As a professor at Oxford University, John Ruskin gathered around him a band of earnest undergraduates, and persuaded them to discover the virtues of hard manual work, by building a road at Hinksey.One was the brilliant historian (and opponent of Henry George) Arnold Toynbee.[1]
In 1871 Ruskin founded the Guild of St George.Land would be purchased for labourers, allowing them to be taken out of the workhouses and work ‘under the carefullest supervision and with every proper means of mental instruction.’Every trade and profession would have its own costume.A new order would flourish on a European scale, with a hierarchy led by a supreme Master, a post which Ruskin himself would reluctantly hold, but only until someone more suitable could be found.The supreme Master would preside over provincial Marshals, and local Landlords, and below them, at the bottom of the pile, the Labourers.This edifice would be supported financially by Companions who would voluntarily give a tenth of their wages to the Guild.
St George’s Farm
In 1876 Ruskin purchased a thirteen-acre estate at Totley near Sheffield to form a community of working men, and this became known as St George’s Farm.Ruskin hoped the community would develop a spiritual character, ‘more in the spirit of a body of monks gathered for missionary service, than of a body of tradesmen gathered for the promotion even of the honestest and usefullest trade.’The community was mainly composed of shoemakers, and Ruskin expected that they would be able to raise their standard of craftsmanship and, he promised, they would be allowed to experiment with a suitable form of self-government.
The community was in fact to be governed not by the shoemakers but by William Harrison Riley, who proclaimed himself a Christian Socialist, and declared that ‘it is the duty of all able-bodied persons to earn their own living by their own labour.’He also believed that ‘the land of Great Britain is the national inheritance of the Commonwealth’ and that all buildings, crops and produce of the land should ‘be used for the good of the Commonwealth.’ Food, fuel clothing and other materials necessary for human life should be distributed to all citizens according to their needs, and ‘all citizens should have a right to do as they please, providing that they do not threaten or interfere with the rights of other people.’
The Sheffield shoemakers had other ideas.They wanted to become full dwellers in the community rather than daily travellers to it, ‘communitarians rather than commuters’.[2]They fell into dispute with Riley who finally emigrated to the United States.Attempts were made to produce strawberries, currants and gooseberries on the farm, but the land was of a poor quality.Although the colony survived for ten years in the end it failed and the farm was sold.It is now run as a commercial nursery – still known as St George’s Farm.
Sources
W H G Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 1961, pp 289-304.
Chris Coates, Utopia Britannica, 2001, pp 124-127.
[1] He died young and Tonybee Hall, the East End settlement in Whitechapel, was named in his honour.
[2] Armytage, p 297
