Hobart and William Smith Colleges

30 January 2015 Spates Lectures in UK

During a recent trip to the United Kingdom, Professor Emeritus of Sociology JimSpatesintroduceda major new collection of lettersand drawingsthat will add significantly to the study of celebrated 19^thcentury Britishwriter and critic,John Ruskin (1819-1900).Ruskin has been the major focus of Spates research for the past two decades.

During the 1880s,the eminent Victorians last working decade,theyoung writer and artist, William Gershom Collingwood (who, during the 1870s, had been Ruskins student at Oxford), determined to dedicatehimself to working with and assisting Ruskin. Thislater decadeof Ruskins life has, up until now, not been well documented or well understood, Spates says, in part becausethe many letters Ruskin wrote Collingwood and his family, as well as many drawings he had given the younger man, remained in the Collingwood family afterCollingwood died in 1932.

For generations, these artifactspassedto various of Collingwoods descendants, and, for that reason, wereunavailable to scholars. Collingwoods granddaughter, Janet Gnosspelius, wasthe last recipient in this inheritance chain and, using these materials as her basis, wasin the process of writing a biography of her grandfather when she died in 2010. In her will, she directed that the valuable Collingwood-Ruskin legacy should goto Cardiff University in Walesfor proper preservation. They are now housed in that universitys SCOLAR Archives. The first scholar to ever examine these documents in detail, Spates says that, before he was long into the process, herealized that this was an important new collection and would allow us toreassessthe last decades of Ruskins lifemuch more accurately.

Theheart of thenew collection covers a five-month trip that Ruskin and Collingwood took toContinentalEuropein 1882, a tripabout which almost nothing was known, Spates says. The contents of the collection include an abundance of new drawings and paintings of cathedrals,cities, and mountains in France, Switzerland, and Italy, extensive correspondencewith Collingwoods wife, and,in many of Collingwoods letters which he posted back to England, muchinsight into Ruskin himself, who was,at that time, recovering from apsychotic episodeearlier that year.

What is new about these letters is that they show Ruskin fully recovered from this bout, contradicting the view among all his biographers that he was then but a shadow of his former, formidable self.

Because so little is understood about Ruskin in the 1880s, the period isalwaysseen asa time whenRuskinwasin decline, Spates says. Id never really believed thatand these letters and drawings are the proof that the suspicion was correct, for-and as was the case after his even earlier mental attacks-during this trip and after he was very muchhimself, made plans, published books. The letters show that he was in good shape.In other words,they can help rewrite the story of Ruskin in the 1880s.

At the invitation of Professor David Boucher, who oversees the Gnosspelius Collection at Cardiff University, Spates gave two talks during this research visit.On Dec. 11,he spokeat the School of Law and Politicsat Cardiff University on the importance of the collectionas a collectionfor Victorian scholars generally. The talk was titled Life with Ruskin: The Janet Gnosspelius Collection of Letters, Diaries, and Art of W.G. Collingwood.

Then, on Dec. 17, he gave the Keynote Address to the Annual British Idealism Section of the Political Studies Associationof Great Britain. The talk was delivered at theGregynogConference Center, also in Wales. The lecture, For the Love of Beauty: On the Old Road with John Ruskin and W.G. Collingwood in 1882, a New Rendering,Spates saw asan opportunity to put some flesh on my general argumentthat these letters and drawings allow us to see both Ruskin and Collingwood in strikingly new scholarly and biographic light and to provide, using some of these new materials, evidence for this new view.

I have in mind that one of the books Ill write in retirement will bea revisionary viewof Ruskin in the 1880s,Spatesadds.Because biographers and scholars have seen him, wrongly, as essentially mad and declining, his work of this decade is regarded as being of lesser importance. Now that we have this new collection, we know this to be a damaging mischaracterization and, using the Collingwood materials, can rewrite the story, not only of Ruskins later life, but can reassess the significance of his work of this period as well.

While in the U.K., Spates also delivered a third lecture, a revised version ofa talk on Ruskins highly influential book, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), at the Ruskin Museum in the Lake District in northern England.

Spatesjoined the HWS faculty in 1971 after earning his Ph.D. in sociology from Boston University and his B.A. in anthropology and sociology from Colby College.In addition to his 43 years of teaching at Hobart and William Smith (he retired at the end of the 2014 academic year), Spateshas beenfour-time Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Shipboard Education at the University of Pittsburgh.On campus, hehastwiceserved as Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, has served for many years as the chair of the Urban Studies Program and chaired two curriculum committees.

His scholarship has focused on the quality of social life and city life, the 1960s counterculture, the sociologies of cities, values and human nature, and, more recently, on the life and work of Ruskin. Regarding this later interest, Spates is the authorof a number of books about Ruskin, including Availing Toward Life: A Summary of the Social Thought of John Ruskin (in draft)and The Imperfect Round: Helen Gill Viljoens Life of Ruskin' (Long View, 2005). He has authored numerous journal articles about Ruskinandhas presented this work locally, nationally, and internationally. Hismost recentbook, Why Ruskin?will soon be published by Pallas Athene in London. Recently, he also has given lectures at The Hillside Club in Berkeley, Calif., on the basic ideas contained in Ruskins masterpiece of social criticism, Unto this Last. Asanother aspectof his effort to communicate his belief in the abiding importance of Ruskins thought for our modern era, he hasstarted a Ruskin website,www.whyruskin.wordpress.com.