ABSTRACT
John Ruskin and Venice, Ruskin and Florence, Ruskin and Verona, Ruskin and Oxford - these are familiar pairings, and they have often been examined. Ruskin’s changing relations with the heterogeneous culture of London and its outlying suburbs has seemed a matter of less consequence. Ruskin is haunted by more than one image of London, and in thinking of London as a blackened labyrinth of death and horror, he is not thinking of the London that formed his mind. He was born at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square. The cultural life of the Ruskin family at 28 Herne Hill was by no means confined to a diet of sermons, though they continued to seek out and enjoy the most fashionable preachers in the area. What is clear, however, is that for Ruskin and his kind, growing up in Camberwell or Herne Hill in the first half of the nineteenth century, life had a very different quality.
