John Ruskin's name recognition among Victorianists was almost exclusively as an art historian and critic until the 1990s. Thanks to, among others, P. D. Anthony, Stefan Collini, Peter Stansky, and Michael Wheeler, this state of affairs has changed. Ruskin now is understood to have commented and exerted—or attempted to exert—influence on aspects of his society beyond art and architecture, encompassing religion, politics, and economics. Gill Cockram makes an important contribution to Ruskin studies in this close examination of how Ruskin's social and economic criticism was received during the second half of the nineteenth century. She starts in 1851, when Ruskin began writing The Stones of Venice (1853). At that time, the sage attacked the Crystal Palace exhibition for celebrating the dehumanizing tendency of industrial capitalist modes of production. He went on to develop his critique of industrial capitalism in Unto This Last (1860–62), Munera Pulveris (1862–63), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), Time and Tide (1867), Fors Clavigera (1871–84), and several minor publications. Cockram ends her analysis in 1906, with the creation of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Cockram's book is organized into eight chapters. The first surveys the late nineteenth-century collectivist critique of orthodox free market economics. The second and third explore early influences on Ruskin's thought (with special reference to Thomas Carlyle), analyze the critical response to several of his early lectures that made reference to economics, and examine the reception of Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris, as measured by reviews in the periodical literature of the day. Middle-class critics displayed “continued antagonism” (66), so Ruskin sought to reach a working-class audience directly by self-publishing cheap editions of his works but with limited success. It was not until after 1870, argues chapter 4, that Ruskin's views began to be received more favorably. Cockram explains this by positing a shift in thought: “Benthamite individualism, sanctioned by the economic doctrine of laissez-faire, was being gradually superseded by a movement toward greater sympathy with collectivism” (71). Ruskin benefited from the shift when he began publishing monthly open letters to the working classes in 1871 (collectively entitled Fors Clavigera) and when he republished Unto This Last in 1878. Apart from using reviews, Cockram finds other evidence for growing acceptance such as the proliferation of cheap editions of Ruskin's works and the degree of wear on a specific copy.

Cockram is admirably careful, throughout these first four chapters, to recognize that it is easier to assess reception than it is to measure influence. Chapters 5 and 6 measure Ruskin's influence by analyzing the ways in which Frederic Harrison the Positivist and J. A. Hobson the New Liberal responded to Ruskin's thought and adapted Ruskin's ideas for their own purposes. She devotes chapter 7 to the assortment of people (e.g., William Morris, Robert Blatchford, Belfort Bax, Stewart Headlam, Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and Keir Hardie) and groups (e.g., the Christian Socialist Union, guild socialists, trade unionists, Tolstoyans, and the Labour Party) that made up the socialist revival. There, too, she finds the influence of Ruskin exerted by reading and in some cases by personal correspondence with the sage. (She would have found Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001], helpful in this connection.)

Her concluding chapter sums up both Ruskin's influence and his contradictions and ambiguities. Ruskin sometimes read the views of others directly (e.g., Carlyle) and often depended on summaries (as when Harrison explained what Comte was about) but never was anyone's disciple. Nor did he wish to establish his own school of thought. Cockram recognizes that Ruskin was not a systematic economist (indeed, observing that he earnestly refrained from reading any economist) and that his economic ideas developed over time. Consequently, she does not attempt to impose a spurious order on his thought. Rather, she argues that an organicist vision of human society informed his critique of industrial society and laissez-faire economics.

Most of her evidence comes from reviews in Victorian periodicals, the back issues of which must contain millions of words. Historians and literary scholars until recently ignored these words piled upon words, but this is changing, thanks, no doubt, to increasing interest in Victorian readers and how they received what they read. Cockram uses these reviews to good effect. However, one regrets that she did not tell us something about who the reviewers were and the perspectives from which they wrote. Also, she should have consulted several important periodicals: namely, the Athenaeum, the most comprehensive and widely read middle-class weekly review; the Observer and the Spectator, also important middle-class weekly newspapers; and the People's Paper, Reynolds's Newspaper, and Lloyd's Newspaper, all written from a working-class Radical position. She also misses many of the denominational religious periodicals of the day. Did these periodicals have anything to say about Ruskin?

Although Cockram's beginning date makes sense, her terminus, 1906, strikes me as rather more problematical, for it seems to hint that Ruskin's greatest influence came via the Labour Party. However, ending then means that she gives but the briefest notice to Distributism, and that is only with reference to A. J. Penty and G. D. H. Cole. Yet the several versions of the Distributist movement, influential in its day, owed much to Ruskin. Indeed, Ruskin's name appears some sixty times in the 150 pages of Peter Grosvenor's biography, The Medieval Future of Arthur J. Penty: The Life and Work of an Architect, Guildsman, and Distributist ([Norfolk, VA: IHS, 2008], forthcoming). What would Cockram have made of Hilaire Belloc and the Chesterton brothers?

Perhaps Cockram's most controversial interpretation is in locating a shift during the 1870s from laissez-faire to state intervention, from individualism to collectivism. The interpretative consensus today is that both polarities coexisted by the end of the 1830s, but perhaps that consensus is starting to disintegrate. I have my doubts about the strength of her interpretation.

Cockram's book is an enlightening excursion into the thought of an eminent Victorian and a sound contribution to reception studies. One looks forward to her future work in these areas.