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.
