During the hundred years after the death of the queen who gave the Victorian era its name, literary and historical figures of the period became subjects of quite a number of biographies. The best of these, by scholars who made extensive and judicious use of letters and diaries made available only after the Victorian era was but a memory, contributed significantly to a general understanding of the men and women whose work had such a profound influence on their contemporaries and who remain figures of importance to anyone wishing to appreciate this period in English life and culture.
Many of these biographies are products of a lifetime of scholarship, the fruits of careful and sometimes painstaking research in libraries and private collections scattered across the globe. Tim Hilton’s two-volume life study of the Victorian writer John Ruskin is such a book. The result of more than twenty years of effort, John Ruskin: The Early Years (1985) and its sequel, John Ruskin: The Later Years, reveal the man behind the hundreds of books, articles, and pamphlets that covered subjects ranging from art to biblical exegesis.
It is a literary commonplace that knowing something about an author’s life can sometimes help readers understand his or her works. In the case of Ruskin, Hilton argues, such knowledge is essential. “Ruskin’s books,” Hilton remarks in the foreword to the first volume, “are without exception personal. They were formed by the events of his life, his reading, his friendships and loves, dreams, travels and memories.” With other authors one might be tempted to dismiss this claim as mere hype from the biographer, but in Ruskin’s case Hilton has good reason for his assertion. As he observes, Ruskin’s books
[A]re neither straightforward nor self-explanatory, and they have an especial unlikeness to anyone else’s writing. Few of them are in an obvious sense works of literature. They rarely conform to the classic genres of writing.
Ruskin’s works do not easily fit into prescribed categories because the man himself refused to confine his intellectual explorations to a single area of study, and whatever he studied, he wrote about—often in several thick volumes. Considered by contemporaries and succeeding generations as one of the great Victorian sages, Ruskin seemed to understand his age, even if he objected vehemently to what other Victorians called “progress.” He was facile in describing even the most complex natural or architectural phenomenon. More than any other writer of his time, he was able to create in readers’ minds a vivid picture of the scene before him and then use his descriptions as springboards for philosophical rhapsodies that would carry readers along to conclusions about life and society often at odds with the prevailing temper of the day.
The principal strength of Hilton’s book is that it reveals the complexity of Ruskin’s character and the range of his interests. Readers will immediately sense that there are many adjectives one could use to describe Ruskin. First, he was prolific. The Library Edition of his collected works, lovingly edited by disciples E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn in the early years of the twentieth century, runs to thirty-nine volumes. Since the publication of this massive edition, discoveries by bibliographers, scholars, and antiquarians have added considerably to the Ruskin corpus, especially in the form of diaries and letters. For the biographer, this treasure trove of material offers fertile soil to till for information that could lead to understanding Ruskin’s life and relationships.
For most readers, the amount of primary and secondary materials is just too vast to be managed with anything less than the scholar’s time and attention. Making matters worse, Ruskin was a polymath. Not content to focus his gift of genius on a single cultural endeavor, the author who became famous at twenty-nine with the first of five volumes of Modern Painters (1843-1860) also wrote about architecture, geology, religion, social issues, economics—the list could be extended considerably. He seems equally at home discussing Greek myth and modern business practices. Additionally, and perhaps even more daunting for the modern reader, lengthy, digressive, and highly allusive paragraphs are the hallmark of Ruskin’s prose, regardless of his subject. To most twentieth century readers, Ruskin seems recondite. Only a biographer of Hilton’s talents can make such a man understandable.
With the advantage of hindsight and using a multitude of Ruskin’s papers, letters, and diaries—Ruskin’s own, as well as those of friends, relations, and other contemporaries—Hilton corrects the incomplete and often misleading information in Ruskin’s autobiographical Praeterita (1885-1889). Hilton’s study of Ruskin’s later years not only offers considerable detail about the writer’s daily life but also provides careful analysis of the impact of personal and public relationships on Ruskin’s many works. Principal among Hilton’s interests are two important crises: Ruskin’s twenty-year infatuation with the young Irish girl Rose LaTouche, and the onset and progress of the dementia that would eventually silence him a decade before his death.
The story of Ruskin and Rose, told before, is given dispassionate and thorough attention by Hilton. As he demonstrates, Ruskin’s infatuation with the child he met in 1858 clearly affected nearly everything he did, including his writing, for the rest of his life. Though old enough to be her father, Ruskin often behaved like a contrite schoolboy when corresponding with Rose, displaying his juvenile passion for her in cryptic letters and notes that contained baby talk, code names, and highly allusive passages intended to reveal obliquely how sincere and serious he was about the relationship. Hilton is careful not to belittle his subject when describing this relationship, but he does not spare Ruskin harsh criticism when appropriate. Similarly, he holds nothing back in displaying the narrow interests, including religious zealotry, that caused Rose to be at once both intrigued and frightened by the attention of her older suitor. The impression left on readers is that this “sad and wasteful story” was bound to end tragically for Ruskin even if Rose had not died at the early age of twenty-seven.
Even before Rose’s death, Ruskin began showing signs of a mental collapse. By 1878, the strain of writing, public speaking, travel, and engagement with various social causes became too much: Ruskin suffered the first of what would be a series of mental breakdowns that left him raving at those who tried to help him. Though Ruskin recovered and went on to serve two terms as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, his influence with readers waned, and the adulation of the public turned into pity. Fortunately, in his later years, Ruskin had around him a circle of friends and admirers who made it possible for him to survive his bouts with dementia for more than a decade before he finally fell into a state in which he was simply unable to function normally. Principal among these individuals was his cousin Joan Agnew, married to the artist Arthur Severn. Joan and her family lived with Ruskin for more than thirty years. She served as housekeeper, nursemaid, financial manager, and, finally, executor. Others, too, played a role in assisting Ruskin both professionally and personally, including the American scholar Charles Eliot Norton and a trio of younger men who became chief among Ruskin’s many admirers: W. G. Collingwood, Alexander Wedderburn, and E. T. Cook. These three were principally responsible for preserving Ruskin’s literary reputation and establishing the texts of his writing as biographers and editors of his literary remains.
At strategic points, Hilton interrupts his chronological narrative to give extended information about Ruskin’s friendships, hobbies, and attitudes about a variety of topics such as photography and horticulture. He also includes a description of Ruskin’s decision to found the utopian Guild of St. George. Directing this organization became almost an obsession for Ruskin, who believed that the materialist and industrial society of Victorian Britain was leading people away from activities that would produce real self-fulfillment. With somewhat cloudy vision Ruskin drafted rules for his guild and recruited friends, acquaintances, and even strangers (charging them for the privilege of membership), then acted in a high-handed fashion when conducting the guild’s business, spending its funds to promote agricultural and literary projects whose ends seemed as obscure as the intentions of the man organizing the activities.
Although not intended as literary criticism, John Ruskin: The Later Years contains brief analyses of dozens of Ruskin’s works. While focusing on the biographical genesis of most of Ruskin’s writings, Hilton does step out of his role as biographer to assess the relative value of the principal works in the Ruskin canon. Often he provides his own iconoclastic judgment about works whose reputations have been fixed for decades by more conventional critics of Ruskin. His staunch support of Fors Clavigera, Ruskin’s series of pamphlets published between 1871 and 1884, is an example of his willingness to break from the mainstream. He also does an admirable job attempting to explain Ruskin’s curious use of mythology and unconventional selection of titles for works intended to appeal to the working classes. Occasionally, flashes of sardonic wit emerge from the otherwise self-effacing, scholarly prose that dominates the book.
It must be acknowledged, however, that the considerable accomplishment of Hilton’s work in bringing order to Ruskin’s busy and often chaotic life comes at a price to readers. It is not easy to read volume 2 without having read volume 1 or without possessing significant knowledge of Ruskin’s life and friendships. Hilton begins the second half of his two-volume biography in medias res, offering no apology except this brief author’s note: “I should explain,” he writes, for the benefit of those who have not read the first volume, “that a number of Ruskin’s friends who were described there are reintroduced in the present book without further explanation.” This is, charitably speaking, an understatement.
Such caviling is not meant to obscure Hilton’s significant achievement. Well written and as objective as one might expect from a scholar writing about a figure whose writings have always provoked strong reactions, John Ruskin: The Later Years joins its companion piece to form what critic Clive Wilmer, in the Times Literary Supplement, called a “simply magnificent” work, “one of the great modern literary biographies.” Readers who invest the time and mental energy to read Hilton’s thorough and insightful narrative are sure to concur with this judgment.