In the tenth and final part of this series of blogs on Ruskin & the Communists, Stuart Eagles outlines what happened to the Guild’s Totley estate after Riley’s departure, when it was successively under the management of David Downs and rented by George Pearson....

In the ninth part of this series of blog posts on Ruskin & the Communists, Stuart Eagles examines in detail the history of the Totley experiment under William Harrison Riley and David Downs between early 1878 and the summer of 1880… RUSKIN & THE COMMUNISTS...

We read William Harrison Riley’s account of his visit to Ruskin at Brantwood in January 1879 in Part 7 of this series. We have seen how Riley and Ruskin forged an uneasy friendship by means of correspondence. Scholarly treatment of Riley, slender as it is, tends to be...

We have seen how the dreams of the original group of communists were tried at Totley and how they faltered. Before they finally ended in disappointment and recrimination, Ruskin placed the experiment in the hands of a notable working-class socialist and republican,...

Why did the collaboration in Totley between Ruskin and the original group of Sheffield Communists end in failure? In the sixth post of his new blog series, Stuart Eagles also follows the lives of some of the secularist radicals after their dreams of establishing a...

In the fifth part of this new blog series, Stuart Eagles outlines the history of the Totley experiment during its first phase which involved the original group of Sheffield communists drawn from the Hall of Science. He seeks out evidence of who did what on the 13...

In the fourth part of his new blog series, Stuart Eagles looks at what the communists planned to do and what financial arrangements were reachd with Ruskin. He also introduces two new figures involved in the project. But first, he sets the scene by sharing an...

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...

In this blog post, the second of a new series, Stuart Eagles looks into what the Sheffield communists believed in. He scrutinises unfamiliar sources to find out more about what happened when Ruskin & the Communists met in Walkley on 27 April 1876 … RUSKIN &...

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...