REVIEWS

Image credit: Cynthia Gamble

Cynthia Gamble. 2008. John Ruskin, Henry James and the Shropshire Lads, New European Publications.

Reviewer: Francis O’Gorman, University of Leeds.

It is easy to forget the extent to which a university education in nineteenth-century England connected a man to a national network. We live now in a different age. Indeed, the networks of the ancient universities could link graduates to an international circle of friends, acquaintances, and their families across the world to whom a letter of introduction opened opportunities, secured hospitality, established even permanent associations of private, intellectual, and commercial consequence. John Ruskin, Gentleman Commoner at Christ Church, Oxford, was not the most sociable of students. But he was made lasting friendships among the undergraduates—Henry Acland most obviously—and tutors. Walter Lucas Brown was kind and stimulating when a don, but not the most inspiring of friends after he had left Oxford and sunk, as Ruskin saw it, into the all-too ordinary life of a parish clergyman at Wendlebury. But before that he had certainly provided Ruskin with a valuable figure and correspondent who sharpened his thinking about art and religion, the ethics of teaching itself, and what might be extracted of value from an educational system the passing of which Ruskin, in Praeterita, could not mourn.

Osborne Gordon (1813–83), too, was a tutor for whom Ruskin had time. He was a ‘pearl’ among them, he remembered, a man ‘of curious intellectual power and simple virtue’. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) thinks a little differently, and records not only ‘simple virtue’ but a social climber with an ‘overpowering love for a lord’. But that is not the worst one can say of a man. And in the unreformed University of Oxford, in a culture that had yet to invent anything like a career academic, Ruskin may have been pleased to over-estimate a man’s possession of ‘curious intellectual power’ and ‘simple virtue’ simply because such things were more than ordinarily needed there. Gordon’s colleagues were by no means all ambitious for their students, the possessors of gifted minds, or committed to their tasks as teachers. Many were profoundly suspicious of anything that looked like research. It revealed unstable convictions. The wiry intellectual energy of the Rector of Lincoln, Mark Pattison (1813-84), helped to change that by re-inventing the academic as a man with a particular specialism and with original and fully-researched ideas. But before Pattison, intellectual accomplishment had to be prized where it could be found. Osborne Gordon seemed to Ruskin a happy exception in a college where intellectual distinction among students was, as Praeterita recalled, in horrible bad taste.

Osborne Gordon’s network, to which Ruskin and his parents became attached, forms the major part of Cynthia Gamble’s intriguing new history of Shropshire, Ruskin, and Henry James. Gordon’s career before Oxford had involved schooling in Bridgnorth (without the ‘e’), then a small market town on the banks of the River Severn. Bridgnorth was home for awhile for Richard Baxter, seventeenth-century Puritan theologian and hymn writer, and the birthplace of Thomas Percy of the Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765). But it also featured periodically in Ruskin’s life. One of the many things this study achieves is to remind the reader just how much of Great Britain Ruskin knew and visited: how far his network of acquaintances took him. Osborne Gordon, of whom Bridgnorth became proud as a man of scholarly distinction, a figure who had once tutored the Prince of Wales, remained friends with the author of Modern Painters until close to the end of his life in 1883. He was one of the last visitors to Denmark Hill and one of the first at Brantwood. Ruskin visited him when Gordon became vicar of Easthampstead (a Christ Church living) in 1860. He was, as ODNB describes him, ‘lean and haggard, with bright eyes, long reddish nose, untidy hair, odd voice, and uncertain aspirates, of quaint wit, exquisite scholarly tastes, extraordinary mathematical gifts, and of a very kind heart’.

Dr Gamble’s engaging, anecdotal book retrieves an enormous amount of empirical material concerning any of Ruskin’s connections with Shropshire. Its winding paths through Victorian high society, both city and country, find their way back, in the end, to a connection with the county. She is a searcher of primary records, and the foundation of empirical learning here is sure. Another example of the Shropshire connections that interest her is Ruskin’s relationship with Edward Cheney, and John and Jane Pritchard. Jane was the only sister of Osborne Gordon. She married John, MP for Bridgnorth, friend and executor of John James Ruskin, and friend too of Edward Cheney, lover of Venice and eventual owner of Badger Hall, near Bridgnorth. Cheney, who inherited the Hall from his brother in 1866, had previously lived at the Palazzo Soranzo-Piovene on the Grand Canal, and was a friend of Rawdon Brown, whom Ruskin knew well too. (Palazzo Soranzo-Piovene, sometimes just called the Palazzo Soranzo, is three palazzi after the Loredan Vendramin Calergi, the Venice Casino, on the left hand side of the Grand Canal going towards Rialto.) Cheney filled Badger Hall with Venetian treasures, which were sold in Christies in 1885 after his death. Effie Ruskin had been a better friend of Cheney than Ruskin, and that, in due course, caused some difficulties. He would later disagree, as a trustee of the National Gallery, with some of Ruskin’s suggestions for purchases for the national collection. But the Ruskins’ brief visit to Badger in August 1850 offers a pleasing glimpse of Ruskin’s social dutifulness, and his energy in exploring the diversities of English rural life, its customs, religious life, and architecture. An image from Much Wenlock Priory, just down the road, provided an illustration—drawn by Ruskin and engraved by J.C. Armytage—of a ‘zigzag’ decoration inside a gothic arch for the first volume of The Stones of Venice. As for Cheney, Shropshire and Venice were related.

Dr Gamble is extensive in her research into the details of Ruskin’s life. This is a book bubbling with facts, like Tim Hilton’s biographies. The reader may not always concur with the volume’s interpretive comments—it is a little hard on Margaret Ruskin, for instance, who was always more than a Dickensian caricature. But the pleasure in detail, the sense of place, the exploration of interrelations between private lives and public figures, the minutiae of a great figure’s biography, are much to be enjoyed. Enjoyable too, is the winning affection of the author for Shropshire and for the felt presence of Bridgnorth and its environs in this intricate story. It is no surprise to learn that Dr Gamble herself, who has published widely on Ruskin and on Proust, was educated in Bridgnorth, and the family affection and gratitude for a schooling there lends to this narrative a charming intimacy. Certainly, a reader’s connection with Shropshire—and an interest in Ruskin or Henry James—makes this book all the more appealing. Its best audience is a local one, its ideal readers those who know the local terrain. So it is not wholly inappropriate for me to admit that, as it happens, I was born in Bridgnorth too and went to school there briefly. My mother taught French in the same Grammar School that the Reverend Osborne Gordon and Cynthia Gamble attended. Perhaps I am a peculiarly apt reader of this book, but all those with an interest in Ruskin, who know Shropshire or otherwise, will find it intriguing.