‘Arcadias of Pantomime’: Ruskin, Pantomime, and The Illustrated London News

Abstract

John Ruskin enthusiastically attended the theatre throughout his life, particularly enjoying pantomimes. As a child, Ruskin found every pantomime ‘a matter of intense rapture’;¹ as an old man, he still enjoyed it as one of his few untarnished delights.² But in addition to his own pleasure in theatrical entertainment, because pantomime reaches all classes, it is for Ruskin a perfect popular cultural reference to illustrate his points in urging a more just society. His books for working class readers Fors Clavigera and Time and Tide both depend on analyses of fanciful pantomimes to make their arguments. In these and other works, Ruskin wants most for theatre to provide a link to the world outside, not, as one might think, to represent that world more accurately or realistically and also not simply to function as a didactic tool telling moral stories, but rather to make manifest in performance the possibility of other ways to act. In other words, as I have written elsewhere, for Ruskin the enactment of a fictional existence, identity, or idea on stage momentarily realizes it.³