Ruskin's Educational Ideals

Sara Atwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781032927862
  9781409408376
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317060604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Focusing on John Ruskin as a teacher and on his greatest educational work, Fors Clavigera, Sara Atwood examines Ruskin's varied roles in education, the development of his teaching philosophy and style, and his vision for educational reform. Atwood maintains that the letters of Fors Clavigera constitute not only a treatise on education but a dynamic educational experiment, serving to set forth Ruskin's ideas about education while simultaneously educating his readers according to those very ideas. Closely examining Ruskin's life and writings, her argument traces the development of his moral aesthetic and increasing involvement in social reform; his methods and approach as an art instructor; and his dissatisfaction with contemporary educational practice. A chapter on Ruskin's legacy takes account of his influence on late Victorian and Edwardian educators, including J. H. Whitehouse and the Bembridge School; the Ruskin colonies in Tennessee, Florida, and Georgia; and the relevance of Ruskin's ideas to ongoing educational debates about teacher pay, state/national testing, retention, and the theory of the competent child. Historically well-grounded and forcefully argued, Atwood's study is not only a valuable contribution to scholarship on Ruskin and the Victorian period but an enjoinder for us to reconsider how Ruskin's educational philosophy might be of benefit today.

Chapter 1
The Forming Time

Dinah Birch has written of the “very personal understanding of education” (Our Victorian Education 4) characteristic of those Victorians involved in educational reform. Such understanding seems inevitable when one considers that education, the drawing out of individual strengths, is an inherently personal process; one’s views on education are shaped as much in reference to (or revolt against) personal experience as they are by objective philosophical considerations. This is particularly true of Ruskin, in whose early years we discover “the initial segments of lines which, drawn boldly out, are recognized as his own lines” (Collingwood 1.24). In order to better understand both Ruskin and his teaching, then, we must begin by tracing these initial segments. So, adapting Ruskin’s prefatory remarks about Scott to my own purpose, let me first “try to give you some idea of his own temper and life. His temper, I say; the mixture of clay, and the fineness of it, out of which the Potter made him; and of his life, what the power of the Third Fors had been upon it, before his own hands could make or mar his fortune” (27.564).

Both Ruskin and his many biographers locate the roots of his life’s work in his early years, Collingwood observing that Ruskin’s “later writing and teaching are demonstrably continuous with his earliest interests and efforts” (1.24). These interests and efforts were shaped and nurtured by a home environment in which learning was respected and encouraged. Ruskin’s childhood and early education have been well documented, most memorably by Ruskin himself in Praeterita and in greater detail (and often with greater factual accuracy) by his biographers. Educated first by his parents and subsequently by tutors until entering school for the first time at fourteen, Ruskin reaped the benefits of his father’s literary and artistic interests and of his mother’s religious devotion. Once her son could read, Margaret Ruskin began the program that would become the central element of his early education. During the course of daily Bible lessons, later supplemented by Latin lessons, Ruskin was made to learn whole books of the Bible by heart along with the Scottish paraphrases and to give close attention to pronunciation, rhythm, and meter as well as to meaning. Ruskin later attributed the “first cultivation of my ear in sound” (28.318; 35.41) to these lessons, and certainly their influence is evident in his prose, both in his habit of Biblical quotation and paraphrase and in the cadence and style of his writing.

Ruskin also benefited from his father’s business sense, for it was John James Ruskin’s successful work in the wine trading firm of Ruskin, Telford, and Domecq that funded the family’s comfortable life at Herne Hill and later Denmark Hill and provided the many opportunities and advantages that Ruskin enjoyed. These included frequent travel; Ruskin accompanied his parents (joined after 1828 by his adopted cousin Mary Richardson) around Great Britain and, later, the Continent on annual holidays that fed his developing appreciation of landscape and architecture and provided opportunities to pursue his beloved studies in geology and mineralogy. His interest in these subjects began early and persisted throughout his life: as Hilton notes, John James Ruskin “was fond of saying that his son had been an artist from childhood, but a geologist from his infancy” (Early Years 17). As a boy, Ruskin dreamed of becoming an accomplished geologist and delighted in his growing collection of specimens. He began composing a mineralogical dictionary at age twelve and attended meetings of the Geological Society, of which he later became a member, before entering University. Ruskin’s parents were devoted Evangelicals, but although “much of what he studied was religious in tone” (Warrell 42) they allowed their son the freedom to enjoy contemporary literature, art, and theatre. The Ruskins’ library was diverse, including works by Homer, Cicero, Livy, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Chateaubriand, Bunyan, Hazlitt, Edgeworth, Bulwer-Lytton, Byron, and Walter Scott; Hilton remarks that “the literary atmosphere of the Herne Hill parlour was felt through all Ruskin’s life” (Early Years 16). The Ruskins’ social circle, a “minor literary world mingled with friends in the wine business” (Early Years 31), was similarly bookish. Ruskin taught himself to read at age four, refusing in an “accurately characteristic” (Collingwood 1.25) way to be taught by orthodox methods; at six he was writing his own books in carefully imitated book print and usually failing, again characteristically, to deliver the multiple volumes promised on his title pages. He also wrote summaries of sermons, a good deal of verse, and accounts of the family’s travels. These travels often provided inspiration for his writing and resulted in his first piece of published prose “On the causes of the colour of the Rhine,” which appeared in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, published by John James Ruskin’s friend J.C. Loudon, in September 1834. Loudon was impressed by the young Ruskin and encouraged his efforts; he would eventually publish Ruskin’s first mature work, the series of articles entitled The Poetry of Architecture, in 1837. Ruskin’s first published poems appeared in the annual Friendship’s Offering in 1835; between 1835 and 1844 Ruskin contributed twenty-seven poems to Friendship’s Offering and also saw his verse published in Amaranth, the Keepsake, and The Book of Beauty (Early Years 30). In 1835 he began to keep a diary, a practice he would persist in for the rest of his life.

Ruskin’s mature aversion to competition and prizes may well have its root in the absence of such competition in his early education. Similarly his adult emphasis on the development and limits of individual capacity may stem from the freedom he was given to develop his own aptitudes and strengths as a child. From an early age Ruskin was happiest when busily occupied. “All his life,” Hilton observes, “Ruskin felt that time was wasted, and worse than wasted, if any day had not been used for study” (Early Years 16). As an adult he often had several books passing through the press simultaneously in addition to being engaged upon a number of artistic, literary, or philanthropic projects. In the “Notes and Correspondence” adjoined to Letter 82 of Fors (October 1877), Ruskin remarks that the “Affairs of the Master” are “Too many for him; and it is quite certain he can’t continue to ride so many horses at once, or keep so many balls in the air” (29.248).

When he was ten, Ruskin’s education began to assume a more formal pattern as he acquired his first tutors. These were John Rowbotham, with whom he began studying mathematics in 1829; the Reverend Edward Andrews, the Evangelical Congregationalist minister whose chapel the Ruskins attended for a time and who was engaged to teach Ruskin Greek; and Charles Runciman, who became his drawing instructor in 1831. Runciman was succeeded by Copley Fielding, President of the Old Water-Colour Society, in 1834. Ruskin’s last drawing instructor was J.D. Harding, with whom he began studying in 1841. Rowbotham’s tutelage made way for that of the Reverend Thomas Dale, notable for establishing English literature as an academic discipline. Ruskin first studied with Dale as a pupil at his school near Herne Hill between 1833 and 1835; in 1836 he began attending Dale’s lectures at King’s College, London, and often joined other students at tutorials in Dale’s rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In early 1837 Ruskin left London for Oxford, where he took his place at Christ Church College as a gentleman-commoner.

Yet the facts and circumstances of one’s education tell only part of the story, and Ruskin’s education was far more complex than the above overview suggests. One purpose of Praeterita, Ruskin’s late autobiography, was to record the deep and lasting impressions left upon him by his childhood and early education. While Ruskin duly reviews the formal elements of his education in Praeterita, he lays greater emphasis upon subtler yet far more powerful influences. Praeterita is an obvious source for information about Ruskin’s childhood, but it has often been described as unreliable and incomplete. Consequently, some discussion of the character of this unconventional book is needed to determine how far we might draw upon it without being misled.

Published in parts between 1885 and 1889, Praeterita was ultimately left unfinished, a casualty of Ruskin’s illness and infirmity. It is not a typical autobiography and certainly not a typical Victorian autobiography; but then Ruskin was never a typical Victorian. Like most of his books—like Ruskin himself—Praeterita resists classification. It is at once open and reticent, intimate and impersonal, honest and inaccurate, suffused with memory and keenly aware of the present. The book has its origins in the letters of Fors Clavigera, in which Ruskin often included passages of autobiography. In Fors, a work primarily concerned with education, Ruskin had looked to his own childhood to illustrate “some results of education on after life, by one example in which I know all my facts” (28.348–9). The first two numbers of Praeterita were largely made up of this autobiographical material taken from eleven issues of Fors, ranging from its tenth to its sixty-fifth letters. In some ways Praeterita is like Fors without the “leaven of malice” (28.270), retaining the intimate, allusive, and associative qualities of the earlier work, but relinquishing its frequent bitterness and intensity. As Hilton notes, Praeterita is “evocative rather than consequential” (Later Years 502), and it is non-linear; Ruskin purposely leaves significant gaps in the chronology, claiming the right to speak “of what it gives me joy to remember at any length I like … and passing in total silence things which I have no pleasure in reviewing, and which the reader would find no help in the account of” (35.11). Turning his gaze inward, Ruskin was able to escape from the role of sage and seer. In the preface to the second edition of Modern Painters (1844) he remarks that “Childhood often holds a truth with its feeble fingers, which the grasp of manhood cannot retain,—which it is the pride of utmost age to recover” (3.31). In Praeterita Ruskin reaches backward in search of this truth.

Praeterita was well received at the time of its publication; it seemed to show Ruskin, who so often appeared combative and eccentric, in a mellower light and to offer a new understanding of a prominent public figure. The book was often described as “charming,” “delightful,” and “lovely” by friends and critics alike. As Ruskin’s editors note, “In some ways this last book by Ruskin was a revelation” (35.lv). Readers appreciated Ruskin’s frankness, keen insight, and novelistic style of description. They also marveled at his ability to continue writing such “perfectly limpid English” (35.lv) in the face of age and illness. The impressionistic character of Praeterita seems to have endeared the book to most contemporary readers, nor do they appear to have much questioned Ruskin’s account of himself; in an age preoccupied with modesty he had long been known for his surprising—sometimes unsettling—candor.1 Collingwood draws upon Praeterita for his own account of Ruskin’s early years and education, generally taking Ruskin at his word. Similarly, although Cook and Wedderburn add “some particulars of interest” (35.lviii) to their introduction to Praeterita, their purpose in doing so is to enlarge rather than contradict Ruskin’s narrative. The great majority of biographical accounts and reminiscences published in the period following his death rely heavily on Praeterita. In a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge in 1910, A.C. Benson declared that he would not recount Ruskin’s early life in detail because it had “been told with such inimitable grace and felicity in his Praeterita that it is impossible to retell it” (14).

Helen Gill Viljoen attempted to break the “spell cast by Praeterita” (17) in Ruskin’s Scottish Heritage (1956), in which she argued that “Ruskin-biography can come to grief if it is based upon Praeterita” (3). Viljoen argued that Praeterita should not be read as “the literal and unadulterated truth … [or] as the rock foundation upon which to build biography” (18), and in the sense that Praeterita is not a strictly factual or chronological record of Ruskin’s life she was certainly right. Of course one may well ask whether any autobiography really offers such a record. Hilton describes the various forces that helped to shape Praeterita: varying moods; crises both physical and emotional; a desire to please or to honor friends, both living and dead. Ruskin’s unconventional and sometimes haphazard compositional practice lent a certain obscurity to some parts of the book. Praeterita “had different audiences in its author’s mind … Sometimes Ruskin seems to be talking to himself, or sharing reminiscences not with a readership but with a single friend … Whole parts of the book were designed as gifts” (Hilton, Later Years 503). Other aspects, Hilton argues, were influenced by Ruskin’s relationship with Joan Severn, his beloved cousin and, in these later years of his life, caretaker. Concerned with propriety and posterity, Joan was keen for Ruskin to avoid any hint of controversy.2 Given this rather complex set of circumstances, many critics and biographers have followed Viljoen in quibbling with Praeterita’s errors and lacunae, often reinterpreting Ruskin’s account of his life from various theoretical perspectives. For instance, it is very likely true that Ruskin’s description of Herne Hill high society and his mother’s resulting social reticence are “nonsense: there was no such society on Herne Hill” (Early Years 15), that his accounts of childhood discipline “were probably exaggerated” (Early Years 13), and that his account of a childhood without toys “is incorrect” (Early Years 13). It may also be arguable that Praeterita “is an intellectual version of Kingsley’s evolutionary fantasy, The Water Babies” (Milbank 39) or that its patterns of composition reflect “Ruskin’s engagement with Dante’s Divine Comedy” (Hanson 58). Many such analyses of Praeterita are fascinating, insightful, and indicative of thoughtful and intelligent research. Yet we must be wary of being betrayed, as Ruskin warned would-be biographers of Scott, “into that extremest folly of thinking that you can know a great man better than he knows himself. He may not often wear his heart on his sleeve for you, but when he does, depend upon it, he lets you see deep, and see true” (27.598). Despite her reluctance to endorse Praeterita as a reliable source, Viljoen conceded that it contained a “nucleus of truth” (25) and that it had, for Ruskin as for his readers, a powerful “imaginative truth” (25).3 It is with this species of truth that I am concerned. Ruskin’s autobiography is fragmentary and often more concerned with sensory experience than with people or events, but as Robert Hewison has noted (echoing Viljoen) “none the less it is imaginatively true” (Argument 42). Praeterita is in many ways a work of personal mythology, in which Ruskin asks the reader to follow a trail of often enigmatic signs and allusions towards a deeper understanding of the action of Fors upon his life and by extension upon his life’s work. Ultimately what matters most is not whether Ruskin’s account of himself in Praeterita agrees precisely with the record or squares with one’s personal version of his life and character. As Ruskin declared in The Bible of Amiens, challenging conventional historical practice, “The real history is underneath all this” (33.59).

“How things bind and blend themselves together!” (35.561) These words from the final passage of Praeterita express one of the guiding principles of Ruskin’s teaching: a belief in the interconnectedness of life and in the continuity between past and present. This principle, which Ruskin called the Law of Help, shaped his understanding of the world and informed all that he wrote or did. Looking backwards in Praeterita Ruskin glimpsed its operation upon his own character and experience. Time and again in his autobiography Ruskin draws connections between the child he was and the man he has become, establishing what Rosenberg calls a “central core of perception” (221). Ruskin’s friend and first biographer, William Gershom Collingwood, acknowledged the same link, calling the second chapter of his life of Ruskin “Father To The Man.” Such connections might seem obvious; after all, childhood experience shapes each of us in various ways. But Ruskin repeatedly and determinedly emphasizes an unchangeable element in himself, forged in childhood and unaltered by later experience. In one of Praeterita’s many moments of wistful meditation, Ruskin remarks that “now, looking back from 1886 to that brook shore of 1837, whence I could see the whole of my youth, I find myself in nothing whatsoever changed. Some of me is dead, more of me stronger. I have learned a few things, forgotten many; in the total of me, I am but the same youth, disappointed and rheumatic” (35.220).

Understanding, then, the nature of Praeterita, we can better estimate the value of Ruskin’s portrayal of his childhood and young self. Ruskin describes an obedient, observant child, naturally curious and industrious but not without a touch of selfishness. He makes no claims to youthful genius and instead locates the source of his subsequent analytical power in habits of patient looking and precise feeling. He describes significant amounts of time spent amusing himself by “tracing the squares and colours of my carpet;—examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses; with rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling of the water cart through its leathern pipe” (28.272; 35.21), his mother content to leave him be so long as he was safe and quiet. Ruskin is keen to undersc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Text
• Introduction
• 1 The Forming Time
• 2 Foundations, Sacred and Profane
• 3 “The Professor”
• 4 “Souls of a good quality”: Foreshadowing Fors Clavigera
• 5 “Riveder le stelle”: Fors Clavigera and Ruskin’s Educational Experiment
• 6 “A world-wide monastery”: The St. George’s Guild and Ruskin ‘To-day’
• Bibliography
• Index