Month: March 2019

This blog, by Rebecca Mitchell, University of Birmingham, draws on new research to reveal a previously undocumented link between John Ruskin and Constance and Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde’s connection with Ruskin is well known but surprisingly under-explored.[1] One famous episode from their shared past, a story on which Wilde dined out for decades, was the young man’s participation, while an undergraduate at Oxford, in Ruskin’s Hinksey road effort. But the Slade Professor’s influence was by no means confined to Wilde’s Oxford years, and scholars including John Unrau have called for more attention to be paid to the role that Ruskin played throughout Wilde’s adult life, a role that extended to friendship with Wilde’s wife Constance.[2] As Unrau has detailed, in April 1888 Ruskin suggested that Constance present an award on his behalf at the Whitelands Training College. In a letter to the Reverend J. P. Faunthorpe, principal of the college, Ruskin wrote, “I think perhaps Mrs Oscar Wilde might like to do it  Oscar has always been a most true friend to me, and she, more than I knew.”[3] Ruskin’s enduring friendship with Constance was built in part on mutual acquaintances from beyond Oscar’s circle: in February 1895, to give one example, Constance and Georgina Mount-Temple—confidante of Ruskin as well as Constance—hosted a party for Ruskin’s 76^th birthday.[4]

Another instantiation of their friendship has escaped scholarly scrutiny. In the months before his letter to Faunthorpe, Constance apparently saw Ruskin in Sandgate, where he moved in August 1887 and lived through the following spring. The visit is documented by an inscription in Constance Wilde’s visitor’s book, now held in the Eccles Bequest at the British Library.[5] In her biography of Constance, Franny Moyle writes that Wilde’s wife, “ever the collector, and impressed by fame and success…made sure that she captured the signatures of some of her visitors” in the book.[6] It must be noted that in 1888, Constance and Oscar were still a united couple, well on the way to fame and socializing in rarefied literary and artistic circles. Indeed, signatories of the book comprise a who’s who of Oscar’s friends, colleagues, mentors, and idols, including Walter Pater, Robert Browning, George Meredith, James McNeill Whistler, and Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts. Constance’s acquaintances, cultural luminaries, and passers-through also make appearances: George Grossmith, G. F. Watts, John Bright, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mark Twain, Marie Corelli, and Vernon Lee all signed the book, among many others. Even Pablo de Sarasate penned the first few bars of his “Zigeunerweisen” above his signature.

Ruskin’s contribution is comfortably situated among such starry company. It appears a few pages after A. C. Swinburne’s contribution—a holograph copy of “Of such is the kingdom of heaven,” here titled “Children”—and a page featuring the signatures of William and Jane Morris. [7] Morris’s inscription seems wholly representative of his longstanding ethos: “The secret of happiness | To take pleasure in all the details of Life and not to live vicariously.”[8]

Written in a clear hand, and occupying its own page, Ruskin’s entry is in many ways similarly typical:

It is thought that Imagination reigns in a
world lovelier than we have known.
But no imagination is clear or bright enough
to conceive the glory of the world we see,
yet know not.

                    John Ruskin

Sandgate 28^th Jan^y
    1888[9]

Ruskin engages (albeit briefly) with the analyses of the imagination that extended throughout his long career.[10] An 1849 diary entry captures an early iteration of this theme. Considering the impact of ignorance and knowledge on the imagination—in particular, the impact of his geological knowledge on his ability to experience the sublimity of the Alps—he muses on ‘two things’ that determine the relationship:  “firstly whether this knowledge, carried out or accompanied by further knowledge of God’s works (astronomy, &c.) would not, in the end, open still nobler fields to the imagination; and secondly, supposing it would not, how much the ignorant Imagination is really worth.”[11] Nearly fifty years later, writing in Constance’s book, Ruskin seems still to conclude that imagination alone is insufficient to know the “glory” of the world around us.

Ruskin’s line might cast into relief Oscar’s own relationship to the imagination, the complexity of which far exceeds the limits of this blogpost. Perhaps the most Ruskin-appropriate touchstone from this period is Wilde’s children’s story “The Remarkable Rocket” (1888), in which he skewers James McNeill Whistler—represented by an insufferably pompous firework rocket—whose famous altercation with Ruskin over his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold—the Falling Rocket was still a familiar memory. The self-deluded rocket insists, “Why, anybody can have common sense, provided they have no imagination. But I have imagination, for I never think of things as they really are; I always think of them as being quite different.”[12] For the rocket, complete disregard of fact (namely his arrogance and uselessness) leads to his ruin. Elsewhere in Wilde’s writing, his full-throated embrace of “beautiful, untrue things,” and his insistence that truth was not necessarily allied to fact, suggest that his notion of the imagination and its role in artistic vision was not the same as Ruskin’s.[13]

What Constance might have made of Ruskin’s entry is even less clear. Her limited published writing of this period—primarily children’s stories and a few articles for periodicals—does not address imagination; Moyle’s biography has precious little to say about Ruskin. There is an unfortunate tendency of among some of Oscar’s biographers to regard all moments of his life as leading inevitably to his trial and imprisonment, and in this vein, it might be tempting to read Ruskin’s inscription as an ominous foreshadow: Constance would likely have been unable, even with a clear and bright imagination, to conceive of the realities of the devastation awaiting her family just a few years later.  But it was clearly the overlooked glories of one’s time that concerned Ruskin, not its potential miseries, and his inscription is better understood as an artefact of what was still a promising time in the Wildes’ lives.

 

Rebecca N. Mitchell is Reader of Victorian Literature and Culture and Director of the Nineteenth-Century Centre at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on Oscar Wilde, Victorian realism, print culture, and fashion. Her recent books include Fashioning the Victorians: A Critical Sourcebook (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts (co-edited with Anna Maria Jones, Ohio UP 2017) and Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery (co-authored with Joseph Bristow, Yale UP 2015). She is currently co-editing Wilde’s Unpublished, Incomplete, and Miscellaneous Works for the Oxford English Text edition of the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde.

…………………………….

The author wishes to thank Merlin Holland and the British Library for permission to quote from and use the image from Constance Wilde’s autograph book, and to Lucy Evans and Hannah Francis for research assistance.

[1] e.g. John Unrau, “Ruskin and the Wildes: The Whitelands Connection,” Notes and Queries 29, no. 4 (1982): 316-317.

[2] Lot “98 Ruskin’s Modern Painters, vol. 2, and other books, Juvenal with plates, &c.” and Lot “102 Five vols. of Ruskin’s Works, blue calf, Ruskin’s Elements of Drawings, and other vols. Ruskin, etc.” Bullock Auction House, Catalogue of the Library of Valuable Books…Wednesday April 24^th, 1895, reprinted in A. N. L. Munby, Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, vol. 1, Poets and Men of Letter (London: Mansell, 1971), p. 381, 382.

[3] Quoted in Unrau, p. 316. Punctuation and italics as in Unrau. At the time of the article’s writing, the then-unpublished letter was held in the Wellesley College Library.

[4] Franny Moyle, Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde (London: John Murray, 2011), p. 253. Later that month, Oscar received the accusatory calling card from the Marquess of Queensbury that ultimately led to Wilde’s arrest.

[5] Unrau mentions the autograph book (p. 317), citing Hesketh Pearson’s biography of Wilde (Life of Oscar Wilde [London: Metheun, 1952] p. 262). Ian Small also records its existence in Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials & Methods of Research (ELH Press, 1993), p. 110.

[6] Moyle, Constance, p. 126-127.

[7] Swinburne’s poem first appeared in Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882) as poem XXII of “A Dark Month”, p. 341. It appears as “Children” in the 1887 collection Select Poems (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 97. Though undated, context suggests the page was written in April 1887, when Wilde’s sons Cyril and Vyvyan would have been nearly two and six months old, respectively.  Constance Wilde, Autograph book, Eccles Bequest. Vol. CXXXVII A; British Library Add MS 81755, p. 16. Used with permission.

[8] Jane offered lines from FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát: “My tomb shall be in a spot where the | north wind may scatter roses over it.” The entry is dated 23 March, 1888. C. Wilde, Autograph book, p. 23.

[9] C. Wilde, Autograph book, p. 22. As far as I know, the lines are published here for the first time.

[10] W. G. Collingwood, The Life of John Ruskin (London: Methuen, 1893), vol. II, p. 316. Neither Collingwood’s nor John Dixon Hunt’s biography of Ruskin mentions a visit from Constance at or around this time. Oscar Wilde’s published correspondence from the period shows him based in their family home on Tite Street in London, but letters from January 1888 are sparse and there certainly could have been time for travel. Constance’s biographers also do not detail a visit around this time, though there are records that the couple did respond to Ruskin’s invitations in March of the same year. Again, Unrau is the lonely source who recounts the episode.

[11] The Diaries of John Ruskin 1848-1873, Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse, eds., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958) p. 416.

[12] Oscar Wilde, “The Remarkable Rocket,” in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (London: David Nutt, 1888), p. 100.

[13] Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” Nineteenth Century 25 (January 1889), p. 55-56.

This blog, about her exhibition at Brantwood, ‘Ruskin’s Good Looking!’ is written by Dr Sarah Casey, Senior Lecturer in Drawing and Installation at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University

All over the country, indeed all over the world, we are currently celebrating Ruskin’s birth and reflecting on his legacy for the 21^st century and beyond. This year, 20^th February marked 200 years since Ruskin’s christening. The christening gown worn by the infant Ruskin on that day is one of several garments belonging to Ruskin now on display at Brantwood as part of the exhibition Ruskin’s Good Looking!, which celebrated its opening on 24^th February. This event is the culmination of a two-year Lancaster University research project, examining Ruskin’s clothes through drawing. The project included testing ideas in The Ruskin’s 2018 seminar series (which took its title from this project, Ruskin’s Good Looking!) and public drawing workshops as part of the Being Human festival 2018.[1] The questions driving this activity are: What is it about drawing that continues to make it a valuable tool of investigation in fields ranging from natural history, to medicine, archaeology and fashion? How might Ruskin’s ideas about drawing be applied in the 21^st century to develop new contemporary approaches to object based research?

Over the past two years I have had the extraordinary privilege to get up close and intimate with Ruskin’s clothing in the Brantwood collection and at nearby Keswick Museum. The research was based on the premise of using Ruskin’s belief in drawing as a means of seeing the world – a view he clearly expressed in The Elements of Drawing (1857): “I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.” Drawing requires us to look and this helps us to understand.  I applied this view to his own clothing.

The first stage was simple – look, look again, and draw what you see. Using this elementary method, I made 1:1 scale pencil drawings  of each garment on graph paper. I called these garment maps. Reflecting on the process, I came to realise a parallel with Ruskin’s methods of ‘true topology’, delineating what is observed in the landscape leaving ‘no stone unturned’ … although in my drawings, the landscape was the more intimate terrain of personal clothing. This was to reveal nuances in the clothing’s construction that might be read as fingerprint of Ruskin’s specific physiology. Artist Louise Bourgeois has described clothing as being like an envelope of a person, bearing the imprint of their body, a history so clear she calls garments ‘road signs’ to the past.[2]

 

These ‘road signs’ are evident if we know how to look. Close looking through drawing is a method promoted by curator and ‘dress detective’ Ingrid Mida from Ryerson University, Toronto who visited Brantwood with me in April 2018 to examine the garments.[3] This provided valuable specialist insight into their use and wear. It was a magical moment when Ingrid first unfolded the shirt to find the laundry mark JR 12 95, which, as she writes in her catalogue essay, dates the shirt to December 1895, towards the end of Ruskin’s life.[4]

 

An equally exciting moment was when, studying the seams and crevices of a tailcoat, I discovered a tailors label marked ‘ John Ruskin Esq.’ affirming that the garment was indeed Ruskin’s and its provenance from his tailor (Stultz Wain & Co. 10 Clifford St London, for those of you interested).

 

From these intense observational studies, I went on to make a series of wax drawings of the garments. Each garment map was transcribed onto a sheet of Japanese paper soaked in wax, using a simple dressmakers pin. The white marks that are visible are made by nothing more than the pressure of touching the surface.

 

Like breath, or memory, the drawings have a fragile existence and will literally melt away if exposed to heat. As Anuradha Chatterjee’s catalogue explains, Ruskin believed clothing to reflect a person’s soul.[5] The wax drawings embrace this idea, taking on a spectral quality that evokes the uncanny sense of absent presence that is felt when examining a person’s clothes and looking into the past.  As Ruskin said  drawing enables us “to preserve something like a true image of beautiful things that pass away, or which you must yourself leave.”[6]

So, if you’re near Brantwood between now and 7^th April, do take a look before they disappear…

To find out more about how this Ruskinian approach to drawing might benefit research in the 21^st century, look out for Drawing Investigations: graphic relationships with science, culture and environment by Sarah Casey and Gerry Davies due for publication by Bloomsbury later this year.

 

[1] Sponsored by AHRC, the British Academy and Institute of Advanced Studies, University of London

[2] Louise Bourgeois in Marie Laure Bernadac, Louise Bourgeois, Paris: Flammarion, 2006, p.155.

[3] Supported by a grant from the Arts Council and British Council Artist International Development Fund.

[4] Ingrid Mida ‘A portrait of John Ruskin through his clothes’ in S. Casey (ed.) Ruskin’s Good Looking! (Lancaster University and Brantwood, 2019), p.13.

[5] Anuradha Chatterjee ‘Wearing the Soul John Ruskin’s theory of ideal dress’ in S. Casey (ed.) Ruskin’s Good Looking! (Lancaster University and Brantwood, 2019), pp.16-19.

[6] John Ruskin Elements of Drawing (1857). Letter 1, On First Practice.