ABSTRACT
While the publication of four essays on ‘Political Economy’ in the Cornhill Magazine in 1860 marked Ruskin’s first explicit foray into that field, they neither represent his first consideration of social and economic questions nor do they mark a new departure in terms of Ruskin’s intellectual development. Given his conception of the roots of art, his concern with its revitalisation had necessarily led him earlier, in his discussions of fine art and architecture, to consider the socio-economic causes of those moral and spiritual failings which had corrupted artistic expression in mid-Victorian society. Nevertheless, the Cornhill essays do mark a turning point in his career. For, thereafter, he devoted the greater part of his considerable literary energy and skills to combating the fallacies, the narrowness of vision, the distortions, the corrupted weltanschauung of the ‘Professors of the Dismal Science.’
