Ruskin's Roses and Lilies

...Rose La Touche, turn to madness What most endeared Winnington to Ruskin was the experience of working with children All his life he was drawn to little girls, preferring (in his own expression) the blossoms to the fruits He first met his cousin, Euphemia Gray, when she was 12, and married her several years later Effie was temperamentally unsuited to Ruskin, his unwillingness (or inability) to consummate the marriage, and his domination by his parents (who accompanied the newlyweds on their honeymoon), complicated matters further The marriage was annulled after four years Ruskin continued to be attracted to children, with an emotion that was not always pure Although his friendships often continued after they grew up, he still addressed them as if they were little girls When he was 70, he wrote to a former Winnington favorite, "But what a blundering old Bear you must have been—not to know perfectly well how much I 'thought of you' as you call it9 Were not all the Winnington girls furious at you about it'—and did ever you see anybody else turning me around your finger as you used to do, or have so often to say 'Paws off'17" Describing the girls' performance of the singing dances he had written for them, Ruskin wrote to his mother, "it would be worth coming far under the heaven to see " In his excellent introduction to The Winnington Letteis, Van Akin Burd suggests that "Ruskin's love foi Rose La Touche explains much of his interest in the children at Winnington " Ruskin was 48 when he first met the nine-year-old Irish girl, a drawing pupil, and she soon became the focal point of his life When she was 16, he proposed to her, but she was as disturbed by his religious doubts as he was by her fanaticism Her mother, worried about Ruskin's previous marriage, wrote to Effie (by this time married to the painter John Everett Millais), who replied that Ruskin would no doubt mistreat Rose as he had mistreated her and, further threatened to publish the account of her annulment Rose was forbidden to correspond with her suitor, and while they met secretly at the house of a mutual tnend, her detenorating mental condition and their mutual impasse on religious matters effected a permanent separation, even before her untimely death Ruskin never forgot her, writing, "Rose, m heart, was with me always and all I did was for her sake " One of the Irish girls at Winning-ton, Lily Armstrong, became a surrogate for her, the friendship lasting until Ruskin's death in 1900 Unlike Lewis Carroll, who carefully structured his relations with his child friends, Ruskin combined paternal and erotic feelings, often signing his letters to the Winning-ton girls as "your affectionate papa," but writing to his father about the possibility of his marrying one of them These relations seem, on the whole, to have been a source of great misery to Ruskin In a letter to a friend he admits "As for Roses and Lilies they are the plague of my life I dare'nt [sic] come to Winnington now because I know I should get so fond of Lily that I should fret because I could'nt [sic] see so much of her as I like and have her here and make a real daughter of her and for my own chief pet [Rose], her being in London is about as good for me as a sharp attack of fever, or a gunshot wound in the shoulder ' By the end of the 1860s Winning-ton Hall had begun to fail For a number of years Ruskin had donated large sums to cover deficits, as well as paying the tuition for several pupils, but his ill health and despondency made this financial burden increasingly irksome In addition, one of the young teachers, Mary Frances Bradford, had become Miss Bell's partner and, taking advantage of the schoolmistress, began to spy on the girls, tamper with their letters and meddle with their religious views But Ruskin felt finally that he had failed as an educator "They would all draw—or break stones, or do anything in the world, as long as I looked after them—but it was only in affection, and ceased, when they were left to themselves" In his profound sense of isolation he wrote to Lily that he had become "the Bear robbed of his whelps " He continued to remember the girls with affection, however, and one of his former students later told him, "In those days we all looked up to you as our real guide and teacher " The Winnington Letters provide a rounded portrait of Ruskin's activities, as well as particular insight into his relations with the girls The early years of the correspondence contain a broad range of Ruskin's ideas The later writings, when he was progressively affected by despondency and madness, otten rise to a tragic intensity He writes to Lily of Rose, "She ought to look sad—and very sad—and that for many a day to come For all days to come, in this world Like many things in Ruskin's life, much of the Winnington experience turned bitter his idealism about the school, his close friendship with Miss Bell, his efforts to talk to the girls about Rose Still, the image of the school stayed with him Three years before madness took complete control of him, he wrote in his diary, "Thinking over the forgotten things in my life, which seem now becoming the most important The Dances at Winning-ton...

...Ruskin's Roses and Lilies The Winnington Letters By John Ruskm Edited by Van Akin Burd Harvard University 739 pp $20 00 Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell In 1859 John Ruskin paid a visit to a progressive girls' school in the west of England, Winnington Hall Its headmistress, Margaret Alexis Bell, had sent him some of her pupils' drawings to criticize, and expressed an admiration for his theories of education Ruskin was so charmed by Winnington that he visited the school often during the next 10 years, and kept up a Tegular correspondence with Miss Bell and several of her students The discovery of these letters m 1952, and their publication in The Winnington Letters, open a new perspective on his life Before they were found, very little was known about Ruskm's relation to Winnington Although he had intended to write a chapter about the school in his autobiography, Praeterita—and had even prepared an outline—ill health prevented its completion Winnington was nevertheless an important part of his life Both "Lilies" (his essay on female education) and The Ethics of the Dust (in which a number of Winnington girls question "The Old Lecturer") are based on his contacts there, and Miss Bell's pupils compiled the index to the final volume of Modern Painters By 19th-century standards, Winnington Hall offered a very liberal female education, providing an academic curriculum as well as painting, singing, dancing, and sports—including cricket Miss Bell was influenced by the ideas of Frederick Denison Maunce, the Christian Socialist leader who founded the Queen's College, a progressive school for girls m London, and the Working Men's College, where Ruskm was his associate Besides capturing Ruskin, Miss Bell managed to gain the patronage of other eminent Victorians, among them Edward Burne-Jones the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Halle, the pianist, and Bishop John Colenso of Natal, the mathematician and Bible critic Ruskin's esthetic sensibilities were bound to be moved by Win-nington's lovely mansion, renovated in the Georgian period, and spacious grounds An exquisite photograph shows the young ladies in their full white skirts, resting nonchalantly on their croquet mallets, with a view of the house in the background Such scenes were a vision of enchantment to Ruskm, who wrote of "a calm sunny morning—the grass golden with light?and two of the girls come out in a hurry to gather some hawthorne before their breakfast bell rang They had both blue cloth dresses on—and the race of the blue figures on the golden ground, and the look of them, bending down the hawthorne branches, was worth going far to see " The letters cover a variety of subjects and preoccupations When Ruskin first stayed at Winnington he gave drawing lessons to some of the girls, and in his letters to them he is full of advice—geometry lessons for one, coloring technique for another—as well as endless comments on Titian, Holman Hunt, Turner, and other artists He also wrote the girls a Sunday Bible lesson each week, beginning with the Greek and Latin etymologies of a text, from there branching into theological and moral homilies These letters give hints of Ruskin's growing religious doubts In 1862 Miss Bell invited Bishop Colenso to stay at Winnington so that he might avoid the storm his controversial book on the Pentateuch was causing At the same time her own faith seems to have suffered a crisis She confided this to Ruskin who admitted that he had lost his own belief several years before (through the study of geology), writing "The world is an awful mystery to me now—but I see that is because I have been misled, not because it need be so " To many who were raised in Evangelism (as Ruskm and Miss Bell were) and trusted in a future life and society's divine sanction, the loss of faith was a shattering experience, in Ruskin's case, it seems to have corresponded with a nervous breakdown He turned strongly toward social ethics and against fundamentalism In The Ethics he writes of girls who involve themselves m religious speculations, "They often go mad," and in several letters he warns the Winnington girls against the perils of fanaticism Ruskin later witnessed the religious hysteria ot his child-beloved...