[In the following essay, Knoepflmacher uses the many letters John Ruskin wrote to Ingelow between 1867 and 1882 to explore the personal and professional relationship the two shared.]

Highly popular as a poet in late nineteenth-century England and America, Jean Ingelow (1820-1897) has not regained her former reputation. Although a few of her verses are finding their way back into recent anthologies, she has hardly fared as well as Christina Rossetti, the writer to whom she was most often compared by Victorian reviewers. Rossetti herself rather nervously regarded “Jean Ingelow, the wonderful poet” as a “formidable rival to most men, and to any woman.”¹ Paradoxically, however, Ingelow's best known work today is a work of prose, her fantasy novel for children, Mopsa the Fairy (1869). Itself destined to remain overshadowed by the work of Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, that novel, which ends with the willed segregation of a powerful fairy queen fated to be forgotten by her best human friend, almost seems to inscribe a desire for oblivion as well as Ingelow's distrust of her own inventiveness. Despite her literary prominence and her association with major Victorian artists and intellectuals—notably John Ruskin, a steady admirer and frequent caller at her Kensington home—she chose to lead as unobtrusive a life as possible.

Retaining much of her Calvinist mother's suspicion of art, artists, and artistic rivalry, Jean Ingelow persistently avoided self-advertisements of any sort. Whereas Christina Rossetti's letters and manuscripts were readily available to later Victorian editor-biographers, Ingelow discouraged a dissemination of the details of her private and public life. Her scattered correspondence—probably just as copious as Rossetti's—survives primarily through the few excerpts included in what is bound to remain the most reliable account of her life that we shall ever possess, the 1901 Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow.² That this modest but insightful study should have been written by a younger friend or relative who preferred to conceal her name seems very much in keeping with the tenor of Ingelow's own self-effacing life. And that this anonymous biographer should astutely characterize her subject's self-effacement by drawing on a floral metaphor devised by Ingelow's friend, John Ruskin, seems especially poignant, for, as I shall suggest in the body of this essay, it is through Ruskin's hardly self-effacing prose in his letters to Jean Ingelow that we obtain our best chance of recovering a sense of the true significance of a writer he genuinely admired yet also steadily patronized.

To characterize her subject's temperament, Ingelow's 1901 biographer draws on Ruskin's contrast between two flowers, the showy young poppy and the more decorous primrose, in his grandiosely entitled Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air Was Yet Pure Among the Alps, and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew.³ Ruskin explains that he has chosen the “impatient and luxury-loving” red poppy as the prime example for his moralized anatomy because it boldly displays its separate parts—pistil, style, ovary, and stigma—after “casting all restraint away.”⁴ Yet the more modest primrose, he contends, never is as showy. Although similarly “confined” in its youth, it refuses to discard its early “tutorial leaves.”⁵ To Ingelow's biographer, Ruskin's description of the primrose thus offers an apt emblem for the self-confinement of a writer who refused to leave her family, opting to reside, first with both her parents, then with her mother, and, finally, with younger brothers. The passage the biographer draws from Ruskin deserves closer scrutiny, for it illuminates Ingelow's ready acceptance of a domestic confinement that other Victorian women writers had found far more problematic. And, moreover, it also helps to explain, as we shall eventually see, why this reclusive writer held such a special value for John Ruskin.

In reproducing the passage in which Ingelow's biographer cites Ruskin at such great length, I shall also reinstate (in brackets and in italics) a few phrases she wisely chose to elide in order to remove some of the infantile or regressive attributes that he confers on his symbolic primrose:

Ruskin, in his “Proserpina,” gives a faithful delineation of a primrose both in pen and pencil. The words might stand for a description of Jean Ingelow. They occur in what could be used as an allegory for parents, and begin with a picture of a poppy, whose scarlet cup cannot be developed until it has split up and tossed away the cruel cap that has held it in bondage and left its petals marked for ever. “Not so flowers of gracious breeding,” says the sage of his primrose, “first confined as strictly as the poppy, with five pinching green leaves, whose points close over it”; [the little thing is content to remain a child and finds its nursery large enough] then “the little yellow ones peep out … [like ducklings] they find the light delicious [and open wide to it;] and grow, and grow, and throw themselves [wider at last] into their perfect rose” … [But they never leave their old nursery for all that; it and they live on together; and the nursery seems a part of the flower.]⁶

The excisions that Ingelow's biographer makes in reproducing Ruskin's description of the primrose make her subject seem less child-like. Instead of stressing what could be construed as a regressive attachment to the nursery, she prefers to emphasize the primrose's conservative allegiances. She therefore disrupts Ruskin's sequence and concludes the paragraph by quoting a sentence about the calyx (which Ruskin had called the “hiding part”⁷) that does not appear at this point in Proserpina:

[B]ut the primrose remains always in its calyx, its first home; they are never separated, and the calyx remains part of the flower, which dies when its day is over.

So it was with Jean Ingelow.

Although she gladly hailed every effort made by her friends to enlarge and enrich their lives by any sort of intellectual or philanthropic work, she certainly belonged to the old school of thought so far as regards public life for women, and she experienced a veritable shock each time that anyone she cared for stepped across the old barrier, as she deemed, needlessly. Still, she differed in silence; it was far from her to discuss these points, and she sometimes let herself be reminded with a smile that she, in her day, had gone to the verge by publishing her poems. To the generation before her such writing was but the graceful and interesting diversion of a gentlewoman, to be kept for the delectation of her own circle.⁸

To stress the voluntariness of her subject's confinement, Ingelow's biographer omits Ruskin's characterization of the primrose as a perennially sheltered child. She suggests that Ingelow's decision to stay within the narrow “calyx” of her immediate family stemmed from her cultural affiliation with pre-Victorian values. The writer she places in an older “school of thought” still exhibits the values of a generation that had placed a premium on female celibacy and domesticity. Women of letters such as Maria Edgeworth, who worked closely with her father in fashioning her educational texts, or the Taylor sisters Jane and Ann, whose poems for children complemented their father's more prosaic instructional works, had also discharged a public role while staying firmly implanted within a parental calyx. Jane Taylor died when Jean Ingelow was only four years old, but the friendship between the Taylors and Ingelows gave Jean access to an atmosphere notably different from that existing in her own home. Her visits, as a teenager, to Isaac Taylor's home exposed her to a household far more receptive to creativity than that of her parents, the repressive Jean Kilgour and the literal-minded William Ingelow.⁹

Yet if Jean Ingelow was shocked by Victorian women writers who had boldly “stepped across the old barrier” (a probable allusion to George Eliot but perhaps even to figures such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Elizabeth Gaskell), her own brand of quietism hardly seems to have been lacking in conflict. The author of Some Recollections provides enough information to allow us to construct an “allegory for parents” that strongly suggests that the conformity which Jean and William Ingelow demanded from their children was hard to bear even for one as “docile” as their eldest daughter. Ingelow's biographer implies that there was a continued tension between the ideology of self-suppression Jean accepted and her determination to find a creative outlet for her emotions. She had, after all, herself gone to “the verge” by refusing to limit herself to a private audience. She was a poppy as well as a primrose.

Such contradictions, which do not escape the shrewd author of Some Recollections, raise important questions about Ingelow's art. Were her writings conformist or self-expressive or both? Did her lingering attachment to a “first home” result in literary productions that merely reasserted old “barriers” at a time of major social and institutional change? Or did she use her work to break away from the “cruel cap” of an inhibiting nursery imposed on grownup women? To counter the notion that Ingelow's art was unaffected by the larger life around her (an accusation that not even Jane Austen has ever managed to escape), her biographer points to her enormous popularity in the United States immediately after the Civil War: “as American homes were just then building up again, families returning after the cruel strain and anguish, the heart of the great people” took comfort in her “consoling, prophetic” verses.¹⁰

Yet even this example may not necessarily rescue Ingelow's work from the charge that it helped to perpetuate an insulation that relegated women and children to a passive domestic sphere. Her lyrics may well have appealed to adults eager to find an anodyne for the horrors of war. Still, had she not merely found a public forum for verses that a “gentlewoman” of an earlier generation might have chosen to keep for members “of her own circle”? That Ingelow aided a male ideology which valued a segregated female “purity” seems clear from John Ruskin's investment in both herself and her writings at a highly tempestuous time in his own career. Before turning to his actual letters to Jean Ingelow, however, we must briefly look at the circumstances that prompted Ruskin to seek a calming feminine alter ego. As someone who saw himself crippled by tensions that she, but not he, had managed to bring under control, he clung to the primrose for converting “restraint” into an exemplary art.

.....

“Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes—he has only heroines,” Ruskin remarked to the Victorian women to whom he proffered a “royal authority” in “Lilies: Of Queens' Gardens.”¹¹ After listing all of Shakespeare's “perfect” women, Ruskin asked his audience to “observe” that perfection's corollary: “The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none.”¹² Soon adding Sir Walter Scott's imagined women—with their “endless varieties of grace, tenderness, and intellectual power”—to Shakespeare's,¹³ Ruskin endorses the ideal femininity upheld by an ever-expanding canon of male writers, from Dante and Chaucer to Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Coventry Patmore. But when he turns from invented to actual women, no female author, past or present, is ever introduced for a verifying sampling of the “wisdom” and “intellectual power” assigned to them by men. Instead, Ruskin dwells on middle-class “girls,” for whose mothers he proceeds to prescribe and to proscribe. As the self-appointed mentor of matrons whose domestic queenliness he wants to activate, he tells them what models to follow and what pursuits to avoid.

The rhetorical strategies Ruskin had adopted in his lecture “Of Kings' Treasuries” thus are markedly different from those used in this sequel. In “Of Kings' Treasuries,” he had subjected earlier texts such as Milton's “Lycidas” to a close analysis that, in its detail and perspicuity, easily rivals the finest literary criticism of our own century. In “Of Queens' Gardens,” however, antecedent texts merely act as passive repositories for catalogues of exemplary women. This split between analysis and exhortation seems unmistakably grounded in Ruskin's Victorian perception of separate spheres of activity for men and women. Although “Kings' Treasuries” addresses “ladies” as well as “gentlemen” in its opening sentence, the etymological, religious, and scientific minutiae that Ruskin asks his audience to master seem hardly intended for the lady/queens he warns off theology, as a “dangerous science for women” in his second lecture. For them, Coventry Patmore's “Angel in the House” seems worthier of citation than the work of Victorian intellectuals such as Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or George Eliot.

Whereas a great variety of feminist critics have, in recent years, recuperated most of the male authors Ruskin upholds as purveyors of an exemplary womanhood, their revalidations of Shakespeare, Scott, Tennyson, and even Wordsworth, hardly have been conducted along Ruskin's lines. What is more, Ruskin himself has continued to suffer from the opprobrium visited on him, a quarter of a century ago, by Kate Millett in her Sexual Politics. Confining herself to “Of Queens' Gardens,” Millett pointedly contrasted it to John Stuart Mill's proto-feminist The Subjection of Women (1869) and conjectured that, despite his “lavish flattery,” Ruskin had, by 1864, felt “and probably smarted under the pressure of feminist insurgence.”¹⁴

Millett's carefully chosen excerpts from “Of Queens' Gardens” certainly validate her attack on Ruskin's sexual stereotyping. Although she exaggerates the representativeness of views she describes as a “compulsive masculine fantasy one might call the official Victorian attitude”¹⁵ and hence may underrate much that is idiosyncratically Ruskinian, she is especially astute in stressing his simultaneous assignation and denial of power to the Englishwomen he wants to influence. For Ruskin hyperbolically contends that the power of Victorian women is so immense that “there is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women are answerable for it.”¹⁶ Yet, at the same time, as Millett notes, he also wants to retain their confinement into gardens they are only allowed to leave on limited rescue missions. The matronly queens are charged to redeem their less fortunate countrywomen, the sexually fallen; they must, in an extension of Ruskin's floral metaphorizing, replant such “feeble florets” into “little fragrant beds” and bid “black blight turn away.”¹⁷ As Millett justly observes, there is a paradox here: the same women who are denied “a deciding voice” of their own are nevertheless made “solely accountable for morality on the planet.”¹⁸

Ruskin's tendency, in “Of Queens' Gardens,” to treat the mothers of England as if they were almost as naive, passive, and uninstructed as their daughters may well have offended educated Victorian women as much as Kate Millett. When he humorously adopts the same tutorial tone, however, in his next major work, Ethics of the Dust (1866), a book issued a bare six months after Sesame and Lilies (and just as cryptically titled), the effect is quite different. For Ruskin here dispenses with adult intermediaries. Instead, he now directly addresses himself to “the minds of young girls, who were ready to work earnestly and systematically” as his pupils in an intricate course on “mineralogy”¹⁹ that soon veers into epistemology, aesthetics, and religion.

The condescension that proved offensive in “Of Queens' Gardens” seems far more palatable in Ruskin's dramatized “Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallization” (the sub-title of a volume he dedicates, “With His Love,” to “The Real Little Housewives Whose Gentle Listening and Thoughtful Questioning Enabled the Writer to Write This Book”). For the “Old Lecturer”—or “L.,” as he calls himself—who informally speaks to his little wards “after raisin-and-almond time,”²⁰ recreates an interactive process in which he repeatedly adjusts himself to the alert and inquisitive minds of the precocious girls named Isabel, Florrie, Lily, Sybil, Mary, Dora, Lucilla, etc. These future “queens” are not abstract entities, like the women exhorted in “Of Queens' Gardens,” or fictionalized as the Alice Liddell whom Lewis Carroll had recently transformed into a Wonderland dream-child. Highly individualized and “real,” they retain the liveliness of the actual students Ruskin taught at the School for Girls at Winnington Hall, Cheshire, at the express invitation of Margaret Alexis Bell (1818-1889), the school's pioneering Principal.²¹

Occasionally put on the defensive, the Old Lecturer clearly cherishes the challenge of his dialogic engagement with such alert young minds. He may still be patronizing, but his ironized self-presentation, his obvious affection and respect for his pupils, and, above all, his ability to share with them the subtleties of his elastic mind, makes Ethics of the Dust a text that even Millett might have found amenable, had she been willing to regard the Victorian patriarchy in less monolithic terms.

It seems significant that, at the very start, even before he has had a chance to introduce the first of his many biblical allusions or any of his copious references to writers such as Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Dickens, the Old Lecturer should find hurled at him a quotation from a female poet, Jean Ingelow. Isabel, a diligent reader who, along with Florrie, has just emerged from Sindbad's Valley of Diamonds, uses this quotation in support of Florrie's objections to the Old Lecturer's playful mode of instruction. The two little girls contend that they, but not a serious adult, are entitled to such a license:

florrie. Now you're just playing, you know.

l. So are you, you know.

florrie. Yes, but you mustn't play.

l. That's very hard, Florrie; why mustn't I, if you may?

florrie. Oh, I may because I'm little, but you mustn't, because you're—(hesitates for a delicate expression of magnitude).

l. (rudely taking the first that comes). Because I'm big? No; that's not the way of it at all, Florrie. Because you're little, you should have very little play; and because I'm big, I should have a great deal.

isabel and florrie (both). No—no—no—no. That isn't it at all.

(isabel, sola, quoting Miss Ingelow.) “The lambs play always—they know no better.” (Putting her head very much on one side.) Ah, now—please—please—tell us true; we want to know.²²

Although the Old Lecturer soon uses this exchange to introduce his little interlocutors to a new sense of wonder, Ruskin himself is paying a graceful tribute to a woman writer whose poetry he had recently come to know and whose prose writings for children he would increasingly respect. Ruskin's citation from the childhood portion of “Songs of Seven,” Ingelow's verses about seven stages of a woman's life in her 1863 Poems, suggests that he identified with this and her later renditions of innocence. He began to quote her work more frequently in other writings.²³ And, by 1867, a year after the appearance of Ethics of the Dust, Ruskin and Jean Ingelow were frequently meeting with each other. A year younger than Ruskin, forty-seven to his forty-eight, she was to remain a close friend throughout their later lives. By 1877, in Fors Clavigera, Ruskin publically lists her as one of the old and tried friends whose inner orbit he likens to that of a “family circle.”²⁴ Although she creased to write after her favorite brother's death in 1886 and Ruskin's own productivity was affected by bouts of mental illness, they remained in touch until her death in 1897, three years before his own. As late as 1885, she offers a perceptive commentary on the first part of Praeterita, Ruskin's autobiographical “Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts perhaps worthy of Memory in my past Life.” In stressing the affinity she feels with Ruskin's vivid recollection of his early sensations, she seems to reaffirm their special bond as translators of childhood into adult life.²⁵

The particulars of Ruskin's investment in Ingelow and in her work need to be considered more thoroughly. Was he simply drawn to her for some of the same personal reasons that made the little girls at Winnington so attractive to him? The pre-pubescent “little birds” Ruskin adored and the intelligent spinster whose company he genuinely cherished may have seemed equally alluring because their femininity struck him as virginal, desexualized, and hence unthreatening. Or did he seriously regard her as a fellow-artist and fellow-educator, a potential propagator of an ideology quite similar to his own? And, if so, did he consider her as a disciple rather than as an equal?

In the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Firestone Library, there is a folder containing thirteen manuscript letters that Ruskin wrote to Ingelow over a period of fifteen years, from 1867 to 1882. These letters, probably a mere fragment of a much more copious correspondence exchanged between the two writers, may hold a partial answer to such questions. Although Ruskin often responds to Ingelow letters that appear to have been destroyed, his treatment of his correspondent offers some insights into the intricacies of their relationship. And that relationship raises further questions about the representativeness of his assumption of the role of Victorian patron of female letters.

Written over a period of fifteen years, the Ruskin letters to Jean Ingelow at Firestone Library not only record changes in the circumstances of each writer's life but also reveal a richly diversified and multi-sided interaction. Subtle shifts are evident even in Ruskin's mode of addressing his correspondent: the formal “Dear Miss Ingelow” used in most of the letters is sometimes replaced by “My dear Miss Ingelow” and, on one unusual (and late) occasion, by a highly personal “My dear Jean” (30 March 1882).²⁶ More significant, however, are the fluctuating postures Ruskin adopts for the role he chooses to play in the relationship. He is at once a dispenser and a receiver. As awed admirer of her poetry, as an eager fellow-philanthropist, and as a stern critic of her prose fiction, he always appears to defer to her own interests and powers. Even at his most patronizing and dictatorial, he professes to have those interests at hand. Yet as a writer who covets her stamp of approval and as an increasingly anguished and brooding loner who desperately requires quasi-parental emotional support, he can put himself in the forefront with a selfishness that resembles that of a small child.²⁷

Ruskin's multiple self-definitions, of course, impose corresponding roles for Ingelow to play. She is expected to be seduced by his flattery, to see herself as an ideological ally, to allow herself to be instructed on both the content and the material presentation of her own handiwork to a Victorian reading public. She is supposed to be attentive to his ideas, his artwork, his writing, and, eventually, to his acute psychological pain. There are other positions that the letters implicitly invite her to adopt. Apparently regarding her as a central link in a female circle that sustains him, Ruskin wants her to interact with others of her sex. He thus urges Ingelow to receive his little girl friends from Winnington at her home or to affiliate herself with grown-up women who are either personally related to him, such as his cousin “Joanie” Agnew (Mrs. Arthur Severn), or younger women artists, like Kate Greenaway, Helen Allingham, and Francesca Alexander, whom he has adopted as deserving protégées and whom he encourages to promote an Ingelow-like “purity.” Lastly, despite her religious orthodoxy, she must allow him, as a skeptic and agnostic, to question the very foundation of a serenity and quietism he values but cannot bring himself to share.

The first three letters in the Princeton folder, all written in 1867, are Ruskin's most deferential in the correspondence. On 11 June, Ruskin reminds Ingelow of her promise to send him her latest volume, A Story of Doom and Other Poems (1867). But when she does, he admits (on 2 July) that he has not yet read the ambitious, nine-part biblical title-poem and prefers to comment on her shorter lyrics and narrative poems. By 21 December, in the longest, most confiding (and also most sprawling, unkempt, and illegible) letter in this trio, Ruskin has effected a shift. He now converts Ingelow, who had asked him to contribute to a philanthropic collection for the poor, into a quasi-maternal caretaker, not just of the indigent, but also of his own psyche and imagination. It is no coincidence that this third letter should culminate with a closure in which he couples his affection for Ingelow with his initial resistance to her mother: “Love + with sincere regards to your mother. (I didn't like her at first, but I begin to like her very much.)” The frankness of this parenthetical admission is startling; but what also remains puzzling are the unexplained reasons for Ruskin's professed change in outlook. What has altered his attitude towards the stern Calvinist (a Scotswoman, like his own mother) who had originally curbed her oldest child's creativity?²⁸ Does Ruskin, having sensed the emotional bond that makes the daughter care for her namesake, want to divert some of that solicitude for himself?

Despite the shifts they dramatize, flattery runs through all three 1867 letters. Given Ruskin's unflinching devotion to an often harsh truthfulness, even his most florid compliments would appear to be sincere. “I shall be deeply and truly grateful for your book—more so the oftener I open it (and that will not be un-often),” Ruskin avows in the opening of his 11 June note to Ingelow. But the proximity he desires cannot solely be attained by mere readership. “I should be more grateful still if you would come over here some sunny forenoon and have strawberries & cream—(not that I mean to compare the one visit to the many poems—but I could have otherwise got the poems, and I have been long hoping to see you)—and look at a picture or two—if you care to do so—or not, if you do not; and give me the comfort of understanding what kind of creature it is that sings so sweetly in those to me mysterious books.”

Seductive as this graceful rhetoric is, it is also carefully de-eroticized. Ruskin is no strawberry-dangling Victorian rake like Hardy's Alec D'Urberville; he is not luring an unwary virgin into his bachelor quarters by promising to show her his precious etchings. It is her poetry that has tantalized him. He is attracted to a disembodied voice. Ingelow's personal presence will merely help him grasp the source of her “sweet” melodiousness. In Tennyson's “The Lady of Shalott,” a mysterious singer leaves her confinement because of Lancelot's allure; yet the poem establishes that this unimaginative knight has never heard the “song that echoes cheerly”²⁹ which so entrances rapt listeners outside her castle. For Ruskin, however, it is a previous familiarity with her song that makes him covet sighting the singer.

Ingelow presumably accepted Ruskin's invitation, gave him a copy of her book, and invited him to reciprocate by visiting her own house. Yet, by 2 July, not too long after their meeting, Ruskin calls attention to a distance that is both literal and metaphoric. Although he now adds “My” to the “Dear Miss Ingelow” address he had used before and also replaces the “Ever respectfully yours” signature of the previous letter with an “Ever faithfully yours,” it is clear he no longer regards physical proximity to be as much of a desideratum. Ruskin explains why he has been prevented from seeing Ingelow in person: “I had hoped, before now—to have called upon you: but chance required me suddenly to go into Scotland; and once here I mean to get some sea & mountain air, and see some ‘delicate lifting up of wings,’ and lift up my own weary & penguinish representatives of wings a little, if I may.” Lest Ingelow fail to recognize his own delicacy in inserting that reference to a “delicate lifting up of wings” and in portraying himself as a songless bird incapable of winged prowess,³⁰ Ruskin's next paragraph leaves no doubt that, though away, he has been carefully perusing her verses. But his close reading of her poetry now seems to license him as a literary critic. And, as such, he feels free to drop the rapturous posture of the earlier note. Still extolled, her handiwork no longer appears to be all that “mysterious.”

“I have brought the Story of Doom with me—among few books,” Ruskin assures Ingelow in his letter of 2 July 1867. “I have not yet read the story itself,” he acknowledges, only to add quickly, “all rest is—one thing more beautiful than another. I like the ‘humble imitation’ best of all. Better than the original, which has always seemed to me a little empty in its pompous melody.” The reference here is to Ingelow's “Song for the Night of Christ's Resurrection,” which employs the rhyme-scheme Milton used in “The Hymn” of “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity” (1745) and thus clearly is meant to act as a nocturnal complement to the earlier, matutinal poem. Ruskin questions Ingelow's self-depreciation when she dubs her effort “A Humble Imitation” in her subtitle—a humility further accentuated by her use of line 68 of Milton's poem—“And birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed waves”³¹—as an epigraph for her pendant. Yet Ruskin's claim that her religious meditation is superior to her great predecessor's is slightly undermined by a sudden eruption of some unexpected nitpicking: “The fifth stanza of this is very glorious to me, in the imagination of it, but I think you should retouch the last line. It won't scan, as far as I can make it out, without laying full emphasis on the Gal in Galilean, and it seems to me, that syllable won't rightly bear leaning on.”³² Lest Ingelow assume that he is insensitive to all metrical irregularities, Ruskin quickly contrasts the offending line to one in which such license meets his unequivocal approval: “The last line of the eleventh stanza is a very perfect & sweet illegality: and ‘the oldest running river’ is delicious.”³³

Ingelow's long narrative poem “Laurance” furnishes Ruskin with an opportunity to praise her presumed understanding of male psychology. His appreciation of this rather sentimental account of a one-sided love affair seems to stem from his own hopeless infatuation with the young Rose Lucy La Touche (1849-1875), from whose hold on his imagination he had first tried to wean himself when he turned to the little girls at Winnington.³⁴ Like the ill Rose, Ingelow's heroine Muriel is sickly and morbid, perennially at the threshhold of death.³⁵ Yet the poem celebrates the steadfastness of her indulgent lover, the exemplary Laurance, who weathers her shifting moods and morbidity, as well as her initial preference of a rival suitor. As one who “knew / A woman's nature,” Laurance is held to be rare, but not unique: “Some men are such gentlemen!”³⁶

Ostensibly commenting on the poem in his letter of 2 July, Ruskin muses:

I never cease wondering—with a wonder which has always been with me—how women know the way men love. We don't know your way of loving—it is a mystery to us, which we accept but cannot imagine. But you can imagine ours. How is this? If you should care to send me a word, and you should care, I think, because I should value it—it would find me, if it rested in the post office of Keswick, Cumberland.

These remarks, made under the rubric “About Laurance,” suggest that more than a response to Ingelow's poem is involved. Since Muriel does not come to understand the way that she has been loved by Laurance until the very end of the poem, Ruskin's wonderment about the intuitiveness of “women” must stem from Ingelow's characterization of Laurance rather than be attributed to her self-involved heroine. Is Ruskin, therefore, trying to probe the possibility of finding in Ingelow someone who might understand and soothe his own anguished, Laurance-like, love for a younger woman? The request that Ingelow write him, “because I should value it,” is ambiguous. Is he valuing a response to his philosophical question about the female capacity for understanding male love? Or is he calling for any “word” from one who “should care” simply because he requires care? A reader of the letter thus is thrown back to its beginning. What “chance” occurrence “suddenly” required Ruskin to flee to the North for some “sea and mountain air”? Why will a letter now find him in a Wordsworthian retreat at Keswick? Subtly, slowly, under the guise of responding to the poems he has taken with him, the admirer and critic of Ingelow's “sweet” verses is turning into a needy patient who desires her therapeutic understanding.

Such a surmise is borne out by Ruskin's third 1867 letter of 21 December, in which his mental agitation seems to be conveyed by frenetic interpolations, a more than usual illegibility, and by the concluding reference to Ingelow's mother, already commented upon above. Ill health—mental or bodily—is immediately acknowledged in the opening paragraph: “I am very glad of your letter. I should have written long ago in answer to your last, but have had some bad passages of hours both for my cousin [“Joanie” Agnew, his caretaker] and myself.” Ingelow's apparent request that he help her “cater” to the poor is seized upon as a mission from which a torpid Ruskin can benefit as much as any indigent from the lower classes: “Out of which shadows nothing could be more helpful in partly awakening me than this proposed action of yours for the poor, and the pleasure of being allowed to help you in it—‘Catering’ is an art far above me—however—you would never let me do it again if I once tried. Perhaps I might yet learn.” Instead of “catering,” Ruskin therefore forwards a more than generous gift: “I enclose [a] cheque for £100 however and never had more pleasure in signing one.”

But Ruskin now wants Ingelow to become a sharer of all the twists and turns of his own mind. He has sent her some of his earlier works, and he feels that she must be apprised of his own preferences. Criticism of her poems thus gives way to an endless self-critique: “I am very glad that you do like those early books of mine; but I am quite certain you will eventually like Unto this Last better. The pretty language of the earlier books is worked up in a curious mingling of vanity with sincerity—an earnest desire to speak truth, weakened by a vain one, to say it gracefully.” This mixture (which is quite evident, by the way, in Ruskin's earlier two letters to Ingelow) is something he not only feels compelled to acknowledge to an interlocutor he regards as sincere yet unadorned, but also wishes to expunge in his future writings. Her own honesty and lack of vanity will, he contends, allow her “to detect the evidence of this taint: and also, these early books are in many respects ignorant and wrong—being talks of what I knew very little about—(religion, for instance).” But Ingelow, he hopes, will also absolve him of past errors upon reading Unto This Last, published in book form in 1862, before she and Ruskin became acquainted. For the “pure, far reaching mathematical veracity” of some of his phrases there “would have been beaten up in the seven lamps [i.e. the 1849 Seven Lamps of Architecture] into a bowlful of egg-flip & sugar.”

What has caused this outpouring of self-abasement and self-justification? Ruskin seems eager to remind Ingelow of her importance to his own mental stability. Not only her writings but her sympathetic capacities are important to him now, for she has apparently demonstrated, as he had hoped she would, an understanding of the private underpinnings of his books. A disquisition on his use of the word “grateful” in a preface presumably written even before their friendship could have started leads Ruskin to a convoluted reminder of her special value to him: “The word ‘grateful’ on that first page was written with some feeling of its unintelligibleness to mere takers up of the book—but more legitimately expresses the feeling [of indebtedness] I have, not to you only, but to all good & helpful writers by whose work I have been made more strong or happy: and it further has some reference which you only could—but I think very easily might—understand and accept—to the sympathy you gave me in our last conversation—with which this particular book is especially concerned.”

By reminding Ingelow of her past extension of “sympathy,” Ruskin implicitly asks her to retain the role of a lenient and forgiving mother-confessor. Her sheer presence is important to him. Whether she is there in person or is simply known to be there as a recipient of whatever self-probing he has jotted down for her instant perusal, he wants to be sure of her continued indulgence. His trust in her empathy is a therapeutic necessity, for she has shown herself to accept much that a more intolerant religious believer might brand as irreverent or even impious. Indeed, it is precisely because Ingelow can soften and relax the Evangelical theology she fully shares with her mother and his own that she increasingly becomes so important to his self-justifications. For Ruskin can speak to her as a fellow-Evangelical, however lapsed in his belief. He is, after all, rooted in the same typology and can fall back on a rhetoric that uses the same biblical cadences that Ingelow herself deploys in an Old Testamental poem such as A Story of Doom: “I like the better to be hopeless than to have a foolish hope—and better to know the worst—so that I may be able to act rationally, than to rejoice in pleasant ignorance and useless doings. It is much to be able to declare positively that one may live—saying of each day ‘Sufficient is the evil thereof—and the good’ and to take [of] out of one's Maker's hand the parched corn—if it is to be parched—and, like Ruth, eat, & be sufficed & leave.”

Although Ruskin's three letters of 1867 establish the postures he will retain in his subsequent correspondence with Ingelow, his later letters also introduce some important variations in his perception of their bond. Several of these later letters deserve special attention. The first, written from Verona on 11 June 1869, informs Ingelow that he has instructed “some of my girl pupils to whom I have been writing letters hastily” to copy them out “and send them to you.” If the Winnington girls have been pressed into service as secretaries, Ingelow's new role seems to be that of editor: “Please read them—and then tell me what occurs to you as wrong or doubtful in them: then I will write to you yourself about them; but it would be impossible in a single letter to put the subject at all clearly before you.” The egotism of this demand seems to be lost on Ruskin. Ingelow must cooperate in a social mission by helping Ruskin refine his public prose. “We must no longer confine ourselves to private efforts.” Accordingly, few private confidences now need to be exchanged: “I do all the drawing I can—and some not badly,” Ruskin allows. “But it is difficult to do any work—when < when > one has not a single happy moment of rest.” Ruskin ends with what amounts to a peremptory command, “Write to me after reading this letter. With sincere regards to your mother & brother. Ever affectionately yours.”

But Ruskin not only expects letters diligently copied by his little “girl pupils” to be perused by Jean Ingelow; he also wants the girls themselves—or at least those in whom his emotional investment remains the strongest—to pass the older woman's inspection. In another letter—undated, but, from internal evidence, written in either 1868 or 1869—Ruskin invites Ingelow to come and see some sketches “I've been making.”³⁷ Ostensibly, the dinner invitation extended to her brother and herself is being proffered to make amends for his last-minute inability to appear at her house: although he has “so much to say & to ask you about!,” a pair of public meetings prevents Ruskin from coming “for my chat with you.” But he asks Ingelow to consider, not one, but two visitors to take his place. Might his cousin Joan be allowed to visit Ingelow in order “to beg you, very hard—to come & see” the sketches he has made? Surely, given his pain for having to cancel the planned tête-à-tête, “you will not refuse to console me a little by seeing my cousin,” instead. His request turns into more genuine pleading, however, as soon as Ruskin asks Ingelow to let Joan introduce her to one of his young girlfriends:

I will even ask you also to allow her to bring with her, for a few minutes—my favourite schoolgirl—the ‘Dora’ of the Ethics of the dust, who will be made so very happy by seeing your face—for ever so little a while—that—(and with also the certainty I have that you will like her)—I've promised her that she shall not be left in the carriage as Joan goes in.

Ruskin here operates with a newfound confidence: he has already assured “Dora” that she can expect to be received because he knows that Ingelow would not turn down his request. Chaperoned by cousin Joan, “Dora” needs Ingelow's stamp of approval as much as the sketches he wants her to see, “because very few people look at them—as I think you would.” Since few people would also kindly look upon an elderly, avuncular lover of little girls, Ruskin's carefully chosen words about the sketches apply just as well to the approval he expects Ingelow to bestow on “Dora” and, by extension, to his emotional investment in adolescent girls: “very few people look at them—as I think you would—and it would encourage me. + I mean—look at them so as to see what I was trying for” (italics added).³⁸

That Ingelow continued to give Ruskin the emotional support he demanded can be gleaned from a third letter, written from Venice on 31 May 1870, in which he responds to one of hers, just received: “I am so very glad you are thinking of what I have been planning and that you care about it.” In her absence, he now implies, he can only do some perfunctory sketching but embark on no ambitious writing projects. She has become a Muse of sorts:

I am drawing—& what work I do must be in that—this is only to say—that for once I am sorry to be in Venice because I can't dine with you and to send you all my love—Joanna [i.e. Joan Agnew]—with a nice clergyman's wife for chaperone—has come with me—and keeps me from going wild with anger at things—& sends you her [rem] (what was I going to write!—you would have quarreled with me.)—her love, and I am ever faithfully & affectionately yours.

Joan the caretaker may screen him from anger, but he requires a conduit of female love to feel less alienated from the world.

By 1875, Ruskin at last returns to a consideration of Ingelow's own writings. But these, even more than before, are rummaged for his own needs as much as for the advice he might dispense to a fellow-writer. Ruskin seems eager to find in Ingelow's prose fictions for children a new antidote for his deepening bouts of depression. He does not allude to her novels for adults.³⁹ A cheerful optimism he now regards as “sacred” has become the object of his close inspection of stories which, given their first publication in 1865 and 1869, he could have easily read much earlier. Indeed, on 3 January 1875, Ruskin all but rebukes Ingelow for not having shared these stories with him “long ago.” The long letter, which begins with a response to her prose and ends with his acknowledgment of his pathological fear of an encroaching darkness, deserves to be fully cited:

Dear Miss Ingelow

Instead of thanking you for your book [Stories Told to A Child], now, I feel inclined to send you along a growl and snarl for not having sent it me long ago. Don't you know enough of me to feel how thankful I am to get hold of any pure and cheerful literature—not but that the tragedy of little Rie is as terrible as Lear—in its tiny way; but it is readable nevertheless for strength—and does not destroy, like misfortune dwelt on for its own sake—which is the guilt of weak writers. After all, Shakespeare's tragedies never last above ten minutes really (—I never thought of that before) as subjects of immediate contemplation. That's all digression—the gist of the book is its sacred cheerfulness—the gift of gifts to me.

Ruskin's analogy between King Lear and Ingelow's “Little Rie and the Rosebuds” is hardly as extravagant as it may appear, as soon as one grasps his rationale for comparing the two works. Like Cordelia, Little Rie is an innocent unjustly accused and banished by an elder autocrat. Since both female outcasts eventually perish (or, in the case of Little Rie, can be presumed to have died), their banishers must bitterly confront the perversity of their misjudgment and admit their own culpability. But Lear remains far more likeable than the cold and childless Victorian matriarch who allows a beautiful street urchin to enter her home only because “a child seems always to make a place cheerful.”⁴⁰ This rigid, self-righteous disciplinarian uses Rie as unemotionally as a beggarwoman who abandoned the child after posing as her biological mother; as Ingelow makes clear, the only figure capable of genuine nurturance is Sally, a servant whose attempts at intercession are as futile as those of Kent. To “escape the anger of the mistress she scarcely knew,”⁴¹ the guilt-ridden Rie runs away from the one figure who could have protected her from beggary, wretchedness, and an early death. Yet, in a final turn, Ingelow's narrator demands forgiveness even for this harsh Pharisee: “in this world of uncertain knowledge and concealed motives, how few of us are not equally at fault!”⁴²

Ruskin obviously takes comfort from the narrator's tolerant voice. His interest in this particular tale has much to do with his own conflicting relation to Margaret Ruskin, who had died less than four years before, at the age of ninety. As a son who had accused his parents of having made him too effeminate, as a writer who had created an abused, feminized boy in his own children's story, The King of the Golden River, and as an avuncular figure who had come to see himself as guardian of little “Florries,” “Isabels,” and “Doras,”⁴³ Ruskin could fully identify himself with the plight of Little Rie and yet welcome the absolution given to a harsh mother figure by a compassionate writer who seems willing to extend a quasi-maternal solicitude to young and old transgressors of both sexes. Although “in its tiny way” the story struck him as being as heart-wrenching as King Lear, he also found its tone strangely fortifying.

Having come to terms with this potentially disturbing tale, Ruskin now turns to the volume as a whole. Shedding the point of view of a child-reader, he assumes a stance that befits his self-appointed role as patron/adviser to the writer he considers likeliest to produce the ideal Victorian children's book. His specifications for such a book need to be spelled out to Ingelow:

—You should insist on a strongly bound edition, with good illustrations. Your present plates, are—(and I can't think how you have managed to get them so)—quite free from the pollutions and monstrosities of modern art. But there's only one really good one—Deborah,⁴⁴—the others are all more or less stupid—The man who did Deborah should be able to give you choice of many designs—you [ought] to go to any expense, and even to give up all chance of profit—to get one perfect and classical Child's Book given to England.

A third tale in the volume, “Two Ways of Telling A Story,” at last offers Ruskin an opportunity to veer away from Ingelow's book to his own personal anxieties. In Ingelow's story, a young sailor boy who wanders on a lonely road is in danger of being waylaid by a murderer. But the expected melodrama never unfolds and the boy reaches his destination without ever knowing how close he had been to losing his life. He has “no adventures to tell” his parents: “No, papa, nothing happened; nothing particular, I mean.” Ingelow's narrator again steps in to round out the tale: her characters, she notes, “did not know, any more than we do, of the dangers that hourly beset us.”⁴⁵ And since no “human art or foresight can prevent” such dangers, we should reflect on the workings of an omniscient and “loving” Providence.⁴⁶

Ruskin appreciates the cleverness of Ingelow's ability to mislead the reader into believing that she is writing a spicy piece of sensation fiction that turns out to be utterly devoid of all melodrama. But he also rebels against the “pretty providential theories” on which Ingelow relies for her story's quietistic closure:

For a bit regular—high-flavoured—well capricumed[?] curry in the way of excitement—I think that the two ways of telling a story may stand with anything—but its like munching a nasturtium seed instead of dining on stinking meat minced with garlic, compared to the general modern stories of that kind.

I wish any of your pretty providential theories would account for Fog.—Thunderstorms—etc.—etc.—is all very fine.

But, it's half past 8—of a Spring morning, and I can't see to write. And it's not smoke. But God's own sky—turned Black. Is it chastisement of England?—I don't believe England cares—and poor I do.

Literally, nothing in my life of evil has ever so much crushed and paralyzed me in all moral thought and hope as the sky-darkness of the last five years.

Ever affectionately yours, JRuskin

In the compass of this single letter, Ruskin has moved far away from the “sacred cheerfulness” he welcomed in Ingelow's book. Instead, he now wallows in the apocalyptic gloom he would eventually try to translate in his 1884 The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, where a meteorological darkening comes to signify a moral plague enveloping all of England.

In a letter written on “Easterday, 75,” Ruskin goes to Ingelow's fantasy-novel for children, Mopsa the Fairy (1869), to portray himself as Jack, the boy who relies on the friendly albatross Jenny to escape his immurement within the trunk of an old thorn tree. Caught in his own “dark dungeon in the tree hollow,” Ruskin welcomes Ingelow as his personal rescuer, “my albatross—Jean—instead of Jenny.” But he then repudiates Ingelow's shift from the didactic mode he values to a work of pure fantasy:

Not that I like that story as well as the stories to children because all good wonder-letting depends on some degree of childish belief in the reality of it—and you don't believe your own story. And there's too much in it—you might make it lovely, and give a lesson to storytellers by simplifying and rewriting it.

To a modern reader, it may seem curious that Ruskin should want Ingelow to curb the extraordinary inventiveness of Mopsa the Fairy, a fantasy that has been praised for its “subversive texture” and its reliance on “surprises and unexplained ellipses.”⁴⁷ For Ruskin, however, it is far more important that Ingelow enunciate simpler, affirmative credos for the edification of “men's souls—and children's alike.” In this, Ruskin implies, she might actually follow the example of “your cheerful-eyed mother” to whom he pointedly sends his “faithful regards.” (Mrs. Ingelow was to die in 1876, a year later.)

Ruskin's last two letters to Ingelow at Firestone Library continue to treat her as an indispensable supporter of writing projects undermined by his periodic bouts of depression. Thus, on 30 September 1878, after complaining about an “inflammation of the brain” that has crippled him “for two months,” he confides that “some day soon,” after finishing the first volume of his Proserpina (1875-1886), he plans to embark on a new project. It will take the shape of “a sort of circular letter to my friends,” among whom she remains as prominent as ever: “Please remember that I hold you for one of the wisest, no less than one of the dearest I know—and all the nice bits in the letter will belong to you (and perhaps a little roundtable full of others, like you) and that all the nasty bits are for other people.”⁴⁸ Direct personal contact with her, however, has again become an impossibility: “I'm afraid however you won't think it a nice bit, when I say that I must not hope to come to London this year—or see you in your new home” (to which Ingelow had moved after her mother's death).

By 30 March 1882, when he next writes to Ingelow, an invigorated Ruskin is well on his way towards becoming a full-fledged patron to a new generation of female artists. The sympathy, purity, and simplicity he had once welcomed in Ingelow's art can now be retrieved in the fresher handiwork of a younger woman, the American Francesca Alexander, on whose graphic art the excited Ruskin has already lectured at Oxford and will again lecture at a private Kensington gathering attended by James Russell Lowell, Matthew Arnold, Sir Frederick Leighton, and the ever-loyal Jean Ingelow.⁴⁹ His similar “discovery” of Kate Greenaway, whose work he will promote, is imminent.

Although Ruskin at last addresses Ingelow by her Christian name, his 1882 letter cannot offset the fact that he no longer regards her as the quintessential female artist. He alludes to a letter in which she has mentioned having felt a resurgence of her former energies in her most recent work (perhaps Don John: A Story). But his obvious lack of interest in her surge of creativity and his tactless exaltation of his latest favorite only accentuate his disregard for the ups and downs of the older woman's thirty-year career. Ruskin has, after all, personally taken over the budding career of Francesca Alexander. He is about to publish her sentimental The Story of Ida at his own expense and has supplied a lavish Preface in which he stresses the unity of Faith and joy of Love that he finds in “the story of a Catholic girl written by a Protestant one.”⁵⁰ He is convinced that Ingelow will be as fascinated as he is by Ida and hence be fully entranced by what he said at Oxford about the “womanly power” of both Ida and her modern interpreter:

My dear Jean,

I'm sure you ought to know that a letter from you is always strength to me, whether I am at work or play, and I cannot tell you how glad I am that you are feeling your own power more in what you are now doing.

Won't you write again and tell me what it is.

I send you the first rough proof of what I said at Oxford—the piece of solemn recantation about womanly power is—much more serious than it seems. I have called it solemn rather with reference to my own meaning than to the words used: and I mean to keep the expression in these lectures, as far as may be, quiet and conversational throughout. The discovery of the two girls [i.e. Ida and Francesca] has been of great import to me in many ways—you shall have the first proof of the American's “Story of Ida” that I get clear.

It is really a spring day at last and our daffodils are opening—we have only lost the month—not the young flowers. But that feeling of “what a waste” is the [cruelest?] of all with me, and a constant one.

The sixty-three old man who addresses a fellow-sexagenarian expects her to understand his regret for energies misspent and hopes unfulfilled. But, as he makes amply clear, he is also buoyed by the “womanly power” now supplied to him by others than herself. Ruskin's 1882 letter thus provides a fitting closure for a correspondence that, despite its permutations, always calls attention to the self-centeredness of his own position. That self-centeredness, it is true, is obviously accentuated by the absence of Ingelow's letters to him. And yet, somehow, given the passive and reactive role into which he places her, the silencing of her voice seems sadly appropriate.

Given the benefits Ruskin derived from the motherly understanding he again and again solicits from Ingelow, he never seems quite as dictatorial or controlling as he was when dealing with younger women who, like Alexander and Greenaway, were still at the threshhold of their careers. His capacity for cruelty—exhibited, for example, towards Annie Howitt in 1850⁵¹—is hardly ever in evidence in his often obsequious letters to Ingelow. Nor did she require his endorsement of her work in the way that, say, Charlotte Brontë was aided by George Henry Lewes's promotion of her work or Elizabeth Gaskell was aided by writing for Charles Dickens's Household Words. Since her reputation as a poet had been fully established when she came to Ruskin's notice, her situation was closer to that of Elizabeth Barrett, long regarded as a major poet before she became Elizabeth Browning. When the widowed Robert Browning became personally acquainted with Jean Ingelow, the possibility of a second union of poets was briefly entertained by the Victorian public. But a creative partnership such as the Brownings had enjoyed (or that of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes) could never have been an option for John Ruskin and Jean Ingelow. His egotism and her habitual self-effacement found a more suitable outlet in the kind of relationship both chose to maintain.

Nonetheless, Ingelow, whose reticence and shyness were noted by all those who knew her, must also have found considerable satisfaction in a relationship that a Charlotte Brontë or even a George Eliot would undoubtedly have rejected. Despite Ruskin's demands on her, Ingelow could maintain the self-sufficiency she valued. And, having nurtured her younger brothers, she found it quite easy to extend her sympathy to an often childish and petulant genius who had given her sufficient proof of sincerely appreciating her own work. Their many visits to each other's homes suggest earnest exchanges of ideas and confidences that were probably as satisfying to Ingelow as to Ruskin. The couple could be seen together in public, moreover, and be regarded as close friends without any taint of sexual impropriety. And even though Ruskin never promoted Ingelow's work as energetically as that of Francesca Alexander or Kate Greenaway, his many allusions to her writings in his pronouncements on art and life must have gratified the genuinely modest author whose posthumous neglect owes much to her own lifelong self-obscurings.

Above all, however, the Ruskin-Ingelow correspondence, suggests an interaction that significantly differs from other instances of male Victorian patronage in its avoidance of a juggling for power. For, as Ruskin's letters show, and as Ingelow's missing side of the correspondence would undoubtedly confirm, there is an avoidance of power-conflicts that one would find embedded in other such relations. Competitiveness can be avoided in a relation that is free from the erotics that mark the hold that Ruskin's younger protégées have on his imagination and that enter imbalanced relations of writers such as Percy and Mary Shelley or even the much better-balanced unions between the Brownings or the Leweses. Ruskin and Ingelow can also proceed without having to worry about the intrusion of professional conflicts. Although, as writers, both are invested in childhood and the education of the young, they work in altogether different arenas and excel in very different genres and literary modes. Although Ruskin's political influence, his Oxford connections, and his financial power greatly exceed Ingelow's more limited sphere of influence, the man who struts within the public world of “Kings' Treasuries” is also highly dependent on the less mobile, private woman who sits in her “Queen's Garden” in Kensington. In this sense, the Ruskin-Ingelow correspondence suggests that his ascription of power to the powerless in “Of Queens' Gardens” may not be as far-fetched a paradox as Kate Millett assumed. For the paradox is as much rooted in reality as in Jean Ingelow's own fantastic account of a magically potent yet powerless queen in her Mopsa the Fairy. Unduly forgotten in our own century, Ingelow accepts what her more famous contemporary George Eliot sadly notes at the end of Middlemarch, namely, the incalculable and diffusive influence of women who may rest—and choose to rest—in unvisited tombs.

Notes

1. Christina Rossetti to Dora Greenwell, 31 December 1863, and to Alexander Macmillan, 1 December 1863, in The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters, ed. Lona Mosk Packer (London: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 22n, 21.

2. Anon., Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow (London: Wells Gardner, Darton, & Co., 1901). Although Maureen Peters was able to draw on some unpublished family papers for her Jean Ingelow: Victorian Poetess (Ipswich: Boydell Press, 1972), her well-intentioned biography is riddled by factual and typographical errors and marred by an insufficient command of the Victorian literary world.

3. For the best discussion of this curious book, see Frederick Kirchhoff, “A Science Against Sciences: Ruskin's Floral Mythology,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 246-258.

4. Proserpina (1875-1886) in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903-1912), vol. 25, p. 260.

5. Ruskin, Proserpina, p. 260.

6. Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow, pp. 128-129; the interspliced passages from Ruskin occur in Proserpina, pp. 260-261.

7. Proserpina, p. 261; Ruskin's italics.

8. Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow, p. 129.

9. The author of Some Recollections passes no judgment on the severe prohibitions placed on Jean Ingelow's “poetic leaning” by her parents, yet she rightly wonders about the origins of a talent strong enough to flourish under such utterly inhospitable circumstances: “where Jean got her poetic temperament it would be hard to say. Not from her witty, business-like father, and certainly not from her mother, who, though truly delighted to wake up one day to find her eldest child famous, had no really poetic tendencies herself” (pp. 15, 134).

10. Some Recollections, p. 130.

11. Sesame and Lilies (1865) in The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 18, p. 112.

12. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, p. 113.

13. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, pp. 115-116.

14. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1970), p. 90. Millett notes Ruskin's acerbic tone when turning to the “question” of “the ‘rights’ of women,” and rightly remarks the even harsher tone he adopts in the 1870 preface to Sesame and Lilies (p. 90n).

15. Millett, Sexual Politics, p. 89.

16. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, p. 140.

17. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, pp. 142-143.

18. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, p. 106.

19. “Preface to the First Edition,” The Ethics of the Dust, in Works, vol. 18, p. 201.

20. Ruskin, The Ethics of the Dust, p. 209.

21. See The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin's Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall, ed. Van Akin Burd (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969).

22. The Ethics of the Dust, p. 211. The Old Lecturer quickly exploits Isabel's desire for truth-telling and “real things” by pointing out that the Arabian Nights, which she and Florrie have just been reading, is as much about things “that really are” as anything that is visible. Although the Old Lecturer chooses to attribute the Arabian Nights to “the man who wrote” them, the tales now believed to be actually composed by an anonymous female author are, of course, told by a female story-teller, as Ruskin well knows.

23. Ingelow almost made it into the expanded version of Sesame and Lilies: the manuscript for “The Mystery of Life and Its Arts,” an 1868 lecture that Ruskin incorporated into later editions of his book, contains an allusion to “Miss Ingelow's ballad of Winstanley,” a poem about the death of Henry Winstanley (1644-1703), who perished in the storm that razed the lighthouse he had built (Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 185n).

24. Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Works, vol. 29, p. 184.

25. See the excerpts reproduced in Ruskin, Praeterita, Works, vol. 35, p. lvi.

26. John Ruskin Correspondence (Co196), folder 4, Manuscripts Division, Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries. All future references to manuscript letters in the text appertain to this folder.

27. As an over-protected only child, Ruskin was unusually dependent on both John James Ruskin (1785-1864) and Margaret Cock Ruskin (1781-1871). He was already involved with the girls at Winnington when his father died on 3 March 1864—nine months before his son, still dressed in mourning, gave the lectures on “King's Treasuries” and “Queen's Gardens,” which certainly might be read as reworkings of his relation to the “king” and “queen” who had so absolutely presided over his emotional and intellectual life. Although Ingelow introduced Ruskin to her own mother, there seems to be no evidence that she was herself introduced to the octogenarian Margaret Ruskin, who always “reserved to herself full liberty to criticise and contradict her son” in public, even to the extent of saying, “John, you are talking great nonsense” (Works, vol. 19, p. xxxvii).

28. Like the author of Some Recollections, Maureen Peters in her Jean Ingelow recounts the anecdote about Mrs. Ingelow's “irritation” over her young daughter's “scribbling verses when she might make herself more useful”; after locking up all writing paper, the mother found her child “secretly” writing on wood behind the window shutters of her bedroom (p. 26).

29. “The Lady of Shalott,” line 31. As deeply rooted in Lincolnshire as Ingelow, Alfred Tennyson admired her poetry long before Ruskin did so: he was quick to respond to her early, less popular A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings (1850).

30. The line is taken from Ingelow's “Sea-Mews in Winter Time,” a poem in the section called “Songs on the Voices of Birds” in A Story of Doom, and Other Poems: “The phantoms of the deep at play! / What idless graced the twittering things; / Luxurious paddlings in the spray, / And delicate lifting up of wings” (lines 24-28), Poems by Jean Ingelow (Oxford University Press: London, 1921), p. 187. Future reference to Ingelow's verses are to this edition.

31. Milton's line actually reads: “While birds of calm sit on the charmed wave.”

32. Ruskin is referring to: “Why dost Thou trouble me, / To bring me up, dead King, that keeps't Thy crown? / Yet for all courtiers hast but ten / Lowly, unlettered, Galilean fishermen” (lines 37-40), Poems, p. 294.

33. Like the irregular line that ends stanza five, this one, which ends stanza eight, has thirteen, rather than twelve syllables: “His desert princess, being reproved, her laugh denied” (line 88; Poems, p. 295). Is it pure coincidence that the reference should be to a barren Sarah who is “being reproved” for daring to question the authority of the angels who prophesy her impending maternity? The phrase, “the oldest running river,” also occurs at the end of a stanza (line 144, p. 296).

34. See Van Akin Burd, “Introduction,” The Winnington Letters, p. 81.

35. She thus also resembles the central character in George MacDonald's Adela Cathcart (1864), written around the time that Ruskin confided his love for Rose to his friend and asked MacDonald to allow the pair to meet surreptitiously at his home.

36. “Laurance,” lines 992-993, 995; Poems, pp. 213-214.

37. The sketches he made at Abbeville were prepared for Ruskin's 1869 piece on “The Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme.”

38. Ingelow's apparent willingness to “encourage” Ruskin in such needs was documented by a Victorian lady who observed him “at a garden party at Miss Ingelow's at Kensington upon a lovely warm summer afternoon in 1875 or 1876.” After she had made sure to have Ruskin surrounded by admiring guests whom he harangued for nearly an hour, “Miss Ingelow came up, accompanied by a very pretty girl, beautifully dressed in an elegant toilette of pink silk and white lace. She was introduced as a great admirer of Mr. Ruskin, who was most anxious for an interview. … Mr. Ruskin at once turned to the young lady with a smiling, devoted manner. I was greatly amused and interested to see the gifted and eloquent speaker plunge at once into the inanities of compliment and personal chit-chat. A little gossamer handkerchief slipped from the pretty small hand. Instantly, Mr. Ruskin stooped to pick it up, and presented it with a compliment and adoring look worthy of a love-sick swain of twenty. It was curious.” The excerpt, from W. Robertson Nicoll, is quoted in “Anecdotia, Etc.,” Works, vol. 34, pp. 720-721.

39. The absence of any references to her fictions for adults, from the religious novel Allerton and Dreux; or, The War of Opinion (1851) to later works such as Off the Skelligs (1872), seems inconclusive, but may suggest that he regarded such works as less “pure” than those intended for children.

40. Jean Ingelow, Stories Told to A Child (London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., 1890), p. 38.

41. Ingelow, Stories, p. 46.

42. Ingelow, Stories, p. 48.

43. For a fuller discussion, see my “Resisting Growth through Fairy Tale in Ruskin's The King of the Golden River,” Children's Literature 13 (1985), pp. 3-30.

44. Ruskin is referring to an illustration for the story of “Deborah's Book,” in which a “rough, red-cheeked young” servant lends her own copy of Pilgrim's Progress to a girl called Rosamond (Stories Told to A Child, p. 145).

45. Ingelow, Stories, p. 59.

46. Ingelow, Stories, p. 60.

47. Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds., Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 211.

48. The projected work here seems to be Arrows of the Chace (1880), the collection of letters, old and new, that did much to reinstate Ruskin as a major polemicist in the eyes of the Victorian reading public.

49. See Works, vol. 32, p. xxiii.

50. “Preface,” The Story of Ida, Works, vol. 32, p. 7.

51. When Annie Howitt sent Ruskin a large oil-painting she had made of Queen Boadicea, his reply “struck the death blow” to her artistic aspirations: “she read out—almost screamed the words, ‘What do you know about Boadicea? Leave such subjects alone and paint me a pheasant's wing.’” (Amice Lee, Laurels & Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt [London: Oxford University Press, 1955], p. 217.)