Ruskin left London on 27 April, with his assistant Arthur Burgess, for the continent; to Verona, where he was gathering information on tombs and to Venice, his first visit since 1852. From Verona, he sent twelve books, unnamed, to various friends including Froude and Gordon ( Diaries, II, 672). Whilst abroad, Ruskin learnt that he had been unanimously elected first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. Preparation for the task and series of important lectures began in early autumn.

Gordon was one of Ruskin's guests at Abingdon where, as Ruskin reported to Joan Agnew, "Gordon enjoyed himself" but "found when he came to Oxford, he couldn’t come to lectures at all. So like things always –" ( Winnington Letters 670). He initiated Gordon into the delights of this rural English town, whose charms Gordon seemed to prefer to attending Ruskin’s lectures in Oxford! *

For the full text of Ruskin’s letter to his solicitor, and letters written by Effie during the time when the annulment was being discussed, see Brownell: 523-35; cf. 464. Not surprisingly, given Ruskin’s love of the Bible and what he regarded as its enduring relevance, we find that Riblah (now part of Syria) was once an important city in ancient Canaan: cf. 2 Kings 25, 6-7, 18-21. Dogs are welcome on a lead in our gardens and the Terrace Cafe. Come and experience the beauty of Brantwood in all seasons. Important Information

Greene, 467-71; cf. Blanchard. The reference to a famous book written by the second of Robson’s “infamous Victorian pedophiles,” Lewis Carroll, prompts me to note that, for the reasons just outlined, there now exists considerable doubt whether Carroll was a pedophile. Brantwood offers a fascinating insight into the world of John Ruskin and the last 28 years of his life spent at Coniston. Filled with many fine paintings, beautiful furniture and Ruskin’s personal treasures, the house retains the character of its famous resident. John Ruskin died on January 20, 1900, and the Severn family inherited the house and much extended estate. In 1905, the drawing room was extended with an additional annex. In 1924, Joan Severn died at Brantwood and was buried next to Ruskin. Princeton University; John Ruskin Collection (CO 196): Folder 11 (AM 15328). The collection contains 25 letters sent by Ruskin to members of the Layton family between 1884-87.

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.” Eleven years later Catherine Robson underscored these verdicts: “Ruskin’s,” she wrote in Men in Wonderland, “is a story of sexual irregularities”. Indeed, she said, Ruskin “was one of the two ‘notorious girl-lovers’ of the Victorian age” (the other, as her title implied, was Lewis Carroll). After quoting examples from a few Ruskin letters and a handful of his works to justify her characterization, she informed her readers that, even though some of the passages she cited refer only to Ruskin’s fascination with the beauty of young girls, there could be no mistaking their “erotic charge,” and concluded that, despite the fact that she could supply “no evidence that he sexually abused little girls” and inaccurately stating that the “dynamics of his encounters with real girls…remain essentially unknowable,” she concluded that “Ruskin, the famous Victorian sage, was also Ruskin, the infamous Victorian pedophile” (122; cf. 13, 97), a much disturbed man for whom “pre-pubescent girls” were “the most beloved objects [in his] world” (181). Evidence of Robson’s fundamental unreliability appears in that forceful “infamous”: since no Victorians ever charged Ruskin with lusting after young girls, much less of sexually abusing them, she seems to have made up out of whole cloth that reputation. More importantly, like Hilton, she provided neither a definition of nor any systematic evidence supporting her use of this most derogatory label.

But it was not simply to relieve some of his despondency that this play was chosen. Ruskin had a very special interest in it; he knew both the leading lady, his "much-regarded friend" Mrs Madge Kendal (née Robertson) and the co-playwright Tom Taylor, his erstwhile rival for the Slade Professorship at Oxford and a witness on his behalf at the Whistler trial in 1878. Madge Kendal, playing Lilian Vavasour, was already the leading lady at this grand theatre at the age of twenty-one; Jeffrey Richards has described her as "an actress of great verve and charm" ( 92). But there were other reasons for his interest. The word "Ruskinism" had been coined and became a catchword. In the play, Lilian says of another girl that "in spite of her Ruskinism-run-mad she isn’t half a bad sort" (36.328, note 1). We know of Ruskin’s fascination with reptiles; snakes and serpents were often present in his dreams along with an attractive female presence. New Men and Old Acres provided a memorable example compressed in the short line, "And his wife – well, she’s a caution for snakes!", uttered by Lilian Vavasour. It was not quite a dream, but not quite reality, for here on stage was a beautiful inaccessible woman being linked with venomous reptiles. Ten years later, Ruskin’s lecture at the Royal Institution on 17 March 1880 was entitled "A Caution to Snakes"; he explained to his audience that he had chosen the title "partly in play, and partly in affectionate remembrance of the scene in New Men and Old Acres, in which the phrase became at once so startling and so charming, on the lips of my much-regarded friend, Mrs Kendal" (36.327-28). *continued to be a time of emotional turmoil with strain and uncertainties surrounding his relationship with Rose La Touche. In early March Ruskin consulted with his medical friend Dr John Simon about the nature of Rose's mysterious illness(es), suggesting to him that she might have some kind of "fatty degeneration" or heart disease. The reply was not particularly reassuring: 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.

In December 1875, Ruskin was invited to stay at Broadlands, near the town of Romsey, the spacious Hampshire home of his close and sympathetic friends Georgiana and William Cowper-Temple. They took spiritualism seriously and in the stillness of the winter countryside conducive to such activity – tapping and faint voices could be distinctly heard – organised regular séances. Several spiritualists had been invited as house-guests (Hilton, Later Years 325). Thus on 14 December, Ruskin learnt from a medium "the most overwhelming evidence of the other state of the world that has ever come to me" ( Diaries, III, 876). In his extremely fragile state, he was predisposed to believe that Rose was communicating with him. (For Ruskin’s letter about this experience at Broadlands, see Landow: "'I heard of a delightful ghost'.) 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. The year ended with the death of Ruskin’s mother at the age of ninety on 5 December 1871. It had been a slow, lingering decline as he explained to W. H. Harrison: "My Mother has been merely asleep – speaking sometimes in the sleep – these last three weeks. It is not to be called paralysis, nor apoplexy – it is numbness and weakness of all faculty – declining to the grave. Very woeful: and the worst possible sort of death for me to see" (37.43). For the very first time, Ruskin, at the age of fifty-three, was free of parental control. * Among these accounts (all of which are empathetic to Effie while impugning Ruskin) are: “The Countess” (a play by Gregory Murphy), “Modern Painters” (an opera by David Larg and Manuela Hoelterhoff), “Effie Gray” (a film written by Emma Thompson and directed by Richard Laxton), and a six-part BBC television series, “Desperate Romantics” (written by Peter Bowden and directed by Paul Gay and Diamund Lawrence).

Joanna Severn

Two Views of Coniston Water. Left: View from the Painters Glade in early spring by Jacqueline Banerjee. Right: