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Ruskin on his sexuality: a lost source.

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Brantwood,

Coniston, Lancashire

May 15 '86

My dearest S.

How little you know me, after all! After all these years! As if I ever cared about marriages!--The moment people marry I drop them like hot coals.--Go suckle your babies and don't bother me! I just let Mary Gladstone write to me still on condition she never signs her married name. But I like my girls from ten to sixteen--allowing of 17 or 18 as long as they're not in love with anybody but me.--I've got some darlings of 8--12--14--just now, and my pigwiggina here--12--who fetches my wood and is learning to play my bells. Also--when I come to town--I'm open to anything visible in the way of Kate Vaughans or Gonnie Gilchrists.

When I come to town! But you don't know how ill I've been--and am. How totally what strength I have goes in setting my own house in order--Not at all in sharing other peoples wedding arrangements--Praeterita is a very grave business to me indeed, though I manage as yet--people tell me, to keep it from being tedious. What years--or months may remain to me, I don't feel the least up to having a divine life in. The little girls help me--but the grave ones not.--I don't want to go out in the snuff like poor Turner, if I can help it.

Meantime my whole mind is utterly selfish--an old friend or two like John and you--being parts of its self. You needn't think to introduce new generations to me.

Your loving JR

(The letter above is written on Brantwood stationary with printed letterhead. The second sheet carries Ruskin's marginal note, apparently about his handwriting, as he draws a line from the word "grave" to this comment: "Join on ... I can't make out how this scrabbly cross came.")

When John Ruskin's editors, E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, had before them the full correspondence between Ruskin...

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