John Ruskin’s bicentenary is being celebrated with an exhibition in London, at 2 Temple Place, organised by that admirable and pre-eminently Victorian institution, the Guild of St George, which he established to further workers’ education. It’s still going strong.

John Ruskin’s bicentenary is being celebrated with an exhibition in London, at 2 Temple Place, organised by that admirable and pre-eminently Victorian institution, the Guild of St George, which he established to further workers’ education. It’s still going strong.

Reading Ruskin means engaging with an extraordinary religious sensibility. Perhaps typical of his world view is his essay “The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art”, where he says emphatically that, “I have had but one steady aim in all that I have ever tried to teach, namely – to declare that whatever was great in human art was the expression of man’s delight in God’s work.” His championing of the Gothic expressed just this view, that the greatness of Gothic art was to be found in its fidelity to nature, the work of God.

There’s very little about Ruskin’s religious sensibility in this exhibition, however, though the very title of the Guild should provide a clue, and though it does suggest that the discoveries of Darwin ultimately helped to undermine his faith and may have contributed to his bouts of insanity. But it wasn’t discoveries about fossils and their implications for the literal truth of the Bible to which he himself primarily attributed his loss of faith; his deconversion, as described in his autobiography, Praeterita, seems more to do with the loss of his Puritanism.

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