John Ruskin

John Ruskin: The Critic Who Attacked Capitalism

In June 1904 Henry Polak handed his friend a book at a South African railway station as the Johannesburg train pulled out. The friend was Mohandas Gandhi, the book was *Unto This Last*, and by the time the train reached Durban Gandhi had decided to reorganise his life. "It gripped me," he wrote. "I could not get any sleep that night." Within a day he had founded the Phoenix Settlement. The book's author had never been to India, was by then a broken recluse in the Lake District, and had begun his career as an art critic writing about watercolours.

A Wine Merchant's Son

He was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London, the only child of first cousins. His father, John James Ruskin, imported sherry and wine and made a fortune at it; his mother, Margaret Cock, was a Croydon publican's daughter. They educated him at home, through their own teaching and private tutors, before a spell at Thomas Dale's school in Peckham and study at King's College London.

He matriculated at Oxford in Michaelmas 1836 and came into residence at Christ Church as a gentleman-commoner. He won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1839, at the third attempt, and left in 1842 with an unusual honorary double fourth. The apparatus of the Victorian sage was already assembled: money, leisure, an eye, and no employer.

Modern Painters

In 1843 he published the first volume of *Modern Painters*, ostensibly a defence of J. M. W. Turner against critics who found his late work incoherent. It grew to five volumes over seventeen years and became something larger: an argument that art's obligation is "truth to nature," and that seeing accurately is a moral act rather than a technical one.

His commitment to Turner outlasted the polemic: after the painter's death he catalogued nearly twenty thousand Turner sketches, working on the Bequest at the National Gallery until May 1858. In May 1851 he wrote to *The Times* defending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood when everyone else was attacking it, and afterwards backed Millais, Holman Hunt, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and paid Elizabeth Siddal £150 a year.

The Nature of Gothic

*The Seven Lamps of Architecture* came in 1849 and *The Stones of Venice* in three volumes between 1851 and 1853. Buried in the second volume is a chapter called "The Nature of Gothic," which is probably the most consequential thing he ever wrote.

Its argument is deceptively simple. Gothic buildings are rough, irregular and imperfect because they were made by workmen free to think while working; industrial precision looks superior but is bought by reducing the man to a tool. The roughness of a medieval cathedral, on this reading, is the visible record of thousands of minds at work. Architecture had suddenly become a labour question.

Christian socialists at the Working Men's College reprinted the chapter. William Morris took it up as a founding text of Arts and Crafts.

Unto This Last

In 1860 the pivot completed itself. *Unto This Last*, four essays on political economy issued as a book in 1862, rejected laissez-faire capitalism outright — the doctrine that labour is a commodity priced by the market and that self-interest reliably produces the general good.

It is the book he is read for now. Gandhi extracted three principles from it — that individual good is contained in the good of all, that a lawyer's work is worth no more than a barber's, and that a life of manual labour is the worthiest — and paraphrased the whole thing into Gujarati as *Sarvodaya*, "the welfare of all," serialised in nine parts in *Indian Opinion* in 1908. It shaped John A. Hobson and the founders of the British Labour Party too.

Oxford, Hinksey, and a Pot of Paint

Made the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford by unanimous vote in August 1869, he gave his inaugural lecture at the Sheldonian on his fifty-first birthday, founded the Ruskin School of Drawing in 1871 with £5,000 of his own money, and lectured on everything from engraving to ornithology — sometimes twice a day, because the halls could not hold the crowds. Then, in 1874, he put undergraduates to work building a road at Ferry Hinksey, the theory of dignified labour tested on young gentlemen with spades. Among the diggers were Oscar Wilde and Arnold Toynbee.

Then, in July 1877, he attacked James McNeill Whistler's *Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket*, accusing the painter of asking "two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler sued. At the trial in November 1878, asked how long the painting had taken, Whistler said two days — a concession the defence used against the price. The jury found for Whistler and awarded him a farthing; the judge split the costs. Whistler was ruined; Ruskin's supporters paid his share by subscription. He resigned the Slade chair in 1879.

Rose La Touche and the Long Dark

The private catastrophe ran underneath all of it. His 1848 marriage to Effie Gray was annulled in 1854 for non-consummation, and Effie married Millais. In 1858 he met Rose La Touche, who was ten; he fell in love with her as she grew up, she refused him, and she died in 1875 at twenty-seven. His first major breakdown came in 1871 at Matlock, and after her death he attended séances trying to reach her.

He bought Brantwood on Coniston Water in 1871 for £1,500 and lived there from 1872. He founded the Guild of St George the same year — a utopian body against industrial capitalism, with himself as Master, funded by a £7,000 tithe of his own inheritance, holding land at Totley, Barmouth and Sheepscombe, and a museum for Sheffield's working men at Walkley. He gave away most of the £120,000-plus his father left him.

A final collapse on his 1888 European tour ended his working life. He died at Brantwood of influenza on 20 January 1900, aged eighty, and was buried at Coniston.

Why John Is Called a Genius

The distinctive faculty is a chain of inference nobody else could hold together: from the surface of a painting to the moral condition of the man who made it, and from there to the political economy that produced him. Ruskin looked at the carved imperfection of a Venetian arch and read out of it a theory of labour — then followed the argument, against his own class and income, all the way to a frontal attack on capitalism. His range was encyclopaedic rather than dilettante: geology, ornithology, mythology, architecture, economics, education. And the consequences are measurable — Morris and Arts and Crafts, the Labour Party's founders, Gandhi's Phoenix Settlement, and a set of ideas that anticipated environmentalism and ethical consumerism by a century.

The counter-case is not small. He was frequently and confidently wrong: his campaign against Darwin grew shrill, he could not see what the Impressionists were doing, and he retreated in later life to admiring children's book illustrators. His method was assertion — magnificent, but rarely argued in a form that could be tested. His inherited fortune insulated him from the economy he theorised about. The Whistler jury, however petty the damages, found against him, and posterity has sided with Whistler on what a painting is permitted to be. The Rose La Touche episode is disturbing on its own terms. His reputation collapsed after 1919 and took until the 1960s to recover.

Legacy

Cook and Wedderburn's Library Edition runs to thirty-nine volumes. Brantwood opened as a museum in 1934 and remains open. The Guild of St George still operates as an educational charity, its Sheffield collection now at the Millennium Gallery.

He is read now less as a critic of pictures than as the man who argued that how a thing is made tells you what the society that made it is worth — a claim that had to travel through Morris, through Labour, and through a train carriage in Natal before it took hold.

Achievements

• Newdigate Prize
• Notable work: Modern Painters
• Notable work: The Seven Lamps of Architecture
• Notable work: The Stones of Venice
• Notable work: Unto This Last