Two Unpublished Letters of John Ruskin to Edward Clayton

Abstract

TN 1894 an anonymous editor published twenty-two letters which I John Ruskin had written to Edward Clayton, his contemporary at Christ Church and one of his closest Oxford friends.' These letters, recently described as of the most illuminating . . . [Ruskin] ever wrote,'2 are of considerable biographical interest. Although Clayton and Ruskin were not lifelong friends (their correspondence seems to have ended some four years after Clayton was ordained in I841, and presumably the friendship terminated at the same time), they enjoyed for nearly a decade the kind of intimacy between young men that permits an almost complete freedom and candor of expression. If overly earnest, Clayton was at least a sympathetic and faithful correspondent, and to him, as E. T Cook observed long ago, Ruskin wrote in the familiar and colloquial style of a college student at his ease, and with vivacity and fancy.3 Hence the peculiar appeal of the letters, whose levity and informality stand in welcome contrast to the later image of the formidable Victorian prophet and to the starkness of his tragedy. Nine years after their initial appearance the letters were republished by Cook and Wedderburn, who made several minor corrections and prefaced their own edition with an explanatory note: The original Letters are now in the possession of an American collector (Mr. W R. Bixby, of St. Louis), and the present editors have not had access to them'4 Had they seen the original correspondence, now in the Henry E. Huntington Library, they would have immediately discovered that it consists of twenty-four rather than twenty-two letters, the first two in the collection (in many respects the most in-