Guild of St George

The Guild of St George is a charitable Education Trust, based in England but with a worldwide membership, which tries to uphold the values and put into practice the ideas of its founder, John Ruskin (1819–1900).

Ruskin, a Victorian polymath, established the Guild in the 1870s. Founded as "St George's Company" in 1871, it adopted its current name and constitution in 1878. Ruskin, the most influential art critic of his day, had turned increasingly to social concerns from the 1850s. His highly influential critique of Victorian political economy, Unto This Last, was serialised in 1860, and published with an additional preface in book-form in 1862. In lectures, letters and other published writings, he used his considerable rhetorical skills to denounce modern, industrial capitalism, and the theorists and politicians who served it. He considered that the ugliness, pollution and poverty it caused were undermining the nation. His deeply felt moral conviction that human society and the natural environment had been corrupted and ruptured motivated him to seek practical means of redemption, reform and reconstruction.

Through the Guild, which married medieval (i.e. pre-industrial) values and a progressive belief in social improvement, Ruskin hoped to establish communities to challenge the profit-motive driving modern industry, and to provide alternatives to mass production. He drew inspiration from medieval craft guilds, and was influenced by his particular interest in the cultural history of Venice.

His utopian ideal was to stimulate greater happiness and improved health by promoting sound and responsible personal conduct, and by reconnecting society with the ennobling beauty of nature. By means of his "Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain," Fors Clavigera (1871–1884), he sought to recruit "Companions" (the name he gave to members of the Guild) to join him in an effort to establish "a National Store instead of [capitalism’s] National Debt". As the Guild’s Master, Ruskin endowed it with a tithe, or personal donation, of £7000. He set about acquiring land which could be cultivated sustainably, as far as possible using traditional methods (hand-labour, wind and water-power), and assembling an educational collection of beautiful and precious books, art-works and other objects.

In principle, Ruskin worked out different grades of "Companion" for his hierarchical Guild. He also wrote codes of practice, described styles of dress and even designed the Guild’s own coins. He also wished to establish St George’s Schools, and published various volumes to aid its teaching (his Bibliotheca Pastorum or Shepherd’s Library), but the schools, like the dress and coins, never materialised. In part, this is because soon after Ruskin started the Guild he began to show signs of emotional disturbance and in 1878 suffered the first of a series of mental breakdowns that increasingly limited his activity. In reality, the Guild has always operated on a modest scale, its activities being suggestive rather than transformational, but always dynamic, adapting to changing circumstances and needs.

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