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
worl.
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.
- ISBN13 9781843681755
- Publish Date 7 February 2019
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Pallas Athene Publishers
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 304
- Language English