Blog
18. The Ruskinian Benefactor: Florence Bennett
To Dr Sara Atwood, Scholar, Teacher, and Dear Friend. Early in 1885 John Ruskin’s utopian society, the Guild of St George, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, issued a Master’s Report. In an account appended by senior trustee, George Baker (1825-1910),...
17. The Ruskinian Industrialist
This is a year of Ruskinian anniversaries. Two of them—the 150th anniversary of John Ruskin’s Guild of St George, and the centenary of the death of the pioneering Yorkshire businessman, George Thomson—have prompted me to write, and the Guild to publish, a new...
16. The Ruskinian Shopkeeper
It is one of the unaccountable facts of Ruskin scholarship that many of John Ruskin’s keenest admirers have barely registered in the histories of his influence. A notable example is Stephen Rowland (1841-1940) (pictured below), an early and long-serving Companion of...
15. Ruskin’s Seven Lamps
The Power of Influence: J. H. Chamberlain & Ruskin’s Seven Lamps Stuart Eagles To Clive Wilmer [Download as a PDF] John Henry Chamberlain (1831-1883) (pictured above) was one of Birmingham’s most eminent architects. A leading Liberal, a talented lecturer, and a...
14. The First General Meetiing of the Guild
“An excess of modesty and bashfulness”: the first meeting of Ruskin’s Guild Stuart Eagles To Annie Creswick Dawson, Guild Companion and Dear Friend [Read as a PDF] No detailed account of the Guild’s inaugural general meeting has ever been published. Until now. For...
13. Ruskinian Redlands
(Dedicated to Anthony Harris and Cedric Quayle.) Milestone birthdays will be celebrated this summer by several veteran contributors to the work of Ruskin’s Guild of St George, an organisation which is itself celebrating its sesquicentenary this year. Two such...
12. Ruskin as an Oxford Lecturer
Descriptions abound of Ruskin as a lecturer at Oxford. As a student Michael Sadler (1861—1943) greatly admired Ruskin, and he became his life-long disciple. Sadler, who was a historian, dedicated his career to education, and served for many years as a university...
11. The Ruskinian Spinster
Edith Hope Scott was one of Ruskin’s most devoted and active disciples. St George’s Day in the year in which we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Guild of St George seems an appropriate moment to remember her. Scott was one of the people who banded together in...
10. God’s Gift: the view from the pulpit
When Ruskin died in January 1900, the following pulpit appraisal was delivered by the Rev. William Knibb Burford (1863-1944),* in a sermon at the Congregationalist Wicker Chapel, in Sheffield, of which he was pastor from 1888 to 1901. Rev. Burford’s testimony is an...
9. Ruskin in Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Russia, and … Reading
A little Easter weekend reading for you. A paper I have written in the recently published John Ruskin's Europe can be read here. The paper attempts to explore how Ruskin’s ideas were received in Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, and (briefly) Russia. Tracing Ruskin’s...