Just Finished Reading: Traffic by John Ruskin (FP: 1862/1866) [56pp] 

This is going to be somewhat difficult to review because it made so little impact on me. Firstly, although I had heard of the author, I didn’t have very much idea of what this short booklet was going to be about. The VERY short blurb on the back gave little away merely saying that it was a defence of dignity and creativity in a world obsessed by money. 

The booklet itself was in two parts. Firstly, we had ‘Traffic’ itself which was a lecture given during the opening of an Exchange Hall in Bradford and later published in 1866. I’m guessing that his audience were either surprised or disappointed by his talk. They (rightly?) suspected that a highly respected art critic such as the author would talk mainly about the Exchange itself. Not so. He actually talked mostly about how money and the pursuit of money was ruining architecture, art and just about everything else it touched. I think the thing that jumped out at me most was the fact that these views were being put forward almost 160 years ago. Truely nothing is new under the sun! He also had nothing good to say about ‘Political Science’ - what we call today, Economics! Rightly he said that it fails to understand the real world because it fails to account for the human factor. 

The second piece was ‘The Roots of Honour’ (1862) extracted from the larger work Until This Last and Other Writings. Here the author critiques ‘political economy’ more closely looking into the ideas that supposedly explain how the economy ‘works’ that only hold together IF significant elements of humanity are removed from the supposed ‘self-seeking’ agents that make up the population. 

Although moderately interesting overall, I can’t say that I either enjoyed this or learnt much from it. As I noted earlier, the primary thing that really struck me was how very modern the economic critique felt although I suppose Economics at that time was both far more blatant and brutal than today. The other thing that really struck (and rather annoyed) me, was the overabundance of comma use in Victorian text. I think that's one thing that makes reading it rather more difficult that modern text. All those commas REALLY break up the flow of things! Reasonable in its historical context.