This Day in Literary History (John Ruskin, Influential But Troubled Art and Social Critic, Born)

Feb. 8, 1819—John Ruskin, a critic who trained his powers of observation on art and architecture before turning his attention to workplaces and natural landscapes endangered by industrialists, was born in the Brunswick Square section of his native London, England.

In college, I was exposed to Ruskin’s work in a course on Victorian literature. I confess that the critic did not make much of an impression on me then. 

Some of this may have had to do with Ruskin’s sometimes grandiloquent style (like many Victorians, he often preferred three adjectives when one would have done the trick just as well). But much of this may have involved my inability to appreciate a polymath who could do so much and affect so many people and across so many disciplines.

Initially, Ruskin gained fame as an advocate for landscape artist J.M.W. Turner. But in the second half of his career, he turned, with increasing dismay, toward the social and environmental havoc created by the Industrial Age, and promoted ideas later associated with the arts and crafts movement, the welfare state and the environmental movement.

A copious collection of watercolors owned by his father, a prosperous wine merchant, whetted Ruskin’s early interest in painting. While he did not pursue the visual arts as a career himself, what he learned along the way continued to inform both his writing routine and his prose for the rest of his life.

Like John Updike, Ruskin fashioned a style heavily dependent on what he saw. His work on Turner, for instance, recreates the painter’s textures and atmosphere almost as vividly as if one were in a gallery or museum. But, while Updike only made art criticism a small tributary in his copious work, Ruskin made it the current from which everything else he did flowed.

Henry James (another novelist fascinated by art) famously wrote that a fiction writer was someone on whom nothing should be lost. Ruskin was already pursuing this admonition on his own, in areas that became even more pronounced over time.

Modern Painters (1843), the first Ruskin title to attract the attention of the public, impressed the likes of novelists Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell. In it, he championed the work of Samuel Prout and Turner, and when the latter died in 1851 Ruskin performed a salutary service by cataloguing the 12,000 sketches the artists left the nation. 

The great transition in his career took place with the three-volume The Stones of Venice (1853). What began as a technical history of Venetian architecture soon broadened into a cultural and even social critique. The Italian city-state’s architecture, he felt, had declined as a result of aesthetic corruption. In parallel fashion, the anonymous guild craftsmen of the medieval period, animated by a pure faith, had given way to the materialism of the Renaissance artist. 

In laboring on this massive project, Ruskin couldn’t help feeling that what he saw applied just as strongly to the crass industrialism that had overtaken Britain:

“And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,-that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach to them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.”

Given such conclusions, in a recent “Masterpiece” column for The Wall Street Journal, Tristram Hunt, director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, labeled The Stones of Venice “a defining text of ethical socialism.” Designer William Morris was influenced enough by Ruskin’s preference for handmade over machine-made products to produce his own highly acclaimed books, wallpapers, textiles, ceramics, furniture, metalwork, and glass, and Ruskin further promoted this fledgling arts-and-crafts movement by founding the  Guild of St George in 1871.

Ruskin developed his critique of contemporary society more explicitly in Unto This Last (1860), which castigated the pillars of Victorian economy: free trade, competition and market economics. In contrast to the works of individual artisans, he decried the products of the Industrial Age as soulless and advocated for the dignity of labor: “In order that people may be happy at work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it.”

The environmental movement, too, received an early boost from Ruskin. A 2015 Atlantic article by Uri Friedman identified a February 1884 lecture by Ruskin on the “plague-wind” afflicting London as an early harbinger of climate change.  This environmental jeremiad remains powerful today:

“For the sky is covered with gray cloud;--not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. And everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do before a thunder-storm; only not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind. Dismal enough, had it been the first morning of its kind that summer had sent. But during all this spring, in London, and at Oxford, through meager March, through changelessly sullen April, through despondent May, and darkened June, morning after morning has come gray-shrouded thus.”

For all his brilliance, it was Ruskin’s misfortune that, though he had been trained to focus on things, he didn’t have a similar education when it came to the female form. His mother hovered around him constantly while he was at Oxford, limiting his opportunities to interact with women. 

He was utterly unprepared, then, when, nearing 30 years old, he wed Effie Gray. Six years later, the aristocrat Gray, childless, had the marriage annulled on the grounds that it had not been consummated. As she explained in a bewildered and angry letter to a friend: 

“Finally this last year he told me his true reason (and this to me is as villainous as all the rest), that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife is that he was disgusted with my person the first evening.”

Smirking among the intelligentsia increased when Effie married again to painter John Everett Millais and proceeded to produce eight children. Early speculation was that Ruskin was put off by her body odor or menstruation on the wedding night. But the most common speculation about the disastrous relationship was that, with his understanding of the female form confined to paintings and classical statues, the critic was too astonished by her genitalia.

The last decade of Ruskin’s life was marked by growing mental instability. He died in 1900. His life has undergone greater popular scrutiny in films like Effie Gray (2014), but it appears that scholars, too, are trying to come to grips with this complex and multi-sided Renaissance man.