John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education

By Anthem Press

John Ruskin, whose bicentenary will be celebrated world-wide in 2019, was not only an art historian, cultural critic and political theorist but, above all, a great educator. He was the inspiration behind such influential figures as William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust and Mahatma Gandhi and his influence can be felt increasingly in every sphere of education today, for example, in debates about the importance of creativity, about grammar schools and social mobility, about Further Education, the crucial social role of libraries, environmental issues, the role of crafts as well as academic learning, the importance of fantasy literature, and the education of women. The current collection brings together ten top international Ruskin scholars to explore what he actually said about education in his many-faceted writings, and points to some of the key educational issues raised by his work. [NP] The volume is divided into three sections, covering the three major areas of Ruskin’s concerns, namely social reform, the arts and religion. Their titles suggest his dynamic effect in all three areas: A) Changing Society; B) Libraries and the Arts; C) Christianity and Apocalypse. Ruskin’s vision of education as both dividually and socially transformative is explored by Sara Atwood in Chapter 1. Among much else, he stresses the value of simplicity, one of many ideas he shared with his great admirer, Leo Tolstoy, a relationship explored by Stuart Eagles in Chapter 2. Ruskin believes too in the social and educational importance of dress, an idea developed by Rachel Dickinson in Chapter 3. Jan Marsh, in Chapter 4, examines Ruskin’s contradictory stance on female education. Though he was a great believer in the ‘separate spheres’, he also championed wider learning opportunities for girls. The dissemination of education, through libraries and through the arts, is one of Ruskin’s abiding concerns. Continuing his argument about the power of simplicity over artifice, he talks in the inaugural address of ‘the virtues of Christianity [being] best practised, and its doctrines best attested, by a handful of mountain shepherds without art, without literature, almost without language.’ In the history of Switzerland, he says, ‘The shepherd’s staff prevailed over the soldier’s spear.’ In Chapter 5 Emma Sdegno explores Ruskin’s Shepherds’ Library, his notion of book dissemination to such people, while in Chapter 6 Stephen Wildman examines another of his educational experiments, the use of photography to enable ordinary people to encounter the Old Masters and to ‘see clearly’. Paul Jackson in Chapter 7 breaks new ground in revealing Ruskin’s response to music, an art to which he responded deeply as a sensuous experience, while arguing that it could also act as an agent of moral improvement. In Chapter 8 Edward James examines Ruskin’s only explicit foray into fairytale, ‘The King of the Golden River’, and links this back to his imaginative use of the fantastic and of fairyland images throughout his social and political writing.

Ruskin was both a teacher and a preacher. His recollection in Praeterita of his first recorded speech, as a very small boy, ‘People, Be Good!’1 suggests the trajectory of his adult career. Keith Hanley and Andrew Tate in the final chapters of this collection explore the links between his aesthetic and his religious views. Hanley in Chapter 9 picks up the notion of the absolute centrality of this Christian worldview to Ruskin’s life and work and suggests the perils of ‘secularising’ him. In Chapter 10, Tate pursues Ruskin’s apocalyptic vision. Ruskin believed that ‘Every human action gains in honour, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come’; for him, therefore, ‘apocalypse’ meant, not an ending, but a revelation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783088072

Book preview

John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education

ANTHEM NINETEENTH-CENTURY SERIES

The Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series incorporates a broad range of titles within the fields of literature and culture, comprising an excellent collection of interdisciplinary academic texts. The series aims to promote the most challenging and original work being undertaken in the field and encourages an approach that fosters connections between areas including history, science, religion and literary theory. Our titles have earned an excellent reputation for the originality and rigour of their scholarship and our commitment to high-quality production.

Series Editor

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst – University of Oxford, UK

Editorial Board

Dinah Birch – University of Liverpool, UK

Kirstie Blair – University of Stirling, UK

Archie Burnett – Boston University, USA

Christopher Decker – University of Nevada, USA

Heather Glen – University of Cambridge, UK

Linda K. Hughes – Texas Christian University, USA

Simon J. James – Durham University, UK

Angela Leighton – University of Cambridge, UK

Jo McDonagh – King’s College London, UK

Michael O’Neill – Durham University, UK

Seamus Perry – University of Oxford, UK

Clare Pettitt – King’s College London, UK

Adrian Poole – University of Cambridge, UK

Jan-Melissa Schramm – University of Cambridge, UK

John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education

Edited by

Valerie Purton

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2018 Valerie Purton editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors.

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-805-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-805-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Foreword

Francis O’Gorman

Introduction

Valerie Purton

Section A. CHANGING THE WORLD

Chapter 1.‘An Enormous Difference between Knowledge and Education’: What Ruskin Can Teach Us

Sara Atwood

Chapter 2.‘Souls of Good Quality’: Ruskin, Tolstoy and Education

Stuart Eagles

Chapter 3.‘To Teach Them How to Dress’: Ruskin, Clothing and Lessons in Society

Rachel Dickinson

Chapter 4.Mad Governess or Wise Counsellor? Sesame and Lilies Revisited

Jan Marsh

Section B. LIBRARIES AND THE ARTS

Chapter 5.‘A Very Precious Book’: Ruskin’s Exegesis of the Psalms in Rock Honeycomb and Fors Clavigera

Emma Sdegno

Chapter 6.‘Our Household Catalogue of Reference’: Ruskin’s Lesson Photographs of 1875–76

Stephen Wildman

Chapter 7.Ruskin, Music and the Health of the Nation

Paul Jackson

Chapter 8.Ruskin and the Fantastic

Edward James

Section C. CHRISTIANITY AND APOCALYPSE

Chapter 9.Ruskin’s Many-Sided Soulfulness

Keith Hanley

Chapter 10.‘Catastrophe Will Come’: Ruskin, Nation and Apocalypse

Andrew Tate

Notes on Contributors

Index

FIGURES

3.1John Wharton Bunney (1867), Study of Peasant Costume

6.1Lesson Photograph No. 1, 1875

6.2Lesson Photograph No. 2, 1876

6.3Lesson Photograph No. 3, 1876

6.4Lesson Photograph No. 4, 1876

FOREWORD

Francis O’Gorman

Dinah Birch is one of the world’s best Ruskin scholars. She is also an exceptional educator, a teacher, writer, broadcaster and ally.

Ruskin believed in scholarship as he helped the nineteenth century define it – the commitment of The Stones of Venice (1851–53) or Modern Painters (1843–60) – and he believed in reading alertly and scrupulously. ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ (1864) remains one of the most ambitious accounts of how books communicate in the whole period – think of the dazzling analysis of ‘Lycidas’. Dinah, in a different world from the Victorians, believes in these things, too.

She is most associated with Ruskin, of course, from Ruskin’s Myths (1988) onwards. That book, which began as the Oxford DPhil thesis, ‘Ruskin and the Greeks’, is one of the most lucid accounts of the whole of Ruskin’s intellectual and personal maturation available. But she is a leading critic of the literature of the nineteenth century more generally. Editions of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell; essays on, among other topics, Keats, Tennyson, the Brontë sisters, nineteenth-century sentiment, the paradoxes of success, Toni Morrison; reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books on a huge diversity of literary and biographical subjects. With both her range and her tact, Dinah was the ideal person to edit the seventh edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009), an enormous undertaking that was greeted with acclaim.

Dinah reads literary works as the products of human lives: of ideas, ambitions, loves, disappointments, confusions and occasional absurdities. She reads as she listens and talks: verbal statements are the testimony of, and from, human existences. They are to be taken seriously. Little makes more sense to Dinah than the individuals who lie behind an imaginative creation. There is nothing flattening in that. On the contrary, her priority is with art as a version of a life, not as a mere statement of it. She is concerned with the play of creativity on real things, the play of real things on creativity. She doubts those who think art is only political assertion, only self-justification or only ‘theme’. It is transformation.

John Ruskin might not seem an obvious person to examine from these perspectives. Does Ruskin do art? Of course, he writes about art. But that is not the same. Is he in any way a creative artist, an imaginative writer? Dinah has demonstrated, both intently and intensively, that the answer is yes. That is because what has emerged from her reading of Ruskin is a luminous presence behind the words, musing in complex ways on who he himself is, what he has learnt and what he can teach. Ruskin writing about foxgloves; about hawthorn blossoms; about the hulk of the Temeraire; about the ideal critic or the conception that all great art is praise; Ruskin thinking aloud in the scattered fragments of Fors or through the gender-crossing language of his ‘womanly mind’;¹ Ruskin as a preacher in print, still endeavouring to satisfy something of his parents’ aspirations for him as a young and brilliantly gifted man destined for the church. The Ruskin we read through Dinah’s work is coherent and purposeful. Even in his lowest times, in the 1880s, when he was demanding gifts back from Somerville or writing awkward letters to people he hardly knew: even this Ruskin is humanly comprehensible through her criticism. Despite the mists of his fading mind and failing heart, Ruskin emerges in her analysis as believable, thoughtful and real.

There are clusters of Ruskin readers who, since Ruskin’s own time, have talked to others about him, taught students, written essays and books, given lectures: there is a peculiar sense with Ruskin scholarship of the inheritance of generations. When you shake James Dearden’s hand, you know that Jim shook John Howard Whitehouse’s hand, and Whitehouse shook Ruskin’s – well, probably he did: he certainly met Ruskin. Dinah’s fellow Ruskinians – from a distinctive moment in the history of Victorian literary and cultural studies in the University of Oxford – include Robert Hewison, Tim Hilton and Nicholas Shrimpton. Some of Dinah’s companion Ruskin scholars were gathered in Robert Hewison’s New Approaches to Ruskin: Thirteen Essays (1981), a volume as exacting in its scholarship as invigorating in its range. Dinah’s essay on Proserpina (1875–86) in that collection,² recently reprinted by Routledge, was her first publication. And it is wholly Dinah – attentive, humane, persuasive, and it deftly reveals that a subject apparently on the margin of Ruskin’s interests (botany) was of major importance to him. Proserpina, Dinah proposed, expressed some of Ruskin’s most significant and syncretic ideas, some of his most ambitious teaching about value, God’s work in nature and humanity’s reverence for it. Ruskin, here, is a man thinking, feeling and imagining – as well as struggling. And he is a man putting those experiences into writing – about roses, for instance – that is at once critical and creative, intellectual and imaginative. Oscar Wilde would later claim that the good critic’s role was essentially creative – who cares, Wilde has Gilbert say in The Critic as Artist (1891), if Ruskin’s views of Turner are sound or not, so long as they are eloquently expressed? Dinah’s argument is not that: attentive to both the creative dimension of Ruskin’s work and his ideas, her Ruskin is both critic and artist.

That first essay was in part about Ruskin as a teacher: Proserpina, after all, was half-conceived as one of the teaching aids for the planned St George’s Schools. Dinah has often written about Ruskin’s educational ambitions as they developed, particularly after the death of his father in 1864. She made, for instance, wonderful sense out of The Ethics of the Dust (1866),³ a text that had not, up to that point, travelled well. For Dinah, The Ethics was a daring effort to reinvent Ruskin’s sources of authority as a teacher in the light of a faded Christianity and in the absence of John James Ruskin, whose certainties had been a foundation of his son’s public career (as well as, sometimes, an irritation). Most recently, Dinah wrote on Ruskin and, lecturing for The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin (2015), exploring how his voice found either in a real or an imagined public audience some of its most characteristic postures. Ruskin the educator has been, indeed, an absorbing concern. Dinah’s Our Victorian Education (2007) brought a long-standing interest in the nature and practice of teaching in the nineteenth century to a high point: Ruskin, of course, was there: his work, not least at Winnington, provided Dinah with an opportunity, apart from anything else, to discuss the place of failure, and its value, in teaching.

There is no obligation for Ruskin readers to agree with him. Indeed, some of the most invigorating writing about Ruskin is by those who very considerably disagree with him. But Dinah, with characteristic tact, has set herself largely outside that question: she has presented herself neither as a believer in Ruskin nor his antagonist. She has endeavoured, rather, to understand the sources and nature of his exceptional mind, as it is accessible to us through his writing. We can see Ruskin better through this criticism – Ruskin, the man who taught others to see. It is then up to us to decide whether we agree with him or not. Such an approach has helped make Dinah, in addition to her explicitly critical writing, a widely sought and authoritative editor of Ruskin. Her Selected Writings for Oxford University Press (2009) and her selection of Fors Clavigera for Edinburgh University Press (2000) provided her with an opportunity, so to speak, to teach Ruskin to others: to provide the explanatory and empirical frame that a reader needs to make the best sense of some of his most important, as well as some of his most challenging, writing.

Dinah’s Ruskin is an intimate, thoughtful and generous one. A man seeking to make things work and whose life is a history of care. Dinah cares, too – about Ruskin, of course, but also about scholarship, about literature in general, about good research and teaching and about people. As a teacher herself, she cares about her former students, of whom I am fortunate to be one. Dinah has written and spoken about Ruskin’s teachers – of J. M. W. Turner as a kind of master, of John James Ruskin. I am writing this just down the road from Sir Henry Raeburn’s great portrait in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery of another one – Alexander Adam (1741–1809), whose Latin grammar played such a formative role in Ruskin’s early education, and who had in person taught John James (as well as Sir Walter Scott and Francis Jeffrey). Dinah, as a reader, critic and educator, is peculiarly interested in the influence and shape of good teaching. I for one will not cease to be grateful for hers.

Notes

1 See ‘Ruskin’s Womanly Mind’, Essays in Criticism , 38 (1988), 308–24.

2 ‘Ruskin and the Science of Proserpina ’, Robert Hewison, ed., New Approaches to Ruskin (London: Routledge, 1981), 142–57.

3 ‘ The Ethics of the Dust : Ruskin’s Authorities’, Prose Studies , 12 (1989), 147–58.

INTRODUCTION

Valerie Purton

John Ruskin, whose bicentenary is celebrated in 2019, was an art historian, cultural critic and political theorist who was also, and perhaps most importantly, a great educator. Ruskin was the inspiration behind such influential figures as William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust and Mahatma Gandhi, and his influence can be felt in many spheres of education today, for example in debates about the importance of creativity, about grammar schools and social mobility, about further education, the crucial social role of libraries, environmental issues, the role of crafts as well as academic learning, the importance of fantasy literature and the education of women. The present collection brings together ten international Ruskin scholars to explore what he actually said about education in his many-faceted writings. The varied approaches taken by the writers suggest that, as Francis O’Gorman writes in his Foreword, ‘There is no obligation for Ruskin’s readers to agree with him’. The tones of the chapters shift between the celebratory and the astringent, as the writers assess from very different perspectives the nature of their subject’s achievements. The essays are grouped for convenience under three headings: Section A: Changing the World; Section B: Libraries and the Arts; and Section C: Christianity and Apocalypse. These headings alone suggest the astonishing breadth of Ruskin’s engagement with his own society and with the wider world. The book is dedicated to Dinah Birch, a much-loved Victorian specialist and authority on Ruskin, whose work has helped make John Ruskin a fresh and significant presence in the twenty-first century.

The Cambridge Inaugural Address

In 1858 a school of art was set up in Sidney Street, Cambridge. Its aim, according to a contemporary poster preserved in the Anglia Ruskin University Library, was ‘to teach the citizens of Cambridge to apply practical skills with a sense of beauty’, and John Ruskin, then in his late thirties, was invited to give the Inaugural Address on 29 October. Already renowned as a critic of art and architecture, author of The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, Ruskin had also, since October 1854, been teaching at the newly opened Working Men’s College in London. It was his passion to broaden education, which made him the ideal person to inspire the first students of the Cambridge School of Art – and it is that passion that we celebrate in this book.

From its small beginnings in 1858 in Sidney Street, the Cambridge School of Art moved across the city to East Road and in 1888 evolved into the Cambridge Institute of Technology and later into Cambridge Technology College. In 1992 it became Anglia Polytechnic University. When a new name was sought for the expanding university in 2005, ‘Ruskin’ was chosen, both because of the 1858 Inaugural Address and because Ruskin’s declared aims – to extend education as widely as possible, while respecting both the practical and the aesthetic – were (and still are) Anglia Ruskin University’s aims, too.

Ruskin’s Inaugural Address (so long and rambling that, according to some accounts, it left no time at all for the next speaker, the illustrator George Cruikshank, to do more than introduce himself) contained many of his key ideas about education, ideas that will be pursued in the chapters that follow. Most striking is the passionate stress on seeing clearly:

Our immediate business, in such a school as this, will prosper more by attending to eyes than to hands; we shall always do most good by simply endeavouring to enable the student to see natural objects clearly.¹

This is the central idea that had been identified by George Eliot two years earlier in her review of Modern Painters, as being ‘[t]‌he truth of infinite value that [Ruskin] teaches[, …] the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature.’² To Eliot, ‘the thorough acceptance of this doctrine would remould our life; and he who teaches its application to any one department of human activity with such power as Mr Ruskin’s, is a prophet for his generation’. Ruskin’s Inaugural Address develops Eliot’s argument at great length, and his notion of education as both individually and socially transformative is explored in Section A, Changing the World, first by Sara Atwood who, in Chapter 1, assesses how Ruskin actually defined ‘education’. One of his central points was the value of simplicity: ‘It is simplicity of life, and language, and of manners, [which] gives strength to a nation [.…] While men possess little and desire less, they remain brave and noble.’ This is one of many ideas he shared with his great admirer, Leo Tolstoy, a relationship explored by Stuart Eagles in Chapter 2. Ruskin believed, too, in the social and educational importance of dress, an idea developed by Rachel Dickinson in Chapter 3 – though in the Inaugural Lecture the subject is treated with heavy-handed Ruskinian humour:

I share this weakness for dress patterns with all good students, and all good painters. It doesn’t matter what school they belong to – Fra Angelico, Perugini, John Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, Veronese, Leonardo da Vinci – no matter how they differ in other respects, all of them like dress patterns: and what is more, the nobler the painter is, the more sure he is to do his patterns well.

Jan Marsh, in Chapter 4, examines Ruskin’s contradictory stance on female education. Though he was a great believer in the ‘separate spheres’, he also championed wider learning opportunities for girls. This habit of setting out apparently inconsistent views, Ruskin not only justifies but glorifies in the Cambridge Inaugural Address: ‘I am rather apt to contradict myself,’ he confesses, but adds: ‘For myself, I am never satisfied I have handled a subject properly until I have contradicted myself at least three times.’

The dissemination of education, through Libraries and through the Arts, is one of Ruskin’s abiding concerns and it is dealt with here in Section B. Continuing his argument about the power of simplicity over artifice, he talks in the Inaugural Address of ‘the virtues of Christianity [being] best practised, and its doctrines best attested, by a handful of mountain shepherds without art, without literature, almost without language’. In the history of Switzerland, he says, ‘The shepherd’s staff prevailed over the soldier’s spear.’ In Chapter 5 Emma Sdegno explores Ruskin’s Shepherds’ Library, his notion of book dissemination to such people, while in Chapter 6 Stephen Wildman examines another of his educational experiments, the use of photography to enable ordinary people to encounter the Old Masters and to ‘see clearly’. The Inaugural Address, designed for a College of Art, obviously concentrates on the visual arts, but Paul Jackson in Chapter 7 breaks new ground in revealing Ruskin’s regard for music, an art to which he responded deeply as a sensuous experience, while arguing that it could also act as an agent of moral improvement. As he says in the Cambridge Address, ‘you must delight in [Art] in the first place; you must get it to serve some serious work, in the second place.’ Dinah Birch has made the case for Ruskin to be seen as both critic and artist. Certainly, there are passages in the Inaugural Address that might come, not from social critique but from fairy tale, as when Ruskin describes visiting the deserted palace of a corrupt Swiss cardinal:

[It was] a palace of pleasure, desolate as it deserves – desolate in smooth corridor and glittering chamber – desolate in pleached walk and planted bower – desolate in that want and bitterest abandonment which leaves no light of memory.

And day by day as I walked there, the same sentence seemed whispering by every shaking leaf and every dying echo of garden and chamber – "Thus end all of the arts of life, only in death; and thus issue all of the gifts of man, only in his dishonour, when they are possessed in the service of pleasure only.

In Chapter 8 Edward James examines Ruskin’s only explicit foray into fairy tale, The King of the Golden River, linking it back to his imaginative use of the fantastic and of fairyland images in his social and political writing.

Ruskin was both a teacher and a preacher. His recollection in Praeterita of his first documented speech, as a very small boy, ‘People, Be Good!’,³ suggests the trajectory of his adult career. Keith Hanley and Andrew Tate, in the final chapters of this collection, Section C, ‘Christianity and Apocalypse’, explore the links between his aesthetic and his religious views. In the conclusion to the Inaugural Address, Ruskin talks of ‘those events in sacred history which, as they visibly and intelligibly occurred, may also be visibly and intelligibly represented’. Hanley, in Chapter 9, picks up the notion of the absolute centrality of this Christian worldview to Ruskin’s life and work and suggests the perils of ‘secularizing’ him. In Chapter 10, Tate pursues Ruskin’s apocalyptic vision, very evident in the Cambridge Inaugural Address in which he asks, ‘What has been the source of the ruin of nations since the world began? Has it been plague, or famine, earthquake shock, or volcano-flame?’ concluding that ‘None of these ever prevailed against a great people’: moral decadence was the true enemy. Tate concludes his chapter on a note of hope, arguing that, despite his evocation of ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’, Ruskin believed that ‘Every human action gains in honour, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come’; for him, ‘apocalypse’ meant, not an ending, but a revelation.

Synopses of Chapters

Section A Changing the World

Chapter 1

Sara Atwood – ‘An Enormous Difference between Knowledge and Education’: What Ruskin Can Teach Us

John Ruskin believed that education meant ‘leading human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.’ Ruskin was above all a teacher – in addition to being the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, he gave art instruction at the Working Men’s College in Red Lion Square; taught drawing by correspondence; and made his teaching more generally available through public lectures and his published books. Unusually for the period, he also showed a great interest in women’s education and gave generously of his time and resources to a number of girls’ schools and teacher-training colleges. Keenly aware of the defects of contemporary education, Ruskin envisioned an alternative, integrative sort of education in which intellectual and ethical elements would combine to form men and women capable of creating meaningful change. His principles were contrary ‘to everything taught as practical among us’ (29.242) and were therefore often dismissed as impractical. Today, debate over educational reform persists, and today’s teachers confront an increasingly conflicted educational environment. Ruskin’s ideas suggest new approaches to classroom instruction, practice and curricula from which we can undoubtedly benefit. Yet his methodology is, crucially, anchored by his understanding of education as an ethical, transformative, communal process. It is a vision for the future, a vision that draws its strength from essential, enduring wisdom. Considering Ruskin’s ideas in light of the challenges of modern education, this chapter explores how he might help us rediscover the foundational elements of education, those things we all need to