Forty years ago, at an exhibition of Ruskin memorabilia, I was drawn to a large cardboard sheet covered with irregular pencil lines. Seen up close, the halting hand, once exquisitely controlled in drawing the spring of a Gothic arch or a wayside thistle, struggled to form two proper names: the lowest and the last of Ruskin's attempted signatures dropped off the edge of the page.

‘Dear me! I seem to have forgotten how to write my own name,’ Ruskin apologized to an autograph collector who had travelled to Brantwood, his Lake District home in his later years (35:xxxix). Just before lapsing into his last, largely mute decade, in country hallowed by the great English poet of memory, Ruskin had completed the triumphant close of Praeterita, the last words he ever wrote for publication. He had struggled to complete twentyeight of an originally projected thirty-six chapters of his autobiography, issued irregularly between 1885 and 1889, in lucid intervals between ever more frequent and incapacitating attacks of madness. The most devastating occurred soon after he drew a black line at the bottom of the last page and wrote, ‘End / Brantwood. / 19th June, 1889.’ Thereafter, until his death on January 20, 1900, he lived an essentially posthumous existence under the benign custody of his Scottish cousin, Joan Agnew Severn, who appears as a young girl in the final chapter of Praeterita.