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

Product Information

Brantwood has a number of services and facilities available for disabled visitors throughout both the house and some of the gardens. Brantwood was originally built as an 8-room cottage on a three-acre piece of land in 1797 by Thomas Woodville. Over the years, the cottage was expanded, with part of the drawing room and four more rooms on the ground floor added in 1830.

The main action scenes were filmed at night. 6960 is first seen passing Bewdley South Box and entering Sandbourne Viaduct. At Miss Marple's request, Lucy Eyelesbarrow secures temporary employment at the Hall to investigate. While searching the embankment for clues, 6960 is briefly seen again at the head of a passing train. In Venice, while Ruskin worked on Carpaccio, Brown and Cheney helped to entertain Joan Agnew and the Hilliards with visits to see glass-blowing and gondola building. Ruskin wrote a note of thanks to Brown on 30 May 1870: "My people [...] very happy with you & Mr Cheney today" (Clegg 142). In that same letter, Ruskin revealed his continuing feelings of ambivalence towards Cheney, affection tempered by fear: "I am always terribly afraid of him – & yet very fond of him though he may not believe it" (Clegg 209n). Ruskin was delighted with an arrangement that left him free to carry on with his own work.Half a decade later, another biographer, Wolfgang Kemp, perhaps following Hilton’s lead, informed his audience that Ruskin was a “nympholeptic.” (288) The word derives from “nympholepsy,” originally indicating “an ecstasy inspired by nymphs.” Today, it more commonly refers to “a passion or desire aroused in men by young girls” ( OED). (Because Kemp offers no explanation of why he chose the term and the fact that it is mentioned nowhere else in the scholarly or medical literature on sexual orientations, I do not refer to it again.) Gordon decided to go to Denmark Hill for a short break 4-5 October 1869 soon after Ruskin's return from abroad. Such was their degree of friendship and so relaxed was their relationship that it was understood that Gordon could visit and stay any time he wished. This is exactly what he did! On this occasion Ruskin was obliged to explain, in advance to Mrs Cowper, Gordon's presence at the very special private dinner, on 5 October. The letter reveals much about Gordon's character and the absolute trust between the two men: 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. * Ruskin, who was one of the critics responsible for the late-Victorian rediscovery of Botticelli, knew the artist’s representations of Zipporah well and took the time to make a careful copy of one. It hangs at Brantwood, his former home in the Lake District, and was recently included major Botticelli exhibitions in Berlin and London.

At the heart of the Stones of Venice he contrasted medieval craftsmanship with modern manufacturing – something hugely influential on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. It marked the maturing of Ruskin’s interest in social justice and the beginning of his attempts to influence the shape of society. 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. Although the locomotive seen hauling the 4.33 as it departs carries a smokebox number 80097, it is actually a Southern Region tender locomotive. Brantwood is an independent registered charity no. 504743 – The Brantwood Trust Coniston Cumbria LA21 8AD Ruskin Today is a resource based upon an informal alliance of organisations and individuals with an interest in the life, work and continuing relevance of John Ruskin.

Arthur Severn

Although Robson presents a plausible central argument that some young boys of Ruskin’s class were socialized into much closer identification with girls than their own sex (hence her subtitle, “The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman”), no evidence whatever is offered in support of her bizarre claim that “we have [now] learned enough to find the appearance of girls in Ruskin’s autobiography, as in his life, is no laughing matter” (96). Similarly, she presents no evidence which would justify her labeling him a “sexual adventurer,” someone whose story is one of “sexual irregularity” (97). Given the thinness of argument and paucity of evidence offered to buttress this claim of worrisome disturbance, especially when (as we shall soon see) the examples she does provide are set beside other original documents pertaining to the same events—documents which, had she consulted them, would have afforded a much more benign interpretation—what Robson provides hardly suffices for her conclusion that her subject harbored a life-long, unhealthy attraction to pre-pubescent girls! Meanwhile, during the bitter frost and snow in the first months of 1867, Ruskin devoted time to Gordon and the Pritchards. Gordon was invited to dinner on several occasions at Denmark Hill and Ruskin made a point of visiting the Pritchards at their London home. The relevant diary entries are: The house affords a unique opportunity to look into the daily life of one of England’s most important social and cultural figures. The atmosphere at Brantwood is special, and because so many of Ruskin’s possessions remain, it feels as if the man himself has just stepped out into the garden! 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.

Tim Hilton’s decision to label Ruskin a pedophile in his biography is more serious. Although his two volumes have justly received sharp criticism for his failure to consult the treasure troves of unpublished Ruskin letters and other biographic materials outside the U. K., it is in many ways one of the best, if hardly authoritative, biographies we have. Coming to grips with what he regarded as recurring evidence, particularly as it appeared in some of Ruskin’s letters and a lecture, he proclaimed that in Ruskin’s case, pedophilia was a late arriving malady, one not uncommon in men in their forties whose marriages had failed and who, as old age loomed, lived lives both lonely and isolated ( Early Years: 253-4). As an instance of this determination, Hilton provides his readers with what he presumes is a pedophilic image from a lecture of the 1860s wherein Ruskin reports having suddenly come across a nearly naked poor young girl of about ten or twelve lying on a hill near Turin, Italy. That the encounter disturbed him, Ruskin freely says, but what its true meaning was, he says he is not sure (see LE 19.82-85). Notwithstanding, Hilton reports—accurately—that this image of a sensual, nymph-like girl will reappear in Ruskin’s later diaries and in a last series of lectures delivered at Oxford in 1884. In which repetitive context, it can be viewed as an emblem of his disturbance. Although pedophilia “became a part of [Ruskin’s] character only gradually,” he writes, an “attraction to young girls was in Ruskin’s sexual nature to the end of his life.”

Contents

Exempted from such a remark would be the subjects of his published criticism—some artists, some other writers, especially those who championed the theory of laissez-faire economics which he regarded as the ideology legitimating the unbridled greed motivating most of his contemporaries.

Ruskin spent much of the following year (1873) at Brantwood, interspersed with lectures at Oxford. * Arthur Severn (1842-1931), Watercolour painter; husband of Joan Severn (née Agnew). Sitter associated with 3 portraits. Identify

During those times when his wits were not fully about him, Ruskin would often say and do odd things in Coniston (and elsewhere). Observing these, his neighbors in Coniston were tolerant and forgiving. Among themselves, however, not infrequently they would refer to him in this way. By Train – The nearest train stations are Windermere (trains to Oxenholme on the West Coast Main Line) and Ulverston. Chapter Eleven. Lost love and a taste of Brantwood Cynthia Gamble, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Exeter, UK 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.