarry’ which, for all its empirical detail betrays signs of an emotional disturbance which will eventually engulf the whole enterprise. There is a persistent slippage from factual data into personification, and from personification into accusation – accusation charged with sexual innuendo. Venice, he says was historically the centre of a corruption which spread through the whole of Europe. Through her influence ‘mythologies [were] perverted into feeble sensualities’ producing ‘Gods without power, satyrs without rusticity, nymphs without innocence’ all of which gathered ‘into idiot groups upon the polluted canvas’ of western art (9.45). Venice, says Ruskin, ‘as she was once the most religious, was in her fall the most corrupt, of European states; and as she was in her strength the centre of the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her decline the source of the Renaissance … and

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the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation, and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into the grave’ (9.46–7). Effie’s need for ‘admirers’ in Perth had already caused disquiet in Ruskin before his marriage, but in Venice worse was to come. ‘We get plenty of admiration and attention,’ Effie wrote to her mother about herself and companion Charlotte Ker, ‘and the number of our admirers increases daily and they are extremely polite and don’t make love to us which is a comfort.’54 Inevitably one of them did fall in love with her – the Austrian, Charles Paulizza, First Lieutenant of Artillery. He was unmarried, thirty-eight years old, though, according to Effie, looked thirty and he was, she said, ‘the handsomest man in Venice’.55 He remained her almost constant companion throughout that first winter in Venice; he called regularly at the Ruskin residence, accompanied the couple to balls, to the opera and ballet, and on the frequent occasions when Ruskin was busy on his Venetian field-work would take trips to the islands with Effie. They spoke together not in English or Italian, but in what Ruskin called ‘that very disagreeable dialect’,56 German, thus excluding Ruskin who knew nothing of the language. From Paulizza Effie received some of the sexual attention which Ruskin failed to give her. With her ‘perfect heart of ice’, however, she knew, as she put it, that ‘men are really great fools’57 and on one occasion decided to put what she called Paulizza’s ‘devotion’ to her to practical test. Paulizza broke down in tears before her at least once,58 and when Effie was leaving Venice she feared that he might shoot himself.59 He died, possibly of a stroke, soon after. Effie’s attitude was deeply hypocritical. She defended herself by telling her mother that technically, at least, she had behaved honourably, but her liaison with Paulizza was so blatant that Ruskin accused her of coquetry,60 and the Ruskins’ close friend in Venice, Rawdon Brown, upbraided her with accusations in ‘the gravest colours’.61 Even her brother George in Scotland pointed out that she was compromising herself. Nevertheless, Ruskin did nothing to give Effie what she wanted; the attention which he should have given to his wife was bestowed upon Venice and its architecture, and that attention was obsessive. While Effie was with Paulizza, Ruskin, with ‘pain of frost-bitten finger and chilled throat … examined or drew window-sills in the wintry air’ so that even his gondoliers ‘thought it stupid to be tied to a post in the Grand Canal all day long’.62 It is as though the libidinal energy had been displaced from the body of his wife to the body of Venice; from the body which, as he put it, was ‘not formed to excite passion’ in him63 to


the body of Venetian ornament which he found sometimes ‘chaste’ and sometimes repellently sexually overcharged. ‘I mean,’ he said, that character of extravagance in the ornament itself which shows that it was addressed to jaded faculties; a violence and coarseness in curvature, a depth of shadow, a lusciousness in arrangement of line, evidently arising out of an incapability of feeling the true beauty of chaste form and restrained power. I do not know any character of design which may be more easily recognised at a glance than this over-lusciousness … We speak loosely and inaccurately of ‘overcharged’ ornament, with an obscure feeling that there is indeed something in visible Form which is correspondent to Intemperance in moral habits … (11.6). In the first volume of The Stones of Venice, emotional uncertainty is compensated for by historical fact, and most prominent amongst those facts is the date which Ruskin ascribes to the fall of the city. He wrote ‘I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, 8th May 1418’ (9.21). This date punctuates all three volumes. He mentions it in connection with the history of the ‘central building of the world’ – the Ducal Palace – in the second volume, where he was pleased to note that ‘the first hammer’ was ‘lifted against the old [i.e. Gothic] palace in the very year, from which I have dated the visible commencement of the Fall of Venice’ (10.352.n). ‘That hammer stroke’, he said, ‘was the first act of the period properly called “the Renaissance”’, and employing the same word that his father had used to describe the effect of his journey upon his mother, said that it ‘was the knell of the architecture of Venice’ (10.352). Finally, he mentions it on the last page of the last volume when he says that immediately after the fall of Venice the city fell into a year of dissipated festivity. The historical details are ascribed to a number of sources, most prominently Pierre Daru’s Histoire de la République de Venise (1819), but, as Richard Ellmann points out, Daru gives Zeno’s death no such consequence. Ellmann goes on to say that ‘in view of [Ruskin’s] penchant for numerology’ the date ‘invites attention’, as indeed it does because it is an outstanding example of the way in which Ruskin creates a private link between historiography and autobiography. Ellmann explained that ‘if Ruskin had been born exactly four hundred years after this date, in 1818 rather than in 1819, the choice might seem related to his theatrical self-lacerations, as if to regret he had ever been born. But his terrors were for intercourse and conception rather than for birth’. ‘I venture to propose,’ Ellmann continues,

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‘that the date so carefully selected was, putatively, four hundred years to the day before his own conception – that act so impossible for him to meditate on with equanimity.’64 I venture to propose a further significance for this date, since it coincides almost exactly with a birthday – a ‘naissance’ – which would have struck a knell in Margaret Ruskin’s heart: Effie Gray was born on 7th May 1828. If Ruskin had reason to fear the primal scene of his own conception, he had equal reason to fear the memory of his own falling in love which, the records suggest, coincided with Effie’s nineteenth birthday on 7 May 1847.65 The Renaissance or rebirth was for Venice what the anniversary of Effie’s birth was for Ruskin – a ‘knell’ – and contrary to what Ellmann says, in 1850 the term Renaissance had largely negative associations for Ruskin’s readers. With the foundations of his work laid in 1849–50, Ruskin returned with Effie to Venice in the winter of 1851–2 to complete his book and his account of the birth, youth, and maturity of Venice. The second volume of The Stones of Venice opens with what even Tanner is prepared to call a ‘primal scene’.66 This, Ruskin says is a ‘frank enquiry into the true nature of that wild and solitary scene’ of the ‘birth of the city’ (10.9). As he places his reader amongst the visceral mud flats of the lagoon, and that ‘black desert of their shore [which] lies in its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful silence’ (10.13), he apologizes to his reader for the ‘pain’ (10.14) that ‘[watching] the slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers into the polluted sea’ (10.14) might bring. Venice is born in the same slimy sexual ‘pollution’ into which she is eventually to sink before the watching eyes of her ‘admirers’. The subsequent life of the female Venice divides broadly into two periods. First ‘she rose a vestal from the sea’ but after ‘consummation’ (which as Ellmann pointed out nearly always has negative associations for Ruskin), ‘she became drunk with the wine of her fornication’ (10.177). The last volume of The Stones of Venice, entitled ‘The Fall’, traces the progressive decline of the mature Venice through ‘Pride’ and ‘Infidelity’ under the influence of the Renaissance, and it is in this last volume that the two periods of her existence are thrown into sharp relief one against the other. On the one hand pre-Renaissance Venice is the embodiment of chaste femininity, probably modelled upon the image of his mother and her ‘maid’s life as pure’; on the other hand Renaissance Venice is corrupt, sensual and given over to ‘pleasure’ – pleasure of the kind in which Effie so liberally indulged herself. In the chapter ‘The Grotesque Renaissance’, the idea of vestal purity centres on the piazza of Sta Maria Formosa and the legend of the Brides


of Venice. Up to the year 943 the day of the Purification of the Virgin on 2 February was celebrated in the piazza; it was also a day settled upon for a curious mass marriage by the Venetian nobility. As Ruskin describes it, this multiple marriage ceremony was not just a personal contract between two people, but was an affair celebrating family solidarity, ‘full not only of the families who that year beheld the alliance of their children … but of all the families of the state, who saw, in the day which brought happiness to others, the anniversary of their own’ (11.139). Though the custom of mass marriage fell into disuse, the anniversary fixed for the 2 February remained important and continued to be celebrated by a feast until 1379. Here we have another date which Ruskin loads with personal significance. It is no coincidence that the Purification of the Virgin on 2 February was the anniversary of the ‘pure’ marriage of Ruskin’s own parents, nor is it a coincidence that it was the 2 February that Ruskin later chose to propose marriage to Rose la Touche. At this point in The Stones of Venice Ruskin asks his reader to ‘fill his mind with the fair images of the ancient festival’ from the past, then instantly replaces them with an image from the Renaissance which still stands at Sta Maria Formosa. It is ‘a head, – huge, inhuman, and monstrous, – leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be beheld for more than an instant: yet let it be endured for that instant; for in that head is embodied the type of evil sprit to which Venice was abandoned in … her decline’(11.145). Ruskin refers here to a mask which occupies the place once dedicated to St Mary the Beautiful and he says ‘we should see and feel the full horror of it on this spot’ to experience the nature of the change which had come over Venice. That head which cannot ‘be beheld for more than an instant’ is, of course, a version of the Medusa: ‘Venga Medusa; sì lo farem di smalto’/ ‘Hasten Medusa, so shall we change him to adamant’.67 Ruskin immediately quotes from the Inferno and says that ‘the workman indeed saw, and … as it appalled him, will appal us also’ (11.169). Before his marriage to Effie, Ruskin had been appalled by the Medusa in her and had become sexually petrified. ‘You are a pitfall—a snare—an ignis fatuus—a beautiful destruction—a Medusa’,68 and it is not difficult to see how, in Ruskin’s mind, a contrast existed between the purity of his parents’ marriage and the potentially sexually polluting nature of his own.69 In the concluding movement of The Stones of Venice, the authority of Dante is supported by the book of Revelations, as Venice is depicted as city condemned for her libidinous dissipation. Once a ‘vestal that rose from the sea’, Venice becomes simultaneously the classical Medusa and

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St John’s ‘great whore that sitteth upon many waters’,70 in which sexual infidelity is linked directly to the social pleasures and masked balls of Venetian society. Speaking of the colour on Gothic building, Ruskin says that, ‘the bright hues of the early architecture of Venice were no sign of gaiety of heart’. On the contrary, she was granted these colours ‘not … in the fever of her festivity, but in the solemnity of her early and earnest religion’ (10.177). But after her fall she became ‘the revel of the earth, the masque of Italy; and therefore is she now desolate; but her glorious robe of gold and purple was given her when she first rose a vestal from the sea, not when she became drunk with the wine of her fornication’ (10.177, Ruskin’s emphasis). In the book of Revelations, the kings of the earth ‘have committed fornication’ with the whore, ‘and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.’71 Like that other female ‘with maid’s life as pure, and a mother’s love as ceaseless’ the whore of Revelations is also a mother, but she is an evil one. She is ‘the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth’72 and she is, therefore, ‘desolate and naked’. The Ruskin marriage was desolate and childless. There were, as Ruskin put it, certain ‘points in [Effie’s] character which caused me to regard with excessive pain any idea of having children by her’.73 Those ‘points’ were almost certainly connected with Effie’s personal irresponsibility. From the moment she arrived in Venice she took delight in masques and balls which, for Ruskin, were redolent with associations of sexual titillation and dissipation. Byron, whom Ruskin quotes, had a positive view of the ancient, festive tradition of Venetian masquing. ‘Nor yet forget,’ he wrote in Childe Harold, ‘how Venice once was dear,/The pleasant place of all festivity/The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.’74 But notions that may have been pleasant for Byron were painful for Ruskin, who, like Othello, had been warned that ‘In Venice they do let God see the pranks/They dare not show their husbands.’75 Iago’s advice to Othello, as Ruskin well knew, derived from the long-standing myth of Venice as a site of unbridled sexual gratification. ‘Tis too well known, ther is no place where ther is lesse Religion from the girdle downward,’ said James Howell in 1651,76 and generations of men of all ranks before and after Boswell in 1765 went to Venice, as Boswell put it, ‘stirred by the brilliant stories [they] had heard of Venetian courtesans’.77 But the idea had been reinforced in Ruskin as recently as 1849 when he was made, as he put it, ‘bitterly melancholy’ by reading in the letters of Lady Wortley Montague of her thoughtless pleasures in this ‘centre of pleasure’ (9. xxiv). Effie confirmed Ruskin’s worst fears in this respect. At Venice, unlike London, she said, ‘one enjoys the greatest freedom of action of any


place I ever saw.’78 She was, she said, ‘the Belle at all the Balls … and the men adore me, one and all … I have sufficient means and Liberty to do whatever I choose.’79 Venice, for her, was one long carnival. ‘Venice’, she said, ‘is so tempting … at night that it is hardly possible not to be imprudent.’80 All her talk is of social engagements, clothing, and men. She was a lively figure at these gatherings because she liked people, mastered languages readily, and mixed easily. Ruskin did none of these things. He hated society, he hated the inhabitants of Venice, whom he found ‘so filthy that he [could not] bear to touch them or be amongst them’,81 and he fell into a melancholy misanthropy.82 ‘John never speaks to any body or troubles to speak at all unless it happens to amuse him at the moment,’83 Effie wrote to her mother. At the opera and ballet he would often sleep, and when invited to balls would find his way to the library to read. ‘He says he has no friends and that he never will have any and that the world and every body in it are all going wrong but that he is right, and then he sits and writes such accounts to Mr R—of the state of society both here in Venice and in London and thinks himself an excellent judge, although he knows no one and never stirs out.’84 Though he probably felt that Effie had not been sexually unfaithful to him, she had, nevertheless, betrayed the values which he so strongly shared with his parents and which he expressed in those long letters home. ‘I rejoice to see’, Ruskin’s father said to him on his first winter in Venice, ‘your sense of your more important station and calling and distinction as a Writer saves you from the Entanglements and poor attractions and frivolities of Foreign society—and that by God’s goodness you are likely to move unscathed through Carnivals and all manners of Dissipation.’85 For the Ruskin family, such frivolities were intimately connected with sins of the flesh, but Ruskin wrote back assuring his parents that ‘Operas, drawing rooms and living creatures have become alike nuisances to me’ and that they were ‘no entanglement at all’.86 This same ‘unscrupulous and insatiable pursuit of pleasure’ (11.134–5) features prominently in the final sections of The Stones of Venice. Here the grotesque mask and the social masque merge in the figure of the Medusa. He claimed that it was ‘painful to dwell’ on work which represented the ‘consummation’ of the ‘obscene’ spirit of Renaissance Venice and that he was unable to ‘pollute’ the volume with illustrations of this most debased grotesque form. As the volume draws to a close the frivolities of society, past and present, merge into a sickening whirl of sexual degradation. In Ruskin’s account, this dissipated carnival began chronologically with the fall of Venice when ‘sifesteggio dalla citta uno anno intero’/‘the city celebrated for an entire year’ (11.195) and it found its

J.B. Bullen 81

most recent expression in what he called ‘dwarfish caricature, the most disgusting types of manhood and womanhood which can be found amidst the dissipation of the modern drawing-room’ (11.162). Throughout Venice it manifests itself in decorative detail of ‘every species of obscene conception and abominable detail’ (11.162). Venice, he said, surpassed ‘the cities of Christendom’ in dissipation as ‘the youth of Europe’ (his wife prominent amongst them) ‘assembled in the halls of her luxury, to learn from her the arts of delight’(11.195). The last paragraph proper of The Stones of Venice, written on the eve of the final ruin of Ruskin’s marriage, places the responsibility for the fall of Venice firmly upon the curse of sexuality. The context is Biblical but it revives once again the image of the polluted canals of Venice. ‘It is as needless as it is painful to trace the steps of her final ruin,’ he wrote. ‘That ancient curse was upon her, the curse of the Cities of the Plain … By the inner burning of her own passions, as fatal as the fiery rain of Gomorrah, she was consumed from her place among the nations; and her ashes are choking the channels of the dead, salt sea.’ (11.195). Effie Gray was soon removed from her place in Ruskin’s life, and as he finished with her so he finished The Stones of Venice. What he had hoped might be an ideal Paradise had become dust and ashes and Venice, like Effie herself, had become for him, in Byron’s words, the ‘Paradise of our despair’. Gautier’s Italia was published in book form in 1852, and the last volume of The Stones of Venice appeared in 1853. Though the presence of Marie Mattei in Gautier’s is imprinted upon the text, Gautier nowhere personifies Venice in Ruskin’s manner. Ruskin was writing a didactic and eccentric history based upon his scrupulous inspection of Venetian architecture; Gautier, in his way no less observant, was creating an impressionistic kaleidoscope of Venetian life which involved art and architecture. Ruskin’s Venice is mainly an unpopulated city; Gautier’s throbs with human life. The influence of both books derived from the way in which Venice emerges greater than the sum of its parts, mythologized, humanized, and reified in powerfully emotional terms. The female is important to both texts, but as Effie Gray was unable to compete with the maternal power of Mrs Ruskin, so Marie Mattei was equally frustrated by the power of the mother of Gautier’s children, Ernesta Grisi. Within three years of meeting him, Marie realized that there was no real way forward for Gautier and her. So as Effie threw herself upon the bosom of John Everett Millais, so Marie went to Rome and threw herself upon Pius IX and onto the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church.


Notes 1 Henry James, Italian Hours (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 14. 2 ‘Dis-moi qu’à mon retour tu resteras une nuit tout entière jusqu’au matin pour te faire dormir auprès de moi! C’est si bon d’être auprès de ton corps, l’idée seule trouble ma vue et mes pensées. … C’est malgré moi que je sens un désir, une soif de te revoir inexprimable. … toute ma vie j’avais rêvé l’amour et ses délices … ’ Marie Mattei, 28 Jan. 1850, Lettres à Théophile Gautier et à Louis de Cormenin, ed. Eldon Kaye (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1972), p. 67. 3 Henry James, ‘Review of Théatre de Théophile Gautier: Mystères, Comédies, et Ballets’, quoted in Italian Hours (1992), p. xix. 4 Théophile Gautier, Italia (Paris: Hachette, 1852), p. 74. 5 Ibid., p. 77. 6 Ironically the palazzo in which the erstwhile lover of Judith Gautier, Richard Wagner, died in 1883. 7 ‘Comment exprimer ces tons roses du palais ducal, qui semble vivre comme de la chair, ces blancheurs neigueuses des statues, dessinant leur galbe dans l’azure de Véronèse et de Titien, ces rougeurs du Campanile que caresse le soleil, ces éclairs d’une dorure lointaine, ces mille aspects de la mer, tantôt claire comme un miroir, tantôt fourmillante de paillettes comme la jupe d’une danseuse? Qui peindra cette atmosphère vague, lumineuse, pleine de rayons et de vapeurs?’ Gautier (1852), p. 86. 8 ‘Ce va-et-vient de gondoles, de barques, d’argosils, de galiottes; ces voiles rouges ou blanches … les matelots qui chargent et déchargent les barques, les caisses qu’on porte, les tonneaux qu’on roule, les promeneurs bigarrés du môle, Dalmates, Grecs, Levantins et autres, que Canaletto indiquerait d’une seule touche.’ Ibid., p. 86. 9 O douce barbe féminine, Que l’Art toujours voulut raser, Sur ta soie annelée et fine, Reçoit mes vers comme un baiser! Théophile Gautier, Emaux et Camées, ed. Madeleine Cottin (Paris: Minard, 1968), p. 212. 10 The words are those of Robert Gleckner in his Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1967), p. 310. 11 Ruskin says that he ‘knew … Byron pretty well all through by 1834’ [i.e. by the age of fifteen] (35.142). 12 Quoted in Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 52. 13 Ibid., p. 36. 14 The Diaries of John Ruskin, ed. Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–9), 1.183. 15 Byron, ‘Childe Harold,’ Canto 4, ll.3–4. 16 Ruskin, Diaries, 1.183. 17 Ruskin in Italy: Letters to his Parents 1845, ed. Harold Shapiro (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp. 200–1. 18 Ibid., p. 143. 19 Ibid., p. 201. 20 See Clegg, p. 57.

J.B. Bullen 83 21 Jeanne Clegg, Ruskin and Venice (London: Junction, 1981), p.110; Denis Cosgrove, ‘The Myth and the Stones of Venice: an Historical Geography of a Symbolic Landscape’, Journal of Historical Geography, 8 (1982), 145–69; Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 22 James Howell, SPQV: A Survey of the Signorie of Venice … etc. (London, 1651), pp. 1–2. 23 For the myth of Venice in travel literature see Milton Wilson, ‘Travellers’ Venice: Some Images for Byron and Shelley,’ University of Toronto Quarterly, 43 (1974), 93–120. Goethe’s wonderfully indecent remarks about Venice occur in his Venetian Epigrams (1795). 24 William Wordsworth, ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic,’ in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, new ed. revised by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 242, l.5. 25 Lord Byron, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), Canto 4, ll.154–5. 26 Richard Ellmann, Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 46. 27 Cosgrove, p. 164. 28 Ellmann, p. 46. 29 ‘On one occasion,’ Ruskin told his solicitor after the separation, ‘she having been rude to my mother, I rebuked her firmly; and she never forgave either my mother or me.’ J. Howard Whitehouse, Vindication of Ruskin (London: Allen, 1950), p. 15. 30 Mary Lutyens, The Ruskins and the Grays (London: Murray, 1972), p. 234. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Effie in Venice: Unpublished Letters of Mrs John Ruskin Written from Venice between 1849 and 1852, ed. Mary Lutyens (London: Murray, 1965), p. 202. 34 Ibid., p. 264. 35 Sir William James, The Order of Release (London: Murray, 1948), pp. 62 and 63. 36 Ibid., p. 60. 37 Ibid., pp. 53–4. 38 Ibid., p. 61. 39 Whitehouse, p. 15. 40 Byron, ‘Childe Harold,’ Canto 4, ll. 1090–6. 41 Ellmann, p. 47. 42 Effie in Venice, pp. 265–6. 43 See below, p. 109. 44 James, p. 58. 45 Most notably in his paper ‘Medusa’s Head’ (1922), where he speaks of Athena, who, carrying the ‘symbol of horror’ on her dress, ‘becomes a woman who is unapproachable and repels all sexual desires’. Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1950), pp. 105–6. 46 James, p. 67. 47 Ibid., p. 68. 48 Effie in Venice, p. 67 and 68. 49 Ibid., p. 149. 50 See below, p. 115.

84 Ruskin, Gautier, and the Feminization of Venice 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

See n. 43. Quoted Clegg, p. 74. Tanner, p. 68. Effie in Venice, p. 98. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 147n. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid. Ibid., p. 136n. Clegg, p. 79. Whitehouse, p. 15. Ellmann, p. 48. His first romantic overture to her took the form of a poem, ‘For a Birthday in May’, presented to her in 1847. See Whitehouse, p. 27. Tanner, p. 92. Dante, Inferno, 9,53. Ruskin quotes the line at 11.169. James, p. 67. The Medusa continued to haunt Ruskin, and a dream which he had in 1869 relates the myth explicitly to the horror of the female. He wrote in his diary: ‘Got restless—taste in mouth—had the most horrible serpent dream I ever had yet in my life. The deadliest came out into the room under my door. It rose up like a Cobra—with horrible round eyes and had a woman’s or at least Medusa’s, breasts. It was coming after me, out of one room, like our back drawing room at Herne Hill, into another; but I got some pieces of marble off a table and threw at it, and that cowed it and it went back; but another small one fastened on my neck like a leech.’ Diaries, 2.685; entry for 1 November, 1869. For the further significance of serpent imagery in Ruskin’s writing see Marc A. Simpson, ‘The Dream of the Dragon: Ruskin’s Serpent Imagery’, in The Ruskin Polygon: Essays on the Imagination of John Ruskin, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Faith M. Holland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 21–43. Rev. 17:1. Rev. 17:2. Rev. 17:5. Whitehouse, p. 12. Byron, ‘Childe Harold,’ Canto 4, ll. 25–7. Othello, iii, 3, 206–7. Howell, p. 8. Quoted Clegg, p. 19. Effie in Venice, p. 150. Ibid., p. 264–5. Ibid., p. 291. Ibid., p. 84. Another dream which Ruskin had in 1869 plays out a phallic strife between man and wife in the context of dancing. In his diary Ruskin dreamt of watching a Punch and Judy show, and was ‘startled by him knocking down his wife without dancing with her first … and then I saw it was an Italian

J.B. Bullen 85

83 84 85 86

Punch, modernized, and that there was no idea of humour in it, but all the interest was in a mad struggle of the wife for the stick, and in her being afterwards beaten slowly, crying out, and with a stuffed body, which seemed to bruise under the blows, so as to make the whole as horrible and nasty as possible.’ Diaries, 2.684; entry for 24 October, 1869. Effie in Venice, p. 260. Ibid., p. 266. Quoted Clegg, p. 79. Effie in Venice, p. 146.

5 The Feminist Origins of ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ Linda H. Peterson

On 6 and 14 December 1864, Ruskin gave two lectures in Rusholme, near Manchester, one to raise money for a library of the Rusholme Institute, another to establish schools in an impoverished section of the city. Published in 1865 under the title Sesame and Lilies, ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ and ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ provoked much debate, in Ruskin’s day as in ours, about women’s education and employment. As Elizabeth Helsinger has noted, most Victorian reviewers perceived the lectures to be ‘an angry attack on traditional values’. The conservative Saturday Review called Ruskin’s words ‘the shriekings of a revivalist’, while Blackwood’s Magazine dismissed the lectures as a ‘clever farrago of unmitigated abuse to the one sex, and of sugared abuse and railing flattery … to the other’, full of ‘extravagant charges and impossible remedies’. Only radical periodicals like the Westminster Review attended seriously to Ruskin’s goals, arguing that ‘Utopianism is at times good for us, if only to lift us out of our usual atmosphere of prudence and pence.’1 By far the most favourable notice appeared in the Victoria Magazine, a journal written, produced, and published by leaders of the English women’s movement. In a two-part series, ‘Mr. Ruskin on Books and Women’, the Victoria reviewer admiringly set forth the arguments of Sesame and Lilies, ‘letting the book speak for itself, as much as possible, before we intrude any observations of our own, or notice the points … where we feel ourselves slightly at issue with our teacher’.2 Why was Sesame and Lilies so well-received by progressive English women of the mid-nineteenth century, while it was so vehemently dismissed by others? To address this question, I consider the literary and cultural contexts for its favourable reception among leaders of the women’s movement, taking my cue from an association the Victoria reviewer makes between Ruskin’s educational theories and those of 86

Linda H. Peterson 87

Anna Jameson, the role model and mentor of a group that included Barbara Leigh Smith, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Adelaide Procter, and Anna Mary Howitt. By exploring the intertextuality of Ruskin’s work and theirs, I argue that Sesame and Lilies, particularly ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, adopts the key principles and rhetoric of Jameson and her circle in their writing on women’s education and work. Indeed, I argue for the feminist origins of Ruskin’s lecture and for his expansion of their goals (with unanticipated effects) to embrace all middle-class women of England.3 Ruskin’s exchanges with key figures of the English women’s movement have been occasionally noted, but incompletely documented. Like their Pre-Raphaelite brothers, the women artists and authors in the circle that included Parkes, Procter, Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), and Howitt (later Watts) read, discussed, and cited Ruskin’s writing in their own works.4 During the 1850s, when Leigh Smith and Howitt began to exhibit paintings at the Royal Academy and other venues, they exchanged letters with Ruskin, mostly about the practice of art. In the mid-50s, for example, we know that Ruskin praised Leigh Smith’s The Cornfield, a picture of a Sussex field with all the shocks tossed over by a gale, whereas he criticized her widely-regarded American landscape Louisiana Swamp, as well as Howitt’s historical oil painting, Boadicea.5 His criticism of Boadicea – ‘What do you know of Boadicea? Leave such subjects alone and paint me a pheasant’s wing’ – was said by Howitt’s mother, the author Mary Howitt, to have ended her daughter’s artistic career.6 Yet, as Jan Marsh has pointed out, in criticizing as well as praising the work of these young women, Ruskin was disregarding a common gender differential ‘which held that women were too sensitive to withstand serious criticism’; his ‘didactic and pedagogic tone towards women artists was … gender free – he behaved the same way to men’.7 The same freedom of expression marked Ruskin’s responses to other projects initiated by this group, such as the reading room Parkes and Leigh Smith established in 1860 at the headquarters of the English Woman’s Journal.8 Not all exchanges were critical. Ruskin praised and financially supported the work of Octavia Hill, a close friend of Anna Mary Howitt and associate of the group – first by providing Hill’s training as an artist with Margaret Gillies, later by supporting her work at the Ladies’ Co-operative Guild and then underwriting her housing project at Marylebone as a social experiment to improve slums.9 Writing to Barbara Leigh Smith on 8 January 1855, Howitt reported that ‘little Ocky Hill … told me the other day that having attended Ruskin’s lectures on Illumination she went and had some talk with him after one of the lectures and asked

88 The Feminist Origins of ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’

him to come and see what they were doing at the Ladies’ Guild’. Howitt added: I wish by the by for the credit of ladies and women that they had had better work and Art to show him!—However he very kindly went and gave them many valuable hints, and ordered three painted tables from them to be done from his designs—He also, I think Ocky says, is helping them to form a class for women to learn painting on vellum [—] Now this really is very admirable in Ruskin—10 Ruskin’s close contact with Hill during the 1850s and 60s kept him well apprised of the work and writings of this group of young feminists. Their mentors, including Mary Howitt and Anna Jameson, were known to Ruskin personally and professionally. For ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, I believe Jameson’s influence was particularly important. Ruskin had met Jameson in Venice in 1845 while he was studying Tintoretto in the Scuola di San Rocco and making notes for a revised edition of Murray’s 1847 Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy and she was working on the Venetian sources of her Sacred and Legendary Art. In Praeterita he recalls his evening walks with Jameson and two other Englishmen, William Boxall and J.D. Harding, during which the four compatriots discussed art, architecture, and other subjects. Although Ruskin deprecates her comments about Italian art, saying that she was ‘without knowledge or instinct of painting’, he nonetheless praises her character as ‘candid and industrious’ (35.374). In fact, Ruskin owed more to that Venetian encounter than he perhaps realized, for in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, he drew repeatedly on Jameson’s ideas – not only from her early volume Characteristics of Women (later titled Shakespeare’s Heroines) but subsequently from her 1855 lectures on women’s work. We can see this influence in each of ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ three parts – the first addressing the question of woman’s ‘place’ and ‘power’, the second asking ‘What kind of education is to fit her for these?’ and the third introducing the ‘new’ realm of woman, her public duties or ‘queenly office with respect to the state’ (18.123, 136). In attempting to understand what the ‘power of women should be’ (18.111), Ruskin suggests that we turn to books, that we ‘consult with the wisest and the greatest men on all points of earnest difficulty’ (18.112). He first turns to Shakespeare and his heroines and, in so doing, follows in Jameson’s ground-breaking steps. Her 1832 volume, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, Historical, had contradicted a long tradition of dramatic criticism that viewed Shakespeare’s heroines as inferior in


conception and representation to his heroes and that attributed this inferiority, at least in part, to women’s lesser natures.11 Jameson argued that Shakespeare’s characters ‘combine history and real life; that they are complete individuals, whose hearts and souls are laid open before us’; and thus that they are better than historical figures or ‘real people’ for understanding human nature.12 Although her categories for analysing female characters – ‘Intellect’, ‘Passion and Imagination’, ‘Affections’, ‘Historical Characters’ – seem modest, even unrevolutionary, her book was noted in its day as the beginning of a distinctively ‘female criticism of Shakespeare’.13 In this work, moreover, as Joanne Shattock has noted, ‘her concern for improvements in the position of women was first presented’.14 For in Characteristics Jameson not only analysed Shakespeare’s heroines, but in her introductory dialogue also discussed women’s education, women’s involvement in politics, and their courage in the private and public spheres. It is unclear whether Ruskin read Characteristics of Women or, more likely, discussed Shakespeare with Jameson on his evening rambles in Venice.15 According to his testimony in Praeterita, he took along a ‘pocket volume of Shakespeare’ on his 1845 Italian journey and for the first time read the plays seriously: ‘the attentive reading … meant only the discovery of a more perfect truth, or a deeper passion, in the words that had before rung in my ears with too little questioned melody’ (35.366–7). When in Sesame and Lilies Ruskin attempts to define ‘what womanly mind and virtue are’ and argues that ‘Shakespeare has no heroes; – he has only heroines’ (18.111–12), he is following Jameson’s lead and taking her argument a step further. Whereas Jameson had assumed that Shakespearian plays include moral positives and negatives in both sexes, Ruskin insists that ‘there is not one entirely heroic figure in all his plays’; ‘the catastrophe of every play is caused by the folly or fault of a man’ (18.112–13). Ruskin also asserts that ‘there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it’; ‘the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and failing that, there is none’ (18.112–13).16 Ruskin’s choice of heroic women duplicates, perhaps predictably, the list of heroines whose characters Jameson analyses: Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, and Helena (18.113). Less predictably, his examples of redemptive heroinism echo analyses in Jameson’s book, including her treatment of Cordelia’s actions as ‘rest[ing] upon the two sublimest principles of human action, the love of truth and the sense of duty’, of Hermione’s as deriving from ‘composure of temper’, a ‘mild dignity and saint-like patience’, and Volumnia’s as representing a


‘matured and matronly’ version of her son’s pride and spirit and thus having the ‘prudence and self-command’ to check his ‘headlong impetuosity’.17 Perhaps more importantly, both critics use their discussion of Shakespeare’s heroines to introduce the topic of women’s education. In the preface to Characteristics, in a dialogue between Alda, the woman writer, and Medon, her male reader and critic, Jameson blames the ‘forcing system of education’ for its negative effects on modern young women’s character, calling it ‘the most pernicious, the most mistaken, the most farreaching in its miserable and mischievous effects, that ever prevailed in this world’.18 Her metaphors anticipate Ruskin’s argument, as does her emphasis on the role of ‘feelings and passions’ in women’s education. In describing the deficiencies of the modern system, Jameson draws on the common analogy between young women and flowers: ‘the bloom of existence is sacrificed to a fashionable education, and where we should find the rose-buds of spring, we see only the full-blown, flaunting, precocious roses of the hot-bed’. Her critique extends to ‘knowing mothers and allaccomplished governesses’ with whom ‘vanity and expediency take place of conscience and affection’. The result of such an education, she argues, leaves young women with ‘feelings and passions suppressed or contracted, not governed by higher faculties and purer principles’.19 Ruskin echoes Jameson in the second part when he addresses the question of what kind of education will fit women for their place and power. He engages the same figurative language and similarly emphasizes the development of ‘vital feelings’ (18.124) in young women. Ruskin takes his developmental metaphor from Wordsworth’s lyric: Three years she grew in sun and shower, Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower On earth was never sown; and uses the lines: And vital feelings of delight Shall rear her form to stately height, – to argue against the too-common suppression of girls’ ‘instincts of affection or of effort’ (18.124). He suggests that girls be given free rein (and reign) in ‘a good library of old and classical books’ and left alone to ‘find what is good’ (18.130). Trying to ‘chisel’ or ‘hammer’ them into shape


will do only damage (18.131): There is not one restraint you put on a good girl’s nature—there is not one check you give to her instincts of affection or of effort—which will not be indelibly written on her features, with a hardness which is all the more painful because it takes away the brightness from the eyes of innocence, and the charm from the brow of virtue. (18.125) These are Jameson’s concerns in Characteristics when, arguing against the ‘forcing system of education’, she laments ‘the strange anomalies of artificial society—girls of sixteen who are models of manner, miracles of prudence, marvels of learning, who sneer at sentiment, and laugh at the Juliets and Imogens’.20 Both she and Ruskin stress the importance of feeling and passion in education – Ruskin by insisting that readers ‘stay with [books] that you may share at last their just and mighty Passion’ (18.78), Jameson by discussing the role of ‘affection and the moral sentiments’.21 The Victoria reviewer noted this similarity in emphasis, quoting Jameson to supplement her summary of Ruskin: ‘I don’t mean to say that principle is not a finer thing than passion; but passions existed before principles—they came into the world with us. … Good principles derive life and strength and warmth from high good passions.’22 As their common metaphors suggest, both Jameson and Ruskin assume an organic model of development, with intellect and affection both receiving free and full play. The two writers no doubt draw on the same Romantic, anti-Utilitarian theories of education – hence the similar arguments and common rhetorical strain. The Victoria reviewer employs the same rhetoric when she adds: ‘The human spirit is not a mere vessel to be filled with good things, but a living organism, the law of whose nature it is to grow, and expand, and clothe itself in beauty of its own.’23 Jameson’s influence can be seen even more directly in Ruskin’s adoption of arguments from two lectures she gave in London on 14 February 1855 and 28 June 1856. Published as ‘Sisters of Charity’ and ‘The Communion of Labour’, these lectures include a rationale for women’s work, as well as historical examples of women’s charitable labour and contemporary instances of its continuing tradition. In both lectures Jameson addresses the more theoretical question of what Ruskin calls women’s ‘power’ and ‘office’ (18.111), what she calls ‘vocation’ and ‘employment’. Jameson’s lectures begin with three fundamental points: that the world needs a ‘communion of labour’, that men and women contribute differently to the world’s work, and that women’s normal contributions


in the domestic realm should be extended into the world at large. Adopting a Shakespearean phrase to describe human existence, Jameson suggests that we live in a ‘working-day world’: it is a place where work is to be done,—work which must be done,— work which it is good to do;—a place in which labour of one kind or another is at once the condition of existence and the condition of happiness.24 She adds that ‘the harmony and happiness of life in man or woman consists in finding our vocation’ and in doing ‘works of necessity’ as well as ‘works of mercy’.25 Jameson believes, however, in the gendered difference of this work: The man governs, sustains, and defends the family; the woman cherishes, regulates, and purifies it; but though distinct, the relative work is inseparable,—sometimes exchanged, sometimes shared; so that from the beginning, we have, even in the primitive household, not the division, but the communion of labour.26 As her reference to the ‘household’ implies, her model for women’s work depends upon the extension of ‘domestic life’ into the ‘social community’. She views this extension as social progress: As civilization advances, as the social interests and occupations become more and more complicated, the family duties and influences diverge from the central home,—in a manner, radiate from it,— though it is always there in reality. The man becomes on a larger scale, father and brother, sustainer and defender; the woman becomes on a larger scale, mother and sister, nurse and help.27 Finally, Jameson sums up by calling her fundamental points ‘truisms such as no man in his senses [ever] thinks of disputing’.28 Jameson’s ‘truisms’ become key arguments in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, part III. Like her, Ruskin asserts that both men and women have responsibilities to the state and that these represent extensions of their household work: A man has a personal work or duty, relating to his own home, and a public work or duty, which is the expansion of the other, relating to the state. So a woman has a personal work and duty, relating to her


own home, and public work and duty, which is also the expansion of that. Now the man’s work for his own home is, as has been said, to secure its maintenance, progress, and defence; the woman’s to secure its order, comfort, and loveliness. (18.136) Ruskin’s tripartite definition of the work of each sex – maintain, improve, and defend for the man; order, comfort, and beautify for the woman – echoes Jameson’s – govern, sustain, and defend for the man; cherish, regulate, and purify for the woman. The similarity becomes even stronger if we compare Ruskin’s earlier formula, ‘the woman’s power is for rule’ (18.121), with Jameson’s that women ‘regulate’ (rule being an older English borrowing from the Latin regula). If a primary difference in defining woman’s role seems to be that she emphasizes the need to ‘purify’, whereas he aestheticizes by asking women to ‘secure … loveliness’ (18.136), we might note that this difference collapses in the final examples of Ruskin’s lecture. As he urges women to cleanse an English landscape defiled by industrialism and restore their fallen sisters ‘whose purity, washed from the dust, is opening, bud by bud, into the flower of promise’ (18.143), securing loveliness becomes the equivalent of purifying England’s garden. How did Ruskin come to adopt Jameson’s seminal ideas in his most provocative arguments of ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’? Ruskin’s echoes of Jameson have perplexed her biographers, if not his. Clara Thomas, early on, noted similarities in their art criticism – including passages from Jameson’s widely-read ‘The House of Titian’ (1845) and Sacred and Legendary Art (1848) that Ruskin echoes in volume III of Modern Painters (1856) – but she attributed these to common ideas ‘current and operative at that time’.29 More recently, Laurie Kane Lew has suggested that Jameson strategically engages in a kind of reverse borrowing; Jameson’s rhetorical stance in her art criticism depends on ‘affiliating herself with the expertise of others’ and framing her knowledge as borrowed from ‘connoisseurs, artists, scholars’ more expert than herself.30 In their art criticism, then, the likelihood is one of mutual exchange and influence. For ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, however, Jameson was the influential figure. It is unknown whether Ruskin attended her lectures, which were delivered privately in the home of Elizabeth Jesser Reid in 1855 and 1856. As the editors of his diaries note, Ruskin’s activities in 1855 are less well recorded than those of other years, largely because of the personal turmoil and ill-health that engulfed him after the annulment of his marriage.31 Yet whether or not Ruskin heard Jameson speak or read the lectures after their publication, he absorbed the ideas through his


exchanges with the younger women of her circle, who disseminated them in their own writings of the 1850s. Indeed, my argument here is a revision of Ellen Jordan’s in ‘Women’s Work in the World’: The Birth of a Discourse, London, 1857’: that, after Jameson’s lectures, the periodical press was filled with a new ‘discursive constellation’ of ‘advanced views’ about women’s work. I believe that the discourse of women’s work in the public sphere was born even earlier in the 1850s, within a circle of young English feminists, and that it came of age with Jameson. As early as 1850, Anna Mary Howitt, Bessie Rayner Parkes, and Barbara Leigh Smith had formulated a vision of a working women’s community. While studying painting in Munich, Howitt was joined by Parkes and Leigh Smith, the latter fictionalized in Howitt’s account of her training, An Art-Student in Munich. In a chapter titled ‘Justina’s Visit—A Group of Art-Sisters’, Howitt reproduces the language that Leigh Smith had used to articulate her dream of an ‘Inner and Outer Sisterhood’: What schemes of life have not been worked out whilst we have been together! as though this, our meeting here, were to be the germ of a beautiful sisterhood in Art, of which we have all dreamed long … [Justina] had a large scheme of what she calls the Outer and Inner Sisterhood. The Inner, to consist of the Art-sisters bound together by their one object, and which she fears may never number many in their band; the Outer Sisterhood to consist of women, all workers and all striving after a pure moral life, but belonging to any profession, any pursuit. All should be bound to help each other in such ways as were most accordant with their natures and characters.32 This scheme, modeled on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but with an emphasis on the sisterhood’s moral purity, mutual assistance, and extension to all women, would have reached Ruskin through Howitt’s book, which began with an epigraph from Modern Painters: ‘There is that to be seen in every street and lane of every city, that to be felt and found in every human heart and countenance, that to be loved in every roadside weed and moss-grown wall, which, in the hands of faithful men, may convey emotion of glory and sublimity continual and exalte[d].’33 In 1852, moreover, Howitt published a fictionalized account of a women’s community called ‘The Sisters in Art’ in Cassell’s Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art. This novella – an idealization of the group that included Howitt, Leigh Smith, and other artists, including Lizzie Siddal – was an early apologia for women’s education and professional work, particularly as painters and fictile artists. The ‘sisters’ live


together, paint together, win a prize competition by working collaboratively, and together establish a college for training women artists. They also assist working-class women less well off than themselves – by, for example, rescuing a young girl from a homelife of physical and verbal abuse and finding her a position with steady wages that allows her to become self-supporting.34 Howitt’s rhetoric of work in ‘The Sisters in Art’ anticipates Jameson’s ‘communion of labour’, as well as some of Ruskin’s ideas about women’s education and charitable work. As Howitt describes the mutual life of Alice, Esther, and Lizzie, the three sister-artists, she writes: ‘Time with them had effected no other change than to draw them together into a holier and truer communion of sympathy, taste, and pursuit, and to evolve from the unity of separate talents a result, of which singly they were not capable’.35 When the three women finally establish their ‘Female School of Art and Design’, its education rejects the narrow approach of ‘art-schools of the country, as consisting of nothing more than in the objective use of the brush or pencil’; instead, their pedagogy embraces the Ruskinian principle that ‘art up to a point is the corollary of many forms and departments of knowledge’ and that women artists must therefore study science, literature, and all those areas we associate now with the liberal arts, what Howitt calls the ‘assisting clauses of general cultivation’.36 Other members of this early feminist circle, which in the 1850s centred itself at Scalands, Leigh Smith’s Sussex home, and in the 1860s evolved into the Langland Place group, began to publish their own articles on women’s education and employment. In 1854 Parkes published Remarks on the Education of Girls, a pamphlet advocating the liberalization of young women’s education, including their physical training for ‘enduring mental and bodily exertion’ and their unfettered reading in the English classics (Chaucer, Jonson, Dryden, and even Fielding) – a position for which she was severely criticized in the press.37 In 1857 Leigh Smith published ‘Women and Work’ in the Waverley Journal, a forerunner of the English Woman’s Journal, and later re-issued her essay in pamphlet form.38 Once the English Woman’s Journal got underway, Parkes wrote a series of articles on women’s education and labour: ‘The Market for Educated Female Labour’, ‘What Can Educated Women Do?’ and ‘A Year’s Experience in Women’s Work’; she revised and expanded this series for Essays on Women’s Work (1865) and dedicated the book to Anna Jameson, who had died in 1860: These essays, composed during eight years passed with many fellowworkers in investigating the condition of the educated working


women in England, are dedicated to the dear and honoured memory of Anna Jameson.39 Even Anna Mary Howitt, who by the late 1850s had turned to spiritualism and withdrawn from active involvement in women’s political causes, contributed publications on women’s work with a series of portraits (visual and verbal) of women writers and artists.40 By the time Emily Faithfull established the Victoria Press in 1860 and instigated its ‘Tracts for Parents of Daughters’, the key issues of women’s education and employment had been well-covered in the women’s press.41 While the rhetorical stance and style of these publications varied considerably, they advocated the same fundamental points that Jameson advanced in 1855 and that Ruskin repeated in 1865 in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’: the need for broadening and deepening women’s education; the need for women’s work in the public sphere; the belief that women’s work should contribute to the social good, not merely to personal development; and the belief that such work should reflect women’s special qualities and abilities. Bessie Parkes addressed the first in Remarks on the Education of Girls (1854), as noted above, and in her collected Essays on Woman’s Work (1865). Expanding her 1854 remarks, in the Essays Parkes provided a historical overview of the nineteenth-century women’s movement, from which she extracted five fundamental ‘theories’: Let women be thoroughly developed. Let women be thoroughly rational. Let women be pious and charitable. Let women be properly protected by law. Let women have fair chance of a livelihood. To these she added a sixth, ‘now being actively pressed’: ‘Let women have ample access to all stores of learning’.42 In pressing this sixth ‘theory’, Parkes advocates free access to the ‘stores of learning’ and does so based on a ‘deep belief in human nature’: … in education, a broadcast method of instruction implies a fond belief that the child has every chance of distinguishing good from evil, and a very narrow training denies any such expectation; and in the bringing up of girls, a very unrestricted liberty argues a belief in the mind of the guardian that the chances are eminently in favour of


their going right, and an incessant watchfulness implies just the reverse.43 Ruskin expresses this optimistic position more succinctly: [A] powerful book never does any harm to a noble girl … And if she can have access to a good library of old and classical books, there need be no choosing at all. Keep the modern magazine and novel out of your girl’s way: turn her loose into the old library every wet day, and let her alone. She will find what is good for her. (18.130–1) Although his position has been described (and decried) as ‘different for girls’,44 the fact that Ruskin advocates free access to books and argues ‘that a girl’s education should be nearly, in its course and material of study, the same as a boy’s’ (18.128) puts him in the company of Parkes.45 His suggestion ‘that it would often be wiser in men to learn things in a womanly sort of way, for present use, and to seek for the discipline and training of their mental powers in such branches of study as will be afterwards fittest for social services’ (18.128) develops the argument, common in her circle, that education should prepare for the social good, not just for self-improvement or advancement as in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859). Dinah Birch’s observations that ‘self-development had never been a principle of his critical ideal’ and that his writing shows ‘the persistently religious framework of his thinking’ help explain Ruskin’s sympathy with the young leaders of the women’s movement, who argued their causes from deeply held religious beliefs and with sincere commitment to the social good. Indeed, in such passages Ruskin exhibits not only what Birch has called his ‘womanly mind’, but also expresses the issues on women’s minds at mid-century.46 In a more utopian and allegorical mode, Barbara Leigh Smith addressed the equally important (and to her more urgent) issues of employment in Women and Work (1857), again foreshadowing Ruskin’s arguments. Her pamphlet begins with a general admonition to its readers: God sent all human beings into the world for the purpose of forwarding, to the utmost of their power, the progress of the world. We must each leave the world a little better than we found it … If we are God’s children, we owe certain duties to him. The life of most women is a practical denial of such duties.47


Leigh Smith then lists the tasks that she believes women must undertake and that Ruskin will more eloquently urge: No human being has a right to be idle … Whatever comes under our hands should be bettered by the touch of our fingers. The land we own we should drain and make more fertile for ever. The children who are in our power should be educated. If sickness falls upon our town, we must try to stop its progress, and to alleviate the suffering it occasions. If an old roof lets in the rain, we must new-slate it. If an old pot comes to us to mend, we must mend it as best we can. And we must train ourselves to do our work well.48 Her rhetoric against busy idleness anticipates the hortatory conclusion to ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, with its lament that ‘you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest; and leaving misrule and violence to work their will among men, in defiance of the power which, holding straight in gift from the Prince of all Peace, the wicked among you betray, and the good forget’ (18.139). It anticipates, too, the tasks that Ruskin sets for women to perform: to educate all children and bring them ‘into their true fold of rest’, to use their ‘power to heal, to redeem, to guide and to guard’, to leave their ‘park walls and garden gates’ and help their sisters in ‘the terrible streets’, and ultimately to transform the world’s wilderness into a garden (18.135, 137, 140, 142). Even seemingly peculiar details in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ – for instance, Ruskin’s representation of fallen, working-class women as ‘feeble florets’ – have their counterparts in the work of this feminist circle.49 In 1854 Leigh Smith, Howitt, and Parkes determined to aid fallen women and speak out against the social causes of their plight. When in the same year they, along with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, instituted the Portfolio Club, they chose ‘Desolation’ as their first theme, with Howitt submitting a sketch of ‘The Castaway’. Using a young model with a child but without a wedding ring, Howitt depicted a ‘miserable flowergirl and her sheaf of despised lilies’ and added a motto from Job 30:19: ‘He hath cast me into the mire, and I am become like dust and ashes.’ Rossetti described Howitt’s picture as ‘a rather strong-minded subject, involving a dejected female, mud with lilies in it, a dust-heap, and other details’.50 ‘The Castaway’ appeared in the 1855 exhibition of the Royal Academy, which Ruskin viewed, and his vision a decade later of ‘feeble florets … lying with all their fresh leaves torn, and their stems broken’ (18.140) recalls Howitt’s work.51 Even if he did not have only her


bemired flowers in mind, this figuration of the fallen woman became common in (indeed, was developed by) women’s painting and poetry of the 1850s. ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ does not, of course, simply repeat the ideas of Jameson and her feminist successors. As well as adopting some of their progressive agenda, Ruskin also avoids some of their characteristic language and schemes. Most noticeably, he avoids Jameson’s semi-religious phrases ‘sisters of charity’ and ‘communion of labour’, with their Roman Catholic associations. Whether this results from anti-Catholic feeling or an antipathy to communities of women or a shrewd sense of the rhetoric likely to persuade a staunchly Protestant audience in Manchester, is hard to determine. We know that Ruskin wrote to Coventry Patmore just after his second lecture: ‘I’ve been quoting you with much applause at Manchester but it is a great nuisance that you have turned Roman Catholic, for it makes all your fine thinking so ineffectual to us English – and to unsectarian people generally.’52 We also know that Ruskin disliked the pretension of nuns’ habits, as his advice to young girls in Fors Claveriga (often republished as ‘Letter to Young Girls’) attests: Don’t wear white crosses, nor black dresses, nor caps with lappets. Nobody has any right to go about in an offensively celestial uniform, as if it were more their business or privilege, than it is everybody’s, to be God’s servants.53 Beyond these personal tastes, a more likely motive for avoiding Jameson’s ‘sisters of charity’ and reconceiving women’s work as a ‘queenly office’ stems from his insistence that all English women, ‘from the Princess of Wales to the simplest of you’ (18.135), not just those with a special vocation or professional training, must take responsibility for the social good. Ruskin’s vision of this social good comes from the prophet Isaiah, as the epigraph to ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ announces: ‘Be thou glad, oh thirsting Desert; let the desert be made cheerful, and bloom as a lily; and the barren places of Jordan shall run wild with wood’ (18.109, quoting Isaiah 35:1, Septuagint). This prophetic vision of a new heaven and earth, restored by Messiah and inhabited by a redeemed Israel, harks back to Ruskin’s initial assertion that ‘redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman’ (18.113). Ruskin transfers the messianic mission to women – or, to put it typologically, he interprets the biblical prophecy by making English women, its ‘queens’, into the modern


fulfillment of Isaiah’s ‘righteous king’ (Isaiah 32:1, KJV). In adapting Isaiah’s vision, Ruskin may have had in mind, too, the prophet’s call to the Israelite women – ‘Rise up, ye women who are at ease; hear my voice, ye careless daughters; give ear unto my speech’ (Isaiah 32:9, KJV) – a call interpreted within English Protestant hermeneutics as directed to those ‘who support excessive self-indulgence by shameful niggardliness! who spend more on their own vanity and luxury in a day, than many large families have to subsist on through the week or month; and who do not contribute to their relief.’54 By concluding on a visionary note in the rhetoric of Hebraic prophecy, Ruskin was also swerving from the common, practical conclusions of mid-Victorian feminist lectures and pamphlets. After stating general principles, women like Jameson, Leigh Smith, and Parkes proposed specific reforms: Jameson, the institution of English, nonsectarian sisters of charity to work in prisons, hospitals, reformatory schools, and workhouses; Leigh Smith, the training of women to work in education, medicine, the press, workhouses and prisons, and skilled trades; Parkes, the professional education of women to work as teachers, journalists, artists, sculptors, lecturers, and businesswomen.55 Ruskin proposes no such measures, whether out of a sense of occasion or resistance to the professionalization of women. Because Ruskin delivered ‘Of Queens’ Garden’ as a charitable lecture to raise funds for Manchester schools, a discussion of professional training for women may have seemed an inappropriate conclusion (whereas it would have been expected at Jameson’s lectures in London). Yet as we know from Jan Marsh’s scholarship on Ruskin and women artists, Ruskin was conflicted in his support of professional women painters, often underwriting their training while diminishing their work.56 Certainly, in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ he refuses to make the final argumentative turn of Jameson’s ‘Sisters of Charity’: We have works of love and mercy for the best of our women to do, in our prisons and hospitals, our reformatory schools, and I will add our workhouses; but then we must have them such as we want them,— not impelled by transient feelings, but by deep abiding motives,— not amateur ladies of charity, but brave women, whose vocation is fixed, and whose faculties of every kind have been trained and disciplines to their work.57 Ruskin maintains the aristocratic ladies – indeed, elevates them to queens – and implicitly assumes their amateur status.


Ruskin also maintains the close tie between a girl’s education and her matrimonial future: ‘A woman, in any rank of life, ought to know whatever her husband is likely to know’ (18.128). Although mid-Victorian feminists also assumed that marriage lay in the future for most women and some, like Parkes, asserted ‘firmly that the married household is the first constituent element in national life’ and ‘that the immense majority of women are, and ought to be, employed in the noble duties which go to make up the Christian household’, they nonetheless stressed the importance of professional education for unmarried women and pointed out that, statistically, half the women counted in the 1851 census worked ‘in non-domestic industry’.58 More progressive women like Leigh Smith advocated paid work for all women who wanted it and the right to ‘carrying on business, professions, different works after marriage’59 – a step that seems of little interest to Ruskin. Ruskin’s failure to embrace the cause of women’s professional education was noted in the feminist press. After praising ‘his strong instinct of truth’ and his ‘genius [in] the perception of the core of things’, the Victoria reviewer reminded him of ‘the surplus half million’ women ‘for whom their are no husbands’ and for whom professional employment was a necessity. She also observed that, if he truly wished women to work for the social good, he needed to advocate their political education: ‘before we aim at making the spirit of woman more powerful in the affairs of the world, according to its gifts and its own specialities, even to the full measure of its capacities, we must educate her in questions of public and national morality, in the fulfilment of public duty.’60 As if acknowledging the mutual exchange in which they were engaged, she quoted a passage from The Stones of Venice back to Ruskin: Education is the leading human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them; and these two objects are attainable together, and by the same means; the training which makes men happiest in themselves, also makes them more serviceable to others.61 Implicitly, her response suggests that Ruskin follow his own principle, ‘that a girl’s education should be nearly, in its course and material of study, the same as a boy’s’, to its logical conclusion, even as she acknowledges that not ‘one less person would be touched and inspired by Mr. Ruskin’s genius, by the adverse criticism which appears on the publication of any new work by him’.62 More generally, her response suggests that progressive Victorian women read ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ as a sympathetic contribution to the


ongoing campaign for women’s education and employment. In our day we have come to think in terms of an opposition, ‘Mill versus Ruskin,’ with Mill as the advocate of the women’s movement and Ruskin as its opponent.63 But we might better revise our thinking to reflect the views of mid-Victorian feminists and make it ‘Mill and Ruskin,’ with Mill as the champion of women’s legal rights and Ruskin, of educational reform.

Notes 1 ‘Sesame and Lilies’, Saturday Review, 20 (1865): 83; [Anne Mozley], ‘Educators’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 98 (1865): 754; and [ John R. de C. Wise], ‘Contemporary Literature—Belles Lettres’, Westminster Review, 84 (1865): 575. See Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Defining Voices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), I, 96–7, for a discussion of the book’s reception. 2 ‘Mr. Ruskin on Books and Women’, The Victoria Magazine 6 (November, 1865): 67–76, and 6 (December, 1865): 131–8. 3 Although an anachronism, I use the term ‘feminist’ throughout this essay as a shorthand to designate leaders of the Victorian women’s movement. 4 Anna Mary Howitt’s An Art-Student in Munich (1853; Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields, 1854), for example, begins with an epigraph from Ruskin: ‘There is that to be seen in every street and lane of every city, that to be felt and found in every human heart and countenance, that to be loved in every road-side weed and moss-grown wall, which, in the hands of faithful men, may convey emotion of glory and sublimity continual and exalte[d].’ The Leigh Smith papers, some now in the collection at Girton College, Cambridge, include letters to Ruskin and frequent references to him; see the auction lists of 15 December 1953, preserved with the private papers of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Girton College. 5 For accounts of these exchanges, see J.J. Piper, Robertsbridge and its History (St Leonards, 1906), p. 25; Pam Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827–1891: Feminist, Artist and Rebel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), p. 164; and Amice Lee, Laurels and Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 216–17. 6 See Mary Howitt, An Autobiography, ed. Margaret Howitt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), II, 116. 7 Jan Marsh, ‘“Resolve to be a Great Paintress”: Women Artists in Relation to John Ruskin as Critic and Patron’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 18 (1994), p. 180. 8 Hirsch, 164, quoting a letter of 14 October 1858 from Ruskin to Leigh Smith in the Autograph Collection, Girton College. 9 For Ruskin’s relationship with Hill, see Hirsch, pp. 78–9; Howitt, Autobiography, II, 26–7; Lenore Ann Beaky, The Letters of Anna Mary Howitt to Barbara Leigh Smith (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia, 1974), pp. 198–9; and Van Akin Burd, ed., The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 332.

Linda H. Peterson 103 10 Beaky, pp. 198–9. 11 In Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, Historical (1832; Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1853), pp. xxi–xxii, Jameson cites William Richardson, Colley Cibber and Henry Mackenzie as exemplars of this earlier tradition against which she argues. For excellent discussions of Jameson’s pivotal role in Shakespearean criticism, see Judith Johnston, Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997), pp. 73–99; Jessica Slights, ‘Historical Shakespeare: Anna Jameson and Womanliness’, English Studies in Canada 19 (1993): 387–400; and Christy Desmet, ‘“Intercepting the Dew-Drop”: Female Readers and Readings in Anna Jameson’s Shakespearean Criticism’, in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 41–57. 12 Jameson, Characteristics, pp. xix–xx. As Johnston notes (p. 74), illustrations for Jameson’s Characteristics also instigated a popular tradition of pictorial representations of Shakespeare’s and Walter Scott’s heroines. 13 ‘Mrs. Jameson’s Characteristics and Sketches’, Edinburgh Review 40 (1834): 181; quoted in Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 1. 14 Joanne Shattock, The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), s.v. Anna Brownell Jameson. 15 His biographer Tim Hilton is unclear on this point in John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819–1859 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 96, only alluding to Jameson’s work in a deprecating remark: ‘Praeterita remembers Mrs Jameson kindly. Sacred and Legendary Art, however, is a poor thing in comparison with the truly spiritual second volume of Modern Painters, just as her book on Shakespeare’s heroines falls limply beside only two pages of comment on Shakespeare which Ruskin incorporated in the Alpine passages of the fourth volume of his earliest great work.’ 16 Another difference may be in Jameson’s foregrounding of ‘Characters of Intellect’ (Portia, Isabella, Beatrice, Rosalind), whereas Ruskin tends to prefer the characters she associates with the ‘Affections’ (Hermione, Desdemona, Imogen, Cordelia). Yet in the ‘Introduction’, Jameson emphasizes the need for both intellect and affection, as Ruskin does. 17 Jameson, Characteristics, pp. 190–1, 142, 250. 18 Ibid., p. xxxi. 19 Ibid., p. xxxi. 20 Ibid., pp. xxxi–xxxii. 21 Ibid., pp. xxxiv–xxxv. 22 Victoria Magazine, 70. 23 Ibid., 69. 24 Mrs [Anna] Jameson, Sisters of Charity, Catholic and Protestant and The Communion of Labour (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1857), p. 25. 25 Ibid., p. 26. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 27. 28 Ibid., p. 29. 29 Clara Thomas, Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson (London: Macdonald, 1967), pp. 167, 179, 180. Given their evenings together in Venice in 1845, the influence may have been mutual. Jameson’s ‘talk’, according to


30 31

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Bessie Rayner Parkes, who knew her well, ‘was a running commentary on the books she published on kindred subjects’; see Parkes’s Vignettes: Twelve Biographical Sketches (London: Alexander Strahan, 1866), p. 446. Laurie Lane Kew, ‘Cultural Anxiety in Anna Jameson’s Art Criticism’, Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996): 840. See Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse, eds, The Diaries of John Ruskin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), II, 513, who begin by stating, ‘1855 was not a good year for Ruskin.’ Howitt, Art-Student, I, 95–6. The work appeared partially in the Athenaeum and Household Words in 1850 and 1851, then in book form in 1853 (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1853). See the page facing the title of An Art-Student in Munich. ‘The Sisters in Art’, The Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art, 2 (1852): 214–16, 238–40, 262–3, 286–8, 317–18, 334–6, 347–8, 362–4. This subplot involves a shopkeeper’s daughter named Lizzie Wilson, possibly a fictionalized version of Lizzie Siddal, who suffers from an abusive mother. Ibid., 319. Ibid., 364. Bessie Rayner Parkes, Remarks on the Education of Girls (London: John Chapman, 1854), pp. 11, 13. When Ruskin argues in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ (18.125) that ‘you have first to mould her physical form, as the strength she gains will permit you, to fill and temper her mind with all knowledge and thoughts,’ he is adopting Rayner’s approach to education for girls, which begins with physical training and continues with intellectual. Barbara Leigh Smith, Women and Work (London: Bosworth & Harrison, 1857). See Sheila R. Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 129–30, for the press’s reaction to Remarks and Women and Work and against ‘strongminded women’ like Parkes and Leigh Smith. For the articles, see the English Woman’s Journal, 4 (November 1859): 145–52; 4 (December 1859): 217–26; 4 ( January 1860): 289–98; and 6 (October 1860): 112–21. For the book, see Bessie Rayner Parkes, Essays on Woman’s Work (London: Alexander Strahan, 1865). See letter from Anna Mary to Bessie [Rayner Parkes], written after Howitt’s marriage to Alfred Alaric Watts in 1859, in the Girton College collection. Emily Faithfull’s first three tracts were: ‘No. 1.—How Shall I Educate my Daughter?’, ‘No. 2.—Shall My Daughter Learn a Business?’, and ‘No. 3.— Choice of a Business for Girls: Part I. Artistic and Intellectual Employments, Part II. Dressmaking, Sick Nursing, and Domestic Employments’. See the list in Choice of a Business for Girls (London: Emily Faithfull, 1864), p. 2. Bessie Rayner Parkes, Essays on Woman’s Work (London: Alexander Strahan, 1865), p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. This phrase and its conservative resonances, used by Catherine Shuman in her 1994 Ph.D. Dissertation ‘Different for Girls: Gender and Professional Authority in Mill, Ruskin, and Dickens’, were subsequently modified in her book Pedagogical Economies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), but the conservative label stuck in Margaret Homans’s ‘Queen Victoria’s Widowhood and the Making of Victorian Queens’, where Ruskin’s


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‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ is affiliated with a ‘conservative social agenda’ and with conservative women writers like Sarah Stickney Ellis; see Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 58–99. Parkes usefully explains why her position, like Ruskin’s, cannot easily be aligned with either a ‘radical’ or ‘conservative’ point of view. Because she believes that ‘the substantial equality of nature renders the two sexes of equal weight and value in the moral world, and that their action upon each other in every relation of life is far too complex to admit of any great difference between them’, she rejects both the radicals who say ‘that English women are at this moment inferior to English men in general sense and intelligence, and ought not to remain so’, as well as the conservatives who ‘think they [women] ought so to remain’. Parkes’s discussion of the politics of nineteenth-century women’s education goes a long way toward explaining why twentieth-century critics have had difficulty sorting out Ruskin’s politics and why neither label fits. See pp. 107–20 below. Leigh Smith, Women and Work, 6. Ibid., 7. Another detail – the importance of young women’s health – was also a common theme in pamphlets on women’s education. In Women and Work, Leigh Smith argues that ‘idleness’ in ‘tens of thousands of young women in Britain’ has led to disease, especially ‘that one terrible disease, hysteria, in its multiform aspects [that] incapcitates thousands’ (p. 9); in her view, ‘WORK is the great beautifier. Activity of brain, heart, and limb, gives health and beauty, and makes women fit to be the mothers of children’ (p. 18). Quotations from Hirsch, pp. 49–50. Rossetti’s contribution was his nowfamous picture ‘Found’, also depicting the theme of the fallen woman. According to Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn in Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (London: Virago, 1989), this painting is now lost. Howitt frequently used flowers as visual analogues to her female characters. Letter of 24 December 1864, 36.478–9. J. Ruskin, Letter to Young Girls (Orpington, Kent: George Allen, [1876]), p. 8. See Thomas Scott, ed., The Holy Bible … with Explanatory Notes, Practical Observations, and Copious Marginal References (New York: Dean, 1843), 480. Scott was known as the ‘theologian of the Evangelicals’. Jameson, Sisters of Charity, pp. 133–5; Leigh Smith, Women and Work, pp. 19–47; and Parkes, ‘The Profession of the Teacher’ and ‘Other Professions’ in Essays, pp. 88–135. Marsh, ‘Resolve’, esp. pp. 179–82. Helen Pike Bauser also discusses his ambivalence in ‘Ruskin and the Education of Women’, Studies in the Humanities, 12 (1985): 79–89. Jameson, Sisters of Charity, pp. 134–5. If Johnston, p. 234, is correct in arguing that Jameson’s ‘Sisters of Charity’ is ‘egalitarian and forward thinking’ in its call for ‘brave women’ and ‘not amateur ladies of charity’, then Ruskin’s refusal to take her final step by retaining his aristocratic titles lady and queen is backward-looking in terms of gender and class. Yet Sharon Aronofsky Weltman’s Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), pp. 103–23, gives a powerful


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argument for the progressive implications of Ruskin’s association of women with Queen Victoria as ‘a powerful political and mythological model to broaden their scope of action’ and, more generally, his mythopoesis of women as queens. Parkes, Essays, pp. 221–2; [Bessie Rayner Parkes], ‘Female Education in the Middle Classes’, English Woman’s Journal, 1 (1858), p. 222. Leigh Smith, Women and Work, p. 11. Victoria Magazine, pp. 132, 137. Ibid., p. 113, quoting The Stones of Venice. Ibid., p. 138. Kate Millett introduced this opposition with her article ‘The Debate over Women: Ruskin versus Mill’, Victorian Studies, 14 (1970): 63–82, and it has influenced critics to this day, including Shuman in Pedagogical Economies and Homans in Representing Royalty.

6 Ruskin’s ‘Womanly Mind’ (1988) Dinah Birch

Ruskin’s reputation survives, but in a fragmented form. His writings are voluminous, demanding, and often out of print. The books, lectures, or passages that do retain currency are usually studied in specific contexts. For students of Victorian literature, ‘The Nature of Gothic’ and, more recently, ‘Traffic’, have gained solid status as classics of social thought. Unto this Last (1860) has comparable prestige for those concerned with political history, while contemporary interest in forms of autobiography has guaranteed a readership for Praeterita (1885–9). Art historians may have a more or less respectful acquaintance with Modern Painters (1843–60) and The Stones of Venice (1851–3). The rest has nearly disappeared from view. Perceptions of Ruskin have accordingly diverged as they have crystallized. But there is at least one other work by Ruskin, his 1864 lecture ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, which has long been widely read. Sesame and Lilies, the volume in which ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ was first published, was for decades a favoured choice as a prize for schoolgirls. As such it found a place, as a sign of success in the established order, on the shelves of countless young women. Perhaps that gave Ruskin a bad start among feminists. For many women, Sesame and Lilies has become familiar as the supreme expression of all we need to know and despise about Victorian culture. This current of contempt can be traced to a powerful source. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) set ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ against John Stuart Mill’s robust piece of progressive humanism, The Subjection of Women (1869) – an encounter in which Ruskin comes off spectacularly badly. Millett is unrelenting in her analysis of the various ways in which Ruskin’s lecture ‘recommends itself as one of the most complete insights obtainable into that compulsive masculine fantasy one might call the official Victorian attitude’.1 She describes how Ruskin, with ‘bland 107

108 Ruskin’s ‘Womanly Mind’ (1988)

disingenuousness’, adopts an ingratiatingly chivalrous attitude to women that flatters their bourgeois pretensions while denying them access to real political or economic power. Ruskin is advocating a pernicious kind of sexual apartheid, in which equality is speciously claimed for separate social spheres which are in fact monstrously and oppressively unequal – as John Stuart Mill’s political and historical analysis makes painfully clear. Kate Millett is particularly devastating about the claim with which Ruskin ends his lecture – the allegation that women, despite the crippling disabilities imposed on them by men, are nevertheless peculiarly responsible for the moral welfare of society. ‘There is a certain humour’, Millett grimly reminds us, ‘in Ruskin’s proclamation that women, confined through history to a vicarious and indirect existence, without a deciding voice in any event, with so much of the burden of military, economic and technological events visited upon her, and so little of their glories, is nevertheless solely accountable for morality on the planet.’2 Though Millett’s influential work has, inevitably, been challenged and revised, some of the implications of her polemic have remained unquestioned – including the still prevalent view that a historically minded feminist can read Ruskin only with the worthy but depressing ambition of familiarizing herself with some of the murkier sources of patriarchy. However, as feminist criticism has grown in maturity and scope, it has begun to establish ways in which reading Ruskin from the perspective of gender can reaffirm his significance and value. We do not need to abandon Millett’s fierce insights in order to reclaim Ruskin’s work as a rewarding rather than simply enraging matter for women’s study. Ruskin’s writing grows out of his life. Sympathetically or not, various biographers have shown us how extraordinary that life was.3 Among its many contradictions is a disparity between the arguments advanced in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ and the way in which Ruskin actually lived and behaved. Despite his dismal strictures about the proper limitations of women’s education in that lecture, Ruskin was for much of his life actively concerned with the furtherance of education for women. He was keenly interested in the foundation of the first women’s colleges in Oxford, particularly Somerville, and endowed them with valuable pictures and artifacts. He also lent his support to Whitelands, a new women’s college in London, and to a girls’ school in Cork. On becoming Oxford’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art, he often gave his lectures twice – first to members of the University, and then in open session, so that interested members of the public, including women, could attend. He gave time and money to Winnington Hall, a girls’ school in Cheshire

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founded on the conviction that girls could and should be given educational opportunities at least comparable with those provided for boys.4 He spent hours writing careful letters of instruction to the many girls who wrote to him asking for help – patronizingly, perhaps, but his advice paid them the rare compliment of taking their aspirations seriously. More usefully still, and more unexpectedly, he gave economic support to women who were trying to establish self-sufficient professional lives. Kate Greenaway is probably the most famous of the women painters whose careers were furthered by Ruskin’s practical and financial help. There were many others. It was Ruskin, not the equivocal Rossetti, who encouraged Lizzie Siddal to try to become an artist in her own right. By agreeing to buy all the pictures she could produce, he offered her a degree of self-respect and autonomy that marriage to Rossetti notably failed to provide. Women writers, too, earned his praise – especially women poets, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Jean Ingelow, who were, after all, attempting to work within a literary tradition that, unlike the novel, had always been dominated by men. His assistance was often overbearing. Nevertheless, he did enable women to do genuinely independent creative work. Here he differed from William Morris, whose notion of what women could most appropriately contribute to the arts was more or less confined to their filling in the boring background of tapestries designed by himself or Burne-Jones, while he stitched the more interesting bits. It is to Ruskin’s credit that he had little interest in decorative needlework. A still more surprising aspect of Ruskin’s life is the fact that he consistently found it easier to relate to and communicate with women than men. This did not mean that he found sexual relations easy, or even possible, as the embarrassing collapse of his marriage testifies. But his closest friends were always women – usually married women, who represented no sexual threat. His friendships with men were by comparison stiff, defensive, and constrained. It was to women such as Pauline Trevelyan, Georgiana Cowper-Temple, Margaret Talbot, Margaret Bell, Jane Simon, Joan Severn, among many others, that Ruskin freely confided his hopes and worries, as thousands of surviving letters prove.5 This seems less odd when we recognize the extent to which Ruskin himself, despite his energetically public presence as a writer on art, nature, and social justice, was often seen by his contemporaries as in some way feminine, or unmanly. F.J. Furnivall met Ruskin for the first time in 1848, the year of the disastrous marriage: ‘I never met any man whose charm of manner at all approached Ruskin’s. Partly feminine it was, no doubt; but the delicacy, the sympathy, the gentleness and affectionateness


of his way, the fresh and penetrating things he said … combined to make a whole which I have never seen equalled’ (8. xxxiv). Such terms as ‘charm’, ‘delicacy’, ‘sympathy’, ‘gentleness’, ‘affectionateness’ were not usually chosen to praise powerful Victorian men. It was at about this time that Thomas Carlyle, the thinker to whom Ruskin owes most, met him for the first time. He shared Furnivall’s view, though he put it differently and less admiringly. He was later to describe Ruskin as a ‘small but rather dainty dilettante soul’, speaking of his ‘sensitive, flighty nature’, which disqualified him for ‘serious conversation’ despite his ‘celestial brightness’ (36. xcvi–xcvii). ‘Dainty’, ‘sensitive’, ‘flighty’ – again, the implications are clear. Indeed, the combination of flightiness with celestial radiance almost makes Ruskin sound like a version of the angel in the house. Those who stopped short of calling him ‘feminine’ often called him ‘boyish’, as did Furnivall and many others. The American critic Charles Eliot Norton, for instance, was one of those incisive and confident men who always made Ruskin nervous. Norton, who was forever urging Ruskin to be more of a man, spoke half scornfully of his ‘boyish gaiety of spirit and liveliness of humour’ (7. xxii). Clearly, Ruskin was by no means a man’s man. There is nothing new in the suggestion that there was something strange about Ruskin’s sexual nature, and there is not much point in speculating about the personal problems to which this led. What matters is that Ruskin’s womanliness did find an intellectual expression with momentous consequences for his work. It was more than a matter of his acting the bully in order to compensate for his own inadequacies. Obliquely, it dictated what he had to say about the powers of men and women in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’. The paradoxes of his femininity become clearer in this passage, one of those which women find most exasperating: The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle,—and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, and their places. Her great function is Praise; she enters into no contest, but infallibly ajudges the crown of contest. By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial;—to him, therefore,

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the failure, the offence, the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued; often misled; and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence (18.121–2). This passage is primarily autobiographical. Ruskin is writing across gender, and he is writing of himself. He had insistently claimed, in Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice, his great works of the 1840s and 1850s, that the vital purpose of all great art is praise. This was a function that he had made his own. The great Gothic buildings of medieval Europe, the paintings of Fra Angelico, Perugino, or above all Turner, the richly moral significance of nature: Ruskin’s business as a writer had been to ‘enter into no contest, but infallibly judge the crown of contest’. In choosing to be a critic, rather than a poet or painter, he had not, in his own terms, opted for creativity. He was a judge, a celebrator, a praiser. And in going about this business, Ruskin had not gone independently into the world. He had lived submissively with his parents, economically and emotionally subservient to them, protected from danger and temptation in very much the way that he ascribes to women here. But in 1865, the year in which Sesame and Lilies was published, Ruskin’s life was undergoing troubling change. He was no longer content to write about art, the subject on which an appreciative audience had granted him authority to speak. It had become his conviction that art was so involved with the social and economic circumstances of the culture which produced it that it was necessary for him to write about politics before anything he had to say about painting could be justified. This is what he had begun to do – most famously in Unto this Last, the measured denunciation of Victorian capitalism published in the Cornhill in 1860. His public had been much less grateful for this new venture into political economy – the deferential or even enthusiastic reviews which had greeted Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice gave way to indignation. ‘The world is not going to be preached to death by a mad governess’, proclaimed The Saturday Review, always Ruskin’s most outspoken enemy.6 The sexual insult in that response is revealing. In turning from the graceful celebration of mountains and pictures in order to assert the claims of charity and justice, Ruskin has forgotten his place. To teach an appreciation of art was, after all, one of the permitted tasks of the governess. Governesses traditionally scold: equally traditionally, they are heeded only by nicely brought-up girls of the kind who had always been Ruskin’s most dedicated readers. Having made his


name in what could be identified as a woman’s province, Ruskin had not entitled himself to deal with more weighty social issues. To talk about anything that really mattered, like money, with any hope of getting yourself heard, you had to be more of a man than it seemed Ruskin was. In Sesame and Lilies, Ruskin is both stating his claim to be a man in the eyes of the world, and, at a deeper level, brooding on the nature of his own work in terms of a complicated sexual identity. There is a sense in which it had been ‘woman’s work’, and he is now asserting the right to move beyond that vocation. But there is also a sense, as Ruskin’s argument develops, in which he lays down for himself a task which is still defined as that of a woman. This is what he had to say about the woman’s ‘public work or duty’: There is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women are answerable for it; not in that you have provoked, but in that you have not hindered. Men, by their nature, are prone to fight; they will fight for any cause, or for none. It is for you to choose their cause for them, and to forbid them when there is no cause. There is no suffering, no injustice, no misery in the earth, but the guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear the sight of it, but you should not be able to bear it. Men may tread it down without sympathy in their own struggle; but men are feeble in sympathy, and contracted in hope; it is you only who can feel the depths of pain, and conceive the way of its healing. Instead of trying to do this, you turn away from it; you shut yourselves within your park walls and garden gates; and you are content to know that there is beyond them a whole world in wilderness— a world of secrets which you dare not penetrate; and of suffering which you dare not conceive (18.140). It is not hard to see why this incensed Kate Millett. But Ruskin’s sermons are always at their most censorious when he is admonishing himself, and this is the case here. Ruskin had come to feel encumbered with guilt at the way in which he had shut himself up in his parents’ safe and comfortable home, shrinking from engagement with the injustices of the world. He now defines moral responsibility in a way which includes both male and female reference. Secrets are to be penetrated, suffering conceived. In ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, Ruskin is publicly talking himself into manhood, without relinquishing the perspective of the woman. It was a process that led to the social campaigning of the 1870s, his most erratic and fruitful decade – the decade in which he published the first provocative numbers of Fors Clavigera (1871–84), established the

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utopian Guild of St George, and claimed the right to call himself its Master. 1864, the year in which the Sesame and Lilies lectures had been written, was a crucial year in this development, for it was the year in which Ruskin’s father died. John James Ruskin had been an industrious and remarkably successful wine merchant, along the lines approved by Samuel Smiles. But he had also been a frustrated artist, and Ruskin’s career up to 1864 had been to a large extent a vicarious fulfilment of the blocked ambitions of his father. Now he was on his own, the new male head of the Ruskin family. It was a role that perturbed him. In ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ we are confronted with a good deal of transposed anxiety. Defining the perfect woman, Ruskin is again talking about himself: But do not you see that, to fulfil this, she must—as far as one can use such terms of a human creature—be incapable of error? So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise—wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side (18.123). This is the uncomfortable model Ruskin proposes for himself. Taking on a mantle of infallibility, he will make himself incorruptible through selfrenunciation. In setting out a moral agenda for women, he describes his own calling – while apparently speaking from an emphatically male platform. Ruskin presents this exemplary self-denial as an act of service to the higher wisdom of the husband. Here too he is finding a way of both voicing and displacing a sense of his own authorial function. The wish for self-development had never been a principle of his critical ideal. He had begun his career in the belief that the higher truth which it was his duty to express was that of the Christian faith. Ruskin was no longer a Christian in 1865. Yet he was as convinced as he had ever been that his work as a writer should be religious, devoted to the interpretation of insights which were not his own. He would continue to honour and obey the godhead, as he had always done, just as the wife in a Christian marriage honours and obeys the husband. To see Ruskin’s argument in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ as a matter of strange cross-gender movements of thought, movements at once self-protective and self-expressive, makes his lecture a good deal more intelligible, though hardly more attractive. Other writings of the period, however, make it clear that his reasoning in this notorious lecture is not


characteristic of what he says about women elsewhere in his work of the 1860s. One thing he had learnt from his experience of long devotion and service to his parents, and especially to his father, is that self-sacrifice is a dubious blessing. In the year in which Sesame and Lilies was published, he also brought out The Ethics of the Dust, a text-book about crystallography. This strange work has as much to do with the moral as with the scientific education of women. In writing about self-renunciation in The Ethics of the Dust, Ruskin is again thinking of his own situation. But here he turns to a rueful recognition of the cost of obedience, rather than giving voice to the unforgiving self-censure that motivated ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’. The book takes the unlikely form of a series of dramatic dialogues. Ruskin casts himself in an accustomed role – that of ‘Old Lecturer’, or simply ‘L’: L. The self-sacrifice of a human being is not a lovely thing, Violet. It is often a necessary and a noble thing; but no form nor degree of suicide can ever be lovely. VIOLET. But self-sacrifice is not suicide! L. What is it then? VIOLET. Giving up one’s self for another. L. Well, and what do you mean by ‘giving up one’s self’? VIOLET. Giving up one’s tastes, one’s feelings, one’s time, one’s happiness, and so on, to make others happy. L. I hope you will never marry anybody, Violet, who expects you to make him happy in that way … the will of God respecting us is that we shall live by each other’s happiness, and life; not by each other’s misery, or death … A child may have to die for its parents; but the purpose of Heaven is that it shall rather live for them;—that not by sacrifice, but by its strength, its joy, its force of being, it shall be to them renewal of strength; and as the arrow in the hand of the giant. So it is in all other right relations. Men help each other by their joy, not by their sorrow. They are not intended to slay themselves for each other, but to strengthen themselves for each other (18.283–6). Such a position is closer to John Stuart Mill’s point of view than anything reasonably to be expected from the author of Sesame and Lilies. No-one, however, could mistake this for Mill’s writing. The rhetorically Biblical resonances of Ruskin’s language are utterly alien from the bases of debate in The Subjection of Women. Here, as in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, Ruskin puts forward his argument as a matter of religious belief. Ruskin differs radically from the tenets of liberal humanism in the persistently religious framework of his thinking. His work throughout

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the 1860s demonstrates that the loss of Christian certainty did not lead him to lose the conviction that his writing could only be an interpretation of wisdom more certain than his own. Sesame and Lilies was one of his earliest attempts to define a new and non-Christian form for the fixed spiritual truths to be discerned in nature and art. Seeking authority, he looked back to the myths of pre-Christian peoples – the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. What he found was a female divinity. Ruskin explains how ‘that great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a Woman; and into her hand, for a symbol, the weaver’s shuttle; and how the name and form of that spirit, adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks, became that Athena of the olive-helm, and cloudy shield, to faith in whom you owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most precious in art, in literature, or in types of national virtue’ (18.118). This is an extraordinary claim for Ruskin to have made. It is not that he was alone in looking to ancient mythologies for codes of belief that might replace a Christianity that seemed to be failing. Many were doing something similar, and the upsurge in new scholarly interpretations of myth is one of the characteristic features of the age. But it is odd to find him, in a book that is in many ways a paradigmatic statement of patriarchal religious control, suggesting an alternative religion that is in some ways matriarchal. Although Ruskin did not develop the idea very fully in Sesame and Lilies, it is one of the most significant of the contradictions and transferences that make up the substance of his text. Ruskin’s religion of Athena cannot, however, be described as wholly matriarchal. Athena, born fully armed from the head of her father Zeus, had no mother; nor did she become one. Though she carried the female attribute of a weaver’s shuttle, and was considered by the Greeks as the deity of women’s work, she was also a goddess of war, often represented with helmet and spear. Chaste and unforgivingly stern, she combined male and female qualities in her defence of order, control, and reverence. She could be protective and calmly loyal, but she was also more given to violent anger than any other Greek deity. Ruskin found in her a deeply attractive emblem. She was an authoritative expression of the sexual ambivalence in his own work, translated into power, and removed into the distant and culturally prestigious world of Greek literature and art. In The Ethics of the Dust he develops a more assertive concept of this formidable female divinity. Athena is now defined, not only in opposition to the maleness of patriarchal Christianity, but also against the maleness of patriarchal science. Ruskin saw that the dominance of Christian religion and of progressive materialistic science are two


aspects of the same phenomenon. The goddess he creates for himself out of the old images of Athena is opposed to both. She is a goddess of natural fact rather than abstract theory, of quick-tempered emotion rather than cool reason, and her function is to sustain life. Modern philosophy, or modern science, cuts things up, dissects, compartmentalizes human experience. So too does Christian religion. Ruskin’s discourse, following the female ideal of Athena, attempts to put things back together, seeing the physical world as an ethical phenomenon. The essential impulse of The Ethics of the Dust is formulated by Ruskin in female terms, a process of celebrating what he describes as ‘the ideas of Life, as the power of putting things together, or “making” them; and of Death, as the power of pushing things separate, or “unmaking” them’ (18.344). Ruskin’s attack on the apparently unquestionable cultural prestige of science has had more to do with the decline in his standing than any other aspect of his late work. Now that feminists are beginning to assemble a cogent critique of scientific methodology, however, much of what has seemed simply eccentric in Ruskin’s repudiation of contemporary science falls into place. Evelyn Fox Keller’s work as a theorist of feminist science marshalls the arguments concisely: The most immediate issue for a feminist perspective on the natural sciences is the deeply rooted popular mythology that casts objectivity, reason, and mind as male, and subjectivity, feeling, and nature as female. In this division of emotional and intellectual labour, women have been the guarantors and protectors of the personal, the emotional, the particular, whereas science—the province par excellence of the impersonal, the rational, and the general—has been the preserve of men. The consequence of such a division is not simply the exclusion of women from the practice of science. That exclusion itself is a symptom of a wider and deeper rift between feminine and masculine, subjective and objective, indeed between love and power—a rending of the human fabric that affects all of us, as women and men, as members of a society, and even as scientists.7 As Keller remarks, orthodox perceptions of gender also have their basis in mythology, a ‘popular mythology’ quite different from the one proposed in The Ethics of the Dust. Ruskin’s thinking is by no means free from the divisive structures of this common mythology. Nevertheless, his reverence for the synthesizing power of Athena is an attempt to repair that rent in the human fabric which Keller describes.

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One of the controlling metaphors in Ruskin’s writing of the period is that of sewing, or weaving, supervised by Athena and her symbolic shuttle. This is not a matter of the superficial embellishment of embroidery, but the kind of needlework that sews things together, making and mending the garments we all need. It is a housewifely activity, and Ruskin calls the girls to whom he dedicates his crystallographic lectures ‘little housewives’ – a feature of the book which has done little to endear it to feminist readers. Ruskin interprets the act of sewing, like that of writing, as essentially one of service. It is creative, but never independent. In a goddess’s hands, it might touch the dignity of representative art, or painting. It is, Ruskin knew, possible to weave a picture. But Athena’s mythical contest with the insubordinate Arachne demonstrates what Ruskin saw as the proper function of such illustrative needlework.8 Athena’s loom produces an image of orderly celebration and homage to the gods, finished with a border of the trim and useful olive, which was sacred to herself. Arachne’s work is as rebellious as Athena’s is reverential. She figures the crimes of the immortal gods; their rapes and deceptions of mortal women. Her web is completed with a border of the unruly ivy, sacred to Dionysus, another sexually ambiguous deity who, in contrast with Athena’s austere discipline, fosters wild disruption and subversion in his female followers. Athena punishes her audacious rival by turning her into a spider, the enemy of housewives, – whose weaving, as Ruskin puts it, ‘instead of being an honour to the palaces of kings, is to be a disgrace to the room of the simplest cottager’ (20.377). Sempstresses, housewives, and weavers, like governesses, were not much respected in Ruskin’s lifetime. It is nevertheless a literary counterpart of their labour that Ruskin undertakes. His work was, as he saw it, a loving duty to Athena, and a refusal of Arachne’s proud infidelity. Instead of confining himself to writing about the pleasures of painting and poetry, with sumptuous descriptions of trees and mountains and flowers thrown in, his works after 1865 are concerned with politics and pollution, crime, vivisection, botany, history, education, geology, ornithology, music, cookery, and a great deal more. He writes about these things in serviceable relation to each other, claiming that you cannot study a geological specimen rightly unless you are alert to its ethical meaning, or that the understanding of modern political economy bears a vital relation to the history of Venice in the middle ages. It is not surprising that it is at this point in his career, after the success of Sesame and Lilies, that Ruskin’s public image as a harmless, or not so harmless, lunatic began to take shape. His continual interweaving of matters kept separate by the dominant ideology meant that he was not taken seriously.


Ruskin’s fading influence in the late 1860s and 1870s cannot be simply attributed to his writing like a woman. There are, clearly, many ways in which he does not write like a woman. But there are some ways, in the most ambitious of his late works, in which he does. He was not oblivious of the effect that this had on his reputation. As he aged he acquired a bitter sense of the standards by which he was judged. Ruskin, like Athena, was not slow to express his anger. In 1874, he published a monumental grumble in Fors Clavigera. He thinks back over his life: because I have passed it in almsgiving, not in fortune-hunting; because I have laboured always for the honour of others, not my own, and have chosen rather to make men look to Turner and Luini, than to form or exhibit the skill of my own hand; because I have lowered my rents, and assured the comfortable life of my poor tenants, instead of taking from them all I could force for the roofs they needed; because I love a wood walk better than a London street, and would rather watch a seagull fly, than shoot it, and rather hear a thrush sing, than eat it; finally, because I never disobeyed my mother, because I have honoured all women with solemn worship, and have been kind even to the unthankful and the evil; therefore the hacks of English art and literature wag their heads at me, and the poor wretch who pawns the dirty linen of his soul daily for a bottle of sour wine and a cigar, talks of the ‘effeminate sentimentality of Ruskin’ (28.81). There is an element of self-pity in that, and of self-aggrandisement. It could be argued that its unshakeable assurance of moral righteousness marks it as a piece of very male apology. But there is also truth in Ruskin’s complaint: he did depart from the norms of male discourse, and this did eventually cause his work to be set aside in ways comparable with the marginalization of generations of women’s voices. One of the sharpest controversies in the school of feminist theory which has arisen from the work of Derrida and Kristeva has revolved round the concept of a specifically female discourse, or écriture féminine. Hélène Cixous is among those who have both used and questioned the concept of écriture féminine, arguing that the idea of a discourse specific to women maintains division, perpetuating the tyrannical opposition in thinking about gender that feminists ought to challenge. Cixous suggests that while there may indeed be male and female kinds of writing, each may be appropriated by either male or female writers. She describes the possibility of a difference between the sex of the writer

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and the sex of the writing he or she produces. The masculine and the feminine need not be endlessly locked in destructive combat; nor need they obliterate each other. Cixous maintains a buoyant vision of bisexual writing: To admit that writing is precisely working in the inbetween, inspecting the process of the same and of the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work of death – to admit this is first to want the two, as well as both, the ensemble of one and the other, not fixed in sequence of struggle and expulsion or some other form of death but infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another.9 This is as far from the confidence of Victorian discourse as from the vehemence of Kate Millett’s confrontations. Nevertheless, Cixous’s tentative prose could be seen as a definition of Ruskin’s distinctive intelligence. Among the unforeseen consequences of Cixous’s radicalism is a return to the values on which Ruskin built his work. Cixous, like Ruskin, champions the idea of an unchanging body of truth, constantly expressed through the infinite flux of human development and variation. It is a truth to be discovered, or rediscovered, through memory and love. Cixous’s literary heroes – Rilke, Kafka, Clarice Lispector – might not have earned Ruskin’s veneration; nor is she interested in Ruskin’s myths. But what Hélène Cixous has to say about her work is startlingly close to Ruskin’s deepest convictions: One thing I’ve discovered just by being alive is that there is truth, and that it’s that same everywhere. This might seem obvious, but it’s essential. Life has its secrets and they are always the same, but they have to be rediscovered. Truth has to be worked for. Everyone has to rediscover truth and this truth tells itself differently. It tells itself according to each individual biography, each memory and experience.10 Ruskin’s cultural analysis is turning out to be less antagonistic to the changing work of feminism than we had supposed.

Notes 1 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 89. 2 Millett, p. 106.

120 Ruskin’s ‘Womanly Mind’ (1988) 3 Among a number of recent biographies of Ruskin, John Dixon Hunt’s The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin (London: Dent, 1982) and Tim Hilton’s John Ruskin: The Early Years (New Haven and London: Yale, 1985) give the clearest picture of the circumstances of his life. 4 For a full account of Ruskin’s relation with the schoolgirls of Winnington Hall, see The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall, ed. Van Akin Burd (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969). 5 Some of the most interesting of these letters may be found in Reflections of a Friendship: John Ruskin’s Letters to Pauline Trevelyan 1848–1866, ed. Virginia Surtees (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979); Dearest Mama Talbot: A Selection of Letters from John Ruskin to Mrs Fanny Talbot, ed. Margaret Spence (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966); Sublime and Instructive: Letters from John Ruskin to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Anna Blunden, and Ellen Heaton, ed. Virginia Surtees (London: Joseph, 1972); The Letters of John Ruskin to Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, ed. John Lewis Bradley (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1964). 6 Hostile reviews of Unto this Last appeared in the Saturday Review on 4 August and 10 November 1860; see 17. xxviii. 7 Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven and London: Yale, 1985), pp. 6–7. 8 A wide-ranging consideration of some implications of the myth of Athena and Arachne may be found in Nancy K. Miller’s ‘Arachnologies; The Woman, The Text, and the Critic’, The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 270–95. 9 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975), trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, quoted from New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. 254. 10 ‘Conversations’, Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Hélène Cixous, ed. Susan Sellers (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988), p. 143.

7 ‘What Teachers Do You Give Your Girls?’ Ruskin and Women’s Education Dinah Birch

The advocation of domestic virtue for women in Sesame and Lilies (1865) hardly seems to qualify Ruskin as a supporter of girls’ schools and colleges. If woman’s special province is to be the home, then it would seem to follow that the home is the place where they should be taught. Ruskin’s encouragement of schools and colleges for young women suggests that he didn’t think so. He was actively interested in female education throughout the 1860s and beyond. His support was often expressed in personal terms, reflected in the diverse and wideranging correspondence he maintained with women in the later decades of his life. To a surprising extent, however, it took the form of working with institutions founded to develop the education of girls. One complication here is that the word ‘home’ was always a peculiarly weighted word for Ruskin, meaning something other than the kitchen, nursery, and parlour. ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ makes this clear: ‘wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her … and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless’ (18.122–3). Recent historical thinking has tended to confirm Ruskin’s view, noting that ‘we no longer see the nineteenthcentury middle-class home as a prison for women, but, more often than not, as a centre of operations, chiefly for a variety of intellectual and philanthropic enterprises.’1 As Ruskin defines it in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, the true definition of home is closer to a spiritual condition than the four walls of a house. It has to do with order, peace and discipline, and it is closely related to the exercise of public charity, which is 121

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here identified as the paramount duty of middle-class women. In fact Ruskin disliked the custom of educating well-to-do girls at home, and one of the purposes of his lecture is to protest against the practice of employing governesses for this purpose: ‘But what teachers do you give your girls, and what reverence do you show to the teachers you have chosen? Is a girl likely to think her own conduct, or her own intellect, of much importance, when you trust the entire formation of her character, moral and intellectual, to a person whom you let your servants treat with less respect than they do your housekeeper (as if the soul of your child were a less charge than jams and groceries), and whom you yourself think you confer an honour upon by letting her sometimes sit in the drawing-room in the evening?’(18.133). Of all Ruskin’s works dating from the 1860s, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ is written with Rose La Touche most clearly in mind. ‘I wrote the Lilies to please one girl’, he noted in 1871 (18.47). Rose had been educated by governesses, and had not been sent to school – just as Ruskin himself had been largely taught by his mother, and by private tutors, rather than in the separate world of school. It may be that he had come to feel that both might have been better off if they had been sent away – to the right school, where the nurturing influence of parents could be expanded and sometimes modified by the example of other teachers. It is clear that his thinking about Rose’s education had moved in that direction, and throughout the 1860s he did what he could to counterbalance the dominating and in some ways destructive control of her parents. Much of what now seems odd, or unpalatable, in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ makes more sense when it is interpreted in the light of Ruskin’s frustrated love for Rose – his bitter condemnation of girls who immerse themselves in theology, for instance, and his insistence on their responsibilities to the poor and ignorant outside the family circle. Self-examination and the lack of serious work is the real enemy of girls’ growth in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, as Ruskin believed it had been Rose’s enemy. Ruskin was not advocating triviality in the education of women. One point which he emphasizes throughout the lecture, a point which goes some way towards qualifying the condescending tone of what he has to say about the teaching of girls, is that their education must be serious. ‘And not only in the material and in the course, but yet more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl’s education be as serious as a boy’s. You bring up your girls as if they were meant for sideboard ornaments, and then complain of their frivolity. Give them the same advantages that you give their brothers’ (18.132). Percy La Touche, Rose’s healthy and wayward brother, had been sent to Harrow for five notably unsuccessful terms,

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where he had made many friends, confirmed his taste for outdoor sports, and spent little time with his books. Percy was not his mother’s favourite child. ‘He is not a bit bad or wild & has never given us any trouble, but he isn’t very good either—& he don’t think—& he eats such a quantity! & is more doggy and horsy than I like—& more contemptuous of female opinion.’2 The story of Percy and Rose might seem like a version of George Eliot’s tale of Tom and Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860), where the opportunities for formal schooling are given to the child who can least profit from them, simply because he is the son and heir. But Ruskin would hardly have wished to have sent Rose to a school like Harrow. Nor did he think that education had much to do with the acquisition of knowledge, no matter how useful or worthy. His definition of the word ‘education’ was as distinctive as his definition of the word ‘home’. In a lecture on ‘The Future of England’ (1869), he declared that ‘education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.’3 He had, in the period when his relations with Rose were at their most intense, become involved with a more innovative school than Percy had encountered at Harrow – Margaret Bell’s school for girls at Winnington Hall. He seems for a while to have hoped that Rose might become a pupil there. He was staying at Winnington Hall when he gave his lecture on ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ on 14 December 1864. It was a time when educational issues were topical, after the establishment of the Schools Inquiry Commission earlier in the year had provoked widespread debate in newspapers and journals. Ruskin was actively involved in the movement to promote better and more inclusive schooling. One of the purposes of the lecture was to support the foundation of new schools in Ancoats, at that time one of the poorest districts of Manchester.4 Ruskin’s association with Winnington Hall had begun in 1859, the year after he had first met Rose La Touche, and there is no doubt that his love for Rose and his affection for the school were linked in his mind. Nevertheless, the girls at Winnington were more than simply surrogate Roses. Ruskin’s first contact was with the school’s headmistress, Margaret Bell (1818–89), an intelligent and resourceful woman whose life had been very unlike that of the affluent and over-protected Rose La Touche. Her school, which she began in Manchester in the 1840s with the help of her sister Mary Anne, was a bid for financial and social independence. It was comparable with the school that the Brontë sisters were dreaming of at just that time, and never quite managed to launch. Like the Brontës, the Bell sisters were the daughters of a clergyman – a


Methodist minister who fell out of favour with his church, and died in obscurity. Without family money, and unmarried, Margaret Bell had few professional options. Her school seems always to have been financially precarious. But it certainly gave her more scope than life as a governess, which might well have been the only realistic alternative. Her adventurous mind was expressed in her liberal religion. She was, like Ruskin, moving from the Christianity of her youth to a more humanist position in the late 1850s. Associated with liberal churchmen like Bishop Colenso,5 whom she knew through her longstanding friendship with his wife, she was also familiar with the work of educational and religious reformers like Alexander Scott and F.D. Maurice.6 She moved her school to the rather grand surroundings of Winnington Hall in Cheshire, twenty-two miles from Manchester, in 1851. It catered for a small number of well-to-do girls – never more than forty. Margaret Bell offered them a degree of physical and intellectual freedom that was far from usual at the time. They were encouraged to play cricket, to dance, paint, study anatomy, and to read far more widely than most girls of their class and age. Influenced by Maurice’s progressive theories of women’s education, she fostered an atmosphere in which the girls were encouraged to think and explore for themselves, rather than learn scattered facts by rote, or acquire showy accomplishments for the marriage market. She did not hesitate to procure controversial or avant-garde books for the school’s library – books like the notorious Essays and Reviews of 1860, or scientific, historical or linguistic works by Herschel, Froude, Lyell, and Max Müller. This was very far from the kind of school that George Eliot satirized in Mrs Lemon’s fashionable academy for young ladies in Middlemarch (1871–2) – where ‘the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female – even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage’.7 The advanced philosophy of Winnington Hall was to Ruskin’s taste in the 1860s, and he became an enthusiastic supporter. His help took an immediately practical form, as Ruskin’s support for women’s education often did. Most tangibly and usefully, he lent money to keep the school afloat. Van Akin Burd, whose edition of the Winnington correspondence is the indispensable starting point for anyone interested in Ruskin’s relations with the school, records that by 1867 Ruskin had lent Miss Bell a total of £1,130 15s 4d – a very considerable sum.8 In addition he gave the school at Winnington books, valuable pictures, minerals, and much else besides. And he gave his time. He visited the school on sixteen occasions, helping the pupils with their drawing and geology, and he wrote regularly and at length to the girls and their teachers.

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Some of these letters amplify the lessons of Sesame and Lilies, encouraging the girls to do more than stay decoratively at home. In September 1865, just months after Sesame and Lilies appeared, he wrote to a Winnington girl: ‘I would say very seriously that no office can be nobler that that of a “woman of the world” in the present day – if she will make a stand against its vanities … Be very steady in employing some portion of every day in real work which will require strict and close attention.’9 Observers of Ruskin’s friendship with the girls and teachers of Winnington Hall before Van Akin Burd’s pioneering work of 1969 were generally disapproving, amused, ruefully pained, or all three together. Ruskin’s father, who was understandably vexed to see his son spend his paternal inheritance on Margaret Bell’s school, had nothing but contempt for the Miss Bell and her ‘virgins’.10 No doubt he saw her as an exploitative hanger-on. There was some truth in this view. Miss Bell’s position was insecure, and she was not slow to make full use of Ruskin’s assistance. Nevertheless, Burd is right to suggest that Ruskin gained as much as he gave. He had never met anyone quite like Miss Bell before – a firm-minded and capable woman of his own age, a woman who was making her own way in the world, with whom he could talk on something much closer to equal terms than anything he had previously experienced in his relations with women. He learned from such a friendship. He benefited as much from spending time with spirited and lively children like Lily Armstrong, Dora Livesey, Mary Leadbeater, Cesca Bradford, and the other girls Ruskin came to know through the school. As they grew from children into young women, Ruskin kept in touch with several of these girls, and they enabled him to make contact with a world of which he would otherwise have remained oblivious. Dora Livesey, for instance, whose extensive correspondence with Ruskin was published by her grand-daughter Olive Wilson in 1984, went on to become secretary for the Manchester Association for Promoting the Education of Women at the Royal Institution in the early 1870s, a post in which she worked hard. Ruskin taught her to take herself and her charitable responsibilities seriously. ‘No girl should commit suicide of her mind—any more than of her body—for the sake of others, she should develop every faculty she possesses and then use it for the general good.’11 In return, Dora showed him what young women might achieve. The substance of what he learned from these Winnington girls took a remarkable literary form in his book The Ethics of the Dust, published in 1865,12 very soon after Sesame and Lilies. This experimental book is an immediate expression of his experience of teaching the girls of


Winnington Hall, and, just as importantly, of their teaching him. The Ethics of the Dust represents a significant landmark in Ruskin’s writing. Its dialogue structure makes it the first of his books to attempt the personal and informal dynamic between text and reader that he was to develop, very much more confidently, in Fors Clavigera. Yet the provisional fluidity suggested by the book’s sense of the spoken voice is contained within a firmly outlined authority. The book is controlled by its author, the ‘Old Lecturer’, as he teases and instructs his fictional pupils, each loosely based on the girls he knew at Winnington. It is in The Ethics of the Dust that he begins to cultivate a new literary personality, the aged figure who was later to become the sage of Brantwood. Alongside this masculine authority, however, something more unexpected emerges – the authority of femininity. The Ethics of the Dust is, like many of Ruskin’s works in the later 1860s, dominated by the sense of a multiple female divinity, ancient and powerful, a divinity who signals the possibility of moving beyond the male traditions of Christian teaching. The Ethics of the Dust continues to be, like Sesame and Lilies, often patronising towards the ‘little housewives’ whose pertly submissive responses are carefully managed within the text. But it also gestures towards a womanly mythology, a female authority of a kind that was to become a controlling presence in his subsequent work.13 The affirmation of her power, like that of the patriarchal God with whom she co-exists in Ruskin’s mind, is a means of displacing the personalized or even eccentric discourse that Ruskin increasingly adopts. He says of this goddess: What I mean, is of little consequence. What the Egyptians meant, who called her ‘Neith’;—or Homer, who called her ‘Athena’;—or Solomon, who called her by a name which the Greeks render by ‘Sophia’, you must judge for yourselves. But her testimony is always the same, and all nations have received it (18.231–2, italic original). Ruskin’s reverence for this female figure, expressed in The Ethics of the Dust, The Cestus of Aglaia (1865–6), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and centrally in The Queen of the Air (1869), might seem to have little to do with his experiences of women’s education at Winnington Hall. These disparate strands in his life and work in the 1860s and beyond have usually been seen in separate terms. In fact they are closely associated. The friendship, the deference, and the flattery that he found at Winnington was a lifeline to him at a tense and difficult period in his life, as he was coming to terms with the decline in his father’s reassuring role as ruler

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and guide, the faltering of his Christian faith, and the slow fading of his hopes of winning Rose La Touche as his wife. The Winnington girls could help rebuild his sense of himself as a stable and revered law-giving voice in a disintegrating world, and in this they did him a considerable service. But it didn’t end there. There is a sense in which Ruskin returned the compliment in full, for as he derived authority from them, so he invested the femininity they represented with its own evolving authority. Throughout Ruskin’s work after the turning point of his father’s death in 1864, this doubleness became increasingly marked. He was more and more dissatisfied with the cultural values of masculinity – competitive aggression, the drive for control, self-assertion, ownership, worldly success, the values that preferred business, or analytical science, or go-ahead common sense, over reverence, wonder, or social responsibility. Though he adopts distinctly male roles for himself (he is the old Lecturer, the Professor, or the Master), he often allies himself with the identifying features of femininity – art, nature, associative feeling rather than analytical logic, the impulse to delight in birds rather than to shoot them. And he continues to associate himself more closely with the support of institutions founded for the education of girls, rather than those intended for the education of boys. Ruskin’s work in Oxford provides illuminating examples of this pattern. His election in 1869 as the University’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art, a post in what was then an overwhelmingly male institution, involved him in some complicated negotiations with the changing gender politics of the period. In 1866, women had won the right to attend university lectures in Oxford. Ruskin’s lectures in the early 1870s proved to be especially popular with women, as I noted in ‘Ruskin’s “Womanly Mind”’ (see p. 108 above), so much so that he often gave them twice, so that ‘the bonnets’ had the opportunity to attend. And this was a time when the bonnets were more in evidence than ever before. A generation of intelligent young academic wives was making its presence felt in Oxford. These energetic women – Georgiana Max Müller, Mary Ward, Charlotte Green, Lavinia Talbot, Bertha Johnson, Alice Kitchin – looked for formal outlets for women’s aspirations for higher education. In 1873, Louise Creighton, one of the leading lights of the ‘Lectures for Women’ Committee, organized a series of lectures and classes inspired by Ruskin’s lectures on Italian art. They were eagerly attended by many of the women who were to be most closely associated with the gathering movement for the establishment of women’s halls in Oxford.14 After years of campaigning, the first of these halls, Lady Margaret Hall, and Somerville Hall, were opened in October 1879. It was just too late for


Ruskin’s first period of office as Slade Professor, which came to an end with his bout of mental illness in 1878. This departure came at a time when Oxford was changing quickly. Art history, the field in which he held his Chair, was beginning to come of age as an academic discipline. Scientific research was an increasingly significant activity within the university. Though the Anglican church was still a central presence in the life of Oxford, theological controversies did not generate the fervour of the Oxford movement at its height in the late 1830s and early 1840s, when Ruskin had been a gentleman commoner at Christ Church. The university no longer saw itself primarily as a training ground for young clergymen. Its dons were marrying in larger numbers, and they were educating students who were entering a wider range of professions. Some of these changes seemed to be close to those that Ruskin had worked for. He had always wanted to see Oxford develop a wider range of intellectual choices for its students, and he had played a major part in the foundation and construction of the University Museum in the later 1850s, established to provide facilities for scientific study. His professorial lectures on art had challenged the dominance of classics and theology in Oxford’s intellectual life. Nor, brought up as he was amidst the spiritual traditions of nonconformism, was he wholly in favour of the supremacy of the Church of England in national life. He had become increasingly hostile to any kind of sectarianism, and had constructed the creed for his own reforming Guild of St George ‘so that Jews and Mahometans may sign it, no less frankly than Christians’ (28.420). Nevertheless, Ruskin had little sympathy for the modern Oxford that was taking shape in the 1870s. He had no time for what he saw as the corrosive secularization of its intellectual life, and denounced the professional direction that scientific research was taking. Ruskin never ceased to believe that nature should be analysed in a spirit of reverence and praise, whether its students were Anglican or not: ‘All Nature, with one voice—with one glory, is set to teach you reverence for the life communicated to you from the Father of Spirits.’15 Such sentiments were hardly in keeping with the direction that Oxford was taking. Perhaps the story should have ended with his resignation in 1878, and it would certainly have been better for Ruskin’s reputation if it had. But in what Tim Hilton, Ruskin’s most recent biographer, has called ‘the major mistake of Ruskin’s public life’, in 1882 he asked whether he might resume the duties of his Oxford Professorship.16 When he returned to Oxford for a second spell of duty, in March 1883, he had become a figure irreconcilably alienated from new developments in the university, and his increasingly open enmity with the new scientific

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establishment made him a controversial figure. There was, however, one exception to this pattern. He approved of the new women’s halls, and soon began to take a serious interest in their progress. He visited both Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville Hall, but his warmest allegiance was reserved for Somerville. Having met Madeleine Shaw Lefevre, Somerville’s first principal, at an Oxford dinner party in November 1884,17 he became an active supporter. Perhaps his preference for Somerville was influenced by the fact that Lady Margaret Hall was specifically for Anglicans, while Somerville imposed no religious tests or obligations on its students. Nevertheless, he gave books and minerals to Lady Margaret Hall,18 alongside a more substantial donation of books, geological specimens, including some valuable jewels, and several pictures to Somerville. It is a mark of the extent of his personal engagement with Somerville, and of the continuing association between his thoughts on women’s education and his love for Rose La Touche, who had died in May 1875, that these pictures included the water-colour copy he had made in 1876–7 of the head of St Ursula, from Carpaccio’s Dream of St Ursula.19 What Ruskin had to say about this picture is recorded in the Pall Mall Gazette’s report of his lecture on ‘Protestantism: The Pleasures of Truth’, delivered on the 15 and 17 November 1884 as the fifth in his final course of lectures in Oxford, the series entitled The Pleasures of England. The words here are those of Edward Tyas Cook, later to become Ruskin’s editor, for he was the reporter: ‘No one knows who she is or where she lived. She is Persephone at rest below the earth; she is Proserpine at play above the ground. She is Ursula, the gentlest yet the rudest of little bears; a type in that, perhaps, of the moss rose, or of the rose spinosissima, with its rough little buds. She is in England, in Cologne, in Venice, in Rome, in eternity, living everywhere, dying everywhere, the most intangible yet the most practical of all saints,— queen, for one thing, of female education, when once her legend is rightly understood. This sketch of her head is the best drawing I ever made. Carpaccio’s picture is hung, like all good pictures, out of sight, seven feet above the ground; but the Venetian Academy had it taken down for me, and I traced every detail in it accurately to a hair’s breadth. It took me a day’s hard work to get that spray of silver hair loosening itself rightly from the coil, and twelve times over I had to try the mouth. And to-day, assuming Miss Shaw Lefevre’s indulgence, I present it to the girls of Somerville Hall. Perhaps the picture of a princess’s room, of which it is a part, may teach the young ladies there not to make their rooms too pretty—to remember that they come to Oxford to be uncomfortable, and to suffer a little—to learn whatever can be


learnt in Oxford, which is not much, and even to live as little Ursulas, in rough gardens, not on lawns made smooth for tennis.’20 ‘Whatever can be learned in Oxford, which is not much’. Ruskin was nearing the end of his long and troubled relations with Oxford when he said that. He had never felt altogether at home amongst its classicists and clerics, he liked the new generation of scientists even less, and he was increasingly out of patience with the constraints of the lecture room. Four months later, in March 1885, he finally resigned his chair in formal protest against the university’s ‘vote endowing vivisection’.21 Oxford had disappointed him. The university authorities had been slow to provide his drawing school with the resources it needed. The undergraduates had been still slower to respond to the teaching he had offered them. ‘Not a single pupil has learned the things I primarily endeavoured to teach’,22 he declared in his last Oxford lecture, delivered on 6 December 1884. Despite the bitterness of this final rift, however, his association with Somerville Hall continued. Oxford men had let him down, but the women had not. Though he never again set foot in Oxford, he maintained contact with Somerville. On 18 June 1885, shortly after his resignation, he wrote from Brantwood to assure Madeleine Shaw Lefevre of his continuing interest: ‘I’m not going to give up teasing you with my crotches – even though I must be far away.’23 Though he withdrew gifts previously made to the male university, including a portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti then believed to be the work of Titian, his gifts to Somerville continued, including a case of eight valuable sapphires in March 1887. On 9 May of that year, he wrote to Miss Shaw Lefevre: Your kind note is a great—rest—and quiet piece of light to me, like the opening of blue hyacinth light in Cowley woods. Do not speak of my kindness. Whatever I can do for you all is only my duty—all the more as I cannot do anything I meant for the Oxford men—gone all into cricket and chemistry, incapable of art or true thought.24 Ruskin’s interest in women’s education in the 1880s was not confined to Oxford. He also supported Girton and Newnham Colleges in Cambridge, giving them books, together with examples of women’s art – including several drawings made for Roadside Songs of Tuscany by Francesca Alexander, and water-colours by Kate Greenaway. His connection with Whitelands College in London, an Anglican establishment for the training of women schoolmistresses, made through his friendship

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with J.P. Faunthorpe, was still more extensive. He is chiefly remembered in Whitelands for suggesting and sponsoring its annual May Queen Festival, first celebrated in 1881, and now supported by the Guild of St George. But Ruskin also played a more practical role in the College’s history, providing books, minerals, pictures and equipment for the girls, and helping with the design and building of a new chapel there, with windows by Morris and Burne-Jones. His public interest in the progress of Whitelands was of substantial help in Faunthorpe’s campaign to raise the College’s reputation and standards throughout the 1880s. He instituted a comparable Rose Queen Festival in the High School for Girls at Cork, sending the pupils gifts of minerals, and corresponding with the Irish girls chosen as queens. Through a family association with Marion Watson (1870–1955), nicknamed ‘Tenzo’, whose father had asked Ruskin to oversee his daughter’s education at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Ruskin also came to know of the work of the energetic Dorothea Beale, who had made her school one of the most innovative and prestigious in the country. In 1887 he assured her that he was ‘most seriously bent on understanding the principles and knowing some of the results of modern girl education.’25 Though his capacity for public work was drawing to an end at the time of this correspondence, and his scheme for drawing the school into a more general scheme for promoting a serious musical education for girls came to nothing, he supported Dorothea Beale’s work with generous gifts of books and expensive manuscripts. He was impressed by her ability: ‘You needn’t mind who is or isn’t in association with you. You have plenty of power alone—and inventiveness enough to lead.’26 Lizzie Allen Harker (nee Watson; 1863–1933), a cousin of Tenzo who became a prolific author in later life, was representative of many who felt that their lives had been enriched by Ruskin’s influence. She and Tenzo had stayed with Ruskin at Brantwood in 1887. In an effusively adulatory article of 1906, she remembered what he had meant to her: ‘Perhaps no writer has had more direct and personal influence on girls and women all the world over, while the influence of the man over such happy girls as were privileged to be numbered among his pets, was absolutely unbounded.’27 The tone is characteristic of many women who published reminiscences of Ruskin’s teaching. Some of these admirers knew him only through his performance on the lecture platform. One such was Margaret Fletcher (1862–1943), whose memories of hearing him speak when she was a girl are still vivid more than half a century later: ‘It was impossible not to feel his singleness of purpose, his purity of heart, in themselves powerfully persuasive. He had broken through


provincialism, nationalism, all the false traditions of the past and the shibboleths of the day, and was leading us to a larger freer truer world.’28 *** Through all Ruskin’s late activities and writings there runs the haunting memory of Rose La Touche, who was the real ‘queen … of female education’ in Ruskin’s life. As Tim Hilton has remarked, these works are ‘about the love that we can maintain for people who are dead’.29 But memory and a lover’s devotion are not the only motives for Ruskin’s endorsement of women’s education. The disturbing intensity of elegiac feeling that Ruskin invested in this work has obscured the fact that it is an expression of central aspects of his thought, and of the legacies of that thought.30 His reputation has undoubtedly suffered for the supposition that he is opposed to the interests of women, and for many years this assumption was a major obstacle to his critical rehabilitation in the late twentieth century and beyond. Yet in his lifetime he was identified as a focus for women’s aspirations. This is an issue that extends far beyond his involvement with girls’ schools and colleges. He wrote literally hundreds of letters to girls who approached him for advice or instruction – often patronising, but usually helpful and always careful. The number of these letters that have survived in scattered Ruskin archives testifies to the care with which they were preserved. They undoubtedly meant a great deal to their many recipients. More publicly, Ruskin was prepared to advocate and to subsidise the work of women painters, amateur and professional. Lecturing on ‘The Art of England’ in 1883, during his final term of office at Oxford, he remarked that ‘For a long time I used to say, in all my elementary books, that, except in a graceful and minor way, women could not paint or draw. I am beginning, lately, to bow myself to the much more delightful conviction that nobody else can’ (33.280). The lectures challenged convention by discussing Kate Greenaway, Helen Allingham, Francesca Alexander and Lilias Trotter alongside male artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. Things did not, however, always run smoothly in Ruskin’s relations with the spirited women who saw him as an inspiration. He valued their intelligence, but he also wanted their obedience. This led to storms. Katherine Bradley, later to earn fame through her literary partnership with her niece Edith Cooper as ‘Michael Field’, provides an example of such turbulence. Ruskin encouraged her wish to join in the work of the Guild of St George: ‘Supposing your parents approve—& that you are independent—or used to acting according to your own judgement—you

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may be one of the usefullest Companions. My best but one or two are women; but nearly all poor.’31 The virtues of deference and service are characteristically assimilated into those of independent thought. The combination was not simply a function of his understanding of how Bradley should behave as a woman; it reflected his view of how all should behave. But women, particularly women of the creative and idealistic turn of mind who were most interested in his work, were more likely to respond to his teaching than men. He was pleased to discover Bradley’s ambitions as a poet, and praised her work: ‘Some of the best poetry of the modern times is by women (Mrs Browning, Miss Ingelow and Miss Proctor [sic]).’32 In March 1876, she was inscribed on the roll as the 28th Companion of the Guild of St George.33 Her later frank confession of atheism led to expulsion from the Guild; she had acted, after all, rather too firmly ‘according to her own judgement’. ‘Your letter telling me that you have lost your God and found a Skye Terrier is a great grief and amazement to me.’34 The correspondence, however, went on, and Bradley continued to value Ruskin’s teaching and advice. The period of contact with Ruskin remained an important episode in her life. The preoccupations of Michael Field’s mature writing, including the passionate commitment to the anti-vivisection movement and the later religious devotion (the atheism turned out to be temporary), are a reminder of his persistent influence. His association with women disciples, like his involvement with girls’ schools, have often been rather sorrowfully viewed as evidence of Ruskin’s critical weakness, or indeed of mental collapse. Ruskin has, in short, suffered from a kind of double backlash. On the one hand, he is dismissed as an anti-feminist and the enemy of women. On the other, he is condemned as a thinker who was unhappily inclined to descend into feminine habits of mind and can for that reason be seen as wanting in cultural seriousness. His participation in women’s concerns implies that he must share in their cultural marginalization. And yet for many women of the period Ruskin’s life and work represented an intellectual liberation. For the intelligent young women who studied Ruskin in the 1860s and 1870s, and for years after, he provided the means of claiming authority and weight for their own interests and cultural values. This was in part simply because he wrote about flowers or water-colour painting, or religion, ethics, or charitable duty – activities conventionally associated with the concerns of middle-class young women. At a deeper level, however, Ruskin could fulfil this function in their lives because so much of his work challenged the traditional foundations of masculine authority.35 His own authority, which was of course a very


considerable institution in itself throughout the late Victorian period, and in the early twentieth century, was always constituted as a criticism of the conventional and largely masculine institutions of church and law and commerce, and later of the growing status of professional science. It is not an accident, to take just one example, that his final resignation from his Oxford professorship was triggered by his anger over the university’s policies on vivisection, at a time when national campaigns for animal welfare were predominantly seen as women’s business. Nor is it an accident that his final words in Oxford were not spoken to the university at all, but to a meeting of the Anti-Vivisection Society.36 As so often, Ruskin was, at that point, on the losing side in this particular battle. Yet his public gesture, like his public support of an establishment like Whitelands, did not go wholly unnoticed. Through donating his prestige, his time and his money to the promotion of women’s education, he assured ambitious girls that what they did, and what they learned, could matter. In many different ways he gave himself as a teacher of girls. It is time for this to be recognized as a positive and significant aspect of his work, rather than merely a faintly embarrassing or crudely oppressive lapse from good sense and judgement.

Notes 1 Mary Hilton and Pam Hirsch, ‘Introduction’, Practical Visionaries: Women, Education, and Social Progress 1790–1930, ed. Mary Hilton and Pam Hirsch (Harlow: Longman, 2000), p. 7. 2 Letter from Maria La Touche to Louisa Mac Donald, summer 1866; John Ruskin and Rose La Touche: Her Unpublished Diaries of 1861 and 1867, ed. Van Akin Burd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 101. 3 The lecture was delivered at the Royal Artillery Institution, Woolwich, on 14 December 1869, published as a pamphlet in 1870, and later incorporated into The Crown of Wild Olive. 4 Ruskin wrote to his mother that ‘the seventy or eighty pounds which the lecture brings will be a notable help’. The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall, ed. Van Akin Burd (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 530. 5 John William Colenso (1814–83), Bishop of Natal, whose controversial The Pentateuch and the Book of Job (1862–79) led to a charge of heresy in 1863. 6 Alexander Scott (1805–66), professor of philosophy, grammar, and English literature at Owens College, Manchester was actively interested in women’s education. His Suggestions on Female Education: Two Introductory Lectures on English Literature and Moral Philosophy was published in 1849. Ruskin had worked with Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–72) in London’s Working Men’s College, of which Maurice has become the first principal in 1854. Maurice, encouraged by the ideas of his sister Mary Atkinson Maurice, a committed advocate of women’s education, founded Queen’s College,

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30

London, in 1848, to provide the means of a better education for governesses and women teachers. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Ch. 11), ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 78. The Winnington Letters, p. 640. Letter to Asenath Stevenson; My Dearest Dora: Letters to Dora Livesey, Her Family and Friends 1860–1900, ed. Olive Wilson (Kendal, 1984), p. 38. The Winnington Letters, p. 72. My Dearest Dora, p. 106; letter dated 5 February 1880. The title page gives 1866, but publication was brought forward to catch the Christmas market. I have developed this idea more fully in ‘The Ethics of the Dust: Ruskin’s Authorities’, Prose Studies, 12 (1989), 147–58. See also Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1998). See Pauline Adams, Somerville for Women: An Oxford College 1879–1993, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 9. 22.237; from The Eagle’s Nest (1872). Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Later Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 455. Adams, p. 24. See Nicholas Shrimpton, ‘Ruskin’s Visit’, The Brown Book (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford: April 2001), 24–34. No. 344 in the Catalogue of Ruskin’s Drawings (38.238). The picture is still in the possession of Somerville College, Oxford. 33.507; see also E.T. Cook, Studies in Ruskin (London: Allen, 1890), pp. 256–7. 33.lvi. After much controversy, on 10 March 1885 the university voted funds to permit the opening of a new physiology laboratory to be presided over by Sir John Burdon-Sanderson, who held a licence to practise vivisection. Ruskin resigned on 22 March. 33.532; quoted in Robert Hewison, Ruskin and Oxford: The Art of Education (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 41. Quoted by kind permission of the Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford. Ibid. Letter dated 10 February 1887; quoted by kind permission of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Letter dated 24 March 1887; quoted by kind permission of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Lizzie Allen Harker, ‘Ruskin and Girlhood: Some Happy Reminiscences’, Scribner’s Magazine (November 1906), 561–72; 561. Margaret Fletcher, O, Call Back Yesterday (Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1939), p. 41. Margaret Fletcher went on to become the founder of the Catholic Women’s League. Tim Hilton, review of John Ruskin and Rose la Touche: Her Unpublished Diaries of 1861 and 1867 in London Review of Books, 6 (3 April 1980), 15–16. See Paul Sawyer, ‘Ruskin and the Matriarchal Logos’, in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thaïs E. Morgan (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 129–42, and


31 32

33 34 35

36

Jennifer M. Lloyd, ‘Raising Lilies: Ruskin and Women’, The Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995), 325–50, for recent reconsiderations of this question. Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field, ed. T. and D.C. Sturge Moore (London: Murray, 1933), p. 145; letter dated January 1876. Works and Days; letter dated January 1876. Particularly enthusiastic about the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (‘Mrs. Browning’s Aurora Leigh is, as far as I know, the greatest poem which the century has produced in any language,’ 15.227), Ruskin also admired the work of Jean Ingelow and Adelaide Procter. Works and Days, p. 148. Works and Days, p. 155; letter dated Christmas 1877. An example of ways in which this has been seen as a weakness is to be found in David Sonstroem, ‘John Ruskin and the Nature of Manliness’, Victorian Newsletter, 40 (1971), 14–17. On 9 December 1884; see 34.643.

8 ‘Any Day that You’re a Good Boy’: Ruskin’s Patronage, Rossetti’s Expectations Joseph Bristow

On Monday, 24 April 1854, the aspiring painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti travelled south of the Thames to meet the prominent art critic, John Ruskin, ten years Rossetti’s senior, at Denmark Hill for lunch. By any account this cordial rendezvous at Ruskin’s parental home inaugurated what, for some years, promised to flourish into an amicable relationship that would reward both parties, if in markedly different ways. Rossetti, the twenty-five-year-old son of a retired professor of Italian literature, arrived with a small gift: a copy of his friend William Allingham’s Day and Night Songs, the second book by an emergent poet who had enjoyed some acclaim in the press. This volume of undemanding poetry – ‘sweet and simple rather than broad and grand’, as the Athenaeum put it1 – was a modest token of respect from a man of slender means to an established individual. Ruskin, as Rossetti well understood, was not only an increasingly celebrated critic but also a connoisseur whose resources enabled him to buy what he deemed best – as well as affordable – in nineteenth-century painting. The springtime luncheon draws into focus the subject of this chapter: the inequalities of age and affluence that in large part created the unpropitious conditions that would eventually vitiate the precarious male friendship that was about to begin between the two men. Plainly, their encounter was based on mutual attraction of some kind. But what exactly were the emotional and material investments that Ruskin and Rossetti were willing to make in each other? The circumstances surrounding this meeting – which involved appreciating some Turner drawings and reading Day and Night Songs aloud – certainly show that 137

138 Ruskin’s Patronage, Rossetti’s Expectations

the collector and the painter wished to share more than just their respective enthusiasms for Turner’s valuable art and Allingham’s light poetry. The lunchtime conversation at Denmark Hill, after all, took place between a prosperous patron and a near-impoverished artist. Two years before, Ruskin had commissioned an imposing portrait of himself from the gifted John Everett Millais, whose brilliance as a colourist and draughtsman distinguished him among Rossetti’s closest contemporaries. Now, in the spring of 1854, Rossetti doubtless held out expectations that Ruskin’s generous invitation implied that patronage would extend to him as well. As a consequence, at this early stage of their acquaintance both men had good reason not to confront the decisive differences of cultural influence and financial power that assuredly lay between them. The meeting at Denmark Hill, however, did not culminate in a business transaction. Nor, from the evidence available, did their discussion allude to the troubling fact that a year before this lunch Ruskin – if only indirectly – had touched on Rossetti’s sensitivities. In early 1853 Francis MacCracken (the son of a Belfast businessman) bought Rossetti’s accomplished oil Ecce Ancilla Domini! (‘Behold the Handmaid of the Lord!’). The purchase, however, was far from straightforward. It remained subject to negotiations that irritated Rossetti. From what we can tell, the young painter continued to be frustrated that this work – which he gently cursed as his ‘blessed white eye-sore’2 – had languished in his studio ever since its original completion in March 1850. MacCracken, whom Rossetti rudely condemned as ‘an Irish maniac’,3 wanted to know on good authority if this stunningly luminous work was worth the £50 that he paid for it. Rossetti revealed to a friend that MacCracken ‘afterwards sent said white daub to Ruskin, to whom he had wanted me to submit it as a preliminary to the purchase, which I sternly refused’.4 Obviously, Rossetti felt piqued that a third party – a critic no less – should establish the value of the oil on which he laboured hard. Already, it would seem, Rossetti apprehended Ruskin as an intrusive presence – since the critic’s opinions, if they extended too far, threatened to make or break the young painter’s reputation. These events, dating from early 1853, no doubt ensured that the lunch had to be conducted on both sides with a certain amount of decorum. There is no question that Ruskin was gathering serious interest in Rossetti’s art. But he would seem to have arranged this meal at Denmark Hill not just with an eye on clinching a deal for the ink drawings and watercolours – works less expensive than oils – which had begun to take his fancy. In a somewhat beguiling latter dated 2 May 1854, Ruskin

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begins by offering his condolences to Rossetti, who lost his father on 26 April. This item of correspondence, however, amounted to far more than an expression of grief. ‘I should be sincerely obliged to you’, Ruskin remarked in a trusting tone, ‘if you would sometimes write to me … telling me how you are, and what you are doing and thinking of … I should deem it a great privilege if you would sometimes allow me to have fellowship in your thoughts and sympathy with your purposes’ (36.166). This carefully articulated letter focuses on the word ‘sympathy’ in order to assure Rossetti that Ruskin has every concern for the young artist’s peace of mind at such a difficult time. The very idea that Rossetti might confide his ‘thoughts’ and ‘purposes’ would, as Ruskin says, amount to a ‘privilege’. Whether such ‘thoughts’ and ‘purposes’ were supposed to be solely of a creative nature remains an open question in light of the fellowship that Ruskin hereafter sought to affirm with Rossetti. My discussion shows that in some respects Ruskin wished to lay ground on which he could build a type of male homosocial intimacy – a sort of brotherhood, as it were – that would enable the free exchange of sympathies in ways that promised to enrich the emotional lives of both the older critic and the younger artist. But, as Ruskin’s behaviour would reveal, such fellowship remained infeasible because it could not be reconciled with the financial ties and familial fantasies that he wove – as tightly as he could – around the painter. By contrast, Rossetti’s approach to consolidating fellowship involved securing fraternal bonds of affection from which Ruskin – both structurally and emotionally – remained aloof. *** The events that quickly followed lunch at Denmark Hill show how hard it would be for Ruskin and Rossetti to exchange their ‘thoughts’ and ‘purposes’ without encumbrance, since even the smallest gift remained attached to obligations that neither man could ultimately fulfil. The volume of poetry that Rossetti presented at Denmark Hill is a case in point, since it hardly provided Ruskin with what he really wanted from the comparatively young painter. This little book by Allingham – who benefited from an introduction to Rossetti’s circle in 1850 – revealed that Rossetti was generously trying to advance the work of a budding poet who had recently abandoned his day job in order to devote himself to literary labour. Early in 1854 Rossetti, who often promoted the work of his cherished peers, offered to create a design of twining ivy for the cover of Day and Night Songs. The design, significantly enough,


remained unused. Rossetti would have to wait two years before one of the few admirers of his works declared that the drawing he prepared to accompany Allingham’s ‘The Maids of Elfen-Mere’ was ‘the most beautiful … illustration … ever seen’.5 In 1854, then, Rossetti had not even succeeded in gracing the cover of the volume by his still far from wellknown friend. By the time he encountered Ruskin, Rossetti – having endured six years of hardship after his sporadic attendance at the Royal Academy schools – remained committed to making his mark as a painter adept in both oils and watercolours. But, despite MacCracken’s interest, his career had not advanced very far. His only claim to fame lay in his inspired pronouncement, dating from 1848, that he and his art-school associates should identify themselves as a ‘Brotherhood’ whose shared aims would contest the Academy’s precepts about artistic practice inherited from Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses (1769–90). This ‘Brotherhood’ formalized Rossetti’s connections with the six other men who proudly advertised – if not unwittingly misrepresented – their aesthetic aims as ‘Pre-Raphaelite’. The stress on fraternal bonds accentuated their youthful spirit of co-operation. But the broader implications of the word ‘Brotherhood’ have misled some modern scholars. Although in 1905 William Holman Hunt recalled that Rossetti ‘overul[ed] the objection’ that the painters’ identity as a Brotherhood ‘savoured of clericalism’,6 Herbert Sussman readily compares their ‘project as the revival of a religious, moralized art freed from commercial considerations’.7 Even if critics choose to dismiss Hunt’s account, it remains hard to maintain Sussman’s emphasis on how the Pre-Raphaelites comprised a secular version of the religious monasticism celebrated in influential mid-century works such as Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843). To be sure, they might be considered to have fashioned ‘a new religion of art’.8 But from the start of their five-year association (their regular ‘social intercourse’ terminated in early 1853),9 the Brotherhood sought support not only from one another but also from patrons – such as Ruskin – whose funds would sustain their fraternal project. Moreover, their fraternizing enabled them to promote what might be called a brand identity: the signature ‘P.R.B.’ that for a while appeared on canvases and panels that attracted notice because their methods were distinctive, if not shocking, for the time. If the idea of the painters’ ‘Brotherhood’ demands certain latitude of interpretation, then the same is true of their choice of the epithet ‘PreRaphaelite’. Elizabeth Prettejohn points out that there has always been debate about the accuracy of the term to describe work by seven different

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artists whose project was hardly confined to making their pictures resemble the seemingly primitive art produced before 1500 – that is, prior to Raphael. ‘Instead’, Prettejohn contends, the Pre-Raphaelites ‘brought the primitive into shocking friction with the illusionistic sophistication and technical refinement ordinarily expected of painting in the modernised and industrialised world of Victorian England.’10 Rossetti certainly made a bid for recognition, exhibiting his first completed painting – The Girlhood of Mary Virgin – at the Free Exhibition in March 1849. But while this was the inaugural painting to bear the initials ‘P.R.B.’, it would be left to Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite colleagues to draw attention to their loosely defined project. Two of the Brotherhood’s most gifted members – Hunt and Millais – stirred up controversy at the Royal Academy in 1850. Disreputably, Charles Dickens could not fathom ‘the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting’ in P.R.B. art – so painful was its realism.11 For a number of years, Dickens’s antipathy characterized a widespread critical view of the P.R.B.’s formidable innovations. But there were one or two dissenting voices. Among the visitors who looked favourably on the unconventional nature of Pre-Raphaelite painting at the Royal Academy was Ruskin. No sooner had The Times in 1851 criticized the Pre-Raphaelites’ ‘cramped style, false perspective, and crude colour of remote antiquity’12 than Ruskin wrote to the editor expressing his ‘regret’ at the journalist’s ‘scornful as well as severe’ tone (12.319). While stating that he could not ‘compliment’ the Brotherhood ‘on common sense in the choice of nom de guerre’, he nonetheless refuted the idea put forth earlier in The Times that these painters ‘pretend[ed] in any way to imitate antique painting as such’ (12.321). In Ruskin’s eyes, the P.R.B. returned to a moment before 1500 only in so far as they were attempting to ‘draw either what they see, or what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene they desire to represent, irrespective of any conventional rule of picture-making’ (12.322). At this stage, however, Rossetti did not form any part of Ruskin’s knowledge of the P.R.B. In fact, it would take until the end of 1852 before Ruskin saw any of the largely unnoticed Rossetti’s watercolours, just as it would take a further twenty-three months before Ruskin’s interest in Rossetti had grown enough for him to invite the young painter to lunch. Having told Rossetti that ‘some’ of Allingham’s volume was ‘heavenly’,13 Ruskin – by way of exchange – offered the artist all of the works that he had published. But there were two significant provisos attached to Ruskin’s substantial gift of books. In the letter in which he expressed his desire for fellowship


with Rossetti, Ruskin not only made his generous offer of ‘all’ that he had ‘written’.14 He also asked the painter for another item in return: ‘a little drawing of yours in exchange – as Glaucus gave his golden arms for Diomed’s brazen ones’. The allusion to Homer’s Iliad is revealing: although Glaucus and Diomedes at first assumed they were enemies during the Trojan Wars, they soon learned that their grandfathers were bound by ties of hospitality – hence their exchange of arms. Yet, as Ruskin knew, the legend featured a materially one-sided transaction: Glaucus’s ‘golden’ arms were worth a hundred oxen, while Diomedes’s arms of bronze equalled only nine. Ruskin, aware that his request for a ‘little drawing’ might appear manipulative, invoked this classical episode in an attempt to forestall any possible misunderstanding on Rossetti’s part about the economic inequality between them – since Ruskin hoped that Rossetti would be flattered by pretending to play Glaucus in this game. In fact, Ruskin sought to correct the balance further by making a rather different solicitation. He wished to obtain not just the liberal gift of a ‘little drawing’ but something emphatically ‘besides’: ‘a drawing for me as for Mr. [George Price] Boyce, for fifteen guineas’. Would Glaucus oblige? Ruskin’s wish for Homeric fellowship, however, could not be more different from the co-operative male bonds assumed by the P.R.B. Here the painter could do little other than recognize that he was destined to act as Diomedes to the richer bearer of arms. By this juncture, as Rossetti recognized, Ruskin’s letter formed part of a procedure to obtain the young painter’s works that had been gathering pace for almost a month. Boyce, a landscapist who acquired some of Rossetti’s art, recalled that on 21 April Ruskin and his father visited his studio: ‘They admired Rossetti’s drawings much.’15 Boyce records that during the previous week Rossetti reported that Ruskin ‘had been to [Rossetti’s] studio and complimented him enthusiastically’. The follow-up visit laid the ground for the small commission that Ruskin made on 2 May when he hoped that the two men – the one a buyer, the other a seller – could be brothers in arms. But, as have seen from his tense negotiations with the ‘maniac’ MacCracken, Rossetti had already found Ruskin difficult to face up to. Moreover, in the months preceding Ruskin’s invitation to lunch there was another reason why Rossetti wanted to turn his gaze away from the interfering critic. Ruskin, he felt, had started to pay him the attention he deserved somewhat too late in the day. Even after learning about Ruskin’s approbation of his drawings from Dante (which appeared in the exhibition at Pall Mall during late 1852), Rossetti despised the

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critic’s apparent presumptuousness. From what Rossetti could tell, Ruskin seemed excited by his art. Such praise, Rossetti learned, appeared in a letter that the critic penned to MacCracken. ‘It now seems’, Rossetti wrote, ‘Ruskin had never seen any work of mine before, though he never thought it necessary to say this in writing about the PRB’.16 Ruskin’s 1851 pamphlet, which followed his two justifications of the Brotherhood in the The Times, honoured Millais as ‘the second Joseph Mallord William Turner’ and reiterated his defence of Hunt’s unorthodox use of perspective (12.360, 357). Rossetti’s letter to Woolner is little short of cynical: since, he maintains, Ruskin ‘is only half informed about art, anything he says in favour of one’s work is of course sure to prove invaluable in a professional way’.17 Later in the year, however, Rossetti realized that he might look more forgivingly on the ‘invaluable’ Ruskin and start to express gratitude for the older man’s handsome gift of books. Little wonder that, six weeks after lunching with the well-known critic, Rossetti felt optimistic enough to disclose to his one-time tutor – the painter Ford Madox Brown – that ‘Ruskin is beginning to bear fruit’.18 The ‘fruit’, though, would be borne with difficulty, since this memorable image implied more than Rossetti’s most obvious meaning – namely, money. It was not just that Rossetti recognized that Ruskin’s favour – not to say his contacts – could foster further commissions from well-heeled patrons. More strikingly, Rossetti’s view of Ruskin’s ‘fruit’ sits oddly with the misfortune that would in some respects humiliate the older critic not long after his lunch with the younger painter. On Tuesday, 25 April 1854, Ruskin’s spouse Effie fled her husband of six years, returning her wedding ring, house-keys, and pocketbook. On the evening after she left, legal representatives arrived at Denmark Hill alleging that the marriage was null and void. Within days the news of Effie’s desertion spread across town. ‘That Ruskin business’, Rossetti remarked on May 17, ‘is a most lamentable affair’.19 The following week doctors would declare that they had proved Effie remained a virgin. On July 15, the Commissary Court of Surrey formally annulled the marriage, declaring ‘impotency’ as the cause. Rossetti looked on Ruskin as a profitable resource – not just because of the amount of ‘tin’ (as he called it) that an exploitable patron might hand out. Rossetti rightly comprehended that Ruskin’s critical opinion had a market value that could enable him to realize his dream of extending his own artistic project to the woman he loved. Rossetti could see that Ruskin might make his most beloved pupil and model – the twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Siddall – into a painter of independent


means. In 1855 Rossetti told Allingham: ‘Ruskin’s praise is beginning to bear fruit already’.20 On this occasion, the ‘fruit’ refers to the positive response that Ruskin made when Rossetti showed him ‘Miss Siddal’s designs’ taken from Alfred Tennyson’s early poetry. Tennyson and his spouse, it seems, were so impressed by Ruskin’s estimation of these drawings that Emily Tennyson wrote immediately to the publisher Edward Moxon, urging him to include Siddall in the illustrated edition of her husband’s works, which Moxon would print – in all its opulence – in 1857.21 Deprived of a spouse by a former protégé, Ruskin assumed a distinctly paternal role by providing sums that would enable his new charge to achieve happiness in marriage. For some months Ruskin laboured under the illusion that his generous sponsorship of Siddall would provide Rossetti with the funds needed to wed the prized pupil whom his new friend could not otherwise betroth. Thus Ruskin granted a substantial pension of £150 to Siddall. Ruskin did not see that Rossetti’s present inability or unwillingness to marry Siddall was not entirely the result of financial distress. There were other reasons – ones partly connected with Rossetti’s sexual apprehensions and Siddall’s infirm health – which would long delay their union. At the same time, Ruskin’s munificence did not solely stem from his belief that he could make an honest man of Rossetti. Ruskin also embarked on a rather elaborate project in which his patronage took on more than an air of the paterfamilias. In fact, Ruskin – through his increasingly paternalistic transactions with Rossetti – tried to extend his reach into almost every area of the painter’s life. *** After commissioning a drawing from Rossetti, Ruskin quickly disposed of the game of Glaucus and Diomedes in order to indulge in a different type of male–male relationship well known from the classics: Socrates’s teaching to such acolytes as Alcibiades. But, even then, the curmudgeonly tone of much of Ruskin’s correspondence with the painter hardly formed part of an instructive dialogue. Initially, Ruskin felt at liberty to impart his views to Rossetti, not only in the elements of drawing but also in the appreciation of poetry. In this regard, a good example can be found in Ruskin’s view of a new English translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy: ‘I think Mr. [C.B.] Cayley’ – a former pupil of Rossetti’s father – ‘has failed simply by endeavouring the impossible’ (36.189). The impossibility for Ruskin lay in what he believed was Cayley’s misguided attempt to translate Dante’s poetry ‘in rhyme’, since the ‘translator

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must sacrifice all grace and flow to the rhyme’. After elaborating his preference for H.F. Cary’s respected 1814 blank-verse translation of Dante’s poem, Ruskin confides: ‘I write this for you only, because I think your taste is as yet unformed in verse, and, so that the thought be good, you have not enough studied modes of expression.’ It is surely significant that Rossetti – fluent in Italian, the son of a well-known Dante scholar, and himself a translator of early-Italian poetry – refused to baulk at Ruskin’s advice. But why should this be the case? By way of an answer Elizabeth Helsinger, following Tim Hilton, has gone so far as to claim that Rossetti ‘responded, was flattered, and perhaps moved, too, by the unexpected desire for a closer friendship on Ruskin’s part’.22 Both of these scholars substantiate this opinion by reminding us that on 3 May 1855 Rossetti informed his aunt, Charlotte Polidori: ‘He is the best friend I ever had out of my own family’.23 It needs to be borne in mind, however, that here the young painter had good reason to manifest enthusiasm for the trust that Ruskin placed in him. In this particular communication, Rossetti wants to make sure that he gives no offence to the friendship – a bond expressed in the form of cheques running into fairly large sums – that his aunt generously bestowed on her nephew. The broader context of this letter makes it plain that Rossetti associates friendship with practical considerations that involved strengthening not only his career but also the artistic ambitions of the woman he had come – if with some difficulty – to love. During their earliest acquaintance, Siddall had served as his distinctive model in more than half a dozen finished paintings, two of which – Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah and La Belle Dame sans Merci – Ruskin bought in 1855. Siddall, of course, had, at this point, become much more than a stunning face that characterized Rossetti’s portraiture. In the same year, Ruskin offered to buy all of Siddall’s available work for £30. Thus Rossetti declared with disarming honesty to his aunt: ‘[Ruskin] is likely also to be of great use to me personally (and the use to her is also use to me), and I am doing two or three water-colours for him’.24 In other words, the friendship – between buyer and seller – depended on useful sums in return for satisfactory goods. By the spring of 1855 Ruskin was working on a deal where he would purchase the artist’s drawings up to a fixed sum per annum. Just to assure the painter that the contract would be binding, Ruskin noted: ‘In case I should be run over, or anything else happen to me, I have written to my lawyer to-day, so that the plan we have arranged at present cannot be disturbed by any such accident’ (36.198). This, as Dianne Sachko


Macleod remarks, was an old-fashioned arrangement: ‘Motivated by a desire to control and guide artistic production, Ruskin did not essentially differ from the aristocratic patron’, one based on ‘the patrician model of the protégé system’.25 But Rossetti was sufficiently self-possessed not to resent this ‘patrician’ style. On the contrary, the reliable sources of income from Ruskin were so appreciated that Rossetti remarked to Allingham: ‘I have no more valued friend than [Ruskin], and shall have much to say of him’.26 The friend – it must be remembered – enjoyed that status because the commissions helped pay the bills. *** Rossetti’s services, however, did not always come at the price of completing commissions, since the painter could direct Ruskin’s sponsorship towards brotherly ends that the paternalistic sponsor failed to predict. Six months after the lunch at Denmark Hill, their friendship – connected in Rossetti’s mind with drawing a regular income from his patron and associated in Ruskin’s eyes with obtaining art that adhered to his principles – also flourished in a forum where they could work in an all-male environment without pay. In early November 1854, Ruskin began lecturing on a weekly basis at the Working Men’s College, which F.D. Maurice – leading proponent of Christian Socialism – founded earlier that year. Soon Rossetti felt ‘infected’ by Ruskin’s ‘enthusiasm’ for the College and conducted a ‘confab’ with his patron about their ‘plans for teaching’.27 The College provided Ruskin with just the kind of venue where he could propagate his critical views. Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (1853), from the second volume of The Stones of Venice, was issued as a pamphlet for the largely working-class audience that absorbed his teaching. For Rossetti, however, the College offered a different prospect. He generously gave up his time until 1857, and again in 1861. Some of students recall the extraordinary verve with which he shared the unconventional skills – notably as a colourist – that he indubitably possessed.28 Such was his impact that at the end of 1862 a former pupil of the College, Walter Knewstub, worked as his assistant. Knewstub abandoned his education at the Academy Schools in order to learn from Rossetti. The Working Men’s College counts among a sequence of voluntary brotherhoods – so to speak – in which Rossetti could enjoy a measure of independence and respect. Not long after the teaching began at Red Lion Square, Ruskin recognized that Rossetti was beginning to evince an altogether too independent

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spirit. The naturally sociable painter started to engage in acts of insubordination that would – to say the least – agitate his paymaster. In this regard, one episode marks a turning point in their dealings over work and pay. Several months after Rossetti stated that ‘[Ruskin] is likely also to be of great use to me personally’, he received an unexpected request that showed how Ruskin wished to make specific use of him. ‘If I were to find funds,’ Ruskin wrote, ‘could you be ready on Wednesday morning to take a run into Wales, and make me a sketch of some rocks in the bed of a stream, with trees above, mountain ashes, and so on, scarlet in autumn tints’ (36.225). Ruskin wanted Rossetti to travel to Pont-yMonach, near Aberystwyth, whose ‘bolder scenery’ Ruskin first glimpsed on his journey through Wales in 1832 (35.95). But Ruskin’s desire for these sketches was not solely connected with a wish to revisit a fondly remembered place. Certain elements in Ruskin’s request – notably the ‘rocks in the bed of a stream’ – have an implicit bearing on an earlier painting that he commissioned from a different artist. The work in question is Millais’s magnificent full-length portrait featuring a rather fresh-faced Ruskin – in black frock coat and bow-tie – standing atop the striated rocks of a stream at Glenfinlas in the Trossachs. In July 1853, when he began this portrait, Millais encountered unaccustomed challenges, since he had not yet learned the skills that a landscapist would need in order to perfect the representation of rocks and water. While Ruskin proved perceptive about the demanding nature of this work, he remained so detached from the some of his companions that he had not the slightest inkling that Effie and Millais – two members in Ruskin’s fairly large party – would become intimate.29 After Effie left Ruskin for good, Millais drew the baffled conclusion that his patron appeared to have no suspicion that she had fallen in love with the painter during their sojourn in Scotland. By the summer of that year, Millais informed Effie’s mother that Ruskin had written to him, stating that he would complete the portrait of Ruskin when the critic returned from the Continent.30 Even though Millais had come to hate the subject of the portrait, he was reluctant to abandon the work because he still derived ‘one great satisfaction’ from it: ‘I am confident that no living man could do a better.’ Ruskin, too, expressed his ‘wonderment’ at the work on its completion at the end of 1854.31 Puzzled that his ‘wonderment’ did not prompt Millais’s instant gratitude, Ruskin petitioned him: ‘Why don’t you answer my letter – it is tiresome of you – and makes me uneasy.’32 On 18 December 1854, Millais explained: ‘I concluded that after finishing your portrait, you yourself would have seen the necessity of abstaining from further intercourse.’33 Some nastiness


ensued, with Ruskin claiming that Millais had been plotting against him for some time. Certainly, Ruskin could not have foreseen that his patronage would create the conditions where he would lose control not only of a painter but also his spouse. The marriage of Effie and Millais in the summer of 1855 focused attention on how Ruskin’s original determination to promote the P.R.B. would ironically seal its fate. The fraternal ties that once existed between Millais and Rossetti were now loosened forever. According to Brown, the following year Millais complained that ‘Rossetti was always speaking of Ruskin as though he was a saint of the callender [sic] & not showing one word of sympathy for [Millais’s] wife.’34 Even though Rossetti – once he learned from Brown of Millais’s ‘soreness’ – ‘seemed penitent’,35 his willingness to reap an income from Ruskin meant that the first phase of the P.R.B. had definitely come to an end. But this is not to say that Rossetti had terminated his broader interest in the kinds of fraternizing that gave rise to the P.R.B. It was simply that Rossetti could not afford, both professionally and monetarily, to turn his back on Ruskin in favour of professing loyalty to the increasingly respected and successful Millais. In light of the marriage between Millais and Effie, one can begin to speculate on how and why Ruskin wished to exert his attention on the seemingly manipulable Rossetti. But, even then, Ruskin was surely too sanguine in his hope that Rossetti would succeed as a landscapist. Where Millais assuredly possessed the gifts to reproduce the glories of Glenfinlas, Rossetti was hardly capable of transforming overnight into a painter who could capture the beauty of Wales. Rossetti’s awareness of his unsuitability for the task partly explains why he asked Ruskin to redirect the funds towards a proposed journey to Paris. But there were other, more decisive reasons for Rossetti’s request which related to his patron’s increasing absorption in Siddall, the woman whom the painter – as Ruskin now perceived – proved reluctant to marry. Having sought to bring them together as man and wife, Ruskin – perhaps in response to Effie and Millais’s wedding – had by this time managed to set them apart. It would seem that somewhat earlier Ruskin arranged for Siddall to visit Paris in order to make contact with the expatriate poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This special appointment contributed to Ruskin’s plan to cultivate Siddall’s talent. Undoubtedly, at this juncture, Ruskin’s determination to improve Siddall’s cultural standing in some ways rivalled Rossetti’s successful attempts to develop her artistic skills. To begin with, Ruskin nicknamed her ‘Ida’, the ‘strange Poet-princess’ whose ‘grand/Imaginations’ inspire the exclusively

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female academy in Tennyson’s The Princess (1847).36 To be sure, ‘Ida’ was an appropriate name in so far as it ranked her among the geniuses ‘little and big’ – including Millais, Rossetti, Turner, and the painter G.F. Watts – whom Ruskin had come to know.37 But, in many respects, the term was an indulgence. Ruskin, after all, believed that ‘Ida’ – like Rossetti – would benefit from a little schooling on his part. At first glance, Ruskin’s considerable investments in ‘Ida’ look benign. They extended, at some expense, to helping Siddall recover her mental and physical health. He arranged for ‘Ida’ to be put into the care of his friend Henry Acland – the famous physician based at Oxford – who produced the following diagnosis of her fragile state: ‘mental power long pent up and lately overtaxed’.38 But the Acland household, where Siddall stayed for a while, could not pacify her. Thus Ruskin put an alternative plan in place: a seven-month rest cure at Nice in the south of France. Undoubtedly, Ruskin believed that Rossetti would benefit from her absence, since the volatile ‘Ida’ would not distract the painter from his commissions. Not surprisingly, Ruskin felt irritated at Rossetti’s disinclination to do his bidding near Aberystwyth. ‘You are a very odd creature,’ he complained to Rossetti. ‘I said I would find funds for you to go into Wales to draw something I wanted. I never said I would for you to go to Paris, to disturb yourself and other people, and I won’t.’39 Returning to the letter the next day, he tried to bite his tongue: ‘I don’t say you do wrong.’ But he could not stop himself from stating categorically: ‘you don’t seem to know what is wrong.’ ‘I can’t’, he protested like an angry parent, ‘have you going to Paris, nor going near Ida, till you have finished those drawings, and Miss Heaton’s too … [T]he less you excite Ida the better.’ The pressure on the painter to do as he was told – not least because Ruskin had encouraged the patronage of a recent acolyte, Ellen Heaton – could not have been greater. Rossetti, however, would not be held back. Rossetti’s act of disobedience enabled him to reveal to one observer how ‘foolishly fond’ he was of Siddall.40 During his ten-day stay, he enjoyed attending the Exposition Universelle. More important, Rossetti relished one event in particular: his visit to Robert Browning, to whom – some eight years earlier – he declared himself ‘an enthusiastic admirer’ of the poet’s works.41 The affable Browning signed the painter’s copies of Men and Women (1855). In every respect, Rossetti’s devotion to Browning could not be a surer sign of his maturing independence from Ruskin. In the month before he went to Paris, Rossetti completed – entirely for his own satisfaction – a fine watercolour portrait of the author of Men and Women that subsequently took pride of place above his mantelpiece. By late


November 1855 he thought he might ‘paint [Browning] in oil’ – a more time-consuming task.42 Meanwhile, the original purpose of the visit to Paris – namely, Ruskin’s wish to introduce Siddall to the Brownings – looked meaningless. As Rossetti told Allingham, Browning ‘only met her once for a few minutes: she being very unwell and averse to going anywhere’.43 At the time, ‘Mrs B[rowning] was forbidden to go out’, presumably owing to ill health. Thus Siddall failed to meet the woman who was one of the most sought-after female authors of her time. One woman, however, who enjoyed excellent connections – including Barrett Browning – was Ellen Heaton. Having inherited a substantial fortune in 1852, Heaton turned to Ruskin for guidance on the purchase of modern art. But quickly she too became enmeshed in his intricate scheme of patronage. At the start of 1855 he was responding to her enquiries about which Turner drawings she should buy. Within a month, he suggested that Heaton might consider soliciting a work from Siddall: ‘a poor girl – dying I am afraid – of ineffable genius’.44 Such a commission, he told Heaton, ‘may by encouragement & sympathy be charity’. Although she did not buy Siddall’s work, Heaton proved responsive to Ruskin’s principal recommendation: his desire for her to invest in Rossetti’s art. Ruskin had particular uses for the commissions he encouraged Heaton to make. Much later that year Ruskin wrote to Rossetti in the spirit of self-mockery: ‘I extend my notions of my deservings to such a conceited extent as to plead not only for myself but for my friends.’45 His stress on that word, however, proved ironic in at least two ways. First, it disclosed how firmly he understood that such friendship could never involve equals, since it meant treating the likes of Heaton not ‘as strangers, but as in a sort [his] clients and protégés’. Second, Ruskin confided his exploitative conceit to Rossetti in a spirit of fellowship – as if Rossetti should think it a ‘privilege’ to learn of his patron’s condescending attitude to Heaton. Worse still, Ruskin’s conceit ran so deep that he felt free to ‘trick’ her when it came to taking the pick of Rossetti’s best work. The boastful ‘trick’ that Ruskin played on Heaton showed how keenly he sensed that his superior patronage permitted him to defraud her. Ruskin’s duplicity – which certainly gnawed at his conscience – focused on Rossetti’s Beatrice Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast, Denies Him Her Salutation, a copy of a watercolour first completed in 1851. Even though Rossetti started preparing this particular work for Heaton, for some reason she appears not to have remembered the commission. Once Ruskin determined that she ‘never heard of the “Beatrice”’ (26.228), he seized on the opportunity to take it for himself, since – as he confessed to

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Heaton – he wanted ‘to have one good drawing of [Rossetti’s] to show, this season’.46 Assuredly, Ruskin did his best to humour her by acknowledging that he ‘may be punished for playing’ such a ‘trick’. He wished, however, to strike a shabby deal: he offered Heaton one of his admittedly ‘imperfect’ commissions at a good price. Just in case Heaton might perceive that this was a poor bargain, Ruskin added that the drawing in question – Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah – was ‘only imperfect because Rachel does not sit easily – but stiffly, in a PreRaphaelite way – at the fountain[’]s edge.’47 Ruskin proposed to sell the watercolour to Heaton for twenty-five guineas – a slight loss, since he had paid thirty when, in fact, Rossetti had asked the lower price of twenty. He trusted that she would agree to this settlement, since he had already offered Heaton another watercolour – The Passover in the Holy Family: Gathering Bitter Herbs – which began as his commission but proved unsatisfactory when it deviated from the sketch that he wanted. Maybe Heaton proved wise to Ruskin’s wish to offload inferior commissions, since this equally ‘imperfect’ watercolour remained in Ruskin’s hands. Later, Ruskin demanded its reconstruction only to be appalled by the resulting ‘mess’ that Rossetti made of it (36.237). *** Ruskin signed off his complaint about The Passover, like most of his rather intimidating letters to Rossetti, with the words ‘Yours affectionately’. But his frequent outbursts, despite the confidences he wished to share, would ensure that the two men could hardly enjoy the homosocial fellowship – if not brotherhood – that Ruskin originally hoped to consummate. That privilege would be reserved for the American critic and editor Charles Eliot Norton, whose intense friendship with Ruskin began at Denmark Hill in 1855. Four years later Ruskin shared with Norton his despair of his loss of Evangelical faith, his political differences with Tory friends, and his alienation from ‘Rossetti and the PRB’ (who were ‘all gone crazy about the morte d’Arthur’, whose medievalism scarcely appealed to him).48 ‘[Y]ou’, he told Norton, ‘are almost the only friend I have left.’ Earlier in 1859, this camaraderie with Norton was such that the American critic banded together with Ruskin in a plan to solicit a portrait of the critic from Rossetti. But even with Norton’s fellowship, Ruskin did not comprehend that this commission – not least because of its poor timing – would turn out to be a mistake. The painter’s art was about to shift abruptly, in a direction that Ruskin had not foreseen. By December that year Ruskin visited the painter’s studio


hoping to find him busy with ‘a little drawing like [the portrait of] Browning’ that hung at Chatham Place.49 Instead, he found Rossetti immersed in ‘a grand finished delicate oil’ that the painter ‘spoke quite coolly of taking three or four weeks’ – a time-span that would involve ‘many sittings’.50 To make matters worse, the other work (a watercolour) that Rossetti prepared for Norton – the medievalized Before the Battle – struck Ruskin as ‘almost the worst thing he has ever done’. It would take four years, after much retouching at Ruskin’s persistent request, before this painting was in Norton’s hands. In the meantime, Rossetti laboured on the portrait in a medium that – in every sense – came at too high a price for Ruskin. In 1856 Ruskin reminded the painter – as if Rossetti might be ignorant of the fact – that that ‘in market, remember, oil fetches always about six or seven times as much as water-colour’ (36.228). But he nonetheless knew that oils would take Rossetti endless hours to complete. Thus he urged the painter to keep churning out small works at fairly modest prices. It is easy to grasp how this mode of production inhibited Rossetti from accomplishing more ambitious paintings. At the end of 1856 Rossetti resisted Ruskin’s emphatic demand that he should give a ‘final answer’ about his candidacy for the Old Watercolour Society (36.249). Contrary to Ruskin’s advice, Rossetti believed that such a Society would only impede his prospects, since – as he later informed the art dealer Gambart – he refused ‘to become ticketed as a water-colour painter wholly, or even chiefly’.51 Thus Rossetti’s art began to transform in medium, scale, style, and subject matter. Rossetti’s new fascination with medieval iconography formed one significant shift in this focus of attention. He spent the summer of 1857 contributing to the murals designed for the empty bays of the recently built Debating Hall of the Oxford Union. While the frescoes proved imperfect (they quickly began to flake from the walls), this exciting endeavour provided Rossetti with a rewarding form of fellowship amid a lively band of younger men, two of whom (Burne-Jones and Morris) stood in awe of him. Morris, who enjoyed a large private income, liberally funded what Rossetti later fondly recalled as the ‘jovial campaign’ that occupied an intensive summer’s work.52 This ‘campaign’ established bonds of fellowship that created the second phase of the movement that continued to be known as Pre-Raphaelitism. Moreover, by the late 1850s and early 1860s the shifts in Rossetti’s career were becoming so various that he could not keep pace with the steadily growing number of purchasers. Rossetti’s dawdling with the portrait of Ruskin was one instance. But the commissions made by the

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highly acquisitive Thomas E. Plint – the stockbroker who started collecting Rossetti’s work in 1858 – comprised another, more serious case. Plint’s commissions proved especially taxing because their delay eventually threatened a lawsuit. When Plint died unexpectedly in July 1861, his estate found that Rossetti had failed to deliver three paintings costing 680 guineas. Financially needy, Rossetti appealed to Ruskin to intervene on his behalf. Ever vigilant, Ruskin obliged. But he could not resist a reproachful joke that showed how much he had transformed from Rossetti’s paymaster into his would-be prison-keeper: ‘I hope somebody with soon throw you into prison. We will have the cell made nice, airy, cheery, and tidy, and you’ll get on with your work gloriously’ (36.378). There were other ways in which Rossetti could not afford to lose Ruskin’s aid. During the same month that Plint died the painter borrowed £100 from Ruskin in order to defray the cost of typesetting his volume of translations titled The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo d’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri. Towards the end of the year, Rossetti started working on a collection of original poems, some of which dated from the late 1840s. Earlier, in relation to this project, he sought Ruskin’s help in trying to persuade William Makepeace Thackeray to publish the monologue ‘Jenny’ in the recently founded Cornhill Magazine. Ruskin, however, would not act as Rossetti’s representative, since this fine poem – first drafted in 1847–8 – ‘would be understood but by few’.53 Besides, its subject matter – the hardly respectable story of a bookish young man visiting the rooms of a female prostitute – seemed ‘doubtful’. In these rapidly changing circumstances, the painter’s ambition to labour at lucrative oils would appear – albeit in a faltering way – to have been renewed with the portrait of Ruskin. Around this time Rossetti became absorbed in ‘doubtful’ subjects that would affront Ruskin. By 1859 he finished a commission for Boyce, the small-scale oil whose title – Bocca Baciata (‘The Mouth that Has Been Kissed’) – came from Boccaccio’s bawdy. Bocca Baciata marked Rossetti’s departure from his earlier images of the Virgin Mary, Beatrice, and medieval damsels by presenting an impressive likeness of the goldenhaired model Fanny Cornforth in the guise of a Renaissance courtesan drawn from Titian. Hereafter Ruskin would retract from Rossetti’s oils because their apparent indecency – in his view – grew out of all proportion. In all probability, Ruskin grew ‘doubtful’ of the works that followed Bocca Baciata because these paintings – featuring lush forms of femininity – betokened the fact that Rossetti, unlike his allegedly ‘impotent’ patron, experienced active male heterosexuality. The point became clear when Rossetti and Siddall married in May 1860. Their tie of


kinship would seem to have defied whatever affection Ruskin demanded from them. By October that year, Ruskin groaned: ‘I wish Lizzie and you liked me enough to – say – put on a dressing-gown and run in for a minute rather than not see me’ (36.342). Siddall relinquished her pension in 1857. Ruskin nonetheless held out one last hope that Rossetti might express the fellowship that seemed absent in 1860. In 1862, after Siddall died of a laudanum overdose, Ruskin asked if he might rent a room at Rossetti’s new home, Tudor House, at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The painter declined the proposal, choosing instead – if only briefly – to populate Tudor House with bohemian comrades, notably the unruly poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. To be sure, Ruskin would visit the painter at Chelsea. But some of his calls to Rossetti’s residence had unpleasant consequences. In June 1863, for instance, William Downey took a much-resented photograph of Ruskin for a carte de visite. ‘I don’t think it like me,’ Ruskin complained to Heaton.54 Its apparent ‘evil side’ forced him to forbid its reproduction. It appears, however, that Rossetti – even though he knew that Ruskin might not allow the publication of this image – let a copy slip into Heaton’s hands. When he learned of this deceit Ruskin wished to ‘scold’ Rossetti ‘for letting that photo[graph] get abroad’ (36.454).55 Even as a widower, Rossetti looked to Ruskin like a little prankster. *** Ruskin’s annoyance intensified because he could no longer countenance the turns that Rossetti’s art was taking at Tudor House. By June 1864, Rossetti told Charlotte Polidori: ‘I have quantities of commissions now’; ‘henceforward’, he declared, it was his intention ‘to do almost exclusively large works in oil’.56 Two months later Rossetti related to Brown that he had ‘lost infinite time looking for honeysuckles’ for his Venus Verticordia – a work that promised to be a ‘stunner’.57 This sizeable painting – c. 99 ⫻ 69 cm – enlarged the sensuality of Bocca Baciata in its representation of a bare-breasted model whose dilated eyes demand the adoration of an implicitly male viewer. In Rossetti’s vision of Venus as a ‘turner of hearts’ (whose meaning he misinterpreted),58 she holds an apple in the one hand and a dart in the other – to sweeten the lover’s taste and pierce his heart, respectively. But the sight of this nude (Rossetti’s first) made Ruskin’s wrath soar. Aghast, he took particular offence at the honeysuckle in the foreground: ‘those flowers … were wonderful to me, in their realism; awful – I can use no other word – in their coarseness’.59 The ‘coarseness’, however, encompassed not only

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the flowers but also Rossetti’s determination to ‘paint like Correggio’ – which, in Ruskin’s view, meant ‘painting badly’ (36.490). (Tacitly, the nudity was unmentionably ‘coarse’.) Yet Ruskin had a further point to elaborate about the manifest vulgarity of the Venus: the work, as he saw it, was the product of the disreputable company that Rossetti now kept. In this respect, Ruskin regretted the ‘entirely blameable introduction’ to the ‘blackguard’ Downey, whose presumed distribution of the ‘evil’ carte de visite was ‘worse than all the scandals or lies’ – like, no doubt, Effie’s desertion – that Ruskin ever endured. Although Rossetti’s reply is missing, in all probability he answered Ruskin’s hyperbole by suggesting that their friendship must grind to a halt. Rossetti, though, remained under an obligation to complete the overdue portrait of Ruskin for Norton. In the circumstances, it is not surprising that after several sittings at Tudor House the portrait hardly evoked ‘wonderment’: ‘the horriblest face I ever saw of a human being,’ Ruskin declared.60 Vexed, Ruskin passed the commission on to the altogether more companionable Burne-Jones. There were, however, plenty of works by Rossetti that would remain in Ruskin’s keep for many years, although rumours that reached the painter suggested that the patron might put some of them up for sale, including a portrait of Siddall. ‘Am I so mean’, Ruskin asked a suspicious Rossetti, ‘that I should sell Lizzie?’ (36.489).61 ‘I’ll give you her back’, Ruskin added, in a tone that sounded disciplinarian, ‘any day you’re a good boy.’ Having lost possession of his wife, Ruskin was only prepared – at least symbolically – to part with Rossetti’s on what were challenging terms. But the day had arrived when the ‘boy’ who had turned into such a sexually expressive artist could afford to have no further expectations of him. In the end, some twenty-five years after his luncheon at Denmark Hill, Rossetti wondered if he might rejoice in the news that Ruskin had been ‘hanged’.62

Notes 1 [Anonymous,] Review of William Allingham, Day and Night Songs and Peace and War: An Ode, Athenaeum, 29 April 1854, p. 518. 2 Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965–7), I, 124. 3 Ibid., I, 122. 4 Ibid., I, 133. 5 [Edward Burne-Jones,] Review of William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcombes, Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1 (1856), p. 60. 6 W[illiam] Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1905), I, 141.

156 Ruskin’s Patronage, Rossetti’s Expectations 7 Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 115. 8 Ibid., p. 141. 9 The P.R.B. Journal: William Michael Rossetti’s Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1849–1853, ed. William E. Fredeman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. 99. 10 Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate, 2000), p. 19. 11 [Charles Dickens,] Household Words, I (1850), p. 266. 12 The Times, 7 May 1851, p. 8. 13 Rossetti, Letters, I, 187. 14 36.166; further quotations from this letter appear on this page. 15 George Price Boyce, The Diaries of George Price Boyce, ed. Virginia Surtees ([1941] Norwich: Real World, 1980), p. 13; further quotation appears on this page. 16 Rossetti, Letters, I, 134. 17 Rossetti, Letters, I, 134. 18 Ibid., I, 201. 19 Ibid., I, 199. 20 Ibid., I, 245; further quotation on this page. Rossetti spelled Siddall’s last name as ‘Siddal’. 21 On 23 January 1855, Rossetti informed Allingham that Moxon had asked the painter ‘to do some of the blocks for new Tennyson’. ‘The artists already engaged’, he added, ‘are Millais, Hunt, Landseer, Stanfield, Maclise, Creswick, Mulready, and Horsley.’ Rossetti’s preferred list of ‘right names’ would be ‘Millais, Hunt, Madox Brown, Hughes, a certain Lady [Siddall], and myself’: Letters, I, 238. 22 Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Pre-Raphaelite Intimacy: Ruskin and Rossetti’, in Ruskin’s Artist’s: Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy, ed. Robert Hewison (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 98. See also Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819–1859 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 210. 23 Rossetti, Letters, I, 250. 24 Ibid., I, 250. 25 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 165. Macleod’s comment refers to Ruskin’s arrangement with Siddall but it can be extended to his dealing with Rossetti. 26 Rossetti, Letters, I, 257. 27 Ibid., I, 231. 28 Thomas Sulman, Good Words (1897), 550. See also J.P. Emslie ‘Art Teaching in the College in the Early Days II’, in The Working Men’s College, 1854–1904, ed. J.L. Davies (London:Macmillan, 1904), pp. 35–53 . Jan Marsh discusses these memoirs in Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), pp. 136–7. 29 Mary Lutyens, ed., Millais and the Ruskins (London: Murray, 1967), p. 121. 30 Ibid., p. 203. 31 Ibid., p. 247; further quotation appears on this page. 32 Ibid., p. 248. 33 Ibid.

Joseph Bristow 157 34 The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. Virginia Surtees (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 169. 35 Brown, entry for 20 April 1856, Diary, p. 170. 36 Alfred Tennyson, The Princess, ll.256–7, in The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols (Harlow: Longman, 1987). 37 J.B. Atlay, Sir Henry Wentworth Acland, Bart. K.C.B., F.R.S., Regius Professor of Medicine in the University of Oxford: A Memoir (London: Smith, Elder, 1903), pp. 225–8. 38 Ibid., p. 208. 39 36.226; further quotations are taken from this page. The editors of Ruskin’s Works speculate that 1855 is the date of this letter, which clearly comes from the autumn of that year. 40 Alexander Munro, ‘To William Bell Scott’ [November 1855], in William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, 2 vols ([1892] New York: AMS Press, 1970), II, 30. Scott dates the letter October but it is clearly from the following month. 41 Rossetti, Letters, I, 32. In this letter, Rossetti reveals that he has read Browning’s first, little-known volume, Pauline, which Browning published anonymously in 1833. 42 Ibid., I, l283. Rossetti did not complete a second portrait of Browning. 43 Ibid., I, 281; further quotation appears on this page. 44 Virginia Surtees, ed., Sublime & Instructive: Letters from John Ruskin to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Anna Blunden and Ellen Heaton (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 157; further quotation appears on this page. 45 26.228; further quotations appear on this page. 46 Sublime and Instructive, p. 168; further quotations appear on this page. 47 Ibid., p. 169. 48 Ruskin, ‘To Charles Eliot Norton’, 15 August 1859, The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, ed. John Lewis Bradley and Ian Ousby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 53; further quotation appears on this page. Tennyson’s Idylls of the Kings began publication in 1859. 49 The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, p. 54. 50 Ibid., p. 55; further quotation appears on this page. 51 Rossetti, Letters, II, 594. 52 Ibid., II, 406. 53 36.342; further quotation appears on this page. 54 Sublime and Instructive, p. 251. 55 On Downey’s photographs of Ruskin, see Helsinger, ‘Pre-Raphaelite Intimacy’, pp. 89–95. 56 Rossetti, Letters, I, 509. 57 Ibid., II, 516. 58 Jan Marsh, discussing the poem that Rossetti wrote in 1865 to accompany the painting, observes that the ‘title derives from DGR’s error in thinking the classical appellation “verticordia” means “turner of hearts” towards love when in fact it denotes a particular attribute of Venus impelling devotees towards virtue’ (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Writings, ed. Jan Marsh [London: Dent, 1999], p. 491). 59 36.401; further quotation appears on this page.

158 Ruskin’s Patronage, Rossetti’s Expectations 60 Ruskin, ‘To Charles Eliot Norton’, 10 October 1865, The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, p. 92. 61 It is not clear to which portrait of Siddall Ruskin is referring; he may mean Regina Cordium, which remained in his collection, or the two pencil and ink drawings that were completed in June 1854. 62 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence, ed. John Bryson and Jane Campbell Troxell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), p. 127.

9 Pantomime Truth and Gender Performance: John Ruskin on Theatre Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

John Ruskin writes about theatre with characteristically contradictory emotions, often revealing pronounced ambivalence toward staged performance. The tension appears throughout his career: the passages analysed in this essay span from Modern Painters IV, published in 1856, to Fors Clavigera, published 1871–84. Each time he uses the theatre to explore complex moral issues. His remarks generally focus on performance moments that blur boundaries, including divisions between races, species, and the categories of reality and fantasy, but most particularly the gender divide. For example, in Time and Tide, published in 1867, Ruskin criticizes several instances that both attract and disturb him: a crossed-dressed pantomime of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, a simian juggling act by a Japanese family, and a serpentine dance by a teenage girl. Ruskin’s intense reaction to each suggests a special concern for the effect of performance on identity. Current gender theorists such as Judith Butler1 have argued that far from being stable or anchored in biology, gender is constructed in part through reiterated performances of gendered acts. But just as performance helps to establish gender, also it inevitably helps to erase distinct gender categories. While Victorian performances threaten Ruskin’s already unstable pretence that genders are immutable,2 they also manifest his belief in a world burgeoning with metamorphic possibility. Despite his fiercely negative response to certain theatrical moments, Ruskin testifies to his love of the theatre repeatedly. He frequently attended performances of all kinds, including operas, ballets, drawing room comedies, French farces, productions of Shakespeare and of fairy 159

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tales, as well as pantomimes, circuses, puppet shows,3 minstrelsy,4 and other popular entertainment. His diaries indicate that he often saw as many as two or three shows a week. As a child every trip to a pantomime ‘was a matter of intense rapture’ (35.175), and as an old man, the theatre remained one of his few unsullied pleasures (34.669, 37.478).5 While a student at Oxford he heartily defended the theatre from an attack, claiming that such frivolous fun cannot convey moral instruction (1.xxxiv); but throughout his life, both moral purpose and sheer entertainment supplied adequate justification for the theatre. He records trying to cheer up the dyspeptic Carlyle with an invitation to some Drury Lane ‘fooling’,6 and as late as 1880 he still planned to write an essay on the importance of the theatre for moral and intellectual education (34.549). His public and private writings overflow with references to theatre and with often enthusiastic informal reviews of recent plays and performers.7 Nevertheless, no one has considered what the theatrical medium itself suggests to Ruskin, especially in terms of gender performance.8 Theatre historians and literary critics have already pointed out that the stage poses a paradox for the Victorians. On the one hand, the use of stereotypical characters, particularly in melodrama and in stock companies, reinforces accepted gender norms.9 On the other hand, all acting undermines the humanist notion of a core identity. According to Nina Auerbach, theatre for the Victorians ‘connotes not only lies, but a fluidity of character that decomposes the uniform integrity of the self’.10 Likewise for theatre historian Kerry Powell, ‘performance by its very nature endangered the Victorian belief in a stable identity, the true or “buried” self that lies for Matthew Arnold at the core of being’.11 The stage makes explicit the perfomativity of all identity, including gender, on stage and off. In Bodies that Matter, Butler argues that the categories of sex, male and female, are socially constructed though the repeated performance of gendered acts. Since, in her words, ‘there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time further formulation of that body’, even the most bizarre representations of bodies help to constitute or formulate them. For Butler, whatever is repeatedly represented can exist, or rather, already is. Construction of sex or gender is a ‘process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration’.12 No discourse reiterates fantastical bodily forms more elaborately than Victorian pantomime and other extravaganzas, with their superabundance of bizarre fairy-tale transformations, teeming with fabulous formulations of what bodies

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can become.13 With long runs of successful shows, with annual mounting of popular Christmas pantomimes that routinely cast a woman as Principal Boy and a man as the Dame, with continual productions of cross-dressed Shakespeare, Victorian theatre ritually reiterated notions of gender identity that fell outside Victorian social norms, helping to destabilize them. Theatre suggests that all of our identities are the result of reiterated performance. And since it also models in fiction what Butler calls ‘morphological possibilities’ unthought of otherwise,14 it provides a site for citation, an original to be imitated in ‘real’ life in Wildean fashion, to be portrayed again on stage in turn.15 When the performance overtly suggests the mutability of gender, race, or species, how much more disturbing for the Victorians, who worked hard to maintain these distinctions, despite mounting evidence undermining rigid demarcations. Ruskin in particular struggled between his yearning for Platonic eternal forms and his fundamental recognition that forms dissolve through evolution, as his vacillation about Darwin and the theory of natural selection demonstrates.16 Ruskin is continually fascinated with and repelled by examples of metamorphosis and hybridity, a pattern that many Victorian stage performances fit. Despite Ruskin’s frequent attendance at the theatre, his published Works contain only a few sustained responses to theatrical performance in general or to gender performance in particular. Before turning to Ruskin’s mid-career Time and Tide (1867), where the bulk of the most interesting gender references appear, I examine passages from two other texts, one earlier and one later, Modern Painters IV (1856) and Fors Clavigera Letter 39 (1873), where Ruskin explores his ideas about the social significance of theatre. Ruskin’s affection for a good show, his concern for its promotion of an ethical world, and his anxiety over the way performances blur important boundaries continue throughout his life. Perhaps Ruskin’s most well-known invocation of the theatre-actually an opera-comes in Modern Painters IV (1856), in the acclaimed chapter ‘Mountain Gloom’. While not about gender identity, this example (and the next from Fors Clavigera) establishes Ruskin’s attitudes toward the social utility of theatrical performance, and it displays his ambivalence towards the theatre. Here his discussion appears in one of many exhortations to his readers for a more economically just society.17 In this book about beauty in art and on earth, Ruskin often conjures pitiful contrasts between the splendour nature provides and the miserable social circumstances humans create from it. Here he first describes the hideously squalid living conditions of certain Swiss villagers, which he ironically


juxtaposes to the inexpressible natural loveliness surrounding them; he then contrasts the unhappy real situation of these Swiss people to their lighthearted depiction on the British stage. But Ruskin’s goal is not only to point out the irony of this contrast between real and play poverty, but also to urge action: If all the gold that has gone to paint the simulacra of the cottages, and to put new songs in the mouths of the simulacra of the peasants, had gone to brighten the existent cottages, and to put new songs in the mouths of the existent peasants, it might in the end, perhaps, have turned out better so, not only for the peasant, but for even the audience. For that form of the False Ideal has also its correspondent True Ideal … Night after night, the desire of such an ideal springs up in every idle human heart; and night after night, as far as idleness can, we work out this desire in costly lies. We paint the faded actress, build the lath landscape, feed our benevolence with fallacies of felicity, and satisfy our righteousness with poetry of justice. (6.390–91) Ruskin the theatre critic preaches the same message as Ruskin the art critic: good painting and acting depend upon creating a better world to depict. He would prefer his companions were ‘painting cheeks with health, rather than rouge’ (6.393). He goes so far as to detail the prices for mounting an elaborate production and calculates what good could be done with that specific sum in charitable effort, feeding whole Alpine valleys (6.391).18 Ruskin continues by urging less spectacle and more acting, smaller productions and better voices, less money and more quality (6.392). Though not a Puritan denouncing ungodly theatre, Ruskin rejects opiate entertainment that dulls and misdirects sensitivity to social problems.19 The theatrical experience seems so real that it allows the audience to feel as though they have acted benevolently, without actually helping anyone outside the theatre, once the show ends. But even more, his worry over theatricality as artifice stands out. The ‘faded actress’ symbolizes most palpably his concern, because she is the only human – indeed the only animate – example of falsity; Ruskin’s list of ‘lath landscape’, ‘fallacies of felicity’, and ‘poetry of justice’ in parallel with her makes the actress as fake as they are. The problem has suddenly shifted from money misspent to fear of feminine duplicity; in painting the faded actress we might pass her off as blooming. Her appearance, or rather her performance, as a younger or healthier woman troubles Ruskin: she embodies ‘costly lies’. As Auerbach argues, this is a typical


Victorian concern with actresses, who epitomize the age’s terror of deceptive women. Acting equals lying, just as painting equals prostitution.20 Another example of Ruskin’s use of a theatrical performance as an opportunity for the moral upbraiding of an unjust society comes in Letter 39 of Fors Clavigera (1874), Ruskin’s series of open letters to the ‘workmen and labourers of Great Britain’. Written almost twenty years after Modern Painters IV, long after Ruskin’s famous unconversion in 1858, the later text abandons the religious orthodoxy of the earlier, although its moral certainty remains. Also changed is Ruskin’s audience: not just the expensive book-buying and opera-going readers of Modern Painters, but also the working class. Here Ruskin does not charge dramatic production with siphoning funds from charity, nor does he revile it for falsely representing joy instead of sorrow. Instead, it is the fantasy Ruskin admires: he teasingly admits that he cannot tell the difference between pantomime and reality. He means his playfulness to emphasize the surreal quality of ugliness in London, where life should be as pretty as the theatrical representations of fairy tales that he describes: [D]uring the last three weeks, the greater part of my available leisure has been spent between Cinderella and Jack in the Box; with this curious result upon my mind, that the intermediate scenes of Archer Street and Prince Street, Soho, have become to me merely as one part of the drama, or pantomime, which I happen to have seen last; or, so far as the difference in the appearance of men and things may compel me to admit some kind of specific distinction, I begin to ask myself, Which is the reality, and which the pantomime? Nay, it appears to me not of much moment which we choose to call Reality. Both are equally real; and the only question is whether the cheerful state of things which the spectators, especially the youngest and wisest, entirely applaud and approve at Hengler’s and Drury Lane, must necessarily be interrupted always by the woeful interlude of the outside world. (28.52) By declaring the difference between Reality and Pantomime insignificant, Ruskin erases his indictment of the ‘fallacies of felicity’. Moreover, by making London life merely ‘part of the drama’, Ruskin turns theatre into the encompassing truth, while our so-called real lives are relegated to woeful interludes within the show. While the idea that we are all just acting our parts in life may sound familiar, this is not quite the same as saying ‘all the world’s a stage’. The kind of show Ruskin elevates to the greater reality is not Shakespeare, not Jaques’s cynical sequence of roles


that life requires. Instead, Ruskin champions pantomime, an extravagant transformation spectacle in which everything is possible. Recalling both Auerbach’s point about the fabulous metamorphoses abounding in Victorian pantomimes and Butler’s point about the way repeated performances develop new ‘morphological possibilities’, we can see the liberating advantage of a fairy-tale reality in which we can become anything. Ruskin’s longing for the make-believe world of the theatre transforms it from the False to the True Ideal he had pleaded for in Modern Painters. Far from failing in mimesis, theatre provides the ideal that the real should imitate. Ruskin describes the actors ‘all doing the most splendid feats of strength, and patience, and skill … [T]he pretty children [are] beautifully dressed, taught thoroughly how to behave, and how to dance, and how to sit still, and giving everybody delight that looks at them’ (28.51). In contrast, Ruskin complains that ‘the instant I come outside the door, I find all the children about the streets ill-dressed, and ill-taught, and illbehaved, and nobody cares to look at them’ (28.51–2). The stage children are still as unlike the children in the streets as the simulacra of peasants were unlike real peasants in Modern Painters; the message for the audience that they neglect their duty to the poor stands, but the ire against the falsehood of dramatic presentation is gone. Abandoning dreams of repainting the faded cheek of the actress with health, Ruskin views the cast as the acme of strength, skill, and exuberant youth.21 The audience can’t have enough, any more than I can, of the loving duet between Tom Tucker and little Bo Peep: they would make the dark fairy dance all night long in her amber light if they could; and yet contentedly return to what they call a necessary state of things outside, where their corn is reaped by machinery, and the only duets are between steam whistles … They still seem to have human ears and eyes, in the Theatre; to know there, for an hour or two, that golden light, and song, and human skill and grace, are better than smoke-blackness, and shrieks of iron and fire, and monstrous powers of constrained elements. (28.52) Ruskin echoes both Carlyle’s rejection of Victorian machinery and Dickens’s exaltation of Sleary’s Circus over Bounderby’s Coketown in Hard Times. As Ruskin idealizes Hengler’s circus and Drury Lane pantomimes, he suggests that only within the golden light of the theatre, performing the role of spectator, does the audience become fully


human. Outside they merely tend machines, or become machines, or worse. Although Ruskin begins by saying that he doesn’t know the difference between performance and reality, of course he does, and he prefers the performance. What all this adds up to is a remarkably complicated attitude toward the theatre, which operates simultaneously as opposites: on the one hand, as described in Modern Painters IV, theatre functions as a parasite entertainment blunting the potential philanthropy of its satiated bourgeois audience; one the other, as shown in Fors Clavigera, theatre offers an idealized world of art, beauty, and skill that contrasts with a blighted reality as well as models an alternative to it. Although the first example comes from an earlier book and the second from a later one, Ruskin does not grow from one position to the other; instead, he exhibits both attitudes – contradictory though they are – throughout his career.22 However, in both texts Ruskin subverts the distinction between life and performance. Ruskin’s rejection of the faded actress’s fallacious beauty and his embrace of pantomime reality are two sides of the same coin: anxious attraction to the hazy border between truth and illusion. These two examples, with their focus on the social impact of theatre, help to put into perspective the vehemence of Ruskin’s reaction to the boundary-blurring performances in Time and Tide. Appearing in 1867, it comes in the decade sandwiched between Modern Painters IV and Fors Clavigera Letter 39. Time and Tide consists of Ruskin’s published letters to his friend Thomas Dixon, a cork cutter. Like the better known letters of Fors Clavigera, Ruskin chooses events from his everyday life as occasions for thoughtful social criticism. As a sequel to Unto this Last (1860), Ruskin outlines responsibilities for workers in an ideal society, finding ample opportunity to inveigh against the real society surrounding him. In the three letters focussing on theatrical performance I discuss next, Ruskin argues for the importance of healthy amusement; he wants a kinder world in which working men will have time, after a reasonable work day, to enjoy noble recreation, rather than suffering such long hours that they are too exhausted to take any pleasure in art or culture. But the crux of the matter for Ruskin is that people do not always want to be amused in a wholesome way. The choice of entertainment available cheaply enough for most labourers worries him. Although Time and Tide belongs to Ruskin’s economic works, he wrote it in the middle of his most active period writing on women: he brought out ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ in 1865, The Ethics of the Dust in 1866, Time and Tide in 1867, and The Queen of the Air in 1869. While Ruskin is, as always, concerned with the idea of theatre as a false or true ideal, here at the height of his


power, we find a text that develops the conjunction of Ruskin’s interests in women’s roles in society and on stage, resulting in a powerful expression of gender ambivalence. In Time and Tide Letter V, Ruskin sardonically describes the pantomime Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves he has just seen at Covent Garden Theatre. Because Victorian pantomimes23 were wildly popular and appealed to all classes, they provide Ruskin with a perfect example for analysing a likely amusement for workers.24 In this first passage, he wryly reports the famed proliferation of cross-dressing supernumeraries or extras: The forty thieves were girls. The forty thieves had forty companions, who were girls. The forty thieves and their forty companions were in some way mixed up with about four hundred and forty fairies, who were girls. There was an Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, in this the Oxford and Cambridge men were girls. There was a transformation scene, with a forest, in which the flowers were girls, and a chandelier, in which the lamps were girls, and a great rainbow which was all of girls. (17.336–7)25 It is characteristic of Ruskin to enjoy the spectacle of young women as flowers; he often identifies girls with flowers and is, after all, the author of Proserpina, which develops a floral taxonomy based entirely on girls’ names.26 Also typical of Ruskin is how clearly he revels in the whimsy of a show that casts a girlish multitude as fairies and lamps and colours of the rainbow. More surprisingly for Ruskin, whose strong ideas about appropriately separate spheres for men and women make up his famous essay ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, he even appears to relish describing the gender-bending performance of actresses as Ali Baba’s thieves and as College men, which was in fact conventional in Victorian pantomime. But there is one part of the show that Ruskin enjoys unabashedly, without irony. He admires the little girl playing Ali Baba’s daughter, eight or nine years old, who dances gracefully with a pantomime donkey made up of two fellow actors: She did it beautifully and simply, as a child ought to dance … —she looked and behaved innocently,—and she danced her joyful dance with perfect grace, spirit, sweetness, and self-forgetfulness. And through all the vast theatre, full of English fathers and mothers and children, there was not one hand lifted to give her sign of praise but mine. (17.337)


As much as the lack of enthusiasm for the little girl’s simple dance distresses Ruskin, something much worse occurs: Presently after this, came on the forty thieves, who, as I told you, were girls; and, there being no thieving to be presently done, and time hanging heavy on their hands, arms, and legs, the forty thiefgirls proceeded to light forty cigars. Whereupon the British public gave them a round of applause. Whereupon I fell a thinking; and saw little more of the piece, except as an ugly and disturbing dream. (17.337–8) The previous good humour with which Ruskin describes the fantastical abundance of thief-girls is disingenuous, a preparation to decry what follows. The innocent and decent girl-child who dances beautifully and naturally (even with a stage donkey) far outshines the hundreds of young women who not only cross-dress and portray thieves, but also who do not bother dancing and who, finally and most damnably, smoke. So why does Ruskin loathe the cigar-smoking so much? First, he hated tobacco; he considered it a terrible evil, corrupting the young men of Europe.27 Second, with Ruskin’s idealization of women as moral guides of men, the idea that young girls would smoke publicly, encouraging rather than discouraging such debilitating behaviour, would seem a moral perversion of their queenly responsibilities.28 Third, applause for a shocking visual joke that had been withheld from an artistic and skilful dance appalls the aesthetic critic. The contrast is especially distressing for Ruskin because dancing represents for him part of the duty of girls; he explains in The Ethics of the Dust that ‘dancing is the first of girls’ virtues’ (18.293), meaning not that they should entertain an audience, but that they should be ‘intensely happy;—so that they don’t know what to do with themselves for happiness,—and dance, instead of walking’ (18.296). Finally, the episode highlights what was wrong with the forty thieves and their forty companions all along: the girls are un-girling themselves both by smoking and by playing outlaw men. Not only are they engaging in masculine behaviour by smoking at all, but also they are smoking cigars: the phallic symbolism of the cigar needs no Freud to declare itself. The Victorian public accepted women in male roles, comic and serious. Theatre historians record more than half a dozen famous female Hamlets; Charlotte Cushman successfully played even Romeo;29 pantomimes routinely employed a woman to play Principal Boy, parodied


in Barrie’s Peter Pan.30 However, Victorian critical uneasiness surfaces when the cross-dressing exceeds particular limits. For example, Powell points out that while the critics do not seem to mind women playing beardless adolescents, they find preposterous women playing mature men, specifically men with beards (pp. 29–30). Likewise, Ruskin does not object to women playing men in the pantomime until they whip out their cigars. So the problem for Ruskin as for his contemporaries seems to be that the beard, like the cigar, symbolizes masculinity too forcefully for critical comfort. A conventionally feminine pantomime boy poses less of a sexual threat, especially since tights show off shapely female legs, often specifically admired by Victorian theatre critics.31 But women with beards or cigars symbolically suggest morphological possibilities too unsettling and compromise gender boundaries too bluntly to pass unremarked.32 In Time and Tide Letter VI, Ruskin continues his exposition on disturbing theatre, here focusing on how performance blurs boundaries not between genders but between races and species. He describes having seen, just the night before the Covent Garden pantomime of Ali Baba, an exhibition of Japanese jugglers. He begins the new letter by explaining that he must carry his reader ‘back to the evil light and uncalm, of the places I was taking you to’, a description that sounds more like a tour to the castle of the un-dead than a trip to a circus.33 But his vexation over the show seems based on the unbalancing effect of behaviour that strikes him as impossible because inhuman. The racism in this account is commonplace among Victorians, but what is surprising is the discomfort Ruskin experiences in viewing the performance. He describes the juggler’s ‘exercises on a suspended pole’: Its special character was a close approximation to the action and power of the monkey; even to the prehensile power in the foot; so that I asked a sculptor friend who sat in front of me, whether he thought such a grasp could be acquired by practice, or indicated difference in race. He said he thought it might be got by practice. … [T]he father perform[ed] in the presence of his two children, who encouraged him continually with short, sharp cries, like those of animals[,] … ending with a dance by the juggler, first as an animal, and then as a goblin … The impression, therefore, produced upon me by the whole scene, was that of being in the presence of human creatures of a partially inferior race, but not without great human gentleness, domestic affection, and ingenious intellect; who are, nevertheless, as a nation,


afflicted by an evil spirit, and driven by it to recreate themselves in achieving, or beholding in achievement, through years of patience, of a certain correspondence with the nature of lower animals. (17.341–2) Ruskin is disconcerted by the analogy he draws between the juggler’s and monkey’s ability to climb; he views it not as a skill to laud but as an unpleasant ‘correspondence with the nature of lower animals’. Indeed, Ruskin likens the jugglers to beasts four times in this passage. He does not want any ‘human creature’ to seem too much like an animal, even though throughout his prose his imagery is full of such metamorphoses. The bestial resemblance makes the jugglers into demons as well. If the demoniacal quality could remain with the Japanese, Ruskin would probably not have too much trouble with it, but his final sentence in this passage exposes the real problem: he denounces the evil spirit driving the Japanese to enjoy or ‘recreate’ themselves through practicing or appreciating this monkey-like skill. However, the exhibition Ruskin watches is in London, and the audience beholding the achievement is British, not Japanese. In other words, Ruskin worries about the possibly debasing effect on the British worker of watching the distinction between human and animal evaporate. Labourers need recreation, but not this kind. The pun on ‘recreation’ as ‘re-creation’ functions here; if the Japanese can re-create themselves as beasts by juggling or by watching jugglers, so can the English. In Butler’s terms, the repeated demonstration of a skill that weakens the difference between man and beast suggests a morphology that is not so imaginary after all: people are monkeys, men are goblins, and women have cigars. Even more disturbing to Ruskin than the animalistic Japanese jugglers or the cross-dressing, cigar-smoking girls is a performance described later in Time and Tide Letter VII,34 where Ruskin describes a dance that imaginatively carries the young performer across lines of both species and gender: It was also a dance by a little girl—though older than Ali Baba’s daughter, (I suppose a girl of twelve or fourteen). A dance, so called, which consisted only in a series of short, sharp contractions and jerks of the body and limbs, resulting in attitudes of distorted and quaint ugliness, such as might be produced in a puppet by sharp twitching of strings at its joints: these movements being made to the sound of two instruments, which between them accomplished only a quick vibratory beating and strumming … only in the monotony and


aimless construction of it, reminding one of various other insect and reptile cries or warnings: partly of the cicala’s hiss … and partly of the deadened quivering and intense continuousness of the alarm of the rattlesnake. (17.343) Ruskin’s contrast between the graceful, innocent dance from Ali Baba and this pubescent girl’s reptilian performance brings together the most distressing qualities from the previous two examples: worse than a monkey, she resembles an insect or serpent.35 The mechanical, bestial imagery dehumanizes the young dancer, but mentioning the phallic rattlesnake in particular also masculinizes her. Her serpent association, which becomes so important in The Queen of the Air, disturbs Ruskin even more than the simian effect of the Japanese jugglers because she blurs double boundaries, merging genders as well as mingling species. In The Darkening Glass, John Rosenberg comments on precisely these three passages from Time and Tide. He points out that although ‘Ruskin’s digression on the cigar-smoking girls is an indictment of the perversity of British taste … , its underlying energy springs from his self-disgust at his own perversity, his horrified fascination at child-like innocence … becoming suddenly and loathsomely adult’ (168). While Rosenberg is unequivocally right to identify Ruskin’s pathology as an explanation of his vehemence, I ask why Ruskin digresses on the theatre at all, in this book about laws for an ideal commonwealth.36 The practical answer is that these theatrical entertainments are popular culture, and he knows his readers will be familiar with them. But another answer is that Victorian pantomimes and spectacles offer repeated enactment of boundary-blurring transformations otherwise available only in the imagination or in fairy-tale or in myth, but which appear realized on stage in extravagant splendour. As long as the transformations seem to reinforce gender dichotomy by playing up sexual difference, Ruskin enjoys himself: Dames are obviously men and the fun comes from their ludicrousness in drag; Principal Boys are obviously women and their costumes highlight rather than hide that fact. But somehow in these three performances described in Time and Tide the transformation goes sour, revealing how stage performance not only models but also muddies distinction in categories of identity such as gender or race or species. Once any performance underscores the instability of gender or species as categories, all performances are suspect, and so are all categories, ultimately collapsing even the difference between pantomime and reality. No wonder that Ruskin reacts so strongly to those cigars that the rest of the performance passes ‘as an ugly and disturbing dream’.


In his diaries Ruskin often chronicles his dreams about the theatre; several recorded dreams correlate precisely with shows he has attended. The most telling example of Ruskin’s reactions to gender performance comes not from Time and Tide, but from a dream he details in his diary entry on August 9, 1867, about six months after Ali Baba and the Japanese juggling exhibition. With its concern with race, species, gender, sexuality, and performance, it ties together all three theatrical experiences from Time and Tide: A most singular dream last night. I was laying out a garden somewhere and a little child, half like a monkey, brought me a bunch of keys to sell. I looked at them and saw they were ivory and silver, and of exquisite old pattern, but I could not make out on what terms they were to be sold. Then I was in a theatre, and a girl of some far-away nation—half like Japanese, but prettier—was dancing, and she had never been used to show her face or neck, and was ashamed; and behind there was a small gallery full of children of the same foreign type, singing, and the one who brought me the keys was one of them, and my father was there with me. And then it came back—the dream—to the keys, and I was talking about them with some one who said they were the keys of a grand old Arabian fortress; and suddenly we were at the gate of it, and we could not agree about the key; and at last the person who held them said: ‘Would it not be better no one should have them?’ and I said, ‘Yes’; and he took a stone, and crushed them to pieces, and I thought no one could now ever get into the fortress for its treasures, and it would all moulder into ruin; and I was sorry, and woke. (2.628) As he had with the Japanese jugglers, Ruskin describes the performer in simian terms, replacing racial difference with one of species.37 Again he locate his anxiousness about dual identity in the theatre. He emphasizes her odd morphology in almost evolutionary terms: she is ‘half like a monkey’ and ‘half like Japanese’, a racist hierarchy of physical beauty placing the Japanese below something ‘prettier’. Like the cigars in the first example from Time and Tide, the keys might be seen as phallic symbols.38 They make the dreamed dancer not only half human and half Japanese, but also partly invest her with a masculine attribute. Surely being half monkey, half racially other, and half male contributes to her sense of shame in Ruskin’s dream as much as having to exhibit too much of her body to public view: Ruskin here maps hybridity in gender, race, and species as sexual anxiety. Unlike the


cigars, however, the keys potentially lead to a treasure trove of beautiful Eastern artifacts. While the sexual symbolism of a key whose purpose is to penetrate a lock and enter a fortress of delight is so blatant that it needs no special explanation, it is worth noting that the fortress is Arabian, not only conflating the East with the feminine in typically Orientalist fashion, but also recalling the five hundred girls in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. While Ruskin unreservedly abhors the corrupting cigars in Ali Baba, he vacillates about the Arabian keys. The dream’s strange solution to the problem of who should have the phallus is that no one should; better castration for all than that the young girl be shamed. Ruskin finally regrets the destruction of phallic power when it could lead to art and knowledge and Eastern treasures. Most of all Ruskin regrets that locked away, the treasures will ‘all moulder into ruin’, suggesting that without appreciation, they decay: both the literal interpretation of deteriorating artifacts for the art critic and the metaphorical interpretation of wasting sexuality for the frustrated lover are obvious.39 But also this idea applies to the avid theatre-goer. If performing requires an audience, remember that Ruskin was to suggest in Fors that spectators only become fully human while watching the performance. The dream suggests that protecting young girls from the shame of public display or from the dangers of phallic power comes at too high a price. While the dreamed performance of the girl dancing and the children singing in the background is short, far briefer than either the whole dream or than the descriptions of performances in Modern Painters, Time and Tide, or Fors Clavigera, Ruskin’s uneasy reactions to real stage performances have already done their work. The imaginary young dancer reiterates the ‘morphological possibilities’ modeled by performances that prompted Ruskin’s dream in the first place. What Ruskin experiences in the heightened reality of reiterated performances and their repetition in his dreams is the notion that bodies can be simultaneously male and female, human and animal, British and Japanese, painted and real, effectively making bitter nonsense of distinctions he wants to maintain, while holding him in fascinated attraction to their transformative magic.

Notes 1 See also Performativity and Performance, ed. Eve Kosofsky Segdwick and Andrew Parker (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). 2 For a detailed explanation of how Ruskin simultaneously establishes and subverts gender dichotomy in the 1860s, see Weltman’s Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1998), which analyses his three most significant texts on women and


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myth: ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, The Ethics of the Dust, and The Queen of the Air. Especially through his notion of queenship and his admiration for the goddess Athena, Ruskin blurs the gender boundaries he appears to uphold. In Praeterita Ruskin tells his famous story of how when he was a child, his Croydon aunt pitied his toyless existence and gave him a beautiful Punch and Judy set. Though his mother thanked the aunt, as soon as the relatives had left, she removed it (35.20). Nevertheless, the image of Punch and Judy permeates Ruskin’s work and even his dreams (indeed it pervades Victorian culture). The traditional puppet show’s plot is violent and misogynist; Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 100, reacts with understandable disgust to the way in Sesame and Lilies Ruskin misrepresents Bill Sykes’s brutal murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist as a mutual battery, comparing it to Punch and Judy beating each other before he kills her. Though space does not allow analysis of Punch and Judy here, the puppets’ significance for Ruskin’s gender politics deserves further treatment. The Christy Minstrels provided Ruskin with what Burne-Jones described as ‘afternoons of oblivion’ (29. xx). Throughout his life, Ruskin’s mother objected to the theatre, having ‘the strictest Puritan prejudice against the stage’ (35.176). His father, however, liked it (he even performed in amateur theatricals in his youth), and took Ruskin as a child. The adult Ruskin often went despite his mother’s dislike for it, but only if she gave her permission – which she must have given very frequently (19. xxxviin.). For a discussion of Ruskin’s memory regarding his mother’s description of his father’s remarkable beauty performing in ‘high, black feathers’, including its gender ambivalence, see Dinah Birch, ‘Fathers and Sons: Ruskin, John James Ruskin, and Turner’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 18 (1994), 147–62. The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, ed. George Allen Cate (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), p. 157. Ruskin’s diaries prove his voracious theatre attendance, but rarely give much description of the plays, operas, or pantomimes he has seen, usually recording only the name of the entertainment or theatre or principal actor, with an occasional brief notes, such as ‘delicious acting’ (Diaries, 2.707) or ‘the vilest rubbish’ (Diaries, 3.964). There has been very little criticism on Ruskin and the theatre; no article like William J. Gatens’s ‘John Ruskin and Music’, in The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music, ed. Nicholas Temperley (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana, 1989) or Delia da Sousa Correa’s ‘Goddesses of Instruction and Desire: Ruskin and Music’, in Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), for example. Shakespeare’s impact on Ruskin has merited discussion by numerous critics, such as Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA. and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 210–11. Most of Ruskin’s sustained analyses of Shakespeare in his published Works centre on the literary texts rather than on the performance experience. But in letters and diaries, Ruskin often briefly remarks on a particular actor or actress in a Shakespearean role (37.28, 30.341, 34.545, 37.303) or on an aspect of a production (Diaries, 2.760). Jeffrey Richards pointed out the extent of Ruskin’s interaction with Henry Irving in his unpublished paper ‘Ruskin and the Theatre’ at ‘John


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Ruskin: The Brantwood Years’, Lancaster University, Lancaster, England, August 2000. See Michael Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 126–7, for a clear, brief account of stock characters and lines of business. I am indebted to Jennifer Jones for pointing out to me that while Victorian pantomime may blur gender boundaries, Victorian stock characters only strengthen types. Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, MA. and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 4. This indictment is particularly damning for actresses, since women are already associated traditionally with lying and mutability. Kerry Powell, Women and the Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 23. Powell alludes to Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The Buried Life’. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 10. Auerbach, pp. 14–15. Butler, p. 14. For Oscar Wilde’s idea of life imitating art, see ‘The Critic as Artist’, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). See Ruskin’s The Queen of the Air (19.358–60) for several examples of the tension between his acknowledgment of the accuracy of Darwin’s work and his disgust with scientific interest in origin at the expense of symbolic meaning. Ruskin often uses theatre, which exemplifies what excites popular imagination, to chastise the public for some moral failing. For instance, in Modern Painters IV, Ruskin describes his distress over the audience’s pleased reaction to horror, as in the actresses putting on the death mask (6.397), and in Ariadne Florentina Ruskin describes an Italian play about boiling children as an example of people’s love of death and horror (22.410). He also believes that immoral intent invalidates skill, resulting in bad art: in The Eagle’s Nest he describes a dance depicting Hell at the Gaity Theatre in this context (22.133). It contrasts to the positive dream of an opera set in hell in his diary (Diaries, 3.783). Later in Fors, Ruskin makes a related comment, pointing out that the money that two young women whom he sees at the opera spent on tickets to operas so that they could hear good singing might have been better spent teaching the poor to sing (25.269). His choice of young women for this example suggests several things about his attitude toward women: he assumes that their more highly cultivated feelings are more easily wrought upon (as he hopes in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’); he wants them to act as moral guides to men in their example of charity and self-denial; he implies that the young women attend the opera out of a frivolous attempt to pass unfilled time, whereas men attending the opera seek a legitimate mode of relaxation in reward for hard work. He makes the same point in several different places, most notably decrying the ‘mimicry compassion’ opera arouses in us, ‘wasting the pity and love’ we feel in a pleasurable response to the theatre instead of on repairing social ills (29.269). Auerbach in Private Theatricals goes farther and links theatricality itself with Woman: ‘this demonic, elusive spirit of performance … is female’ (p. 12); ‘the spirit of play is perceived by patriarchal culture as demonically female’ (p. 118n).

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman 175 21 Here Ruskin ignores the material lives of the actors as working men, women, and children. Ruskin does not mention that the children whose model behaviour on stage so impresses him receive a sum for acting the parts of good children before a paying audience. Elsewhere in Fors Ruskin adjures young women not to become postal workers instead of taking care of children or sewing (27.536), but he never offers a like injunction against performing as one of the five hundred extras in a pantomime. He accepts amusement from the ‘Arcadias of Pantomime’ (27.256) with surprisingly little thought of how little the huge pantomime casts earn, or how dangerous their working conditions had become with gas flames licking at diaphanous costumes on a crowded stage. This is surely because of the power of theatrical illusion for Ruskin. With all his concern for other labourers, he does not recognize actors as workers because he so loves to be taken in by their craft; their stage representations overwhelm his consciousness of their working lives. (Ruskin remains alert to actresses’ morality, however; for example, he admired Ellen Terry’s acting but prefers the respectable Mrs Kendall (Diaries, 3.693, 3.1044).) Later, in the early 1880s, Ruskin learned more about the lives of performing children through his friendship with the young Webling sisters, whose public poetry recitations he esteemed (34.545–6). He entertained them in his home (Diaries, 3.999) and corresponded with them (Hilton, 2.428). For more information about this relationship, see Peggy Webling, Peggy: The Story of One Score Years and Ten (London: Hutchinson, 1924). My thanks go to Dinah Birch for making this and many other connections for me. 22 For other examples, see notes 13–15, 17, and 29. 23 Non-British readers will want to know that pantomimes are not actually silent, mimed performances at all, but rather spectacular song-and-dance, pun-filled entertainments, borrowing from music hall shows, interacting with the audience, drawing on conventional tropes, employing innovative stage machinery and lighting effects, and using popular comedians from other stage genres. 24 For information on the popularity of Victorian pantomime across classes, see Michael Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 25 The huge numbers here are not exaggerated, although the sense of proliferation is the result Ruskin’s humour. Booth gives the number of thieves and their followers in the 1886 production of Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves at nearly five hundred. See Michael Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 35. 26 See Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, ‘Myth and Gender in Ruskin’s Science’, in Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, ed. Dinah Birch. 27 Cook and Wedderburn point out six separate passages sprinkled throughout the Works in which Ruskin denounces tobacco as a curse (17.334n). 28 See ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ (18.109–44). 29 See Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 130; Tracy Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 112–14. 30 Auerbach, Private Theatricals, p. 30. Although several male Victorian critics express anxiety about actresses playing male roles (for example, Archer decried an 1894 all-female production of As You Like It), Kerry Powell, in Women and the Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 28, analyses their discomfort as either over the actresses’ usurpation of the male playwright’s intention or over the artistic insignificance of the cross-dressing.

176 John Ruskin on Theatre 31 For a psychoanalytic interpretation (and a concise history) of transvestism in Victorian pantomime, see David Mayer, ‘The Sexuality of Pantomime’, Theatre Quarterly, 4.13 (1974), 55–64. Also see Laurence Senelick, ‘The Evolution of the Male Impersonator on the Nineteenth-Century Popular Stage’, Essays in Theatre, 1.1 (1982), 29–44. 32 It would surely horrify Ruskin to know that from the 1890s to the 1950s, popular John Ruskin cigars were manufactured and sold widely in America. The double irony of a cigar named for Ruskin is that not only is it a vile tobacco product, but also it was a very cheap cigar, using inferior tobacco and poor quality paper. See James Dearden, Facets of Ruskin (London and Edinburgh: Skilton, 1970), p. 128. 33 He readily carried himself back, however, indulging in the show at least twice, according to entries in his diary. 34 In Letters IX and X, Ruskin includes a brief mention of a performance of the can-can in Paris that evokes his most extreme reaction of all. The dances he saw were called ‘Chain of the Devil’ and the ‘Cancan of Hell’ (17.359). Conceding that ‘it is many years since I have seen such perfect dancing, as far as finish and accuracy of art and fullness of animal power and fire are concerned,’ he rejects the performance as unmitigated evil, with ‘the object of the dance throughout being to express in every gesture the wildest fury of insolence and vicious passions possible to human creatures’ (17.358). 35 The serpent metaphor and the images of vibration here prefigure Ruskin’s famous description of the serpent in The Queen of the Air, where the snake (along with the bird) symbolizes the goddess Athena. As he gives her more and more power (not only wisdom and war, but air, metaphor, and finally language), this most masculine of goddesses becomes for Ruskin the ideal woman. See Weltman, Ruskin’s Mythic Queen, pp. 149–65. 36 That this is a digression is clear: not only do Cook and Wedderburn leave it out of their introductory outline, but Ruskin himself admits in Letter XI that he has ‘allowed’ himself ‘to be led into that talk on theatres’ (17.368). 37 For an analysis of the simianization of the Other in Victorian literature, see Elsie Michie’s Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 38 The dreamed keys also mean much more than this, recalling other keys throughout Ruskin’s oeuvre: for example, his famous close reading of ‘Lycidas’ in Sesame and Lilies (where one key unlocks heaven, the other, prison) (18.75), suggests that this dream may also reveal Ruskin’s anxiety about evolution and declining religious faith. Equally significant here is the key of Fors Clavigera, one meaning of which Ruskin explains as Fortitude with the key to the ‘gate of Art and Promise’ (27.xx). See also Mary Ann Caws, ‘Against Completion: Ruskin’s Drama of Dream, Lateness and Loss’ in Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana, 1990) for a psychoanalytic, biographical reading of this dream, focussing on Ruskin’s relationship with his father. 39 Many books detail Ruskin’s failed romance with Rose La Touche. See Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Later Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).

10 Images of Proustian Inversion from Ruskin Emily Eells

John Ruskin played a seminal role in Marcel Proust’s literary career, and knowledge of his work profoundly influenced the writing of A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). Proust subscribed to the Library Edition of Ruskin’s works1 and boasted that he knew half a dozen or so volumes by heart, including his Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854), his work on Tuscan art in the Val d’Arno (1874), and his autobiography Praeterita (1885–89).2 He was one of the first to translate Ruskin and his copiously annotated and eloquently prefaced translations of The Bible of Amiens (1880–5) and Sesame and Lilies (1865) were published in French in 1904 and 1905 respectively. Proust cites Ruskin’s name only four times in the various volumes of his novel (when the narrator embarks on his first trip to the coastal resort of Balbec,3 where he meets Elstir, the fictitious painter whose aesthetic ideas are derived from Ruskin, then twice in connection with Venice,4 and finally on the doorstep of a homosexual brothel5), but he works images from the illustrated volumes of the Library Edition into A la recherche du temps perdu. One of Proust’s objectives was to write ‘un essai sur la Pédérastie (pas facile à publier)’/’an essay on homosexuality (not easy to publish)’6 and his novel contains a portrait of what Oscar Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas called ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.7 Proust undertook to portray transgressive sexuality by shielding himself behind the acknowledged respectability of his literary forefathers. His wide-ranging network of references reflects his great culture and extensive reading; our focus here will be on Ruskin and the art works Proust knew through his writings. The illustrations in the Library Edition were an important source for Proust, and he included allusions to the Italian Renaissance frescoes and nineteenth-century British paintings in Ruskin’s volumes in the passages of La Recherche dealing with sexually ambiguous characters. 177

178 Images of Proustian Inversion from Ruskin

He thus used images from Ruskin as a means of aestheticizing the socially unacceptable and conveying the unutterable. By drawing on the visual arts to depict sexuality, Proust blurred definitions and abolished the distinction between the two sexes. He borrowed images from Ruskin to suggest homosexuality and androgyny, so that pictorial art became a language enabling him to write about different genders. *** The first Ruskin volume that Proust translated taught him to read the visual. Its very title – The Bible of Amiens – suggests that the cathedral can be studied as The Book. Amiens’ Notre-Dame is a translation into stone of the teachings of the Bible, and Ruskin refers to the ‘Beau Dieu d’Amiens’ – the statue of Christ which adorns the great central porch – as ‘a letter, or sign of the Living Spirit’ (33.147). This Gothic architectural language is an iconography requiring exegesis, which Ruskin performs, reading it as if it were what Proust calls ‘une sorte de livre ouvert, écrit dans un langage solennel où chaque caractère est une œuvre d’art, et que personne ne comprend plus’/‘a kind of open book written in a solemn language, no longer understood by anyone, in which every character is a work of art’.8 Ruskin provided numerous lessons in how to decipher iconography, which Proust followed, pursuing his study of Italian architecture and painting, with particular focus on the stones of Venice and Florentine painting. Ruskin also uses the trope of an architectural building as a book in Mornings in Florence (1875–7) when he calls the Spanish Chapel Andrea da Firenze sumptuously decorated in Santa Maria Novella ‘The Vaulted Book’ (24.363) and its frescoes ‘a kind of precious manuscript’ (36.300). When Ruskin analyses the paintings of the Venetian Carpaccio, he presents them as a narrative to be read, and speaks of his lessons written in ‘Venetian words’ (28.746), and his ‘painted syllabling’ in a ‘brief book’ (28.732). The second work by Ruskin which Proust translated – Sesame and Lilies – raises questions of gender and individual responsibilities of the sexes. Its first lecture – ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ – concentrates on the subject of books and libraries, whereas ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ is a complex text on women’s education which has led to diametrically opposed interpretations. Kate Millett presents a vehement feminist reading of it in Sexual Politics (1970), in which she questions Ruskin’s sexuality, and comes close to denouncing him as a misogynist, qualifying his lecture as ‘one of the most complete insights obtainable into that compulsive masculine fantasy one might call the official Victorian attitude’.9

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Millett’s argument has given rise to much discussion and objection. It fails to take into account that Ruskin objected to the way society brought up girls as if they were meant for sideboard ornaments (18.132). David Sonstroem has even argued that ‘Although it would be misleading to call Ruskin’s lecture a feminist tract, it does advocate the fullest exercise of women’s influence and authority – indeed the dominion of women over men.’10 Dinah Birch offers an insightful reading of the text in her ‘Ruskin’s “Womanly Mind”’,11 which suggests that ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ reflects Ruskin’s ‘strange cross-gender movements of thought’.12 Indeed, a balanced reading of Ruskin’s text would not obscure his view that the sexes are complementary to each other. This he states unequivocally: We hear of the ‘mission’ and of the ‘rights’ of Woman, as if these could ever be separate from the mission and the rights of Man—as if she and her lord were creatures of independent kind, and of irreconcilable claim. This, at least, is wrong. (18.111) Ruskin advocates an harmonious relationship between man and woman, a compatibility which would ‘aid and increase the vigour and honour and authority of both’ (18.111). In reconciling the qualities of the two sexes to their mutual benefit, Ruskin highlights their complementarity: We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the ‘superiority’ of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completes the other, and is completed by the other: they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give. (18.121) Dinah Birch furthers her argument that ‘Ruskin is writing across gender’13 when she considers the importance Ruskin ascribes to the preChristian, mythological goddess, Athena. In Sesame and Lilies he presents Athena as the ultimate matriarchal deity, the source and inspiration of all the arts: that great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a Woman; and into her hand, for a symbol, the weaver’s shuttle; and … the name and the form of that spirit, adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks, became that of Athena


of the olive-helm, and cloudy shield, to faith in whom you owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most precious in art, in literature, or in types of national virtue. (18.118) Ruskin gives a fuller portrait of Athena in The Queen of the Air (1869), the first work by Ruskin which Proust read, after going to some lengths to obtain it.14 Athena embodies sexual duality, a consequence of her strange birth. When Zeus heard that his wife Metis would bear him a son stronger than himself, he swallowed her whole. The myth recounts that Metis then became one with the masculine foetus she was carrying, producing the androgynous Athena, born from Zeus’s brow. This figure of mixed gender embodied pure, queenly maidenhood but emitted Gorgonian cold, turning men to stones (19.306–7). According to Dinah Birch, ‘Ruskin found in her a deeply attractive emblem. She was an authoritative expression of the sexual ambivalence in his own work.’15 She substantiates her argument by pointing out that: Though she carried the female attribute of a weaver’s shuttle, and was considered by the Greeks as the deity of women’s work, she was also a goddess of war, often represented with a helmet and spear. Chaste and unforgivingly stern, she combined male and female qualities in her defence of order, control, and reverence.16 Sharon Aronofsky Weltman gives credit to Birch’s argument, writing that in The Queen of the Air Ruskin presents a series of binary oppositions that he immediately conflates: ‘Athena and Medusa, air and earth, bird and snake, formation and destruction, science and myth, male and female.’17 Ruskin’s point that Athena is ‘a warrior maid’ (19.399) is made visually by the reproduction of a statue of her from Herculaneum (vol. 19, plate 14; see p. 181). She wears masculine armour and a helmet of fortitude over a flowing robe of justice. She stands erect in combative posture, brandishing a shield covering one breast but leaving the feminine curvature of the other one exposed. The shield is decorated with the Gorgon’s head and the repeated image of a serpent, an ambivalent symbol which could be interpreted as both as a phallic reference to her masculine side and as an allusion to her feminine wiliness. Athena’s legs seem to straddle the linking conjunction ‘and’ in the title Sesame and Lilies, making her an androgynous figure, emblematic of artistic creation. Proust’s passing, unacknowledged reference to this Ruskinian queen in Sodome et Gomorrhe I, the section of his novel devoted explicitly to homosexuality, suggests that he subscribed to this interpretation

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Athena, photogravure from a statue at Herculaneum (Library Edition, 19, plate 14)


of Athena as androgynous.18 He alludes to the incident in Homer’s Odyssey when Athena appeared before Ulysses clad as a young shepherd with a javelin. Proust uses his failure to recognize her in this disguise as an image of how obtuse one can be about identifying the homosexual, but his reference to the cross-dresssed Athena also reveals the hybrid quality of the race of ‘hommes-femmes’ who take centre-stage in Sodome et Gomorrhe I. The lessons Proust learnt about word and image from The Bible of Amiens and about gender in Sesame and Lilies are the key-stones on which he constructed his innovative A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust’s novel is suffused by his extensive knowledge of Ruskin’s works: the Proustian theory of involuntary memory reads like a textual borrowing from this passage of Modern Painters: The kind of mental chemistry by which the dream summons and associates its materials, I have already endeavoured, not to explain, for it is utterly inexplicable, but to illustrate, by a well-ascertained though equally inexplicable fact in common chemistry … with all those whom I have carefully studied (Dante, Scott, Turner, and Tintoret) it seems to me to hold absolutely; their imagination consisting, not in a voluntary production of new images, but an involuntary remembrance, exactly at the right moment, of something they had actually seen. (6.40–1) Ruskin’s own richly illustrated books underlie the painterly prose of Proust’s involuntary remembrances of the past. Proust was particularly laudatory about the illustrations in the Library Edition of Ruskin’s works,19 which were arguably a greater source of freedom and inspiration to him than the text itself. Proust noted that in some instances the illustrations and the words in Ruskin’s works are only related by association, pointing out that the plate corresponding to the passage on Giotto’s baptism of Christ in Padua is an illustration of the same scene from a psalter (vol. 24, facing page 83) and that the frontispiece of The Bible of Amiens is not a photograph of the cathedral, but a drawing of the Madonna by Cimabue.20 The text of this first instalment of ‘Our Fathers have told us’ is an explicit spelling-out of every word, an exegesis of the man-made language of sculpted stone. In this way, it is opposed to the suggestive, silent gaze of the Madonna, which could bear the complementary title ‘Our Mother shows us’. This tentative interpretation of the text as masculine and the images as feminine follows Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s argument in The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in

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Fin-de-siècle Illustrated Books.21 As the plates in the Library Edition are protected by tissue paper, reading them is an intimate process of unveiling which engages the reader’s participation. The pictures are printed on only one side of paper, thus leaving space for the readers to project their own images onto the blank side of the reproduction. Proustian aesthetics, which emphasize that the artist offers a new way of seeing and that the role of the critic is to bring that perspective into focus, follow in the wake of Ruskin’s study of Turner in the five volumes of Modern Painters (1843–60). Proust echoes Ruskin’s position, when he presents art as an optical instrument which offers the artist’s view of the world, and the critic as the optician who adjusts the viewing-glass for the spectator. We see Turner’s paintings through Ruskin’s eyes, a point made by Proust in his obituary of Ruskin, where he rewrites Ruskin’s praise of Turner: ‘through those eyes, now filled with dust, generations yet unborn will learn to behold the light of nature’ (12.128) and applies it to Ruskin himself: on peut dire de lui ce qu’il disait à la mort de Turner : ‘C’est par ces yeux, fermés à jamais au fond du tombeau, que des générations qui ne sont pas encore nées verront la nature.’ we can say of him what he said when Turner died: ‘it is through those eyes, closed for ever in the depth of the grave, that generations yet unborn will see nature.’22 Proust in turn will refocus Ruskin’s images and make them his own: Giotto’s allegorical figure of Charity which heads the seventh letter of Fors Clavigera (vol. 27, plate 3; see p. 184) will become a kitchen maid in Combray, just as a detail from a Botticelli fresco in the Sistine Chapel copied by Ruskin which opens the Florentine volume of his works will become the portrait of Odette Swann. *** Proust turns to Ruskin in the passages of La Recherche concerned with homosexuality, making a strategic, covert reference to his work on Turner in Le Côté de Guermantes II, the section of the novel leading up to Sodome et Gomorrhe I. The narrator’s sentinel viewpoint over the courtyard garden of Sodom is described as a Turnerian perspective: what he looks over is compared to a Turner landscape with ‘un voyageur en diligence, ou un guide, à différents degrés d’altitude du Saint-Gothard’/‘a traveller in a stage-coach, or a guide, at different degrees of altitude on

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Giotto, Charity, photogravure from the fresco in the Chapel of the Arena, Padua (Library Edition, 27, plate 3)

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the Saint-Gothard’.23 Proust is making a covert reference here to Ruskin’s work on the artist’s subjective perspective, which was illustrated with Turner’s views of the Faido Pass on the St Gothard alpine crossing. In the same section of Modern Painters as that devoted to involuntary memory, Ruskin compares his own factual drawing of the view done on the spot, which he calls First Simple Topography, with an impressionistic version of the same scene which Turner had completed back at home from memory. To establish a comparison between his version and Turner’s, Ruskin copied the latter, including the coach and traveller clad in white to which Proust refers in Le Côté de Guermantes II, calling it Second Turnerian Topography.24 These companion pieces reproduced in the Library Edition show that in order to obtain the desired effect, Turner modifies the perspective, enlarging the mountains to enhance the impression that they are looming above the scene, and making the riverbanks steeper than they are in reality. Ruskin explains that the painter recreates the impressions he had when viewing the scene, which compound the visual perception of the moment with the cumulative effect of sensations gathered on route there (6.33). While this temporal layering of experience can be seen as a painterly equivalent to Proust’s literary project in A la recherche du temps perdu, the allusion to the artist’s subjective perspective points to the heightened visual faculty the narrator will acquire by witnessing the subsequent homosexual seduction scene. Proust thus implicitly associates the imminent visual revolution that will open his narrator’s eyes to homosexuality with Ruskin’s reflections on the artist’s way of seeing. Proust studs La Recherche with allusions to the art of the Italian Renaissance on which Ruskin had worked extensively. Proust’s narrator views some of the people he frequents in terms of the early Italian Renaissance painting he became acquainted with through the illustrations accompanying Ruskin’s text.25 The function Proust attributes to them accentuates the slightly decadent quality Ruskin subtly suggested: Proust even came to read the art of the period pre-dating Raphael as an expression of homosexuality. He had considered inverting the terms in Ruskin’s section title ‘The Virtues and Vices of Padua’ and making it into the title ‘Les Vices et les Vertus de Padoue et de Combray’/‘The Vices and Virtues of Padua and of Combray’ for one of the chapters of his work,26 which would have been an oblique acknowledgment of his novel’s debt to Ruskin, and of the associations it establishes between the art of the early Renaissance and what he calls the vice of homosexuality. An early passage in Proust’s novel, which inaugurates its treatment of homosexuality, includes a significant reference to Ruskin’s copy of Benozzo Gozzoli’s patriarchal Abraham (see p. 186). Unable to fall

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Abraham Parting from the Angels (from Ruskin’s drawing of the fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli) (Library Edition, 4, plate 10)

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asleep without his mother’s goodnight kiss, the young narrator waits for her to come upstairs to bed. When his parents arrive and find that he is still awake, their first impulse is to punish him, but his father quickly yields and agrees to let his wife spend the night with their son. In this ambivalent role – he is at the same time chastizing his son for not being in bed and comforting him with his mother’s presence – the father is compared to Benozzo Gozzoli’s portrait of Abraham in the Campo Santo frescoes in Pisa, which Proust knew second-hand from the Ruskin drawing reproduced in the Library Edition. Proust’s description of him conflates the picture Ruskin drew of Abraham with the angels – whom he has just ordered to destroy the sin-ridden towns of Sodom and Gomorrah – with another panel from the same series painted by Benozzo Gozzoli, which shows an acquiescent Abraham telling his wife that she must be separated from Isaac: Je restai sans oser faire un mouvement; il était encore devant nous, grand, dans sa robe de nuit blanche sous le cachemire de l’Inde violet et rose qu’il nouait autour de sa tête depuis qu’il avait des névralgies, avec le geste d’Abraham dans la gravure d’après Benozzo Gozzoli que m’avait donnée M. Swann, disant à Sarah qu’elle a à se départir du côté d’Isaac. I stood there, not daring to move; he was still in front of us, a tall figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet cashmere scarf which he used to wrap around his head since had begun to suffer from neuralgia, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac.27 The narrator’s father poses on the threshold of his bedroom, granting his wife permission to spend the night with him, reading to him from George Sand’s story of incestuous love in François le Champi (1847). His expression conveys the same sense of resignation at the loss of a son that Abraham had experienced, whereas his gesture imitates the movement of Benozzo Gozzoli’s revengeful, castigating angels on their way to Sodom. Proust continues to associate the art of the Italian Renaissance with variant sexuality in the references he makes to the allegories of the Vices and Virtues painted by Giotto in the Scrovegni chapel and analysed by Ruskin in Giotto and his Works in Padua (1853–60). Proust’s interpretation of the figures therefore appears to be based on the photographs accompanying Ruskin’s notes, rather than on the notes themselves, which only indirectly suggest that the figures are sexually ambiguous.


When discussing ‘Prudence’, who is traditionally depicted as a Janusfaced figure with a woman’s head looking one way and a bearded, older man’s head looking the other, Ruskin points to the sexual doubleness with flat, matter-of-factness: Giotto expresses her vigilance and just measurement or estimate of all things by painting her as Janus-headed, and gazing into a convex mirror, with compasses in her right hand; the convex mirror showing her power of looking at many things in a small compass. But forethought or anticipation, by which, independently of greater or less natural capacities, one man becomes more prudent than another, is never enough considered or symbolized … Lord Lindsay’s description adds little to this, except the suggestion that the second face is that of Socrates. (24.115) Proust is more up-front than Ruskin about the ambiguous sexuality of Giotto’s figures: he even introduces the bisexual character Albertine with a reference to Giotto’s work, as she is first seen advancing along the beach, as if part of ‘une procession sportive digne de l’antique et de Giotto’/’a sportive procession worthy of Greek art or of Giotto’.28 Given that she is modelled on one of Proust’s male friends, Albertine is a ‘drag queen’ of uncertain sexuality, and she is described at the beginning of the same episode as one of the kings from a Renaissance painting of the Epiphany.29 When we see her playing with a ‘diabolo’, she is suggestively likened to Giotto’s figure of ‘Infidelitas’ or ‘Idolatry’,30 whom Ruskin refers to as a woman, before he quotes the art critic Lord Lindsay who describes it as a man (24.121). Proust thus appropriates what Ruskin left without comment and makes it into an image of sexual ambivalence. The art connoisseur Swann nicknames the kitchen maid in Combray ‘La Charité de Giotto’ and, like the drawing of Gozzoli’s Abraham, he seems to lift her photograph from Ruskin’s works in order to give it to the young narrator. Clad in loose maternity gowns and pictured with a basket full of phallically shaped asparagus, she is depicted in contradictory terms as an androgynous, pregnant virgin: la pauvre fille, engraissée par sa grossesse, jusqu’à la figure, jusqu’aux joues qui tombaient droites et carrées, ressemblait en effet assez à ces vierges, fortes et hommasses, matrones plutôt, dans lesquelles les vertus sont personnifiées à l’Arena. the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled and stoutened every part of her, even including her face and her squarish, elongated cheeks,

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did distinctly suggest those virgins, so sturdy and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are personified in the Arena Chapel.31 The sexual ambiguity Proust hinted at in the stocky figure of Charity is more graphically represented in the corresponding Vice Giotto painted on the opposite wall of the chapel. Envy (see vol. 27, plate 2) is ostensibly a female figure, but her swollen, protruding tongue can be likened to an engorged phallus. Proust hints at the narrator’s own confused sexuality when he borrows her picture to describe the image he has of himself when asleep: on dort déshabillé. Telle, les yeux aveugles, les lèvres scellées, les jambes liées, le corps nu, la figure du sommeil que projetait mon sommeil lui-même avait l’air de ces grandes figures allégoriques où Giotto a représenté l’Envie avec un serpent dans la bouche … we sleep without our clothes. So, my eyes blinded, my lips sealed, my limbs fettered, my body naked, the image of sleep which my sleep itself projected had the appearance of those great allegorical figures where Giotto has portrayed Envy with a serpent in her mouth.32 Proust’s obituary of Ruskin in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (August 1900) associates him with a female figure, as it is illustrated with a photograph of Giotto’s Charity,33 which is described in the conclusion using an amalgamation of translated citations from Ruskin (10.397, 27.130 and 24.118): [Ruskin] fait penser à cette figure de la Charité que Giotto a peinte à Padoue et dont [il] a souvent parlé dans ses livres, ‘foulant aux pieds des sacs d’or, tous les trésors de la terre, donnant seulement du blé et des fleurs, et tendant à Dieu, dans ses maux, son cœur enflammé.’ Ruskin reminds one of the figure of Charity which Giotto painted in Padua, and which he frequently talks about in his books: ‘trampling upon bags of gold, all the treasures of the earth, giving only corn and flowers, and handing to God, for her pains, her flaming heart.’34 Proust further develops the associations between Renaissance art and ambiguous sexuality through numerous references to Carpaccio’s painting, which he knew from Ruskin’s work. Proust hailed Ruskin as ‘le découvreur, le chantre, le dévot de Carpaccio’/‘the discoverer, exalter and devotee of Carpaccio’35 and is indebted to him for his own


unbounded admiration of ‘ce peintre divin’/‘this divine painter’.36 He made a close reading of the pages Ruskin devoted to him in Guide to the Academy at Venice (1877) and St Mark’s Rest (1877–84) and claimed that he had translated all that Ruskin had written on Carpaccio.37 The Carpaccio works which narrate a story visually are characterized by the way they include words in the painting, and many of the scenes incorporate vignettes depicting reading and writing. Ruskin drew attention to the innovative way Carpaccio signed his work in a drawing which magnifies the detail from The Burial of St Jerome of the lizard holding in its mouth a piece of paper bearing the artist’s signature. When making a point about iconographic writing, Proust makes a passing reference to this illustration of ‘The Shrine of the Slaves’ in St Mark’s Rest (vol. 24, opposite page 352), after citing Whistler’s trademark butterfly: ‘certains artistes … au lieu des lettres de leur nom, mettent au bas de leur toile une forme plus belle par elle-même, un papillon, un lézard, une fleur’/‘certain artists … instead of the letters of their names, set at the foot of their canvases a figure that is beautiful in itself, a butterfly, a lizard, a flower’.38 Carpaccio’s work figures in Proust’s novel in order to show what language dare not tell. During the narrator’s wanderings through wartime Paris in the last volume of La Recherche, he happens on the notorious sodomist Charlus. The setting and the throng of colourfully uniformed foreign soldiers are compared to an exotic crowd scene by Carpaccio, and Charlus is dressed in a loose-fitting overcoat – the same ‘houppelande’ worn by Giotto’s sexually ambiguous figures.39 Proust is following Ruskin’s lead when he makes Carpaccio’s paintings into a veiled expression of homosexuality: in his analysis of the cycle of paintings depicting the life of St Ursula, Ruskin brings into focus the way Carpaccio paints men’s legs (24.178), and even refers to the pretty dresses worn by the male figures (24.162). Although Ruskin does not point them out, Proust would not have failed to see the youthful Venetian gondoliers in their feathered caps and tightly fitting leggings as effete homosexuals. Proust explicitly associates Carpaccio’s work with homosexuality when he warns his publisher Gallimard about the daring scenes in his novel: ‘M. de Charlus trouve d’ailleurs son compte dans ce Paris bigarré de militaires comme une ville de Carpaccio’/‘M. de Charlus by the way gets his due in this motley Paris teeming with exotic soldiers reminiscent of a Carpaccio townscape’.40 Some rough drafts of Le Temps retrouvé consolidate this association between Carpaccio and Charlus’s homosexual affairs, suggesting that Proust used the multi-ethnicity of Carpaccio’s

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paintings – particularly the African soldiers in their culottes – as a way of expressing multi-sexuality: Ne pas oublier dans le Paris de la guerre que M. de Charlus me dit: ‘N’est-ce pas c’est amusant ce Paris fort exotique où se pressent les soldats de tous les pays, même des Africains à jupes culottes rouges, des Asiatiques à turban. ‘Comme dans le bigarrement d’un tableau de Carpaccio’, aurait dit le pauvre Swann … Aussi murmura-t-il comme s’il se parlait à lui-même et ne voulait pas, mais en même temps paraissait prendre grand soin que j’entendisse: ‘Il me semble pourtant me rappeler qu’il y a un des ces bougres-là qui m’a fait dernièrement chanter.’ Don’t forget during the war, in Paris, when M. de Charlus says to me: ‘Isn’t it amusing, this ever so exotic Paris, where soldiers of all countries throng together, even Africans in red culotte-skirts, and Asians in turbans … like the motley crowd in a painting by Carpaccio, poor Swann would have said … And he added, murmuring to himself as if he didn’t want me to hear, but at the same time taking great care that I should: ‘I seem to remember for some reason or other that one of those buggers recently blackmailed me.’41 Proust’s allusions to Carpaccio’s Legend of St George (1502–8) are enigmatic, participating as they do in this nexus of associations linking Carpaccio and homosexuality. Proust makes a veiled reference to St George in Le Côté de Guermates II when a lively conversation about the oversize photograph Swann had brought to the Duchess includes the following coded exchange: ‘Ah! extinctor draconis latrator Anubis,’ dit Swann. ‘Ah! c’est si joli ce que vous m’avez dit là-dessus en comparaison du Saint-Georges de Venise.’ ‘Ah! Extinctor draconis latrator Anubis,’ said Swann. ‘Ah! It was so charming what you said about that, comparing it to the St George in Venice.’42 A manuscript version of this passage confirms that Proust was referring to Carpaccio’s painting of the saint,43 but what exactly Swann has told the Duchess remains unsaid. We learn in the same conversation that Swann had shown ‘des choses inouïes’/‘things she’d never dreamed of’ in art to Madame de Montmorency during a trip together in Italy and


had explained their incomprehensible details to her.44 The Latin phrase: ‘extinctor draconis’ also refers to St George’s feat, as the words ‘latrator Anubis’ (the dog Anubis barking) are a quotation from Virgil, which Ruskin used as the title of the second chapter of St Mark’s Rest. It is an interpretation of the two columns on the Molo in Venice in which Ruskin reconciles their apparent differences by likening St George’s victory over the dragon to St Theodore’s triumph over the crocodile: St Theodore represents the power of the Spirit of God in all noble and useful animal life, conquering what is venomous, useless, or in decay: he differs from St. George in contending with material evil, instead of with sinful passion. (24.226) According to Ruskin, St George is ‘the champion of Purity’ (24.383), and the dragon represents man’s lust: ‘The allegorising Platonists interpret Medusa as a symbol of man’s sensual nature. This we shall find to be Carpaccio’s view of the dragon of St George’ (24.381). The chapter of St Mark’s Rest entitled ‘The Place of Dragons’ proposes to read Carpaccio’s work and to translate the ‘words of this poem in a forgotten tongue’ (24.394), explaining for example that the dragon would have been interpreted as an unequivocal symbol of lasciviousness: To an Italian of Carpaccio’s time, further, spines—etymologically connected in Greek and Latin, as in English, with the backbone— were an acknowledged symbol of the lust of the flesh, whose defeat the artist has here set himself to paint. The mighty coiling tail, as of a giant eel, carries out the portraiture. (24.386–7) The destruction wreaked by the dragon is nightmarish: Behind the dragon lie, naked, with dead faces turned heavenwards, two corpses—a youth’s and a girl’s, eaten away from the feet to the middle, the flesh hanging at the waist in loathsome rags torn by the monster’s teeth. (24.387) George annihilates corruption and decadence by killing the dragon, imposing a certain puritanism, and destroying what Ruskin refers to as ‘shame’ and ‘nameless lust’ (24.389). Proust’s St George differs from Ruskin’s in that he sees him less as a saint championing purity, and more as an embodiment of homosexuality. His interpretation of the figure is doubtless inspired by Ruskin’s two copies of

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Carpaccio’s St George on horseback attacking the dragon: one represents the entire panel, the other is a detail of St George’s head, which emphasizes his effete facial features and his long, flowing locks (see vol. 24, plates 60 and 69). Carpaccio’s St George appears elsewhere in fin-de-siècle art: BurneJones, who introduced Ruskin to Carpaccio,45 copied it, and Gustave Moreau made a drawing of it which Proust had seen.46 Proust appropriated St George as a figure of forbidden, illicit desire. In a manuscript draft of a passage of Sodome et Gomorrhe, he compared the sexually ambiguous Albertine with the portrait of St George done by the old masters: filant à toute vitesse les épaules penchées sur sa machine, dans les rues de Balbec, enveloppée dans un caoutchouc comme dans la tunique de Méduse et sous laquelle ses seins semblaient cachés comme on se met à l’abri dans l’épaisseur d’une forêt. Aussitôt il me semblait être avec elle, sur les routes, dans les bois, je faisais avec elle, à la vue de son caoutchouc, des lieues, tout un libre voyage. Et à l’endroit où le caoutchouc était serré aux genoux par la roue quelles belles bosses il faisait comme les cuissards de fer d’un jeune guerrier, un saint Georges dans les vieux tableux. Riding at breakneck speed through the streets of Balbec, her shoulders hunched over the handlebars, wrapped up in a mackintosh as in Medusa’s tunic, under which her breasts seemed hidden as one takes shelter from the rain in the cover of the forest. Instantly I felt I was with her, on the roads, in the woods, seeing this mackintosh, I travelled miles with her, a whole journey, unconstrained. And at the place where the mackintosh was pulled tight around the knees by the bicycle wheel what lovely lumps it made, like the iron thighplates of a young warrior, a St George in one of the old paintings.47 Although the position of Albertine clad in a rubber raincoat astride her bicycle evokes Carpaccio’s St George on horseback, Proust superimposes a reference to another painting of the Italian Renaissance extolled by Ruskin in Guide to the Academy at Venice (24.156) in a manuscript annotation glued over this first version: Ce caoutchouc, matière à la fois souple et qui semblait durcie partout où elle fait de belles cassures, lui faisait aux genoux de nobles jambières qui semblaient en métal, comme dans le Saint Georges de Mantegna. That mackintosh – a substance which, although flexible, looked hardened wherever it had formed large cracks – dressed her knees in


noble leggings which looked to be made out of metal, as in Mantegna’s St George.48 The hybrid quality of rubber has been underscored the French critic Antoine Compagnon, who describes it in his discussion of these manuscript versions as ‘entre la chair et le fer, empruntant à l’une et à l’autre, ni dur ni mou’/‘halfway between flesh and iron, that takes on the characteristics of both, neither hard nor soft’).49 He reminds us that it is a sterile material, and suggests that it is ‘emblématique de l’androgyne et de l’inceste, elle est au plus près du désir’/‘emblematic of androgyny and incest: it is tantamount to desire’.50 As Compagnon points out, this manuscript is resonant with echoes to an earlier description of the hooded rubber cloak Proust’s driver – and lover – Alfred Agostinelli – wore, which in Proust’s eyes metamorphosed him into a nun. The textual link between the two descriptions is not only of autobiographical significance, but more importantly, it blurs the sexes, and provides further evidence that Proust modelled the bisexual figure of Albertine on his male friend: ‘Le caoutchouc, qui faisait d’Agostinelli une femme, et pas n’importe laquelle, une nonne, mue Albertine en éphèbe’/‘The mackintosh, which made Agostinelli into a woman – and not just any woman, a nun – causes Albertine’s mutation into an ephebe.’51 Proust has thus referred to Ruskin’s work on painting to pen the portrait of the sexually ambiguous Albertine. It is precisely because she resembles a figure from the Italian Renaissance that Proust’s bisexual Odette arouses Swann’s desire. In his eyes, she is Botticelli’s Zipporah, from The Trials of Moses in the Sistine chapel: Debout à côté de lui, laissant couler le long de ses joues ses cheveux qu’elle avait dénoués, fléchissant une jambe dans une attitude légèrement dansante pour pouvoir se pencher sans fatigue vers la gravure qu’elle regardait, en inclinant la tête, de ses grands yeux, si fatigués et maussades quand elle ne s’animait pas, elle frappa Swann par sa ressemblance avec cette figure de Zéphora, la fille de Jéthro, qu’on voit dans une fresque de la chapelle Sixtine. Standing there beside him, her loosened hair flowing down her cheeks, bending one knee in a slightly balletic pose in order to be able to lean without effort over the picture at which she was gazing, her head on one side, with those great eyes of hers which seemed so tired and sullen when there was nothing to animate her, she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sistine frescoes.52

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As Ruskin gives Zipporah only the shortest of shrift, the comparison Proust makes was probably inspired by his drawing of her, which was granted pride of place as the frontispiece of the volume of the Library Edition devoted to the art of Florence (vol. 23). Like the photographs of Giotto’s allegorical figures which seem to have been torn out of Ruskin’s works to be hung on the narrator’s schoolroom wall, Proust has Swann take the drawing of Zipporah from its volume and place it on his desk, as if it were a photograph of Odette.53 In her recent article ‘Zipporah: A Ruskinian Enigma Appropriated by Marcel Proust’,54 Cynthia Gamble has shown how Odette’s identification with Botticelli’s Zipporah contains a subtle suggestion of her ambiguous sexual nature. Indeed, Ruskin drew a curious parallel between Botticelli’s image of Zipporah, with her allusive, fragile beauty and that of the mighty, masculine Athena, when he qualified the former as ‘simply the Etruscan Athena, becoming queen of a household in Christian humility’ (23.275). He pursues the analogy in a catalogue entry on Botticelli’s Zipporah, when he compares and contrasts their attire. Cynthia Gamble points to the compromised femininity of the Botticelli figure, as a ‘detailed examination of Zipporah’s feet in Ruskin’s copy reveals a heavy masculine shape and form, and her lower legs appear hirsute’.55 Zipporah also seems to have abnormally thick thighs for a woman, though they are cloaked by her billowy Oriental trousers gathered around the ankle. Cynthia Gamble persuasively concludes that the ‘fusion of these two virgins results in the charged and heightened sexuality of Zipporah–Athena, and consequent lesbian proclivities’,56 which she corroborates by pointing out that both carry lance-reeds, whose phallic symbolism suggests their androgynous nature. There is a certain irony in Swann’s love for Odette: despite his jealous suspicions of her lesbian unfaithfulness, he loves her because she resembles Ruskin’s copy of Botticelli’s Zipporah, which hints at her masculinity in its understated detail. In addition to alluding to pictures reproduced in Ruskin’s works, Proust creates his own images by making one of his characters a painter and investing him with the task of representing visually what words cannot describe. Elstir’s Ruskinian filiation is established during the narrator’s first visit to his studio, when he echoes the title of his volume on Amiens cathedral, in his qualificaion of Balbec church as ‘la plus belle Bible historiée que le peuple ait jamais pu lire’/‘the finest illustrated Bible that the people have ever had’.57 Elstir’s description of Carpaccio’s Legend of St Ursula is replete with knowledgable references and precise details which make it read like a pastiche of Ruskin’s style.58 He praises the way Carpaccio endows the Venetian scenes with an amphibious


quality by blurring the boundary between land and sea. Elstir’s masterpiece Le Port de Carquethuit is built on The Harbours of England (1856) which Ruskin wrote as an ‘illustration’ of Turner’s paintings (13.10) and a kind of appendix to Modern Painters. It was one of the volumes of the Library Edition which Proust asked to have sent to him, during a summer visit to Normandy in 1907.59 He transformed Turner’s twelve views of The Harbours of England reproduced in the Ruskin volume and Ruskin’s description of them into a French port painted by Elstir. In his introductory essay, Ruskin emphasizes how Turner renders boundaries indistinct, to such extent that ‘never afterwards was he able to recover the idea of positive distinction between sea and sky, or sea and land’ (13.44). Similarly, Elstir’s painting is characterized by the way it fuses and confuses the land and the sea: Dans le premier plan de la plage, le peintre avait su habituer les yeux à ne pas reconnaître de frontière fixe, de démarcation absolue, entre la terre et l’océan. Des hommes qui poussaient des bateaux à la mer couraient aussi bien dans les flots que sur le sable. On the beach in the foreground the painter had contrived that the eye should discover no fixed boundary, no absolute line of demarcation between land and sea. The men who were pushing down their boats into the sea were running as much through the waves as along the sand, which, being wet, reflected the hulls as if they were already in the water.60 Imitating Turner’s Portsmouth (1828), the masts and the church towers, the marine and the urban are intermingled: un navire en pleine mer, à demi caché par les ouvrages avancés de l’arsenal, semblait voguer au milieu de la ville … tout le tableau donnait cette impression des ports où la mer entre dans la terre, où la terre est déjà marine et la population amphibie. a ship actually at sea, half-hidden by the projecting works of the arsenal, seemed to be sailing through the middle of the town … the whole picture gave this impression of harbours in which the sea penetrated the land, in which the land was already subaqueous and the population amphibian.61 The confusion which reigns in Elstir’s painting of the harbour becomes an expression of ambiguous sexuality in his portrait of Miss Sacripant, for

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which Odette modelled. The composition and the colour scheme of the portrait – she is standing in a pose which shows her with a hat covering her knee, and painted as a harmony in black and white – imitate Whistler’s work, which Ruskin condemned vehemently, only to be condemned himself for libel. The portrait depicts a young transvestite actress, whose sexuality hovers between that of a tomboy and that of an effete. Elstir’s work copies the scenes from Shakespeare by the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt and friend of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Walter Deverell, which feature an actress cross-dressed as a youth. Proust’s interest in the Pre-Raphaelites was elicited by Ruskin’s writings on their work, and his description of William Holman Hunt’s picture of Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1850–1) showing the fugitive Sylvia from The Two Gentleman of Verona disguised as a page (12.324–5) finds a counterpart in Elstir’s sexually complex portrait. The paintings produced in Elstir’s studio, which is itself likened to a laboratory of a new creation of the world,62 blasphemously reverses God’s creation. Whereas in Genesis, God separated the land from the sea, and created woman from man, in Le Port de Carquethuit Elstir brings them together, and in Miss Sacripant, he fused man and woman in the sexually ambiguous. As J.E. Rivers puts it: ‘The demiurgic power of Elstir’s painting has a profoundly erotic and a profoundly androgynous basis.’63 The novel’s final reference to Ruskin in Le Temps retrouvé identifies the narrator of the novel with its author and illustrates how Proust turned to established cultural sources when penning homosexual episodes. He embeds a reference to his translation of Sesame and Lilies in an overtly homosexual context, and has his homosexual pimp, Jupien, make a rhetorical image out of its title. As the latter explains to the narrator, ‘Sesame’ has been chosen as the password for admission to his male brothel: Je connais [un conte des Mille et Une Nuits] qui n’est pas sans rapport avec le titre d’un livre que je crois avoir aperçu chez le baron’ (il faisait à une traduction de Sésame et les lys de Ruskin que j’avais envoyée à M. de Charlus). ‘Si jamais vous étiez curieux, un soir, de voir, je ne dis pas quarante, mais une dizaine de voleurs, vous n’avez qu’à venir ici; pour savoir si je suis là vous n’avez qu’à regarder la fenêtre de là-haut, je laisse une petite fente ouverte et éclairée, cela veut dire que je suis venu, qu’on peut entrer; c’est mon Sésame à moi.’ ‘there is another [tale from the Arabian Nights] I know of, not unrelated to the title of a book which I think I have seen at the Baron’s’ (he was alluding to a translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies which I


had sent M. de Charlus). ‘If ever you are curious, one evening, to see, I will not say forty but a dozen thieves, you have only to come here; to know whether I am in the house you have only to look up at that window; if I leave my little window open with a light visible it means that I am in the house and you may come in; it is my private Sesame.’64 In this wartime episode, one word of Ruskin is the sesame which opens the door not to Ali-Baba’s cave, but to La Recherche’s underground homosexual world. By making the title Sesame and Lilies into a password in this way, Proust undermines Ruskin’s passage in that same work which rails against ‘masked’ words and adds another to those which Ruskin described as ‘droning and skulking about’ (18.66). Proust’s translations and transpositions of Ruskin help build the foundations on which he erects his cathedral of a novel. His work represents gender by transforming Ruskin’s artistic images into words; it is a creative translation of the pictorial into a coded language of Proustian sexuality.

Notes 1 Marcel Proust, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1970–93), VII, p. 274. 2 Proust, Correspondance, II, p. 387. 3 RTP II 9/SLT II 261. The abbreviations used here and in subsequent notes refer to Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1987–9) and its translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992). The volume number in Roman numerals is followed by the page number. 4 RTP II 99/SLT II 369 and RTP IV 224/SLT V 741. 5 RTP IV 411–12/SLT VI 175. 6 Proust, Correspondance, VIII, p. 113. 7 The phrase is used in the concluding line of his poem ‘Two Loves’ in The Chameleon I: 1 (London: Gay & Bird, 1894), p. 28. 8 Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 104. 9 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 2nd edn, 1977), p. 89. 10 David Sonstroem, ‘Millett versus Ruskin: A Defense of Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens”’, in Victorian Studies, 20 (1977), p. 297. 11 See above, pp. 108–13. 12 Ibid., p. 113. 13 Ibid., p. 111. 14 See Proust, Correspondance, II, p. 375 and p. 385. 15 See above, p. 115. 16 Ibid., p. 115. 17 Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, ‘Mythic Language and Gender Subversion: The Case of Ruskin’s Athena’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 52:3 (1997), 350.

Emily Eells 199 18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

See RTP III 15/SLT IV 15. Proust, Correspondance, VI, p. 75. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 729. Published by Scolar Press, Aldershot, in 1995. Sheila Emerson’s book Ruskin: The Genesis of Invention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) explores the question of gender and creativity with specific reference to the pictorial and scriptorial signs. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 129. RTP II 861/SLT III 663. The Pass of Faido. 1. First Simple Topography and The Pass of Faido, 2. Second Turnerian Topography are plates 20 and 21 in the sixth volume of the Library Edition (between pages 34 and 35). Proust developed his knowledge of Italian Renaissance painting through visits to Venice and Padua and he also owned several illustrated monographs on Carpaccio. See Proust, Correspondance, VII, pp. 40–1. As announced in the publication of Du côté de chez Swann by Grasset in 1913. RTP I 36/SLT I 41. RTP II 164–5/SLT II 447. RTP II 148/SLT II 427. RTP II 241/SLT II 539. RTP I 79–80/SLT I 94–5. RTP II 444–5/SLT III 163. Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 24 (August 1900), 135. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, pp. 443–4. Proust, Correspondance, VII, pp. 40–1. Ibid., XV, p. 62. Ibid., XV, p. 58. RTP II 342/SLT III 40. RTP IV 342/SLT VI 90. Proust, Correspondance, XV, p. 132. This is a transcription from Proust’s notebook ‘Carnet 2’ (N.A.Fr. 16638, fº 56 rº, 56 vº, 57 rº). The references used here follow the coding system of the Cabinet des manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France. RTP II 878/SLT III 683 – modified. See the final manuscript of Le Côté de Guermantes, N.A.Fr. 16707, fº 94 rº. RTP II 881/SLT III 687. See the notes to the Library Edition 4.356. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 668. Antoine Compagnon transcribes this manuscript ‘Cahier 46’, N.A.Fr. 16686, fº 58 vº in Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 117; translated by Richard E. Goodkin as Proust between Two Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 98. Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles, p. 117, and translation p. 98. Ibid., p. 118, and translation p. 99. Ibid., p. 118, and translation p. 99. Ibid., p. 119, and translation p. 100. See Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, pp. 66–7. RTP I 219/SLT I 267. RTP I 221/SLT I 270. See Word and Image 15:4 (October–December 1999): 381–94.

200 Images of Proustian Inversion from Ruskin 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Ibid., p. 387. Ibid., p. 387. RTP II 196/SLT II 485. RTP II 252/SLT II 552–3. Proust, Correspondance, VII, p. 260. RTP II 192–3/SLT II 480–1. RTP II 193/SLT II 481. RTP II 190/SLT II 478. J.E. Rivers, Proust and the Art of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 231. 64 RTP IV 411–12/SLT VI 175.

Selected Bibliography The footnotes to each contributor’s chapter give full references to all cited publications. We have included the following select bibliography to provide readers with a guide to significant works related to the subject of this book.

Works by Ruskin Complete works The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: Allen, 1903–12)

Other works Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, selection ed. Dinah Birch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000)

Letters and diaries The Diaries of John Ruskin, ed. Joan Evans and J.H. Whitehouse, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–9) Letter to Young Girls (Orpington, Kent: Allen, [1876]) The Gulf of Years: Letters from John Ruskin to Kathleen Olander, ed. Rayner Unwin with a commentary by Kathleen Prynne (London: Allen & Unwin, 1953) The Letters of John Ruskin to Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, ed. John Lewis Bradley (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964) Dearest Mama Talbot: A Selection of Letters from John Ruskin to Mrs Fanny Talbot, ed. Margaret Spence (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966) The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall, ed. Van Akin Burd (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969) Ruskin in Italy: Letters to his Parents 1845, ed. Harold I. Shapiro (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972) Sublime & Instructive: Letters from John Ruskin to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Anna Blunden, and Ellen Heaton, ed. Virginia Surtees (London: Joseph, 1972) Reflections of a Friendship: John Ruskin’s Letters to Pauline Trevelyan 1848–1866, ed. Virginia Surtees (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979) My Dearest Dora: Letters to Dora Livesey, Her Family and Friends, 1860–1900, from John Ruskin, ed. Olive Wilson (Kendal: Wilson, 1984)

Other works [Anon.] ‘Mr. Ruskin on Books and Women’, The Victoria Magazine, 6 (November, 1865), 67–76, and 6 (December, 1865), 131–8 201

202

Selected Bibliography

Auerbach, Nina, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990) ——, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982) Bauser, Helen Pike, ‘Ruskin and the Education of Women’, Studies in the Humanities, 12 (1985): 74–89. Birch, Dinah, Ruskin’s Myths (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) ——, ‘The Ethics of the Dust: Ruskin’s Authorities’, Prose Studies, 12 (1989): 147–58 ——, ‘Fathers and Sons: Ruskin, John James Ruskin, and Turner’, NineteenthCentury Contexts, 18.2 (1994): 147–62 ——, (ed.), Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Bloom, Harold, ‘Introduction’ to The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin (Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1969) Booth, Michael R., Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: CUP, 1991) ——, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–1910 (Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) Bradley, J.L., A Ruskin Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) Brooks, Michael, ‘Love and Possession in a Victorian Household: The Example of the Ruskins’, in The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 82–100 Broughton, Trev Lynn, Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/Biography in the Late Victorian Period (London: Routledge, 1999) Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993) Caws, Mary Ann, ‘Against Completion: Ruskin’s Drama of Dream, Lateness and Loss’, in Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990) Christ, Carol T., ‘“The Hero as Man of Letters”: Masculinity and Victorian Nonfiction Prose’, in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourses: Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thaïs Morgan (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 19–31 Clark, Kenneth, Ruskin Today (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, first published 1964) Collingwood, W.G., John Ruskin: A Biographical Outline (London: Virtue, 1889) ——, The Life of John Ruskin, 7th edn (London: Methuen, 1911) ——, The Bondwomen: A Saga of Langdale (London: Heinemann, 1932) Da Sousa Correa, Delia, ‘Goddesses of Instruction and Desire: Ruskin and Music’, in Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 111–30 Davis, Tracy C., Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991) ——, ‘The Spectacle of Absent Costume: Nudity on the Victorian Stage’, New Theatre Quarterly, 5.20 (1989): 321–33 Dearden, James S., Facets of Ruskin (London and Edinburgh: Skilton, 1970) ——, John Ruskin: A Life in Pictures (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999) Dellamora, Richard, ‘John Ruskin and the Character of Male Genius’, in Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 117–29

Selected Bibliography 203 Donohue, Joseph, ‘Women in the Victorian Theatre: Images, Illusions, Realities’, in Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts, ed. Laurence Senelick (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1992), pp. 117–40 Dowling, Linda, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994) Ellmann, Richard, Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) Emerson, Sheila, Ruskin: The Genesis of Invention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Gatens, William J., ‘John Ruskin and Music’, in The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music, ed. Nicholas Temperly (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989) Hammerton, A. James, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London: Routledge, 1992) Harker, Lizzie Allen, ‘Ruskin and Girlhood: Some Happy Reminiscences’, Scribner’s Magazine (1906): 561–72 Helsinger, Elizabeth K., Sheets, Robin Lauterbach and Veeder, William, eds, The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883, 3 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983) Hewison, Robert, Ruskin and Oxford: The Art of Education (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) Hilliard, David, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies, 25 (1981–2): [181]–210 Hilton, Mary and Hirsch, Pam, eds, Practical Visionaries: Women, Education, and Social Progress 1790–1930 (Harlow: Longman, 2000) Hilton, Tim, John Ruskin: The Early Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985) ——, John Ruskin: The Later Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) Hirsch, Pam, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827–1891: Feminist, Artist and Rebel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998) Howitt, Anna Mary, An Art-Student in Munich (Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields, 1854) ——, An Autobiography, ed. Margaret Howitt (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889) James, Admiral Sir William, The Order of Release: The Story of John Ruskin, Effie Gray and John Everett Millais Told for the First Time in Their Unpublished Letters (London: Murray, 1948) Jameson, Anna, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, Historical (1832; Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1853) Johnston, Judith, Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997) Kent, Christopher, ‘Image and Reality: The Actress and Society’, in A Widening Sphere, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977) Koven, Seth, ‘Henrietta Barnett (1851–1936): The (Auto) biography of a Late Victorian Marriage’, in After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain: Essays in Memory of John Clive, eds Susan Pedersen, and Peter Mandler (London: Routledge, 1994) pp. 31–53 La Touche, Rose, John Ruskin and Rose La Touche: Her Unpublished Diaries of 1861 and 1867, ed. Van Akin Burd (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979)

204 Selected Bibliography Lee, Amice, Laurels and Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955) Lloyd, Jennifer M., ‘Raising Lilies: Ruskin and Women’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995): 325–50 ——, ‘Conflicting Expectations in Nineteenth-Century British Matrimony: The Failed Companionate Marriage of Effie Gray and John Ruskin’, Journal of Women’s History, 11 (1999): 86–109 Lutyens, Mary, ed., Effie in Venice: Unpublished Letters of Mrs John Ruskin Written from Venice between 1849 and 1852 (London: Murray, 1965) ——, The Ruskins and the Grays (London: Murray, 1972) Marsh, Jan, ‘“Resolve to be a Great Paintress”: Women Artists in Relation to John Ruskin as Critic and Patron’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 18 (1994): 177–85 —— and Nunn, Pamela Gerrish, Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (London: Virago, 1989) Mayer, David, ‘The Sexuality of Pantomime’, Theatre Quarterly, 4.13 (1974): 55–64 Michie, Elsie, Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993) Miller, Lori M., ‘The (Re)Gendering of High Anglicanism’, in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture ed. Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan, and Sue Morgan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 27–43 Miller, Nancy K., The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970) ——, ‘The Debate over Women: Ruskin versus Mill’, Victorian Studies, 14 (1970): 63–82 O’Gorman, Francis, Late Ruskin: New Contexts (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001) ——, ‘“Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do”: Ruskin’s Aesthetic of Failure in The Stones of Venice’, forthcoming in Review of English Studies ——, ‘“To see the finger of God in the dimensions of the Pyramid”: A New Context for Ruskin’s The Ethics of the Dust (1866)’, forthcoming in Modern Language Review Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds, Performativity and Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1995) Parkes, Bessie Rayner, Remarks on the Education of Girls (London: Chapman, 1854) ——, Essays on Woman’s Work (London: Strahan, 1865) Pickering, Michael, ‘Mock Blacks and Racial Mockery: The “Nigger” Minstrel and British Imperialism’ in Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991) Powell, Kerry, Women and the Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Rieger, Christina, ‘“Sweet Order and Arrangement”: Victorian Women Edit John Ruskin’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6.2 (2001): 231–50 Robson, Catherine, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001) Rosenberg, John D., The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1963, reprinted 1986) Rossetti, William Michael, Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870, first published 1903 (New York: AMS, [1970])

Selected Bibliography 205 Rothenstein, William, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein, 2 vols (London: Faber, 1931–2) Rowell, George, The Victorian Theatre: A Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956) Quincey, Thomas De, Suspiria de Profundis, in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols (Edinburgh: Black, 1889–90) Sawyer, Paul L., ‘Ruskin and the Matriarchal Logos’ in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thaïs Morgan (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990) ——, Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985) Senelick, Laurence, ‘The Evolution of the Male Impersonator on the NineteenthCentury Popular Stage’, Essays in Theatre, 1.1 (1982): 29–44 ——, Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1992) Shuman, Catherine, Pedagogical Economies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) Simpson, Marc A., ‘The Dream of the Dragon: Ruskin’s Serpent Imagery’, in The Ruskin Polygon: Essays on the Imagination of John Ruskin, eds. John Dixon Hunt and Faith M. Holland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 21–43 Sonstroem, David, ‘Millett versus Ruskin: A Defense of Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens”’, Victorian Studies, 20 (1977): 283–97 ——, ‘John Ruskin and the Nature of Manliness’, Victorian Newsletter, 40 (1971), 14–17 Stanley, Liz, ‘Moments in the Marriage of John Ruskin and Effie Gray’, Lives and Works: Auto/Biographical Occasions, a special double-issue of Auto/Biography, 3.1 and 3.2 (1994): [139]–57 Tosh, John, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999) Webling, Peggy, Peggy: The Story of One Score Years and Ten (London: Hutchison, 1924) Weltman, Sharon Aronoksky, ‘Myth and Gender in Ruskin’s Science’, in Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 153–75 ——, ‘Mythic Language and Gender Subversion: The Case of Ruskin’s Athena’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 52: 3 (1997): 350–71 ——, Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1998) Whitehouse, J. Howard, ed., Ruskin Centenary Addresses: 8 February 1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1919) ——, The Solitary Warrior: New Letters (London: Allen & Unwin, [1929]) ——, ed., Poems to Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941) ——, Vindication of Ruskin (London: Allen, 1950) Wilde, Oscar, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper & Row, 1989) Wilenski, R.H., John Ruskin: An Introduction to Further Study of His Life and Work (London: Faber, 1933) Williams-Ellis, Amabel, The Tragedy of John Ruskin (London: Cape, [1928])

Index Note: where a number is given in bold, it refers to the page on which the indexed illustration appears; authors of individual essays in this book are not indexed unless they are referenced in the main text of a chapter in their own right. Acland, Sir Henry, 149 Agnew, Joan, 42, 44 Alexander, Francesca, 130, 132 Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, 159, 166–7, 168, 172, 198 Allingham, William, 137, 139–40 Arachne (from Greek mythology), 117 Athena (Greek divinity), 7, 115, 116, 117, 126, 179–80 ambiguous gender position of, 115, 180–2 statue at Herculaneum, 180, 181 Zipporah, association with, 195 Auerbach, Nina, 160, 162–3, 164 Barrell, John, 54 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 109, 148 Barrie, J. M., Peter Pan, 168 Beale, Dorothea, 131 Bell, Margaret, 123–4, 125 see also Winnington Hall School Bible Genesis, 197 Isaiah, 99, 100 Revelations, 78–9 Birch, Dinah, 24, 56, 72, 179, 180 Botticelli, Zipporah in The Trials of Moses, 194–5 Brontë sisters, 123 Brown, Ford Maddox, 143 Brown, Rawdon, 75 Browning, Robert, 149–50 Burd, Van Akin, 124, 125 Burne-Jones, Edward, 132 Butler, Judith, 159, 160, 169 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 68, 69, 72, 79, 81

Cambridge University, 130 Carlyle, Thomas, 16, 110, 140, 160 Carpaccio, 178, 189–91, 192–3 The Burial of St Jerome, 190 Dream of St Ursula, 129 Legend of St George, 191–2, 193 Legend of St Ursula, 195–6 Cheltenham Ladies’ College, 131 Cimabue, 182 Cixous, Hélène, 118–19 Clark, Kenneth (Lord), 16, 19 Colenso, Bishop, 124 Collingwood, William Gershom, 5, 10, 20 Ruskinian masculinity, his approach to, 10–28 A Biographical Outline, 12–13, 21 The Bondwoman, 14–15, 23 The Bondwomen (see The Bondwoman) The Life and Work of John Ruskin, 12–13, 14, 21 Ruskin in his Study at Brantwood, ii, 10, 11, 13 Ruskin Relics, 14 Thorstein of the Mere, 14 Cook, Edward Tyas, 14, 20 Cork, High School for Girls, 131 Creighton, Louise, 127 Cushman, Charlotte, 167 Dante, Divine Comedy, 144–5 Daru, Pierre, 76 De Quincey, Thomas, 54, 57–8 ‘involute’, idea of, 57–8 sister (Elizabeth), 54 Dickens, Charles, 164 Dilke, Emilia, 16

206

Index 207 Domecq, Adèle, 6, 13–14, 31, 53, 57, 58, 67 influence on Ruskin’s perception of Venice, 67–8 Domestic ideology, modern reconsiderations of, 121 Dowie, Sybilla (in Praeterita), 32 Earland, Ada, 17 Ecriture féminine, 118 Education for girls, Victorian middle-class, 121–36 Eliot, George Middlemarch, 124 The Mill on the Floss, 123 Ellmann, Richard, 69, 72, 76, 77 Faithfull, Emily, 96 Field, Michael (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), 132–3 Fletcher, Margaret, 131–2 Fun, 2 Furnivall, F. J., 18, 109–10 Gamble, Cynthia, 195 Gautier, Théophile, 6, 64–6, 81 Forte, Eugenie, with, 65 Giselle, 64, 65 Grisi, Ernesta, with, 81 Italia, 64, 66, 81 La Presse, letters to, 64, 65–6 Mademoiselle de Maupin, 64 Mattei, Marie, with, 65–6, 81 Titian, response to, 66 Venice, in, 64–6, 81 Giotto, 182, 187–9, 190 Charity, 183, 184, 188–9 Envy, 189 Girls, Victorian male constructions of, 29–46 Glenfinlas, 55–6, 147, 148 Gozzoli, Benozzo, Abraham Parting from the Angels (Ruskin’s copy), 185–7, 186, 188 Gray, Effie, see Ruskin, Effie Greenaway, Kate, 109, 130, 132 Guild of St George, 8, 113, 128, 131 Hallé, Charles, 39 playing ‘Home, Sweet Home’, 39–40

Harker, Lizzie Allen, 131 Harrison, Frederic, 15 Harrow School, 122–3 Heaton, Ellen, 149, 150–1, 154 Helsinger, Elizabeth, 24, 86 Hill, Octavia, 87–8 Hilliard, Laurence, 11 Hilton, Tim, 67, 128 Howell, Charles Augustus, 16 Howell, James, 69, 79 Howitt, Anna Mary, 7, 87, 88, 94–5, 96, 98 Hunt, William Holman, 197 Hydrocephalus, 51, 54 Ingelow, Jean, 109 James, Admiral Sir William, Ruskinian masculinity, and 16, 20–21 James, Henry, Italian Hours, 64, 65 Jameson, Anna, 6, 7, 87, 88–93, 95, 99, 100 Characteristics of Women, 88–91 Lectures on ‘Sisters of Charity’ and ‘The Communion of Labour’, 91–3, 100 Jordan, Ellen, 94 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 116 Ker, Charlotte, 75 Kingsley, Charles, 2 Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen, 182–3 Lady Margaret Hall (University of Oxford), 127–8 Langham Place Group, 95 La Touche, Emily (Rose’s sister), 41 La Touche, Percy (Rose’s brother), 122–23 La Touche, Rose, 12, 13, 24, 31, 40, 44, 48, 50, 56–7, 78, 122, 127, 132 Lefevre, Madeleine Shaw, 129–30 Lew, Laura Kane, 93 Lindley, Dr, Ladies’ Botany, 49 Livesey, Dora, 125 Love of John Ruskin, The (film), 17, 20 MacCracken, Francis, 138, 142–3 Macleod, Dianne Sachko, 145–6

208 Index Mantegna, St George, 193–4 Marsh, Jan, 87 Mather, J. Marshall, 12, 15 Maurice, F. D., 146 Meynell, Alice, 15 Mill, J. S., 7, 102 compared to Ruskin, 102, 114 Millais, John Everett, 2, 17, 18, 20, 55–6, 147, 148 Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics, 1, 5, 11, 23–5, 107, 112, 119, 178–9 chivalry, and, 23 comparison between Mill and Ruskin, 107–8 Ruskin’s sexuality, and, 24 Montague, Lady Wortley, 79 Neith (Ancient Egyptian divinity), 7, 126 Northcote, James, Ruskin aet 32–1, 2, 29, 30, 47–8 Norton, Charles Eliot, 110, 151, 155 O’Gorman, Francis, 15, 24 Original femininity, fantasy of, 29–32 Oxford University, 8, 30–1, 108, 127–30, 160 Debating Hall of the Oxford Union, 152 University Museum, 128 Parkes, Bessie Rayner, 6, 87, 94, 96–7, 98, 100, 101 Pater, Walter, 2 Patriarchal Christianity, 115, 126 ‘Patriarchal’ culture, 11, 24 Pengelly, R. E., 15 Pius IX (Pope), 81 Powell, Kerry, 160 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 8, 94, 140–43, 148, 152, 197 Prettlejohn, Elizabeth, 140–1 Procter, Adelaide, 6, 87 Proust, Marcel, 8–9, 177–200 A la recherche du temps perdu, 177–200 Athena, view of, 180–2 obituary for Ruskin, 189

relation to Ruskin’s work, including Library Edition illustrations, 177–200 translations of Ruskin’s work, 177 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 47 Richmond, George, 2 Rivers, J. E., 197 Rosenberg, John D., 170 Rossetti, D. G., 8, 98, 132, 137–58 Beatrice Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast, Denies him her Salutation, 150 Bocca Baciata, 153, 154 Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah, 145, 151 Ecce Ancilla Domini! 138 The Girlhood of the Virgin Mary, 141 ‘Jenny’, 153 La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 145 Venus Verticordia, 154 Rossetti, William Michael, 16, 20 Rothenstein, Sir William, 18, 20 Ruskin, Effie (previously Effie Gray, later Lady Millais), 3, 6, 11, 13, 16–17, 18, 31, 55–6, 60–1, 69–77, 79–80, 81, 143, 147 Ruskin, John ‘Abnormal’, as sexually, 18, 19, 20–1, 22 Adèle Domecq, 6, 13–14, 31 Alpine Club, views on, 4 autobiography and gender, 29–46 baby-talk, 42 bitten by ‘Lion’, 47 Cambridge University, support for women’s education at, 130 Christian faith, 113 composite gender position, 12, 109–10 cousin Jesse’s death, 48–52, 53, 55, 56 dreams, 171–2 Ecriture féminine, 118 Egyptian divinities, 7, 115 feminized lover, as, 60 flowers and childhood, association between, 48–63 foxgloves, imaginative association with, 48–57, 61

Index 209 Ruskin, John – continued friendships with women, 109 frivolity, view of, 80 girlhood, 29–46, 47–63, 71 girls and eroticism, 38–40 girls, and their association with crystals, 33–4, 38, 41–3 governess, as, 3, 111–12 government and co-operation, 36–7 Greek mythology, 7, 115, 116–17 Hydrocephalus, 51 innocence of the eyes, 48 involute, as, 57–8, 61–2 Jameson, absorbs ideas from Anna, 93–4 Jameson, his regard for lectures of Anna, 92–3 lecturing at Oxford, 108, 127 loss of girls in Praeterita, 31–2, 48–52, 53, 55, 56 marriage, Victorian and twentieth-century readings of his, 10–28 marriage, its influence on his perception of Venice, 67–81 masculinity, and, 2–3, 10–28, 109–10, 111–13, 133–4, 142 Mill, J. S., compared to, 102, 107–8, 114 mother, language used to address his, 72 old age, and, 35 Oxford road digging, 2 Oxford University, relations with women’s education at, 127–30 pantomime, views of, see Theatre, views of Parkes, Bessie Rayner, the relation of his ideas to, 97 Paterian Aestheticism, 2 plural identity of, 1 poppies, 61–2 portraits of, 1–2 Proust, place in the works of Marcel, 177–200 relation to 1980s feminism, 118–19 reputation of, in 1860s–1870s, 117–18 reputation of, in 1988, 107

Roman Catholicism, view of in 1864, 99 Rossetti, relation with D. G., 137–58 sapphires, 37 self-construction as girlish, 29–46 sexuality, his view of Effie’s, 71–2, 73–4, 75–6 sexuality, Victorian and twentieth-century readings of, 10–28 Shakespeare, discussed with Anna Jameson, 89 Shakespeare, R’s view of his heroines, 89–90 Smith, Barbara Leigh, the relation of his ideas to, 98 Somerville College, Oxford, his support for, 108, 127–8, 129–30 theatre, views of, 159–76 theatrical identity of, 1 tobacco, dislike of, 167–8 transformation, attraction and repulsion to ideas of, 159–76 Venice, 3, 6, 66–85; Ducal Palace, 76; as ‘leperess’, 68; as paradise, 67–8; Zeno, Carlo, 76–7 vivisection, 130, 133, 134 Whitelands College, his support for, 108, 130–1, 134 women’s painting, view of, 87, 132, 143–4, 145–6, 148–9, 150–1 women’s poetry, view of, 132–3 women’s professionalism, view of, 101–2 Zeno, Carlo, and Ruskin’s conception, 76–7 Ruskin, John: works ‘The Art of England’, 132 The Bible of Amiens, 8, 177, 178, 182 Cambridge Inaugural Address, 1 The Cestus of Aglaia, 39, 41, 126 The Crown of Wild Olive, 126 Deucalion, 4 The Ethics of the Dust, 3, 8, 33, 43, 45, 114–16, 125–6, 165, 167; erotics of, 38–40 Fors Clavigera, 2, 12, 42, 70, 99, 112, 118, 126, 159, 161, 163, 172, 183 ‘The Future of England’, 123

210 Index Ruskin, John: works – continued Giotto and His Works in Padua, 187–8 Guide to the Academy at Venice, 190, 193 The Harbours of England, 196 The King of the Golden River, 31, 55 A Knight’s Faith, 12 Lectures on Architecture and Painting, 177 Love’s Meinie, 3–4, 33–40, 43, 45 Marcolini, 67 Modern Painters (as a whole), 111, 183, 185 Modern Painters, I, 68 Modern Painters, III, 93 Modern Painters, IV, 33, 36, 52, 159, 161–2, 163, 164, 165, 172 Modern Painters, V, 36 Mornings in Florence, 178 ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, 178 ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, 1, 3, 5, 6–7, 23–4, 86–106, 107, 110–11, 112, 113, 114, 121–36, 165, 166, 179; autobiography, as, 111–13; reception of, 86–7, 91, 101; women’s and girls’ education, and, 121–36; women’s movement, relation to early Victorian, 86–106 The Pleasures of England, 129 Praeterita, 2, 5, 6, 29–32, 41, 42–45, 47–63, 107 Proserpina, 4, 6, 50, 61, 166 ‘Protestantism: The Pleasures of Truth’, 129 The Queen of the Air, 50, 52, 56, 126, 165, 170, 180; draconidae, and, 52–3, 56 Roadside Songs of Tuscany, 130 St Mark’s Rest, 190, 192 Sesame and Lilies, 4, 8, 12, 24, 86, 107, 112, 114, 117, 121, 177, 178, 180, 197–8; Proust’s use of the word ‘sesame’, 197–8 The Stones of Venice, 64, 66, 69, 71, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 101, 107, 111, 146; ‘The Nature of Gothic’, 52, 107, 146 Time and Tide, 159, 161, 165–72 ‘Traffic’, 107

Unto this Last, 3, 4, 107, 111, 165 Val d’Arno, 177 Valle Crucis, 12 Ruskin, John James (father), 19, 21, 73, 74, 79, 113, 126, 127 Ruskin, Margaret (mother), 19, 21 Margaret’s Well, 72 Son’s conception, 76–7 Sand, George, François le Champi, 187 Saturday Review, 3, 86, 111 Sawyer, Paul, 33 Scott, Sir Walter, Lady of the Lake, 51 Shakespeare, William, 89, 163–4 Heroines, Victorian views of, 88–90 Hamlet, 167 Othello, 79 The Two Gentleman of Verona, 197 Sheets, Robin, 24 Siddall, Elizabeth, 94, 109, 143–4, 145, 148–9, 150, 154, 155 Smiles, Samuel, 113 Smith, Barbara Leigh, 6, 87, 94, 95–6, 97–8, 100, 101 Somerville College, Oxford, 108, 127–8, 129–30 Sonstroem, David, 24, 179 Tanner, Tony, 77 Tennyson, Alfred, 144, 149 Turner, J. M. W., 137, 138, 143, 183, 185 Portsmouth, 196 Tyndall, John, 4 Veeder, William, 24 Venice, 3, 6, 66–85, 117, 177 Ducal Palace, 76 Sta Maria Formosa, 77–8 see also under Ruskin and Venice Vitagraph Company of America, The Love of John Ruskin (film), 17, 20 Wardell, Miss (in Praeterita), 32, 53, 57, 58, 59–60 Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky, 56, 180 Whitehouse, John Howard, chivalry, language of, 21–2

Index 211 Whitehouse, John Howard – continued Ruskinian masculinity, 16, 19, 20, 21–2 Saint George, 21 The Solitary Warrior, 21 Vindication of Ruskin, 21, 22 Whitelands College, 108, 130–1, 134 Wilenski, R. H., 18–19 Williams-Ellis, Amabel, 18, 19

Wingate, Ashmore, 15 Winnington Hall School, 3, 8, 33, 40, 108–9, 123–5, 126 Withers, Charlotte (in Praeterita), 31–2, 53, 57, 58–9, 60 Wordsworth, William, 90 ‘Lucy’ poems, 49 Working Men’s College, 146–7

Ruskin and Gender

Ruskin and Modernism

The Life of John Ruskin

John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre

Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture

The Works of John Ruskin, Volume 25 (Cambridge Library Collection - Works of John Ruskin)

Ruskin Unto This Last A Paraphrase

Gender, Power and Relationships

Language and Gender

Gender, Development and Health

Gender, Nature, and Nurture

Gender, Globalization, and Postsocialism

Gender, Water and Development

Gender and Discourse

Death, gender, and ethnicity

Milton and Gender

Gender and Mathemathics

Gender and Discourse

Gender and Groupwork

Gender, Work and Tourism

Gender and Everyday Life

Women, Gender and Enlightenment

Eminem and Gender Stereotyping

Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender

Understanding Gender and Organizations

Education And Gender Equality

Gender and Development

Gender and Discourse

Ruskin and Gender

Ruskin and Modernism

The Life of John Ruskin

John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre

Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture

The Works of John Ruskin, Volume 25 (Cambridge Library Collection - Works of John Ruskin)

Ruskin Unto This Last A Paraphrase

Gender, Power and Relationships

Language and Gender

Gender, Development and Health

Gender, Nature, and Nurture

Gender, Globalization, and Postsocialism

Gender, Water and Development

Gender and Discourse

Death, gender, and ethnicity

Milton and Gender

Gender and Mathemathics

Gender and Discourse

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