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-siecle artistic communities with...
This cultural study reveals the interdependence between British Aestheticism and late-Victorian social reform movements. Following John Ruskin, who be...
