John Ruskin and The Totley Colony

John Ruskin in the 1850's

It was in his writings 'Letters to Workmen and Labourers (entitled "FORS CLAVIGERA) that he put forward his most ambitious constructive scheme - The Guild of St. George. He set out a code of conduct Christian Belief to which the Companions of the Guild were to pledge themselves. They were then to give a tenth of what they have and of what they earn, towards the creation of a Ruskinian utopia.

John Ruskin was one of the most extraordinary characters of the Victorian age. As a socialist and social reformer, artist and art critic, essayist and author, lecturer and educator, he has an enormous influence on the whole nation, which is still felt today. Tolstoy, Gandhi and Bernard Shaw are among those who regarded his as one of the greatest reformers of his time.

The following are highlights from his life:

1819 Born in London in the same year as Queen Victoria. Only child of a prosperous and cultured wine merchant and his deeply religions wife.
1837 Aged 18, went to Oxford University. Wrote first book, The Poetry of Architecture.
1854 Aged 35, became art tutor at the newly founded Working Men's College in London and later wrote two books, Elements of Drawing and Elements of Perspective, which are both still in demand. 

1860 Aged 41, wrote important series of articles on social ethics, arguing that the art of growing rich (much admired in Victorian times) was really the art of keeping others poor. He also called on employers to treat workers as is they were members of their own families. These writings, later published as a book, Unto This Last, were condemned as subversive and dangerously heretical but had an enormous impact. Many of the first members of Parliamentary Labour Party declared that Ruskin was the predominant political influence on their lives.
1870 Aged 51, became first Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. Two years later he established the Ruskin Drawing School in the City. Believing in the value of physical work, he persuaded a group of undergraduates to repair a country road, under the supervision of his gardener. The diggers included Arnold Toynbee and Oscar Wilde. Campaigning for the reform of England, Ruskin established the Guild of St. George, "to set the example of socialist capital as opposed to a national debt and of socialist labour as opposed to competitive struggle to life". The Guild still exists and is the owner of the museum collection which Ruskin assembled specially for the people of Sheffield and is described in detail later.

At his peak, Ruskin wrote up to 20 letters daily, besides travelling, writing articles and books, lecturing sketching, collecting minerals, rowing, chopping wood. But in the 1880's he suffered a series of mental breakdowns from which he never fully recovered. Ruskin died in 1900 and was buried in Coniston churchyard in the Lake District he loved so much.

The Ruskin Building, 97-101 Norfolk Street, Sheffield, formerly Hay's Wine Rooms, built circa 1875, restored in 1985

In May 1985 the collection of the Guild of St. George was returned to Sheffield to be housed in the new Ruskin Gallery in Norfolk Street, Sheffield. Ruskin tried to educate widely through his letters, lectures and pamphlets, many of which were aimed at working men, and which generated an enormous following. His ideas contributed to the increase of Mechanics Institutes, to the demand for free public libraries, for working class access to university education, (leading to the creation of the WEA and several university extramural departments). Perhaps most obviously the naming after him of the first residential working-class college (founded in Oxford earlier this century) pays lasting tribute to Ruskin's influence.

 Sheffield was important to Ruskin because he was impressed by th utility of its iron and steel manufacture, the excellence of its cutlery and the town's proximity to beautiful scenery which provided such a contrast with the 'dolorous city of the dirty Don'.

Ruskin was familiar with Sheffield. He had visited in 1875 and in his Fors Clavigera letter 56, published in August of that year he wrote, "I have become responsible, as the Master of the Company, for rent or purchase of a room in Sheffield, in which I propose to place some books and minerals, as the germ of a museum arranged first for workers in iron and extended into illustration of the natural history of the neighbourhood of Sheffield and more especially of the geology and flora of Derbyshire.

In February 1876, Ruskin informed his readers that out of the annual income of the Guild, which was 240 pounds a year, one of his old pupils at the Working Men's College, Henry Swan, had been appointed as curator at a salary of 40 pounds a year. The site of the original small cottage at Walkley, situated between Bell Hagg Road and Bole Hill Road is commemorated today by Ruskin House, a private flats complex. The purchase price of the original five roomed, stone built cottage in 1875 was 300 pounds.

When Henry Swan moved into the cottage with his family he took up most of the house, leaving just one small room to accommodate Ruskin's growing collection. And this was a constant source of complaint by Ruskin.

 Henry Swan was an interesting man in his own right. He had been trained as an engraver and worked with Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand, before becoming a photographer in London.

 In the 1870s he moved to Sheffield to find work as an engraver and helped Ruskin to find suitable premises for the museum. Swan was considered something of an eccentric having been of the first people to ride a bicycle in Sheffield and had attempted, and failed, to popularise the sport of throwinq boomerangs. Sheffield was one of the centres of industry in Victorian England, and the skill and craftsmanship in ironwork was held to be of the finest quality in the world. There was little chance to study the history of art in Sheffield at that time. It was in 1875 that Sheffield got it's first public museum and not until 1887 that the Mappin Art Gallery was opened.

 The Walkley Museum became one of Ruskin's most successful ventures. It soon outgrew the Walkley cottage and Ruskin began negotiating with the Sheffield Council to persuade them to provide suitable accommodation for the museum. When they failed to, he built a wooden extension in 1884 to ease the problem of space but by 1894 the Council offered Ruskin the use of the recently-acquired Meersbrook Hall, situated in Meersbrook Park.

 The newly housed collection was opened by the Earl of Carlisle on April 15th, 1890. In the spacious premises, situated in parkland, the popularity of the museum grew year by year. Up until 1953, the collection remained on view to the public but interest in Ruskin's work had, by this time, declined and when structural problems with the building arose the museum finally closed.

 The collection remained in store in Sheffield, until 1964 when it was removed by the Guild of St. George to Reading University. In 1979, Sheffield City Art Galleries began a campaign to persuade the Guild to return the collection to its original home and in 1981, it returned to Sheffield. In May, 1985 the new Ruskin Gallery was opened with its new premises on Norfolk Street, in the city centre, in the old Hays Wine Lodge building, an appropriate place as Ruskin's father founded the family fortune in the wine trade.

 "We will try to take some small piece of English ground, beautiful, peaceful and fruitful". 

St George's Farm (photo: Harry Camm)

Ruskin's most persistent attempt on his utopian line was at Totley, now a South Western suburb of Sheffield, some 6 miles from its centre. This was a 13-acre farm and was variously referred to as Abbeydale, Abbeyfield, the Mickley Estate, or simply as Totley. It stayed under the direct control of the Guild of St. George from the time of its purchase in 1876 until 1885, after which it was leased to a tenant farmer and the name was changed to St. George's Farm. Whilst it never achieved success during the 9 years it was under the control of the Ruskinian colonists as a model orchard and botanical garden, it has since 1885, up to the present day flourished as a commercial nursery and has been farmed continuously by the Pearson family.

It was pointed out to Ruskin that the tone of his, Letters to Workmen and Labourers, were not best suited to his intended audience. Often in the letters and his Oxford lectures of the 1870's he could have addressing a group of small girls in his most patronising manner. Some of the content of the letters is destructive, denouncing modern science, or machinery or the ideal of liberty, or the economics of competition. But is was also through this medium that Ruskin put forward his most ambitious constructive scheme, the Guild of St. George. He set out a code of conduct and Christian belief to which the Companions of the Guild were to pledge themselves; they were then to give a tenth of what they have and of what they earn, towards the creation of a Ruskinian utopia.

"We will try to take some small piece of English ground, beautiful, peaceful and fruitful. We will have no steam engines upon it and no railroads. We will have no untended or unthought of creatures on it; none wretched but the sick, none idle but the dead. We will have no liberty upon it; but instant obedience to known law and appointed persons; no equality upon it; but recognition of every bitterness that we can find and reprobation of every worseness. When we want to anywhere, we will go there quietly and safely, not at 40 miles per hour..." (in the 1890's as a contemporary conservationists Ruskin opposed the proposed Dore-Chinley Railway line, through Totley, loudly protesting against, 'the invasion of Virgin country').

Some companions of the Guild would devote their full time to developing this society and others would support it while pursuing their own professions. Ruskin led the way with his own 7,000 pounds but very few others followed his lead. Having announced the scheme in 1871, he repeated his appeal the year after in greater detail but by the end of 1873 there where only seven annual subscribers. Eleven years later, the Trustees' Report showed that 56 individuals had joined the Guild. There were one or two legacies, but Ruskin's own contribution remained much the largest element of the Guild's resources, which were used to buy a little farm land and some cottages and to promote certain traditional crafts. The only tangible result of any permanence was the Guild Museum, founded in Walkley, Sheffield in 1875.

In April, 1876, Ruskin made a tour of the North of England, visiting Sheffield on the way. For this journey he built a special carriage, as he had no great love for the railway and on the 27th of the month he met a few friends of the museum - Secularists, Unitarians and Quakers, mostly gathered by Henry Swan, tile curator of the museum. The Sheffield Telegraph of 28th April, 1876 gave the following report: "The proceedings were chiefly of a conversational nature and no set speech on anyone of these several subjects dealt with was given. Primarily, the subject of comununism came up and its most extreme principles were freely and enthusiastically advocated by one or two of those present".

Ruskin subscribed his belief in the broad principles of Communism and pointed to his sustained advocacy of it. He also attacked machinery - from sewing machines, which would not be used by members of the Guild, to the gigantic steam devices of his day. Indeed he argued that steam should only be used for cutting icebergs in the frigid zones and for blasting rocks to provide more land on which people could live.

One of his audience at this meeting suggested that a community should be established in Sheffield where members could live together in furnished apartments and establish some system of co-operative manufacture - like making boots. Having a government of their own they would inspire similar communities gradually to grow up stronger and more powerful that the government of the country. In the same month, Ruskin wrote, "A few of the Sheffield working men who admit the possibility of St. George's notions being just, have asked me to let them rent some ground from the Company whereupon to spend what spare hours they have, or morning or evening, in useful labour.

I have accordingly authorised the sale of 2,200 pounds worth of our stock, to be re-invested on a little estate, near Sheffield, of thirteen acres, with good water supply. The workmen undertake to St. George for his three per cent and if they get tired of the bargain, they land will always be worth our stock. I have no knowledge yet of the men's plans in detail nor shall I much interfere with them, until i see how they develop themselves. But here is at last a little piece of England given into the English workman's hand, and heavens". So St. George's Farm came into existence.

But there was dissent from both the Guild's trustees, who resigned when Ruskin (working in Venice at the time and showing more appreciation of its broader ideals than of it's practical details), insisted that the purchase should go ahead. Nor was Ruskin vindicated by his action and he was soon to incur further criticism for his poor choice of land and his inability to ascertain the suitability of the colonists for the task in hand. As with his other land ventures, the Totley community never approached Ruskin's loftier ideals. 

He had hoped that shoemakers who mainly made up the community would used the opportunity to raise their standard of craftmanship as well as experiment with a suitable form of self government. Ruskin christened them, 'Life Guards of a New Life'. He went on, 'You are called into a Christianship of war, not hiring a corsair's hull, to go forth and rob on the high seas. And you will find the engagements you have made only tenable by a continual reference to the cause for which you are contending, not to the advantage you hope to reap'. It was to be 'the first essay of St. George's work'. He also stated that the lane had been given to them so, 'that they may do the best you can for all men and that they were a fellowship more in the spirit of a body of monks gathered for missionary service'.

However, this was matched by disappointing results on the ground. He had told them, 'You must get your simple and orderly tyrant, or Cyrus, to begin with. Cyrus, first suppose, only over green-grocers - - - in these gardens of yours'. As to their shoemaking enterprise he commanded: 'You are to make shoes with extremist care to please your customers in all matters and which they ought to ask; by fineness of fit, excellence of work, and exactitude of compliance of special orders, but you are not to please them in things which they ought not to ask. It is your business to know how to protect and adorn the human foot. When a customer wishes you really to protect his or her own foot, you are to do it with finest care. But if a customer wishes you to injure their foot, or disfigure it, you are to refuse their pleasure in these particulars and bid them, if they insist on such dis-service, to go elsewhere".

Their accounts were to be opened to the public so that their profits might be known. The tenants were not chosen immediately. Perhaps the reason was that he was experiencing difficulty in transferring the property at once to the society as a body, for as it stood, it was in his own name. He realised he ought to be in Abbeydale (as he called the property) but he was wholey occupied and completing some notes on St. George's Chapel in Venice. He declared that the 'Dalesmen' must take care of themselves.

Early attempts to grow fruit and vegetables for the Sheffield market foundered and Ruskin himself was soon to complain of constant outlay of capital and low yields. Admittettedly the land itself was reputedly poor, described at the time of purchase as being wasteland that had been exhausted and then neglected by previous owners. Averting criticism of his own selection and of the inexpertise of the colonists, Ruskin also blamed a hostile climate for the crop failures.

The Community engaged one man to work for them and then another. Visitors flocked to see them to such an extent that a profitable side industry grew up to supply them with tea. Fruit, eggs and vegetables in small nunbers were taken by the members to be sold in Sheffield. Many became hopeful that it would become a fully residential community. 

The cobblers wished to accelerate this movement but the committee and management did not wish to become further indebted to Ruskin. They refused permission to one cobbler who wished to lease his cobblers shop and take up permanent residence in the Totley community. This cobbler then appealed to William Harrison Riley. It was probably inevitable that with the absence of Ruskin from the project there would be disagreement between the colonists as to how the project should be organised. At first they tried to get on by vote of simple majority but Ruskin became aware that they had entirely convinced themselves of the impossibility of getting by in that particular manner. Things were to get worse with the arrival of William Harrison Riley, who proclaimed himself as Master of the project, arousing bitter resentment among the others.

Riley was a person of unusual calibre. For a long time his association or his background had not been appreciated in connection with the Totley enterprise. He does not figure in any biography of Ruskin or any biographical dictionary. Riley was the son of a Manchester local preacher, who learned the art of engraving and later emigrated to America where he worked for three years. Returning to England, he became a commercial traveller for his father, who was connected with a cloth printing factory and in doing so, became interested in the thoughts of socialism. In 1866 he was in America again, this time in the jewellery trade and journalism. He met Walt Whitman, the poet and by 1870 decided to return to England.

Riley setteled for a time in London where he published his Yankee letters to British Workmen and joined the International Working Men's Association, the title being changed to The Republican Herald and in April 1874 The Herald and Helpmate.

In April 1875 he moved to Bristol where the last copy of the paper appeared. At the same time Riley and his wife were managing a Mutual Help Club, the object being co-operative distribution and educational work. Riley objected to the sale of intoxicants on the premises, so he moved and formed a wholly temperance society in December 1875, called the Social Improvement Institute. However, due to financial problems this folded after eighteen months and he moved from Bristol to Sheffield.

In Sheffield, Riley edited and published The Socialist, a monthly which ran from July to December 1877. He proclaimed himself a Christian Socialist. His vigorous opinions brought him to the attention of John Ruskin and Edward Carpenter - who was then settling at Millthorpe in Derbyshire, only a short distance from Totley and he became the unacknowledged leader of the social reformers in Sheffield.

Riley's own brand of utopianism was laid down in his twenty two clause "Draft of a British Constitution", printed in the final copy of The Socialist in December, 1877.

As Riley confessed. to himself : "I am glad to know that I am, to some extent, a visionary - a seer. I know that the blind - the non-seers - will grin and chuckle at this thankful confession and will continue to lead other blind men into every orthodox ditch. I will continue to respect the faculty of sight - insight and foresight - and will continue with other and greater seers to enlarge and improve the sight of mankind and to oppose the champions of darkness - the revilers and destroyers of sight". The arrival of Riley as custodian; or Master of the Totley communitarian experiment was in accordance with the principles of the St. George's Guild. The colonists, however, had other ideas. They had existed as a group since 1874, originally meeting as members of a Mutual Improvement Society that met at the Hall of Science in Rockingham Street, Sheffield. It had been previously noted that their contact with Ruskin had been through Henry Swan, the agreement being that they would repay Ruskin back within 7 years, the money that had been used to buy the Totley Farm.

Many were hopeful of settling in Totley permanently, in a community, rather than daily travellers to it; Communitarians rather than Commuters. The cobbler who had been refused permission to lease his shop and who turned to Riley upon his arrival in Totley, had been anxious to accelerate the movement as a whole and in July 1875, had succeeded in obtaining a cheque for one hundred pounds from Ruskin which he cashed and brought the money to the Committee of Management. The Committee, however, passed a vote of censure on him and returned the money to Ruskin. Ruskin did not reply. The cobbler's disappointment led him to Riley who immediately communicated with Ruskin.

The conclusion to this complicated and deteriorating situation was startling. In the words of one of the original committee, "Riley went to the farm and took absolute possession of everything, telling our manager that he was Master. The poor man came to our meeting looking not too delighted at the change and gave us the information. Now, considering that the society had agreed to pay Ruskin back on his own terms this thing seemed impossible and a chosen number of the committee went to the farm to seek an explanation. Riley coolly informed them that he was Master there and they had no power. He met their remonstrances with sneers and in one case with threats of personal violence. Two letters were written to Ruskin seeking his explanation but no answer was returned. Then the committee wrote again declining all further responsibility or connection with the farm. The story is finished as far as we were practically concerned".

By this time, Riley seems to have exhausted his own and Ruskin's patience, so he emigrated with his wife and child to the United States of America. Ruskin's disappointment with him was heartfelt. "Mr. Riley was no friend of mine. I tried him as an exponent of modern liberalism and was as pleased with the results as your members were". So the Guild of St. George turned Totley to another purpose.

This new purpose was announced in the Report of the St. George's Guild for 1879. It was to be cultivated 'with the object of showing the best methods of managing fruit trees in the climate of Northern England; with attached greenhouses and botanical garden for the orderly display of all interesting European plants'. It was to be 'connective with the work of the museum of Sheffield', and be placed under the superintendence of David Downs, Ruskin's own head gardener on whose zeal and honesty Ruskin said he could rely. David Downs would work for Ruskin without expense to the Guild.

Ruskin hoped that the gardens would soon become important enough to require the establishment of a curatorship in connection with them. On 29th August 1878, he wrote to a friend, 'I have just given orders that Abbeydale shall be made a vegetable and botanic garden, giving employment to any workmen or workmen's children who like to come so far - for any hour's exercise and furnishing model types of vegetable produce to the Sheffield markets, while I am going to build good greenhouses for keeping out frost but not unhealthy hothouses, needing watching all night'.

David Downs was quite a character and well worthy of mention. He had been in the employ of John Ruskin's father and hence referred to Ruskin as 'the young master'. Ruskin referred to him, affectionately as 'Downsie'.

David Downs would not have been too keen on coming to Totley after having worked for Ruskin in the South, in the Lake District and also having travelled abroad with John Ruskin. However, he was a good man and always willing to work for the master, he loved so well. We had previously been in charge of seven gardeners and no doubt found that Sheffield community which was made up not only of cobblers and bootmakers but also iron workers and opticians, along with their squabbling wives, a different environment.

Downs was a simple man and the work he was sent to do in Totley growing cabbages and grubbing up the roots of trees was very different to the Azaleas and sunshine he was used to. In appearance, he was regular John Bull looking man, with a good natured red face, bushy eyebrows which worked up and down and a squeaky voice. His eyebrows helped him look very wise at times, though his innocence and simplicity made him very comical and kept him in a constant state of surprise.

There is an amusing story of him sitting in Venice, reading an Italian newspaper upside down, with a group of wandering beggars around him to whom he would now and then dole out the smallest possible coin, telling them to go away and not make beasts of themselves.

It appears that even the presence of David Downs and his gardening expertise could not make the revitalised plan for Totley work. Unlike the success of the Ruskin Museum, on the other hand, St. George's Farm languished and in spite of the efforts to produce strawberries, currants and gooseberries on it, Ruskin was writing to Downs on 24th April, 1881; 'Suppose we sell all that good-for-nothing land at Totley and take somebody else in, for once - if we can - instead of always being taken in ourselves, for a change'. 

 Three years later he spoke of it in his Report for 1884 as, 'Thirteen acres of very poor land'. Luckily in 1885, a tenant was found for it, through the agency of Edward Carpenter, a friend of Riley's and pioneer of Socialism in Sheffield.

Carpenter introduced one of his young friends, George Pearson to Ruskin and as a result Pearson leased it from the Guild until 1925, when he bought it outright. The Totley experiment was not without significance. One of those who were, as we have seen, much stimulated by it, was young Edward Carpenter, then a young university extension lecturer, who stated, 'The year 1879 was in many ways the dim dawn or beginning of a new life for me', and began to 'knit up alliances more satisfactory to me than I had known before' .

He visited Bradway and Totley, he actually lived in Totley for a few months in 1880. After a lecture, a scythe maker, Albert Fearnehough, became a close friend and in this way began the association with working people. In May 1880 he settled in a small cottage near Bradway, close to the Fearnehoughs, before going to Millthorpe. He was a friend of the Rileys whom he visited in 1884 whilst on a visit to America.

Carpenter's own enthusiasm for sandal making, stemming as it did from his Indian friends, was undoubtedly encouraged by the very cobbling Communitarians who had originally enthused over the St. George's project. It was also through Edward Carpenter that William Morris, later famed for his textiles and wallpaper, became an observer of the Totley project. Carpenter left a history of the project, which had been overlooked by the editors and biographers of Ruskin. It can be found in the newspaper published by William Morris in The Commonweal for 9th March, 1889. In an article entitled A Minstrel Communist, Carpenter wrote an obituary of Joseph Sharp, one of the original dozen of the group, for whom Ruskin bought the land in Totley. Further correspondence on the Totley project was published in The Commonweal and asked for 'more light on these experiments at Totley, as perhaps the nucleus of contemporary tendencies in the evolution of Socialism'. As a result part of Carpenters reply was, 'I think one reason why all these little communal schemes fail is their narrowness - and it is a good thing they do fail though it is also a good thing that they are started and succeed for a short time... ..personally I would not like to belong to a comununity of under a million people. I think with that number one might feel safe, but with less there would be a great danger of being watched... ...all honour to those who have fought to establish these little communities. They have kept the sacred fire alight through a long and dark night.

Edward Carpenter was well acquainted with practical schemes in the Sheffield district and the wider current of radical ideas at the time. He obviously looked back, with some scepticism at the 'would-be Garden of Eden'. 

Towards the end of his life Ruskin was not able to resume his writings for although he lived on until 1900, the smallest literary task even the composition of a brief informal letter, was soon utterly beyond his strength. He had retired into a private universe of reveries and dreams.

He believed that his lifework had failed and from some points of view, a critic is bound to agree that his pessimism was not ill-founded. None of his schemes of reform had resulted in much practical benefit, some, indeed like the Guild of St. George had dwindled and decayed many years before his death. He had impressed his contemporaries but had not influencd them.

Mike Williamson

February 1995