An appreciation by Mark Frost of Stuart Eagles's 'Ruskin's Faithful Stewards: Henry and Emily Swan'

Companion Dr Mark Frost reflects on the tireless scholarship of fellow Ruskinian & Companion Dr Stuart Eagles, as his new book is published.

An Appreciation of Stuart Eagles’s Ruskin’s Faithful Stewards: Henry and Emily Swan (Exeter: Ruskin Research Blog, 2024), 150 pp, ISBN. 9781399990493

This wonderful volume is testament to Dr Stuart Eagles’s characteristic generosity on a number of levels. Firstly, because of the enormous contribution it makes to Guild historiography, and secondly, because of the fact that he has gifted a copy of this volume to every Guild companion – an extraordinary gesture, but one that will not be surprising to those, like me, who have known Stuart for a long time. It is also in tune with Ruskin’s own attitudes when setting up the Guild. In Letter 8 of Fors Clavigera (August 1871), announcing his own financial pledge (confirmed in December that year as £7000), Ruskin urged others to contribute funds to place the newly-conceived St George’s Company on a sound footing. Crucially, he told them that the intention behind giving was more significant than the amount pledged:

First, let whoever gives us any [money], be clear in their minds that it is a Gift. It is not an Investment. It is a frank and simple gift to the British people: nothing of it is to come back to the giver.

But also, nothing of it is to be lost. The money is not to be spent in feeding Woolwich infants with gunpowder. It is to be spent in dressing the earth and keeping it, —in feeding human lips,—in clothing human bodies,—in kindling human souls (Cook and Wedderburn, 27. 142).

With Ruskinian spirit, then, Dr Eagles has gifted us all something extremely special, and I was more than pleased to be asked to offer an appreciation of this work. Stuart and I go back further than either of us would probably care to admit – to our shared time undertaking millennial postgraduate studies at the University of Lancaster’s Ruskin Programme. At that time, our work did not overlap much, but over the years our scholarly interests have intersected considerably, coalescing around studies of the Guild. Stuart’s magnificent Oxford University Press monograph, After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet, 1870-1920 led the way in 2011 with a wide-ranging survey of individuals, movements, and organisations who had been influenced by Ruskin in ways that had often been under-reported or neglected. This work set the stamp for Dr Eagles’s characteristic and unrivalled ability to undertake detailed, forensic, and extended primary research via archives and primary resources, and to reach analytical conclusions of considerable acuity. These qualities are admirably demonstrated throughout his subsequent Ruskin Research Blog (which has just reached its 40th entry), a valuable resource for Ruskin scholars and Guild companions alike. Although its purview reaches beyond purely Guild matters, our organisation is covered in wonderful detail. It is something of a pity that other Guild materials that Stuart had accumulated on an older version of the Guild’s website, in the years that he acted as a stalwart secretary to our organisation, have not found their way to the new site.

At any rate, I was happy to be able to follow in Stuart’s footsteps when I was fortunate enough to discover startling new materials on the Guild’s history that led me on my own archival detective trail through Britain and the United States, and that resulted in The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George (Anthem Press, 2014). My attempts to correct previous accounts of the Guild, and to introduce significant actors in its early history who had been unknown, suppressed, or rendered obscure by time or scholarly neglect, owed much to a desire to follow Stuart’s tenacity in tracing sources, following leads, refusing to admit dead ends, and to put scattered pieces together in ways that made sense. It’s also no coincidence that ‘Eagles, Stuart’ is the longest entry for any critic in that work, given the foundational nature of his work on Ruskin’s influences.

While it was a pleasure to expand the Guild’s history so extensively in The Lost Companions, I was also beset during the research and writing process with a strong sense of how much I had not been able to discover. Trailing between archives had extended the map of the Guild, and made connections between figures and events far clearer, but many mysteries remained that I was simply unable to follow up – partly because of limits to my time that left unpursued leads, and partly because the coherence and impetus of the monograph would have been interrupted by including all of the possible materials on the Guild’s early history that might have been available if I had had yet more time. This problem has, however, led to a not-insubstantial body of work that has sought to fill in my gaps, to follow my clues, and to establish new lines of enquiry. The range and quality of work of this kind is evident when looking at the volumes available in the Guild bookshop (many of which are authored by Stuart). It was a particular pleasure to assist Sally Goldsmith at various points as she expanded our knowledge of a significant episode in Guild history in in Thirteen Acres: John Ruskin and the Totley Communists, a work that took its starting point from the list of members of the Totley commune that I had discovered back in 2012 in Hull History Centre. Ruskin’s Faithful Stewards goes much further in this regard, illuminating the lives of some of the key figures in that most vexed and complex of the Guild’s early ventures: Edwin Priest and William Skelton Hunter, in particular, are no longer simply blank names, but vibrant figures whose complex Sheffield lives are fascinating.

It’s wonderful, then, to find that my own work has been one of the inspirations for Stuart’s indefatigable and tireless campaign to unlock everything that can possibly be known about the Guild’s history, and this latest book is a sign that he is maturing rather than slowing down. One of the tasks of my study of the Lost Companions was to agree with those who had sought to critique an earlier impression that the Guild’s first Sheffield Museum was a ‘crank’, a word first used to describe Henry Swan by George Allen, Ruskin’s publisher and – like Swan – a Ruskinian forged in the art classes that Ruskin gave at the Working Men’s College in the 1850s. I was also able to enhance and widen our understanding of Swan by drawing on the extensive Ruskin-Swan correspondence from the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia that had been largely neglected by critics. These letters also revealed the hitherto-unrecognised significance to the running of the museum of Henry’s wife, Emily. Valued by Ruskin on many levels, he called her the museum’s ‘curatress’. A fuller picture of their significance is available in my own Guild pamphlet. Whatever I managed to do, however, there remained a nagging sense of incompleteness in the Guild’s Sheffield history.

What Dr Eagles has done in his latest work is to build significantly on mine and all previous studies of the Swans, fully exploring all aspects of their lives and opening up previously unknown facts and details that contribute so much to scholarship. This pattern is set from the earliest chapters that tell us far more about Henry Swan’s early life, adolescence, and young adulthood than has ever been known before, using a remarkable array of journalistic and genealogical sources to give us, for the first, time, a really vivid and convincing portrait of this incredible man. The same is true for Emily, whose distinctive family history and character emerges vividly throughout the volume. Given that the latter years of her life were painful and difficult, it’s particularly welcome that Dr Eagles has delved into the specific details of mental and physical health problems that were somewhat evident in the Rosenbach correspondence and other materials, and given a clear picture of her final years at a York sanitorium, The Retreat. There is, indeed, a deep thread of pathos running through this book about a family who suffered much – not least from the untimely suicide of their second son, Godfrey. After making a truly remarkable impact on nineteenth-century social and cultural history, the family essentially faded away.

There is in fact far too much to commend in a volume that I would urge all Companions to read from cover to cover, but I wanted to particularly recognise the extraordinary revelations contained in Chapter 8 – which offers the first detailed account of Henry Swan’s pioneering contributions to advanced photographic technologies – and Chapter 9, ‘Jersey Boys’, which reveals a period in the Swan family life about which I had no idea: their brief but not insignificant residence in the Channel Islands during the early 1870s. While the content of the book is always riveting and revelatory, the manner in which these lives are traced is deeply engaging, a testament to Dr Eagles’s deep enthusiasm, his love of all things Ruskinian, and his abiding desire to find the stories of often-overlooked people whose lives are valuable, encouraging, meaningful, and rich.

Very recently, I passed on to this remarkable author all of my Guild archive notes and materials – including those used in my Guild monograph and those that could not find their way there. I could think of no better person to act as a guardian of a little treasure trove that I have no immediate hope of exploring again myself. So, in thanking Stuart now – on my own behalf and hopefully on behalf of all Companions who in receiving the gift of Ruskin’s Faithful Stewards are thus the beneficiaries of his extraordinary gifts – I want to wish him the best of health and the hope that he will continue to produce works that mark him out as a companion to Henry and Emily Swan in being a faithful steward of the legacies of Ruskin, the Guild, and all its Companions.

Mark Frost

October 2024.

Find further information about the book on the Ruskin Research blog HERE.