This Day in History: 1819-02-08

John Ruskin — Author, art critic, Oxford professor, and romantic who detested the industrial revolution, Ruskin was born on this day in 1819. It was Ruskin who said every city was “…little more than laboratories for the distillation into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease… [Every river was] a common sewer, so that you cannot so much as baptize an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain, and even that falls dirty.”