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Chapter Two - Glimpsing Eden: 1867–70

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2014

Mark Frost
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Summary

Threads of Guild ideas run far back in Ruskin's work, including schemes for a ‘Protestant Convent Plan’ for ‘a community of Art Workers […] to be employed by the public in copying illuminated MSS., and various other kinds of Art work’ (36.186n), but the specific shape of the project emerged during 1867–69. During those years, Ruskin pursued two ambitious ideas, one in relation to management of Alpine rivers, the other a grander notion of a society of volunteers dedicated to far-reaching social transformation. Both strands combined in the establishment of the St George's Fund as a moral and spiritual crusade centred on honest labour and the reclamation of land and souls. Recognisably Guild-like plans emerged in two 1867 letters, but an Alpine retreat in 1869 enabled these ideas to cohere. A May 1867 letter to what Ruskin's editors frustratingly term ‘a Yorkshire correspondent and friend, who desires to remain anonymous’, contained the first evidence of Guild thought:

Any of us who have yet hearts sound enough must verily and in deed draw together and initiate a true and wholesome way of life, in defiance of the world, and with laws which we will vow to obey, and endeavour to make others, by our example, accept […] Accidents of my own life have prevented me until lately from being able to give to such a plan any practical hope; but now I might, with some help, be led on to its organization. Would you join it, and vow to keep justice and judgment and the peace of God on this earth?

(19.xxvi)
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Chapter
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The Lost Companions and John Ruskin's Guild of St George , pp. 53 - 60
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2014

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