Month: June 2020

In this post, Dr Barnita Bagchi discusses her British Academy Visiting Fellowship at The Ruskin, ‘Transcultural Utopian Imagination’.

My British Academy Visiting Fellowship, held for two months at The Ruskin – Library, Museum and Research Centre, Lancaster University, from late August to late October 2018, researched transcultural utopian imagination in early 20th-century South Asia.  At the centre of my research were the South Asian, Indian, and transcultural poet, educator, and community-builder Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), his friend and associate, anti-colonial politician and social experimenter M. K. Gandhi (1869–1948), and their mutual friend, British Christian anti-colonial and social activist, pacifist, and missionary C. F. Andrews (1871–1940). John Ruskin, whose Unto this Last influenced Gandhi, also figured prominently. I argue that the visits of Tagore and Gandhi to England in 1930 and 1931 respectively manifest and illuminate Indo-British entanglements in social dreaming or utopian imagination and experimentation.

The Ruskin, the Institute for Social Futures, and the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University all supported my application, and I was hosted by the Ruskin, in an institutional environment which was supportive and stimulating.My hosts and I were delighted that during this fellowship, we could co-organise a conference on Transcultural Utopian Imagination and the Future: South Asia, Britain, and Beyond, on 11 October 2018, at The Ruskin. Speakers at the symposium included Sandra Kemp, Carlos Lopez-Galviz, Lynne Pearce, Rebecca Braun, Sangeeta Datta (filmmaker, curator, director, academic, singer, who gave a keynote speech), Monika Buscher, Nicola Spurling, and northern England-based creative writers Shamshad Khan and Qaisra Shahraz. I am guest editing a special issue of Utopian Studies, a leading journal in the field, entitled ‘The Prospective Memory of the Future’ as the key output of my Fellowship.

I went to Darwen, Lancashire, during the period of my fellowship. Darwen prospered due to the spinning and weaving of cotton. Yet cotton did not grow in Lancashire. The American Civil War increased Britain’s dependence on cotton from India and Egypt, and this cotton was processed industrially into cloth in Darwen and other cotton towns of Lancashire. During my stay in Lancashire, I also went to Edgworth, near Darwen, where I found myself standing outside Brandwood Fold. Edgworth used to be industrial, a hub of cotton manufacture. Lancashire cotton manufacturer James Barlow was born in this rustic fold, the son of a weaver, Thomas Barlow. James (1821–1887) later lived at Greenthorne, Edgworth, which Gandhi would visit in 1931. The Barlow family became wealthy and well-known philanthropists. They financially supported charities connected with the Methodist church, most notably including the National Children’s Home and Orphanage at Crowthorn, the Barlow Institute, which they founded in 1909.

Edgworth, now in the borough of Blackburn with Darwen, Lancashire, looks similar, to an outsider’s eyes, to the villages idealised by Romantics in their critique of industrialism. James Barlow was born in a family that wove and spun cotton in the pre-industrial handloom manner. Brandwood Fold was one among a number of folds, formed in the seventeenth century through the enclosure of a farmstead and associated cottages. James’s daughter Annie Barlow (1863–1941), whom the family trade in Egyptian cotton led to a passion for Egyptology, and who was also a great philanthropist, hosted Gandhi in 1931.

Gandhi worried representatives of the Lancashire cotton industry, which was in decline then for many reasons. They were concerned that an Indian boycott of manufactured Lancashire cotton was contributing to the decline of the UK industry. (In fact, other factors, not least the ascendancy established by Japanese-manufactured cotton by the early 1930s, were far more important for that decline.) Gandhi, of course, did not love machine-spun cotton: he campaigned for the widespread crafting and use of village handloom cotton, and the spinning-wheel or charkha with which he himself and millions of his followers spun coarse cotton, khadi, was an object that was a concrete image of the commitment to village India, to the artisanal, to the manual, to craft, and to the beauty of the handmade product. At Greenthorne, as in nearly every place he visited, Gandhi used the charkha.

I also visited the estate of Brantwood, on the shores of Coniston Water, in Cumbria, where John Ruskin lived in the latter part of his life, a sublime landscape of mountains and water, redolent of Romantic expressive aesthetics and the pastoral. My time in northern England illustrated to me how in Lancashire and in Cumbria, places are often fulcrums both for the industrial-urban and the pastoral-rural. Both Tagore and Gandhi were acutely aware of the deindustrialization of India under British colonialism, which took place through squeezing out handwoven cloth produced locally in India in favour of influxes of British-manufactured cotton that were exempt from or had very low tariffs. Tagore and Gandhi had somewhat different views about the presents and futures they wanted for India. Tagore was more positive about industrial society. They both however remained committed to micro-utopian experimentation, with handicrafts and labour being particularly key to Gandhi’s ideals. In this regard, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last (1860), as Gandhi famously articulated in his autobiography, was a major influence:

It was Ruskin’s Unto This Last. The book was impossible to lay aside, once I had begun it. It gripped me. Johannesburg to Durban was a twenty-four hours’ journey. The train reached there in the evening. I could not get any sleep that night. I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book.

This was the first book of Ruskin I had ever read. During the days of my education I had read practically nothing outside text-books, and after I launched into active life I had very little time for reading. I cannot therefore claim much book knowledge. However, I believe I have not lost much because of this enforced restraint. On the contrary, the limited reading may be said to have enabled me thoroughly to digest what I did read. Of these books, the one that brought about an instantaneous and practical transformation in my life was Unto This Last. I translated it later into Gujarati, entitling it Sarvodaya (the welfare of all).

I believe that I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great book of Ruskin, and that is why it so captured me and made me transform my life. A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human breast. Poets do not influence all alike, for everyone is not evolved in an equal measure.

The teaching of Unto This Last I understood to be:

1. 1. 1. 1. That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.
         2. That a lawyer’s work has the same value as the barber’s, inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work.
         3. That a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman, is the life worth living.

The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it as clear as daylight for me that the second and the third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice.¹

I’d like us first to focus on the medium of the book, studied on that very modern medium of mobility, the train.  Gandhi was in South Africa in 1904, and Unto This Last was gifted to him by Henry Polak (1882–1959), his British-Jewish friend, and later editor of the Indian Opinion. The transnational and transcultural dimensions are evident. It is also notable that Gandhi learns from a ‘poet’, from the domain of aesthetics, ‘through the magic spell of a book’, that all work is or should be viewed with equal value and dignity. Gandhi also saw Tagore, like Ruskin, as above all a poet: the imagination remained very important to Gandhi, who saw himself, in contrast, as the experimenter in and seeker after Truth. The Beauty-Truth relationship is re-parsed again and again in the social dreaming of Tagore and Gandhi. In learning that a life of labour, of the tiller and the handicraftsman, is the life worth living, the recoil from machinic, urban, industrial life is implicit.

Yet Gandhi worked in his political career with urban working classes, too, not least in his native province of Gujarat, which was home to leading Indian cotton mills: in March 1918, he led a non-violent strike based on the principle of Satyagraha or civil disobedience in the cotton mills of Ahmedabad, one in which he went on hunger strike, with a resolution in which workers’ demands for higher pay were largely conceded by mill-owners. So, it is perhaps not surprising that Gandhi’s visit to the Lancashire cotton workers and mill owners was so cordial. In late September 1931, he visited Lancashire, first meeting with representatives of cotton industry at Edgeworth and Darwen. On 26 September 1931, he received a deputation of unemployed workers at Spring Vale Garden village, Darwen. Having spoken on Lancashire’s unemployment problem, having received deputations from weavers’ associations and unemployed workers, and having spoken to journalists, Gandhi left Lancashire.

Readers will find out more about the resonances between British and Indian utopianists that I uncovered in the published output from my British Academy-funded project, but the larger point that I want to make here is that the Indo-British utopian entanglements I studied complicate reductive binaries between urban and rural, industry and handicraft, ‘West’ and ‘East’, Britain and India, with the aesthetic and the ethical continuously entangled, in visions of social futures in which cooperation, solidarity, and fellowship were interwoven, to use an image from handicrafts and from the imaginative domain. The Ruskinian resonances echo through to our times, rippling across to the futures we attempt to build today in our larger social crisis unleashed by a pandemic. Andrews, Tagore and Gandhi would, I believe, remind us again today of the truth of John Ruskin’s words: ‘There is no wealth but life.’

¹M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth, trans. by Mahadev Desai, 2^nd edition (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1940), pp. 364–65.

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Dr Barnita Bagchi is a faculty member in Comparative Literature at the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication at Utrecht University. Her research investigates transcultural utopian imagination in early 20th century India and Britain. Her British Academy Visiting Fellowship was hosted at The Ruskin during the summer and autumn of 2018.

In this post, Dr Rob Smail (our recent AHRC Creative Economy Engagement Fellow) reflects on his research in using Machine Learning to explore Ruskin’s manuscripts.

What can computer Machine Learning reveal about Ruskin?  During my time at The Ruskin as an AHRC Creative Economy Engagement Fellow, I’ve been exploring how the digitisation of The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection can create opportunities for new kinds of research.

The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection is the largest assemblage of Ruskin material in the world, and the most representative of Ruskin’s working practices across a diverse range of media. In addition to 7,400 letters and 29 volumes of manuscript diaries, it includes thousands of drawings, paintings and photographs – digitising all this material will take years. However, supported by the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (NWCDTP) and the Friends of the National Libraries (FNL), I’ve been able to work with the team at The Ruskin on a study to guide this work.

Our aims in this study were twofold.  We wanted to set some basic digitisation standards and we wanted to experiment with using Machine Learning to trace connections across the full range of Ruskin’s works.

The Source Set

Our first task was to select a source set, with a manageable number of items to develop and refine our approach.  Building on my previous work at the Lancaster Environment Centre, which focused on the historic flora of the Lake District, I decided to choose a source set that revealed Ruskin’s thoughts about the region.

Ruskin first visited the Lakes when he was 5, and he returned throughout his life before deciding to settle there in 1871, when he bought Brantwood, near Coniston. The last tour he made before buying Brantwood took place between late June and August 1867.  On that occasion, Ruskin had come to the Lakes to recover from fatigue.  His stay that summer helped him recoup, which is part of the reason he later made the region his home.

Surprisingly, Ruskin’s 1867 visit has received less attention than his other Lake District holidays. Therefore, we decided to centre our study in the letters he wrote during his tour, which had the added benefit of potentially enabling us to determine what it was about the Lakes that helped lift Ruskin’s spirits.

In all, we identified 53 letters.  These included letters sent by the writer, Thomas Carlyle; the philologist, Fredrick Furnivall (of OED fame); the engraver, George Allen (who would later become Ruskin’s publisher) and the painter, Thomas Richmond.  But the majority of the letters – 39 of the 53 – were sent to Ruskin’s cousin, Joan Severn, and his mother, Margaret.

Digitising the Letters

Digitising these letters was a two-part process, which was supported by the contributions of two digitisation assistants: Claire McGann and Ben Wills-Eve.  Working together, we created an accurate and faithful transcription of the contents of each letter, and then we encoded information about each letter’s structure and layout into each transcription.

After consulting current standards, we decided to adapt the ‘modest approach’ to XML (eXtensible Markup Language) encoding recommended by our colleague Andrew Hardie. Andrew’s approach provides a flexible way of using XML tag elements to encode extra information about the plain text transcriptions, whilst keeping the amount of tags added to a minimum.  These elements, which appear inside chevrons, help capture different levels of semantic meaning, and they can help us ensure that information regarding each letter’s structure and layout is retained during the process of digitisation. In order to ensure that our approach was in keeping with best practices in the field, we built on Andrew’s model by selecting tag elements based on the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).

Using Machine Learning

Once we finished digitising all 53 letters in the source set, we were able to run a series of tests using Machine Learning approaches to examine them.  One aspect of the letters we were keen to examine was whether we could use ‘classifiers’ to detect differences in the way Ruskin wrote to different correspondents.

Classifiers are algorithms that assist with predicative modelling.  They’re often used in supervised Machine Learning research, where raw input data needs to be sorted on the basis of specific characteristics.

In this case, we used a classifier known as Naïve Bayes, which is based on Bayes’s Theorem and which has been shown to be reliable in the classification of texts.  This theorem, formulated by the 18^th-century minister and statistician, Thomas Bayes, helps calculate the likelihood of an event on the basis of characteristics that might relate to that event.

We were curious to see whether we could use Naïve Bayes to group the letters in the source set by recipient based on each letter’s stylistic characteristics.

Naïve Bayes works best when the algorithm can cross-reference several examples of the characteristics related to each classification.  This process, which is sometimes called ‘training’, allows the classifier to learn which characteristics to associate with each group.  So, we decided to restrict our experiment to the 39 letters in the source set to Ruskin’s mother, Margaret, and his cousin, Joan.

This gave us a small but sufficient sample with two clearly defined classifications: letters to Margaret and letters to Joan. Our aim was to determine if Naïve Bayes could correctly identify which letters were written to whom based on the words Ruskin used.

We split the letters in to two sets: a training set of 38 letters to which the recipient was known and a testing set of 1 letter, from which we’d removed the recipient’s name.  Whereas the former was used to train Naïve Bayes; we used the latter to test whether the trained classifier was able to determine to whom the anonymised letter was sent.

We repeated the test 39 times, splitting the letters in every possible combination and then taking an average of all 39 predictions.  We were pleased to find that Naïve Bayes was able to predict the recipient of the testing set correctly 87.2 percent of the time.

Our Findings

Our study confirms that there’s a discernible difference between the way Ruskin wrote to his mother and his cousin.  Now, on the face of it, that might not seem all that surprising. Most of us adjust our style to suit our addressee.

What matters though, is that our findings demonstrate that – even with a modest source set – we can begin to train software to detect these differences and this can help us identify patterns in Ruskin’s writings across the whole collection.

Identifying these sorts of patterns gives us a new way of assessing Ruskin’s writing in different contexts over the course of his life, and an approach to determining when undated material was written and the identity of un-named correspondents. In future, it will be possible to train the software we’ve used with increasing accuracy and to extend it to different types of textual material, including Ruskin’s diaries.

These possibilities are exciting.  They will allow us to reveal new links across the collection, providing researchers and visitors with deeper insights into both Ruskin’s works and his world.

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Dr Rob Smail received his PhD in History from the University of Manchester in 2012, and he completed his AHRC CEEF Fellowship at The Ruskin in 2019. His exploratory research with the Whitehouse Collection helped pave the way for further projects, including Digitising the Manuscript Letters of John Ruskin and Enriching understanding of natural-cultural heritage in the English Lake District.