I haven’t actually started the book yet, but the introduction by Clive Wilmer is so remarkable that I just had to say something now. (It’s a Penguin Classics edition, ISBN 0-14-043211-6.)
I had never heard of Ruskin until I read Judith Brown’s biography of Gandhi. (Ah, if only my parents had EDUCATED THEMSELVES lol. I wouldn’t have had to discover all this for myself.) In this biography, she said two of Gandhi’s most important influences were Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. I got them both – along with a number of other related works – and I’m gradually working through my TBR (or what’s left of it after I threw most of it away a few months ago).
So a few days I finally picked up the Ruskin. How it survived all the TBR cuts between when I got it and now I don’t know, but it did. And I am SO GRATEFUL. Clive Wilmer’s introduction, all by itself, is an education and a half. Who is this guy? Why have I never heard of him before? There’s a note about him in the book: he works as a freelance poet, critic, lecturer and broadcaster. Oh my GOD. He is on point and on task. He knows whereof he speaks. I thought at least he must have the Nobel Prize for Journalism or something. That’s a joke.
Anyway. So Wilmer pulls together the entire Scottish Enlightenment in a few choice phrases, summing up conservatives, liberals, Tories, socialists, communists, etc, and setting them all in their proper positions in the economic and social history of the 18th and 19th centuries in a manner that cannot be described otherwise than magisterial. Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Bentham, Mill, Carlyle, all troop forward for their introductions and stand on stage awaiting further instructions. Wilmer reveals how insane Ruskin was and also how well he understood and communicated what he believed. You wouldn’t think a guy with the first condition could possibly display the second, but evidently it can be done well. And not just well: better than anyone else before him.
It turns out Ruskin was a conservative socialist. When I say he was conservative, I mean he opposed the march of progress in its invention of factories and modes of production that alienated the worker – and here we see the socialism – from the result of his work. According to Wilmer, this was a problem that bothered Smith as well as Ruskin and Marx. But the point is: Ruskin was a MORALIST. He took morality seriously. For these others, morality was really secondary to their primary goals (if it was even that high on their personal list).
I’m going to leave you with one quote: “He \[Ruskin\] detested both liberty and equality, blaming them, more than privilege, for the injustices he condemned. Only those who held power by right, as he saw it, could be moved by a sense of duty to serve and protect the weak. This is a side of Ruskin that is likely to confuse and even repel the modern reader, in particular the radical who finds his apparent socialism attractive.”
lol well that’s enough for now. A deep bow to Wilmer for what I’ve read so far of the introduction, and I hope this inspires all of you to get the book and read it thoroughly!!
by tolkienfan2759