This 1898 volume provides a brief biography of the art critic and social theorist, with an extensive look at his influential views on social reform.

In the first book to analyse the form and influence of Ruskin's social theory, Gill Cockram looks at Ruskin's significant contribution to social and intellectual thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In a field often overlooked by 19th century historians, "Ruskin and Social Reform" clarifies for the first time how Ruskin's social theory was disseminated to a much wider readership than was evident in the mid-nineteenth century and how it was that Ruskin achieved great prominence as a social philosopher. Cockram examines the chronological development of Ruskin's thought and establishes the extent of his influence among the nascent labour movement. It was the support of a thinker as original and as unconventional as Ruskin that helped to challenge the laissez-faire conformities of classical economics and launched the quest to find a more ethical and humane basis for social policy-making.

Excerpt from John Ruskin: Social Reformer A book which professes to be primarily an exposition of Mr. Ruskin's social teaching may seem at first sight to be needless and unprofitable. No master of impassioned prose has endowed his writings with more perspicuity of meaning and more force of utterance, or used a fuller liberty of reiteration in placing his chief thoughts before the reading public. And yet these very qualities of brilliance and amplitude have helped to hide from many the supreme value of Mr. Ruskin's criticism of life, especially in reference to social reform, by giving too great emphasis and attractiveness to unrelated individual thoughts, set in single jewelled sentences, or in purple patches, and by thus concealing the consistency of thought and feeling which underlay and gave intellectual unity and order to his work. Though Mr. Ruskin, like Matthew Arnold, would probably disclaim the title of a system-maker, as implying too mechanical a conception of his intellectual life, and though his mode of composition seldom leans towards severity of arrangement, yet no great modern thinker exhibits in his writings a more definite and conscious adjustment of ideas, both in the order of their growth and in the maintenance of their relations towards one another. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.