Details
RUSKIN, John (1819-1900). Ten autograph letters signed, including nine to Mrs. William Buckland and one to an unidentified correspondent ('Dear Sir'), Denmark Hill, Keswick, Geneva and n.p. (5), 13 March [1848] - 26 July 1854 (including 4 n.d.) breaking the news of his impending marriage 'to a young Scottish lady - who has consented to leave her good friends and fair country in order to put a happy term to my philosophership', and after the collapse of the marriage describing his work either among 'old books or pictures' or 'in the non-molluscous part of geology and natural history', commenting on Mrs. Buckland's own studies and her family, always with gratitude and affection, 15 pages, 8° and one page, 4°, address panels (small tears, one leaf split through at vertical crease, traces of tape).
Mary Buckland (d. 1857) was the wife of the geologist William Buckland whom Ruskin first met as an an undergraduate at Christchurch College, Oxford, where Dr. Buckland was a Canon. In Praeterita he recalled the family as 'frank, kind, clever, vital in the highest degree, to me medicinal and saving'. These sympathetic, frank and often humourous letters (one even written in mock-anger) reflect his keen affection for the Bucklands. He introduces Euphemia Chalmers Gray as a young lady 'of open heart and gentle temper... singularly cheerful and unaffected', but writes on honeymoon 'I have been trying - not altogether unsuccessfully to rid myself of the yearning for glaciers and chalets which alas can now no more for some while be satisfied'. After 'Effie's ' flight with Millais, he returns to the Alps for solace, needing 'continuous occupation and un-agitating thought', leading to immersion in his studies - commenting fastidiously on modern geology which 'always seems to me to go scraping about in the gutters after the fashion of dirty children among the oysters and periwinkle heaps in the New Road'. In several of the letters he refers somewhat neurotically to his own health and reluctance to venture out, 'I have a morbid horror of late hours upon me'. (10)
Mary Buckland (d. 1857) was the wife of the geologist William Buckland whom Ruskin first met as an an undergraduate at Christchurch College, Oxford, where Dr. Buckland was a Canon. In Praeterita he recalled the family as 'frank, kind, clever, vital in the highest degree, to me medicinal and saving'. These sympathetic, frank and often humourous letters (one even written in mock-anger) reflect his keen affection for the Bucklands. He introduces Euphemia Chalmers Gray as a young lady 'of open heart and gentle temper... singularly cheerful and unaffected', but writes on honeymoon 'I have been trying - not altogether unsuccessfully to rid myself of the yearning for glaciers and chalets which alas can now no more for some while be satisfied'. After 'Effie's ' flight with Millais, he returns to the Alps for solace, needing 'continuous occupation and un-agitating thought', leading to immersion in his studies - commenting fastidiously on modern geology which 'always seems to me to go scraping about in the gutters after the fashion of dirty children among the oysters and periwinkle heaps in the New Road'. In several of the letters he refers somewhat neurotically to his own health and reluctance to venture out, 'I have a morbid horror of late hours upon me'. (10)