It is 150 years since an extraordinary and consequential meeting took place between John Ruskin and a group of politically radical workers in Sheffield. It resulted in the most quixotic of Ruskin’s experiments, and led to one of the most awkward collaborations he ever attempted. The striking popular appeal of this episode in the story of Ruskin’s politics is suggested by the fact that it forms the subject of a new play due to debut in Sheffield in June 2026: Ruskin Comes to Walkley… by David Price and Rosemary Gray.
In the latest issue of The Journal of the Friends of Ruskin’s Brantwood, Stuart Eagles has identified precisely who Ruskin met in Walkley in 1876 and has sketched biographies for each of them. Now, in a new series of blog posts, Eagles reveals the detailed history of 13 acres of farmland in Totley, Derbyshire, and shows how it became a site of contested promises and competing visions. And yet, for all their differences, Ruskin and the self-styled communists shared a remarkable degree of sympathy that brought them together in a noble if short-lived common endeavour.
RUSKIN & THE COMMUNISTS (PART 1):
THE MEETING IN WALKLEY, 27 APRIL 1876 (PART 1)
Stuart Eagles
It is the afternoon of Thursday, 27 April 1876. Ruskin is visiting the museum he has recently inaugurated in a cottage in Bell Hagg Road, in the burgeoning Sheffield suburb of Walkley. He hopes that the town’s artisan metalworkers will seek inspiration in the educational collection of artworks, books, mineralogical specimens and other beautiful treasures he is in the process of creating there. His curator, Henry Swan (1825-1889), whom Ruskin met over 20 years earlier as a teacher at the Working Men’s College in London, has gathered together a group of workers to talk with him.
Ruskin had urged Swan to arrange the meeting in a letter he sent him on St George’s Day. If “half a dozen or so as last time” wished “to confer with me on what they like”, he wrote, he would be “at their command”. But, he added, he could not “make any speeches”—he was too tired for that. The “last time” to which Ruskin referred was on 27 September 1875 when Swan had first assembled a group of working men to speak with Ruskin. Frustratingly, only the briefest references to the September ’75 meeting has thus far emerged. It is not clear what was said or who was present. The scholar Mark Frost has shown that Ruskin wrote ominously in his diary that the September meeting left him “somewhat wearied, in gloomy wreck of sunset” (qtd in Frost, p. 136).
Yet Ruskin told Emily Swan (1835-1909), the wife of the museum curator, and his assistant in the museum work, that he was “very glad […] to know that there are men ready to listen to me. I do not think they will be puzzled by anything in Fors next year [i.e. his monthly published letters, Fors Clavigera]. How far they may be pleased;—is another matter, but I have good hopes of being useful to them” (recd 21 December 1876). The hint of promise here is palpable, but so is the warning.
A short report that appeared in The Times in April 1877 recalled that Ruskin had “explained” to the working men he met at Walkley a year earlier why he had chosen to place his museum in Sheffield. “He was well pleased with the workmen”, it went on, and “spoke to them in the most familiar and friendly strain, and remarked that he had come there to learn, and not to teach” (9 April 1877). Moreover, it had encouraged other working men to want to meet Ruskin, heartened by reports of his “exceedingly amiable and affable disposition”.
But it is to more chronologically and geographically proximate sources that we must now turn for a detailed account of the fateful meeting.
“COMMUNISM AND ART” was the Sheffield Daily Telegraph’s sensationalist sub-heading to its report on “RUSKIN IN SHEFFIELD” (28 April 1876). The article was re-printed the following day: Saturday’s paper reached more people; most workers had the afternoon off. The Telegraph, the town’s Tory-supporting newspaper, apparently set out to provoke its readers, even perhaps to shock them. Just over thirty years later, when Ruskin’s editors compiled the 30th volume of the Library Edition of his Works, which dealt with Ruskin’s Guild of St George, this account from the Telegraph was reproduced, with minor alterations (see Works 30.306-309). It had also been re-printed in the Ruskinian journal, Igdrasil (vol. 3 (March 1892) pp. 256–258). It has served as the standard source of information on the meeting ever since. It has been supplemented with some references to the meeting made by Mrs M. A. Maloy in an article in William Morris’s socialist journal, The Commonweal (26 May 1889), but with little else. Both are essentially unsympathetic in character and have undoubtedly coloured commentary on this episode.
Yet an entirely overlooked report—more detailed and more sympathetic—and a letter by one of the communists present at the meeting, both published in the Liberal-leaning Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, provide detailed and vital information not previously regarded by scholars. We will consider this evidence carefully in due course (starting with the section, “Unfamiliar Evidence: A Letter from George Dawson”, below), but for now let’s stick to the more familiar assertions made in the Telegraph.
EVIDENCE FROM FAMILIAR SOURCES
According to the Telegraph, about 20 people, six of them “ladies”, assembled at Ruskin’s museum in Walkley “for the purpose of hearing Mr Ruskin’s opinions on various subjects, and of giving their own” (Works 30.306). Such a description might imply a series of statements expressing different points-of-view, but the article goes on to explain that the meeting was “chiefly of a conversational nature” and that—true to Ruskin’s confidential undertaking to Swan—there was “no set speech” but that, rather, “several subjects” were discussed.
Recalling the evening more than 15 years later, the Congregationalist minister, the Rev. Thomas William Holmes (1836-1915), a close friend of the Swans’, described Ruskin’s contribution as “one of those monologues to which his hearers listened with breathless attention”: his words ‘flowed on like a mountain stream’ (Works 30.309, 310).
NB:–Holmes’s article, “An Evening with Ruskin at Walkley”, originally appeared in The Lamp: a Magazine for Christian Workers and Thinkers (no. 1 (January 1892) pp. 13-17), and was extensively quoted in the Sheffield Independent (5 January 1892). Ruskin’s editors, Cook and Wedderburn, do not establish the date of the event Holmes recollects, but state that it refers to a conversation other than that of April 1876 (see Works, 30.xlv). This is incorrect. Holmes is named as being present at the meeting in Walkley in April 1876 in the report that appeared in the Independent (29 April 1876) that we will consider later. Given that his 1892 article calls the meeting he thus describes as “one of the greatest privileges” of his life, it is improbable that he met Ruskin at some other time yet failed to mention it (Works 30.309).
Holmes recalled, more than 15 years after the event, that he was among “about a dozen” people assembled in the museum to meet Ruskin (Works 30.309). The “majority were working men” and Ruskin greeted them, Holmes said, “with that exquisite courtesy which is characteristic of him”, such that “Mr Swan’s face’, he tells us, “beamed with rare delight” (Works 30.309). The meeting took place in the museum’s one public room, measuring about 12 feet square, on the upper floor of the cottage. Holmes tells us that Ruskin sat in the window which “fram[ed] that summer [sic] night”— “a bit of scenery that would have delighted Turner, and did delight his expositor” (Works 30.309).
RUSKIN THE COMMUNIST?
The primary focus of the meeting, according to the Telegraph, was the discussion of Communism. The implied audacity and even outrageousness of this is suggested by the menacing assertion that the “most extreme principles [of communism] were freely and enthusiastically advocated by one or two of those present” (Works 30.306). The Rev. Holmes’s characterisation, on the other hand, was of a meeting where “the ethics of business” as outlined in Ruskin’s ‘noble treatise’, Unto this Last (1860) were fruitfully discussed (Works 30.310).
According to the Telegraph, Ruskin told the meeting that “he believed in the broad principles” of Communism and had “so far advocated it” (Works 30.307). He had indeed provocatively declared himself “a communist of the old school—reddest also of the red” in July 1871 in the seventh letter of Fors Clavigera (Works 27.116), but on being reminded of this passage he once told William Harrison Riley (1835-1907), a man who later played a significant role in the Totley story, that
“Yes. I have called myself ‘an old communist’, but there are few people of this generation who even try to understand me, or who read anything carefully except their ledgers and bank books.
“Of course, anything may be rightly communised by ‘consent’, and it may be well for all when there is ‘no money to waste time over’. But how and when do you expect to get ‘general consent’? Do you expect the average English shopkeeper will ever voluntarily hand over all his money to the public treasury?” (Qtd in [Riley], pp. 348-349)
Furthermore, Ruskin reportedly told those assembled in Walkley in April 1876 that “[t]he word Communism was susceptible of many meanings” (Works 30.307; and the article in the Sheffield Independent (29 April 1876) which we will scrutinize in a later blog, agrees that this is exactly what Ruskin said).
Communism, Ruskin went on to say, should start “among themselves” with the “cultivat[ion of] love between themselves”—by which he presumably meant a sympathetic understanding and respect among and between the different social classes (Works 30.307). Only in such circumstances, Ruskin asserted, could they “go further in the general principles of Communism” (Works 30.307).
An unnamed gentleman contended that “a state of Communism” meant that people “should all live together in furnished apartments, and they should start at the outset by manufacturing boots” (Works 30.307). We can guess at the identity of the speaker later, when we consider further evidence not looked at before. Ruskin asked him, “Why not hats?” and added that they “must first get the funds before they thought of dividing them” (Works 30.307). The unnamed gentleman continued by arguing that their purpose, as communists, was to have a “Government of their own” which would be “stronger and more powerful” than the government of the state (Works 30.307).
Ruskin’s reply apparently missed or side-stepped this point altogether. Indeed, he seems to have taken the gentleman to have said that he wanted a government of their own to influence the government of the state, rather than to serve as an alternative to it. It would take “a million of men with strong shoulders”, Ruskin said, “to make any change in the general government”: but he apparently agreed with the unnamed gentleman that they must become “stronger than the Government” if they were to change it. (Works 30.307).
What followed, the Telegraph argued, were several “desultory questions” and one gentleman said that, in his opinion, “he had as much right to have as much money as any other man: everybody ought to be on an equality; there ought to be no poor” (Works, 30.306). All the “paupers in the town”, the man reportedly went on, could have been housed for what it had cost to host the recent visit to Sheffield of the Prince of Wales (August 1875), and the “whole of England” for the cost of the Prince’s “fool’s errand” to India—a remark Ruskin “mildly objected to” (Works 30.306, 307). (The future King Edward VIII had been in India since October 1875, and would only return to England in May 1876.)
Responding to another letter from William Harrison Riley in the first half of the 1870s, Ruskin had written revealingly:
“So you think I would write more passionately if I had felt poverty. You cannot fancy the state of mind in which a man writes passionately of what he knows, as well as of what he feels.
“Probably my conception of poverty is far more bitter than the thing itself. But if I had been a poor man I never should have written as I now do, in favour of the poor and against the rich. I should then have written against the poor. (Qtd in Riley, p. 348). Riley would later write, “I believe Ruskin to be a better man than I am, by which I mean that I believe that if I—when young, had become rich, I should have turned out worse than he has done.” (Qtd in Frost, p. 168)
For all Ruskin’s contempt for the rich and sympathy for the poor, he never endorsed the notion of “equality”, and this difference between him and the self-styled communists would never be resolved, only ignored for the sake of mutual convenience.
The critic of the Prince reportedly proceeded to ask Ruskin whether a pedestrian did not have “as good a right” to ride a horse as one already on horseback, to which Ruskin replied that “there might not be horses enough for everybody to ride”, but he added that he liked to see men “fond of animals” (Works 30.307). In the absence of further context, it is impossible to know if Ruskin was here being gently humorous, dismissively flippant, or bitingly sarcastic.
It is worth pointing out at this stage that some unsympathetic commentary would appear in the middle of a regular column in the Liberal-leaning Independent by the “Spectator in Hallamshire”. The Spectator’s opinions seem to have been informed entirely by the Telegraph’s report and as such it tells us nothing new about the evening’s events. What it does provide, however, is a context in which to understand a particular attitude towards both Communism and Ruskin. It also highlights the significant ideological gap that separated Ruskin from the communists. This evidence is all the more refreshing for not having been quoted in scholarly accounts of the meeting to date.
According to this Spectator, Ruskin had “for months past” been “preaching” in the pages of Fors Clavigera
“doctrines that can scarcely be distinguished from Communism, and yet when his disciples supply their broad homely interpretation to his words and hail him as a Communist it is soon evident that his Communism and theirs are very different things” (Sheffield Independent, 29 April 1876).
It was an astute observation. But the Spectator was not well-disposed towards the communists or Ruskin.
Not wishing to say what Ruskin did in fact mean by “the various schemes that float through his brain”, the Spectator was nevertheless certain that he did not mean the kind of communism that pitched “one man riding on a horse” against “another walking on foot”, so that “the footman pull[s] the horseman off his steed for no better reason than that he is strong enough to do it”. Entertaining as this image might be, it misrepresents the account in the Telegraph which said nothing about the use of force. But the speculation conveniently supported the columnist’s central claim which was that the communism striven for by the radical Sheffielders amounted to “a return to the barbarous days when might was right”. Ruskin should not be surprised, the Spectator warned stingingly, “if unlearned and ignorant men fail to catch the inspiration of his prophecy, and mistake him for a leveller like themselves”. Yet, the hack went on, he could not withhold admiration from Ruskin, whose “sins are so pure and noble” that he felt acutely the “evils” that spring from the “system of capitalism; the separation of class from class”. He continued:
“In great factories the employers do not as much as know their workmen by sight. When they have paid them their wages they consider every obligation discharged, and as the capitalist rolls away in his comfortable carriage to a beautiful suburban residence, the workman finds shelter in some of the smoky streets and courts near the works.” (Sheffield Independent, 29 April 1876).
“There is something wrong in this separation” this Hallamshire Spectator concedes, “but how to set it right has so far been a puzzle”—and here’s the sting in the tail: ‘I doubt whether Mr Ruskin has got hold of the clue”.
UNFAMILIAR EVIDENCE: A LETTER FROM GEORGE DAWSON
The accuracy of the Telegraph’s report of Ruskin’s meeting with the communists, and of the Spectator’s commentary in the Independent, was disputed in a hitherto overlooked letter to the Independent (6 May 1876). It was written by someone signing himself simply “G. D.” This was George Dawson who was present at the meeting in Walkley and about whom we will learn more in the next blog post.
It is worth noting here that the Rev. Holmes pointed out in his own recollections of the meeting that “[t]here was no shorthand-writer present, at least none who dared to produce his book and pencil” (Works 30.309-310). Dawson goes further and says that the Telegraph reporter’s boast that his account had been “exclusively” printed by him, ought rather to have stated that it had been surreptitiously “obtained by ‘exclusively’ unfair means, even after they had been told that no reporter would be admitted, and that no report was desired” (Sheffield Independent, 6 May 1876). Either “some person, not invited, stole into the meeting, and carried away a garbled report, or some person who had been invited violated the rules of confidence, and did the same”. Dawson added angrily, “I have an idea who the person was—not a professional reporter. We were all disgusted to see that unprivileged report.” As we shall see, some of the communists—Dawson evidently among them—would certainly be cautious about publicity.
In his letter, headlined “The Socialists and Mr Ruskin”, Dawson set out to correct the record of the communists’ otherwise “fortunate” meeting, pointedly referring to Ruskin’s “private interview with a few specially-invited friends”.
Dawson particularly took exception to the Spectator’s allegation that he and his friends were levellers who advocated the barbaric notion that “might is right”. Nobody had hinted at the idea of pulling a man from his horse, Dawson insisted, and it was “hardly correct” to say that he and his friends were “unlearned and ignorant”.
The Spectator appeared to Dawson to have unwisely depended for his information on the “perverted report” in the Telegraph—a report, it must be repeated, that scholars have since also relied on. An editorial note at the end of Dawson’s letter alerted readers of the Independent to the fact that the paper had chosen not to reproduce many paragraphs of detailed criticism of the Telegraph’s report and the Spectator’s commentary, but they did print more than 800 words nevertheless, many of them conveying unfamiliar information.
Commending the Spectator’s criticisms of the prevailing capitalist system, Dawson wrote that he and his friends had also doubted that Ruskin “had got hold of the clue” as to how to “set it right” and it was in order to exchange ideas that they had “procured an interview” with him. This is stark testimony that the communists did not consider themselves to be very ideologically close to Ruskin from the start.
Moreover, Dawson argued, during their meeting with Ruskin the communists had questioned the morality of certain people acquiring vast amounts of wealth from other people’s labour, while simultaneously thousands of people starved—or had been consigned to the workhouse, as the report of the meeting published in the Independent put it (see 29 April 1876). Nobody had suggested “compelling” rich men to share their riches, still less had they advocated the idea of taking it by “force” in order to redistribute it “equally”, nor did they believe in such things, or suppose that men would ever be equal in “talents and capabilities”.
According to Dawson, in other words, the communists’ position was apparently closer to Ruskin’s than either the Telegraph or the Hallmashire Spectator suggested.
What the Sheffield communists proposed was the “possibility” of starting “a scheme” for “honestly, peacefully, and gradually bringing about a ‘more equal’ state of things” (or, perhaps, a less unequal one) which “rich men would gladly give a part of their wealth to help along, when they see that it deserves their support”. But as a group the communists were nevertheless “alive to the difficulty of getting men to believe in the practicability of any new system or invention”.
After all, Dawson continued, men had laughed at Robert Fulton (1765-1815) and his steamboat, and at George Stephenson (1781-1848) for saying he could make a “puffing billy” (steam locomotive) travel at 15mph; similarly, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) “and other great men” had laughed at the idea of lighting towns by gas, and Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859) had said it was impossible to propel ships by steam a few years before thereby crossing the Atlantic. Such was the lot of “every reformer and improver”:
“So Ruskin is laughed at because he can see further than most men: and so with Carlyle and others. So we are content to be laughed at by selfish conservators of existing things, and patiently bide our time, which will come.” (Sheffield Independent, 6 May 1876)
For those Sheffielders who had held “Communistic principles” dear for “many years”, the fact that they enjoyed the privilege of meeting John Ruskin was viewed by them as a boon:
“The Communists in Sheffield have been fortunate in winning a visit from Mr Ruskin; and from the date of his presence amongst them they hope their principles will spread more rapidly, and the object they have in view will the more quickly be attained.” (Sheffield Independent, 6 May 1876)
But who was George Dawson, and what were the “Communistic principles” he and his friends espoused? Only when we consider these questions can we fruitfully explore further unfamiliar evidence of what happened when Ruskin met the Sheffield communists in Walkley 150 years ago today, and that will be the focus of the second blog in this new series…
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Sources Cited
Anon: “Ruskin in Sheffield: Communism and Art” in Sheffield Daily Telegraph (28 & 29 April 1876) reproduced in John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols) (George Allen, 1903-1912) volume 30
Anon: “Spectator in Hallamshire” in Sheffield and Rotherham Independent (29 April 1876)
D[awson], G[eorge]: “The Socialists and Mr Ruskin” [a letter] in Sheffield and Rotherham Independent (6 May 1876)
Frost, Mark: The Lost Companions and Ruskin’s Guild of St George: A Revisionary History (Anthem Press, 2014)
Holmes, T[homas] W[illiam]: “An Evening With Ruskin at Walkley” in The Lamp: a Magazine for Christian Workers and Thinkers, no. 1 (January 1892) pp. 13-17, reproduced in Ruskin, Works, volume 30
Maloy, M.A.: “St George’s Farm” [a letter] in Commonweal, vol. 5, no. 176 (25 May 1889) pp.164-165
[Riley, William Harrison]: “John Ruskin” in The Illustrated American, vol. III, no. 28 (30 August 1890) pp. 347-352