ABSTRACT
In its closing years, Ruskin's life turned into a national institution. As recur rent bouts of insanity rendered him increasingly unable to speak, or write, his private identity was subsumed into that of his work. He was the aged Professor of the University of Oxford, the Master of the Guild of St George, the august author of a series of literary monuments - Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice, Fors Clavigera. The diverging academic disciplines of art history, literary criticism, political theory and history, claimed his intellectual authority or disputed its significance. Yet much of the critical response to Ruskin's presence in late nineteenth-century culture was formed by the sense of a vivid inner history. The openness of his works was at once political and personal, analytical and emotional. The consequences of this perception have often been a source of irritation to those who take Ruskin's writing seriously. It is exasperating to find that readers are so keenly interested in his life - his father and mother, his failed marriage, his frustrated love for Rose La Touche - and so little interested in the challenge of his work. It is a fascination that can all too easily slide into the pursuit of gossip. Nevertheless, these curious readers are not wholly mistaken. They are responding to something central to the energy of Ruskin's work, and its lasting importance. In this concluding chapter, I want to suggest that the engaging intimacy of Ruskin's writing has much to do with his preoccupation with the story of his own life, and particularly with the family dynamic that formed it. This is one of the ways in which he was most Victorian, for the nineteenth century was a period in which the story of the family was becoming public property. Patri archal and yet transformed by new roles for women, economically powerful but threatened by the pressures of capitalism, families were resented, cele brated, and examined as never before. Associated anxieties about gender, money and power are deeply inscribed in the art of the period. Yet Ruskin's response also shows him contributing to new patterns of thought, for few
were able to articulate the resonances of family narratives with Ruskin's breadth of insight. In constructing an identity as a critic, Ruskin created relations with art, and artists, that are closely bound up with these family stories. He wrote constantly about the family he had, and just as percipiently about the families he did not have. Imagined and real, these families people his life and work.
