On Looking Into John Ruskin’s Praeterita

The cover of Praeterita. On the left are drawings of John Ruskin’s two aunts

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by Phil Hall

It took me years to read Crime and Punishment. I first tried when I was 14, then tried again at 15 and finally completed it at 16. What world do we enter, when we open a book? Keats saw a planet swim into view when he opened Chapman’s translation of Homer. When you are young, you do not understand the trouble you are getting into with the books on your parents’ shelves.

I was very much into tai chi and chi kung when I was a young mother, and bought book after book until I finally bought a very strange book about Jade Dragons and White Tigers. The Jade Dragon must press his finger hard into Huiyin to stop sperm from coming out and so live longer. The White Tigress asks many men to orgasm onto her face and then allows the ejaculate to dry and peels it off and eats it in order to be full of jing.

On reading this I began to have my doubts about Chi Kung. But the book was on my shelf in emerald green. Perhaps one of my children scanned through it. They must have thought their mother strange and the book, taken at face value, might have warped their outlook a little.

In the same way my parents had ‘Memoirs of A Woman of Pleasure’ on the bookshelf and the collected memoirs of Frank Harris, editor of The Times. And a book by Brian Aldiss called ‘The Hand-Reared Boy’. These books are no longer available at Waterstones. There were others. Nowadays, smug editors republish ‘banned books’ and by banned they mean Ulysses or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Who are they trying to fool?

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And yet, our family got into all sorts of scrapes and we were thrown out of three countries and so, in some childhoods, life is all about opening the next dangerous page of a book, entering the next colourful and frightening episode of a life. Ask my students from Afghanistan and Chad and elsewhere. Flying out of airports with guns strafing. Freezing in the holds of cargo ships and ending up in Dover. Going from country to country learning five languages by the time they are 18. Flotsam on the bore of a tidal wave.

And less like an adventure and more like a horror story, a drama, the teenager who could never eat fruit because when she was young her father made her fellate him. The boy whose drunken mother pushed his face into a basin of water and held it down so that he couldn’t breathe. The pages we turn. The new morning encountered.

And Ruskin. Ruskin’s mother, Margaret (from Croydon) would never let him eat pudding. He could only eat the leavings from his father’s dish when he was 6. They had a garden full of every kind of fruit and Ruskin was not allowed to eat any of it. His mother did not allow him any toys and he was not allowed any friends and never went to school. His mother read him the Bible over and over and over again, and all this she did, the daughter of a shop owner, as Margaret Thatcher was the daughter of a shop owner, in the hope that her son would become a great evangelical preacher, all this with the consent of Ruskin’s father who, when they were out walking, was ordered to walk ahead while Ruskin walked by his mother. She had such ambition! But not for herself. Not like Thatcher.

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My grandfather was killed at two-and-thirty, by trying to ride, instead of walk, into Croydon ; he got his leg crushed by his horse against a wall ; and died of the hurt’s mortifying.

My mother was then seven or eight years old, and, with her sister, was sent to quite a fashionable (for Croydon) day-school, Mrs. Rice’s, where my mother was taught evangelical principles, and became the pattern girl and best needlewoman in the school ; and where my aunt absolutely refused evangelical principles, and became the plague and pet of it.

My mother, being a girl of great power, with not a little pride, grew more and more exemplary in her entirely conscientious career, much laughed at, though much beloved, by her sister; who had more wit, less pride, and no conscience.

At last my mother, formed into a consummate housewife, was sent for to Scotland to take care of my paternal grandfather’s house ; who was gradually ruining himself; and who at last effectually ruined, and killed, himself.

My father came up to London ; was a clerk in a merchant’s house for nine years, without a holiday ; then began business on his own account; paid his father’s debts; and married his exemplary Croydon cousin.

From Praeterita, John Ruskin

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He said that all that was left for him to do was to examine the wallpaper or the carpet while he sat alone. To count the threads in the carpet. To examine the designs and colours on the wall. And, for all this, he never hated her. Everything she did, she impressed upon him, was for his own good. And so he tried to escape by going inwards, inwards, inwards, and inwards into language.

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Contented, by help of these occasional glimpses of the rivers of Paradise, I lived until I was more than four years old in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, the greater part of the year; for a few weeks in the summer breathing country air by taking lodgings in small cottages (real cottages, not villas, so-called) either about Hampstead, or at Dulwich, at ‘Mrs. Ridley’s,’ the last of a row in a lane which led out into the Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself full of buttercups in spring, and blackberries in autumn.

But my chief remaining impressions of those days are attached to Hunter Street. My mother’s general principles of first treatment were, to guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger; and, for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful nor troublesome.

But the law was, that I should find my own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first allowed ; — and the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic poverty in this respect was boundless.

On one of my birthdays, thinking to overcome my mother’s resolution by splendour of temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and Judy she could find in all the Soho bazaar — as big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that would dance, tied to the leg of a chair. I must have been greatly impressed, for I remember well the look of the two figures, as my aunt herself exhibited their virtues. My mother was obliged to accept them ; but afterwards quietly told me it was not right that I should have them ; and I never saw them again.

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Nor did I painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toy-shops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled ; as I grew older, I had a cart, and a ball ; and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks.

With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion ; and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the 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, from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge; or the still more admirable proceedings of the turncock, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street.

But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate, that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet.

From Praeterita, John Ruskin

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When Ruskin went to university his mother took up lodgings next to his rooms and whenever he went out with fellow students they all remembered how she went alongside him and she took pleasure in his every achievement, he lived up to her expectations. Clearly she looked upon his achievements as her own.

And she was his shadow until the day she died and when she died he wrote Praeterita in between bouts of madness and depression and the most inappropriate obsessive infatuation with a nine year old, with whom he then corresponded with intensively for years, proposing to her when she was 18 and he was in his late forties.

John Ruskin was allowed, initially, to lavish his language and attention on Rose and she was thrown into the terrifying and glamorous world of Victorian celebrity (a shared celebrity denied to her in the end by her family) and this drove the girl into a severe mental breakdown. She was hived off into an asylum and died at the age of 27 of anorexia nervosa.

Praeterita is Ruskin’s attempt at setting the record straight about his mother above all, and it is excuse for his behaviour towards the young girl. He publishes an incredibly long and admiring letter she wrote to him to help explain why he was in love and why he groomed her.

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In evidence, in Praeterita is the key to his intellectual prowess, his writing builds and builds and builds. It climbs and climbs and climbs in a futile attempt to escape. In an attempt to confront what his mother did to him, and he can never bring himself to condemn her because by the time she was dead the wind had changed and his face was frozen, the victim of a basilisk. She created him and his genius, inadvertently. Ruskin’s genius grew and grew in his attempt to escape her through understanding and words and culture and it could never find a way out of the prison she made because the way out was to demolish his love for her.

And so his depression and decline and failure, the man who shaped Victorian art appreciation, who was one of the first to encourage the kind of paternalistic craft socialism that inspired William Morris, who could jailbreak others and encourage them to reach for artistic and social freedom, but never be free himself. Ruskin the most admired polymath of his time who wrote the last word on architecture and who wrote about everything. He wrote about himself, finally, and then fell into severe depression. He died despised by many. Rose’s Héloïse was far too young for Ruskin’s Abelard and Rose died not as a nun, but as Ruskin’s victim. Effectively, he murdered her.

And we see Ruskin in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and we see Sebald imitate Ruskin’s sentence structure in its building, circling patterns of intricate predication and complementation in Praeterita.

The sense of claustrophobia and horror and admiration combine when one reads Praeterita. It is asphyxiating! You feel so sorry for Ruskin, the little boy counting threads, world building, and his valiant attempts to escape. Witness the orthography of his failure! The last sentence of the final accompanying Dilecta, in the edition published by Everyman’s Library, is a loving note to a friend, an admission of final defeat from a brave, but leprous man.

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There my dearest John, I’ve scribbled of (I can no longer write) as you wished. Best love to you, and love to all. I send it to Joan to read to you.

Ever yours with John’s truest love.

JS See less

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Martina Winter is a professional ghost writer who lives Near Shoreham in Kent near the magical valley where Samuel Palmer painted. She has a degree in English Literature and Masters in the History of Art and is an amateur archeologist and anthropologist with a particular love for the Mediterranean and the southern downland, weald and coast of Britain. She is currently engaged on writing a fictional account of the life of Pythagoras. She loves gardening and making jams and preserves and lives alone with her dog and two cats. She is a member of the Ramblers Association and the National Trust.