Utopian schemes and visionary dreamers : John Ruskin's Guild of St. George and Julius Augustus Wayland's Ruskin Cooperative Association

Hundreds of utopian experiments sprang up in Europe and America in the chaotic nineteenth century. John Ruskin, eminent Victorian art critic and essayist, began the Guild of St. George in England in 1871. Julius Augustus Wayland, a socialist reformer and an American disciple of Ruskin, established the Ruskin Cooperative Association in middle Tennessee in 1894 in John Ruskin's honor. Like most utopias, these reflect the dreams and influences of their convenors. This thesis investigates the dissimilar social forces which led Wayland and Ruskin to take similar approaches to their utopian endeavors.

Wayland's newspaper, the Coming Nation, and Ruskin's Guild publication, Fors Clavigera, are the primary works cited in this study. References to Fors Clavigera and other works by Ruskin are cited from Ruskin's thirty-nine volume Collected Works. The University of Tennessee's Special Collections Library, MS-23, provided some original issues of the Coming Nation as well as other valuable documents from the Ruskin Cooperative Association.