Taken from Modern Painters for a series of Ruskin selections, this essay asks what we really mean by “gentleman” and “vulgar.” Ruskin argues that the essence of vulgarity is deadness of feeling, not low birth or poverty, distinguishing the coarseness people cannot help from the coarseness they choose. His language of breeding and race is that of the Victorian age.
A short, provocative piece of Victorian moral criticism. Download the free EPUB.