Ruskin and Dickens: John Ruskin's Bicentenary

• Published in: Dickensian Vol. 115; no. 507; pp. 53 - 58
• Main Author: Tambling, Jeremy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London The Dickens Fellowship 01.04.2019
• Subjects: 19th century; Art criticism; Arts and crafts movement; British & Irish literature; Comparative analysis; Dickens, Charles (1812-1870); English literature; French literature; Influence; Literary criticism; Painters; Proust, Marcel (1871-1922); Realism; Ruskin, John (1819-1900)
• ISSN: 0012-2440

Ruskin responded to Dickens's death on 9 June 1870 in a critical vein, telling Charles Eliot Norton in a letter that Dickens was 'a pure modernist ... his hero is essentially the Ironmaster ... in spite of Hard Times he has advanced by his influence every principle that makes [life] harder ... the fury of business competition and the distrust of nobility and clergy' (37.7). Dickens's geological sense is implicit in the 'Megalosaurus' of the opening paragraph of Bleak House, and his response to nature was also keen, as in the description of the Alps which opens Book Two of Little Dorrit, but he rarely looks at nature without relating it to people, and their situations. The fascination with storms, in Turner, Dickens and Ruskin, is noteworthy: it is a reminder of the kinetic energy that marks all three, and of the attention to nature as an active force, in each: artist, novelist, social critic. Dickens and Ruskin alike criticised Henry Cole, who is certainly the Commissioner of Fact in Mr Gradgrind's classroom (Hard Times chapter 2).10 They saw Cole, an up-and -coming legislator of public taste who was to become the first curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum, as the establishment Utilitarian whose concepts of 'practical' design not only cut out imagination, but imposed a factory-created universal 'taste', implying a rule of sameness and control.