Ruskin and the Challenge of Modernity

Abstract

Ruskin called his first book Modern Painters, and made his name by establishing a visual aesthetic for the modern age. By the time he reached middle life, however, it was not altogether clear whether he spoke for modernity or for reaction. Was Unto This Last, his attack on the Political Economists that he published in middle age 150 years ago, the protest of an outraged conservative or the blueprint for a new sort of society? It was followed by a succession of attacks on key figures in the transition to a fully industrialized and secularized society: notably on Whistler and Darwin. By the end of his career, he was speaking of Kate Greenaway as if she had been a painter of Turner’s stature. This paper will argue that Ruskin’s apparent ambivalence is a mark not of uncertainty but of dissent: an attempt to define a distinctive course in the understanding and measure of cultural value.