John Ruskin Biography

He was born on eight February, eighteen nineteen in London and was the only son of

prosperous merchant. He was multi-faceted individual because he was not just an English artist

and the art critic of the Victorian era but a prominent social thinker, a writer who wrote on various

subjects, including geology, architecture, literature, education, political economy and etc. he was

a nature lover and his artworks were often of plants, birds, and landscape. He died on January,

twenty nineteen hundred.

His skills of writing

1) In earlier writing of Ruskin we find an ornamental, gorgeous prose. He clothes his thoughts

in the language of exceptional beauty. Its mean that he had a great skill of language use.

2) Rhythm is the principal weapon of Ruskin. His words flow as rhythmically as the waves

in the sea. Although rhythm is feature of poetry but he use it in his prose writing.

3) Another salient feature of Ruskin’s style is the length of his sentences. Since seventeenth

century he has the first writer who use sentences which carry twenty or thirty lines and

contain two hundred or more words.

4) He use too many biblical allusion in his writing.

5) Ruskin is a great master of an English style. Chesterton remarks; “ If there is an age which

did not realize that Ruskin wrote great English, it would be an age that ceased to write

English at all ”.
The crown of wild olive ( first lecture )

By John Ruskin

This lecture was delivered by Ruskin before the working Men’s institute at Camberwell.

Title of the crown of wild of olive

The wild olive was the prize of the victor in the Olympic games in Greece. Here it refers

to the ideal work of worker and the reward he is to expect for such an ideal work.

In this lecture Ruskin talks about workers, about the society where poor become poorer

and rich richer. He talks about a society where the upper class enjoy the labour of poor class. For

him there is no difference between the modern capitalists and the barons of the middle ages as

for as poor are concerned.

There are few points which Ruskin had defined and elaborated in his lecture, I will

mention them below;

1) Greedy pursuit of wealth by men

Ruskin says that men are trying to make money and there is no end to it. The only end is

to make more money. Because of this greed every individual tries to earn money through

cheating; as employs always cheat employs and their bosses. Further he says this situation can be

redeemed if a law is enforced which enables men to retain only that what they have justly earn.

This law will disallowed rich people to keep the money earned by the labour class and it will

bring balance in the economic system of the society.

2) Work for the love of work

Ruskin states that for most of the people it is not the love of work that motivate them to

work but money involved in it. Such as soldiers fight not for the glory of fight but for money.

He further says that man cannot serve two masters at a time either individual work for the sake of

work or for the sake of money. For Ruskin the man who loves to work is to be valued more than

the man who works solely for pay.

3) Work with heads and work with hands

Ruskin says that there are few people who work with heads means they are intellectual and

their occupations are that of bosses on the other side there are majority of people who work with

hands and they are labourers and always are subordinated to the intellectuals. He points out that

throughout history these hands workers are discriminated by intellectuals as taking from them

more work and giving them less amount of money which is injustice to these labourers.