Ruskin frequently referred to Dickens 's works, considering Hard Times to be his greatest book, and once declaring that he knew Pickwick Papers almost 'by heart', and sending at least one of his own autographed books to Dickens as a gift ( Works, 34.613). His opinions of some of Dickens's other novels were less favourable, however: on seeing the advertisement for Barnaby Rudge Ruskin wrote that he hoped for better things from it than the 'diseased extravagance' of The Old Curiosity Shop, afterwards declaring that it was 'a stupid novel' ( Works, 36.15).
Ruskin believed that Dickens was a consummate performer who lacked subtlety and a nobility of style and sentiment, characterizing Dickens's prose style as a 'circle of stage fire', a method of calculated exaggeration designed to inflame the emotions of his readers ( Works, 17.31). Even the deliberate simplicity of Hard Times jarred because Ruskin believed that Dickens had exaggerated for effect, but he approved of its denunciation of selfishness and the corrupting power of money. Ruskin concluded that 'his view was finally the right one, grossly and sharply told' ( Works, 17.31), although he harboured suspicions that Dickens himself had cherished wealth sufficiently to court death with his exhausting but lucrative public readings from his own works.
Although Dickens was one of the most prominent of detractors of the Pre-Raphaelites, he and Ruskin concurred in commending governor Eyre's suppression of a native revolt in Jamaica in 1865 and, most importantly, in denouncing what Carlyle (1795-1881) termed the 'cash nexus' of Victorian England (see Dickens on Ruskin).
Ruskin described Dickens 's death as a 'frightful' blow, an 'infinite' literary loss; despite his admiration for Hard Times, however, and his admission that the novelist's work had constituted one of his own 'chief comforts and resoratives' ( Works, 35.303), Ruskin deprecated Dickens as:
a pure modernist-a leader of the steam-whistle party par excellence - and he had no understanding of any power of antiquity except a sort of jackdaw sentiment for cathedral towers. He knew nothing of the nobler power of superstition - was essentially a stage manager, and used everything for effect on the pit. ( Works, 37.7)