J.H. Whitley Lecture 2019 – John Ruskin’s political legacy

BORN in the same year as Queen Victoria, John Ruskin became one of the most widely-read critics and political thinkers of the Victorian age.  His ideas remained influential in the 20th century – making an impact on the likes of Gandhi – and are still relevant in the era of Extinction Rebellion, argued the Ruskin expert Howard Hull at the University of Huddersfield.

He was delivering the 2019 J.H. Whitley Lecture, which for the past eight years has taken place at the University in commemoration of a Halifax-born politician who was a highly-respected Speaker of the House of Commons in the turbulent 1920s.  In 2011, a collection of Whitley’s papers and books was deposited in the archives of the University of Huddersfield.

Howard Hull’s lecture was titled Riding the Storm: the political legacy of John Ruskin.  After the talk, J.H. Whitley’s descendant Mr John Whitley said that Ruskin’s ideas had been so influential on his grandfather, a Liberal MP, that he named his house Brantwood, after Ruskin’s dwelling on the shores of Coniston Water.

Today, the original Brantwood is a major visitor attraction in the Lake District and Mr Hull directs the trust that administers it.  He is also the Director of the Ruskin Foundation and during 2019, he is closely involved in commemorations of the bicentenary of the writer and critic’s birth.

The J.H. Whitley Lecture was one of 200 global events taking place and Mr Hull provided the large audience at the University of Huddersfield’s Heritage Quay archives centre with an overview and analysis of Ruskin’s life, ideas and writings and their continued relevance.

Mr Hull told how Ruskin, belonging to a wealthy family, was brought up as an artist and geologist and wrote about art and architecture before he broadened his horizons and he became a critic of the laissez-faire capitalism and industrialisation of the 19th century.

“The early influence of Wordsworth and the Romantic poets filled him with a profound sense of the divinity of creation while opening him up to a radical new interpretation of the nature of society,” said Mr Hull. 

Ruskin became a “publishing sensation” and his admirers included Charlotte Bronte, who said his writings gave her new eyes.

“Ruskin’s concern was people and it became his mission to change society for the better,” said Mr Hull.

“In a burst of creative thought over ten years he argued for such things as a minimum wage, free libraries, education for women, welfare for the sick and elderly, national insurance, fair trade, planning green belts and careers advice.”

But Ruskin – who described himself as both a Communist and “a violent Tory of the old school” – subscribed to no single ideology, said Mr Hull.  “Indeed, he firmly challenges the classic concept of the ideal as a form of slavery.”

Ruskin’s writings were highly influential on the founders of the Labour Party – far more so than Marx or the Bible – and Mr Hull went on to analyse “the connecting fabric of Ruskin’s ideas that made them so valuable to political reformers of so many different persuasions, especially in the early twentieth century, and which may explain why Ruskin is being looked at with interest again”.

He concluded his lecture with an analysis of the relevance of Ruskin to the contemporary movement, Extinction Rebellion.

John Ruskin had delivered an environmentalist lecture, titled The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, and it provoked a storm, said Mr Hull.

“Ruskin saw the link between the social ills of mankind and environmental ills.  He saw that the social ills were sicknesses of the spirit as much as of the body.  He saw clearly that if we wanted to tend our planet properly we had to sort ourselves out, but he also believed that the reciprocal was true, that if we tended our planet properly it would sort us out.  Handled properly, Extinction Rebellion offers us hope.”

The 2019 J.H. Whitley Lecture was introduced by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, Professor Tim Thornton, who provided a resume of the wide variety of subjects that had been covered over the past eight years.

After the conclusion of the lecture, giving his thanks to Howard Hull, Mr John Whitley said that the use which had been made of the Whitley Archive at the University had been a source of great satisfaction to his family.