Published as pamphlets, they now comprise a significantly weighty tome. I have only ever read two of the letters; 7 and 10, which were included by way of context in my copy of Unto This Last, Ruskin’s polemic against 19th-century capitalist economics. Mohandas Gandhi would translate Unto This Last into Gujarati in 1908, but that’s another story.
Fors Clavigera is a play on words. It translates literally as ‘fortune the nail-bearer’, -gera being Latin for ‘bearer’ and clavus ‘nail’. But two other Latin objects also begin with clav-; clava is club and clavis is key.
Similarly, three English words can be pulled from fors. Fortune, Fortitude and Force. These three images form the focus of this linocut series. The club of force, the key of fortitude and the nail of fortune.
Fors Clavigera resonates today. It is the product of uncertainty, written in the context of political unrest across the channel in Paris, which casts its shadow on Letter 7 in particular.
In Letters 7 and 10, Ruskin describes himself first as a Communist, then a Tory ‘of the old school’. This serves both as a mockery of the political polarity of the time and an assertion that he cannot be considered to belong in any sense to a ‘new school’.
Much of Ruskin’s writing is filled with a melancholic longing for the Middle-ages, a time when he believed craftsmen could make true art, unfettered by the evils of mechanisation. As a result, Ruskin harbours a deep respect for Catholic thought, perhaps more than would have been considered healthy in a 19th-century English Protestant. Thomas More and his work Utopia feature heavily in Letter 7.
Like Unto This Last, Ruskin’s concern for workers is multi-faceted. He cares about their craft, their wellbeing, their pay. He cares about the importance of rest and leisure at a time when workers were increasingly becoming more like the mechanised tools than embodied makers.
Although as an art critic his concern can be considered foppish, detached - a bit bourgeois - I believe it is sincere. He cares deeply about their souls.
At the time I wrote the first two of these essays, I thought we might finally be reflecting on the importance of workers and their craft, and particularly the way the labour of many has been critically undervalued, particularly those branded ‘essential workers’, who also happened to be those who were paid the least, and whose job security was most precarious.
Such a hope was hilariously misplaced, and the month since have only seen those at the top of the pyramid shore up the vast gulf in income inequality, whislt simultaneously pushing technology and trends that make life for everyone else even more miserably disembodied than it was for the workers of Ruskin’s era.
Corporate Memphis, the metaverse, Jimmy Fallon’s NFT collection, those dreadful doorbells with integrated CCTV cameras that everyone seems to voluntarily be attaching to their own homes - I’m fairly sure 2022 would have been more than too much for Ruskin’s delicate temperament.
Nevertheless, his writing in Fors Clavigera contains important wisdom still waiting to be grasped in the present day. I wrote the first two of these pieces in the Spring of 2020 and already find them disagreeable.
I wish I’d pushed back a bit more against Ruskin’s understanding of nonviolence and his faith in authority, but other than adding a little extra on the idea of Occult Theft, I’ve tried not to change the original spirit of the writing, even if I can no longer heartily endorse it.