British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900: Beauty for the People

This cultural study reveals the interdependence between British
Aestheticism and late-Victorian social-reform movements. Following their
mentor 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 novelist's ambivalent, even satirical, representations,
missionary aesthetes nevertheless constituted an influential social
network, imbuing fin-de-siecle artistic communities with political
purpose and political lobbies with aesthetic sensibility.