The Social and Economic Works of John Ruskin

John Ruskin was over forty years old and well-established as an art critic when he published, in the Cornhill Magazine, the four essays on political economy which, two years later, were brought together in book form under the title Unto This Last. His views were violently repudiated by the majority of the Cornhill’s readers, and Thackeray, the famous novelist who was its editor, was forced, after the third essay had appeared, to curtail what Ruskin had clearly intended to be a longer exposition of his ideas. Most reviewers of the published book also found the ideas expressed either repugnant or incomprehensible. The strength of the reaction may have owed something to the fact that Ruskin’s early readers were unprepared for what most of them must have seen as an abrupt shift in the focus of his attention. Yet in many ways Unto This Last was the logical outcome of Ruskin’s experience. As attentive readers of Modern Painters and the Political Economy of Art (first published in 1857 and later reprinted as A Joy for Ever) would have already noted, he had long been convinced that high artistic achievement was only possible in a society in which the relations between rich and poor were based on justice and that justice was in short supply in capitalist Britain. Indeed, Ruskin would have directly confronted the issues raised in Unto This Last much earlier in his career had it not been for his scruples about offending his beloved father.

A Joy for Ever began life as two lectures given in Manchester in July 1857. Edited and expanded, they were then reprinted in the same year under the title The Political Economy of Art. There were two further editions printed in 1867 and 1868. Then, in 1880, Ruskin added three other short lectures, only the first two of which were strictly relevant to the central themes of the book, and reissued it under its new title. In the preface to the edition of 1880 Ruskin claimed that the original essays contained the substance of all his subsequent social teachings ‘first undertaken systematically and in logical sequence’. This was not an idle claim, although it may not seem obvious to the casual reader. Later writings, such as Unto this Last, can make a more immediate impact because they confront the question of capitalism and its social concerns head on, whereas in A Joy for Ever, Ruskin was concerned with the much more specific question of art and its production in modern times and the wider issues are discussed in this context. The specificity of the book’s theme is probably the chief reason why it attracted less hostile comment from those contemporaries who poured such bitter scorn on the later writings. It is also why it is less well known today. Yet A Joy for Ever merits the attention of anyone with an interest in Ruskin’s thinking, for what it lacks in directness it frequently makes up for in terms of subtlety.

Ruskin’s first great assault upon the ethical foundations of the economic society of his day and upon the classical economic reasoning which sustained it, appeared in a series of essays in the Cornhill Magazine in 1860. They attracted a great deal of unfavourable comment and Ruskin was forced to stop contributing to the magazine after four essays had appeared. Nonetheless, he was convinced that these essays ‘contained better work than most of my former writings and more important truths than all of them put together’ and, besides issuing the offending essays as a book under the title Unto This Last in 1862, he also ‘resolved to make it the central work of my life to write an extensive treatise on Political Economy’. He was then encouraged by J. A. Froude, the eminent historian who edited Fraser’s Magazine, to try his hand again at ‘this dangerous subject’ and published four more essays which he thought of as a preface to a greater work. But Ruskin’s ideas were no more acceptable to the public than before and he was again stopped after the fourth essay. Discouragement, the death of his father and other distractions meant that the essays were then laid aside (Preface, para. 20). They were not published in book form until 1872, by which time Ruskin had recognized that the comprehensive treatise he had envisaged would never be written. Apart from adding a few explanatory notes and a preface, the only significant change made by Ruskin was to divide the original four essays into six chapters.

Time and Tide originated as a series of letters which Ruskin addressed to one Thomas Dixon, a working man from the North East of England. The letters, written in 1867 in the context of the struggle over the Reform Act of that year which gave some working men the vote for the first time, were originally published in newspapers, principally the Manchester Daily Examiner and Times and the Leeds Mercury. They were first published in book form in the same year. Like everything else which Ruskin published, they were very carefully wrought pieces and they were revised before being issued in book form. Nonetheless, they retain a great deal of the informality of the epistolary style, including many asides and digressions. Since Ruskin was an excellent letter writer, they provide an entertaining way of entering into some of the most central aspects of his social ideas and, like The Crown of Wild Olive, Time and Tide provides a fine introduction to the more complex and analytical works such as Munera Pulveris.

The Crown of Wild Olive is a book written in a different style to Ruskin’s earlier, and better known, socio-economic writings, Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris. The latter were written as essays in the heavyweight journals of the day and they represented Ruskin’s attempt to challenge conventional political economy, and the business ethics derived from them, by subjecting the assumptions upon which they were based to close scrutiny. Despite the brilliance of Ruskin’s writing, to be fully appreciated both books, and more especially Munera Pulveris, need the same careful and attentive reading as any formal economics text.

William Smart (1853–1915) became Professor of Political Economy at Glasgow University in 1896 and made numerous contributions both to economic theory and, through his well-known Economic Annals of the Nineteenth Century, to economic history. But, in the early 1880s when he wrote this piece on Ruskin, he was still employed in business. His short pamphlet originated as a lecture given to inaugurate the Ruskin Society in Glasgow and it is worth reprinting now principally because it offers a fine, early conspectus on Ruskin’s social thought which it places in the context of Ruskin’s life, developing interests, and schemes such as the famous St George’s Guild which he founded to try to demonstrate the practicality of his ideas. (Smart’s description of the Guild indicates that he was a functioning member of it.) It also gives the newcomer to Ruskin’s writings a good insight into the style and substance of Fors Clavigera, the long series of letters in which, in the 1870s, Ruskin concluded his attack on the economic foundations and the social philosophy of capitalism. In addition, the pamphlet contains brief, but clear and insightful, comments on a number of major Ruskinian themes such as the nature of wealth, usury and the use and abuse of machinery, which are still well worth reading today.