ABSTRACT
The last words of Ruskin’s Inaugural Lecture proved controversial. His first take us to the heart of one of his most dominant and determining self-images. Being useful at Oxford was a task to which Ruskin was, as he saw it, called; he was obedient to a request from others. But, energized by the newly-available platform for doing good, and for teaching the upper classes, as he put it years later in the Fors Clavigera letter of June 1877, of the ‘necessity that life should be led, and the gracious laws of beauty and labour recognized’, Ruskin found that Oxford was not enough. Letter 6, for June 1871, was the most urgent of all the early Fors letters, written at the height of the Commune misery, the most pronounced example of Ruskin’s practice of writing at the beginning of the Fors series. Fors embraced a sharply-observed, local fact, a contingent occurrence which was integrated into the argument of the text.
