British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900: Beauty for the People (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900: Beauty for the People (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)
Diana Maltz | 2005-12-17 00:00:00 | Palgrave Macmillan | 296 | England

This cultural study reveals the interdependence between British Aestheticism and late-Victorian social reform movements. Following John Ruskin, who believed in art's power to civilize the poor, cultural philanthropists promulgated a Religion of Beauty as they advocated practical schemes for tenement reform, university-settlement education, Sunday museum opening, and High Anglican revival. Although subject to novelists' ambivalent, even satirical, representations, missionary aesthetes nevertheless constituted an influential social network, imbuing fin-de-siècle artistic communities with political purpose and political lobbies with aesthetic sensibility.

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