At the time of his death in 1900, John Ruskin was, according to Andrew Hill, ‘perhaps the most famous living Victorian apart from Queen Victoria herself’. He was a landmark — more or less literally. You could visit Brantwood, where he had his Lake District home in later life, and buy postcards of him. There were ‘Ruskin ceramics, Ruskin linen and lace products and Ruskin fireplaces’ available. In New Jersey, undismayed by the great man’s loathing of tobacco, there was a company that sold ‘John Ruskin’ premium cigars. Postmortem you could get Ruskin souvenir brassware or toasting forks and a scale model of the Ruskin monument near Keswick.
But that, Hill also says, was about the peak of his fame. Though everywhere these days you’ll find a street or a housing estate named after him, the 20th century was not kind to Ruskin’s reputation. He is vaguely known and little read now — and as Hill reports wanly on his very first page, most people to whom he mentioned the name Ruskin in the course of researching his book asked: ‘Wasn’t he the guy who…?’ Mostly those ellipses are filled with some variant on the phrase ‘fainted dead away when he found his wife had pubic hair’.
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