The Ruskin Society Book of The Year. Who was John Ruskin? What did
he achieve - and how? Where is he today? One possible answer:
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 travelogue, part quest, part unconventional
biography, this book will attempt to map Ruskinland: a place where,
two centuries after John Ruskin's birth, more of us live than we
know.
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