”Trade Unions of England – Trade Armies of Christendom, what’s the roll-call of you, and what part or lot have you, hitherto, in this Holy Christian Land of your Fathers? Whose is the wealth of the world but yours? Whose is the virtue? Do you mean to go on for ever, leaving your wealth to be consumed by the idle and your virtue to be mocked by the vile? The wealth of the world is yours; even your common rant and rabble of economists tell you that: “no wealth without industry.” Who robs you of it, then, or beguiles you? Whose fault is it, you cloth-makers, that any English child is in rags? Whose fault is it, you shoemakers, that the street harlots mince in high-heeled shoes and your own babies paddle bare-foot in the street slime? Whose fault is it you bronzed husbandmen, that through all your furrowed England, children are dying of famine?” (John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: 89th Letter, 1873)
John Ruskin, (1819 -1900), who lived much of his life in South London (Herne Hill and Camberwell), is best known for his work as an art critic and social commentator; he was also an author, poet and artist. Ruskin’s essays on art and architecture were very influential in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. As an Art critic, he was heavily judgmental. He supported the pre-Raphaelites when they were widely disapproved of as being too avant-garde, and was particularly outspoken in support of Millais’ paintings of Christ, which were generally condemned as blasphemous.
His books on architecture, The Stones of Venice and Seven Lamps of Architecture argued that art cannot be separated from morality, by which he meant that the arts should be the expression of the whole moral being of the artists, and of the quality of the society in which the artist lived. He believed that ‘man’ achieved ‘his’ own humanity through labour, but through creative labour, not drudgery. He attacked mechanisation and standardisation of goods; this led him increasingly into rebellion against 19th century capitalism. “Mens pleasure in the work by which they make their bread” lies at the heart of a just society, this was his underlying thesis. His view was that Capitalism was turning workers into machines: he viewed craft and artisan skill as vitally important, and looked back in some ways to the Middle Ages, to craft-based guilds. He also condemned the separation of manual and intellectual labour… “the workman ought to be often thinking, and the thinker often to be working…. As it is… the world is full of morbid thinkers and miserable workers.”
Ruskin was born in 1819, the son of an Evangelical Protestant mother who wanted him to be a Bishop. His father was a successful wine merchant whose art collection gave “an unquestionable tone of liberal-mindedness to [his] suburban villa”. Ruskin said his parents treated him “effeminately and luxuriously” by paying for his education, artistic tuition, travels across Europe and studies but “thwarted [him] in all the earnest passion and fire in life”.
His travels in Europe and studying at Oxford led him to launch himself into art and architecture criticism. Between 1843 and 1860 Ruskin worked on his huge multi-volume study of art history, Modern Painters. But he discovered he could not study and write about beauty without discussing the ugliness of urbanisation, and poverty in the Europe of his time, then rapidly industrialising as capitalism came into its fullest power. The conditions million lived under seemed contrary to his moral and aesthetic religious view of the world.
“In the late 1850s, Ruskin’s thoughts began to turn from the nonsensical religious analysis of art to an examination of the conditions under which art was produced. He contrasted the works of gothic beauty in Stones of Venice (1851-3) with the squalid uniformity and imitation of industrial British architecture. The relation of labourer to his work in industrial capitalist society meant that production was totally separated from the workers’ creative faculties and art had become bastardised displays in private galleries for the appreciation of a privileged few. Ruskin’s conclusion that artistic and social decline were due to political and economic conditions produced works that was of interest to later critics of capitalism; most notably the political reformists that emerged from the labour movement in the late nineteenth century, but also early socialists like William Morris.” (Colin Skelly)
In 1858, Ruskin was again travelling in Europe, when he experienced what he later described as the loss of his faith. The tour took him from Switzerland to Turin where he saw Paolo Veronese’s Presentation of the Queen of Sheba; the discovery of which painting, contrasting starkly with a particularly dull sermon, he later claimed led to his “unconversion” from Evangelical Christianity. But in fact he had doubted his faith for some time. He blamed Biblical and geological scholarship, that had undermined the literal truth and absolute authority of the Bible: “those dreadful hammers!” he wrote to Henry Acland, “I hear the chink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.” This “loss of faith” launched him into a serious crisis, including doubting much of his writing to date, which he now thought had been founded on a bed of lies and half-truths. (He later returned to Christianity.)
Following this crisis of religious belief Ruskin effectively abandoned art criticism at the end of the 1850s, moving towards commentary on politics, under the influence of his great friend Thomas Carlyle. Ruskin’s lectures began increasingly to be concerned with social relations; the one given at the Camberwell Working Men’s Institute, for instance, on January 24th, 1865, was entitled “Work and Play”, and took this theme: that work had to be useful, fulfilling and enjoyable.
Fundamentally Ruskin condemned the division of labour, which formed part of the heart of capitalism. In many ways he pointed the way for liberals and radicals towards socialist ideas without quite going there himself. His ideas were crucially influential on many radicals who became fouders of the ILP and other trade unionists, and most particularly on the development of William Morris, and through him the Arts and Crafts Movement. In Unto This Last he expounded his theories about social justice, which influenced the development of the British Labour Party and of Christian socialism.
“Ruskin, by around 1860 and the publication of his essays on political economy, Unto This Last, had reached the conclusion that the test of production and consumption was in its impact on human life and happiness. This was opposed starkly to the capitalist society in which he lived, of production for profit and subsequent overproduction amidst a grossly unequal society where the hardest poverty existed next to luxury and opulence. Though a very long way from any sort of socialist conclusions, Ruskin sought, against his inherited Tory political inclinations, to redefine the classical political economy of the era (not fundamentally different from the current orthodoxies). This laissez-faire, free trade political economy was, for Ruskin, a far too narrow reading of human nature, with the motive of human existence being reduced to the lowest terms of private gain and universal, supposedly “enlightened” selfishness. Despite the limited nature of these conclusions from a socialist perspective, they provoked an outcry from Ruskin’s contemporary ex-admirers who were alarmed at his straying beyond art in the application of his aesthetic and ethical values. A society which denied production for profit in favour of production for the benefit of humankind, would clearly not enable the privilege of a few to continue. Ruskin, however, never concluded that capitalist ownership of the means of production (whose political economy Ruskin thought was its ideological expression) was the defining feature of the existing condition of production. Instead, he concluded that the relinquishing of paternal responsibilities of industrial capitalists, no longer with a close pastoral tie to its labour force, was the problem (and here lies a possible link to later state capitalists and reformists who wanted the state to fill this role).”
Ruskin was a rebel against the idea of money wealth: “to leave this one great fact clearly stated: THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers, of love, of joy, and of admiration”.
But he was unable to break with the bourgeois conception of power, of enlightened elites who would lead; mainly because he was not able to realise the nature of class division and in the ownership and non-ownership of productive resources; failing to see a definite difference in interests between those who own property and derive privilege and those who, by their non-ownership of productive resources, are forced to sell their labour power for less than the value of what they produce.
“Upon the death of his father, Ruskin declared that it was not possible to be a rich socialist and gave away most of his inheritance. He founded the charity known as the Guild of St George in the 1870s and endowed it with large sums of money as well as a remarkable collection of art. He also gave the money to enable Octavia Hill to begin her practical campaign of housing reform. He also taught at the Working Men’s College, London and was the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, from 1869 to 1879, he also served a second term.
In 1871 Ruskin began publication of Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain. Between 1871 and 1878 it was issued in monthly parts and until 1884 at irregular intervals. Ruskin intended the work to be a “continual challenger to the supporters of and apologists for a capitalist economy”. It was Ruskin’s socialist writing that influenced trade unionists and political activists such as Tom Mann and Ben Tillett.
Ruskin was a weird mix, to our eyes: a railer against the dehumanising effect of capitalism and mass industrialisation, and a hater of some of the new technologies also because of the destruction of nature that was involved. He famously hated trains, especially when lines were run through countryside that he loved. “The valley is gone and now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour and every fool in Bakewell in Buxton,” ranted John Ruskin when a railway was first built in the 1860s through the peaceful Wye Valley, which runs through the Peak District National Park. He didn’t want more people to flock to wild places, and was undoubtedly elitist in some aspects, though he was in other ways egalitarian and pro-democracy… Ruskin also influenced the setting up of the National Trust, the National Art Collections Fund and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
Like many of the bourgeois radicals of the 19th and 20th centuries, he also supported imperialism and racial hierarchy: Ruskin was supported the savage suppression of the Jamaican Insurrection in 1865. Racist views were hardly unusual among such figures of the era…
Some folk see Ruskin “as a visionary, more the progeny of William Blake than a member of the Victorian establishment. He foresaw climate change in The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century – both as a physical threat, in industrial pollution, and a metaphysical one, as a “plague cloud made of dead men’s’ souls”.”
But he was also a technical innovator; using collage to create his letters to supporters and artisans: “Although he disdained new technologies such as the train, Ruskin did not reject other advances. He advocated the new medium of photography, and in his monthly newsletter to the working man, Fors Clavigera (Fate’s Hammer), he created what was in effect a 19th-century blog. Sitting at his desk with a pile of newspaper cuttings by his side, he worked through the day’s stories to surreal effect, creating new juxtapositions of imagery that augur the work of the modernists and even, perhaps, William Burroughs’ cut-ups.”
Ruskin continued to lecture in art, becoming Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University, and later in 1871, John Ruskin founded his own art school at Oxford, The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. The School challenged the orthodox, mechanical methodology of the government schools (the “South Kensington System”).
His lectures were often so popular that they had to be given twice—once for the students, and again for the public. Most of them were eventually published. He lectured on a wide range of subjects at Oxford, his interpretation of “Art” encompassing almost every conceivable area of study, including wood and metal engraving (Ariadne Florentina), the relation of science to art (The Eagle’s Nest) and sculpture (Aratra Pentelici). His lectures ranged through myth, ornithology, geology, nature-study and literature. “The teaching of Art…,” Ruskin wrote, “is the teaching of all things.” Ruskin was never careful about offending his employer. When he criticised Michelangelo in a lecture in June 1871 it was seen as an attack on the large collection of that artist’s work in the Ashmolean Museum.
In the July 1877 Fors Clavigera letter Ruskin launched a scathing attack on paintings by James McNeill Whistler exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, especially Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Ruskin accused Whistler of “ask[ing] two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”. Whistler filed a libel suit against Ruskin. Whistler won the case, which went to trial in Ruskin’s absence in 1878 (he was ill), but the jury awarded damages of only one farthing to the artist. Court costs were split between both parties. Ruskin’s were paid by public subscription; Whistler was bankrupted within six months. Ruskin’s reputation suffered from this episode, however, which may have accelerated his mental decline.
Ruskin founded a utopian society, the Guild of St George, in 1871 – a communitarian venture, with a hierarchical structure, with Ruskin as its Master, and dedicated members called “Companions” whose first loyalty was to Ruskin personally. Ruskin wished to show that contemporary life could still be enjoyed in the countryside, with land being farmed traditionally, with minimal mechanical assistance.
Ruskin purchased small parcels of land – initially in Totley, near Sheffield, later land was bought or donated at Wyre Forest, near Bewdley, Worcestershire; Barmouth, in Gwynedd, north-west Wales; Cloughton, in North Yorkshire; and Westmill in Hertfordshire.
Ruskin also tried to see traditional rural handicrafts revived, especially weaving.
Ruskin increasingly became subject to depression and then mental health problems, and for much of the last 20 years of his life felt haunted by a sense that he had failed in the causes he had adopted. He died at his home in Brantwood in the Lake District in 1900.
Ruskin’s legacy was strong in the last decades of his life and the early part of the twentieth century, in the Labour movement and in conservation and housing; many town planners acknowledged his influence. A number of Utopian socialist Ruskin Colonies also attempted to put his political ideals into practice. These communities included Ruskin, Florida, Ruskin, British Columbia and the Ruskin Commonwealth Association, a colony which existed in Dickson County, Tennessee from 1894 to 1899.
But interest in him and his ideas has declined somewhat in the last half century; it is also likely that many of the movements and organisations that he did inspire would disappoint him; in the way they operate. During his own life he as critical of architecture developments that acknowledged his influence, claiming they paid lip service to form but failed to arise from a true understanding or feeling for the intellectual basis behind it.
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An entry in the
2018 London Rebel History Calendar
LONDON RADICAL HISTORIES 
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