JOHN RUSKIN (1819–1900)

Summary

Perhaps because it cost him the most effort, Ruskin once expressed the wish that, of all his writings, this essay should be preserved. Unreliable judges as authors often are of their own work, in this case Ruskin's wish was eventually to be fulfilled. The circumstances surrounding its initial publication were, however, inauspicious. ‘Ad Valorem’ is the fourth and last of a series of pieces written for the Cornhill Magazine in 1860; they produced so adverse a reaction from the readership that the editor, Thackeray, declined any successor. It was seventeen years before a second edition of the pieces, collected under the title Unto This Last (1862), appeared. Thereafter, its reputation soared. A survey of London libraries in 1894 revealed it to be the best-read work of ‘the most popular author who deals with political economy and sociology’ (‘What London Reads’, London (19 April 1894) p. 243), while a questionnaire circulated to Labour Members of Parliament in 1906 showed that Ruskin was the most frequently cited influence on their thinking.

It seems likely that if he provided these MPs with the foundations of an economic strategy (and it was by the older, not the younger ones he was most mentioned), it was as a moralist, not as a social scientist. Ruskin had little interest in the workings of the nineteenth-century economy compared with the vision he offered of a world in which production and consumption were but components of an absolute moral economy.