UNTO THIS LAST Readings from Ruskin
A filmed record of the five live readings from the four essays of John Ruskin's Unto This Last, held between January and May 2024. Featuring speakers from the UK, Italy, Germany, Russia, India, Japan and the United States.
A series of five free online monthly readings and discussions, held on zoom between January and May 2024.
Following our two previous winter series, focused on Ruskin’s writing on Venice and on Craft & Craftsmanship, and as 2024 began with conflict and injustice in too many parts of the world, we turned our attention to the four essays in Ruskin’s seminal work on political economy, Unto This Last, published in 1862.
An outcry against injustice and inhumanity, the book was hard-hitting enough to cause a huge storm of indignant opposition in Britain when it was published and it marked a key shift in the public understanding of Ruskin as a trenchant and, as it turned out, prophetic social critic. His fierce assault on the prevailing business practices that underpinned the new mercantile wealth that unfettered industrial capitalism was enabling in Victorian Britain, remains as relevant today, in a world of gross inequality, exploitation and environmental degradation, as it was in his time.
Considered by Ruskin as one of his most important works, Unto This Last argues that economics, art and science must have a foundation in morality. Enjoy a variety of voices reading from the work that contains perhaps Ruskin's most famous and resonant single statement, that 'There is no Wealth but Life.'
Below you will find links to the recording of each session, and details of the readers involved.
You can follow the entire text, from the free online Complete Works:
1.
Tuesday 16 January - 'The Roots of Honour'
WATCH THE VIDEO RECORDING HERE
Participants in the first session were:
Peter Burman
Peter is a Director of Ruskin’s Guild of St George and holds the portfolios for International Relationships (the Guild has members in 12 countries) and for Craftsmanship & Craftspeople. He is an architectural historian and archivist. He has alternated between working for major heritage organisations (Council for the Care of Churches/Cathedrals and National Trust for Scotland) and teaching in two universities, York (England) and Cottbus (Germany). He chaired the Fabric Committees of Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral, London, for twenty years, and that of Lincoln Cathedral for seven years.
Dion Dobrzynski
Dion is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham interested in literary responses to ecological crises. He is currently working on interdisciplinary and educational projects on forests and literature with the Guild of St George and the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) at Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest National Nature Reserve. His PhD explored forest ecology in fantasy literature through a series of immersive readings and workshops in Ruskin Land.
Matt Sowerby
Matt Sowerby is a writer and environmental activist from Cumbria and was the Fundraising Coordinator for the Save Ruskin's View Campaign. He is also the Climate Action-lead in National Trust’s Regional Advisory Board for North England, and Director of Kirkby Lonsdale Poetry Festival — the first of which took place in 2022. As a poet, Matt has earned the titles of National Youth Slam Champion (2018) and National University Slam Champion (2023) and his writing was exhibited at the UN Headquarters in New York in 2022.
Andreas Ammon
Andreas is an Architect, running RKA office in Dresden, Germany, working on existing buildings and protected monuments. Began career as Stonemason in Cologne; studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Berlin, Dep. of Architecture and Sculpture. 1995 to 2000 he worked on Axel Schultes`s new Bundeskanzleramt in Berlin as a quantity surveyor and head of construction. 2000 to 2008 he worked at TU-Dresden, as scientific collaborator, Dep. “Denkmalpflege + Entwerfen”. 2010 he was at Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz, Head of Monuments and Buildings. Since 2011 he has practised architecture while teaching part- time. In 2022 he received the „Staatspreis für Architektur Sachsen“ (1. Preis) for a group- work of TU-Dresden for Design and Integration of Flood-Protection Walls in Grimma.
Simon Seligman
Simon is the part-time Membership & Communications officer for the Guild of St George, working with his administrator colleague and the volunteer Board of Directors to run the charity and manage its members (Companions) and events. He first encountered the poetic majesty of Ruskin’s writing while an art history student at the University of Warwick, during which time he lived and studied in Venice for four months. For 19 years he worked at Chatsworth, the historic estate and art collection in Derbyshire’s Peak District, and he has also worked for a chamber music festival in Sheffield and theatre in Nottingham. Alongside his work with the Guild, Simon is a cultural lecturer and a Life Coach in private practice.
2.
Saturday 17 February - 'The Veins of Wealth'
WATCH THE VIDEO RECORDING HERE
Convenor: Arjun Shivaji Jain
Participants in the second session were:
Julia Bolton Holloway
Julia is in Florence, directing the English Cemetery and its Library, creating websites and limited edition books as well as the Academia Bessarion. Formerly a professor of Medieval Studies in America with a Ph.D. from Berkeley, she was born in Marylebone, London, and now care-takes Elizabeth Barrett Browning's tomb and beside it that of Fanny Holman Hunt. She has published books on Dante Alighieri, his teacher, Brunetto Latino, and women, including Julian of Norwich, Birgitta of Sweden, Christine de Pizan and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, this last for Penguin. She works with skilled Roma who restore the Cemetery's tombs and teaches them the alphabet.
Peter Burman
Peter is a Director of Ruskin’s Guild of St George and holds the portfolios for International Relationships (the Guild has members in 12 countries) and for Craftsmanship & Craftspeople. He is an architectural historian and archivist. He has alternated between working for major heritage organisations (Council for the Care of Churches/Cathedrals and National Trust for Scotland) and teaching in two universities, York (England) and Cottbus (Germany). He chaired the Fabric Committees of Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral, London, for twenty years, and that of Lincoln Cathedral for seven years.
Arjun Shivaji Jain
Arjun is a Companion and formerly Young Companions' Representative of the Guild of St George. Trained in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee and Art and Science from Central Saint Martins in London, he is at present Director of the Red House cultural centre in New Delhi. He has worked in various capacities in various fields in his life, though all prompted in fact from a critical reading of Ruskin's Unto This Last in 2014, which enabled him to accept economics as a valid field of study. He is an advocate for a rich manual as well as intellectual life.
Frances O'Connor
See biography HERE.
Helen Parker
Helen was born in Sheffield and became a Companion in 2015 after volunteering at the Pop-Up Museum in Walkley. She contributed to many “Ruskin in Sheffield” events and collated research for the Guild publication “Genevieve Pilley: 50 years’ devotion to Ruskin at the Meersbrook Museum”. She has degrees in Philosophy and Software Engineering and has taught in adult and higher education. Presently she is involved in uncovering Arts and Crafts tiles in the church at her new, much loved home of Youlgrave (where purple veined rock has been exploited for centuries)!
3.
Saturday 9 March - 'Qui Judicatis Terram'
Convenor: Peter Burman, with readers Howard Hull, Olga Sinitsyna and Chiaki Yokoyama
WATCH THE VIDEO RECORDING HERE
Peter Burman
Peter is a Director of Ruskin’s Guild of St George and holds the portfolios for International Relationships (the Guild has members in 12 countries) and for Craftsmanship & Craftspeople. He is an architectural historian and archivist. He has alternated between working for major heritage organisations (Council for the Care of Churches/Cathedrals and National Trust for Scotland) and teaching in two universities, York (England) and Cottbus (Germany). He chaired the Fabric Committees of Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral, London, for twenty years, and that of Lincoln Cathedral for seven years.
Howard Hull
Howard Hull has been the Director of Ruskin’s former home, Brantwood since 1996, restoring the house and its gardens and adding substantially to its collections. He has curated a large number of historic and contemporary exhibitions exploring Ruskin’s life and ideas and their relevance today. He has also lectured internationally on Ruskin and contributed to a wide range of publications. Howard is a Companion and former Director of the Guild of St George, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Olga Sinitsyna
Olga Sinitsyna is one of 3 Russian Companions of the Guild, an art historian, independent museums and libraries strategic management consultant, lecturer, author of books and articles, translator, and exhibitions’ curator. She is also actively involved in the care, protection and preservation of cultural heritage She is based in Moscow. Among her many Ruskinian interest and activities over many years, Olga organized the very significant International Conference “Ruskin-Tolstoy-Gandhi: Dialogue through the century”, held in Moscow and then followed up by the trip to Tolstoy’s Museum/Estate, Yasnaya Polyana.
Chiaki Yokoyama
Chiaki Yokoyama is a professor at the Faculty of Law, Keio University (Japan) and one of the Japanese Companions of the Guild of St George. Her current research interest lies in the education of the Victorian working class and the inter-relationship between art and community. Her publications include John Ruskin and the Working-class Education (in Japanese) in 2018, and Community and Art: Creativity in the Pandemic Era (in Japanese) in 2021. She runs, together with her friends, a 'third place' in Yokohama every Tuesday for elderly welfare recipients and young Hikikomori people (recluses)
4.
Tuesday 16 April - 'Ad Valorem' (part 1)
WATCH THE VIDEO RECORDING HERE
Convenor: Prof James L Spates, with readers Peter Burman, Andrew Hill and Clive Wilmer.
Peter Burman
Peter is a Director of Ruskin’s Guild of St George and holds the portfolios for International Relationships (the Guild has members in 12 countries) and for Craftsmanship & Craftspeople. He is an architectural historian and archivist. He has alternated between working for major heritage organisations (Council for the Care of Churches/Cathedrals and National Trust for Scotland) and teaching in two universities, York (England) and Cottbus (Germany). He chaired the Fabric Committees of Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral, London, for twenty years, and that of Lincoln Cathedral for seven years.
Andrew Hill
Andrew Hill is senior business writer at the FT and consulting editor, FT Live. He is a former management editor, City editor, financial editor and comment and analysis editor. He is the author of ‘Leadership in the Headlines’ (2016), a collection of his columns, and ‘Ruskinland’ (2019), about the enduring influence of Victorian thinker John Ruskin. He joined the FT in 1988 and has also worked as New York bureau chief, foreign news editor and correspondent in Brussels and Milan. He is a long-standing Companion of the Guild and has contributed to both a Guild symposium, and the Ruskin Bicentenary edition of the Guild's magazine, The Companion.
James L Spates
James Spates is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, an author, including of a forthcoming book on Unto This Last; a long standing Guild Companion and co-founder of the Ruskin Society of North America, and the webmaster of the truly extraordinary and wide-ranging blog, ‘WhyRuskin’. He has published a number of books and articles on sociology as well as, relative to his Ruskin work, reviewing the book, “The imperfect round: Helen Gill Viljoen’s Life of Ruskin’ and a series of scholarly articles reassessing important aspects of Ruskin’s biography, including his mental illness and sexuality.
Clive Wilmer
Clive Wilmer is a poet, critic, literary journalist, translator, editor, broadcaster and lecturer. He has previously described John Ruskin as “overwhelmingly the most important influence” on his life. Clive’s first collection of poetry, The Dwelling-Place (1977), opens with an epigraph from Ruskin’s Val d’Arno. He has written and lectured extensively on Ruskin. From 2009 to 2019, he served as Master of the Guild. He writes: "The work of John Ruskin has been my main academic interest since the early 1980s when I edited a selection of his essays and lectures, Unto this Last and Other Writings, for Penguin Classics. But he has also been a deep personal enthusiasm since I first read him in 1966, and I have also been involved in the practice of his ideas, especially through his Guild.”
5
Tuesday 7 May - 'Ad Valorem' (part 2)
Convenor: Prof James L Spates, with readers Rachel Dickinson, Tyson Gaskill, Howard Hull, Pamela Hull and Gabriel Meyer
WATCH THE VIDEO RECORDING HERE
Rachel Dickinson
Rachel Dickinson is Reader in Interdisciplinary Studies & English at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she is Co-Director of the Long Nineteenth Century Network. Her research, publication and engagement activity flow from a specialism in John Ruskin, which began with doctoral work on archival correspondence (Lancaster 2005).
Experienced at running projects and collaborating with partners, she conceived and coordinated a bicentenary ‘Festival of Ruskin in Manchester’ (2019) and developed a follow-on ‘Everyone Deserves Space: Ruskin’s Manchester Now’ (2022) with SuAndi and the National Black Arts Alliance. She was P-I on the AHRC-funded ‘Celebrations: Victorian and Edwardian Greeting Cards’ engagement and digitisation project (2022). Her publications include articles on Ruskin, art and textiles, and she has given invited lectures and talks on Ruskin in Canada, France, Italy, the USA, as well as the UK. She is writing a monograph on Ruskin and textiles.
A textiles practitioner, she has been a member of the Lancs & Lakes Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers for more than a decade. In 2019 she was elected the first female Master of Ruskin’s Guild.
Tyson Gaskill
Tyson Gaskill is executive director of communications and events at USC Libraries, where he has overseen the libraries’ cultural programs since 2001. In addition, he curates about half a dozen exhibitions a year on campus, covering the entire spectrum of human endeavor—frequently touching on the intersection between the arts and sciences. He is also responsible for producing the Libraries’ annual Scripter Award fundraiser and the public programs at the annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar. Prior to joining USC he spent ten years as an Associate Editor at the Getty Research Institute, working on exhibitions, printed ephemera, and various treatises on architecture and aesthetics. He earned degrees in history and art history from UCLA and is still in the nascent stages of Ruskinmania.
Howard Hull
Howard Hull has been the Director of Ruskin’s former home, Brantwood since 1996, restoring the house and its gardens and adding substantially to its collections. He has curated a large number of historic and contemporary exhibitions exploring Ruskin’s life and ideas and their relevance today. He has also lectured internationally on Ruskin and contributed to a wide range of publications. Howard is a Companion and former Director of the Guild of St George, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Pamela Hull
Pamela lives and works at Brantwood where her husband, Howard Hull, is Director. She has a degree in psychology and business and is a CPA. She came to the UK in 1989 when she replaced the Finance Director at the energy services segment of Cooper Industries. Before being transferred to the pan European operation of Belden Electroniques in Germany, she and Howard travelled to Brantwood on a dark October day in 1991. It was a spiritual experience to stand in the turret window of Ruskin’s bedroom where he stood and observe what he saw. Since coming to Brantwood at the end of 1996, it is a privilege to connect with people from all over the world and engage in the many issues which plague humankind in our time. Pamela is Worship and Outreach minister for Coniston & Torver and Director of a company within the footwear sector. She plays the piano, organ and french horn (Windermere Orchestra) and sings in the Ambleside Choral Society. She is the Secretary of the Friends of Ruskin’s Brantwood.
Gabriel Meyer
Poet-journalist Gabriel Meyer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has lived and worked throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and East Africa. He was especially acclaimed for his coverage of the first Palestinian intifada and of the Bosnian war. His reporter’s diary on the civil war in Sudan, War and Faith in Sudan (Eerdmans), won ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year award for essays in 2006. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work as a journalist by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at UC Berkeley in 2017 and by Lancaster University in the UK in 2022. He has published poetry and two novels; a large-scale nonfiction work, The Testimony of Stones, a “biography” of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, is awaiting publication. He had been involved with the historic Ruskin Art Club since 1998 and currently serves as its executive director. He has lectured widely on Ruskinian themes, most recently at Notre Dame University where he delivered the second annual “Ruskin” lecture in February (2022), sponsored by the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, on Ruskin and ecology. His essay “Ruskin and the California Dream” appears in the latest edition of the Ruskin Review (Lancaster University, UK). He is a Companion of the Guild.
James L Spates
James Spates is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, an author, including of a forthcoming book on Unto This Last; a long standing Guild Companion and co-founder of the Ruskin Society of North America, and the webmaster of the truly extraordinary and wide-ranging blog, ‘WhyRuskin’. He has published a number of books and articles on sociology as well as, relative to his Ruskin work, reviewing the book, “The imperfect round: Helen Gill Viljoen’s Life of Ruskin’ and a series of scholarly articles reassessing important aspects of Ruskin’s biography, including his mental illness and sexuality.
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FURTHER READING:
We recommend Clive Wilmer’s introduction to the Penguin edition Unto This Last and other writings (1985; reprinted with revised Further Reading,1997 and reprinted as On Art and Life (Penguin Books – Great Ideas, 2004))
Brown, Judith M., ‘Reading Unto This Last – A Transformative Experience: Gandhi in South Africa’, in Rachel Dickinson and Keith Hanley (eds.), Ruskin’s Struggle for Coherence: Self-Representation through Art, Place and Society (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), Ch.10, 154-165.
Jay, Elisabeth and Richard (eds.), Critics of Capitalism: Victorian Reactions to “Political Economy”’ (Cambridge University Press, 1986). 7, ‘John Ruskin (1819-1900)’, 137-161. [‘Ad Valorem’, essay IV of Unto This Last, with introduction]
O’Gorman, Francis, ‘“Suppose it were your own father of whom you spoke”: Ruskin’s Unto This Last’, Review of English Studies, 51, no.202, 2000, 230-247.
Shuman, Cathy, Pedagogical economies: the examination and the Victorian literary man (Stanford University Press, 2000). Ch.3. 'The Productive Consumption of Unto This Last '
Wong, Daniel, ‘Toward a Postsecular Economy: John Ruskin’s Unto This Last’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Vol.34, No.3, July 2012, 217-235.
We are grateful to Prof Stephen Wildman for this list.
