by Ann Harries
I was astonished to find Oscar rising before midday in order to lay stone.
‘To push a wheelbarrow upon Ruskin’s road is the equivalent of helping to build a medieval cathedral on the Hinksey village green, my dear Wills,’ he explained. ‘Can you understand that here Useful Muscular Work joyously unites with Art and Beauty, in the best Gothic tradition? Besides, Ruskin sometimes rewards us with sensational breakfast parties in his rooms at Corpus.’
In fact, Oscar was less enchanted by useful muscular work than by the spectacle of toffs breaking stone with their lily-white hands, and once he had discovered my ability with a camera he persuaded me that a photographic record of this historic enterprise was necessary. It was over four years since I had attended Ruskin’s inaugural lecture: rumours were rife about his eccentric lifestyle, his bouts of madness, his reported dependence upon opium and sherry, his inflamed and destructive love for a girl over thirty years his junior. Yet in spite of his erratic behaviour and his oft-declared contempt for Oxford, he still exerted an extraordinary influence over the entire University: crowds (including university professors) flocked to his lectures, and burst into spontaneous applause as he entered the cramped confines of his dark lecture hall (a request for a more spacious auditorium having been refused by the authorities). Unkind critics claimed that many of his lectures were pure drivel, though he was still able to entertain his audiences with unpredictable verbal – and physical –pyrotechnics.
Thus it was that I was ferried to Hinksey one autumnal afternoon, burdened with Mr James’s camera, dark-room, chemicals and handcart. It was Oscar’s job to transport barrows-ful of prepared stone to the undergraduates who were actually laying the road, but it has to be said that his trundling lacked the purposefulness of the common labourer. Indeed, the entire focus of his attention was directed towards the melancholy figure of Ruskin himself, chiselling at slabs of stone in his customary frock-coat, from the upper limits of which protruded his tall collar and bright-blue neckcloth. At first it seemed to me that Oscar wanted merely to bask in the proximity of his mentor and occasionally gain his attention with witticisms considerably better chiselled than Ruskin’s stone, but as I watched (no one had yet perceived my arrival) it slowly dawned on me that Oscar, already cognisant of his own fund of comic genius, was engaged in the impossible task of trying to entice a smile from Ruskin’s thin and somewhat asymmetric lips.
For misery had indeed hunched the shoulders of the Slade Professor, and shortened his height; his nose was more beaklike than I remembered it, while his facial skin was covered in a web of fine wrinkles. A tall hat was pushed at an angle upon his head. He was serenely indifferent to an audience of Scoffers that had gathered upon the grassy verges, some of them having travelled from as far afield as London. These self-appointed critics, who included several dons among their number, even took to picnicking among the yarrow and the wild autumnal roses (planted by the undergraduates during the spring), shouting and catcalling at the comical spectacle of lords labouring like navvies. One of them leapt to his feet soon after I had arrived and, exactly imitating Ruskin’s fulsome cadences, cried out a piece of doggerel that had recently appeared in Punch magazine:
‘My disciples, alack, are not strong in the back,
And their arms than their biceps are bigger.
Yet they ply pick and spade, and thus glorify Slade:
So to Hinksey go down as a digger!’
Though this performance elicited cheers and whistles from the picnickers, Ruskin continued to utter long, perfectly-formed sentences in his wistful tenor voice, as if there had been no interruption. He seemed able to chisel and speak simultaneously, and was concerned to show the diggers how to break stone without losing the heads of their hammers, a skill he had learned from a professional stone-breaker in an iron mask.
Oscar laughed delightedly at the performing Scoffer; then noticed me.
‘Coz!’ he exclaimed, clearly pleased to see me. ‘You have come to immortalise this historic venture! Allow me to introduce you to these noble navvies whose images you will soon magically convey on to your plate glass.’ And he grabbed at the nearest noble navvie, whose copious moustaches and spidery legs put me in mind of my newly-acquired pet from Mexico. Alfred Milner allowed a wintry smile to flicker momentarily across his face, and then continued to heave stone out of Oscar’s barrow, his long arms twisting at curious angles. Undeterred by this cool response, Oscar led me to the Master himself, who was comparing, in a seamless flow of prose, the stones of Hinksey with those of Venice. His gaze settled upon my handcart with some anxiety, and he paused for a moment to raise his enquiring blue eyes to meet those of my friend.
‘You know that I cannot admire the camera.’ But he withheld the chisel from the stone for a few minutes in deference to my presence. ‘Better your cousin were to draw or paint this busy scene and thereby convert a work of Labour into a work of Art.’
I managed a watery laugh. ‘I have come merely to record the image of your project for posterity. My inept drawing would scarcely do justice to the scene.’
A peevish expression flitted across Ruskin’s face. ‘You bring a wagonload of equipment to synthesise a picture that would be more beautifully produced by a simple pencil on a plain sheet of paper. But go ahead. I have only one request: pray do not include me in your collodion composition!’
It was true that my equipment was disproportionately cumbersome, and as I unpacked my box camera, lenses, tripod, chemicals, glass plates, scales, weights, trays, dishes, funnels and pails (at least there was no need for me to carry water to Hinksey), I reflected that the advent of dry collodion would indeed save me a great deal of labour. Rumours were rife that within a few years it would no longer be necessary to prepare the plate first with wet collodion and then with silver nitrate, taking care that no dust particles settled on the wet plate, which must at all cost remain wet throughout every stage of the process.
Oscar had decided in favour of informal pictures of the diggers in various attitudes portraying hard labour within the picturesque framework of crooked cottages and hedgerows laden with crimson berries. I was therefore obliged to explain to these young aristocrats that it was necessary for them to turn to stone themselves for some thirty seconds while I buried my head under a cloth. So relentless was the intellectual activity of my photographic subjects that neither they nor their mentor could desist from a torrent of discourse, even as they somewhat self-consciously, under Oscar’s directions, arranged themselves into a useful muscular tableau.
The topic now under discussion was the University itself. Ruskin was complaining once again about the inadequacy of his accommodation at the University Museum. ‘But the provision of amenities for the enhancement of intellectual and artistic thought is of no interest to a university that values Oars above Art – to a university that has become a mere Cockney watering-place for learning to row!’ exclaimed he in a voice sharpened with anger.
‘I certainly see no point in going backwards down to Iffley every evening,’ agreed Oscar, motionless in an attitude of hard labour behind his barrow.
‘But rowing, rightly done, can be an art in itself.’ Alfred Milner, lean, spidery and dangerous, held a stone above Oscar’s barrow.
This challenge caused Ruskin to lay down his chisel and orate for several minutes in a great flow of indignant words.
‘Even digging, rightly done, is at least as much an art as the mere muscular act of rowing; it is only inferior in harmony and time.’ His hands flew about. ‘On the other hand, the various stroke and lift is as different in a good labourer from a tyro as any stroke of oar. But all that is of no moment!’ cried the Professor, rising suddenly. ‘The real, final, unanswerable superiority is in the serviceableness and duty and the avoidance (this is quite an immense gain in my mind) of strain or rivalry! Do wheel your barrow round that Rosebay Willow Herb, Arnold, and not over it!’
I suppose it is a tribute to Ruskin that I found myself listening to his talk even as I rushed, we
t plate in hand, into my portable dark-room to develop and fix it immediately in a variety of chemical solutions in order to produce a successful negative. This procedure was necessary for each photograph, and by the end of the session, as ever, I found my clothes and hands stained black with chemicals.
After an hour or two my task was completed, or rather, the first part of my task was completed, for I had now to varnish the negatives in order to make positive prints. At least this could be done at a more leisurely pace at my rooms at Magdalen, and was a process I enjoyed perhaps more than actually taking the photographs. As I painstakingly packed my handcart and prepared to leave the novel scene, I became aware of a tall, golden-haired youth in a blue spotted bow-tie and creased tweed trousers who stood upon the grassy mound, somewhat detached from the Scoffers. He was staring, as if mesmerised, at the Professor’s attempts at stonebreaking: his expressive mouth knew not whether to curl in derision or to fall open in astonishment. Something stirred in my memory, and I recognised the young man as the member of the public who was hoping to discover his Destiny at Ruskin’s inaugural lecture. Four years had matured his bearing and endowed him with a glow of confidence that he had earlier lacked. Where once his figure had been almost girlishly slender, it was now apparent that the upper part of his body was grown muscular, and his face burnt by a stronger sun than that which hides behind English clouds. It struck me that his eyes were no longer those of an immature young man (he was not much over twenty), but had become infused with a shrewdness one might expect from a man in his middle age. I was considering going over to him to ask him about whither his destiny had led him when Oscar tapped my shoulder.
‘That man rattles loose diamonds in his pockets and believes everyone can be bought,’ he whispered, pointing to the very youth. I had heard of the undergraduate who had made his fortune in diamond speculation in the Cape Colony, but had not yet seen him. ‘He used to dig with a pickaxe once as well, but for rather different motives,’ Oscar continued. ‘He is a bore upon the subject of diamond claims. I know, for he belongs to my club.’
I watched the young man with his weatherbeaten features and thatch of untidy hair make his way uncertainly over to the Professor of Art. I thought he might fall upon his knees before the Master, so reverent was his bearing. But at that moment Ruskin moved on to the topic of Rail (in both senses of the word!), and his admirer hesitated.
‘Amputation! Penetration! Pollution!’ shrieked the Professor. ‘Where the landscape is round and female, the railway slashes like a knife through its delicate tissues, leaving scars on park and copse, and mounds vaster than the walls of Babylon!’ In this state, it was quite possible to believe that Ruskin was mad. ‘Those tracks of steel cannot curve round hillocks or caress their slopes; instead they slice through the landscape in their abominable straight lines, throwing up huge embankments for crossing the valleys! And the greatest sin of all is that now the road builders emulate the rail builders, knocking down ancient hills or cutting them in two that their road may be the shortest distance between two points!’
My young man, whose mouth had already opened to identify himself to his hero, now began to retreat, a confused look in his eyes. I abandoned plans to reintroduce myself, and bade farewell to Oscar and his colleagues, who looked as if they were ready to return to their colleges soon in order to soak in hot baths. A gloom, caused not so much by the imminent setting of the sun as by the exhalation of grey vapours from the watermeadows, had imposed itself upon the entire project. The Scoffers had disappeared without a sound.
The clock of Carfax Tower was chiming four as I rested a moment with my heavy barrow. Other photographers, I knew, could push their handcarts across fifty miles of rough terrain in all extremes of climate, but I lacked their energy: my journey up the Botley Road and past the station had tired me considerably. Though I had merely the length of The High to complete before reaching Magdalen, I needed to regain my strength, and sat upon one of the benches erected at the crossroads beneath the ancient tower.
The late afternoon was now damp and cheerless. The fog which had seeped up from the Hinksey fields now uncoiled from the rivers and canals that both penetrate and surround Oxford, dissolving the edges of venerable buildings, and reducing the city to a uniform greyness. I shivered, and thought with pleasure of the hot water, bright lights, tea and muffins that awaited me at Magdalen. This reflection was enough to make me rise to my aching feet – when a lean clerical figure (whom I instantly recognised) emerged from the mists and hobbled towards me. His movements, though jerky, were brisk and purposeful; but almost too purposeful, as if he planned to climb into my cart and order me to drive him to his college. Instead, he stopped a few inches short of my barrow, and gazed at it with a rapture its humble appearance scarcely merited. His sparkling eyes met mine; he opened his mouth to speak; his upper lip trembled; no sound emerged.
Charles Dodgson closed his mouth and curled it into a wistful smile. I too seemed to have lost my powers of speech, so startled was I to be in the presence of this famous writer, mathematician, photographer and stammerer. Whereas the gigantic egoism of Ruskin made speaking by anyone redundant, Dodgson’s interest in my cart and even myself seemed unnervingly sincere. I looked anxiously at his sensitive, cleanshaven face, as if we might perhaps communicate through our eyes rather than our voices, and found the corners of my mouth sliding about. For a moment I felt I might, in his eyes, be some curious dream-like creature that inhabited the pages of Alice, stranded at the crossroads of Carfax, my pale face disintegrating into the mists; and for that moment, perhaps the only moment in my life, I felt as odd and eccentric as the White Rabbit or the Mad Hatter or the Cheshire Cat.
When at last he spoke, his voice was light, quick, amused. ‘Do-do-Dod-son, Fellow of Christ Church. Th-this is indeed an impressive handcart.’
‘Francis Wills. Under-g-graduate, Magdalen,’ I stammered back.
‘It is so good to see a fellow photographer prepared to push a barrow through the streets of Oxford. Let me guess: have you been taking pictures upon the Hinksey Road?’ His body could not keep still, even though his feet did not move; a shoulder clenched briefly beneath an ear; an elbow jerked; his chin angled first to one side, then the other, so that his gaze tended sideways.
I admitted that he was correct in his surmise.
‘How very fascinating!’ He paused and placed a black-gloved finger on his chin. ‘I should be so interested to see your photographs … how you have arranged the men, positioned their hands – that sort of thing. I wonder …’ He looked politely apprehensive. ‘Might you be prepared to come to my rooms and print your plates in my dark-room? I b-believe I make an excellent pot of tea!’
It was clear that Charles Dodgson was a man quite untouched by his fame. His natural shyness, which infused both his speech and his movements, gave him a vulnerable charm that was strangely irresistible. I became like one of the Pied Piper’s children – or rats – as I scampered down St Aldates with my barrow; past the Christ Church corner turrets bedecked with Cardinal Wolsey’s mitre; beneath Wren’s gracious Tom Tower; and into the most opulent quadrangle in Oxford. There was no time to admire the fountains, the archways, the stained-glass windows of the Great Hall, or the noble lawns, all designed by the doomed Cardinal for his own pleasure as Dodgson, the upper half of his body held stiff as a tin soldier, led me to his home. We abandoned my handcart to the care of a sullen scout and ran up staircase 7 to burst into Dodgson’s suite of ten rooms at the top of the stairs.
I felt I had entered a children’s paradise. Every room we passed through was packed with toys, games and gadgets displayed in orderly fashion upon every available surface. But Dodgson raced past the printing press, the dumbbells, the Ammoniaphone, the skeletons, the mechanical toys, the music boxes, the calculating machine (’It adds up to one million pounds,’ he mentioned as I lingered a while over the latter), the travelling inkpots and the machine for turning over pages. He called to his scout to heat up water for tea – and th
en we entered his dark-room.
Humbly, I handed my prepared wet plates to the most celebrated photographer in England. With intense concentration he rocked them to and fro in his acid baths, exclaiming in delight as the images gradually emerged from their dark cells … there was Oscar with his wheelbarrow; Milner with his shovel; Toynbee with his pickaxe. Dodgson began to make prints immediately, speaking at top speed as he did so. (I marvelled at his fastidious organisation, his ruthless powers of logic which he imposed upon the potential chaos of his own imagination.) How Mr James would have loved to have partaken in our animated debate on the wonders of collodion; how he would have enjoyed discussing the crucial importance of lighting; how he would have envied Dodgson his glass house erected upon the roof above his chambers, where he could place his young sitters outdoors, even upon the wettest and coldest and foggiest of days.
An hour must have passed before we left the distraction-free confines of the dark-room for the distraction-filled space of the drawing-room. The scout fussed about with heated water, and Dodgson, having complimented me upon the composition of my pictures, now offered to show me his albums. While he strode up and down, swaying a teapot between his hands (‘It needs to brew for precisely ten minutes, and this technique entices the full flavour from the leaves!’), I, gawky but deeply flattered, turned over the pages of his meticulously indexed albums.
By now the chill I had experienced at Carfax had quite thawed: if anything, the temperature in the room was a little too warm for my complete comfort. I noticed that rugs had been rolled up and placed against cracks between the four doors and the thickly carpeted floor, apparently to exclude any suggestion of draught. On my lap lay precise landscapes, perfectly lit: chains of logical hills and valleys, luminous with their photographer’s aesthetic sensibility. A few seascapes followed; a growing number of portraits of well-known faces – Tennyson, Rossetti, Ruskin; groups of Oxford dons gathered round archways, or examining skeletons …