John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, philosopher, prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
His writing styles and literary forms
were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel
guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed
sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural
structures and ornamentation.
The elaborate style that characterised
his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to
communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised
the connections between nature, art and society.
He was hugely influential in the latter
half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of
relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the
publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and
concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in
environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
Ruskin first came to widespread
attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended
essay in defence of the work of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the
principal role of the artist is "truth to nature". From the 1850s, he
championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work
increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the
shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art
at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing.
In 1871, he began his monthly
"letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published
under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–1884). In the course of this
complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his
ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation
that endures today.
Social Critic and Reformer: Unto This Last
Although in 1877 Ruskin said that in
1860, "I gave up my art work and wrote Unto This Last, . the
central work of my life" the break was not so dramatic or final. Following his crisis of faith, and influenced
in part by his friend Thomas Carlyle (whom he had first met in 1850), Ruskin
shifted his emphasis in the late 1850s from art towards social issues.
Nevertheless, he continued to lecture on and write about a wide range of
subjects including art and, among many other matters, geology (in June 1863 he
lectured on the Alps), art practice and judgement (The Cestus of Aglaia),
botany and mythology (Proserpina and The Queen of the Air).
He continued to draw and paint in watercolours, and to travel extensively
across Europe with servants and friends. In 1868, his tour took him to Abbeville,
and in the following year he was in Verona (studying tombs for the Arundel
Society) and Venice (where he was joined by William Holman Hunt). Yet
increasingly Ruskin concentrated his energies on fiercely attacking industrial
capitalism, and the utilitarian theories of political economy underpinning it.
He repudiated his sometimes grandiloquent style, writing now in plainer,
simpler language, to communicate his message straightforwardly.
Ruskin's social view broadened from
concerns about the dignity of labour to consider issues of citizenship and
notions of the ideal community. Just as he had questioned aesthetic orthodoxy
in his earliest writings, he now dissected the orthodox political economy
espoused by John Stuart Mill, based on theories of laissez-faire and
competition drawn from the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus.
In his four essays Unto This Last,
Ruskin rejected the division of labour as dehumanising (separating the labourer
from the product of his work), and argued that the false "science" of
political economy failed to consider the social affections that bind
communities together. He articulated an extended metaphor of household and
family, drawing on Plato and Xenophon to demonstrate the communal and sometimes
sacrificial nature of true economics. For
Ruskin, all economies and societies are ideally founded on a politics of social
justice. His ideas influenced the
concept of the "social economy", characterised by networks of
charitable, co-operative and other non-governmental organisations.
The essays were originally published in
consecutive monthly instalments of the new Cornhill Magazine between
August and November 1860 (and published in a single volume in 1862). However, the Cornhill's editor, William
Makepeace Thackeray, was forced to abandon the series by the outcry of the
magazine's largely conservative readership and the fears of a nervous publisher
(Smith, Elder & Co.). The reaction
of the national press was hostile, and Ruskin was, he claimed, "reprobated
in a violent manner". Ruskin's
father also strongly disapproved. Others
were enthusiastic, including Ruskin's friend Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, "I
have read your paper with exhilaration... such a thing flung suddenly into half
a million dull British heads... will do a great deal of good."
Ruskin's political ideas, and Unto
This Last in particular, later proved highly influential. The essays were
praised and paraphrased in Gujarati by Mohandas Gandhi, a wide range of
autodidacts cited their positive impact, the economist John A. Hobson and many
of the founders of the British Labour party credited them as an influence.
Ruskin believed in a hierarchical social
structure. He wrote "I was, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of
the old school." He believed in
man's duty to God, and while he sought to improve the conditions of the poor,
he opposed attempts to level social differences and sought to resolve social
inequalities by abandoning capitalism in favour of a co-operative structure of
society based on obedience and benevolent philanthropy, rooted in the
agricultural economy.
If there be any one point insisted on
throughout my works more frequently than another, that one point is the
impossibility of Equality. My continual aim has been to show the eternal
superiority of some men to others, sometimes even of one man to all others; and
to show also the advisability of appointing such persons or person to guide, to
lead, or on occasion even to compel and subdue, their inferiors, according to
their own better knowledge and wiser will.
— John Ruskin, Unto This Last: Cook
and Wedderburn 17.34
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