6 - Thinking green, nineteenth-century style: John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin

Summary

Neither Mill nor Ruskin can be treated as representative Victorian figures, but they do have qualifications – some self-acquired, some imposed on them in retrospect – to act as standard bearers for two warring styles of thought, with irreversible damage to the natural environment, presumptively at least, serving as one of the significant battlefields. Whatever qualifications might be added to Mill's credentials as some kind of radical liberal, he could not possibly emerge as ‘a violent Tory of the old school’, Ruskin's description of his own political credo. In the long aftermath of his initial attack on political economy in Unto This Last (1860), Ruskin did his best to position himself before the Victorian public as the humane alternative to everything for which he took Mill to stand. This included secular modernism, liberalism, utilitarianism, and acting as the chief exponent of a soi-disant science that Ruskin regarded as responsible for almost everything that had gone wrong in the headlong pursuit of Mammon in nineteenth-century Britain. To Ruskin – not much given to understatement – Mill was literally ‘the root of nearly all immediate evil among us in England’; he was also the embodiment of a science that was ‘the most cretinous, speechless, paralysing plague that has yet touched the brains of mankind’.

By the time Ruskin died in 1900 he had acquired a reputation as one of the leaders of the ‘romantic’ protest against Victorian capitalism.