Abstract
This chapter considers John Ruskin’s (1819–1900) view of stone as a material that reflects a divine presence and order. Armetta reveals how Ruskin’s musing upon the Gothic cathedral in The Stones of Venice is a worshipper’s surest means of encountering God, as it points the way towards heaven. His discussion of stones, and the labour of shaping them, can be found in other writings by Ruskin as an extended appreciation of earthy materials, including earth itself: that is to say, dirt, and work that is dirty. Using English paintings from the 1850s and 1860s, and extracts from Victorian literature, Armetta engages with critical and philosophical writings by Ruskin, and twenty-first century critical readings of Ruskin and his contemporaries. She argues that the radical value for dirtiness, so contrary to the Victorian ideal of cleanliness, becomes for Ruskin an insistence on the transforming power of God at work in His creation.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted in Alastair Grieve, ‘Ruskin and Millais at Glenfinlas’, The Burlington Magazine 138:1117 (Apr. 1996), p. 228.
- 2.
Marikka Trotter, ‘Ruskin’s Rocks’, Architectural Association Files, 73 (2016), p. 138.
- 3.
Grieve, ‘Ruskin and Millais’ (1996), p. 228.
- 4.
John Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), Vol. 35, p. 296. All other references are to the Library Edition and are given by volume and page number in the text, for example (xv.149).
- 5.
See, for example, C. Stephen Finley, Nature’s Covenant: Figures of Landscape in Ruskin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Michael Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Andrew Tate, ‘“Sweeter Also Than Honey”: John Ruskin and the Psalms’, The Yearbook of English Studies 39:1/2, Literature and Religion (2009), pp. 114–125.
- 6.
George P. Landow gives an excellent description of Ruskin’s grappling with contemporary geological discoveries that seemed to cast doubt on the biblical narrative of the flood in George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 265–292. See also Clive Wilmer, ‘“No Such Thing As A Flower, No Such Thing As A Man”: John Ruskin’s Response to Darwin’, in Valerie Purton, ed., Darwin, Tennyson, and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science (London: Anthem Press, 2013), pp. 100–101; and Jonathan Jones, ‘“John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing” Review—Oddball or Visionary?’ The Guardian, 24 January 2019, http://theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jan/24/john-ruskin-the-power-of-seeing-review-critic-social-reformer-two-temple-place, accessed March 2022. Each of these mentions Ruskin’s famously despairing comment that he could ‘hear the clink’ of the geologists’ hammers ‘at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses’ (quoted in Wilmer).
- 7.
“Engraving of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’”, The Elements of Drawing: John Ruskin’s Teaching Collection at Oxford, Ashmolean Museum (2013), http://ruskin.ashmolean.org/object/WA.RS.STD.011, accessed May 2022.
- 8.
This point of Ruskin’s stands in startlingly direct contrast to a statement by the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Ruskin, disapproving of Whistler’s work in an exhibition, had written dismissively of Whistler’s ‘cockney impudence’ in asking ‘two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint into the public’s face’. In response, Whistler brought a suit of libel against Ruskin, and, during the trial, stated, ‘For me a picture is a problem to solve, and I use any incident or object in nature to bring about a symmetrical result’. This idea of the ‘use’ of nature as a symmetrical element is surely part of what so infuriated Ruskin that he felt justified in defaming the younger painter. Quoted in Robert Aitken, ‘Whistler v. Ruskin’, Litigation 27:2, MILLENNIUM (Winter 2001), pp. 65–66.
- 9.
‘But, above all, in our dealings with the souls of other men, we are to take care […to] prize and honour them in their imperfection [.]… And this is what we have to do with all our labourers; to look for the thoughtful part of them’ (ix.191) (emphasis added). Significantly, this point is comparable to Ruskin’s argument regarding the process of viewing something in nature that might seem uninteresting: ‘Now this power of enjoyment [in looking at a twig] is worth working for, not merely for enjoyment, but because it renders you less imperfect as one of God’s creatures—more what He would have you…’ (emphasis added). Letter to Edward Clayton, 1841, quoted in ‘Natural Fragments’, The Elements of Drawing: John Ruskin’s Teaching Collection at Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, http://ruskin.ashmolean.org/collection/9006/9037/9358, accessed May 2022.
- 10.
The point here regarding Victorian attitudes towards work, and parts of the discussions of paintings of workers that appear below, were first raised in an article of mine on the novelist Anthony Trollope, ‘Dirty Work: Trollope and the Labour of the Artist’, Victorian Network 6:2 (Winter 2015), pp. 7–28, and are included here with kind permission of the magazine.
- 11.
T. J. Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (Hartford, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 27.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 28.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
See Kirsten Leng, review of Soap and Water: Cleanliness, Dirt and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, by Victoria Kelley in Gender & History 23 (July 2011), pp. 462–463; Victoria Kelley, ‘“The Virtues of a Drop of Cleansing Water”: Domestic Work and Cleanliness in the British Working Classes, 1880–1914’, Women’s History Review 18:5 (November 2009), pp. 719–735; Stephen Halliday, The Great Filth: Disease, Death and the Victorian City (New York: The History Press, 2011); Laura Foster, ‘Dirt, Dust, and Devilment: Uncovering Filth in the Workhouse and Casual Wards’, Victorian Network 6:2 (Winter 2015), pp. 29–58; Christopher Herbert, ‘Filthy Lucre: Victorian Ideas of Money’, Victorian Studies (Winter 2002), pp. 185–213; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Natalka Freeland, ‘The Politics of Dirt in Mary Barton and Ruth’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 42:4 (The Nineteenth Century, Autumn 2002), pp. 799–818.
- 15.
Nigel Rees, Brewer’s Famous Quotations (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009), p. 489.
- 16.
Foster, ‘Dirt, Dust, and Devilment’ (2015), p. 30.
- 17.
Freeland, ‘The Politics of Dirt…’ (2002), p. 804.
- 18.
Dick Sullivan, ‘In Brief’, Navvyman, Victorian Web, http://victorianweb.org/victorian/history/work/sullivan/2.html, accessed May 2022.
- 19.
Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 60.
- 20.
See for example Peter Hounsell, London’s Rubbish: Two Centuries of Dirt, Dust and Disease in the Metropolis (Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2013); and for a literary evocation of the dirt a crossing sweep might live in, consider Charles Dickens’ description in Bleak House (1853) of the young orphaned sweep Jo, who was ‘very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged’, and lived in a ‘black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people […] among the mud and wheels […] passing deftly, with his bare feet, over the hard stones, and through the mud and mire’ (London: Penguin Books, 1996), pp. 176, 256–257.
- 21.
According to the Museum of London’s collections entry for this painting, Frith made these comments in his autobiography. See ‘The Crossing Sweeper’, Museum of London, http://collections.museumoflondon.org.uk/online/object/726177.html, accessed May 2022.
- 22.
See for example George P. Landow, ‘The Crossing-Sweeper Nuisance’, Victorian Web, http://victorianweb.org/victorian/periodicals/punch/17.html, accessed March 2022.
- 23.
In fact, Frith began as a popular genre painter but, as a young artist at the Royal Academy, became dissatisfied with its general conservatism and the rigidity of its sanctioned themes and subjects; he helped form a rebellious group called ‘The Clique’, and set out to paint what he called ‘modern life’ (emphasis added), as opposed to more ‘elevated’ subjects. See Graham Reynolds, Victorian Painting (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 29.
- 24.
Such darkening is a common occurrence with older paintings; for a detailed technical description of how it takes place, see Segal, Sam, and Klara Alen, Dutch and Flemish Flower Pieces: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints Up to the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1, trans. Judith Deitch (Boston: Brill, 2020), p. 90. And for information on other versions of this particular Frith image, see, for example, an engraved copy of the painting by Charles William Sharpe, created in 1864, that is faithful to each of Frith’s details except that there is no stain, but rather a shadow under the boy’s bow, on his white shirt (‘The Crossing Sweeper’, The British Museum, http://britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1872-1012-6172, accessed March 2022); similarly, later versions by Frith (after the painting proved popular and he decided to copy and update it, even as late as 1893) also present the boy’s shirt as purely white—see ‘Art in the Christian Tradition: Crossing Sweeper’, Jean and Alexander Heard Divinity Library, https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu//act-imagelink.pl?RC=55350, accessed May 2022.
- 25.
Quoted in Dianne Sachko Macleod, ‘Private and Public Patronage in Victorian Newcastle’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 52 (1989), p. 190.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 191.
- 27.
This painting does show sketching underneath the paint surface that leaves some areas unclear (a chain and gear, e.g. are visible through the apron of the man second from left), but the painter’s effort to essentially ‘wash’ the men is certainly clear. Significantly, though Ruskin and Bell Scott were well acquainted with each other, an anonymous reviewer of Bell Scott’s autobiography, while commenting that Bell Scott was ‘a much less able artist than several of his eminent friends confirmed’, describes how Ruskin once slighted Bell Scott, at the presentation a large cycle of paintings that included the oil version of Iron and Coal; Bell Scott did not forget it, complaining later that ‘He [Ruskin] took no notice of me’. Quoted in The Academy and Literature, Vol. 42. London: Alexander & Shepheard, 1892, p. 500.
- 28.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. 1861. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 97–98.
- 29.
Philip Priestly, Victorian Prison Lives: English Prison Biography, 1830–1914 (New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 133–134.
- 30.
Gabriel P. Weisberg, Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), pp. 9–23. In fact, about a year after Wallis’ painting appeared, Ruskin noted another image of a stonebreaker, by the painter John Brett, that more closely followed the expected vision of worthy labour, showing a spotless, pink-cheeked child, about 10 years old, holding a hammer atop a pile of stones. Evidently, Ruskin liked the painting’s geological and botanical accuracy, but he did not comment on its prettiness, and it is clearly in a very fundamental sense ‘unnatural’, given its utter lack of dust or dirt. See Christopher Newall, ‘John Brett: the Pre-Raphaelite Years’, in David Cordingly, et al., John Brett: A Pre-Raphaelite on the Shores of Wales (Cardiff: National Museum Wales, 2001), pp. 18–19.
- 31.
The Athenaeum: London, British Periodicals Ltd., no. 1592 (May 1, 1858), p. 567.
- 32.
Quoted in Mike Hickox, ‘The Stonebreaker by Henry Wallis’, Victorian Web, http://victorianweb.org/painting/wallis/paintings/hickox3.html, accessed May 2022.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Caroline Levine, ‘Visual Labor: Ruskin’s Radical Realism’, Victorian Literature and Culture Vol. 28, No. 1 (2000), pp. 73–86.
- 35.
Clive Wilmer, ‘“No Such Thing As A Flower…”: John Ruskin’s Response to Darwin’, in Purton (2013), pp. 100–101.
- 36.
See Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, pp. 265–292.
- 37.
Significantly, within a few pages of this biblical echo Ruskin returns to the theme of work, connecting the Maker and the made by remarking that ‘[Man] is himself precisely the most wonderful piece of God’s workmanship extant’ (vii.199–203).
- 38.
‘Ruskin’s Dust’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Spring 2016), p. 472. http://jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.58.3.03, accessed May 2022.
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Armetta, F. (2023). Earth and Heaven: Ruskin on Dirt, Work, and Beauty. In: Beaumont, S., Thiele, M.E. (eds) John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Religious Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21554-4_2
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