by governesses. Hélène Ricketts died in 1880 and her widower moved to London with his two children. Ricketts was at that stage hardly able to speak English. His biographer Paul Delaney writes that the boy was considered "too delicate to attend school", and consequently was largely self-educated, "reading voraciously and 'basking' in museums; he thus escaped being moulded along conventional lines". In 1882 Ricketts entered the City and Guilds Technical Art School in Kennington, London, where he was apprenticed to Charles Roberts, a prominent wood-engraver. The following year Ricketts's father died, and Ricketts became dependent on his paternal grandfather, who supported him with a modest allowance. On his sixteenth birthday he met the painter and lithographer Charles Haslewood Shannon, with whom he formed a lifelong personal and professional partnership. The Times described their relationship: The Vale Press After concluding their studies at Kennington, the two men considered going to live and work in Paris, as several of their contemporaries had done. They consulted Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, an artist they revered, who advised them against it, considering the current trends of French art to be excessively naturalistic – "photographic drawing". Shannon, three years the senior, took a teaching post at the Croydon School of Art, and Ricketts earned money from commercial and magazine illustrations. In 1888 Ricketts took over James Abbott Whistler's former house, No 1, The Vale, in Chelsea, which became the focus of contemporary artists. They produced The Dial, a magazine devoted to art, that had five issues from 1889 to 1897. Among their circle was Oscar Wilde, for whom Ricketts illustrated his books A House of Pomegranates (1891) and The Sphinx (1894), and painted, in the style of François Clouet, the hero of Wilde's short story, "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." used as the frontispiece of the book. Ricketts and Shannon worked together on editions of "Daphnis and Chloe" (1893) and "Hero and Leander" (1894). Reviewing the former, The Times singled out the "beautiful type [and] the very charming woodcuts and initial letters with which it is enriched by two accomplished artists, Mr. Charles Ricketts and Mr. Charles Shannon, who are jointly responsible for the designs, while the actual woodcut execution is the work of Mr. Ricketts." Inspired by the work of A. H. Mackmurdo and William Morris's Kelmscott Press, Ricketts and Shannon set up a small press over which, according to the critic Emmanuel Cooper,