Learning to Write

In a 1903 essay, , 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 (, , 652; reprinted in Collingwood, , 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” (, ed. Burd, 128; and see Hanson, , 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 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 , 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.

(Day, , 12)

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 by both Margaret and John James are found in the book as well, attesting to their guidance.

Prior to this writing instruction and practice circa 1823, 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” (, ed. Burd, 128). Also, Ruskinʼs copy of by Maria Edgeworth (Books Used by Ruskin in His Youth: Physical Descriptions—Books Held by the Beinecke Library), a flyleaf of volume 1 holds contains a signature in pencil in an unsure, albeit undateable hand (see Viljoen, , 6 [item 2]). Helen Viljoenʼs notion is fanciful, however, that Ruskinʼs earliest surviving signature can be detected in a scrawl that forms a vague shape like a J—an interpretation disproven by the dating of the book containing the scrawl, an edition of by John Aikin and Letitia Barbauld which could not be his boyhood copy (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 and , 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 likely wrote using English plumbago 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, , 52–53; Petroski, , 68, 73, 127, 140–41).

Ruskinʼs graphite instrument was probably an English‐made cedar pencil. In , Lucy mentions misplacing her “pencils”; and although the term, according to the (“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, , 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, ). 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, , 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 . 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, , 15–17). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a precedent for typography in childrenʼs books had been set by Anna Letitia Barbauldʼs (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, , 3–4; and see McCarthy, , 200–201). It is not known if Ruskin was exposed to Barbauldʼs , 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 , 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 during the same period (a type possibly not as large and spacious, however, as that used for the original editions of 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 , his adaptation of Maria Edgeworthʼs and , 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 , a reprint series of which Ruskin owned volumes of Popeʼs translation of the (1824) and of Drydenʼs translation of the and other works by Virgil (1825). At three by five inches, much smaller than the Edgeworth volumes, the were comparable in size to Ruskinʼs , 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 (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 another creative solution to problems occasioned by constraining his lettering within the guidelines of bookmaking, Ruskin invented a punctuatoin mark enabling him to imitate a text block, justified right and left. Encountering difficulty in managing his letter‐ and word‐spacing so as to end a line of prose 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 effectively adapted the hyphen as an original punctuation mark, whose varying length enabled him to justify 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 fair copy of (1834.

A particularly obsessive and time‐consuming typographic imitation that Ruskin adopted to ornament his printed lettering was a decorative capital 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 and (see, e.g., the 1 January 1827 pencil presentation copy, ). Possible models for the “double‐lettering” include a display typeface used on title pages of and a similar engraved lettering used on maps in Ruskinʼs geography book, (1820) by the Reverend J. Goldsmith—the author also of a geography text used by the Brontës (see Ruskin, , 35:79; Alexander, introduction to Brontës, , 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, , 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 imitating 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 , which he apparently failed to complete in time for a holiday presentation to his father (see ). 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” ( [Burd, ed., , 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 : 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 and . 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, , 31). Reproducing typography and obeying its constraints could be a creative exercise.

From Pencil to Pen, Print to Cursive

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 (1815) (John James Ruskin, , 2r; Burd, ed., , 168 n. 1; Dearden, , 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, , 59–62; and on the burgh schools, see Watters, , 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, , 59–61). It is impossible to view the 1804 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 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” (, 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, , xi; Viljoen, , 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, (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, , 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, , xxxiii, xl).

Plain though its sample “hands” may have been, 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, :

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.

( [Burd, ed., , 259])

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 . 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” ( [Burd, ed., , 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” ( [Burd, ed., , 209–10]).

Unidentified Hands