Learning to Write
In a
1903 essay,
“Ruskinʼs Hand”,
W. G. Collingwood claims that, in childhood,
Ruskin
“developed his own writing like other precocious boys and girls, though there is some trace of teaching at the very start”;
and then later, “after
1830, he exchanged, perhaps at the instance of superior orders, his ‘print’
for copperplate”, imitating his
fatherʼs mercantile round hand with the aid of a copybook
(
“Ruskinʼs Hand”, Good Words, 652;
reprinted in
Collingwood, Ruskin Relics, 141).
Seemingly the most untenable assumption in
Collingwoodʼs account is the exclusion of
Ruskinʼs mother from any role in his developing handwriting,
by limiting the story to the boyʼs precocity and his fatherʼs masculine mercantile discipline.
Who else but
Margaret Ruskin presided over the scenes of
Ruskinʼs first handwriting
during
John Jamesʼs frequent absences on business trips? (See
Ruskinʼs Cursive Hand.)
Yet, in the family letters,
Margaret does tend to absent herself from reports of
Ruskinʼs progress in handwriting, as if he simply performed these feats unaided, like
a creature in nature starting to use its limbs. On
15 March 1823, when
Margaret transcribed “exactly word for word” what
the four year old “said was a letter to send to” his father and “pretended to read” for his motherʼs dictation “from his paper” on which he had “been very busy
scrawling with a pencil”—
Ruskinʼs “first letter”, as it has been called—
Margaret remarked “he is beginning to copy from his books
and will soon learn himself to write I think” (
Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 128; and see
Hanson, “Materiality in John Ruskinʼs Early Letters and Dialogues”, 5–7). While it seems unlikely that
Margaret provided
John with no direction whatever
when “learn[ing] himself to write”, evidence of his “copy[ing] from his books” as a possible auto‐didactic practice
does survive in his copy of
The History of Little Jack by
Thomas Day
(
Books Used by Ruskin in His Youth: Physical Descriptions—Books Held by The Ruskin).
Throughout the book,
Ruskin traced the outlines of the engraved illustrations on the blank reverse of those pages
(omitting to outline only the illustration of
Little Jack fighting with another boy), and on one page he has copied words.
In the text of Little Jack, Day imagines a scene of writing instruction, given the limited resources available to the hero in his youth
and his impoverished adoptive father, the old man:
But the old man, as he was something of a scholar, had a great ambition that his darling
should learn to read and write: and this was a work of some difficulty; for he had neither
printed book, nor pens, nor paper, in his cabin. Industry, however, enables us to overcome difficulties:
in the summer‐time, as the old man sat before his cottage, he would draw letters in the sand,
and teach Jack to name them singly, until he was acquainted with the whole alphabet.
He then proceeded to syllables, and after that to words; all which his little pupil learned
to pronounce with great facility: and, as he had a strong propensity to imitate what he saw,
he not only acquired the power of reading words, but of tracing all the letters
which composed them on the sand.
In Ruskinʼs copy of the book, the outlines of the woodcuts testify to his sharing Little Jackʼs “strong propensity to imitate what he saw”, while scattered, penciled words in Ruskinʼs hand on a flyleaf
may be artifacts of his “learn[ing] himself to write” by imitation, as well. (Some of the barely legible, smeared words—arrived, preserve—can be found in the printed text.)
Ruskin can scarcely have relied solely on himself, however, for the old manʼs method of progressing from alphabet to syllables to words.
Words written in ink apparently by both Margaret and John James are found in this book as well, attesting to their guidance.
From 1827, probably at least two years after the undated tracings in Little Jack,
the rear endpaper of MS III contains, in Ruskin's hand, a scattering of characters, especially the letters m and n;
and alongside these, in a parent's hand, appear demonstrations of both lettering and spelling:
for example, Ruskin attempts a Scottish place-name, which he spells "canoul", and a parent corrects to "Kinnoul" in pencil print lettering.
Sometime prior to this practice by imitation,
Ruskin was already able to print his name in pencil.
In her
15 March 1823 letter containing her transcription of
Johnʼs so‐called
first letter,
Margaret pointed out to
John James that “the signature you will see is his own”, although “sometimes he makes the letters much better”
(
Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 128). As a candidate for
Ruskinʼs earliest surviving signature,
Helen Viljoenʼs proposes a vague shape like a
J in an edition of
Evenings at Home by
John Aikin and
Letitia Barbauld;
however, this volume cannot have been
Ruskinʼs boyhood copy since it is dated too late
(see
Books Used by Ruskin in His Youth: Physical Descriptions—Books Held by the Beinecke Library).
Ruskinʼs Early Print Lettering in Pencil
The earliest extant sustained writing by
Ruskin appears in
MS I and
MS IVA,
dated
1826–27, which
he wrote entirely in print lettering. The medium is graphite; and considering the darkness and legibility of the marks after two hundred years,
he may have used a pencil leaded with English plumbago, which was mined on the
Derwent Water fells in
Borrowdale—deposits
that were famous for yielding the highest quality plumbago in
Britain or on the
Continent, and that remained plentiful in the
first third of the century,
prior to depradation in mid‐century owing to over‐mining and theft
(
Finlay, Western Writing Implements, 52–53;
Petroski, The Pencil, 68, 73, 127, 140–41).
Ruskinʼs graphite instrument was probably
an English‐made cedar pencil. In
“Harry and Lucy . . . Vol I”,
Lucy mentions misplacing her “pencils”;
and although the term, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary (“pencil”, n., 2.a),
could apply either to “metallic” or “wooden” instruments, wooden pencil‐making with superior plumbago had been an established industry in
Keswick and in
London since the
eighteenth century. The cedar pencil of
Ruskinʼs youth was probably unvarnished or unpainted (treatments that became popular in mid‐century) and sharpened using a penknife
(
Petroski, The Pencil, 69, 126–44). The artistʼs porte‐crayon—a holder for pieces of pure plumbago, chalk, or charcoal, such as
Ruskin is shown
holding in
George Richmondʼs
1843 watercolor portrait—was associated with children in French
eighteenth‐century genre paintings showing boys absorbed in drawing,
such as works by the French artists
Jean Siméon Chardin (
1699–1779),
Jean‐Baptiste Greuze (
1725–1805), and
Nicolas‐Bernard Lépicié (
1735–84).
Such depictions were intended to suggest progressive educational ideas and represented children as thoughtful, individualistic observers
(
Johnson, “Picturing Pedagogy”).
For common purposes, however, the French porte‐crayon was replaced by the Conté pencil, developed in the
1790s by
Nicolas‐Jacques Conté,
who devised a method of filling the wooden casing with a blend of graphite and clay, thus stretching and improving supplies of inferior Continental plumbago when war with
Britain cut off access to
Borrowdale graphite
(
Petroski, The Pencil, 70–78).
In his earliest pencil lettering,
Ruskin formed his characters very large
and allowed ample interlinear space—the line spacing owing in part to his following the pre‐ruled lines in the stationerʼs notebooks known in the family as the
Red Books.
The model for his large (and, by
1826, well‐formed) lettering probably lay in the typography of his books—not in a handwriting copybook, which
John James Ruskin acquired for him in
1827, but which
Ruskin appears not to have used immediately
(
Hanson, “Materiality in John Ruskinʼs Early Letters and Dialogues”, 15–17).
In the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a precedent for typography in childrenʼs books had been set by
Anna Letitia Barbauldʼs
Lessons for Children (
1778–79),
in which she advocated for printing childrenʼs books in large font size, along with generous allowance of white space on the page,
in order to make print accessible and legible to a childʼs eyes. As
Barbauld explains in the preface,
a “great defect” she found in books commonly produced for children was “the want of
good paper, a clear and large type,
and
large spaces. They only, who have actually taught young children, can be sensible how necessary
these assistances are” (
Barbauld, Lessons for Children, 3–4; and see
McCarthy, “Mother of All Discourses”, 200–201).
It is not known if
Ruskin was exposed to
Barbauldʼs
Lessons, which
Margaret Ruskin like countless mothers may have used to teach him to read when very young
(its four parts were intended for children aged two to four), but he certainly was familiar with
Barbauldʼs
Hymns in Prose, which, in the Ruskinsʼ
1821 edition published as a share‐book
by Baldwin Cradock & Joy and others, used type only slightly closer than the generous size still being reserved for those publishersʼ edition of
Lessons for Children during the same period
(a type possibly not as large and spacious, however, as that used for the original editions of
Lessons published by
Joseph Johnson).
See
Books Used by Ruskin in His Youth: Physical Descriptions.
At the same time,
Ruskinʼs early pencil print lettering already shows signs of being modeled on favorite books that were not intended for small children. For example, in
“Harry and Lucy . . . Vol I”,
his adaptation of
Maria Edgeworthʼs
Frank; A Sequel and
Harry and Lucy Concluded,
he imitated the
originalʼs title page; and in the text, he may have modeled his letters on the serif typeface used for
Edgeworthʼs
books, even adopting a decorative capital
Y from the display type of the title page.
(The lettering suggests Caslon or perhaps the English transitional serif typefaces, such as Baskerville and Bulmer,
which predominated in British books of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.) Another influential model was the
“Doveʼs English Classics”,
a reprint series of which
Ruskin owned volumes of
Popeʼs translation of the
Iliad (
1824)
and of
Drydenʼs translation of the
Aeneid and other works by
Virgil (
1825).
At three by five inches, much smaller than the
Edgeworth volumes,
the
“Doveʼs English Classics” were comparable in size to
Ruskinʼs
Red Books,
but typographically the text was the opposite of
Barbauldʼs child‐friendly large and spacious type.
The densely set lines of verse on small pages resulted in many runovers, which the printer/publisher J. F. Dove signaled with a right‐facing square bracket
[, which
Ruskin precisely imitated
when his own poems crowded the margins of his
Red Books
(see
Books Used by Ruskin in His Youth: Physical Descriptions;
Editorial and Encoding Rationale and Methodology: Element, Attribute, and Value Usage—Justification, Runover, and Word Division).
As a creative solution to problems occasioned
by modeling his lettering on printed books,
Ruskin invented a punctuation mark enabling him to imitate a text block, justified right and left.
Because he encountered difficulty in managing his letter‐ and word‐spacing so as to end a line of prose squarely on the right‐justified margin,
he filled in the gap with a variable‐length hyphen. Presumably, he based his mark on hyphenation used in print to divide words at the margin,
and he did also employ the hyphen for that purpose. More often, however, he adapted the hyphen to his own use as an original punctuation mark, which he varied in length in order to justify his right margins.
In
ERM, the mark is designated as
Ruskinʼs
justification mark
(see
Editorial and Encoding Rationale and Methodology: Element, Attribute, and Value Usage—Justification, Runover, and Word Division).
Ruskin continued to use this mark for the purpose of right‐justifying text at least through
1834, in the
MS IX fair copy of
An Account of a Tour of the Continent (
1834.
As another typographic imitation in his print lettering, which must have been particularly obsessive and time‐consuming,
Ruskin ornamented his sentences with decorative capitals that he called “double” print.
This was formed with a doubled downward or upward stroke, which could be left open or filled wtih shadow.
Examples occur in the earliest fair‐copy manuscripts, both in the
Red Books and in the separate
presentation copies of poems that were later bound in
MS IA and
MS XI
(see, e.g., the
1 January 1827 pencil presentation copy,
“Papa whats time a figure or a sense”).
Possible models for the “double‐lettering” include a display typeface used on title pages of
“Doveʼs English Classics”
and a similar engraved lettering used on maps in
Ruskinʼs geography book,
Geography Illustrated on a Popular Plan (
1820) by the
Reverend J. Goldsmith (the
author also of a geography text used by the Brontës;
see
Ruskin, Works, 35:79;
and
Alexander, introduction to Brontës,
Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, xvii).
Ruskin appears to have derived his double‐lettering primarily from a serif model,
but he may also have based it on the sanserif typefaces that began as a neoclassical revival in the
1780s
and sprang into a variety of forms and associations in the first decades of the nineteenth century
(see
Cramsie, Story of Graphic Design, 117–18, 126–27).
Ruskin used these decorative printed letter forms until
1828–29, when his lettering for many texts
became notably smaller, though no less typographical in form—the decrease in size perhaps owing to his increasing agility with pen and ink, which he was using by then, but perhaps also to imitate the smaller type in the adult books
he was consuming by then.
Double‐print lettering cost
Ruskin a great deal of time and attention, as in the elaborate fair copy of the poem
“A Battle: Irregular Measure”,
which he apparently failed to complete in time for a holiday presentation to his father (see
“Harry and Lucy . . . Vol. III”).
The showmanship and consequent difficulties managing his time drew worried comments from his
mother.
In a study of writing instruction in colonial
America,
E. Jennifer Monaghan notes the disjunction between the point of the writing masterʼs exercises—which was
focused on “form” and the “purely visual properties” of handwriting, thus requiring the student “to learn
how to represent the words of others” in “a variety of scripts”—and the ultimate purpose of writing instruction,
which was to teach “a child to express himself”
(
Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, 275).
Margaret Ruskin turned the writing masterʼs approach on its head, asking her husband to “excuse” how
Johnʼs “showing you” the mechanical skill of “his writing
occupied his thoughts fully more than how he expressed his feelings” (
Margaret to John James Ruskin, 28 April 1827
[
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 156]).
From the perspective of the nineteenth‐century child writer, however, what seems a deflection into materiality may have seemed a source of empowerment.
Copying a text skillfully sponsored agency, as the seven‐year‐old
Ruskin asserted on the title page of
“Harry and Lucy Concluded, Being the Last Part of Early Lessons, in Four Volumes, Vol 1”:
the work, according to its author, was “
PRINTED and composed by a little boy | and also drawn”.
The problems caused by obsessive print forms would be solved by
Ruskinʼs adopting a more flowing “copperplate” round hand for fair copies of his poems—especially longer poems,
such as
“Iteriad” and
Account of a Tour on the Continent.
Yet
Ruskin continued to take pleasure in decorating his text, the opportunities for fancy calligraphy only increasing with his mastery of pen and ink
(
The Ruskins and Copybook Self‐Culture). As
Christine Alexander comments, nineteenth‐century child writers appropriated adult voices and their discourses in order to gain
“the freedoms of the adult world”. Although working “within a defined discourse” that they found ready made, in doing so child
writers gave “an account of both their own and the adult world”, empowering themselves
to “construct an identity of authorship” chosen in “response to the print culture of their time”
(
Alexander, “Play and Apprenticeship”, 31).
Reproducing typography and obeying its constraints could be a creative exercise.
The Ruskins and Copybook Self‐Culture
In
June 1827, soon after
Ruskinʼs adoption of pen and ink in place of pencil in
April of that year
(
From Pencil to Pen, Print to Cursive),
John James purchased a copybook—“Writing Butterworth 7/6”, his Account Book records,
a text identified by
Van Akin Burd and by
James Dearden as
Butterworthʼs Young Arithmeticianʼs Instructor, Containing Specimens of Writing with Directions (
1815)
(
John James Ruskin, Account Book [1827–45], 2r;
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 168 n. 1;
Dearden, The Library of John Ruskin, 59 [no. 407]).
The manual was produced by the firm of
Edmund Butterworth (d. 1814),
who had held the post of writing master and accountant at the Royal High School,
Edinburgh,
until
1793, shortly before
John James Ruskin enrolled at that institution in
1795.
Apparently,
John James regarded this juncture in the development of his sonʼs handwriting as a coming of age,
analogous to his own. When
John James enrolled at the Edinburgh Royal High at age ten,
he was already somewhat older than his class, the customary starting age being eight—
Johnʼs age when first using a pen.
Scottish burgh schools like the Edinburgh Royal High in theory championed a democratic ideal
of seating tradesmenʼs sons alongside those of patricians, and fees were kept moderate. Nonetheless, the Ruskin family
may have delayed in order to scrape together the means even for moderate fees, or
John Jamesʼs mother,
Catherine,
may have been apprehensive of exposing him to a famously sadistic Latin master
(see
Viljoen, Ruskinʼs Scottish Heritage, 59–62;
and on the burgh schools, see
Watters, “Καλοι κʼαγαθοι (The Beautiful and the Good): Classical School Architecture and Educational Elitism in Early Nineteenth‐Century Edinburgh”, 280–82).
Given his own delayed matriculation, whatever its cause,
John James perhaps acted with deliberate resolve in introducing his son in
1827, at age eight,
to copybook exercises by his alma materʼs writing master.
When
John was eight in
1826–27,
he had already begun practicing (in pencil)
Latin Rules and Conjugations in
MS Juvenilia A. Just so, at the Edinburgh Royal High, boys were drilled
for five to six years in Latin lessons (and some Greek in the fifth year) as a foundation for entry to the universities, where at age thirteen or fourteen they began training
for professions, most often for the law (
Viljoen, Ruskinʼs Scottish Heritage, 59–61).
It is impossible to view the
1804 Portrait of John James Ruskin
by
Henry Raeburn (
1756–1823)—an iconically Romantic image of a youth, who looks up from the book on which he is leaning and gazes into the
imaginative space his reading has opened up—without concluding that
John James once hoped to continue his studies at the university.
Instead, his departure in
1802 for a mercantile life in
London compelled him to pursue self‐culture,
which both his own determination and the broadening print and visual culture of the era enabled him to support, first for himself and then for his family.
Copybooks like
Butterworthʼs were designed to straddle the worlds of public instruction in schools and of private instruction in the home, whether by writing masters or by self‐guided practice.
Even at the Edinburgh Royal High, the writing and arithmetic classes had always been optional, the expectation being that many youths would acquire these accomplishments
on their own by various means (see
Edmund Butterworth [d. 1814];
and for the ties between writing instruction and training in mathematics, which had been strong in English and American copybooks and pedagogy since the seventeenth century, see
Monaghan,
Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, 275, 293–96).
In an
1825 advertisement, the publisher Oliver & Boyd of
Edinburgh characterizes
Butterworthʼs Young Arithmeticianʼs Instructor
as “designed for the Use of Schools and Private Families”, by “combining accurate Writing, correct Figures, and judicious Arrangement”.
Respecting the five productions by
Butterworth listed, the advertisement goes on to declare that “[f]or beauty of design, and correctness of execution,
these Works of Mr
Butterworth are admired by every competent judge of Penmanship.
A decided preference is accordingly given to them by the most eminent Teachers in the
United Kingdom.
They are the productions of an indefatigable genius in his profession, exercised and improved by the experience of above forty years.—The
demand for them continuing to increase, the Publishers have spared no expense in bringing them out in the superior style in which they now appear”
(
“Books Published by Oliver & Boyd”, 21).
As a path to self‐cultivation, copybooks typically provided instructional texts (set in letterpress) along with illustrations of writing samples in various styles or
hands
(reproduced from engraving or woodcut and, later, from lithograph). Subcategories of copybooks specialized in particular disciplines or audiences,
such as youths or ladies; and
Margaret may have learned from such a manual at Mrs. Riceʼs Academy for Ladies in
Croydon,
where she attended as a girl and learned accurate spelling and legible penmanship “in good round hand” among other accomplishments
(
Becker, Practice of Letters, xi;
Viljoen, Ruskinʼs Scottish Heritage, 86).
Most copybooks modeled the formal script known as
English round hand or
copperplate, for which
an influential standard had been set by the copybook,
Universal Penman (
1733–41),
jointly authored by the engraver and writing master,
George Bickham (
1684–1758), and his son. Practiced using a pen with a flexible quill nib,
round hand called for a looping style that accentuated contrasts of thin and thick strokes, a style related to the late eighteenth‐century transitional and modern typefaces
that featured these extreme contrasts, such as Baskerville and Bodoni
(
Cramsie, Story of Graphic Design, 119–21).
In the eighteenth century, round hand settled into a practical but elegant script that was less elaborate than earlier versions, and that was widely used in business.
In the view of a historian of calligraphy, the common English round hand was “colourless, thoroughly unromantic, and dull”; however, these “were precisely
the qualities which commended [the hand] to those who wrote our invoices and to those abroad who received them”; and this “plain hand for a plain purpose”
was typified in the nineteenth century by “the books of
Butterworth”, in which the hand became “even more matter‐of‐fact and more standardised”
(
Morison, “Development of Hand‐Writing”, xxxiii, xl).
Plain though its sample “hands” may have been,
Butterworthʼs Young Arithmeticianʼs Instructor
provided
Ruskin with patterns for his “copperplate” fair‐copies of poems, as well as a storehouse of flourishes for decorating his manuscripts.
One wonders is copybook exercises ever occasioned as much mirth
as its role in
Ruskinʼs finishing the fair copy of his epic poem,
“Iteriad”:
Iteriad is at last finished, quite copied in, fairly dismissed, I was cutting capers all the remainder
of the evening after I had done the notable deed Uproarious was I and quite pleased with myself
and everybody looked about me Then in the morning I took Mr Butterworth and I put such a finis
If you saw the innumerable flourishes with which it is decorated and the paper loaded you would think
there never was to be a beginning of that end I quite eclipsed Mr Butterworth threw him into the shade,
made him quite ashamed of himself and his patry attempts ar flourishing.
Ruskin consulted Butterworthʼs copybook, then, to “publish” his poems and other productions in a family context,
just as he had always copied from print sources to produce his presentation copies of poems for his father and other works.
Butterworthʼs practical text, however, modeled an elegant but easy round hand that was less demanding and time‐consuming than his earlier “double print”,
while at the same time supplying patterns for elaborate flourishes where needed, such as the “finis” of “Iteriad”.
Ruskin seems not to have used Butterworthʼs copybook to improve his everyday cursive script, in which he took his own way.
Nor would the elder Ruskins necessarily have expected such thorough discipline.
Margaretʼs skepticism about the fixation
on presentation at the expense of “expression” has alreay been cited.
Margaret took the opposite approach
to
Ruskinʼs cousin,
William Richardson (1811–75),
whom she regarded as limited in abilities, but industrious. For
William, exercises in
Butterworth seemed the ticket
to success: “The very dullness of his faculties in childhood”,
Margaret reasoned,
“has induced such habits of laborious study as will at least place him on an equality if he does not go beyond many
of far higher genius”; and one sign of the dogged self‐improvement was his “trying by copying
Butterworth to improve
his writing” (
letter to John James Ruskin, 17 March 1831 [
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 251]).
In
Johnʼs case, methodical discipline was perhaps a duty to be paid for his gift of invention,
but laborious exercises were not required, as in
Williamʼs case, to make up for the lack in native genius.
As
John James assured
John at age ten: “It would be sinful in you to let the powers of your mind lie dormant through idleness
or want of perseverance when they may at their maturity aid the cause of Truth & of Religion”,
for his genius had “doomed [him] to enlighten a People by your Wisdom & to adorn an age by your Learning”
(
letter of 6 November 1829 [
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 209–10]).