Lot 49
RUSKIN (JOHN) Three letters signed ("J Ruskin"), to his mother Margaret ("My dearest Mother"), one incomplete, eulogising his girl-friend Lily Armstrong ("Lily, my Lily of the Ethics of the dust"), Winnington Hall and Dublin, 12 and 16 October [1864] and [18 May 1868]
14 June 2017, 13:00 BST
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £1,125 inc. premium
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RUSKIN (JOHN)
Three letters signed ("J Ruskin"), to his mother Margaret ("My dearest Mother"), one incomplete, eulogising his girl-friend Lily Armstrong ("Lily, my Lily of the Ethics of the dust"), whom he compares to his beloved Rose La Touche: in the first describing her as "a very lovely sight just now" ("...she is so exactly what a girl ought to be – not a bit of showiness or display in her dress or ways... She has been growing fast taller, but her face remains small – so that proportion is far more beautiful than it was..."), in the last, written nearly four years later, praising the now grown-up girl ("...Lily, my Lily of the Ethics of the dust, is therefore lady of the house, for her mother leaves nearly everything to her. She is not quite eighteen – perfectly simple, gentle, and resolute – the nurse and firm governess of the younger children – and the most beautiful creature in face and form I ever saw anywhere – but she has none of Rosie's genius, or wild spiritual nature. For a perfect woman, I never saw Lily's like: with her dark-eyed delicate head and white shoulders and long satin dress, at a full dress party on Saturday she was like a princess of the Arabian nights..."), 8 pages, the first two on black-edged mourning paper (for his father), the last lacking its first gathering, light dust-staining, etc., 8vo, Winnington Hall and Dublin, 12 and 16 October [1864] and [18 May 1868]
Footnotes
'LILY, MY LILY OF THE ETHICS OF THE DUST' - Ruskin to a favourite girl pupil at Winnington School, one of those who inspired his Ethics of the Dust published in 1865: 'It is safe to say that The Ethics of the Dust could not have been written without the inspiration provided by Winnington. The book stands as both a unique and richly allegorical example of Ruskin's teaching as well as a memorial of a happy time. Ruskin's visits to Winnington and the relationships he developed with the girls helped him through a difficult period of his life, marred by his ongoing struggle with Rose La Touche... At the same time, the spectre of his failed marriage to Effie Gray loomed, and he had begun to realize that he would never escape "the net that he had woven for himself in his marriage"... He looked back on his time at Winnington wistfully, as at a lost golden age' (Sarah Atwood, Ruskin's Educational Ideas, 2012, p.25). These letters, the last already incomplete, are published in The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin's Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall, edited by Van Akin Burd, 1969.
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