Rosie & the Critic

THE LETTERS OF JOHN RUSKIN TO LORD AND LADY MOUNT-TEMPLE, edited by John Lewis Bradley. 399 pages. Ohio State University Press. $6.25.

John Ruskin was a critic of great ability and prodigious output. He was also a precocious child who remained until middle age the captive of wealthy, doting parents. An early Ruskin biographer wrote that shortly before her death in 1871, when his mother was nearly 90 and Ruskin 52, she still "ruled her son and her household with inexorable kindness."

The results of this kindness were known to Ruskin's friends, but were suppressed by most biographers and not generally known until the publication in 1947 of letters about Ruskin's marriage to Effie Gray. The marriage, it seemed, had been arranged by Ruskin's and the girl's parents. According to Effie, on the wedding night Ruskin, who was 29, told his bride that sexual intercourse was irreligious and that, at 20, she was too young to consummate a marriage. She must wait five years, he said. She waited, showing "restiveness," which Ruskin said he feared was due to "incipient insanity." After six years the marriage was annulled "by reason of [Ruskin's] incurable impotency."

The present volume of letters charts the remainder and the darker portions of Ruskin's desperate sexual journey. Four years after the annulment Ruskin met Rosie La Touche, the pretty daughter of an Irish banker whose wife admired Ruskin's work. He fell deeply in love with Rosie, who seems to have returned as much affection as could be expected of a girl her age--she had just turned ten. After Ruskin mooned about for four years, the La Touches became alarmed and forbade him to see Rosie. To his friend and confidante, Lady Mount-Temple, he wrote later that since then, "I have never had one happy hour -- all my work has been wrecked -- all my usefulness taken from me."

In 1866 he saw Rosie long enough to propose to her. She was 18 and he 47. She told him to wait three years. Off he went to wait, pathetically telling all to the patient Lady Mount-Temple and her husband. If Rosie were to love another, he wrote, "I would do all for her -- bear -- if it were necessary --to see them together all day -- be their footman and walk behind them -- nay -- be their servant after they were married -- if they needed it -- I don't think her father loves her so well as that." He and Rosie, who kept stalling him off, never married. Instead, they grew mad together. She deteriorated more quickly; the years before her death at 27 were clouded with mental illness. He suffered a series of mental break downs and was insane for the ten years before his death at 80 in 1900.

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