Ruskinian moral authority and theatre's ideal woman

Dickinson, Rachel (2009) Ruskinian moral authority and theatre's ideal woman. In: Ruskin, the theatre and Victorian visual culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 58-73. ISBN 9780230200593 (hardcover); 9780230236790 (ebook)

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Abstract

John Ruskin loved the theatre in a broad sense. He was particularly fond of popular, comic performances; childlike, he delighted in the Christy Minstrels, which he referred to as ‘Kisty Mins’; comique operas such as Edmond Audran’s The Mascot, which he referred to by its French title, ‘La Mascotte’, and described as a ‘naughty opera’; romantic comedies such as Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Money; and pantomimes such as Cinderella.1 He publicly expressed his preference for such lighter theatre in ‘Letter 39’ of Fors Clavigera, his series of regularly published Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain. This instalment of Fors was published in March 1874 and in it he overtly articulated a parallel between the Church and the Theatre as spaces of particular influence on the morality of society. This connection is one facet of Ruskin’s broader project to teach his readers to re-learn what he believed infants naturally know: how to see, to judge and to act along useful, morally sound paths.