January 1900. Henry Wilson, the Arts & Crafts architect, was sitting in his London club when he learned from a fellow member that John Ruskin had died. "Ruskin is dead?" he asked, rhetorically. A pause. "Thank God. Give me a cigarette." Stephen Wildman, curator of the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, tells this story with a somewhat perverted relish. Ruskin bestrode the Victorian worlds of art, architecture, culture, political economy and morality like some supremely elegant, if fiery, colossus. Wildman is a Ruskinite dedicated to conserving the memory of this misunderstood and thoughtlessly maligned genius. Yet his charge was admired and reviled in equal measures. In any case, as everyone in the know knew, the great prophet, seer, critic - what had you - was, for the last decade of his life, mad. His flame had long burned out by the time Henry Wilson lit his celebratory gasper. And yet, curiously, even while metropolitan arty-smarties sneered, Ruskin was being hailed as a champion and prophet by aspiring left-wing politicians and working men up and down the country in institutes and clubs that bore his name.

Today, John Ruskin, who died on January 20, 1900, is known, if he is known at all, as champion of Turner, patron of the Pre-Raphaelites, but mostly as the ultra-refined aesthete who proved incapable, for whatever reason, of consummating his ill-starred marriage to Euphemia Chalmers Gray. She was the society beauty who eventually ran off with John Everett - later Sir John - Millais, painter of such sudsy stuff as Bubbles and The Soldier's Farewell. Ruskin is, however, about to be resurrected through a major exhibition of his life and work curated by Stephen Wildman, Robert Hewison and Ian Burrell at the freshly reconstituted Tate Britain on London's Millbank.

By the end of this year, Ruskin's name might just become familiar to a generation for whom he means little or nothing. Yet how can anyone get the measure of a man whose hugely influential writings are as obscure today as those of the anonymous authors of the Dead Sea scrolls were until unearthed? But, like those ancient authors, Ruskin, for all his loquaciousness and encyclopaedic breadth of thought, had ultimately one simple and life-affirming message to leave behind him: "There is no wealth but life," he wrote, an aphorism of great simplicity and equal profundity, and crafted with passionate economy by one of the most eminent Victorians of all, one who sought neither fame nor honour.

He was admired by Gandhi, Tolstoy and Proust. His ideas on political economy, which gradually became more important to him than his prolific writing on art, became gospel for the Labour Party in Britain between 1900 and 1950; they were put into action by William Beveridge (universal education) and Nye Bevan (a national health service). He was a champion, albeit in a gallant, white-knight-on-a-horse manner, of women's rights. He wrote one of the most inspiring and effective of all political and economic manifestos, Unto This Last, published in book form in 1862.

Ruskin's was a complex and massive genius. He was neither an academic nor a specialist, nor wanted to be either. He represented, perhaps, the very last of a generation for whom everything connected - poetry, prose, geology, ancient myths, art, architecture, science, politics - and which was pushed into the shadows by the 20th century's mechanistic need for specialisms and pseudo-sciences. A precursor of the welfare state, and inspiration to liberal socialists around the globe, Ruskin described himself as a "violent Tory of the old school". He could be contrary, at once radical and conservative, brilliant and absurd; perhaps this is to be expected of a man who was fundamentally an artist with an eagle's eye, a secular prophet who wrote like an archangel might, if only an archangel could.

In our own demeaning new age of deregulation, privatisation, commercial sponsorship, globalisation, of "brands", dumbing down, the de-skilling of workforces, private finance initiatives, the rise of a mass, US-inspired culture, our cultural mandarins' obsession with "accessibility" (for which read "bread and circuses"), Ruskin, who wanted us to aim for the stars, seems unhappily irrelevant. Even so, every squeaky-clean young member of the New Labour government ought to be given a copy of Unto This Last to read - via the net or email, if they find books too old a concept - before they consider legislation brought before them in parliament.

They will certainly get to hear something of Ruskin in the coming year as he emerges from behind the cloud of Wilson's cigarette smoke. Every member of Clement Attlee's cabinet in the Labour governments of 1945-51 would have been aware of Ruskin, and most probably have read him, too.

Given his colossal influence and intriguing genius, where has Ruskin been this past century - save in the names of south London streets, of a few down-at-heel working-men's clubs in an age when we're all supposed to be middle class, and of that outgrowth of prickly late-Victorian red-brick buildings forever boarded up and due to be replaced any moment by a drive-thru McDonald's or anonymous distribution depot?

Ruskin's memory, however, has also lived on in the minds of those who have discovered this extraordinary man and original thinker for themselves. They include the likes of Hewison, Wildman and Warrell, and a core of dedicated Ruskinites harumphing around the globe. My own voyage around this uncategorisable Victorian began as a teenager when walking in the Lake District. I imagined myself following in the footsteps of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey, of Hazlitt and De Quincey, when I came across Brantwood, Ruskin's picturesque home on the banks of Coniston Water, without knowing who Ruskin was. Unlike Coleridge and Wordsworth, he wasn't taught at school, and figured neither in my local nor my school libraries. I took Brantwood, with its then overgrown gardens and general state of shabby yet pleasing decay, to be either an old person's home or the sort of windy, rattly house to which Catholic children are sent on retreats by well-meaning priests.

Inside, a man in damp tweeds and a beard sold me a red clothbound copy of Unto This Last for 40p. I sat in the slanting, slate chair Ruskin had made for himself beside a stuttering waterfall among the ferns that brushed the forlorn gardens, and read that book from cover to cover. It had been a Johannine conversion on the road to Coniston. Unto This Last explained, in language far greater than that of Wordsworth or Southey, and the equal of Coleridge, how it was possible to reconcile a Christian upbringing with a belief in radical politics, equal opportunities for all and a love of art. Only connect . . . and did Ruskin make the connections.

At university, I bought as many second-hand copies of Ruskin's works as my grant would allow, which was ultimately far more than a shelf-full. Wonderful tomes such as The Seven Lamps Of Architecture, The Stones Of Venice and Sesame And The Lilies went for 25, 30, and very occasionally 60 pence in a green George Allen hardback edition. In my third year, I was sold the handsome Cook & Wedderburn library edition of Ruskin for approximately 38 ¹/2 pence a volume (there are 39 of them). The bookseller had just cleared a houseful of unwanted books. Here came that odd undergraduate looking for Ruskin again. Just take them . . . 15 quid the job lot.

Just before Christmas last year, I visited Brantwood for the first time in a long while. Lottery grants have seen the house Ruskin bought in 1871 come to life under the care of its knowledgeable and likeable curator, Howard Hull, and the Ruskin Foundation. The gardens promise to blossom healthily this spring, to become again the botanical laboratory Ruskin wanted them to be: he was an early champion of ecology and conservation. Just inside the back door (main entrance for the public; 35,000 visitors a year, with a further 15,000 rambling up and through the steep-sided 250-acre Brantwood estate alone) is a healthily-stocked bookshop. Those green Ruskin editions are on sale today for up to £35 each. A complete set of Cook & Wedderburn goes, I learn, usually in auctions, for upwards of £2,000. A pantheon of biographies has been published over the past decade, Tim Hilton's two-parter perhaps the best. Clearly there are people who value Ruskin - I met a couple of dozen at a Ruskin seminar held in the New Town-style architecture of Lancaster University last December - and each of them appears to have undergone much the same conversion on the road to Coniston as I did.

At Brantwood, Ruskin's beginning and end meet. I lay on the bed in the small, fire-lit room in which he died. Beyond the window and across the darkness of the long lake loomed the snow-capped peak of the Old Man of Coniston. Holding his cousin Joan Severn's hand, this was the last sight Ruskin saw - this and floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall Turner watercolours (sadly, long since gone). The bedroom he retreated to in the decade of his largely silent madness connected the reality of the Lake peaks with the spirited drama of Turner's Alpine landscapes.

It had been as an eloquent defender of Turner's reputation that the young Ruskin made his mark as author of the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843, and began his grand intellectual tour of art, architecture, politics, economics and social welfare. Ruskin was aged 24 then, and only recently down from Christ Church. He had taken more than a year out in the middle of his studies to travel across Europe, by carriage, with his devoted and evangelical parents, John James and Margaret. These two, married late, were first cousins. Scots, they met in Edinburgh. John James went on to make a fortune in the sherry trade as a partner of Ruskin, Telford & Domecq. He bought books and paintings. John - born in Bloomsbury in 1819, and brought up in Herne Hill and Denmark Hill in what was once sylvan south London - was their only son. Margaret hoped he would enter the church and ultimately, so John said, become an archbishop. Always a great preacher - in later life, his lectures on art, life, the universe etc were highly animated and enthusiastically attended - he was to question the orthodoxies of the Christian religion in which he had been so assiduously brought up. His religious doubts were later to contribute to the loss of the love of his life, the young Anglo-Irish evangelical Rose La Touche (1848-1875), which loss led to madness.

Ruskin's time off from Oxford was occasioned by the news that his first love, Adèle Domecq, one of the three beautiful Parisian daughters of his father's Spanish business partner, had married a rich French count. Rejection hit Ruskin hard. He took love seriously and fell dangerously ill. Yet what was the gorgeous, cosmopolitan Catholic Adèle to make of this thin, if handsome, and awkward Protestant intellectual? He must have been as remote to her as later he proved to be to his wife. His sanity and health were ultimately restored through a trip to the Alps - he was to become an eminent amateur geologist, and resorted to sorting rocks and stones whenever unreason or unwanted guests threatened - and then to his beloved Venice. By this time, he had met JMW Turner. The miserly and misanthropic Cockney artist accepted the adulation and generosity of the Oxford-educated dandy, and brought him, at first a little grudgingly, into the extraordinary worlds of his London house in Queen Anne Street - crowded with his "children", his own paintings - and of his imagination. Inspired by Turner's watercolours, the Ruskins would travel, as far as their old-fashioned carriage weighed down with improving books allowed, to each and every site, many around Chamonix, where Turner had established his easel.

In 1841, John met the young Euphemia Gray, and wrote for her his popular and delightful fairytale, King Of The Golden River. His life was essentially happy at this point. He sat in his study at his parents' grand and well-staffed new house in its own grounds, with cats and dogs, at Denmark Hill and wrote the first volume of Modern Painters, a defence of Turner, comparing his hero to the masters of the Renaissance. The author was "A Graduate of Oxford", for Ruskin felt that his youth would prejudice critics. In fact, Modern Painters was well reviewed. The complete work, a magisterial and occasionally baffling incursion into many aspects of art and society, was to cover five volumes and not to be completed until 1860.

By this time, Ruskin, always a prodigious and tireless author, had also written his hugely influential and best-selling The Seven Lamps Of Architecture (1849), The Stones Of Venice (first volume, 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace), The Political Economy Of Art and the essays, published in Cornhill Magazine, that formed his greatest book, Unto This Last. In 1844, John James, proud of his son's new reputation as a top-drawer author, bought him Turner's turbulent oil painting Slavers, a 250-guinea New Year's present (this ended up in Princeton, New Jersey, and can be seen here for the first time in a very long while at Tate Britain this spring). The next year, he made his first trip abroad without his parents. He travelled with two varsity pals overland to Venice; characteristically, he was upset by the new railway bridge crossing the lagoon from Mestre to La Serenissima, complaining in a letter to his father that the Grand Canal below Rialto was "adorned with gas lamps! in grand new iron posts of the last Birmingham fashion". He was learning to thunder as well as to reason.

And then came marriage to Effie Gray. Was it a mistake from the outset, the wealthy and successful young intellectual and author wedded in 1848 to a cute and ambitious Edinburgh society fledgling in need of a fortune? In hindsight, maybe. Ruskin's friend, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, described Effie as "a young, lively party, rather shrewd and rather hard", and "snobbish" to boot. Many years later, Ruskin wrote to Kathleen Olander, a London art student and the last of his loves, "I may tell you that the girl who bore my name was never my wife - I found two days before the marriage that her father had forced her to take me for my fortune - and I kept separate - thinking that in time she would come to care for me, but she would not - and left me as the world knows."

The truth is a matter for conjecture. John was always wrapped up in his protean labours, which must have seemed more than strange to the party-loving Effie. On holiday in Venice for the first time together, she wanted to shop - her greatest passions were frocks and jewellery - while John clambered over the front of St Mark's making accurate measurements of the fabulous Byzantine basilica. She shone most of all at Venetian soirées, as long as there were plenty of handsome young Austrian army officers to flirt with. At home, for the most part with John's parents in Denmark Hill, she was bored. The marriage lasted six years. There has been much unkind nonsense talked about the Ruskins' honeymoon. All we know for sure is that both John and Effie were sexual innocents. Neither had seen an adult naked before. Effie had her period, and John had a rotten headcold. Whatever didn't happen on their first night naked together, they agreed to try again in three years' time. However odd this seems to us post the Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles' first LP, they seemed, despite everything (or not quite everything), to be rather happy with one another.

John, though, was more married to his work than to Effie, who had nothing much to do. In 1854, they went with the impish and ambitious young painter, John Everett Millais, on what proved to be an ill-fated trip to Scotland. At Glenfinlas falls, Ruskin posed for Millais. The commission, a portrait in oils, was to help establish one of the group of young radical painters, who included Rossetti and Holman-Hunt and who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelites. Not unprofitably, they had chosen Ruskin as their mentor. Ruskin taught Millais much about how to see and how to draw: Millais had eyes only for Effie, with whom he fell in love. His ardour was appreciated. Shortly afterwards, Effie sued for divorce, won on the grounds of non-consummation and her husband's "impotence". Effie married Millais the following year. Ruskin was, as his parents knew, rather relieved. He had never really been in love with his wife. Now, he could get back to his work without disturbance.

Tragically, the consequences of the divorce came to haunt Ruskin some years later, after he had fallen deeply in love with Rose La Touche. The La Touche parents admired Ruskin and invited him often to their grand home at Harristown in Ireland, and Mrs La T fell rather in love with John, too, as many women did - Kate Greenaway was probably the last - but for her he felt nothing more than friendship. She was herself five or six years younger than Ruskin, and determined to separate the lovers before their relationship went too far. John had, in fact, proposed to Rose in 1866. She was just 18, and said she would give her 47-year-old suitor an answer when she was 21. The long wait caused Ruskin no end of mental anguish. Meanwhile, Mrs La Touche wrote to Effie Millais asking for details of her divorce.

By then, Effie was a hardened woman, in love with fame and money, who liked nothing better, says Stephen Wildman, than to attend some of John's lectures with Millais. Spitefully, the money-crazed couple sat in the front row, glaring at the extraordinary man in front of them and hoping, in vain, to put him off his stride. Effie - who knows why? - wrote back to Mrs La Touche, describing her former husband as "unnatural".

It was an odd business. If Ruskin was indeed potent, was Effie then a bigamist and her many children with Millais technically bastards? Or, from the La Touche perspective, might it also mean that if John produced children with Rose, they would be illegitimate?

Ruskin, meanwhile, insisted to his friends that he was far from impotent, that he was in these matters a "follower of Rousseau": he masturbated. Where he had not loved Effie, he clearly loved Rose, and not just the idea of her, as unfeeling biographers have suggested: just look at the beautiful drawings he made of her. Mrs La Touche, with help from Mrs Millais, poisoned Rose's troubled mind. Rose rejected John, only to ask for him again and then again over several years as she grew increasingly sick in mind and heart. He rushed to Ireland when she was very ill to cradle her in his arms. She haunted his dreams. He took to painting roses (he was always a very fine painter). Rose died in 1875, and although Ruskin tried even quite late in life to find a romantic young woman to replace her in his heart, he never really did. Rose became the thorn in his side that hurt him to the point where he crossed the border of sanity to escape the pain.

Ruskin's problem with women lay partly in the fact that he never met his match. Perhaps as a precocious only child, he was self-absorbed and quietly egotistical. Yet what woman ever really challenged him, or offered back the powerful love he offered them? Year by year, he retreated into a world of ever younger women, the strange "vice" of Victorian men of Alician taste. Even so, during these tumultuous years, Ruskin wrote many of his greatest letters, essays and books, gave his greatest lectures, and became one of the truest as well as the greatest radicals of his day. An unlikely revolutionary, his increasing fascination with the workings of society and the political economy, and what he did with that fascination, affects us to this day.

Of the four essays that comprise Unto This Last, he wrote, justly, "I believe them to be the best, that is to say, the truest, rightest-worded, and the most serviceable things I have ever written; and the last of them, having had especial pains spent on it, is probably the best I shall ever write." What was so special about Unto This Last? What it did was to set out a "logical definition of wealth". Because there is ultimately no wealth but life, he argued the case for universal education "at government cost", for the establishment of "government manufacturies to compete honestly alongside private enterprise" (ie nationalised industries), for social security for the unemployed, and also provision for their education and training. He argued for the provision of "comfort and home for the old and destitute" (state pensions, sheltered housing). These were shocking, even unnatural demands, in laissez- faire, free-trade Britain. The rules of the economy were governed by the self-interest of Adam Smith's entrepreneurs, all working to the laws of supply and demand. Darwin's laws of natural selection, fully developed in The Origin Of The Species (1859), reinforced the message that an unbridled capitalist ordering of society was exactly as Nature intended.

Ruskin and Darwin had a great respect for one another, and visited each other's homes at Brantwood and Downe, Surrey. Yet, for Ruskin, the so-called laws of political economy were a clever, unfeeling nonsense. The political economy, argues Ruskin, is not so much a mechanism as an organism: "Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusions of the science, if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons." Modern political economy, he reasoned, assumes "not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton", and thus it "founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometric figures with death's-heads and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures." The theory, then, may be true in its own terms, says Ruskin, but is irrelevant to human life.

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