Elizabeth Gaskell’s House explores the friendship between the Gaskell family and John Ruskin in this exhibition as part of The Ruskin Bicentenary on 2019. Often at odds with their contemporaries, John Ruskin and Elizabeth Gaskell were controversial writers, often sharing the same ideals. Elizabeth openly took sides when Ruskin’s wife, Effie, left him, commenting in a letter that “…She really is very close to a charming character; if she had had the small pox she would have been