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...