Ruskinland: How John Ruskin Shapes our World

by Andrew Hill

• Part unconventional biography, part travelogue tracing the profound influence on how we look, live, work and think of Victorian critic, artist, activist and environmentalist John Ruskin The Ruskin Society Book of The Year. Who was John Ruskin? What did he achieve - and how? Where is he today? One possible almost everywhere. John Ruskin was the Victorian age's best-known and most controversial intellectual. He was an art critic, a social activist, an early environmentalist; he was also a painter, writer, and a determined tastemaker in the fields of architecture and design. His ideas, which poured from his pen in the second half of the 19th century, sowed the seeds of the modern welfare state, universal state education and healthcare free at the point of delivery. His acute appreciation of natural beauty underpinned the National Trust, while his sensitivity to environmental change, decades before it was considered other than a local phenomenon, fuelled the modern green movement. His violent critique of free market economics, Unto This Last, has a claim to be the most influential political pamphlet ever written. Ruskin laid into the smug champions of Victorian capitalism, prefigured the current debate about inequality, executive pay, ethical business and automation. Gandhi is just one of the many whose lives were changed radically by reading Ruskin, and who went on to change the world. This book, timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of John Ruskin's birth in 2019, will retrace Ruskin's steps, telling his life story and visiting the places and talking to the people who - perhaps unknowingly - were influenced by Ruskin himself or by his profoundly important ideas. What, if anything, do they know about him? How is what they do or think linked to the vivid, difficult but often prophetic pronouncements he made about the way our modern world should look, live, work and think? As important, where - and why - have his ideas been swept away or displaced, sometimes by buildings, developments and practices that Ruskin himself would have abhorred? Part travelog, part quest, part unconventional biography, this book will attempt to map a place where, two centuries after John Ruskin's birth, more of us live than we know.

Genres: Art

304 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2019

About the author

Librarian note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Natassja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful, witty, and a joy to read.

[Heather Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read around John Ruskin since I became rather obsessed with Pre-Raphaelites some years ago. What I knew of him was more to do with the scandal of his marriage break-up to Effy Grey, his support of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and that he was an art critic and had a lot to say about lots of things, not always very welcomed by others.

This book, while not technically his life story, deals mainly with his influence on others that is still in evidence today. Ruskin had much to say about industrialization and the lot of workers, education and what children should learn (very forward thinking) women, art, architecture, science and nature.

His own art is quite stunning. There are some colour plates in the book. However, I'd never seen Ruskin's drawings and painting until I attended an exhibition of his work (alongside those of other artists' work he'd collected - he was a big fan of Turner) at 2 Temple Place in London. I was quite knocked out.

Ruskin was his own man. He said what he thought, though was often contradictory and some of his views were quite shocking, especialy about slavery. He often came across as neurotic, perhaps stemming from his over bearing mother, and he was terrible at finishing things. His paintings were often left unfinished, perhaps because he'd painted the part that fascinated him, and his series of books dragged out over the years and he seemed incapable of getting those done.

In this book we find Ruskin travelling Italy, spending months there drawing, sometimes as buildings were being demolished in front of his eyes (he was a great believer in the preservation of buildings). His love life seemed doomed, for not only was there Effy, who eventually married John Millias, but there were other women he pursued which never reached satisfaction (and certainly not sexually). Ruskin suffered from mental health (it has been suggested he may have been bipolar), and towards the end of his life he certainly struggled. He was looked after by his cousin Joan who bore the brunt of his anger and moods.

The book gave me a great insight into Ruskin's life and his thoughts while the author interviewed today's artists, furniture makers, college principals and so on seeking Ruskin's legacy. At times I did find my mind wandering and wanting to get back to the man himself. I especially enjoyed reading the part where Ruskin and William Morris or Edward Burne-Jones featured. Ruskin and Morris, in particular had similar views on production and industry and of course Morris (who is my number one personal hero!) was a socialist.

So the reading of this book, while at times laboured (for me), meant I learnt a lot and that was the object of reading this.

[Candy Wood]

The cover image, a mural with a young Ruskin looking out, blue sky above and concrete parking lot below, neatly prepares readers for Andrew Hill’s look at the writer’s influence. The Americans who founded the town of Ruskin in Florida never met the 19th-century critic of art and society but tried to put his ideas into practice. Hill provides several examples of 21st-century enterprises that still follow at least some of Ruskin’s teachings. Because Ruskin’s interests and knowledge ranged so widely and his long sentences full of biblical references challenge most readers today, Hill notes that modern versions of his ideas are selective, sometimes involving misinterpretation. That means it may be going too far to say that “Ruskin shapes our world.” Still, Hill’s journalistic style, supported by interviews with academics and practitioners as well as extensive endnotes and illustrations, offers an entertaining, timely view of a controversial Victorian.

[John Kaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging read, ofr the most part, although I found some of the attempts to link Ruskin to the modern-day left-overs rather tame, by comparison with the robust handling of the years of Ruskin's own life: perhaps too much of the journalist in these.

[Bülent Duagi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most inspired by the idea that it’s vital to learn to see clearly in order to understand the world around us and that drawing can enable this kind of understanding.

[Rosemary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first crossed paths with Ruskin in 2009 when Tom Hollander sported a pair of muttonchops for Desperate Romantics. Since then Ruskin has been for me primarily the art critic who championed the Pre-Raphaelite bros, posing in front of some rocks for Millais and afraid of his wife’s pubic hair (apocryphal, and unfair to be honest). Andrew Hill wants to show us a more multi-faceted, even modern character than the dour, moralistic figure usually portrayed in depictions of Ruskin. Here we find Ruskin as draughtsman, woodchopper, hater of railways and democracy, molly-coddled child of a sherry merchant, would-be social reformer via his Guild of St George, blogger avant la lettre in his Fors Clavigera newsletter, ill-fated suitor of a dubiously young woman, and perhaps most surprisingly, a figure of the progressive left and inspiration to the first generation of Labour MPs. The book is full of insights into this often contradictory figure, which I must admit I enjoyed a lot more than Hill’s sections on Ruskin’s legacy in the 21st century.

[Cal Barton]

Contains sentences like: “He was a voracious collector and recorder of scenes that appealed to him, putting a premium on accuracy — which today Instagram users might hashtag #nofilter.”

And: “Like today’s Twitterati and online opinionistas, he often adopted an extreme stance for effect.”