After the recent scenes of rioting on the streets of London and other British cities, set against an economic landscape not just of downturn but meltdown in some Euro-zone countries, it is hard to think of a more appropriate moment for exploring the legacies of John Ruskin, whose opposition to Victorian laissez faire political economy now resonates with our own disquiet over capitalism’s moral future. As well as timely, Stuart Eagles’s impressive study of the political and social influence of Ruskin at the end of his intellectual career and into the first decades of the twentieth century is a very fine work of scholarship indeed and an important addition to our understanding of the British Ruskinian world—a world that continued to exist even when the controversial proclamations of Modern Painters (1843–60) on art, beauty, and Turner had been outdated by the fin de siècle and the arrival of modernism. Eagles has labored extensively in various archives to recreate this world, chasing down unpublished correspondence, regional records of Ruskin Society branch meetings, and the legion of major and minor devotees who toiled publicly in the great man’s name—sometimes with only a tenuous connection to Ruskin himself. The result is a magnificently detailed map of Ruskin’s imprint on civic and social institutions up until 1920. It serves as a valuable reminder of the many practical forms that his ideas and principles frequently took as well as the call to social action found throughout his writings, not to mention the ranks of men (and often women) who carried those ideas into all corners of public life, from the linen industry to housing reform, the Victorian public schools to publishing, university settlement to the conservation of rural England.

Influence on this scale can be hard to measure, of course. Deciding where the work of disciples, legatees, and obsessives (and all three varieties of advocate populate this book) diverges from a master or source must always be somewhat arbitrary. But the problem applies especially to Ruskin, a singular Victorian who cut across so much of his period’s life—art criticism, painting, architectural history, social theory, education, literature, myth, political economy, church politics, and even botany and geology—and whose sagelike presence seems both to embody a central strand of the Victorian geist and also somehow to fall outside it, often consciously. As Eagles repeats, Ruskin was famous for contradicting himself at least three times over any idea worth its salt and moreover considered doing so an essential intellectual duty, and he “expressly sought to avoid prescription” or any “blueprint” (146) for others to follow. This might support the impression that Ruskin’s influence was too diffuse to be visible, but Eagles helps make clear its undeniable leitmotifs: a moral concern for work and workers, abhorrence of the injustices of urban poverty, a belief in the virtue of practical application over abstract teaching (famously, in 1874 Ruskin enlisted his Oxford undergraduates to form a workforce and dig a new road on the outskirts of the city), and a conviction that art, nature, and labor could be integrated in attempts at social improvement. Equally consistent, if wholly unprogressive by today’s standards, were his resistance to democratic principles and Parliament and his unwavering belief in hierarchy and inequality, which Eagles rightly characterizes as an old Toryism of the kind that yearned for the world of Sir Walter Scott and sought refuge from the overheated Victorian cities, mills, and factories.

Yet Ruskin’s relentless criticism of the modern world did not merely take the form of pessimism. Communism was a word Ruskin could enthusiastically embrace—if a brand of communism different to Marx’s and inflected instead by a kind of Christian socialism or instinctive fellow-feeling. His lyrical, unconventional, even amateurish attack on Mill’s liberalism in Unto This Last (1860) was important, Eagles points out, precisely “as an aestheticized vision that appealed to the imagination and to the senses” (206), not just the reader’s rational capacities. Its very outside-ness lent his argument more force, and the powerful legacy of Unto This Last really drives the entire narrative of this study. If the later Ruskin echoed Carlyle in his despair at the nineteenth century’s newly industrialized, mechanical urban world, that despair could be retraced to the brilliantly creative arguments set out in this earlier work of political economy. And its adherents—Eagles prefers the term “disciples,” which captures the spiritual flavor of Ruskin’s celebrity—were energetic, civic minded, and numerous. From the social campaigner and housing reformer Octavia Hill (1838–1912), who cofounded the National Trust, to the Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, who served as secretary at the socially progressive institution Toynbee Hall in East London (which installed a Ruskin-inspired curriculum for the poor), these figures formed a complex network of influence that fed debate about philanthropy and social improvement.

The central chapters of After Ruskin demonstrate how this influence ranged further than previously assumed, and the author’s unearthing of documents from Ruskin Society meetings in cities like Glasgow and Birmingham valuably extends our knowledge of the nature of their memberships, speakers, activity, and influence. A fascinating section on Ruskin’s posthumous relation to the rise of the Labour Party adds richly to historiography on British working-class politics, while helping to explain the exhaustion of his influence: industrial poverty fell increasingly within the remit of the state, replacing Victorian philanthropic and civic institutions. (Ruskin’s Guild of St. George, his biggest such experiment, survives to this day, but its heyday effectively ended once its Companions who knew Ruskin were dead.) A final chapter assessing the work of John Howard Whitehouse (1873–1955) renews interest in a curious political figure who did so much to prolong the Ruskinian world (starting a national society in 1931, when all others had disappeared) and, crucially, to establish Brantwood (Ruskin’s Lake District home) as a lasting memorial. But Whitehouse became a Ruskin obsessive to the point where discipleship almost gave way to idolatry, “a quasi-religious devotion which ultimately was out of tune with his contemporaries, and which, at times, was out of touch with reality” (261). Such eccentricity also again raises the thorny problem of “influence,” an issue perhaps not quite wholly resolved by Whitehouse’s example.

Eagles writes impeccably and with vivid turns of phrase; Ruskin is depicted in the Oxford lecture theater as a “slightly hunched figure, whose gentle, mesmeric cadences would suddenly burst into angry invective” (105). The whole book, in fact—so diligently researched and rich in detail—seems to embody Ruskin’s commitment to labor and meticulous care, a quality that its pages help us better to recognize as distinctively Ruskinian.