Social critic and reformer: Unto This Last[edit]
Whenever I look or travel in England or abroad, I see that men, wherever they can reach, destroy all beauty.
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Cook and Wedderburn, 7.V.422–3 (1860).
Although Ruskin said in 1877 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.[86]Following his crisis of faith, and influenced in part by his friend, Thomas Carlyle (whom he had first met in 1850), Ruskin’s emphasis shifted from art towards social issues from the end the 1850s. Nevertheless, he continued to lecture on and write about a dazzlingly wide range of subjects including art and, among many others, geology (in June 1863 he lectured on the Alps), art practice and judgement (The Cestus of Aglaia), botany and mythology (Proserpina, The Queen of the Air). He continued to draw and paint in watercolours, and to travel widely 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 eloquent style, writing now in plainer, simpler language, to communicate his message straightforwardly.[87]
There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the function of his own life to the utmost, has always the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.
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Cook and Wedderburn, 17.105
Ruskin’s social view broadened from concerns about the dignity of labour to consider wider 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 labourer from his product), and argued that the "science" of political economy failed to consider the social affections that bind communities together. Ruskin articulated an extended metaphor of household and family, drawing on Plato and Xenophon to demonstrate the communal and sometimes sacrificial nature of true economics.[88] For Ruskin, all economies, and all societies are ideally underwritten by a politics of social justice. Ruskin's 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 was published in a single volume in 1862.[89] However, its editor, William Makepeace Thackeray, was forced to abandon the series by the outcry of its largely conservative readership and the fears of a nervous publisher (Smith, Elder & Co.). The press reaction was hostile, and Ruskin was, he claimed, "reprobated in a violent manner".[90] His father also strongly disapproved.[91] 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."[92]
Ruskin’s political ideas, and Unto This Last in particular, later proved highly influential, praised and paraphrased in Gujaratiby Mohandas Gandhi, a wide range of autodidacts, the economist John A. Hobson and many of the founders of the BritishLabour party.[93] Ruskin believed in a hierarchical social structure. He wrote "I was, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school."[94] He believed in duties and responsibilities to, and under, God, and whilst 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.[citation needed]
Ruskin’s explorations of nature and aesthetics in the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters focused on Giorgione, Paolo Veronese, Titian and Turner. Ruskin asserted that the components of the greatest art are held together, like human communities, in quasi-organic unity. Competitive struggle is destructive. Uniting Modern Painters V and Unto This Last is Ruskin’s "Law of Help":[95]
Ruskin’s next work on political economy, redefining some of the basic terms of the disicipline, also ended prematurely, when Fraser's Magazine, under the editorship of James Anthony Froude, cut short his Essays on Political Economy (1862–63) (later collected as Munera Pulveris (1872)).[96] Ruskin explored further political themes in Time and Tide (1867),[97] his letters to Thomas Dixon, the cork-cutter in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear with a well-established interest in literary and artistic matters. In these letters, Ruskin promoted honesty in work and exchange, just relations in employment and the need for co-operation.
Ruskin’s sense of politics was not confined to theory. On his father’s death in 1864, Ruskin inherited a considerable fortune of between £120,000 and £157,000 (the exact figure is disputed).[98] This considerable inheritance from the father he described on his tombstone as "an entirely honest merchant"[99] gave him the means to engage in personal philanthropy and practical schemes of social amelioration. One of his first actions was to support the housing work of Octavia Hill(originally one of his art pupils), by buying property in Marylebone for her philanthropic housing scheme.[100] But Ruskin’s endeavours extended to a shop selling pure tea in any quantity desired at 29 Paddington Street, Paddington (giving employment to two former Ruskin family servants) and crossing-sweepings to keep the area around the British Museumclean and tidy. Modest as these practical schemes were, they represented a symbolic challenge to the existing state of society. Yet his greatest practical experiments would come in his later years.
Lectures in the 1860s[edit]
Ruskin lectured widely in the 1860s, giving the Rede lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1867, for example.[101] He spoke at the British Institution on 'Modern Art', the Working Men’s Institute, Camberwell on "Work" and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich on 'War'. Ruskin’s widely admired lecture, Traffic, on the relations of taste and morality, was delivered in April 1864 at Bradford Town Hall, to which he had been invited because of a local debate about the style of a new Exchange building.[102] "I do not care about this Exchange," Ruskin told his audience, "because you don’t!"[103] These last three lectures were published in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866).[104]
The lectures that comprised Sesame and Lilies (published 1865), delivered in December 1864 at the town halls at Rusholme and Manchester, are essentially concerned with education and ideal conduct. "Of King's Treasuries" (in support of a library fund) explored issues of reading practice, literature (books of the hour vs. books of all time), cultural value and public education. "Of Queens' Gardens" (supporting a school fund) focused on the role of women, asserting their rights and duties in education, according them responsibility for the household and, by extension, for providing the human compassion that must balance a social order dominated by men. This book proved to be one of Ruskin’s most popular books, and was regularly awarded as a Sunday School prize.[105] The book's reception over time, however, has been more mixed, and twentieth-century feminists have taken aim at "Of Queens' Gardens" particularly as an effort to "subvert the new heresy" of women's rights by confining women to the domestic sphere.[106]
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