Ruskin, John - Brian Maidment (essay date 1988)
Brian Maidment (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: "Reading Ruskin and Ruskin Readers," in PN Review, Vol. 14, No. 5, 1988, pp. 50-3.
[In the following essay, Maidment suggests that Ruskin's importance lies in how his ideas have been understood, as well as in his large—but largely unread—oeuvre.]
Reading books about Ruskin always makes me wonder if anyone ever reads, or ever read, Ruskin's own books. His cultural presence has always been something more than that of a producer of texts. Beyond being an author he has always been a rallying place for a whole variety of heterodox social views, many of them unsanctioned by any conceivable reading of his works, and the owner of a proud and sad biography which is only just becoming available for a relatively fair interpretation. So Ruskin the cultural icon constantly obtrudes on Ruskin the writer and Ruskin the man.
Even the evidence of precisely how and where Ruskin has been read...
[The entire page is 3200 words long]
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