Jack London, photograph by Ted Walton.
John Ruskin and Jack London both felt convinced of the need for social reform to cure the ills of poverty. London was influenced by Oscar Wilde, who in turn looked to Ruskin as a mentor. Was there also a direct link between Ruskin and London? Each writer pursued endeavors to achieve the goal of reform: Ruskin helped support the Workingmen’s College, he sponsored a tea shop whose goods and prices were intended to help the poor, and he invested in the housing projects of reformer Octavia Hill. London spent seven weeks living in the East End of the City of London to experience the life of the poor, and, based on his own childhood experience with poverty, he championed the rights and dignity of the poor. Most importantly, both wrote extensively about the social ills they saw and about the solutions they envisioned. They shared a distaste for laisse faire capitalism and a desire to elevate the desperately poor, but their views differed in crucial ways. This lecture will explore the nature and extent of a connection between Ruskin and London.
Sara S. “Sue” Hodson is the retired curator of literary manuscripts for The Huntington Library, where she oversaw all British and American literary manuscripts, from the Renaissance to the present. She speaks and writes often on a variety of literary subjects and on the issue of privacy in modern manuscript collections. A cowriter of Jack London, Photographer, published in 2010, she contributed an essay, “The People of the Abyss: Tensions and Tenements in the Capital of Poverty,” to the Oxford Handbook to Jack London and will edit one volume in the forthcoming Oxford Edition of the Works of Jack London. Her current project is an edition of the Korean War letters of Al Martinez, the award-winning featured columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her honors include being named a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists, and the Woman of the Year by the Jack London Foundation in 2012.