The Art of Charles Ricketts: Selected Writings

MANY VICTORIANISTS—even those who specialize in the fin de siècle—have heard little if anything of the book designer, illustrator, and writer Charles Ricketts (1866–1931). That is a shame, as this new volume of his work collected by Nicholas Frankel amply demonstrates. Scholars specializing in Oscar Wilde or Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) will have read Ricketts’s accounts of his good friends and appreciated the biographical information he has provided. Book historians know and value the beauty and quality of his lavish book designs. But very few have had the opportunity to read much of his writing, now selected and brought together for the first time by Frankel in Charles Ricketts, Everything for Art: Selected Writings. This is the first book to gather Ricketts’s intellectual contributions and examine them on their own terms.

Appropriately for the subject, this is a beautifully designed and executed book. An abundance of gorgeous illustrations (thirty-three black and white, plus eight color plates) feature Ricketts’s designs for borders and frontispieces for the Vale Press, his illustrations, his illuminated capitals, and the work of other artists connected to his innovations (such as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his life partner Charles Shannon). The visual feast alone would make this volume a treat. The majority of the book comprises Frankel’s selections of Ricketts’s prose, which includes something for everyone: essays on book arts, engraving, art history and criticism, memoirs of Wilde and Michael Field (which will be the chief attraction of the volume for many), and even fiction, all primarily written for the Dial, the shortlived but influential magazine which in 1889 he co-founded and co-edited with Shannon.

Frankel begins his task of recovering Ricketts with a substantial introduction of fifty-two pages. He laments that although Ricketts was “one of the most significant figures of the 1890s and early 1900s,” with intimate connections to many canonical figures, he is now among the most neglected. He argues persuasively for the importance of reading Ricketts not only for information about Wilde and Michael Field, but also for his own accomplishments and ideas. Kenneth Clark called Ricketts “the quintessence of the 1890s,” considering him to be a leading art critic in the same league as Roger Fry. Frankel points out that Ricketts’s art was admired by James MacNeil Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris, while “writers Oscar Wilde, ‘Michael Field,’ John Gray, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Thomas Sturge Moore, and George Bernard Shaw were all eager for him to design their books or design costumes or scenery for their plays.” Ricketts not only designed books and illustrated their content, but also created jewelry for friends (such as Cooper and Bradley) and designed around “fifty theatre productions, including a successful staging of Thomas Hardy’s epic poem The Dynasts in 1915, directed by Harley Granville-Barker, as well as works by Synge, Yeats, Shaw, Masefield, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare.” After briefly narrating Ricketts’s life and demonstrating his recognized significance in his own time, Frankel introduces each of the collected sections of writing and illustration, placing them in historical and critical context. He makes a plausible case for the possibility that the scholarly neglect of Ricketts’s cultural contributions springs from the diversity of his output. Frankel offers the variety of achievement in this selection as evidence of how hard it is to pin Ricketts down.

Ricketts’s prose is divided into four main sections: 1) writings on printing and book design, 2) writings on art, 3) memories and recollections, and 4) fiction. Three contemporary articles about Ricketts are also included in appendices, providing information and points of view beyond what is included in the book’s introduction, which is erudite and engaging. Hundreds of meticulous and amply sized annotations accompany the essays and stories, essential for readers whose areas of expertise are not as broad as Ricketts’s own. Frankel also provides a useful...