In this blog post, the third of a new series, Stuart Eagles sifts the evidence and reveals the identities and backgrounds of the Sheffield communists who met Ruskin in Walkley and went on to collaborate with him in establishing a working community on 13 acres of farmland in Totley, Derbyshire.

RUSKIN & THE COMMUNISTS (PART 3):
THE SHEFFIELD SECULARISTS & THE HALL OF SCIENCE

Stuart Eagles

Some of the most valuable information contained in the Sheffield Independent’s report on Ruskin’s meeting in Walkley 150 years ago is a list of many of those who were present:

“Mr and Mrs Swann [sic], Mr E. Priest. Mr R. Smith, the Rev. W. Holmes [sic], Mr G[eorge] Dawson, Mr Ernest Hill, Mr G. Shaw, Mr W. S. Hunter, Mr Webster, Mr Williams, and Mr Daniells, besides several ladies” (Sheffield Independent, 29 April 1876).

Not everyone listed here considered himself a communist, notably the Rev. Holmes, the Congregationalist minister whose reminiscences we have already considered. Ruskin’s friends, Henry and Emily Swan, who curated his museum collection at Walkley, were sympathetic to the communists both personally, and agreed with many of their views, but they did not themselves identify as communists.

For the purposes of the present discussion, we can ignore “R. Smith”—this is Richard Smith (1818-1890), a celebrated Sheffield artist—likewise Allan MacDougall (1832-1918), a Glasgow-born master printer and law stationer who, though not named in the Independent’s list, identified himself as present in Walkley in a letter he wrote to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph (29 April 1876) that addressed the art side of the Walkley discussion, as I have outlined in a recent article in the Journal of the Friends of Ruskin’s Brantwood.

The other name over which we can quickly pass is Ernest Hill (1834-1917). A skilled silver chaser (a designer or pattern-maker involved in the manufacture of silverware) Hill was the son of a town councillor who interested himself in politics of a broadly progressive stamp. He was the secretary of the Sheffield branch of the National Education League which campaigned for free, compulsory, secular schooling nationwide. He also lobbied to have the opening times of public libraries changed to accommodate the needs of the working classes. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that Hill was directly involved with the group of communists that went on to collaborate with Ruskin at Totley.

The Telegraph claimed that the conversation between Ruskin and his guests reached a point when the “majority” of the audience had “begun to tire of so much time being consumed by the subject of Communism”, and that when the focus shifted to the subject of art one of the communists rose to his feet and said that “there seemed to be two parties in the room” (Works 30.307, 308). If this is correct, then we must assume that there were several other people present whose names remain obscure.

Yet, most of the names listed in the Independent recur in the history of the Totley experiment. We can assume that Mrs Maloy, whom we met in the first post of this new series of blogs, was among the ladies—the Telegraph claimed that there were six women present. Of the men named (and only men are named), it is only Webster who cannot be positively identified, owing to a lack of corroborating evidence, though a “W. Webster” is recorded in the accounts of the Guild of St George as having been paid £2 17s. 9d. for “mason’s work” on 3 November 1877 (Works 30.113).  Whether this was the same “Webster” is impossible to know, however.

An appreciation of the biographies of these working-class radicals in Sheffield helps us to unpack more of the Totley story than has hitherto been possible.

 

THE RADICAL ROOTS OF SHEFFIELD COMMUNISM

First, though, it is necessary to dig more deeply into the history of the group to which George Dawson and his friends belonged. We find the origins of the group in Sheffield’s radical history.  Specifically, they came together to pursue their shared communist sympathies in Sheffield’s secularist Hall of Science and the local co-operative movement. So, how did this come about, and what were the origins of the Hall of Science?

The group of radicals had only formed their communist group about a year before their fateful discussion with Ruskin in Walkley in April 1876.

This new, independent, and apparently informal society held “regular meetings”, according to Dawson’s letter to the Independent (6 May 1876).

In fact, as Mrs Maloy later explained in The Commonweal, the group had formed out of a Mutual Improvement Class that had met from 1874 on Sunday mornings at the Hall of Science on Rockingham Street. The Secular Chronicle also referred to the group as a Mutual Improvement Class (see 6:6 (15 October 1876) p. 189). Although neither Mrs Maloy nor George Dawson say so, this was an avowedly secularist group that was part of the Sheffield Secular Society.

The truth of this was hit upon in an otherwise unsympathetic piece of commentary that appeared in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in April 1877:

“On one point [the Communists] expect to be wonderfully united. The Twelve [founding members of the Totley colony] are nearly all Secularists, and as they do not regard themselves or chapels with favourable eyes, the probability is they will be a church and a chapel to themselves, and thus, as we have heard it put, ‘escape all the trouble of sectarian bitterness’. They are to worship ‘under the blue canopy of heaven’, which generally means smoking a short pipe in a Derbyshire lane, with a couple of curs at their heels, and recognising a distinct ‘public-house’ as the most picturesque object in the landscape.” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 4 April 1877)

Notwithstanding its sneeringly mocking tone, the paper rightly identified the communists’ secular roots and sympathies. They were vitally important.

The Hall of Science was an essentially Owenite workers’ educational institution founded by the leading local socialist politician Isaac Ironside (1808-1870). It was opened by Robert Owen (1771-1858) himself in 1839. (For more on its origins, see Salt).

From a Ruskinian perspective, the key figure associated with the Hall of Science was the leading secularist, journalist, and co-operator, George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906). He had been one of the early teachers at the institution, appointed in the 1840s to serve as a Pestalozzian lecturer. When he visited Sheffield in September 1876 he gave two lectures at the hall. The first, in the afternoon, unfolded his “Impressions on reading the Bible a second time”; it stimulated “considerable discussion” in which “several Christians” expressed objections (Secular Chronicle, 6:4 (1 October 1876) p. 166). The second lecture, given in the evening, was on “Secular Responsibility”. Holyoake had been imprisoned for blasphemy in 1842, but by August 1876 had launched the Secular Review. The Sheffield meeting passed a resolution congratulating him “for his undaunted courage and perseverance against oppression and wrong” and expressed the hope that he would continue to “do battle against tyranny and help forward the cause of humanity”. When Holyoake visited Sheffield again in February and March 1880 to talk at the Hall of Science about his “Co-operative Travels in America”, a talk he gave to the Sheffield Co-operative Society, he visited Ruskin’s museum in Walkley (see Sheffield Independent, 6 March 1880). He was a correspondent of Ruskin’s, and the keen supporter of his ideals

In the context of the Hall’s co-operative politics, enthusiastically endorsed by George Dawson, it is worth noting that Ruskin told Holyoake in August 1879, after he received a copy of Holyoake’s History of Co-operation: its Literature and its Advocates (2 vols., 1875–1877), that he was

“very heartily glad to be remembered by you. But it utterly silences me that you should waste your time and energy in writing ‘Histories of Co-operation’ anywhere as yet. My dear sir, you might as well write the history of the yellow spot in an egg—in two volumes. Co-operation is as yet—in any true sense—as impossible as the crystallisation of Thames mud.” (Letter from John Ruskin to George Jacob Holyoake (August 1879) qtd in Works 29.414)

Holyoake appears to have responded patiently and politely to such provocative discouragement, and in a second letter, Ruskin pleaded:

“[…] let me pray for another interpretation of my former letter than mere Utopianism. The one calamity which I perceive or dread for an Englishman is his when yet it is a fraud: its reality is not according to the appearance.” (Letter from John Ruskin to George Jacob Holyoake (12 April, 1880) in Works 29.414)

George Dawson, in his letter in the Co-operative News about the merits of co-operative communities, commended the views of a number of leading co-operators who had recently visited Sheffield: “their ideas contain the germs—more than germs—of principles which would, if carried, completely reform society”.

He was specifically referring to J. T. W. Mitchell (1828-1895), one of the leading Rochdale Pioneers who helped shape the Co-operative Wholesale Society by his emphasis on consumers’ interests, and John Holmes (1815-1894), a wealthy draper from Methley, Leeds, who was a radical essayist and one of the founders of the Leeds Co-operative Society.

Mitchell and Holmes were present in Sheffield on 31 January 1876 when the cornerstone was laid of a new store opened by the Improved Industrial and Provident Society Ltd. With an 80-foot frontage, the building on Trippet Lane consisted of four shops: a butcher’s, a grocer’s, a draper’s, and a hardware store (see Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 5 February 1876). “I hope”, Dawson opined, “that Sheffield co-operators may benefit from their visit. They certainly needed all the advice they got”, in order to move them on from “candles and soap” and from “milk-and-water co-operation”, to “far higher subjects”.

By December 1876 Ruskin was writing in Fors Clavigera that the co-operative movement had “already combined to build co-operative mills” and added significantly, “they would find common land a more secure investment” (Works 28.768).

At the Mutual Improvement Class of Sheffield Secular Society at the Hall of Science, to which both Dawson and Mrs Maloy belonged, a member would read a paper at a morning meeting which the group would then collectively discuss. Mrs Maloy explained that the best of the “very interesting and instructive papers” were then given a public reading at the Hall on the Sunday evening (Maloy, p. 164).

Digging deeper into the character of the class, it is evident that its heroes were Robert Owen, George Jacob Holyoake, Charles Bradlaugh, and Annie Besant, as well as Ruskin.

Many of the names of its members crop up in journals such as the Christian Socialist, The Agnostic Journal and Eclectic Review, The Freethinker, The Reasoner, The Co-operator, The Co-operative News  and especially The Secular Chronicle and The Secular Review and Secularist which carried short but valuable notices of the class’s meetings which serve to confirm and extend Mrs Maloy’s testimony.

The Secular Chronicle reveals that the classes were more than mere talking shops: from 15 September 1875, for instance—not a fortnight before the first meeting between Ruskin and working men in Walkley—a singing class was commenced on Wednesdays in “order to make their meetings more attractive” (4:11 (12 September 1875), p. 119). On 3 January 1877, W. Pearson organised the society’s first (clearly belated!) “Christmas children’s party”: “and although it rained and snowed all day, it was a thorough success” (The Secular Chronicle, 6:25 (17 December 1876) p. 298; 7:3 (14 January 1877) p. 34).

By 1877, a recreation class had also been added, and in January 1878 the class even considered starting its own secular Sunday school. Within a couple of years, Sheffield’s secularists were sufficiently well established to host guest lectures from leading sympathisers such as George Hacob Holyoake (September 1876), Charles Bradluagh (February and November 1877), Touzeau Parris (1839-1907) (June 1877), Charles Watts (1836-1906) (November 1876, January and September 1877, and January 1878) and Annie Besant (1847-1933) (September 1877).

The topics debated by the Sheffield secularists in 1877/78, when the communist grouping was most involved in the Totley project, neatly sums up the political context in which they operated: the population question, the Eastern question, and the land question were top of the agenda. In August 1877, a Mr Symes criticized the prosecution of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in the previous year for publishing Charles Knowlton’s advocacy of birth control: they were heavily fined and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, but the sentences were overturned by the Court of Appeal on technical grounds.  Annie Besant’s visit to Sheffield the following month was described as a “profound” and “remarkable success” attracting large but not disorderly crowds which included Christians of many sects as well as secularists, young and old, men and women, united in their condemnation of the “gross injustice” Besant and Bradlaugh had suffered.

By the end of the year, one W. H. Neave, a committee member who had previously spoken powerfully about the doctrine of free will, read a paper on “The Eastern Question”. Popular opposition had waned to the Disraeli Government’s support for the Ottoman Empire over the so-called “Bulgarian Atrocities” committed by Turkish mercenaries against Bulgarian Christians. A new jingoistic mood supported the government’s shift towards war with Russia. This was the crisis that had drawn William Morris into the political sphere, aligning him with the trade unionists who remained loyal to the Eastern Question Association of which Morris was treasurer, while the Liberal Party merely fell silent.  Neve advocated non-interference by the British. This provoked some disagreement, but in January 1878 the class passed a resolution protesting against British involvement in the conflict, and in light of “the present widespread distress” they opposed any increase in Britain’s military expenditure.

 

A NEW COMMUNIST FAITH

Mrs Maloy recalled that in July or August 1875 a member of the Mutual Improvement Class of the Sheffield Secular Society gave a paper on Communism that its members unanimously agreed should be repeated for the benefit of a wider public. It stimulated “much interest and some excitement” (Maloy, p. 164).

Mrs Maloy seems to have been referring to a debate on “Communism and Competition”, reported in The Secular Chronicle on 29 August 1875. The debate began with a 20-minute speech by a Mr Russell in which he promoted the merits of competition and free trade.

Then one “Mr Shaw” replied

“ably contending that Competition was a system of deception, lying, and all sorts of villainy, whilst a Communistic state of society is calculated to remedy these evils and bring about a better state of things” (The Secular Chronicle, 4:9 (29 August 1875) p. 101).

Although the report went on to note that “[a] number of the audience took part in the discussion”, there is no indication that the debate, or Shaw’s paper if that is what his contribution amounted to, were repeated as Mrs Maloy claimed. Nevertheless, this debate would have been fresh in the minds of any members who might have met Ruskin a month later. As we shall see, “Mr Shaw”—the “Mr G. Shaw” from the list of people who met Ruskin in April 1876 quoted earlier—would play a vital role in the experiment at Totley.

According to Mrs Maloy, this “paper” on communism was then read elsewhere, and this was followed by other “bolder” papers read in and around Sheffield. Dawson also tells of how an article on co-operative villages had stimulated discussion on four consecutive Saturdays at the Sheffield Liberals’ Reform Club in Paradise Square (then about to be given up in favour of new premises in Angel Street). “We ‘Communists’ laid our principles before the class” and though the Liberals were reasonably well-disposed to the communists, their objections to the impracticability of communism were “amusing” to the communists (Dawson, Co-operative News).

Mrs Maloy claimed that “[o]pponents became numerous and adherents few” but, by the start of 1876, she was herself “an ardent advocate of Communism” and a small society was formed out of the Mutual Improvement Class to explore and promote communist principles (Maloy, p. 164).

According to the Independent’s report about the communists’ meeting with Ruskin in April 1876, the group had since enlisted “aid and sympathy” in “a quiet unostentatious manner” (29 April 1876); winning, as Mrs Maloy later put it, “all the converts” they could (Maloy, p. 164).

In February 1876, Mr E. T. Edwards gave a paper to the Mutual Improvement Class entitled “Communism, what it ought to be”: Henry Richardson, the secretary to the class, and another prominent member of the group of communists later to become involved at Totley, reported that

“The principles and arguments put forth in the paper were good, and it was decided that a copy be sent to Mr Ruskin.” (The Secular Chronicle, 5:8 (20 February 1876) p. 91).

Edwards was later noted as Sheffield’s delegate to the National Secular Society’s conference in Bradford. Yet his identity remains stubbornly mysterious (he might have been Mr  E. T. Edwards of 255 Gleadless Road, Heeley, but it is not clear). In any case, there is no evidence that Edwards later became involved with the Totley scheme, but the fact that the Mutual Improvement Class voted to send his paper on communism to Ruskin two months before the consequential meeting in Walkley suggests that some sort of connection had already been established between Ruskin and the Sheffield communists, probably at the first meeting organised by Swan in September 1875 about which we know next to nothing.

Motivated by “wretchedness, and poverty”, and the other “anomalies” they had seen and suffered, and moreover impelled to action by the inadequacy of “all the efforts put forth to remedy” these “evils”, the self-identifying communists had banded together in order to strive purposefully for their “life dream”, as the Independent’s report on the meeting with Ruskin put it (29 April 1876).

Mrs Maloy testified later that their “ultimate object” was “to live the lives of Communists” (Maloy, p. 164).

The communists decided that the best way to achieve this was to buy or rent land—the “best and cheapest”’ land they could secure—and to build homes and business premises on it.

 

WHO WERE THE SHEFFIELD COMMUNISTS?

According to Mrs Maloy, the group of communists consisted of “Secularists, Unitarians, and one Quaker”, and they initially met at the home of the man who read that first paper on Communism.

This was

George Shaw

George Shaw 1834-1914), a boot and shoe maker. He was a member of the committee of the Mutual Improvement Class and throughout 1876 was president of the Sheffield Secular Society. He remained on the society’s committee in 1877, when one of his colleagues was fellow shoemaker, William Atkin Lill (1843-1919), later a member of Edward Carpenter’s Sheffield Socialist Society and reputedly the man who taught Carepenter—who was himself involved in the Totley story—how to make sandals (see Secular Chronicle, 7:3 (14 January 1877) p. 34 and Carpenter, p. 124). Shaw would represent the society at the National Secular Society conference in Nottingham in 1877 (see The Secular Chronicle, 7:15 (8 April 1877) p. 177; 7.22 (27 May 1877, p. 253).

In the 1870s Shaw had a retail shop at 127 South Street Moor.  He was described definitively in the Independent report of the meeting with Ruskin as “the prime mover in the Sheffield scheme for a community on Owen’s principles” (29 April 1876), an assertion which tallies with the finding that it was Shaw who spoke in favour of communism to the Mutual Imporvement Class at the time Mrs Maloy remembered hearing the consequential paper on the subject. 

Shaw seems to have led an extraordinary life. It started off unremarkably enough. He was the son of one of Sheffield’s many scissor manufacturers. He grew up on Fitzalan Street in the district of Burngreave. By the age of 15 he had been apprenticed to a shoemaker based at no. 296, Shalesmoor. In 1857 he married his first wife, Harriet Wright (1839-1888), in Wicker. She was the daughter of a local file forger and grew up on Solly Street.

George and Harriet settled down to an apparently comfortable life together. They established their home and boot-and-shoe shop at nos. 7 and 9 Corporation Street. According to the 1861 census, the business employed four men and a woman; the couple’s first child (a daughter) had already come along and they seemed to be doing well.

In late April of the same 1861, however, Shaw advertised the sale of all his stock, consisting of “200 pairs of homemade, serviceable boots and shoes” and his working tools (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 26 April 1861). He also sold various musical instruments, including a “fork-action harp, old bass, [and] violins”—whether this represented what we might now call a “side hustle” or his own private collection is not clear.

Shaw sold up in order to take himself, his wife, and young daughter, on their travels. They first emigrated to Australia, where a son and a second daughter were born in Brisbane in 1864 and 1866 respectively. From there they emigrated to America. They settled in San Francisco, California, where a second son and a third daughter were born in 1868 and 1870 respectively. Such facts have been pieced together from the standard genealogical sources. What the Shaws thought of their adopted countries and what they experienced can only be guessed at.

Ruskin had told Henry Swan ahead of the meeting in Walkley in April 1876:

“I should like to meet the men; but could tell them no reason why they should stay in England, if they wish to leave England.

“Why we should love our country, and desire to stay in it, is not a debateable matter to me, nor one respecting which people can be informed. I think it very probable life may be easier elsewhere, and Communist principles more easily carried out.

“But my work is here—with those who choose to stay here. —It may be imitated—or excelled elsewhere—in time.

“And I can only do it in my own slow way, as it comes into my head and my hands.

“I cannot spend time in persuading or preaching—else the thing would never be Done.” (Letter from Ruskin to Henry Swan, 1 February 1876)

Whatever Swan had written to provoke this response from Ruskin, it seems most likely that Shaw’s experience and example was in their minds. It is probably further evidence of Shaw’s centrality to the story of Totley, and yet he has remained an obscure figure until now—even his first name and occupation being unknown, let alone his foreign travels. (Ruskin’s comments are also instructive in respect of William Harrison Riley, as we shall see in a subsequent blog post, though he was not yet part of the picture and is therefore unlikely to have been in Swan’s mind or Ruskin’s.)

By the mid-1870s the Shaws had settled back in Sheffield where George resumed business as a boot-and-shoe maker and dealer.

We know from a letter alluded to but not actually published in the Secular Chronicle, that Shaw, having read in the journal an article on what might follow Christianity, that he wrote to say

“he thinks the ‘New Evangel’ is the system explained by Dr Travis, and says that there is a party in Sheffield training themselves to live under it.” (Secular Chronicle, 5:4 (23 January 1876) p. 40)

This demonstrates that he was closely aligned politically with George Dawson.

As president of the Sheffield Secular Society, Shaw spoke on education in January 1876 and spiritualism in December of the same year (see Secular Chronicle, 5:5 (31 January 1876) p. 55 and 6:25 (17 December 1876) p. 297). Meanwhile, on Sunday, 15 October 1876, six months after the meeting with Ruskin, Shaw delivered a paper on Communism. It is possible that Mrs Maloy’s version of history composed in 1889 mixed up this paper with Shaw’s earlier, briefer advocacy of communism. A notice that appeared in the Secular Chronicle read:

“HALL OF SCIENCE, Rockingham Street, Sheffield. —Last Sunday Mr. G. Shaw read a paper on ‘Communism’, in which he endeavoured to show that it was the only true remedy for the evils exist­ing in Society. Mr Weston and another gentleman, who was a stranger, opposed.—H. RICHARDSON.”(Secular Chronicle, 6:7 (22 October 1876) p. 200)

The following month, Shaw travelled about 30 miles to address the Heckmondwike Secular Society on the same subject. The report in the Secular Chronicle notes that Shaw was “a thorough going man in favour of that state of society, and the theory he propounded was subjected to severe cross-examination”(6:22 (26 November 1876) p. 261). It is evident that he had become quite the evangelist for the communist way of life.

In the Secular Chronicle of just one week earlier (19 November 1876) it was reported:

“We learn with great pleasure that the Communists of Sheffield are endeavouring to form a community based upon the system of Robert Owen. They are trying for a piece of land to commence upon. We shall be glad to receive a copy of rules, and all particulars; to which we will give all the publicity in our power.” (Secular Chronicle, 6:21 (19 November 1876) p. 246)

On 10 December they followed up thus:

“Our readers will have seen that a Society modelled after the plan of Robert Owen is about to be formed in Sheffield. The following is the declaration required to be signed by those wishing to join the Community.

“‘I, A. B. hereby declare that I will for ever abandon all claims to private property that is produced by the community; that I will look upon every individual as my brother, or my sister; that I will do all in my power to promote the happiness of all in this community, and will at all times observe to all the utmost kindness and forbearance. Also that I consent that the surplus wealth that may be created by our united exertions be devoted to the extension of this community, or to the formation of others upon the same fundamental principles, for the emancipation of our fellow men.” (Secular Chronicle, 6:24 (10 December 1876) p. 284)

At the meeting in Walkley, it was almost certainly Shaw—the only shoemaker among those present—who made reference to the manufacture of footwear. Shaw certainly answered Ruskin when the master asked what the group’s notion of happiness was. Shaw said that

“his idea of the happiest state of life was to live in common, and for each to do as far as possible his fair share of work, everyone being guaranteed a sufficiency of food and clothes through life. He believed any effort in this direction would have to be begun in a humble way amongst the working classes. He had an idea that if land could be got, with a good supply of clay, stone, and water, with which to erect their homes and workshops, a good commencement would have been made.” (Sheffield Independent, 29 April 1876)

Ruskin responded sympathetically to Shaw’s vision, but said that the primary question was how to begin.

Shaw replied that if the Sheffield communists could only get the land and the houses, they could proceed to manufacture boots and shoes. He added, with some authority, that “there was such a tremendous market for them”.

Ruskin agreed, but he wondered whether shoes or hats were the best item to start with, presumably unaware that Shaw was a shoemaker.

Ruskin continued:

“That they must begin in a small way was certain, and also that food and clothing ought to be guaranteed to everyone who worked. Of the advantage of this there could be no doubt. The only question was why people were content to live in total uncertainty about their food or wages, and as to whether their trade would last a year or a dozen years; and he tried to mend these things.” (Sheffield Independent, 29 April 1876)

Ruskin presumably meant, by this latter point, that he had addressed these arguments in his political writings, and was raising them in his Fors letters.

Shaw would speak again to the Mutual Improvement Class at the Hall of Science in January 1878. This time he set out “to show that the New Testament gave a wrong account of Christ’s character and teaching, and that we ought to think much better of Christ than all the accounts represent him”. It provoked opposition among his colleagues, some of whom were presumably atheists or agnostics as well as secularists, but he reportedly answered their objections well. Nevertheless, it gives some indication of the differences among the communists and secularists themselves, and some of these would prove to be arguably as important a factor in the failure of the first phase of the Totley experiment as their ultimate disagreement with Ruskin himself.

The communists had only met at Shaw’s home for a relatively short period before changing their venue, Mrs Maloy tells us, to  a “small room” in “a warehouse” which was probably more centrally located; it belonged, she said, to the group’s President, whom Mrs Maloy does not identify (Maloy, pp. 165, 164).

However, Mrs Maloy does reveal that said President was a friend of Henry Swan’s, who sometimes attended their meetings. It was Swan who was responsible for inviting members of the group to meet Ruskin on that late April evening.

This unnamed President of the Sheffield Communists was

Edwin Priest

Edwin Priest (1814-1890) was a Quaker whose friendship with the Swans was probably forged through their shared religious affiliation.

Sally Goldsmith has done valuable work in her fine study, Thirteen Acres, to uncover something of Priest’s life. He was an optician in a large and successful spectacle-making partnership (Priest & Ashmore) which owned a warehouse in Sheffield. Priest seems to have been a figurehead for the communists from the beginning. Already over sixty by the time the group was formed, he was the eldest member on whose wide experience the others greatly relied.

It was almost certainly Priest to whom Ruskin was referring when he wrote obscurely in a letter to Henry Swan that “[t]hat ‘Quaker’s Dozen plan’ is a very pretty one, but more complex than I at present feel to be needful, or care to try” (letter from Ruskin to Henry Swan, received 3 April 1876).

A comment piece in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph described one member of the group of communists as “a man of means” who did “not need to work to gain a livelihood” (4 April 1877). This may well have referred to Priest. By this poin in his life Priest may well have been in such a position; he is the likeliest candidate for such a description.

Priest’s wife died towards the end of 1876 before the Totley project got underway. Even the youngest of his daughters, who assisted with the work of the family business, was not married and was then in her mid-20s. He was relatively free of responsibility and probably had time on his hands.

Moreover, Priest had been an active and leading member of a dizzying range of co-operative and mutual improvement organisations. He was sympathetic to Ruskin’s ideas and his name was among the list of people present at the April meeting between Ruskin and the communists. Priest did not merely provide the venue for the communists’ meetings. He influenced, even guided them in, some of their key practical decisions.

The report of the meeting published in the Independent confirms that the Sheffield group had already “ripened” by April 1876 to the point where it had made plans for “more than one” model village (29 April 1876). Several gentlemen had already expressed their willingness “to throw in their lot with each other” in order to form such a community. Their main difficulty had been in securing “sufficient funds and a suitable piece of land”.

The communists’ planned community would be far from being an anarchist utopia. They were “fully alive” to the “great moral difficulties” they would have to grapple with, and had therefore devised “a code of rules”.

In his letter in the Co-operative News, George Dawson explained that the Sheffield communists

“after discussing several schemes for raising capital, finally adopted that of ‘shares’. And, on the first night of the adoption of this plan, 380 shares were promised to be taken up by six persons present at the time, and many persons outside offered to take shares, should our idea ever be realised.” (Dawson, Co-operative News)

The Sheffield Communists, in other words, had set up what amounts to a joint-stock company. Shares were priced at £5 each, and £600 had been raised by April 1876 according to the Independent (29 April 1876). This is impressive, albeit that it is far short of the £1,900 that Dawson implied had been pledged. Perhaps the share-price rose before actual purchases were made…

According to Mrs Maloy, members of the group also subscribed a penny a week towards the communists’ expenses. They also contributed whatever additional funds they could afford—typically between one and five shillings a wekk—in order to amass sufficient capital to pursue their dreams. They understood that it would take “years” to reach their goal. With the benefit of hindsight, Mrs Maloy insisted that they “did not intend to seek any rich man’s aid”—a point at odds with Dawson’s testimony, but supportive of the general tone of her own argument, which was one of unleavened regret at their involvement with Ruskin (Maloy, p. 164).

Underlining her point, Mrs Maloy wrote that, in the early days, the communists had been “very happy”:

“There was not one doubter in our ranks, and we had, I believe, perfect trust in each other.” (Maloy, p. 164)

For her, Ruskin’s involvement explained the beginning, middle, and end of the problems that would be encountered at Totley.

But Edwin Priest seems to have kept a cool head throughout. He had a mass of experience. He was President of Sheffield’s Industrial and Provident Society, and Chairman of the Industrial Building Society. Priest was also mainly responsible for attracting the prominent co-operators to visit Sheffield in early 1876 that Dawson considered so pivotal. Formed in 1865, within five years the Provident Society had developed co-operative services to cover the provision of butcher’s meat, drapery, coal, and housing. Meanwhile, members of the Industrial Building Society subscribed £1 a month. It had also borrowed £400 at 5% interest from an unnamed private individual. In the half-year to April 1870 it reported impressive receipts of £4,068 (see Sheffield Independent, 27 April 1870).

In 1873, Priest and Dawson had taken leading parts in a meeting at Sheffield’s Temperance Hall at which it was determined to form a Co-operative Coal Mining Company. Dawson told the assembled crowd, to loud cheers, that it was the duty of working-men to combat “the rascally combination that existed amongst the coal owners” (Sheffield Independent, 1 April 1873). Here again, a joint-stock model of business was adopted, with shares costing £1 (payable by installments). When Priest proposed that an executive committee be formed to steer the project, he drew upon a wealth of philanthropic and administrative experience that dated back to the 1850s when he was junior steward of the Ecclesall Church of England Sick Society. In the 1860s, he frequently chaired meetings of the Sheffield branch of the Victoria Benefit Society (which also used to meet at the Temperance Hall on Townhead Street).  He was a keen member of the Sheffield Debating Society, and by 1879 he was a director of the Industrial Permanent Building Society.

Without a doubt, Priest was central to the communists’ decision to adopt a joint-stock model of business.

The report of the April 1876 meeting between Ruskin and the communists that was published in the Telegraph noted that a member of the Society of Friends—almost certainly Priest, though he is not named—had objected to the accessibility of Ruskin’s books—their cost and the fact that they had to be applied for from Ruskin’s publisher by post—which had allegedly prevented them from being “satisfactorily well-known” by working men. Ruskin was too modest, the man thought, but Ruskin disagreed. An issue of Fors could be had for the “fair price […] of a pot of beer” (Works 30.307). It was the result of “twenty years’ work and experience”, but if they did not want it, “he would not throw it at their heads”, words and sentiments that eerily anticipate aspects of the Whistler libel case in 1878 (Works 30.307).

To explain this point: in June 1877, in Letter 79 of Fors, Ruskin had accused Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” (Works 29.160). Suing Ruskin for libel, Whistler, when examined at the trial as to whether 200 guineas for two days’ work could be justified, he famously retorted, “I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime” (see Works 29.580-587). To judge by correspondence received from Ruskin between 1873 and 1875 by William Harrison Riley, Ruskin would have agreed with Whistler at least so far as to acknowledge the value of accumulated experience, at least. Addressing Riley’s radical views in relation to the Labour Reform Party of America, Ruskin wrote:

“[…] it costs me ten minutes to make a drawing for which I can get ten guineas. Now, do you mean to forbid by law my getting the ten guineas? You can; and that, I suppose, is your notion of liberty.

“But you can’t make me make the drawing for less, so you simply won’t have the drawing.

“How do you pro­pose to get it? Or supposing that I did choose to make it and you came and took it by force; how do you mean to determine who is to have it?” ([Riley], p. 378)

Priest is anonymously referred to by a correspondent, “W.H.C”, in The Co-operative News, who gave an account of the communists’ endeavours at Totley which we will examine in greater detail in subsequent blog posts.  Of the members W.H.C. met on his visit, it was “a venerable-looking old gentleman, whose peculiar vernacular indicated his acquaintance with that very worthy sect the ‘Society of Friends’” (i.e. Priest) that he singled out:

“I found in him a man of superior intelligence, and one likely to be of great use to the Communists, even if he remains as an outside member, which, judging from his age and other circumstances, I think will be the likely case for him to pursue. At present he acts as their adviser, for which he appeared well adapted.” (W.H.C., p. 448

Priest’s interest in the farm at Totley would in fact long outlast the communist experiment itself and even Ruskin’s association with it.  George Pearson (1857-1943), who would eventually take on and make a success of the farm as a family business, recalled later that, “Old Mr Priest (of Priest and Ashmore) took a great interest in the place since I have been here”, though Pearson did not know, or could not remember, whether Priest had had “any connection with the Commune” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 9 January 1926).

Ruskin wrote to Swan on 12 August 1877:

“[…] I am quite unable at present to visit Sheffield, or deal with any one of the practical problems at Abbeydale [i.e. Totley].  For the men’s sake, and for the sake of all, I must now husband my strength, and for the present leave the men to themselves; trusting to Mr Priest and Mr Shaw, and the others who have sent me their names, to do honour to our cause in the Fors accounts, by enabling me at the end of the year to show that the estate is paying its 3 per cent interest, if I did not choose to return it.” (Letter from Ruskin to Henry Swan, 12 August 1877).

In the following month’s number of Fors, Ruskin admitted, “I ought, by rights, as the Guild’s master, to be at present in Abbey Dale itself; but as the Guild’s founder, I have quite other duties.” (Works 29.208)

Ruskin’s confidence in Priest and Shaw—if that is what it amounted to—would evaporate as problems with the experiment mounted. Ruskin wrote in some anger to Swan in January 1878 that he had “tried this experiment on your recommendation of the men to me, more especially of Priest and Shaw.  Both Priest and Shaw fail” (Letter from Ruskin to Henry Swan, 5 January 1878). But that is to get ahead of ourselves.

Beside Priest and Shaw, several of the other working men named by the Independent as having met Ruskin at the museum in Walkley in April 1876 were involved with the Mutual Improvement Class at the Hall of Science and the communist group it spawned. They would go on to make important contributions to the Totley scheme.

William Skelton Hunter

William Skelton Hunter (1838-1904) who, like Dawson, was named on Swan’s list of Sheffield working men, was a surgical instrument filer. He rejected formal religious practices in favour of spiritualism, and got himself into a robust argument with an anti-spiritualist lecturer at Sheffield’s Mongomery Hall in 1889, which ended up with him issuing a macho challenge to debate the subject with the speaker anywhere in Sheffield and at any time (see Sheffield Independent, 16 April 1889).

Hunter had advocated spiritualism for years, and just as the Totley experiment was taking form, he advertised in the local press offering to give instruction on how to help “everyone to investigate spiritualism for themselves in their own homes” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 14 March 1877).

In September 1875, Hunter read a paper to the Mutual Improvement Class on “Co­operation: Commercially, Politically, and Religiously Considered”.

Two other men not apparently present at Walkley but later involved at Totley—Henry Richardson and Henry Fellows—are also worth introducing at this point.

Henry Richardson

Henry Richardson (1824-1919), a carving fork maker, was for most of the period from 1874 to 1878 the Sheffield Secular Society’s secretary. As Sally Goldsmith has pointed out, he was also Edwin Priest’s neighbour. The two men had been involved in the co-operative movement together since the 1850s. Richardson also attended the conference of the United Kingdom Alliance of Organised Trades which took place in Manchester on New Year’s Day 1867 (see Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 2 January 1867).

Henry Fellows

Although there is no evidence that Henry Fellows (1827-1902) was among the workers who met Ruskin at Walkley in April 1876, his name does appear on Henry Swan’s list of “Candidates for Abbeydale” and he would indeed go on to be involved with the scheme. A stove grate fitter like his father, he lived in the 1870s on Headford Street where he also traded as an ironmonger. Having been widowed by his first wife, Mary, in 1871, in 1873 he married, at Chesterfield, Jane Ann Waller, a milliner (women’s hat-maker), the daughter of a tailor and 15 years Fellows’s junior.

One of the first references to Fellows’s involvement with Sheffield Secular Society comes at 10.30am on a Sunday in early September 1875. He read a paper on the “Land Question”. It was so successful that the class discussed it further on the following Sunday morning, and “by a resolution of the Improvement Class” it was given a public reading at 7 that evening (The Secular Chronicle, 4:11 (12 September 1875), p. 119).

Perhaps it was this success that led him to join the society’s committee in 1876 under Shaw’s presidency. He delivered a paper in November on “The Church of the Future” (see Secular Chronicle, 6:22 (26 November 1876) p.262).

In the following year (1877) he was elected the society’s Vice-President. He read another paper on “Land, Labour and Money” in June 1877 in which he “argued that neither money nor land was capital, but that which was produced by labour was the only real capital. He spoke in favour of paper currency issued by Government”.

In October he returned to the land question, and this time his talk was more fulsomely reported, giving us a sense of his line of argument. We are told that Fellows explored

“the unjust distribution of wealth, and the wonderful benefits which would result from a proper attention to what contains the resources of our food, clothing, houses, health, wealth, and prosperity.” (The Secular Review and Secularist, 1:23 (10 November 1877) p. 367; also mentioned in Secular Chronicle, 8:20 (11 November 1877) p. 237)

His concerns were closely aligned with those of his fellow Totley communists. “A vote of thanks was unani­mously given to Mr Fellows”, the report in the Review concluded. Among the few additional things that can be said of him is that his name appears in the 1880s as one of the sellers of the journal, the Christian Socialist (see below)

Joseph Daniels and Frederick Williams

Two of the other communists to meet Ruskin and work at Totley, about whom relatively little can be said, are Joseph Daniels (not Daniells as given in the press) and Frederick Williams. They were both named by Swan as “Candidates for Abbeydale: Applicant for shoe-tuition”.

Joseph Daniels (1834-1911), the son of a stone mason, was a carpenter and joiner, born in Belper, Derbyshire into a Primitive Methodist family. Joseph and wife Mary spent their early married life together in Radford, Nottinghamshire. They had three sons and a daughter. After a period living in Codnor, Derbyshire, in the 1860s, they had moved to Sheffield by 1870. Daniels established a successful business of building contractors in the town. It specialized in horticultural projects. This must have been particularly relevant at Totley, which was always managed principally as a market garden. Although the business was based on the London Road for many years, in 1903 it moved to premises near Abbeydale Road, Totley, which must have reminded him of those heady days in the late 1870s when the communists collaborated with Ruskin.

Frederick Williams (1842-1928) was a stone mason like his father. He was born and brought up in Buckfastleigh, Devon, and the family later settled in Torquay. In the early 1870s he moved to Sheffield, and lived at 12 Crowther Place, off Abbeydale Road. By 1891 he had moved back to Devon probably to look after his widowed mother, and by 1901 his family had relocated to Holborn in London. A year after his wife, Emma, died in London (1906)), he returned to Torquay and re-married (to Ellen, 14½ years his junior); she died in 1927, and he late the following year.

Mrs M. A. Maloy

Of all the people involved in the Totley project, Mrs M. A. Maloy deserves special attention. This is both because she happens to be the only woman named in the story, and because her voice has traditionally dominated accounts of the project. The outspoken and reasonably detailed history which she supplied in a letter to William Morris’s socialist Commonweal has been the main—often the sole—source for many scholars interested in Totley as a (failed) utopianist experiment.. Yet, curiously and frustratingly, all but nothing has ever been revealed of her biography—until now.

Her recollection of the project indicates that she was one of the half-dozen unnamed women present at St George’s Museum when Ruskin visited Walkley in April 1876. At that point in her life she was 36-years-old and not yet married. So, strictly speaking, Mrs Maloy did not meet Ruskin on that occasion, because she was not yet Mrs Maloy.

Born Mary Ann Berry (1839-1925), she was the daughter of a gas fitter and the eldest of at least six children. Raised in London’s East End, she was baptized at St Mary’s, Whitechapel, and grew up in Stepney. The family moved to Woolwich when she was about eight-years old, and then to Charlton a few years later. She was still living at home in Streatham with her parents in 1871 when the census was taken, but within the next few years and for reasons unknown she moved to Sheffield.

She quickly got involved with the Sheffield Secular Society. She became a member of its committee in 1876, when George Shaw was president and Henry Richardson was Secretary (see  Secular Chronicle, 5:2 (9 January 1876) p. 23).  She was something of a secular missionary: she delivered lectures outside Sheffield, for example at New Bank, Halifax, where on 18 February 1877 she spoke in the afternoon on “Education, where does it commence, and from what does it consist?” and in the evening she spoke on “Communism” (see Halifax Guardian, 24 February 1877).

She married John Maloy, who was also involved with the Totley experiment, when that project was already under way. Their wedding took place on 14 May 1877 at Sheffield’s Register Office, and the two witnesses were their fellow Ruskinian communists, George and Harriet Shaw. Like the Shaws at that time, Mrs Maloy then lived on South Street Moor—she at no. 47.

John Maloy

John Maloy (1849-1884) was a blacksmith. Born in Sheffield to Irish immigrant parents, he was baptised at the Roman Catholic St Marie’s Church (as John Malloy). He grew up at 24 Water Lane, in a home that his mother ran as a lodging-house. Maloy’s father, a working labourer, died when John was about ten. At the time of his marriage to Mary Ann Berry, John Maloy was living at 54 Russell Street.

In the 1880s John Maloy and Henry Fellows were listed as official vendors of the radical periodical, The Christian Socialist: A Journal for Thoughtful Men. Fellows was listed at 47 Wellington Street, and it could also be bought at the bookstall in the Hall of Science, which Fellows appears to have run. The journal’s strap-line quoted St Paul, “Stand aloof from injustice”, and Milton, “We measure not our cause by our success but our success by our cause”.  By then, the Maloys had moved to 31 Bow Street, near to Times Buildings where Henry Swan had worked as a silver engraver in the mid 1870s. It was at Bow Street that John Maloy died at the age of 34 on 17 January 1884 as a consequence of the complications of kidney damage caused by Bright’s Disease.

Next time, we will start to look at the Totley project itself in detail as it gradually unfolded, and we will become more familiar with the Sheffield communists involved…

 

Sources Cited

Anon: “Mr Ruskin and the Communists of Sheffield” in Sheffield and Rotherham Independent (29 April 1876)

Anon: <Untitled article on the Totley experiment> in Sheffield Daily Telegraph (4 April 1877) pp. 2-3

Carpenter, Edward: My Days and Dreams: Being Autobiographical Notes (George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1916)

Dawson, George: “Co-Operative Villages—Co-Operation and Communism” in Co-Operative News (12-19 February 1876)

D[awson], G[eorge]: “The Socialists and Mr Ruskin” [a letter] in Sheffield and Rotherham Independent (6 May 1876)

Eagles, Stuart: “Artisans and Communists: Who Met Ruskin in Walkley in 1876?” in The Journal of the Friends of Ruskin’s Brantwood (Spring 2026) pp. 27-33

Goldsmith, Sally: Thirteen Acres: John Ruskin and the Totley Communists (Guild of St George, 2016)

Maloy, M.A.: “St George’s Farm” [a letter] in Commonweal, vol. 5, no. 176 (25 May 1889) pp.164-165

[Pearson, George (G.P.T.)]: “Ruskin Communism at Totley” in Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 9 January 1926

[Riley, William Harrison]: “John Ruskin” in The Illustrated American, vol.  III, no. 28 (30 August 1890) pp. 347-352

Salt, John: “The Sheffield Hall of Science” in The Vocational Aspect of Secondary and Further Education, vol. 12, no. 25 (1960) pp. 133-138

1. H. C.: “Modern English Communism” in The Co-operative News (25 August 1877)

 

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