Jim Spates, Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York
with Gabriel Meyer
Thursday Sept. 10, 17, 24 — 5-6:30pm PDT
Please email us at info@ruskinartclub.com in order to register for our virtual Zoom events.
For more than a century, the “accepted version” of John Ruskin’s life story has been in grave error. So grave has been this error, Ruskin’s reputation has suffered greatly, along with serious interest in his vital and ever-relevant work.
This lecture series will be a distillation, in three virtual discussions conducted with Gabriel Meyer, Executive Director of The Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles, of the findings contained in major studies of Ruskin’s life that I have conducted and published over the last three decades. All our sessions will begin at 5 PM PDT and each presentation will be followed by a Question and Answer period with the audience.
In the first session, “Helen Gill Viljoen: The Unsung Hero of Ruskin Biography,” I will show how this American scholar, making a chance visit to Brantwood, Ruskin’s home in the Lake District, in 1929, discovered in the thousands of Ruskin letters and diaries that survived there, that the story of Ruskin’s life which had been told by the executors of Ruskin’s literary estate in their immense collection of his works, The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, had been meticulously censored to eliminate any aspect of his life story that might be potentially seen as “off-putting” to readers. So effective was this biographic subterfuge, that all later writers on Ruskin’s life have, however unwittingly, compounded the Library Edition’s distortions—except for Viljoen, who, spent the rest of her professional life—45 years!—compiling reams of additional evidence that proved the correctness of her revisions to the standard biography. Unfortunately, she died in 1974 before she was able to publish her findings. This talk will focus not only on her personal story but on the major new insights she would have contributed to our understanding of Ruskin’s life.
In the second interview, “Ruskin’s Mental Illness: An Alternative Interpretation,” we will consider another aspect of what can be called “The Ruskin Myth,” the suggestion that the severe bouts of mental illness he experienced over the course of his last quarter century were the consequence of some congenital malady. The available evidence, however, when it is analyzed in the context of modern psychiatric knowledge, shows, rather, that Ruskin’s disturbances were the outgrowth of a particularly deleterious series of soul-damaging “real world” events experienced during his lifetime. This reinterpretation has the advantage of demonstrating that Ruskin’s work, often thought to be “tainted” by an inherited tendency to mental imbalance, is as sound and brilliant as the great majority of his contemporaries thought it was.
The last discussion concerns “Ruskin’s Sexuality: Correcting a Century of Misinformation and Misdiagnosis.” Of all the derogatory labels that have been pinned on Ruskin, none has been more unjustly damaging to his reputation as the suggestion that he was sexually interested in little girls, was, in fact, a pedophile. Like the misinterpretation of his mental illness, this distortion finds its origin in what was (and wasn’t!) said about his relationships with the opposite sex in the biographical chapters of the above-mentioned Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin. My analysis of his sexual interest — again, using for analytical and evaluative purposes, up-to-date research on the topic, shows that the charge of perversion is refuted by the facts. Also in this discussion, I explain why the notion of a “sexually perverse” Ruskin has proved so seductive to us modern sensibilites, not least because we fear the challenge of Ruskin’s critical cultural insights. If he can be “sidelined” by the claim that he was sexually deviant, we no longer have to take his critiques of our society, and by extension, ourselves, seriously.
We do hope you will join us for these discussions.
Jim Spates is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. He is the Co-Founder (with Sara Atwood), in 2020, of The Ruskin Society of North America, webmaster of the blog site, https://whyruskin.wordpress.com, a Companion of Ruskin’s Guild of St. George, a Member of the Roycroft Campus Community, and a Member of the Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles.
For the last three decades, he has lectured regularly in both the UK and US, on various aspects of Ruskin’s life and work. He is the author of many published articles on Ruskin and of the book, The Imperfect Round: Helen Gill Viljoen’s ‘Life of Ruskin.’ Currently, he is writing Availing toward Life: The Radical Social Thought of John Ruskin, a book dedicated to making Ruskin’s masterpiece of social and economic criticism, Unto this Last, accessible to a new generation of readers.