Recontextualizing "the Two Boyhoods": Ruskin, Thornbury and the double lives of Turner

Abstract

The "Two Boyhoods" chapter in Modern Painters 5 (1860) is widely anthologized because of its "poetry." But I argue that its canonization as poetic prose uncritically valorizes its extreme opacity. "The Two Boyhoods" is obscure because it encodes Ruskin's traumatic discoveries about the double life of Turner - the late, presiding genius of his Modern Painters series. Unpublished correspondence from the Ruskin Library reveals that Ruskin's father pressurized him to be Turner's biographer. Hence "The Two Boyhoods" serves as Ruskin's cryptic, minimalist biography of the secretly disgraced artist. Consequently the chapter needs to be contextualized in terms of its troubled connection with Turner's first biography, Walter Thornbury's The Life and Correspondence of J.M.W. Turner" (1862). Thornbury's universally reviled book would appear to be the execrable Other of "The Two Boyhoods." Yet Ruskin acknowledged it as the sequel to Modern Painters 5, and the two texts have an important (and hitherto unnoticed) material and intertextual relationship. © 2006 Taylor & Francis.