When John Ruskin, the great Victorian critic, writer, teacher, polemicist, environmental campaigner, painter, draughtsman, philanthropist died from influenza at his beautiful, but badly heated, draughty home at Brantwood, overlooking Coniston Water and his beloved Lakeland hills and fells, at the age of eighty, on 20 January 1900, The Times paid him due homage over several pages of that prestigious newspaper. There was a sense of national and international loss and grief at the death of this towering, bearded figure whose life spanned that of Queen Victoria. In accordance with his wishes, a simple burial took place in the little churchyard attached to St Andrew's Church, Coniston.
Ruskin’s parents: Left: Margaret Ruskin by Sir James Northcote, RA. Source: 35.126. Middle: John James Ruskin by Sir Henry Raeburn, RA. Source: 35.16. Right: John James Ruskin by Sir James Northcote, RA. Source: 35.126. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
John Ruskin, the only child of a Scot, John James Ruskin (1785-1864) and his cousin Margaret, née Cock (later changed to the less sexually charged name of Cox), was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, near Russell Square, in central London. The terrace house was demolished in the 1960s to make way for property development of the Brunswick Centre. Ruskin had the good fortune to have a father who was a shrewd and wealthy wine merchant and active partner in the wine and sherry firm Ruskin, Telford & Domecq that he had established in 1815. Although the offices were in Billiter Lane, in the heart of the City of London, John James needed to be in frequent face-to-face contact with stockists, outlets and customers throughout Britain and abroad. This involved a great deal of travelling and hard work acquiring orders, conducting business and tasting the vintages.
Ruskin as a Child and Young Man. Left: Portrait of Ruskin at the age of 3 1/2 years by Sir James Northcote, RA. Source: 35.21. Middle: Ruskin as a Child (Study for a Classical Subject) by Sir James Northcote, RA. Source: 35.22. Right: John Ruskin. Engraving of a cameo. Source: 36.280.
In 1831, the Ruskin family – father, mother, twelve-year-old son John and Mary Richardson his sixteen-year-old Scottish cousin – journeyed slowly, over several months, in their horse-drawn private carriage, on a circular route from the south of England, through Wales, returning via Oswestry on their way back to their home at 28 Herne Hill, in the village of the same name, to the south of London (Diaries, I, 1). The itinerary included Dover, Margate, Southampton, Portsmouth, Stonehenge, Hereford, Devil's Bridge, Hafod, the mountain of Plynlimmon that marks the source of the river Severn (35.622), Aberystwyth, Dolgelly, Cader Idris "a king of mountains" climbed with the help of ponies (35.95), Pont y Monach and the Rheidol Falls, Barmouth, Harlech, Tan-y-Bwlch, Caernarvon, Snowdon the highest peak in Wales, Bangor, Conway, Llangollen, back into Shropshire at Oswestry, a small market town only three miles from the Welsh border, Monmouth, Chepstow, Clifton, Bath and Newbury. That first taste of Shropshire, the wild border country and the "blue mountains" of Wales (16.445), did not leave the budding geologist indifferent. Ruskin always travelled for a purpose, to learn through seeing and sketching; landscape, geology and botany fascinated him. He incorporated some of his scientific observations about Snowdon and its lakes in his first article "Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine", published in 1834 in the Magazine of Natural History (1.191). In a letter to his father the following year, he used the metaphor of the force of the conjunction of the gushing rivers Myach and Rheidol linked by the bridge of Pont y Monach over the deep gorge (an impressive and picturesque sight popularly known as the Rheidol Falls) to exemplify the power and passion of being reunited with his father on the latter's return home after a long absence (Burd, I, 267). Many decades later in his autobiographical work Praeterita, he remembered fondly "the drive from Hereford to Rhaiadyr, and under Plynlimmon to Pont-y-Monach" and "the joy of a walk [...] towards Hafod", "gathering pebbles on the beach at Aberystwyth", "Harlech and its sands, Festiniog, the pass of Aberglaslyn, and marvel of Menai Straits and Bridge" (35.95-96).
The year after that trip to a country and borderland that was even more remote than the Wild Wales of George Borrow, John James was in Shrewsbury, on his own, on business, in late February (Burd, I, 260, 266). When away from home, John James wrote frequently – usually daily – to his wife Margaret and son; thus we know that he visited Shrewsbury again, in 1840. He set out from Chester at 3 o'clock in "a Unicorn Coach – that is 3 horses", he explained to Margaret, from Hereford, on 22 March 1840. Stagecoach journeys were not only slow but often dangerous and unpredictable. It is not surprising to learn that about seven miles south of Chester, into a forty-three-mile journey, an encounter with a dozen or so piebald ponies belonging to a circus company so terrified the three horses pulling John James's Unicorn Coach that the latter turned around "like a coach coming in the opposite way" and broke the pole on the coach. The repairs were long and tedious, and delayed considerably his arrival at (most likely) the famous old coaching-inn, The Lion, standing on a steep thoroughfare called Wyle Cop, in central Shrewsbury.
His main purpose was to conduct business with the wine and spirit merchants John Jones and Son, and Peter Beck & Co., in Claremont Street. But he also found time to attend a service at the Abbey Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul (commonly known as Shrewsbury Abbey), at Abbey Foregate, a suburb to the east of the town, close to the English Bridge (the subject of one of Turner's picturesque paintings), one of several bridges over the loop of the Severn. This was the site of a former Benedictine monastery founded by Roger de Montgomery in circa 1080. Only a few years before John James's visit, many of the monastic buildings were destroyed to enable the main Shrewsbury-Holyhead (A5) road to be built close by. John James described to his wife his delight in both the architecture of the Abbey Church and the religious service. The building was "a remarkable beauty in old Saxon columns & such twisting & nice rusting notching & nicking in a Stone Skreen". The preacher, who impressed him greatly, was "a capital young Clergyman – Bickerstaff [sic]". Comparing the experience to a service in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, at the Abbey Church the "Voices & Music [were] sweeter [...] – perfectly heavenly. Never did hear in home Church or foreign Cathedral anything so sweet. After Rome please to take Shrewsbury – you will wonder at what you have missed" (Burd, II, 267). One can but speculate on how these high church leanings would have been received by his Puritanical wife, then in lodgings in the High Street, Oxford, where she was chaperoning her son, an undergraduate at Christ Church.
Rev. Edward Bickersteth. Albumen carte-de-visite c. 1860.
The "capital young clergyman" was the Rev. Edward Bickersteth (1814-1892). Bickersteth had graduated from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1836; after studies at Durham University, he was ordained deacon in 1837. John James had correctly spotted a high churchman and a high-flyer, for Bickersteth rose quickly in the ranks of the Church of England. From being a humble curate at the village church of St Giles, Chetton, near Bridgnorth, Shropshire, in 1838, he moved the following year to be curate at the Abbey Church in Shrewsbury. Subsequently he was appointed vicar in Aylesbury and archdeacon of Buckinghamshire, finally becoming Dean of Lichfield Cathedral in 1875 where he remained until his death. His appointment as honorary canon of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1866, enabled him to have contact with Ruskin's circle of friends and acquaintances. One of these was George Richmond (1809-1896) whose portrait The Venerable Archdeacon Bickersteth (1869) depicts a handsome, youthful, kindly, clean-shaven fifty-five-year-old. Bickersteth maintained strong links with Shropshire on account of his two marriages with local girls; firstly to Martha Mary Anne (or Marianne?) Vickers of Cranmere, (married in 1840, she died in 1881) and secondly to Mary Anne, daughter of Thomas Whitmore Wylde-Browne of The Woodlands, Bridgnorth. He was a prolific writer on religious subjects.
John James added the following slightly enigmatic post-scriptum to this letter: "They said at Shrewsbury they had no Oxford paper but they have told lies in this Town since Falstaff's days." John James's allusion to their being "no Oxford paper" in Shrewsbury may be an attempt to reassure his Evangelical wife that, in spite of the High Church service at the Abbey, the town has not really come under the influence of the Oxford Movement or Tractarians (hence John James's reference to an "Oxford paper" or Tract) seeking to restore ceremonial and some Catholic teachings within the Church of England. The mention of St Mary's, Oxford is poignant for that was the church at which John Henry Newman, who later converted to Catholicism, was preaching and promoting his Tractarianism. St Mary's was also situated only a few yards from Margaret Ruskin's lodgings. John James concludes by almost teasingly suggesting that their being "no Oxford paper" might not be true! The reference to lies and Falstaff embeds Shrewsbury in a historical context, for it was the site of the famous Battle of Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403 between Henry Percy (Hotspur) and King Henry IV of England. In Shakespeare's play Henry IV, part I, Sir John Falstaff is depicted as a fat, jolly, debauched knight, greedy and cowardly despite his joviality, a larger-than-life character. On the battlefield at Shrewsbury, he feigns death when attacked, then rises up, picks up the body of Hotspur who had been slain by Prince Harry (Hal) and makes the false boast to have killed him. He also untruthfully asserted that he and Hotspur had "fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock" (5.4, 139-40).
Richard Fall: an Old Salopian
Richard Whiteman Fall (1820-1878) was a close, boyhood friend of Ruskin; the two families lived near each other at Herne Hill. The friendship started in 1832 when both sets of parents agreed that their sons of more or less the same age could spend time together during holidays (35.139). During term time, Richard was away at Shrewsbury School. Ruskin recalls that Richard was already at Shrewsbury School when they first met; however, records confirm that he was there between 1834 and 1837 (Burd, I, 260n). This ancient school, founded by King Edward VI in 1552 as the Free Grammar School for boys, was situated off a steep slope at Castle Gates, close to Shrewsbury castle. It possessed stately and lavish premises, and according to Nicholaus Pevsner’s Shropehire only surpassed by those at Eton and Winchester (267). In 1882 it transferred to its present site, and the solid old school building in front of which is a late nineteenth-century seated statue of Charles Darwin (a former student of the school), was used as a library.
Richard Fall was, Ruskin wrote, "extremely gentle and good-natured [...] entirely good-humoured, sensible and practical; but had no particular tastes; a distaste, if anything, for my styles both of art and poetry. […] He was never unkind or sarcastic" (35.138-139). The two boys got on well; they studied Greek and Latin together at Ruskin's home in the morning and often enjoyed walks in the afternoon. In an undated letter to Henry Acland, Ruskin described Richard as his “first playfellow and unfailing friend" (B13, Lancaster). When apart, the boys corresponded. In 1835, touring through France and Switzerland with his parents, Ruskin sent a regular diary in the form of rhyming letters to Richard in Shrewsbury. Even at the top of Mount Rigi, near Lucerne, he was thinking of Richard, playing cricket or in his schoolroom. The verse begins:
I hope all this is entertaining!
I think, if lesson-time's gone by
And play-time come, and it is raining,
It may be so, at Shrewsbury [2.433]
From the Refuge or Hospice on the Grimsel Pass, in the Bernese Alps, at a height of 6000', on "a terrible day", 25 August 1835, Ruskin's thoughts were of the Shropshire countryside, of the river Severn (of which Richard was reputed to know every mile) and Shrewsbury:
I wonder much what sort of day
This 25th of August may be
In dear old England far away!
Perhaps the sun is shining gaily,
And you may see, by Severn's stream,
The city basking in the beam,
And sloping fields with harvest white,
And distant mountains, bluely bright, [2.434]
He then contrasted the Shropshire scene with the Swiss views before him from which he composed a lyrical recollection of different moments and moods at sunrise and sunset; moonlight, storm, darkness, thunderclouds and terror. Elements of this poem to Richard and recollections of the Rigi were later incorporated into Modern Painters, in a descriptive passage beginning: "Stand upon the peak of some isolated mountain at daybreak, when the night mists first rise from off the plains" (3.415-16).
Three portraits of Ruskin by George Richmond (36.280 and 16.frontispiece, and 3).
In August 1841, Richard and Ruskin went on holiday in Wales, as far as Pont-y-Monach, the little bridge at the Rheidol Falls; at which point Ruskin, in poor health, had to return to the spa town of Leamington to be treated by the physician Dr Jephson (35.299). One can imagine the many conversations between the boys about life in Shrewsbury and the county so steeped in history and legend. They shared both a practical and theoretical interest in the new and often controversial science of geology and on several occasions attended lectures at the Geological Society in London (Diaries, I, 239, 244, 266). Their friendship remained steady and constant, at least until 1849 when Fall and Ruskin went on a walking holiday in the Alps. Richard Fall was one of the first of Ruskin's contemporaries to initiate him into some of the mysteries of Shropshire.
Last modified 14 March 2020