Tory Byronism: Mentorship and Influence in Early Ruskin

David C. Hanson

In his autobiography, John Ruskin wryly comments that, as his youthful precocious talents emerged, his father formed the ambition that the boy would write poetry as good as Byron’s, only pious, and sermons as good as Bossuet’s, only Protestant. John James Ruskin did in fact present his son with a model of Tory Byronism through association with such men as the Anglican poet and clergyman, George Croly, who was known for combining a Byronic manner with Ultra-Protestant theology and politics. This paper explores this instance of late Romantic sociability, in which Croly and others performed a politically acceptable Byronism around the Ruskins’ dining table in the form of conversational “eloquence,” and in which the boy was encouraged to imitate Byronic eloquence by “making a sensation” in the literary annuals.

Influence, as Andrew Elfenbein theorizes in his study of Byron and the Victorians, is mediated through literary production and dissemination. In Ruskin’s case, the Byronic influence was not just mediated but monitored through the intervention of W. H. Harrison, an editor and contributor in the annuals trade, who shared the family’s Ultra political and religious position. Harrison served as go-between for the commercial Ruskins and the (small) literary star of Croly, and as a patron of Ruskin’s poetry in the annual, Friendship’s Offering. Gradually, Harrison settled into a long-standing relationship with the elder Ruskin, as friend and compatriot in the production and marketing of the younger Ruskin’s “eloquence.” However, as the stakes grew—at Oxford, where Ruskin’s father became preoccupied with his winning the Newdigate Prize—Ruskin confronted and critiqued this commodifying of “genius.” In a group of Byronic oriental poems, the young writer critiques this powerful combination of patriarchal mentorship and commodification of art, exhibiting a version of what Jerome Christensen characterizes as Lord Byron’s anti-commercial “strength.”