John Ruskin's Correspondence with Joan Severn: Sense and Nonsense Letters (Legenda Main Series)

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Welcome to Brantwood’s gardens, to ensure the safety of all staff and visitors please make sure to follow all instructions and signage during your visit. I’m beginning to really have hopes of you. This terrific sunset shows [great improvement]. Now, do be a good girl for once and send me a little sunset as you know now how to do it—reversing everything you used to do.

i.e., draw figures in the nude, a practice employed for millennia to ensure that the body is accurately rendered. Earlier (20 March 1884: Swett 50), he had written, “one must confess to one’s Mammina when one’s naughty.” Ruskin's sketch of Rose on her deathbed encapsulates the wasted life of the young woman, her hysteria and the demise of his longed-for happiness with her. On the letter, after the word “round,” Joan Severn, Ruskin’s caretaker cousin at Brantwood, intercepting the letter before it left for London, wrote in pencil: “Do nothing of the kind.” To which, Ruskin, discovering Joan’s interpolation before the letter posted, rejoined, on the reverse side: “That naughty Joan got hold of it—never mind her—you see, she doesn’t like the word ‘round’—that’s all.” Can you tell us more about this portrait? Spotted an error, information that is missing (a sitter’s life dates, occupation or family relationships, or a date of portrait for example) or do you know anything that we don't know? If you have information to share please complete the form below.

Ruskin extended Gordon's circle of friends. At the beginning of November, he took him to dinner at the home of John and Jane Simon, probably at their London home in Great Cumberland Street, where he also met Mr and Mrs Hutchinson ( Diaries, II, 686). Mr Hutchinson was most likely Dr (later Sir) Jonathan Hutchinson (1828-1913) who became a surgeon at the London Hospital (1863-1883) in the East End and Hunterian professor of surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons. One of his great discoveries was the identification of three symptoms of congenital syphilis, known as "Hutchinson’s triad". The day after the dinner, Ruskin made a strange comment in his diary: "Had to talk at the Simons’; felt as if silent Mr. Hutchinson thought me conceited" ( Diaries, II, 686). Ruskin's physical and emotional health continued to be poor. "Frightly tormented in various ways", he wrote in his diary in January 1867 ( Diaries, II, 609). His mother's health was also poor – her sight was failing and her son thought she would not live beyond the spring. But a suggestion he received from Thomas Dixon, a cork-cutter from Sunderland in the industrial north-east of England, asking for copies of his writings on political economy, prompted him to commence a regular series of public letters or pamphlets on a range of socio-economic issues. This was to become Time and Tide and provided Ruskin with a focus for his work. was a year of many changes for Ruskin. On 20 April 1871, Joan Agnew, Ruskin's ward and his mother's companion for many years, married the painter Arthur Severn, son of Joseph Severn, British Consul in Rome who was best known as the artist in whose arms Keats died. This was not an unexpected event for Ruskin had exercised his authority over Joan and Arthur and insisted on their waiting for three years, a trial period of separation, before marrying (Hilton, Later Years 130-31). Perhaps he hoped the marriage would not take place, for it would disrupt the family dynamics. Ruskin had no choice but to adapt if he wished to remain within this new orbit. For a fuller account of the relationship with Olander and his subsequent collapse, see my “Dark Night.”

Brownell cites a letter of 24 June 1849 where Ruskin specifically alludes to the possibility of having children with Effie (PML MA 1338, H.34), a file apparently not consulted by others who wrote on the marriage.Gordon's visit to Ruskin very soon after receiving that letter from Dr Simon, and after the snake dream, may have been to provide his friend with comfort and advice. The diary entry of 10 March reads: "Gordon in evening" ( Diaries, II, 644).

I begin today on my return from London a revised catalogue of the minerals which I hope may remain mine as long as I can enjoy them, and afterwards, somewhere and in some sort, serve in my monument, having in their time, given me much pleasure, and been the sources of helpful knowledge” Rudolf Diesel is issued a patent for his internal combustion engine; Diesel's engine eventually replaces steam power. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray first appears in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine . InternationalCecil Rhodes, organiser of the diamond-mining De Beers Consolidated Mines, becomes premier of Cape Colony as part of his expansionist aims in South Africa.Gordon kept Ruskin, then staying in a Sacristan's Cell in a Roman Catholic monastery in Assisi, informed about his private and social life. There had been a gap in their relationship. Gordon, seemingly not knowing that Ruskin was abroad, had gone to see him in Oxford but learned that he "had departed the day before". He was planning to go to Shropshire the following day, 12 June, to visit his sister Jane at her country mansion Stanmore Hall, near Bridgnorth. He also wrote about his invitation, two weeks before, to dine with "Mr Ritchie" at Highgate, in north London: it was his first visit and he was "quite charmed with the view". "The house", he continued, "is about on the level of the Cross of St Pauls". Henry Ritchie had been John James Ruskin's trusted clerk in his Billiter Street office. * Early in the 1970s, before the accusations of pedophilia arrived, Ruskin had been the exemplar used, most famously by Kate Millet (“Debate”; Sexual), as an instance non pareil of the nineteenth century belief in “dual spheres,” an ideology that championed male dominance. Men, Ruskin said in his lecture “Of Queens’ Gardens” (1864), were the gender which, by virtue of its intrinsic nature, was charged with the responsibility of culture-building—making war, governing, thinking deeply; in contrast, women, possessors of a different intrinsic nature, were more suited to home-building. It was a bifurcation, Millet and others argued which, by definition, disallowed the full development of women’s potential and humanity, forcing almost all of them into the secondary and less powerful roles of family creators and maintainers. Millet’s thesis generated many, sometimes heated, responses both in support of and in challenge to it, some focusing on whether or not Ruskin deserved the symbolic status of “intransigent gender traditionalist” he had been accorded: cf. (among others) on the support side, Lloyd; Pierce; on the revisionist side, Birch; Sonstroem; O’Gorman (“Manliness”). It is possible that this widely public argument made later proposals that Ruskin was disposed to the sexual exploitation of little girls and young women less surprising. To illustrate the persistence and cultural depth of this negative, almost Pavlovian, reaction to any reference to Ruskin’s sexuality, consider that the just-mentioned article by Barnes appeared in 2011. Even more recently (10 August 2017), I received from a friend a link to an article celebrating Ruskin’s sense of taste and appreciation of handicraft work, reading, not far into it—almost as a “throw away” comment—this: Ruskin’s “susceptibility to visceral delights may be [the] more surprising, less because of his aversion to other pleasures of the flesh (his five-year marriage to Effie Gray was notoriously unconsummated)” (Vane). In an earlier essay (“Dark Night”), I argued that, for more than a century—to the detriment of his personal reputation and perception of the enduring relevance of his works—Ruskin’s mental illness had been misdiagnosed because not one of the many who asserted that he suffered from this or that inherited (always the claim) cerebral debility had taken the time to examine the scientific and medical literature pertinent to the disease they said he had. The problem could be solved, I said, if we did just that—turn to modern medical understandings of mental illnesses and analyze the data pertaining to the illnesses from which he was supposedly suffering. Doin Gordon read the letter, almost certainly in The Times, and was prompted to respond not only to Ruskin but also to Joan Severn. In his letter to "My dear Ruskin", he expressed his approval: