excellence in Art is not a matter of intention or technical ability but resides in personality. It is a matter of character, spirit, in a word, Personality and is of the Spirit.
Letter to Gordon Bottomley, 25 September 1918
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Admirers of Charles Ricketts probably find it both frustrating and strange that his work is not more widely known, because it is never less than interesting, is often remarkable, and can offer moments which touch on genius. But his exceptional facility in so many kinds of artistic endeavour paradoxically resulted in his paying a price for spreading himself too widely, and of being regarded by some as a talented generalist. He was a book designer and illustrator, publisher, wood engraver, painter, sculptor, jewellery designer, stage designer (of sets, properties and costumes), an astute art historian and critic â indeed, in Kenneth Clarkeâs view, matched at the time only by Roger Fry1 â adept also in journalism, memoir and even imaginative fiction. In addition he was an astute collector and connoisseur, sought after as an exhibition curator and adviser on art acquisitions, and the fiercest of advocates for preserving and enhancing the national collections (whilst turning down the opportunity to be Director of the National Gallery). Somewhat bizarrely, he even wrote a scenario for a ballet based on the Keats poem âLamiaâ and collaborated on another for a film about Joan of Arc, both of which came to nothing. And as an admirer of La Rochefoucauldâs Maximes, he composed a set of his own, in French. There is certainly a tendency to regard him as another of the several interesting personalities who emerged out of the fin de siècle, and perhaps instinctively conservative in his own artistic preferences, but Martin Meisel astutely places him in rather different and decidedly august company when considering late nineteenth-century scene-painting. âHerkomer, Alma-Tadema, the architect E.W. Godwin, and even the reluctant Burne-Jones reverse the pattern of earlier painters like Stanfield and Roberts, who raised themselves from the craft of scene-painting and scene design to the art of the Academy; and they anticipate Picasso, Munch, Ricketts, Bakst, Gris, Matisse, Vuillard, Braque, Derain, Arp, Miro, Ernst, and numerous other saints of the modern movementâ.2
The originality of Rickettâs wide-ranging imagination is perhaps to be seen most effectively deployed in his theatrical work. He was sought out by some of the most significant contemporary dramatists to provide stage designs and costumes, whilst his startlingly original treatments of Shakespeare met with consistent critical acclaim. His two productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas for Rupert DâOyly Carte radically turned away from the stale conventions into which the company had settled. Authors like Yeats and Bernard Shaw, and actor-managers such as Granville Barker and Lillah McCarthy, placed their confidence in his understanding of what would work best for their dramatic intentions, and they remained lifelong friends. Despite his constant complaints and frustrations at budget limitations, about the uneven talents of actors, and of confronting the challenges of meeting production deadlines (which nevertheless he always achieved without undue compromise), there is ample evidence in his correspondence to show that he was happiest and most imaginatively creative in the theatrical work, and certainly that he valued theatre not just as a practitioner, but as a committed spectator and listener â often an enthusiastically voluble if articulately critical one. Indeed, the craft of writing for the stage remained a close interest, and he freely offered pertinent and highly practical suggestions about stage effects, plotting and dialogue to his playwriting friends, including Thomas Sturge Moore, Laurence Binyon and Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Michael Field). It is appropriate that this personal commitment to the theatre is commemorated in the only surviving film footage of Ricketts, dating from 1926, showing him sketching costume designs for a new production of Gilbert and Sullivanâs The Mikado.3
Performance, both in its presentation and its reception, is what mattered to him as a spectator, whether in the theatre (drama, dance and opera) or concert hall, and even as a participant in the privacy of fancy dress balls. The fact that he was regularly approached by the Royal Academy and other galleries as their preferred exhibition hanger is testimony not only to his intuitive understanding of how something might best be presented, but also to his insistence upon getting the detail right, so that on entering the exhibition room the spectator ideally would recognise both the pleasing proportions in the hanging and the understated handling of the whole space â the room was on show, and not just its pictures. It is a persistent theme running through his multi-layered career, this fascination with design and the framed image, whether it is a book page, an illustration, a cover design, a painting, or a stage scene contained within the proscenium arch. In his letters this even extends to his precise descriptions of landscapes through which he travelled, and in his desire to capture all of the visual detail for his reader as if it were contained within the boundaries of a photograph.
Few pertinent letters have survived from the early period when Ricketts made drawings for magazines and designed books for commercial publishers, particularly for Oscar Wildeâs The Picture of Dorian Gray, Poems, A House of Pomegranates (with Shannon) and The Sphinx, now an iconic nineties book that shows his masterly penmanship. It was Wilde who dubbed him âthe subtle and fantastic decoratorâ.4 His work developed rapidly towards an early form of Art Nouveau which was apparent in the notably decadent book design of John Grayâs Silverpoints with its cover of wavy gold lines running from top to bottom with sixty-six flame-like willow leaves, and later, during the Vale Press years (1896â1904), took on a more abstract-linear style particularly evident in the book bindings he designed for some of the copies printed on vellum. Immediately after the Vale Press was closed, he designed the cover for Wildeâs posthumously published De Profundis. One of the three roundel designs Ricketts provided for the deluxe edition, a star above the âgreat watersâ (as described in the last paragraph of the book), was used for many reprints of Wildeâs works and is now arguably his best-known book design. He continued to design covers, but they were no longer initiated for commercial reasons, and arose instead out of social obligations or personal friendships. Examples of the first category are his designs for the deluxe editions of Twenty-Five Years of The National Art Collections Fund 1903â1928 (1928) and The Legion Book (1929), whilst his bindings for Michael Field and Gordon Bottomley are illustrative of his work for friends. For the late works of Michael Field, and though an unbeliever himself, he combined his linear style with symbols prompted by the poems and the authorsâ fervent Catholicism. The book bindings for Gordon Bottomleyâs plays reveal his own fondness for the stage with designs being given a more three-dimensional theatrical appearance, but always combined with abstract patterns of borders and circles, and suggesting also another of his crafts, that of the promotional lithographic poster for productions of Aeschylusâs The Persians (in his own translation, 1907) and of Thomas Hardyâs drama The Dynasts (1914).
In his many surviving letters to friends, colleagues and clients, most of which have never before been published, and some only in part, we are offered a rich resource which constantly reveals the refined sensitivities and rigorous intelligence of a man for whom letter-writing became both a pleasure and a release.5 The letters serve, in effect, as a private critique of those more public manifestations of his life and work and offer an astute insight into many aspects of the art world of the late nineteenth century as well as the years before and after the Great War. Rickettsâs profound interest in and engagement with contemporary events runs through this correspondence, revealing him as both an articulate chronicler and a perceptive observer of human behaviour â not least in the careful record of his travels to Europe, Egypt and North America.
What is known about his family heritage and his peripatetic early years must partly explain the quixotic temperament and certain insecurities which he carried into his adult life. Some remarkable evidence about his motherâs background has emerged in recent years.6 She was Italian by birth, and married first a Frenchman, whom she left after the birth of her fourth child. In 1862 she met Rickettsâs future father in Naples; he was a British naval officer and a capable painter of marine topics, who the following year took a reduced pension on the grounds of his ill health. Charles de Sousy Ricketts was born on 2 October 1866 in Geneva where his as yet unmarried parents were now living, but by the beginning of 1868 they had moved to England, where in January they married at the Hanover Square Registry Office. What makes this sequence of events exceptional is not the boyâs illegitimacy, but (surely unknown to Rickettsâs father) that the marriage was bigamous, for his mother had kept private the fact that the marriage to her French husband had not been annulled. Indeed, she seems to have lived something of a fantasy life, so that although she was born in 1824, at her British marriage ceremony she managed to shed both a husband and ten years by asserting in 1868 that she was widowed and aged only 33.
They lived first in south London, near the Crystal Palace, and later in Kensington (not in any sense a fashionable address at that time) and in 1870 his father was declared bankrupt.7 Then, when Ricketts was aged about ten, he and his mother moved to France, principally it seems on account of her failing health. About two years were spent happily enough in Boulogne and then a further two in Asnières, near Paris, where he discovered the Louvre and the art of Puvis de Chavannes; it was a period that gave him a love of French culture and a facility in the language which he never lost, but all changed with the death of this much-loved and unconventional mother in December 1880. Once back in England, the fourteen-year-old boy did not return to formal schooling but was in effect allowed to learn by reading widely and intensely, by exploring museums and galleries and thereby acquiring the techniques of a confident if sometimes arrogant autodidact which served him well for the rest of his life. Whether it was something instinctive, or a technique which he consciously developed, it was probably in these years in France and then London that he developed his remarkable facility for remembering the details of an art work after only a single viewing. This acute visual memory allowed him to compare and discuss paintings seen in different places and sometimes years apart, and gave him the confidence to write precisely about individual works of art or a particular artistâs technique, earning him the grudging respect of attributors like Bernard Berenson, and critics like Roger Fry, D.S. MacColl and Claude Phillips. He was an early committee member of the National Art Collections Fund, and, from its inception, of the Vasari Society (for the reproduction of art works). But he would never feel part of an art establishment, nor was he regarded as such.
Paul Delaneyâs authoritative and balanced 1990 biography of Ricketts wisely guards against making quick assumptions about the nature of the friendship between Ricketts and Charles Shannon, which began when they met as fellow students at the City and Guilds Technical Art School in south London and ended only with Rickettsâs death, 48 years later. He appears to have begun his technical studies in art in October 1883, a year later than previously thought.8 His father had died in June that year, and so it must have indeed seemed like a new departure when, just turning seventeen, he embarked on formal training as an apprentice wood-engraver, and by January 1885 was describing himself simply as an âArt Studentâ.9 Shannon, three years older, had already been a student for a year. Ricketts, semi-schooled and largely self-taught, volatile and opinionated, sophisticated beyond his years in his knowledge of French art, yet almost feral in some aspects of his behaviour, must have seemed an exotic creature to his fellow students. Within a couple of years Ricketts and Shannon were sharing accommodation, moving several times until in 1888 they took on Whistlerâs former Chelsea house in The Vale, off the Kingâs Road, a place which would become something of an artistic salon, so that speaking of âthe Vale yearsâ now evokes the names of a coterie of friends who gathered there â former fellow students as well as people like William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert, Max Beerbohm, John Gray, Thomas Sturge Moore and Oscar Wilde. Friday evenings was a kind of Open House, when friends would call âon specâ to eat (initially somewhat frugally, as money was tight), talk and share their work in progress. The regular Friday invitation to âcome and grubâ remained during the years to come, as they moved within Chelsea to Beaufort Street, then to Richmond, on to Holland Park and finally to Regentâs Park. But essentially what makes the period in the Vale so distinctive, resulting in the permanent linking of âRicketts and Shannonâ as a creative partnership, was not just the work generated there â The Dial and the book designs for Wilde â but also what followed after financial constraints led to a move of house, namely The Pageant and the foundation of the Vale Press itself â achievements which probably remain better known than any single work of art by either man.
A further aspect of their shared living and a tangible testament left to us was the superb personal art collection created jointly over the years, the greater part of which would be bequeathed to national museums and galleries after their deaths. They collected astutely and with faultless taste, buying cleverly if sometimes paying more than they could easily afford. European, Oriental and Ancient works (Egyptian and Greek) all fell within their interests, and it seems that they rarely disagreed about what should be acquired. Their Lansdowne House apartment came to be called âThe Palaceâ by the Michael Fields, and like all real collectors they lived with their treasures about them and so shared them with their friends.
The more than 2100 letters gathered in these volumes represent a fraction of what must originally have been written, ample evidence that Ricketts was a prolific correspondent. At least, that is what he became, but it was not quite the case in the early years. Perhaps his interrupted English education at first left him unconfident about writing â certainly his spelling was irregular and sometimes decidedly eccentric â but in this edition we have provided a counterbalance to this initial slow start by the inclusion of a number of Shannonâs letters in the early pages of the first volume, and just occasionally later as well. It quickly becomes apparent that in these first years it was the norm for Shannon either to write on behalf of them both, or, tellingly, to Rickettsâs dictation. This surely represents not laziness but an insecurity about committing himself in writing, something which passed quickly enough, so that Shannon would never again have to write on Rickettsâs behalf. Indeed, in later years Ricketts would declare that Shannon was the reluctant letter writer.
In what one might properly call his personal letters, rather than those, usually briefer, which deal with matters of business, Ricketts finds a range of registers, appropriate for each reader. Here we find his sharp wit and acid observations, his humanity and generosity, but occasions too of vulnerability and reflection when he evaluates his own work. There is no false modesty, but there are moments of regret and self-doubt. The long-sustained exchange with the aunt and niece partnership of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper began in the mid-1890s and continued until the deaths of both women. It is a virtuoso performance on his part, as if his free-flowing imagination has at last found the medium in which it can have uninhibited expression. Whilst the friendship began as one between two couples â Ricketts-Shannon and Bradley-Cooper â before long the correspondence was exclusively an exchange between Ricketts and Bradley, or as they invariably addressed each other, âPainterâ and âPoetâ. We have drawn extensively in the editorial notes on the largely unpublished journal written jointly by Bradley and Cooper, now in the British Library, as much pertinent material touches directly and in detail on issues raised in the Ricketts letters. They followed his career closely, and commented intelligently on his work. Their observations on the Ricketts-Shannon friendship are also fascinating, but in some ways as speculative as more recent accounts inevitably tend to be. When considering how some of Rickettsâs letters might be used in the volume which became Self-Portrait (1939) Thomas Sturge Moore relates that âR. told me that he had quite distinct personalities in writing to his different correspondents. I feel that the personality which wrote to Michael, needs balancing with some other or others for its real value to appearâ.10
In his long correspondence with the poet Gordon Bottomley (who, like the Michael Fields, carefully preserved each of Rickettsâs many letters and cards), he discusses in a more reflective way aspects of his own work as they exchange opinions about art, literature and music,11 and whereas they are also themes about which he writes to Thomas Lowinsky, his wartime letters now have rather a different function, reflecting his wish to provide both a distraction and a reminder of the hope of the civilised values which awaited the young men serving in France, fighting the battles of the older men who had sent them there. And in the same manner with all of his regular correspondents, he recognises what in each case is the shared common ground, and considers its meanings with sympathy and intelligent understanding.
His letters are rich in good humour and gossip, occasionally sprinkled with malice, as evidenced in his exchanges with Robert Ross, but they are also reflective and thoughtful, questioning and, in his later years, touchingly sad. The tone inevitably changes in January 1929 when Shannon fell from a ladder whilst hanging pictures in their final home at Regentâs Park; he suffered permanent mental impairment, and life as normal could never be resumed. For the first time, Rickettsâs love for Shannon is made explicit, for after years of uninterrupted companionship, Shannon had retreated into his own world, unaware of his situation but not discontented, leaving Ricketts as a helpless and even heartbroken onlooker who spared nothing in securing his partnerâs ongoing specialist medical care. This was the first occasion in Rickettsâs adult life that tragedy had touched him so personally, the hopelessness of the situation forcing him to realise that life would never return to anything resembling normality. In the letters of these last years he would reassure friends that Shannon seemed rather better, or that doctors still spoke of the hope of a slow recovery, but to himself he was only ever harshly realistic about the permanent nature of the separation. Shannonâs physical presence only made harder the impossibility of any kind of normal interaction, and Ricketts was left with an enduring and exhausting sadness. It gave a fresh poignancy to thoughts he had shared as early as 1916 with Richard Roland Holst, and the fear that he was already out of date. âI am growing old and so reactionary and so devoted to my habits and recollections and I rather dread the future, which is the greatest possible sign of age. I dread the pace at which things go in the world of art, the lack of memory, intimacy and sanity in those I meet; art should look backwards and forwards and I look but one wayâ (Letter 1066), whilst to âBengyâ Lowinsky he had recalled memories of his Boulogne childhood: âCountless times I have thought of staying there to look up old haunts; as one grows old, places hold one more than peopleâ (Letter 1234). However, as Stephen Calloway remarks, his later book designs were modernistic and âlook unmistakably towards a future developmentâ.12
It is ironic that Shannon should have outlived Ricketts by several years, as everyone seemed to assume that he might die at any time. After Rickettsâs own sudden death from heart failure on 7 October 1931 the news was kept from Shannon; in fact, there is no convincing evidence that he was ever told. A house at Kew Gardens was found for him and he would move there with Percy Nicholls and his wife, the servants who had been their loyal servants ever since the move to Regentâs Park, and who now continued as Shannonâs carers during his last years. Gordon Bottomley and Mary Davis kept each other informed of any developments in Shannonâs apparently unchanging situation. Then in March 1937 came news from Kew Gardens which she at once passed on to Bottomley.
Shannon is passing over & I feel Ricketts has been about him for some days. I told the Nurse to stand over him & give him âMary Davisâ love & blessingsâ & he answered quite rationally with a smile: Splendid â that sounds like old times! You are all so good to me! I feel as if he were sailing out on a blue sea to meet his âBrother,â he calls him âRickettsâ again, & surely their souls are meeting as he sails into the Land of the Leal.13 [â¦.] The Doctor says he cannot linger more than 10 days & I feel it will be much less.
[â¦.] Lewis just brings me in word that Nicholls Telephoned last night that Shannonâs sweet soul had passed on. You see I know better than the Doctors that Ricketts was my informant. I do thank God for taking him & for all the years of constant friendship that has been between us. Nothing can alter that & it is a very real & great possession.14
Bottomley was in Greece when her letter reached him, and he responded in a like manner.
I had always thought that, when the body approached dissolution, Shannon might speak again as from himself; so it was intensely moving to learn that that had really happened. Thank you and thank you very much indeed for letting us hear about it so immediately â I donât mean in point of time, but im-mediately in its real meaning, without the newspaper dilution, and the hearsay passed from mouth to mouth: you brought us near to Shannon again for his last moments â and that brought us near to Ricketts too, with the thought of them together again, creative and eager and their eyes kindling. And Rickettsâ voice ringing happily.
How fortunate, how happy we were in being present with them in their great years, seeing life in their light enriched and fulfilled â so that we cannot now be poor again, with their light coming through clear again.15
Preparations for and Publication of âSelf-Portraitâ
That so many of Rickettsâs letters have survived is not due to mere good fortune, but falls to the careful curatorship of Thomas Sturge Moore, the most enduringly loyal friend of Ricketts and Shannon since their later student days, who would eventually assume the role of their literary executor, a task he also performed for the Michael Fields. He diligently preserved everything, which would eventually be presented to the British Museum (now the British Library) and forms the core of the Ricketts and Shannon Papers. In addition, after Mooreâs death his own huge archive of personal papers was given to the University of London, where it is available in the Special Collections archives of Senate House. It too contains a great deal of unique material which has been drawn on extensively in the current volumes. Moore keenly felt the weight of responsibility placed upon him. The Michael Fields had died a year apart, in 1913 and 1914, since when he had edited and published a small portion of their journal as Work and Days (1933). After Rickettsâs death in 1931 his energies turned to a wish appropriately to memorialise his friend, and knowing that the work itself was in danger of being forgotten, and was not well represented in print, he first put together Charles Ricketts, RA: Sixty-five Illustrations (1933), the most enduringly valuable part of which is his introductory memoir. The larger task, the book of letters and journal extracts which would appear as Self-Portrait (1939) in the early months of the Second World War, was originally intended to have been one of two volumes, for Moore would also assemble from the wealth of materials available in the surviving correspondence exchanged between the Michael Fields and Ricketts (and to a lesser extent Shannon) a second typescript which he called Poets and Painters, combining more substantial sections of the Michael Field journal together with passages from the many letters exchanged between them and Ricketts, together with his own linking narrative. It was never published, even though after Mooreâs death in 1944 his widow Marie continued to hope that it might find a publisher. This accounts for the otherwise strange fact that not a single one of Rickettsâs many letters to the Michael Fields was included in Self-Portrait, despite their vital importance amongst his earliest and most revealing writings. Moore had set them all aside for his other project.
Of course, in the absence of anything else, Self-Portrait remains an important source, but it has fundamental weaknesses. Much of this, sadly, was a result of Mooreâs increasingly poor health during the years that he was working on the volume, when he began to feel the size of the task might overwhelm him. The essential problem was that he found it almost impossible to select from so much material, even with the omission of the letters to the Michael Fields, and erred on the side of over-inclusion, whilst providing very little in the way of explanatory material. Ricketts destroyed his diaries between 1907 and 1913, and although they survive for 1900â6 and 1914â18, he appears to have ceased altogether from keeping a diary after the war. In Self-Portrait letters are included somewhat arbitrarily; fewer are needed for the years when the diaries can be drawn on, even when this means the omission of valuable material.
The bookâs structure also reveals the history of its preparation. Fairly late on, and finding it hard to secure a publisher for what was turning into an unmanageably bulky collection, Moore turned to Cecil Lewis, the young friend of Rickettsâs later years, who took on the task of finishing it and placing it with his own publisher, Peter Davies. At one level it seemed a pragmatic solution. Lewis reduced the size of the manuscript, necessarily quite ruthlessly, but he had only known Ricketts for a few years and had no real understanding, nor probably much knowledge, of the earlier part of his creative life. Rather oddly, when the manuscriptâs unwieldy size was already evident, he introduced a substantial number of his own often quite long letters received from Ricketts, thus distorting the balance of the later portion of the book and requiring the removal of perhaps more varied and certainly more interesting material. In the very last months before publication and with the outbreak of hostilities, Lewis returned to active service (he had been a young fighter ace in the Great War), and asked Gordon Bottomley to oversee the proofing and to decide on illustrations. Throughout Mooreâs years of work on the project Bottomley had provided support and encouragement, but had been kept at armâs length, and his involvement at this late stage in response to Lewisâs plea only caused tensions between these two most loyal of Rickettsâs admirers. On its appearance Self-Portrait was welcomed for what it was, a remembrance of an exceptional man, but it too clearly shows its history as a cut and paste piece of work.
And yet the preparations which went in to gathering the materials for Self-Portrait will remain invaluable as a resource for all future researchers. As he began planning his work, Moore set up something of a family cottage industry to make sense of all the manuscript material, his chief assistant being his son, Daniel Charles Sturge Moore, who was Rickettsâs godson. Daniel had already assisted with work on the Michael Fields volume, Work and Days, and now, as then, his role seems to have been the sorting out of the manuscript materials, mainly letters and diaries, and making typed transcriptions of everything, not least the precious letters given on loan to his father by Rickettsâs friends, which once copied were returned to their owners. These transcriptions, both top copies and carbons, have been preserved in the British Library and Senate House collections, and in many cases provide the only known source for the letters to some correspondents. It is particularly reassuring that, when a surviving original letter can be compared with its transcription, the copy turns out to be both accurate and complete, without omissions but with some obvious errors in spelling corrected, whereas substantial deletions would be made in many of the transcriptions selected for Self-Portrait, always without warning to the reader.
During the course of preparing this edition we have taken every opportunity to extract corroborative or complementing information from surviving letters which Ricketts received from his many correspondents as well as from other sources such as diaries, and these supplementary materials have frequently helped to arrive at firm or likely dates for his letters. But it has been a major challenge to assign accurate, or even approximate dates for some items, for Ricketts himself rarely provides one, though he occasionally writes the day of the week at the top. Some friends thoughtfully dated his letters on receipt, or even retained the postmarked envelopes, and they have earned our posthumous gratitude, for these have often provided clues to dating others. The process of assembling the edition into an acceptable order has not been unlike piecing together an enormous jigsaw puzzle, with letters being regularly reassigned a new position in the chronology as some discovery demands a shift in the patterns. When a precise date is not known, descriptors such as âprobablyâ, âperhapsâ, âpossiblyâ and âaboutâ have proved to be unavoidable, and it is inevitable that some items will have been assigned to a wrong month or even year. Items like this tend to be the brief notes of thanks or apology, but the contexts for some longer letters also remain elusive. We have included every letter which we have been able to locate, but we are aware that some have eluded us, including a few early family items. We have chosen to omit office letters from the Hacon and Ricketts years, because these are usually only signed in the name of Ricketts (and mostly only on his behalf).
Here then is Ricketts in his own words. As his remarkable original work becomes more widely-known, it is our hope that this resource will assist researchers and admirers towards a better understanding of the man who produced it and the complex network of artistic endeavours within which he operated.
See the foreword to Stephen Calloway, Charles Ricketts. Subtle and fantastic decorator. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1979, p. 6, in which Clarke also remembered Ricketts and Fry as âbrilliant talkersâ.
Martin Meisel, Realizations. Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 405.
âThe Mikado Redressed in 1720 Period Costumeâ, YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O08j4ERSk58), last accessed 10 November 2025.
The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert-Hart Davis. London: Fourth Estate, 2000, p. 501 (Wildeâs letter to the editor of the Speaker, December 1891).
Instances of previously published letters include a few to Charles Holmes and others to Robert Ross (in Holmes 1936 and Ross 1952); several letters to Sydney Cockerell appeared in Friends of a Lifetime. Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, edited by Viola Meynell (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940); two small groups of letters to âMichael Fieldâ were published in Some Letters from Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon to âMichael Fieldâ (1894â1902), edited by J.G. Paul Delaney (Edinburgh: The Tragara Press, 1979) and Letters from Charles Ricketts to âMichael Fieldâ (1903â1913), edited by J.G. Paul Delaney (Edinburgh: The Tragara Press, 1981).
See J.G.P. Delaney & Corine Verney. Charles Rickettsâs Mysterious Mother. The Hague: At the Paulton, 2016.
The Standard, 7 September 1870, p. 1.
A letter written on his fiftieth birthday in 1916 records his first meeting with Shannon on that day 34 years earlier (1882), in other words even before enrolling as a student in the following year (see Letter 1039). But this may well be a slip in memory.
These details concerning the dates of his first and subsequent enrolments are based on research undertaken by Anna Gruetzner Robins into the incomplete School Records at the London Metropolitan Archives.
Sturge Moore to Gordon Bottomley, 28 March 1932, BL Add MS 88957/1/69 f 71.
Some years after Rickettsâs death, Gordon Bottomley would tell Otto Kyllmann that âC.S.R. was a letter-writer [â¦] of the richest, rarest qualitiesâ. 12 January 1939, BL Add MS 88957/1/118 f 195.
Calloway, Charles Ricketts. Subtle and fantastic decorator, p. 24.
âThe Land of the Lealâ is a Scottish allusion to the land of the faithful.
19 March 1937, BL Add MS 88957/1/38 ff 51â2.
6 April 1937, BL Add MS 89957/1/38 ff 53â4.