Ruskin redeemed

A page from one of the Severn family’s Brantwood albums

How could anyone collect John Ruskin?

To some people, asking such a question might automatically suggest something of this once influential figure’s fall in popularity. One indication of that fall is that Ruskin has the distinction of being portrayed, let’s say, somewhat unsympathetically in two films in the same year: Richard Laxton’s Effie Gray and Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner (both 2014). The former, scripted by Emma Thompson, concentrates on the unhappy story of his marriage to Euphemia “Effie” Gray. The latter reduces him to praising the paintings of J. M. W. Turner as “glorwious work”.

To those who still study and admire Ruskin, I suspect, the question of collecting him has a different meaning. There is, for a start, the Library Edition of of The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (George Allen, 1903–12) in thirty-nine volumes. But somebody trying to pick up lifetime editions of Ruskin’s published works (let alone any drawings or manuscripts) is setting themselves a formidable challenge, taking in the five volumes of Modern Painters (1843–60), Unto This Last: Four essays on the first principles of political economy (1862; serialized two years earlier in the Cornhill Magazine), Fors Clavigera: Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain (1871–84) – and so on. Ruskin’s was nothing if not a long and productive writing life. A far cry from the modern caricature is the prolific and profound author described by John Batchelor (in the TLS, July 31, 1981), an expert on modern art, a social critic, a moral philosopher:

From a distance Ruskin’s books look monumental; huge, self-contained blocks of masonry on the Victorian landscape. As one approaches them they are seen to be fluid and unstable, highly charged and intensely personal books which transcend the categories of criticism, autobiography, economics and politics but at the same time demand one’s attention if Victorian thinking on any of these topics is to be properly understood.

Nobody knew this better than James S. Dearden (1931–2021). Born in Barrow in Furness, Dearden was sent to the Ruskinian establishment Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight, and became a schoolteacher there himself after National Service. Bembridge had its own extraordinary collection of Ruskin material – the school’s founder, John Howard Whitehouse, being a significant aficionado – and Dearden served as its custodian for several decades. (Among other things, he found numerous unopened and unexamined packets of correspondence in the Bembridge collection, without knowledge of which modern Ruskin scholarship would have suffered severely.) In 1969 he established the Ruskin Association, which ran until the 1990s; it was around the same time that he published a series of essays in the Book Collector about Ruskin and that troublesome book forger T. J. Wise. He went on to publish several books, such as Facets of Ruskin (Charles Skilton, 1970), John Ruskin: A life in pictures (Sheffield University Press, 1999) and The Library of John Ruskin (Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2013).

That last work, incidentally, describes the 2,969 books and manuscripts that Ruskin himself was known to have owned at one time or another, and happens to record some of his comments on the items he eventually got rid of: “Thrown out for want of room, never a word read”. One can, alas, relate.

Anyway, you can probably see why, in Justin Croft’s meticulous catalogue of Dearden’s Ruskin collection, a fellow expert in the field, Stuart Eagles, could call him the “unofficial Dean of Ruskin Studies”.

The collection built up by the unofficial Dean of Ruskin Studies could not have been anything but a labour of love and scholarly dedication. And the catalogue compiled by Croft and Jonathan Stone, covering 345 items across its two parts, is a remarkable and engrossing piece of work in itself.

It begins with an “exceptionally scarce” copy of Ruskin’s earliest published work, a prize poem called Salsette and Elephanta (J. Vincent, 1839) that won its author the Newdigate Prize at Oxford. It continues with other published works, such as The King of the Golden River (Smith, Elder, 1851), a fantasy Ruskin had written at the young Effie’s request ten years earlier (but which was only published after they married, in 1848).

John Ruskin, The King of the Golden River (Smith, Elder, 1851)

Dearden brought together fifteen copies of the highly popular Sesame and Lilies, almost in all different editions, and starting with the first (Smith, Elder, 1865). He also managed to get hold of one of the “genuine rarities of Ruskin literature”: one of the fifty copies of Ruskin’s Poems, privately printed by the author’s father in 1850. There were copies bound in green cloth to be presented to ladies, apparently, and copies bound in purple for gentlemen. This one, bound in green, was presented by Ruskin’s father to Emma Edwardes, the stepdaughter of his physician, in February 1851.

Perhaps Dearden could feel that Ruskin was brought close, in some sense, via some of the other items in this collection. For instance, there is the first chapter of “Our Fathers Have Told Us”: Sketches of the history of Christendom for boys and girls who have been held at its fonts (George Allen, second edition 1883) that is covered in “corrections on almost every page in his hand”. Ruskin has likewise filled a first volume of Modern Painters (Smith, Elder, 1867) with “extensive annotations”. And then there are the letters, the albums kept over many years by the Severn family (who assisted Ruskin at his house, Brantwood, as “assistants and guardians”), the photographs, the assorted Ruskiniana (including three small busts) and the secondary literature (including ten doctoral theses).

James Dearden’s Ruskin collection has apparently now been sold, “almost en bloc”; this catalogue, a splendid source of abstruse information about both the collector and his collection, might be taken as a suitably learned and painstakingly produced tribute.

C. R. Ashbee, An Endeavour towards the Teaching of John Ruskin and William Morris (Essex House Press, 1901)

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ICYMI: International Translation Day was a while ago (September 30), but Bernard Quaritch’s catalogue to mark the occasion remains a fine reminder of the literary traffic between languages (John Stuart Mill in Japanese, Ovid in Spanish, Anna Akhmatova translating from several other languages into Russian). Looking forward, I make it forty-three book fairs the PBFA has lined up for next year, in most corners of the country; there are also four online, the first of which is on January 1. I’m hoping to make it to Cambridge (again), among others.