Victorian Literature: Sixty Years of Books and BookmenShorter, Clement King
History
Victorian Literature: Sixty Years of Books and Bookmen
Shorter, Clement King
English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
But as Goethe declared of himself that posterity would honour him, not
for his poetry, but for his discoveries in science, so Ruskin, perhaps
more justly, insists that it is as an economist that he is most
deserving of remembrance. The four essays on the first principles of
political economy, entitled "Unto this Last" (1862), he declares to be
"the truest, rightest-worded, and most serviceable things" he has ever
written. These essays were originally published by Thackeray in the
_Cornhill Magazine_, but the remonstrances of its readers brought the
series to a speedy end. The principles of state socialism there
initiated have since entered the field in direct contest with the
established order of things. Mr Ruskin would have every child in the
country taught a trade at the cost of government; he would have
manufactories and workshops entirely under government regulation for the
production and sale of every necessary of life, and for the exercise of
every useful art; he would permit competition with government
manufactories and shops, but all who desired work could be sure of it at
the state establishments: finally, he would provide comfortable homes
for the old and destitute, as "it ought to be quite as natural and
straightforward a matter for a labourer to take his pension from his
parish, because he has deserved well of his parish, as for a man in
higher rank to take his pension from his country because he has deserved
well of his country." Ruskin has amplified his economic doctrines in
"Munera Pulveris," "Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne," and "Fors
Clavigera." "Time and Tide" is a collection of letters on the laws of
work to the late Thomas Dixon, a working corkcutter of Sunderland. They
were originally published in the _Manchester Examiner_. "Fors Clavigera"
is a series of ninety-six letters to working-men, which were issued in
monthly parts, and rendered additionally interesting by the quantity of
autobiographical anecdotes so freely interspersed in their pages. The
title is derived, as Ruskin has explained, from the Latin _fors_, the
best part of three good English words--force, fortitude, and fortune;
the root of the adjective _clavigera_ being either _clava_, a club,
_clavis_, a key, or _clavus_, a nail, and _gero_, to carry. Fors the
Club-bearer therefore represents the strength of Hercules or of Deed;
the Key-bearer, the strength of Ulysses or of Patience; and the
Nail-bearer, the strength of Lycurgus or of Law.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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