The Feminist Origins of ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’

Abstract

On 6 and 14 December 1864, Ruskin gave two lectures in Rusholme, near Manchester, one to raise money for a library of the Rusholme Institute, another to establish schools in an impoverished section of the city. Published in 1865 under the title Sesame and Lilies, ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ and ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ provoked much debate, in Ruskin’s day as in ours, about women’s education and employment. As Elizabeth Helsinger has noted, most Victorian reviewers perceived the lectures to be ‘an angry attack on traditional values’. The conservative Saturday Review called Ruskin’s words ‘the shriekings of a revivalist’, while Blackwood’s Magazine dismissed the lectures as a ‘clever farrago of unmitigated abuse to the one sex, and of sugared abuse and railing flattery… to the other’, full of ‘extravagant charges and impossible remedies’. Only radical periodicals like the Westminster Review attended seriously to Ruskin’s goals, arguing that ‘Utopianism is at times good for us, if only to lift us out of our usual atmosphere of prudence and pence.’1 By far the most favourable notice appeared in the Victoria Magazine, a journal written, produced, and published by leaders of the English women’s movement. In a two-part series, ‘Mr. Ruskin on Books and Women’, the Victoria reviewer admiringly set forth the arguments of Sesame and Lilies, ‘letting the book speak for itself, as much as possible, before we intrude any observations of our own, or notice the points… where we feel ourselves slightly at issue with our teacher’.2