It has gone 150 years since John Ruskin (1819 – 1900) and William Morris (1834 – 1896), the two most influential figures of the Arts and Crafts Movement, clashed. To understand these two people, it is useful to look at their predecessor, Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881), who – unfortunately – distorted Ruskin’s radical political approach to something more authoritarian. Morris was more critical of Carlyle, which allows him to appear more modern than Ruskin.
Both Ruskin and Morris shared a belief in the superiority of medieval crafts. This has implications for everyone living in a digital age, where a retreat to medievalism is an impossible task. We are dependent on using our laptops and hand-held devices to look up medieval topics on Wikipedia. It is difficult for us to see ourselves as immoral when every nation’s political structure is dominated by lying, grabbing politicians. It is difficult to create any form of art, without using artificial intelligence as an intermediary. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, it is difficult to find anyone capable of creating great art. People content themselves with the temporal, the mechanical, the pretty, all far removed from genuine beauty.
In The Nature of Gothic, the second chapter in the second volume of Ruskin’s three volume, The Stones of Venice (1851), a work described by Morris as ‘one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century’, sought not merely to inspire beautiful buildings, paintings, and crafts, but to transform what Ruskin saw as the inhuman conditions of labour endured by Victorian workers.
Morris produced an 1892 reprint of The Nature of Gothic at his Kelmscott Press. The challenge with the Kelmscott Press, and other similar companies, was that they could only produce works for the affluent minority. They used excessive quantities of hand labour, that were beyond the reach of members of the working class. Thus, the works of the Arts and Crafts movement in terms of wallpapers, textiles, ceramics, furniture, metalwork and glass, were far beyond the reach of the poor. The poor needed the industrial revolution, with mass production and designers eager to produce quality objects for everyone.
Neither Ruskin nor Morris were interested in industrialism. In reflecting on them, I doubt that they were capable of understanding the limitations of craftspersonship, as a challenge to modern industrial practices. Their elitism ensured that handmade products were so expensive that they could never reach the mainstream market.
This limitation was even more evident in of one of the craft experiments with which Ruskin was associated. The Langdale Linen Industry, a revival of Lake District spinning and weaving led by Ruskin devotees, Marian Twelves (ca. 1843 – 1929) and Albert Fleming (? – ?), only ever found a market amongst wealthier buyers. The Linen Industry was loosely connected to Ruskin’s major utopian venture, the Guild of St George, begun in 1871 and conceived as a means to fundamentally challenge the steam-powered dragons of Victorian modernity.
Ruskin hoped that the Guild would attract many adherents or ‘Companions’ and create a series of agricultural and artisanal communities devoted to hand labour, fine products, and the socially transformative effects of non-mechanised land work. Despite Ruskin believing that this work would encourage environmentally sustainable practices, this was not the result. Young idealist agricultural companions found that their efforts were a nightmare of drudgery and neglect. Reasons put forward for these failures include Ruskin’s failing mental health, his inability to organize practical work. Sometimes his failed relationship with Rose La Touche (1848 – 1875) are used to explain it. In the 20th and 21st centuries, emphasis has shifted to Ruskin’s authoritarianism, which compelled practitioners to obey unscrupulous and unsympathetic local agents.
Morris described a fictional utopia in News From Nowhere (serialized 1890, reprinted as a Kelmscott book in 1892). Yes, the book is a contradiction because nowhere is it explained how an authoritarian society can transform itself into a egalitarian society with contented citizens living in harmony in beautiful landscapes, producing beautiful goods and an abundance of necessities. Of course Morris believes this is possible because of his commitment to socialism. Yet, as a writer of fiction, the setting is entirely fictional. He offers no mechanism delineating how a society can transform itself.
If the early twenty-first century offers any guidance, it is that the billionaires, and their multi-millionaire followers, will attempt to extract more from society that it is capable of providing. Today, they pay almost no tax, loan their excessive wealth to governments who cannot function without tax incomes, and receive interest payments for their efforts. The working poor, continue to have a marginal existence, with excessive workloads, paying next to nothing. So, more than one hundred and thirty years after the publication of News from Nowhere, there is no magic formula unlocking a transformational secret.
Except, there are two authors who do offer a vision of the future worth examining. The initial diagram, above, was developed by economist Kate Raworth (1970 – ) in her 2012 Oxfam paper A Safe and Just Space for Humanity. It was further elaborated upon in her 2017 book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Raworth wants the foundations of economic science, and in particular its emphasis on unfettered growth, to be reconsidered, so that planetary resources can perpetually serve human needs, including quality of life. Instead of economic growth, economics has a duty to ensured that everyone on earth has access to their basic needs, such as adequate food and education. There is also a need to protect future generations by protecting the ecosystem.
As an augment to Raworth’s position, Ingrid Robeyns’ (1972 – ) Limitarianism: The case against extreme wealth (2024), argues that extreme wealth undermines democracy, is incompatible with the earth’s ecological predicament, is almost always undeserved, and harms the interests of everyone including the super-rich. Robeyns proposes that wealth should be capped. While the exact limit is open to discussion, she has proposed €10 M, yet has suggested that €1 or €2 M is probably a more appropriate level. This comes in addition to a poverty threshold.
I can hear the complaints now. How is Christian von Koenigsegg (1972 – ) going to survive if Koenigsegg Automotive AB can’t sell world-class sports cars to the super-wealthy? Perhaps he will have to take a new direction. After all, Koenigsegg got the idea to build his own car after watching the Norwegian stop-motion animated movie The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix in his youth. In Norwegian Flåklypa replaces Pinchcliffe. At 22 years old, Koenigsegg gathered SEK 60M from investors and founded Koenigsegg Automotive in 1994. He could learn to become an animator.
A partial explanation for my interest in Ruskin has to do with Ruskin, British Columbia.
Several places are named after William Morris, including the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, London, and the Morris Room at the Oxford Union. Additionally, the William Morris Society, has its office and museum located at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, where Morris lived from 1879 until his death.
Several places are also named after John Ruskin, including: Ruskin, Florida; Ruskin, Georgia; Ruskin, Minnesota; Ruskin, Nebraska; and, Ruskin, British Columbia. Additionally, there are educational institutions like Ruskin College in Oxford and Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, as well as landmarks such as the Ruskin Museum in Coniston, England.
In British Columbia, Ruskin is a rural community, in Maple Ridge municipality, about 55 km east of Vancouver on the north shore of the Fraser River, adjacent to the Stave River. It was named around 1900 after John Ruskin. Fifty-four members of the Canadian Co-operative Society, formed a sawmill there in 1895 and named it Ruskin Mills. They set up a school, general store, a black smith’s shop, a shoemaker’s shop, a dairy and a vegetable farm.
To operate the sawmill, logs had to be pulled by horses or oxen to Stave River and then floated down to the mill. That was, until 1898, when, due to a rainless summer, the Stave River dried up and logs could not be moved to the mill. Lacking money and facing potential bankruptcy the Society surrendered its assets to E.H. Heaps & Co. who had supplied the machinery for the mill on credit.
I mention this because Trish, my wife, is a great grand daughter of E.H. Heaps (1851 – 1931). Heaps turned the small Ruskin mill into a more modern operation. They started expanding and upgrading the mill. Horse or oxen logging was replaced with steam and railway logging. Heaps built a logging rail line that grew northwest until it reached Dewdney Trunk Road and down a short distance along the east side of Kanaka Creek. This was not the only railway owned by the Heaps family. They also owned one on Narrows Inlet, formerly Narrows Arm, a fjord branching east from Sechelt Inlet.
Across the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) rail track, on the shore of the Fraser River, was Heaps office building that also accommodated a general store and post office as well living quarters for senior staff (read: Heaps family members).
The Heaps mill at Ruskin burned down in the winter of 1904/1905 and was rebuilt, only to burn down again in 1910. Plans to rebuild the mill failed when no money could be raised by the company. There were plans and promises for a new and even larger mill but Heaps’s Ruskin logging and lumber operations went in receivership after the building boom in Vancouver crashed in 1913.
