An Endeavor Towards the Teaching of John Ruskin and William Morris - Being a Brief Account of the Work, the Aims, and the Principles of the Guild of Handicraft in East London #246503

June 23rd, 1888. A kindly public gave the funds for supporting the school for two trial years; while the Guild, launching as an independent venture, announced its intention of taking up three lines of practical work: woodwork, metal work, and decorative painting, and intimated the ambitious hope that it would one day take over the school, for which purpose, when formulating its constitution, it laid by a first charge on its profits. When this was written, the two sides of the exper~ iment, the productive and the educational, were closely allied. It is possible that they may become so again, but probably not in the same manner as formerly, and probably only through some gra~ dual process of internal growth. At the moment of writing a class in design is being conducted at Essex House by Mr. C. Spooner. It has been started by the men themselves and is attended by some eight or ten cabinet makers, metal workers and blacksmiths. In section II. Of this book also where I deal with the future of Essex House as a centre of craftsmanship I have pointed to certain uses of an educational nature to which the house itself may, it is hoped, shortly be placed. Social 88 municipal conditions, however, it would seem, are not at present favourable to the carry~ ing on conjointly of a productive workshop and of a school of a public nature. We claim, however, to have established the principle, and though it may, owing to circumstances,have had tobepart~ ly modified g abandoned, its working has none the lass been proved a success.