Dr Stuart Eagles

In the course of the summer, the Ruskin Research Blog, now four years old and boasting 40 entries, published Ruskin’s Faithful Stewards. It is the first book-length biography of Henry Swan (1825-1889) and his wife Emily, née Connell (1835-1909). Here are 27 reasons why you may wish to look at it

RUSKIN’S FAITHFUL STEWARDS

The Swans curated the museum in Walkley, Sheffield, founded by Ruskin 150 years ago as part of his quest to improve society through his Guild of St George, an organisation that continues its work as a charitable trust today. Ruskin’s exemplary collection of art-treasures,  inaugurated in the 1870s and originally given into the Swans’ care, now has a permanent home at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery, where modern-day art-lovers can visit regularly changing and free exhibitions.

The bicentenary of Henry Swan’s birth will be marked in February next year (2025). Now, then, is a timely opportunity to tell the remarkable story of his life. A summary of the book can be read here, and readers of the blog might like to re-visit the second entry in this series, “A Swan without a Leda”, which first scotched a theory among some modern scholars that Henry Swan had been involved in decorating the Oxford Museum of Natural History and the Oxford Union (he was not — the Swan involved in those projects was a little-known Irish artist, Joseph Swan (no relation).

This blog focuses on what makes the book most interesting and valuable — what you can find in it that you won’t find anywhere else.

Let’s start with the visual content. Among 20 illustrations in the book are five which have not hitherto been reproduced since their first publication.

Two of these illustrations depict St George’s Museum in 1879: an exterior view of the yet-to-be-extended cottage on Bell Hagg Road, which adorns the book’s cover; and an interior view, which forms the frontispiece. They were part of a cycle of drawings commissioned for the journal, the Pictorial World, in illustration of Prince Leopold’s visit to the museum. They are believed to be the earliest images of the museum to have been published.

Two other illustrations reproduced in the book date from the 1850s and ’60s to Swan’s innovative career in stereoscopy (a form of three-dimensional photography). One is a sketch of the ‘Clairvoyant’ stereoscope, patented by Swan in 1858, and illustrated in a contemporary advertisement promoting this curious hand-held device, which Swan invented when he worked for the pioneering Quaker publisher, Alfred William Bennett, in Bishopsgate Street Without. Bennett was among the first publishers to produce books illustrated with photographs. He went on to be a notable botanist who published widely on the subject: he was also the first sub-editor of the scientific journal, Nature; and was later editor of the Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society.

Swan’s original technical drawing which he submitted in illustration of his notable ‘crystal-cube miniature’ (a self-contained three-dimensional, hand-tinted photographic ‘bust’-style portrait) is reproduced from his successful patent application.

Finally, a photograph of the Swans’ talented eldest son, Howard, who compiled a well-regarded catalogue of the collection at St George’s Museum, is reproduced from an article in an issue of W. T. Stead’s Review of Reviews.

This biographical tapestry has been woven from widely scattered threads found in a wide and diverse range of contemporary manuscript and printed sources. It uncovers a wealth of facts about the lives of the Swans which have been long since forgotten, and not previously explored by Ruskin scholars. It gives the first comprehensive account of lives full of interest and variety, creative energy, constant effort, and loyal dedication.

The book is composed of seventeen short and accessibly written chapters. Among the biographical details they expose and explore for the first time are:

• Henry and Emily’s ancestry and family backgrounds;
• Henry’s upbringing in a toy-shop in Little Brittox, Devizes;
• his successful boyhood rescue of a friend who had plunged through the icy surface of the Kennet and Avon Canal (Henry even won a medal for his bravery from the Royal Humane Society);
• the Swan family’s move to the Kingsland area of London in the late 1830s, and their early encounters with crime and disease;
• the partnership in theological bookselling briefly entered into by Henry’s father, John Swan (in the firm of Ives & Swan which was also, briefly, a publisher);
• details of the system of musical notation Henry devised in the mid-1850s, and named the “Regent Method”, which he deployed in order to teach people the noble art of singing (his musical enthusiasm was at least partly shared by his brother, John, who until his death at the age of 20, worked as a piano-maker);
• the record of Henry’s apprenticeship as a writing engraver, with information about the life and career of his master, William Richard Royle (1811-1886), who set up a family printing firm that endured into the 21st-century;
• the history of the engraving and lithographic-printing partnership Henry set up and ran from Liverpool Street in the 1840s and ’50s with the closest of his siblings, Frank, which includes details of the work they undertook for clients, among them Isaac Pitman, the inventor of the most widely-used form of shorthand;
• detailed information about the brothers’ studies at the Working Men’s College, London, where they met Ruskin and did artistic copying work for him — it emerges that they were among the first 176 students to enrol in the institution, signing up on 4 November 1854 just 11 days into its first term of operation; the following year Ruskin asked Henry to show the young Octavia Hill the art of copying pages of illuminated manuscript;
• the mapping of the network of vegetarians and Quakers in London and Sheffield, with their overlapping Ruskinian associations, which helped shape the Swans’ lives;
• Emily’s upbringing as the daughter of a leading London chronometer-maker, clockmaker and municipal politician, William Connell, and a childhood spent in Clay Street, Walthamstow, where the young William Morris grew up;
• the origins, circumstantial history and reception of Henry’s innovations in stereoscopic photography;
• the lives of Henry’s parents, brother Frank and sister Fanny, following their move in the mid-1860s from London to Jersey (Frank continued the family’s association with photography into the 1880s); it is revealed that Henry, Emily and their four children (Howard, Godfrey, Mabel and Leonard) also briefly lived in Jersey in the early 1870s (a fact that unmasked his authorship of two fascinating letters to Ruskin published anonymously in Fors Clavigera, the monthly letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain);
• the origins and development of St George’s Museum, including the hitherto forgotten name of the extension to the museum opened in May 1885 —  the Lyceum Gallery;
• Emily’s imaginative but controversial scheme to enlist the women of Sheffield to campaign for funds with which to build enlarged or alternative museum accommodation (she provided the women with hand-made purses in which to collect money);
• the identities of notable visitors to St George’s Museum (revealed from the first comprehensive survey of the visitor books) — some of them locals, such as Edward Carpenter, Benjamin Creswick, Frank Saltfleet, Omar Ramsden and Alwyn Carr, all of whom went on to establish themselves as leading figures in their field, — and such former residents of Sheffield, who had gone on to harvest a global reputation for excellence, such as Henry Bradley, whose colossal contribution to what became the Oxford English Dictionary provides an ongoing intellectual legacy — and, most excitingly of all, perhaps, the famous men and women who were drawn to Walkley by their discipleship of Ruskin, including Oscar Wilde, William Morris, Charles Ashbee, Robert Fry, Cecil Reddie, and Florence Balgarnie;
• Emily’s role in liaising with one of the Guild’s founding Companions, Henrietta Carey, in an ultimately unsuccessful bid by Nottingham to borrow the Verrocchio Madonna, later the centrepiece of Ruskin’s museum (Ruskin subsequently compensated Nottingham and Miss Carey by sending them a now almost forgotten collection of shells);
• the identity of the leading self-styled communist — the local shoemaker and radical, George Shaw — who pioneered the short-lived workers’ colony at Totley on land provided for the purpose by Ruskin himself;
• illuminating records of the Swan children’s education at the Quaker Ackworth School, near Pontefract, and that institution’s other Ruskinian connections;
• harrowing evidence of the tragic suicide of the Swans’ youngest son, Leonard, a promising woodworker and designer;
• moving accounts of Henry’s final moments and his well-attended and funeral at Walkley Cemetery;
• touching details of Emily’s final months when she was tenderly cared for in the Quaker mental-health hospital, The Retreat, at York, where all of her surviving children visited her before her death there in 1909.

Such a list merely hints at the rich and original research which embroiders our knowledge and understanding with colour and detail that enhances the picture we have of the Swans’ lives.

This is the first time that Henry and Emily’s own words have been extensively quoted to reveal their story, with material collected from forgotten letters published in the press, and private correspondence dispersed in archives far and wide.

Henry and Emily Swan were two of Ruskin’s most consequential disciples. They helped shape both Ruskin’s enduring legacy and Sheffield’s cultural heritage.

Fully referenced, with more than 400 source citations, the book is also comprehensively indexed.

You can read a review of the book by the editor of The Victorian Web, Dr Jacqueline Bannerjee, by clicking here. She concludes

“There is much here for Ruskin scholars and enthusiasts alike to enjoy. For the uninitiated, Eagles has provided a gentle, thoroughly readable and informative introduction not only to the Swans themselves, who are delineated with understanding and empathy, but to Ruskin’s ideas, and how he hoped they might be propagated for the benefit of society at large. Later generations have been far from the ‘model custodians and exemplary stewards’ that the Swans were, and that Ruskin had hoped many others would be, but a book like this might at least inspire us to appreciate what we still have, and try our best to preserve it.”

Ruskin’s Faithful Stewards: Henry and Emily Swan is available for just £20 (post-free in the UK). Please email contact@stuarteagles.co.uk for details.