Tour of 1825
In
1825, when
John was six, the Ruskin family made its first visit to the
Continent.
According to
Van Akin Burd, the family party included
Johnʼs nurse,
Anne Strachan, who accompanied the family also on the
1833 Continental journey.
Burd adds that they journeyed between
11 May and 13 July,
and the itinerary covered
Calais,
Bruges,
Ghent,
Brussels, and
Paris, including
Versailles
(
Ruskin, Works, 1:xxv;
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 132 n. 3).
As such, the tour was characteristically
post‐Napoleonic, organized around paying tribute to the Alliesʼ victory on
Waterloo Field
and witnessing the festivities in
Paris to celebrate the crowning of
Charles X—the successor to
Louis XVIII
who died in
1824.
The coronation of
Charles X was the first since the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy—
Charlesʼs brother,
Louis XVIII,
having died less than a decade after being restored to the throne following the Alliesʼ victory. The ceremony itself took place on
29 May 1825 at the
cathedral in
Reims,
where French monarchs had for centuries traditionally been anointed, and not in
Paris, where
Napoleon had crowned himself emperor in
Notre Dame.
While some aspects of the ceremony were updated to take account of political conditions in the Restoration, “the overriding symbolism was that of the pre‐
1789 monarchy,
with pride of place being given to the clergy and nobility” (
Price, Perilous Crown, 119).
In
Britain, where
Charles had lived in exile in
London and
Edinburgh,
theaters staged replicas of the
Reims Cathedral ceremony; and in
Paris,
opera houses mounted productions that reflected the spectacle at
Reims, which was in itself deemed by many to be inappropriately operatic in character
(
Walton, “‘Quelque peu théâtral’”, 6–10).
In his travel diary for
1833,
John James Ruskin reflected back on this
1825 journey,
comparing the familyʼs experiences during the much more ambitious Continental
Tour of 1833.
On this present visit, he notes that
Paris was “not so gay as in
May 1825”
(
Diary of John James Ruskin,1833–46, 72, 73).
Following the
July Revolution of 1830 and the abdication of
Charles X, as a historian remarks,
“a coronation for
Louis Philippe was never raised”, even in the tempered form of medievalism surrounding
Charles Xʼs ceremony,
“and the bourgeoisieʼs king contented himself with his proclamation by the Chamber of Deputies and the swearing of an oath
of fidelity to the
Constitutional Charter as his sole inaurgural rite”
(
Jackson, Vive le Roi!, 199).
In his autobiography,
Praeterita,
Ruskin acknowledged that the trip was prompted by the coronation festivities, but he remembered nothing of the pomp,
claiming to have been “only interested by things near me, or at least clearly visible and present”, such as the good‐natured servants at the
Paris hotel
(
Ruskin, Works, 35:104).
A journey to the
Continent may seem ambitious for a middle‐class
London family, only recently established (since
1823) in their new suburban home,
Herne Hill, and with a young boy to raise and educate. By the
mid‐1820s, however,
Channel crossings were common, if limited to the nearby and comparatively inexpensive destination of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands
(
Belgium did not secede and form a nation until
1830). Trips expressly to view the
Waterloo battlefield
had been popular since as early as the weeks immediately following the battle. The popularity had been enhanced by personal visits paid by such well‐known literary figures as
Walter Scott,
Robert Southey, and
Lord Byron
(
François, “If Itʼs 1815, This Must Be Belgium”, 74–75, 89).
For the increased affordability and efficiency of steam packet lines crossing the
Channel
by the
mid‐1820s, see
Touring and Travel on the Continent;
and for the Ruskinsʼ crossing by steam seven years later, see
Tour of 1833, along with the essay,
“Calais” (with its glosses), in the
Account of a Tour on the Continent.