INTRODUCTION
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When William Morris died in 1896 at the relatively early age of sixty-two, one doctor had no doubt about the cause of death. ‘I consider the case is this,’ he commented: ‘the disease is simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.’ The doctor was hardly exaggerating. Looking over Morris’s career, one is indeed struck by the quantity of his work, but even more so by its range and variety.
He is best known today as a designer and craftsman. In the view of at least one major art historian, Morris must be regarded as the greatest European pattern-designer since the end of the Middle Ages, one moreover who revived several long-forgotten crafts and skills. He achieved major success in at least thirteen fields of decorative arc stained glass, ceramics, painted or stencilled decoration, embroidery, wallpapers, chintzes, printed fabrics, woven materials, tapestries, carpets, illuminated manuscripts, typography and book design. He had no formal training in any of these fields and often had to teach himself forgotten skills by studying ancient artefacts or reading the primers of medieval craftsmen. His concern extended beyond the methods of design and production to his raw materials themselves: dyes, papers, inks and so on. By all these means, he became a major authority on textile design in medieval Europe and the Middle East, as well as on illuminated manuscripts and early printed books.
In his own day Morris was thought of as primarily a poet. His most popular work, however, a book-length poem called The Earthly Paradise, may strike the modern reader as prolix, over-decorative and escapist. In general his poetry has not worn well, though the best of his lyric verse and his epic, Sigurd the Volsung, are unlikely to be forgotten. He also translated verse and prose from Greek, Latin,Danish, Icelandic, Old English and Old French. His versions of Icelandic sagas represent a literary treasure he may be said to have discovered for the English-speaking world. According to his daughter May, he was a natural story-teller, a talent that emerges in his many prose romances, most of which have roots in northern folklore. Out of this habit of romancing came his two great political fictions, A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere. During the last two decades of his life, the years of his political activism, he also became a noted lecturer and journalist on subjects that ranged from practical skills in the field of design to the kind of society he hoped for as a Socialist.
The co-existence in Morris’s work of revolutionary politics and nostalgic romance is puzzling to the reader unfamiliar with his range. It has provoked some mockery and the charge of sentimentality. Yet Morris was a practical man and anything but an armchair Socialist. He worked virtually full time for, successively, the Eastern Question Association, the National Liberal League, the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League, which he helped to found and lead. It is estimated that, between 1884 and 1890, he spoke or lectured at, on average, three meetings a week. This involved him in extensive travelling, as well as participating in demonstrations, chairing his branch of the League, attending executive meetings and running the League’s remarkable newspaper, the Commonweal. Many of the skills he brought into politics he had learnt in the world of business. Inheriting shares in a copper-mining company, he served for several years on the board of directors. He also ran his own successful design firm and, at the end of his life, the Kelmscott Press as well. He was a very rich man: at twenty-one he came into an inheritance that earned him £900 a year, in 1884 he was earning £1,800 a year from his firm alone, and he died leaving an estate worth £62,118.*
His political activity extended outside the world of party politics to consumerist and environmental lobbying. He founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and inspired and supported the conservationist bodies that have led in our day to the Council for the Protection of Rural England, the National Trust and others. A few months before he died he addressed the first meeting of the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising. His influence has been enormous, particularly at the intersection of politics, art and the environment. He inspired the Garden City and Arts and Crafts movements, the landscape gardener Gertrude Jekyll, the Modernist architect Walter Gropius, the town-planner Lewis Mumford; and his thought has had its effect today on the Green movement and the various campaigns for alternative technologies.
THE LIFE OF WILLIAM MORRIS
Morris was born in Walthamstow in 1834. The area was still rural at the time, though it began to be built on in the course of his life. The story goes that as a small boy he was often to be seen dressed in a miniature suit of armour, riding his pony through Epping Forest. Always an omnivorous reader, he is said to have worked his way through the novels of Sir Walter Scott by the age of seven. Both these legends convey the necessary image of a child steeped in Romantic medievalism from his earliest years.
They also remind us of the wealth that underpinned all Morris’s dreams. His father was a wealthy bill-broker in the City, who died when Morris was thirteen, leaving him the wherewithal for the schemes and experiments of a lifetime. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Marlborough College in the early days of the public school system. He claimed to have learnt nothing from the school, which he despised as a ‘boy-farm’, except for what he found in the well-stocked library and on solitary excursions into the surrounding countryside. For that region of Wiltshire is crammed with prehistoric monuments and remains, which stimulated his passion for the past in general and for the heartland of rural England in particular.
These passions were more than confirmed by his experience of Oxford, still today the most medieval of English cities and part of the landscape he had learnt to love. Oxford in 1853, when he went up to Exeter College, was the centre of the Anglo-Catholic and Ritualistic revival in the Church of England, a movement closely related to the Gothic Revival in architecture, both tendencies ultimately deriving from Romantic medievalism. Almost immediately Morris met a kindred spirit who was to remain his closest friend for the rest of his life. This was the painter Edward Burne-Jones, whose adolescent dream was to set up a quasi-monastic brotherhood of art and learning, its members dedicated to a ‘crusade and holy warfare against the age’. Together these young men discovered the work of their medievalizing older contemporaries: Tennyson, Kingsley, Carlyle and, most important of all, John Ruskin, whose great book The Stones of Venice, with its central chapter on ‘The Nature of Gothic’, was to shape the course of Morris’s subsequent life. That chapter not only defines the beauties of the style Morris valued most; it explains it in terms of the labour conditions that made it possible, specifically contrasting them with life in a modern factory. Creative freedom, for Ruskin, is the source of all human happiness; soulless drudgery a crime against humanity. Thus begins the nineteenth-century alliance of decorative artist and campaigner for social justice.
In 1855, with Ruskin fresh in their minds, the young men toured the cathedrals of northern France. For Morris, the experience of large-scale Gothic buildings, often in broadly medieval settings and with most of their sculpture and stained glass intact, was visionary in its intensity. It stayed with him for the rest of his life: an image of how things might be. He and Burne-Jones had previously aspired to holy orders; now, in the shadow of Rouen Cathedral, they vowed themselves to the life of art – a calling, as they saw it, no less holy. For Morris it was to be architecture and he was soon articled to the neo-Gothic architect G. E. Street, in whose office he met another life-long friend, Philip Webb, whose first building was to be Morris’s house. By this time Morris had begun writing poems and prose romances. With the wealth he came into at the age of twenty-one he set up a magazine in which to publish his writings alongside work of a similar character, Keatsian and medievalist. It drew Morris and his circle to the attention of the newly famous Dante Gabriel Rossetti, under whose spell they now fell. Before long Morris had abandoned architecture for painting and was working with Rossetti and his associates on a cycle of frescos in the Oxford Union building. There, in the typically Pre-Raphaelite atmosphere of lofty idealism and boyish horseplay, he fell in love with a ‘stunner’ whom Rossetti had invited to model for them. Jane Burden was a groom’s daughter and one of the most beautiful women of the age. In 1859 she became Morris’s wife.
The experience of communal creativity now began to give form to Morris’s aspirations. In need of a home and wealthy enough to make one that fulfilled his artistic ideals, he commissioned Webb to design a modern house in the medieval manner. The Red House in north Kent is something more than pastiche or Gothic fantasy. The Morrises found it impossible to furnish, given the degeneracy of contemporary taste, and so decided to make their own things. The whole circle contributed: Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Webb, Ford Madox Brown and the young couple themselves. (Jane was an accomplished embroiderer, needlewoman and wood-engraver.) The satisfaction Morris derived from this confirmed the truth of all he had learnt from Ruskin: the superiority of handicraft to mass production, the pleasure of creative work, and much else besides. As a result, in 1861, the friends launched what Morris ever after called ‘the Firm’: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., ‘Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture, and the Metals’. Success came quickly in terms of reputation and important commissions, though it was not until the mid seventies that the Firm began to make really substantial profits.
The great mass of their early commissions came from churches. The best of Morris’s stained glass, most of it from cartoons by Burne-Jones, towers above any other contemporary product. But the real greatness of Morris as a designer emerged later when he began to concentrate on domestic work. He had early adopted a motto from Jan van Eyck: Si je puis – ‘if I can’. It proved more than appropriate. Whenever a craft he needed proved dead or degenerate, he would simply settle down to learn it himself. So, for example, when in 1879 he began high-warp tapestry weaving, he studied an eighteenth-century French primer, ‘one of the series of Arts et Métiers’, set up a loom in his bedroom and spent several hours a day – 516 in all – weaving his first tapestry alone. He also visited the Gobelins factory in France to see the hautelisse, or vertical loom, in use.
During the 1860s Morris became famous as a poet. His first (and best) book, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), had been a critical disaster. The poems are precisely detailed medieval fantasies, which typically drew the charge of affectation. What the critics missed was the compensating realism, vigorous sometimes to the point of brutality. There was always something full-blooded about Morris to counter what he was later to condemn as ‘the more maundering side of medievalism’. The violence is even more marked in the prose romances of this period, where, allied to sexual adventures, it perhaps points to a deep emotional turmoil that in maturity he was able to sublimate in industry. The poems of his middle years, The Life and Death of Jason (1867) and The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), are mostly less disturbing. As a result, they are easy reading but, in the end, lack depth and substance. E. P. Thompson calls this work ‘The Poetry of Despair’:* for the successes of Morris’s middle life conceal considerable depression and discontent. By the late 1860s, though he was now a father with two daughters, Morris’s marriage had effectively died and Jane was involved with Rossetti. He had, moreover, lost his religious faith – with little anguish by Victorian standards – but it had left him obsessed with death and futility. His very success as a designer, paradoxically, intensified his feelings of guilt and impotence, for his achievement was thrown into harsh relief by the predominant ugliness of modern life, while the pleasure he derived from his own labours contrasted painfully with the drudgery endured by the great mass of people just as a matter of course.
With hindsight it is not difficult to see how Morris became a Socialist, but as early as 1856 he had written to a friend: ‘I see that things are in a muddle, and I have no power or vocation to set them right in ever so little a degree. My work is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another.’ Dreams, for the author of The Earthly Paradise, were a mode of escape, as indeed was poetry itself:
Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small and white and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its garden green.
But already present in this forgetting is a protest against the filth and misery of capitalist society. For the Morris of News from Nowhere in 1890, to dream of such a London had revolutionary implications.
Morris’s road to Socialism, oddly enough, begins in his personal tragedy. In 1870 his main concern was how to deal with the failure of his marriage. Reading between the lines one can only suppose that he resolved to accept the relationship between Jane and Rossetti, thereby preserving a stable home for his children and perhaps maintaining friendship with the lovers. Two things helped him through the consequent loneliness: Icelandic literature and Kelmscott Manor.
Morris had long been interested in the folklore and mythology of northern Europe and had begun to recognize in himself an innate preference for the northern and Teutonic over the Latin and Italianate. In 1868, in collaboration with an Icelander living in London, Eiríkr Magnússon, he began translating the sagas, an activity he was to keep up for the rest of his life. Shortly afterwards, seeking a refuge from work and the horrors of London, he lit upon a living earthly paradise.
Kelmscott Manor is a handsome sixteenth-century farmhouse, unostentatious and modest in proportions. It is situated on the edge of a small Oxfordshire village near the upper reaches of the Thames. It is built, like most of the village, of a fine grey local stone. Even today, the idyllic but unsensational countryside seems cut off from the main routes; in the late nineteenth century the labours of agriculture still went on there very much as they had for countless centuries. The tiny Norman church, where Morris is buried, has escaped the hand of the Victorian ‘restorer’, though that achievement was due to Morris himself. When he found the place, it must have struck him immediately as a chance to turn dream into tangible reality.
In 1871 Rossetti and Morris took on the joint tenancy of the house, thus setting up a decorous ménage à trois that was scarcely noticed till long after their deaths. That summer Morris set sail for his first visit to Iceland, leaving Jane and Rossetti to Kelmscott and intimacy. Two years later he visited Iceland again and otherwise seems to have kept as far away from Rossetti as possible. Then, in 1874, Rossetti suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. As a result he left Kelmscott for good and severed most of his links with the Morrises.
About Rossetti’s relationship with Jane Morris no certain information can be found. All parties behaved with extreme discretion, no doubt in order to protect Jane from the disgrace that attached to erring wives in Victorian times. Morris’s natural bravery and stoicism were now enhanced by his experience of Iceland. He contrasted Icelandic values and mores with the luxury and self-indulgence of the English middle class. He admired the natural egalitarianism of the social arrangements he found there, the sense of continuity with an ancient past, the easy intimacy with nature and, above all, ‘the religion of the Northman… the worship of Courage’.
His growing distaste for Rossetti – hardly surprising in the circumstances – was intensified by Nordic contempt for the older man’s self-pity. Morris now decisively rejected the ‘maundering’ aestheticism of his old associates too. It is surely significant that, directly after the breach with Rossetti, the Firm (in which Rossetti had been a partner) was reconstituted as Morris & Co., with Morris as sole proprietor. Free of the old despair, he now composed a heroic poem in the Nordic manner, Sigurd the Volsung, and moved into a new phase of creativity edged with activism. For Iceland had also politicized him. It had helped him to distinguish between ineluctable laws of nature and an unjust social order which, made by human beings, can be unmade by them too.
His emergence as a political activist was quite sudden. In 1876 he fired off a letter to the Daily News in protest at the Conservative government’s policy in the Balkans. The Turks had massacred 12,000 Bulgarians after an uprising against Ottoman rule. The Russians, who had long craved naval access to the Mediterranean, were threatening to intervene on behalf of their fellow Slavs and fellow Christians. It was this possibility that troubled the British government, who saw the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russian expansionism. To protect their interests in the Near East, they offered the Turks their military support.
A significant section of British public opinion, mostly Liberal in persuasion, was outraged by this cynical demonstration of realpolitik. Morris’s letter, which gave voice to their feelings, thrust him suddenly into the public sphere. In a matter of weeks he had been elected Treasurer of the Eastern Question Association, formed to campaign against the prospect of war. By 1879 he had broadened his activities to become Treasurer, too, of the largely working-class National Liberal League. This early association with working people is significant. Morris had always voted Liberal as a matter of instinct, but he now became aware of the party’s inescapably false position. It had come into being to represent the people enfranchised by the 1832 Reform Bill: the middle classes, whose enterprise was responsible for the nation’s wealth and power. When the franchise was further extended in 1867 to large sections of the working class, it succeeded – as the party of progress and reform – in attracting the new voters too. It was, in other words, running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. The Eastern Question campaign very soon enlightened Morris in this regard, for when Gladstone and the Liberals returned to power, they seemed to him no different to the Tories. A genuinely radical policy, anti-imperialist and independent of all financial interests, could be achieved (in Morris’s view) only with the will and support of the working class. In 1883, therefore, he took the plunge, declared himself a Socialist and joined the Democratic (later, Social Democratic) Federation.
By this time activism had become a habit. In 1877 he had also founded what we should now call a conservationist pressure group. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, or ‘Anti-Scrape’ as its adherents called it, was formed to resist the fashion for ‘restoration’. The fashion was heavily promoted by the new Ritualists in the Church of England. It was usually a case of some successful architect throwing out medieval stonework in need of repair to replace it with what he and the incumbent imagined the scheme of the building to have been at an earlier and liturgically more favoured stage of development. A visit to the churches at Kelmscott and nearby Ingle-sham, both of which Morris rescued from proposed restoration, will give the clearest idea of the Society’s achievement. These are buildings of genuine antiquity, not preserved in aspic but parts of a living continuum, kept alive by use, their imperfections inseparable from their charm. When he launched the Society, Morris wrote, ‘our ancient buildings are not mere ecclesiastical toys, but sacred monuments of the nation’s growth and hope’. The force and precision of the language typify Morris’s writing of this period: growth, because human society grows as nature does; hope – a key word in his vocabulary – because art grows into the future out of deep roots in the past. His objection to the art of his day, even to work he admired, was that it had ‘no root’. Having no source in a people’s sense of its wholeness, art had become merely individual, disconnected from society.
Such thoughts run through a series of lectures on which Morris embarked in 1877, originally in order to raise funds for Anti-Scrape. The great master of the public lecture at the time was John Ruskin, who treated it as a kind of secular sermon. In lecture after lecture Morris acknowledges the influence of Ruskin, who as far back as 1849 had been drawing attention to the loss incurred through misguided restoration; and who in his work from that time onward had insisted on the links that bind a nation’s art to the health or otherwise of its economic and social arrangements. To read the first six of Morris’s lectures (published as Hopes and Fears for Art in 1882) is to follow the progression of his mind through despair for art in the modern world to hopes for a new society. A further collection of lectures, Signs of Change — all broadly Socialist in content – was published in 1888. These two books, central to Morris’s work, must count among the finest of his achievements.
When the SDF was formed in 1881, it was the only Socialist movement in the country. In the earlier nineteenth century, at the time of Robert Owen and then of the Chartists, Britain had been at the forefront of political innovation. But after 1848, the year of revolutions, all that had changed. This was partly due to some genuine improvements: the extension of the suffrage in 1867, the rise of the trades unions, increasing prosperity and liberal reforms. Continental Europe, by contrast, had experienced major political ferment, which found theoretical expression in the writings of Karl Marx. Ironically, in the 1870s, the calm of liberal England had provided Marx and Engels with a safe haven in which to develop their ‘scientific’ theories of social change. Their observations suggested to them that Britain, as the most advanced of the capitalist countries, with its extremes of urban poverty in a context of political freedoms, was the most likely setting for the coming revolution.
So it seemed, too, to the founders of the SDF, who regarded themselves as Marxists. Indeed, when Morris joined in 1883, he did so on the assumption that the inevitable revolution was only a few years off and that it might still be peaceful. By the time he published News from Nowhere – only seven years later – his view had changed almost beyond recognition.
The founder and leader of the SDF, H. M. Hyndman, was hardly the obvious candidate for the job. A stockbroker by profession and a Tory, he had been quite suddenly converted on first reading a book by Karl Marx. He was an ambitious politician of autocratic tendency, and it was by no means clear that in foreign policy he differed from the imperialists. Morris distrusted him from the start but accepted his leadership because there was no alternative. Within eighteen months, however, Morris and his circle – which included the prophet’s daughter, Eleanor Marx – had left the SDF to set up the Socialist League. The parties continued more or less in parallel until 1890, when the League also split and Morris resigned from its executive. All commentators seem now to agree that the split in the SDF had been disastrous: an error of judgement that set British Socialism back at least ten years. The fissiparousness of radical movements, of course, is now a familiar feature of political life. It is surely to Morris’s credit that, though he lamented it, he could also see the funny side of it, as is clear from the League meeting in News from Nowhere: ‘there were six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented, four of whom had strong but divergent Anarchist opinions’.
It was the Anarchists in fact who split the League, though some of the orthodox Marxists had already begun to drift back towards the SDF. This latter group more or less shared the SDF commitment to what Morris calls State Socialism. That is to say, they wanted a Socialist party to fight both local and national elections and believed that Socialism would be achieved by means of, for instance, nationalization. The third group, to which Morris adhered, were also Marxists, but in their view the purpose of the League was to agitate, educate and organize; that is, to prepare the workers for the coming revolution. In their view participation in the parliamentary process would inevitably compromise their leaders, committing them to palliative measures and indefinitely postponing genuine change. Morris’s group believed in what he called (in the title of a series of articles) ‘Socialism from the Root Up’ – fundamental change brought about by spontaneous popular revolution. Morris lost this argument: most subsequent varieties of Socialism have accepted some form or other of the State Socialist solution. Since the fall of Soviet Communism, however, and with the decline of Social Democracy, his position has acquired a renewed relevance. Could equality imposed from above ever have satisfied the desire of working people for autonomy? Could it ever have been other than an imposition?
On the other hand, Morris and his faction were quite incapable of seeing ‘how to combine the struggle for Socialism with the struggle for immediate demands’.* This led them into conflict with the trades unions, and it was not until the collapse of the League that the various radical movements in the country began to draw together. Before he died, Morris was reconciled to the SDF, had recognized the achievements of the London County Council and was prepared to go along with Parliamentary action. One suspects that he was never wholly convinced but saw that the essential thing was to hold the movement together. In 1893 the West Yorkshire branch of what had been the League announced the formation of the Independent Labour Party and, in 1900, within four years of Morris’s death, the modern Labour Party came into being.
It would be hard to overestimate the disappointment Morris must have felt as sectarian bickering became the order of the day. He treated his work for the League as a full-time job, which entailed a good deal of hardship. Such things could be borne if there was hope, but as the movement developed and resistance to it developed too, the probability of early change retreated. The later 1880s were dominated by the Free Speech campaign, in which the Socialists of both parties struggled for the right to demonstrate and propagandize in public places. In the course of this campaign Morris was twice arrested and fined, and hopes for a peaceful solution collapsed in 1887 at the Trafalgar Square demonstration known as Bloody Sunday, when without provocation the police attacked the crowd. Ranks closed against the Socialists after this: the enlightened middle class, the radicals, the press, even at times the trades unions. Bloody Sunday convinced Morris, first, that change would never come by peaceful means and, secondly, that the struggle would be longer and harder than he had anticipated.
It was in this context, and as the Socialist League drew nearer disintegration, that Morris wrote News from Nowhere, a book that combines continuing trust in a Socialist future with a need to recharge the batteries of an imagination near exhaustion. For many years it was asserted that the onset of violence in the streets and the break-up of the League gave Morris second thoughts about revolution. Thanks largely to E. P. Thompson, we now know that events such as Bloody Sunday and the successful dock strike of 1889 made Morris more certain that revolution was necessary and inevitable. Though he ceased to be an especially prominent figure, he continued to work wholeheartedly for the Socialist movement in all its aspects. The difference was he now knew he would never live to see the change to which he had given so much of his life.
One effect of this relative disengagement was that he now returned to his creative work with renewed invention. Not that he had ever stopped: many of his finest designs, notably the carpets, date from the 1880s. But the foundation in 1891 of the Kelmscott Press was an entirely new venture. Morris had always been interested in the problems of book production. Medievalist that he was, he had always really longed for a return to the days of the illuminated manuscript. Yet it is perhaps the secret of his genius that he could usually find a practical outlet for his dreams. An enthusiast for early printed books, which he collected, he saw the history of printing as a long process of decline, accelerating through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1889, under the influence of a printer and fellow Socialist, Emery Walker, he began studying the craft of fine printing and in [1891 started producing books. In the five years of life left to him, Morris was responsible for designing and printing some fifty-two volumes, ranging from small books of pamphlet length (such as his reprint of Ruskin’s The Nature of Gothic) to the 564 folio pages of the incomparable Kelmscott Chaucer, described by W. B. Yeats as ‘the most beautiful of all printed books’.
This last creative venture, however, highlights the central contradiction of Morris’s career. As a designer he always aimed at the best, and the best for him was always work by hand. His purpose was to improve public taste and, more importantly, to motivate a happier society through the satisfactions of creative work. As he says in his preface to The Nature of Gothic, ‘the lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is that art is the expression of man’s pleasure in labour.’ Thus, changed conditions of labour would not only produce better art but happier individuals more capable of enjoying it He was not opposed to machines as a matter of principle. Contrary to popular belief, he was in favour of labour-saving devices where hardship or mere dullness was concerned. He argued, though, that, under capitalism, machines were primarily used to increase production, thereby increasing the worker’s drudgery, since machine production is mindless and repetitive. But here is the contradiction: in a modern competitive society, hand-made goods are inevitably more expensive than those made by machine. They are therefore available only to the rich and privileged, so the worker remains deprived. This contradiction is especially glaring in the case of publishing, for a Socialist, it might be argued, should aim at producing books the poor have some chance of reading.
Morris was not unaware of these contradictions and could to some extent have answered the criticisms. He would have argued that while we live under the capitalist system we cannot escape the laws of the market. That being the case, the creation of beautiful furnishings and so on is part of a process of public education, providing a model of good production methods and pioneering a return to higher standards of design. The Kelmscott Press, strangely enough, has something in common with Morris’s all-or-nothing politics: his rejection of palliatives. Rather than compromise with commercial publishing, he preferred to show the world a possible alternative.
His literary activities at this time are even more contradictory. Between 1885 and 1890 he wrote three political narratives for serialization in the Commonweal: Pilgrims of Hope, a verse tale about the Paris Commune, was followed by two prose romances, A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere, arguably the best of his literary works. Around the same time, however, he returned to romancing of a purely escapist kind and, between 1888 and 1896, wrote eight prose tales set in imaginary heroic societies. His characters, simpler people from a simpler time, owe something to the Icelandic sagas and something also to Grimm’s fairy-tales. The language is not merely coloured with archaism, as it is in A Dream of John Ball or Sigurd the Volsung: it is an artificial language that insulates the tales from the touch of reality. In their escapism they come close to the long-discarded ‘poetry of despair’. Yet they can also be seen as complementary to the political romances. Like so many of Morris’s creations – the stained glass, the carpets, the decorated initials – they are visionary accounts of an ideal world. To dream of the impossible and disregard reality is to question the inevitability of existing circumstances.
There is a simple explanation for Morris’s partial retreat in his last years. By 1890 he was exhausted. He had suddenly begun to look old, and his health was breaking down. He put as much work into the rest of his days as most people put into a lifetime. But it is perhaps not surprising that he allowed himself to look to the work for comfort. Though he had a genius for friendship and seems to have been a strong and loving father, he was a deeply lonely man. His wife, though she stuck to him, had never loved him; one can only assume, for instance, that there had been no sexual relations between them for something like thirty years. The fault undoubtedly lay within himself, even Burne-Jones, who knew him better than anyone, was often frustrated by Morris’s self-sufficiency. With his powerful will, his energy and the range of all his talents, Morris seemed not to need people – and yet he felt their lack. His daughter May, who made herself responsible for his memory, tells how in June 1896 he handed her his last great achievement, a copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer, ‘the look of profound melancholy that (perhaps unconsciously) he turned on me in smiling tenderly seemed like a glimpse into a very far country… it was the look of an intensely lonely man – never to be forgotten while memory serves’.* Just over three months later, on 3 October 1896, he died. The funeral was just as he would have wished it. Garlanded with willow-boughs and bullrushes, his coffin was borne on a haycart to Kelmscott churchyard, the spiritual centre of his earthly paradise. ‘You can lose a man like that by your own death,’ wrote Bernard Shaw, ‘but not by his.’
EARTHLY PARADISES
Morris called News from Nowhere ‘A Utopian Romance’. Utopia, the title of Sir Thomas More’s great satire, is derived from a Greek word meaning ‘nowhere’. Both More and Morris clearly intend an irony. Utopia/Nowhere is a country that does not and cannot exist–at best a dream, at worst an irrelevance. On the other hand, a dream set in a real or possible place may invite attention to the shortcomings of contemporary reality. It may thus promote discontent and, through it, the hope for change. Morris’s Nowhere is unmistakably England; equally unmistakably, it is a much happier place than we or his contemporaries have known.
Morris was not certain, though, that something rather like it had not existed before. His preoccupation in the latter part of his life with possible futures is a condition of his earlier feeling for the past: both his personal past, as a boy growing up in an unspoilt rural Essex, and the historical past of the Middle Ages, poignantly recalled in surviving artefacts. In both cases the past is Arcadian: a paradisal world from which humanity has since fallen.
His personal past is evoked in Chapter XXIII of News from Nowhere in a lyrical description of his childhood landscape. This feeling for the physical substance of rural England, blighted by industrial capitalism, is at the core of all Morris’s work. It recurs with a still greater emotional charge at the end of the book when the protagonist reaches the goal of his journey, ‘the old house by the Thames’ we recognize as Kelmscott Manor. ‘It seems to me,’ says Ellen, ‘as if it had waited for these happy days, and held in it the gathered crumbs of happiness of the confused and turbulent past.’ And she continues: ‘Oh me! Oh me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it, – as this has done!’ ‘This’ is the house itself, which, built in vernacular style out of local stone, embodied for Morris a way of living, building and working in harmony with nature. Because it had once been, he reasoned, it might be again too.
So Morris’s sense of a rural paradise unites, in ‘the old house by the Thames’, with his dream of an ideal past. Romantic medievalism, in which Morris had his roots, was a way of by-passing the rationalistic ethos of eighteenth-century life. Aesthetically, this meant an alternative to Neo-Classicism, which Morris detested with a vehemence it is hard for a modern person to understand. Gothic buildings were mysterious and atmospheric; organic in form, they seemed to grow out of nature; their lofty aspirations and dark recesses are resonant with the complexities of human nature. What is more, Gothic is a northern European style, functionally related to the climate, materials and conditions of northern life; it therefore seems more intimate with nature than Neo-Classicism does. The latter struck Morris as cold, impractical and snobbish. The attempt to emulate Roman imperial power, the acceptance of a cultural hierarchy, the concern with propriety – to Morris these conveyed a particular social message. No one, in his view, built such buildings because they liked them; they merely sought to aggrandize themselves.
We are accustomed today to hearing the words ‘feudal’ and ‘medieval’ used as terms of abuse, as ‘Gothic’ itself originally was. It is therefore essential to stress that, even as a Socialist, Morris thought feudalism superior to capitalism. He found his reasons originally in Ruskin and Ruskin’s master, Thomas Carlyle. The freedom of expression and the feeling for natural beauty that Ruskin identified in Gothic revealed a culture in which arts and crafts, art and work, were one. The delight the workman took in the physical world was expressed in his own physical workmanship, and his workmanship returned his delight to the human world. If feudalism was hierarchical, it at least created a society with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, not an individualist jungle in which only the ruthless and greedy could survive. For greed is the natural enemy of the fulfilment Ruskin celebrates. Medieval culture, as he describes it, died with the advent of mercantilism at the end of the fifteenth century – when the pursuit of material gain superseded the love of God and the beauty of his handiwork.
It is easy to scoff at this view of the Middle Ages as idealized and historically incomplete. As Morris developed, in fact, he grew more critical of the period and of the Ruskinian myth. But by the time he became a Socialist, his knowledge of medieval life was deep and wide. What it taught him was, quite simply, that a society based on self-interest is not the only possible form of society. Medieval England, as he increasingly realized, had its brutalities and injustices, but it was rarely guilty of the specifically social and economic evils that deform the industrial world. According to the sociologist T. H. Marshall,* Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris were quite right to believe that feudal society, characterized as it was by rigid stratification, guaranteed a dignified role for those in its lowest stratum. Marshall quotes a report of 1797, Sir Frederick Eden’s The State of the Poor. ‘To the growth of civilization and the development of commerce may be ascribed the introduction of a new class of men, henceforward described by the Legislature as the Poor’ (italics mine). ‘The relation of the poor to those on whom they depended,’ Marshall comments, ‘was a durable one, governed as to its terms by custom and the principle of the "just wage" and the "just price".’ The modern concept of a fixed social class ‘permanently at risk of severe poverty’ was established by the Poor Law of 1601, which none the less – through its imposition of a Poor Rate – continued to acknowledge the responsibility of society for those overtaken by economic disaster. But the New Poor Law of 1834, in abolishing this responsibility, created a new under-class of social outcasts. In the notorious workhouses it provided, in effect, prisons for the punishment of poverty, as if failure in the struggle for survival should be regarded as a crime.
When Morris became a Marxist, he must have felt bound to reconcile the medievalism that had shaped his adult life with the ‘progressive’ politics to which he now assented. It cannot have been easy. Marx had been contemptuous of thinkers like Carlyle, whom he classed as ‘feudal Socialists’. The implication was that they were too timid to face the future. Marx admired many aspects of capitalism – its inventiveness, its energy, the freedom of thought it encouraged – and saw it as a necessary stage in the process of social evolution. Morris gave his assent to this analysis – rather too dutifully, it might be thought – but continued to dream of the Middle Ages.
Yet now there was a difference. In a lecture like ‘The Hopes of Civilization’ (1885) he looks at the past with a Marxist’s eye. The medieval world is no longer a refuge from the present; it helps him, rather, to understand the present and construct, in imagination, an alternative future. From the Romanticism of Keats and Scott, Morris had learnt the power and value of dreams. Pre-Raphaelite art had seemed to take his dreams of an ideal rural England and the Middle Ages and make them palpable – in paint or sensuous verse. The Morris of, say, ‘The Story of the Unknown Church’ (1856) is a dreamer of this kind, inward-looking, withdrawn and ultimately impotent. He evokes the type in The Earthly Paradise.
Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
And yet there are different kinds of dream. As his early writings show, the escapist dream is sometimes continuous with nightmare; pleasant illusions may end by evoking the very fears they sought to escape. Other dreams, though, may embody hopes of a possible future. Hopes and fears are key words in Morris’s vocabulary:
To what a heaven the earth might grow
If fear beneath the earth were laid,
If hope failed not, nor love decayed.
The earth is a paradise, though marred by tears and death. By middle life the Rossettian palace of art had become for Morris a frustrating and claustrophobic habitation. Probably, aestheticism had never satisfied him. What he wanted was the real world with its prelapsarian glow restored to it. By the mid 1870s he began to feel that this was attainable.
It was in his work as a decorative artist that Morris first achieved this blend of the actual and the paradisal. His designs represent his medievalism at its most fruitful. Art historians call him a ‘historicist’, but his work always exceeds mere imitation. As he argues in the lecture ‘Gothic Architecture’ (1889), some historical styles provide an opening to the future while others close it off; you need to go back in order to go forward. The architecture and design in the imagined future of News from Nowhere is often compared to medieval work, yet it is always seen to be a new development, and the same is true of Morris’s designs, once he got past the stage of emulation. This is where the feudal world as model of a possible future became operative in his creative work. There was nothing theoretical about it. In his desire to learn from medieval design, he came to understand the conditions of its production and to see how removed they were from anything possible in the modern world. To take an obvious example: no modern person would devote a lifetime of creative endeavour to a building he or she could never hope to see completed and in use, yet that is what the masons did who worked on the great cathedrals. Such people must have derived satisfaction from creative work executed on behalf of a community and a way of life that extended far beyond one person’s allotted span. ‘Therefore, when we build,’ wrote Ruskin, ‘let us think that we build for ever.’*
Nikolaus Pevsner makes the point when he says, ‘What raises Morris as a reformer of design above the [best of his contemporaries] is not only that he had the true designer’s genius and they had not, but also that he recognized the indissoluble unity of an age and its social system, which they had not done.’† Morris’s desire to improve design was inseparable from his desire to improve society. Where the beauties of his verse represent a withdrawal from social reality, his designs constitute an engagement with it. Take the fresh simplicity of the early wallpaper known as ‘Daisy’ (1861) or, by contrast, the witty and sophisticated fabric called ‘Strawberry Thief’ (1883). These are images of paradise that bring the hope of its attainment nearer. But the paradise is earthly. Critics have observed that the secret of Morris’s designs lies in his understanding of the patterns of natural growth and his obedience to them. Such natural patternings, admitted to the circumstances of domestic life, confer a kind of blessing on it. In Morris’s terms, they bring hope and rest. And rest is the reward for labour – labour which should, in a just society, bring pleasure through fulfilment.
For the great mass of people, as Morris was all too aware, these ideals were not even unattainable dreams. The example the Firm provided was an achievement but it could never be enough, especially as it meant that he earned his living by ‘ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich’, which pricked his conscience. From the mid 1870s on, the problem was how to realize the world he had long dreamt of, in which ‘art is the expression of man’s pleasure in labour’.
The turning-point came in 1876. In his letter on the Eastern Question, Morris uses a characteristic metaphor in an uncharacteristic context He imagines falling asleep after the Bulgarian massacre and waking up three weeks later to find that Britain is going to war. He would have rejoiced at this possibility, he says: having slept, he would have assumed that his country was about to fight for justice. ‘… but alas, though I have not slept, I have awakened, and find the shoe quite on the other foot’ (italics mine). The image of dreaming could hardly be more significant No longer a form of escape, it becomes the means whereby a different order is conceived and then becomes possible in the process of awakening. The awakening, moreover, is not only to the facts of political life but also to his own long-suppressed awareness. It anticipates in this way the momentous dreams and awakenings that provide the structure of A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere.
UTOPIA
Morris was not much interested in the main traditions of European literature – in classical poetry or realist fiction. What he valued most was ‘the kind of book which Mazzini called "Bibles"; they cannot always be measured by a literary standard, but to me are far more important than any literature. They are in no sense the work of individuals, but have grown up from the very hearts of the people.’ Among the books of this kind which he names are the Greek, Indian, Persian and Anglo-Saxon epics, the Old Testament, Hesiod, the Norse Eddas and Grimm’s fairy-tales. In other words, he was not concerned with the faithful analysis of character and motive – the thinness of the personages is the most glaring weakness of News from Nowhere – or in the exact representation of social conditions. He looks to literature for the timeless and symbolic patterns of human experience which we find in myth, in folk literature and in dreams.
Writings of this sort often include records of paradise, usually envisaged as an earlier state of the world now lost through human corruption. The Garden of Eden and the classical Golden Age are for Western man the two that first come to mind. These ideal pastoral states stand outside time, before the beginning of history in effect. Other works, especially common during the Middle Ages, refer us to supposed periods of history when humans lived in an ideal social order. Such periods are not free from the ravages of sin, death, war and natural disaster, but the social order is governed in truth and justice. An obvious instance of this would be Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), a story particularly relevant to Morris, not only because of the Pre-Raphaelite obsession with the Arthurian myth, but because the pattern of history he argued for is reflected in it: a past era of justice and beauty, now dead, but sure to return before the end of time. The legend is common to many cultures – ‘the king over the water’ – but it does seem to be an especially British obsession. Thus, at the most sophisticated level, it is implicit in Hamlet, the knightly honour of the dead king set against the corruption of the entire body politic under Claudius, though Shakespeare offers no hope of a return. It is also the essence of the Robin Hood legend, which Morris alludes to once or twice. Indeed, Robin is a highly Morrisian figure: a medieval rebel who, in the name of justice, sustains the betrayed values of a past order in his natural and egalitarian retreat.*
Morris was also affected by consciously Utopian texts. The first-century historians Plutarch and Tacitus both depicted societies in which simpler cultural values brought about a way of life conducive to virtue and decency. In the Life of Lycurgus Plutarch looks back to the origins of Sparta, a time later than the dawn of history but only recorded in tradition. The Germania of Tacitus, by contrast, deals with contemporary ways of life beyond the fringes of the Roman Empire. He expresses admiration for these German communities, unaffected by the decadence of his own society. Both writers use their subjects as sticks with which to beat their fellow countrymen, and it is clear they gave Morris a hint of how he might do likewise. Both, for instance, describe societies which, like Morris’s Iceland, set a high premium on personal courage, value good craftsmanship, are unaffected by social distinctions and care little for material wealth or luxury, preferring good health or closeness to nature. Lycurgus, according to Plutarch, abolished money, thus removing both the need to enforce laws and the main index of social superiority. Among the Germans, Tacitus tells us, exploitation and usury are unknown. In both cases, as in News from Nowhere, people naturally want what they really need or what really brings them happiness; there is no market and no social ladder to stimulate false desires. To the modern reader familiar with Stalinism or the Hitler youth, it must be added, both of these books have a slightly ominous ring, which Morris mostly avoids.
The Iceland Morris visited was probably the last of the old Germanic societies to survive into modern times. It must have reminded him of the Germania and Tacitus’s implied critique of imperial Rome. The relevance to imperial Britain was obvious. The Roman historian’s sense of a nearly ideal society contemporary with his own also informed a number of Utopias that sprang up during the Renaissance. There was More’s Utopia (1516), Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), Bacon’s New Atlantis (1629) and Harington’s Oceana (1656), to say nothing of several works (such as The Tempest) that include Utopian motifs. All these writers were influenced by the discovery of the New World and the often simpler societies encountered there–sometimes on islands cut off from the corrupting influences of larger civilizations. The notorious unreliability of the traveller’s tale provided many of these moralists with an occasion for depicting ideal or fantastic societies that reflect on our own. Sometimes, as in a later work like Gulliver’s Travels (1726), they show the evils and follies of the reader’s own community in a distorting mirror. This is probably the case with More’s Utopia.
Morris admired Utopia so much that he published a beautiful edition of it at the Kelmscott Press and wrote an eloquent foreword for it. He takes the book very much at face value – as a portrait of an ideal communistic society, critical by implication of early Tudor England. This view of it has not been universally accepted, but it is one possible interpretation which provides us with a useful perspective on News from Nowhere. The traveller—narrator of More’s tale, Raphael Hythloday (the name means ‘nonsense-talker’), is a man of uncertain nationality whose travels have brought him to England as well as to the Americas and the unknown island that gives the book its title. As a foreigner, he has found much to criticize in Tudor England: usury, mercantilism, land enclosures and so on. The defamiliarized picture is more than usually important, since Utopia, where a form of communism prevails, is praised from an identical point of view. Morris sees this, rightly or wrongly, as More’s attempt to preserve certain medieval values in the teeth of the new commercialism. There are many things, it should be said, that Morris dislikes in More’s ideal society, though he recognizes most of them as inescapable parts of medieval life. Thus More’s book points to the limitations of medievalism for Morris, while indicating the dangers of regarding any Utopia as a blueprint for the future. Its value for Morris lies in More’s sense of a dying social order which he evidently prefers to the one developing round him. The loss of it provokes in him a longing, as Morris understands him, ‘for a society of equality of condition’.
Hesiod, Malory, Plutarch, Tacitus, Chaucer, More and Plato: all these had their effect on News from Nowhere. But the immediate inspiration probably came from two contemporary works: Morris’s own A Dream of John Ball (1886–7) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887).
The former begins as a dream of the Middle Ages. Morris (or his narrator) falls asleep and dreams that he wakes in fourteenth-century Kent. The scene, by contrast with the dismal present, is fresh, clean, vigorous and brightly coloured. One is reminded of the idealized use of architecture as social criticism in the writings of Ruskin and the Gothic Revival architect A. W. N. Pugin. Yet almost immediately there is a difference, for this is 1381, the year of the Peasants’ Revolt, and the dissident priest John Ball is inciting the Kentish people to rise up against their overlords. After a brief skirmish in which the rebels are victorious, Ball begins to feel foreboding about the future. Recognizing the narrator as a time-traveller and seeking reassurance, he questions him about the ages to come, only to learn with growing horror of the Industrial Revolution and the triumph of capitalism. He is pulled back from the brink of despair by the assurance that his exemplary role will in the end contribute to the overthrow of all forms of economic oppression.
The final impact of John Ball, truth to tell, is unintentionally ambiguous. It is hard to accept the narrator’s assurances about a future that he cannot know, when the intervening time has been so discouraging. It is also the case that his account of history, touched as it is with a residue of his old romanticized medievalism, comes close to celebrating the social order that could produce a hero like Ball. The real value of the story lies, perhaps, in what it has to say about the lives of those who commit themselves to the class struggle. The narrator puts it in these memorable words: ‘I pondered… how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fight for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out to be not what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.’ For a generation that has seen the collapse in Eastern Europe of a tyranny that called itself Socialist, these words possess an unmistakable resonance.
It has been said that Morris’s most significant contribution to Socialist thought is to be found in his reconciliation of Karl Marx with John Ruskin. Looking back over his life in 1894, Morris was to write: ‘how deadly dull the world would have been twenty years ago but for Ruskin! It was through him that I learned to give form to my discontent, which I must say was not by any means vague. Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.’ This strange marriage is especially evident in John Ball, where the Ruskinian view of medieval labour blends with the Marxist dialectic of history. Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’, indeed, anticipates Marx’s doctrine of alienated labour point for point. Where Morris runs into difficulty, though, is in squaring Marx’s progressive optimism with the profoundly lapsarian philosophy of history that runs through all the writings of Ruskin. John Ball’s glimpse into the future (by way of our past) draws heavily on the historical parts of Capital, which Morris read in 1883. This sense of a dialectic culminating in revolution, an improved social order and the Communist millennium provides Morris with a structure, almost mythical in its simplicity, for News from Nowhere, but it is vital to note that the later book would have been impossible without, first, a Ruskinian journey back into the past.
Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which Morris reviewed in 1889, is a journey into the future. Didactic though it is, it was hugely (if briefly) successful both in Britain and Bellamy’s native America. It tells the story of a young man named Julian West, who is awakened from a hypnotic trance to find himself living in the year 2000. He finds a new and perfect order which has been achieved by what Morris contemptuously describes as ‘machinery’: both the literal mechanization of all production and the rationalization of society by bureaucratic control. This transformation has been effected by the evolution of monopoly capitalism into a corporate state run for the benefit of all. Work is now so regulated as to be free of pain, or so we are told, and the great goal of life seems to be leisure, which comes to everyone with superannuation at the age of forty-five.
This was precisely not what Morris was fighting for. He concedes that it might be an improvement on the capitalist system, less brutal and more efficient, but ‘organized with a vengeance’ and utterly soulless. Indeed, society remains competitive in Bellamy’s world – there are rewards for labour – and it is almost totally urban. Worst of all, work – far from being a source of happiness – is severely regimented and still basically thought of as something to be endured. Such a society would be, though Morris refrains from saying so directly, even more meaningless than a capitalist one, ruled by impersonal diktat and the laws of supply and demand, with no true community, no art, no nature, no sense of the past and nothing to hope for but freedom from work.
To the modern reader Bellamy’s world is chillingly familiar. Morris puts his finger on it with prophetic insight it may be described, he says, ‘as State Communism, worked by the very extreme of centralization’. It brings to mind not only Soviet Communism but all the statist bureaucracies that, in dream or reality, have haunted the modern age. One thinks especially of dystopia— of the anti-Utopian fables so characteristic of the twentieth century: E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984.
Morris’s conception of the ideal society was valuably deepened by his response to Looking Backward. For one thing, it helped him to formulate his dislike for one major part of Socialist tradition. It also helped him to see how important to his view of Socialism was the largely Ruskinian idea of pleasure in work: how else in a post-Christian world was human life to acquire purpose and significance? And the failure of Bellamy’s parable encouraged him to formulate an ideal world of his own. ‘The only safe way of reading a Utopia,’ he writes in his review of the book, ‘is to consider it as the expression of the temperament of its author.’ We are thus warned not to read News from Nowhere as either blueprint or prediction. It is first of all an expression of discontent and, secondly, a personal vision, born from one man’s passions and preoccupations, of how different the world might be. It asserts the possibility of a better world. We are not expected to swallow Morris’s dream. On the contrary, we are encouraged to dream for ourselves.
NEWS FROM NOWHERE
When Morris wrote News from Nowhere, he could not have anticipated its importance, for he had little time to plan it. It was serialized in the Socialist League’s newspaper, the Commonweal, between January and October 1890. Morris, who was extremely busy and wrote a good deal of the paper anyway, composed his instalments week by week. As a result there are several inconsistencies and improbabilities, none of them important. The story is plainly written for a League audience. It begins at an executive meeting of the League and there are one or two obvious in-jokes. The reader is clearly meant to recognize the protagonist as an ironic self-portrait and to identify Morris’s two homes: Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, which he bought in 1878, and Kelmscott Manor itself.
When it was published in book form the following year, Morris tidied it up a little, adding a chapter and a few paragraphs, but he made no fundamental changes. The only difference worth noting concerns his projected dates. In the serialized version, for instance, the revolution takes place in 1910. In the book, revised for publication less than a year later, the date has been put forward to 1952: evidence, surely, of Morris’s growing pessimism.
The book is not without its weaknesses. There is the thinness of the characters, to begin with, and there are times when the plot flags under the weight of didactic purpose. It remains, none the less, a compelling tale. Like the river that dominates the plot, it gathers in force and substance as it proceeds. As it does so, it blends and unites the various currents of Morris’s thought and writing. It is, in the medieval sense, a romance – two journeys through a moralized landscape, culminating in a vision half bestowed and half denied: the hero, like Malory’s Lancelot, sees the light of his Holy Grail but not its substance. As romances often are, it is also a dream, but unlike the dreams in Morris’s earlier writings, it presents no occasion for terror. It has all the pleasures of escapist writing but, since its whole purpose is to criticize the present, it does not turn away from painful realities. Though it draws on the medieval world, it looks to the future for answers to the ills of modern times. It thus reconciles two fundamentally different kinds of narrative: the timeless and schematic mythical tale, and the nineteenth-century realist novel with characters and events embedded in history. As political parable, it invites comparison with, say, the contemporary fables of H. G. Wells; but there is a closer family resemblance to Three Men in a Boat (1889) or The Wind in the Willows (1908). On the other hand, if the ideal world of the action is reminiscent of Hesiod or Malory, the intellectual debate at the centre of it is surely based on Plato’s Republic. It is, on the face of it, an odd confection.
The book’s structure, though, is very simple. It consists of two journeys framing a long discursive conversation. The protagonist, William Guest – choleric and prematurely ageing – is a piece of engagingly ironic self-portraiture. (One might compare the similarly self-mocking persona adopted by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales.) Guest wakes one morning in his Hammersmith home to find himself in the year 2102. He gradually realizes that England has undergone a revolution that has utterly transformed it. A young boatman named Dick volunteers to guide him through the new society, and they set off on a journey into central London, now a set of urban villages strung together by gardens, woodlands and patches of green countryside. In the British Museum they meet Dick’s 105-year-old uncle, old Hammond, an historian with a special interest in the nineteenth century and the revolution of 1952. Hammond, who also in some sense mirrors the author, agrees to treat Guest as ‘a visitor from another planet’ and explain to him the order of this new society. He concludes his long exposition with an account of ‘How the Change Came’, the story of the revolution, which springs from events very similar to those experienced by Morris on Bloody Sunday. In Hammond’s section, fictional history takes over from myth; we feel how revolution, generated by the struggles of Morris’s day, has given birth to a new society that seems as timeless as the Golden Age. Then, in the final section, Dick and his wife Clara take Guest on a boat-trip up the Thames, rowing from Kelmscott House to Kelmscott Manor, as Morris had done with a group of friends in 1881. Their object is to join in the year’s haymaking in Oxfordshire, that annual necessity of those who dwell on the land having become in the new England an occasion for festival. On the way they meet an unconventional and glamorous young woman named Ellen, with whom Guest falls in love. The tale ends with their arrival at the old house, which now typifies this revived nation whose present is in harmony with its past.
The first of the two journeys, which brings the protagonist knowledge and understanding, is a Marxist inquiry into the historical process. The second involves all his instinctual life, leading him into the past, the heart of England and the sources of human happiness. The language of the book, as E. P. Thompson has stressed, is dominated by expressions of longing and desire. In the last phase of the narrative Guest is overtaken by passionate desire for Ellen, so that by the final chapter the possible fulfilment of such sexual want becomes a metaphor for the whole complex of human fulfilments that the daily grind for profits has stultified. In the balmy summer landscape – there has been a striking improvement in the English weather! – we are reminded of Hammond’s words, spoken in an historical context: ‘The spirit of the new days… was to be delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells, such as a lover has in the fair flesh of the woman he loves…’
Desire of that kind is intrinsic to our nature. To deny or suppress it is to stifle our humanity. Morris was motivated by the perception that industrial capitalism separates us from our real desires by diverting our longings into ‘sham wants’. The citizens of Nowhere, by contrast, have ‘cast away riches and attained to wealth’ – preferred well-being to the cash nexus.* Morris was well aware that his good fortune in being born rich had granted him, in effect, a privileged perception. The liberty bestowed by money had enabled him to learn of the pleasure good work may give and the blessings conferred by a beautiful environment. In News from Nowhere he describes a society in which good fortune like his own is common to all. Social revolution has restored to mankind those things which, after all, are merely the gifts of nature.
In constructing his ideal society Morris surveys a variety of questions. Sometimes he takes us by surprise: learned, literate and antiquarian though he was, he appears to argue for the abolition of schools, while few of his characters have much time for books or knowledge of the past. Sometimes he may disappoint us, as when the women at the Hammersmith Guest House ‘bustled about on our behoof’, as if the service of men was enough to satisfy the deepest desires of women – though to be sure the female ‘master’ mason in Chapter XXVI and Ellen’s sun-tanned eroticism go some way towards making up for this particular limitation. There are obvious blindnesses: Morris’s general indifference to machinery makes him incapable of imagining any sort of technological advance. There is something rather comic about his picture of the forces of repression in 1952 with nothing more sophisticated than the Gatling gun to crush a revolution. Moreover, to the post-Freudian (or indeed to the Christian) mind, his eminently sensible solutions to problems of sexual conflict and violent crime are, to say the least, incomplete.
Yet when at the end of the book Morris puts in a plea for his personal dream to be recognized as a vision, it is hard to dissent. Indeed, to many in the 1990s his vision has seemed more relevant than ever. Why should this be?
There are several answers to this question, the first of which we have already touched upon. That is that in harnessing the power of myth to a vision of the future which makes no claims to being anything but personal, Morris recalls to life the dormant longings for a better world, juster and more beautiful, which we all share with him. We do so because to dream is to be human. And as Stephen Coleman has recently observed: ‘The enemy of the dreamer of belter times to come is the ideologist of the present, armed in defence of the existing miseries with the claim that the prevailing relationships of oppression are immutable.’ And yet, he goes on, ‘History can explode. And when it does it is ignited by those who have dared to dream, who have the courage to take on seemingly unbeatable odds, who are brave enough to demand the impossible.’*
For sometimes the impossible does happen. It did, as Coleman points out, in 1989, when the Socialist tyrannies of Eastern Europe collapsed like so many packs of cards. This should remind us of those planks of Morris’s argument that have stood the test of time. He lost the debate, it will be remembered, about State Socialism. In News from Nowhere he depicts a country where the state has ‘withered away’ (to use the Marxist terminology) and individual communities are free to run their own affairs. This is the millennial condition which, in Marxist theory, will come to pass once ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ has done its work. But Morris plainly envisages Socialism, even in its early stages, as a form of decentralized popular democracy: precisely the opposite of the Socialist states that have now been so decisively rejected. It is important therefore to see that those who agreed with Engels when he called Morris ‘a settled sentimental Socialist’† were far more mistaken in the long term than was Morris himself.
Still more impressive is Morris the environmentalist. When the Communist governments in Eastern Europe fell, the world discovered the full extent of the ruin they had wrought on their natural environments. Irony of ironies: the pollution caused by the selfish and bloated West seems insignificant beside the achievements of those apostles of brotherly love. Here again, back in the 1880s, it had been Morris who dissented from the ‘progressive’ view about the expansion of industry for the increase of social wealth. As early as 1878, in ‘The Lesser Arts’, he reflected on the role of ‘disinterested’ Science in our wealth-creating societies; ‘what will she do?’ he asks.
I fear she is so much in the pay of the counting-house, the counting-house and the drill-sergeant, that she is too busy, and will for the present do nothing. Yet there are matters which I should have thought easy for her: say for example teaching Manchester how to consume its own smoke, or Leeds how to get rid of its superfluous black dye without turning it into the river, which would be as much worth her attention as the production of the heaviest of black silks, or the biggest of useless guns. Anyhow, however it be done, unless people care about carrying on their business without making the world hideous, how can they care about Art?
The world depicted is so sadly familiar that there is no word for the writing but ‘prophetic’. Compare Marx at his most optimistic:
Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour.
A generation under threat from global warming, a phenomenon brought about by precisely these instances of progress, may find the pastoral nostalgia of News from Nowhere marginally less sentimental than The Communist Manifesto. The originating myth of the book is pastoral and, to that extent, nostalgic; yet closer examination will reveal a vision of society based on a practical and sustainable relationship with nature. One cannot imagine Morris approving, for instance, of the clearing of the Amazon rainforest.
Yet, in the end, romances are not meant to be manifestos. Morris observes of Looking Backward that the romance is only there to sugar the didactic pill. The dull Utopia – and there are many of them – is dull either for lack of sugar or for too much of it. Morris avoids dullness by maintaining the sense of romantic enchantment and refracting his personal vision through a self-deprecating lens. His blundering persona provides many occasions for humour and he even, through the person of Ellen’s crusty old grandfather, presents us with some of the more telling objections to his version of paradise. The successful Utopia achieves its effect not by sermonizing but by creating a compelling dream-world to stand in opposition to the world we know. In that sense the genre shares something with its acidulous cousin, the satirical fable – with Gulliver’s Travels, say, or 1984. Morris’s New Jerusalem may be impossible, inconceivable, even in some respects undesirable (as More’s Utopia was to Morris). Nevertheless, its emotional power reminds us of the wretchedness of much of modern life, insisting that the way we live is not inevitable. Industrial capitalism, as he learnt from his medieval studies, is not a law of nature and, for that reason, William Guest’s journey into the future is also a journey into the past, back into the depths of England, towards the physical roots from which life might begin again.
In making this selection, I have concentrated on two things: I have tried to enlarge on some of the themes of News from Nowhere, while illustrating something of the range of Morris’s concerns. It may therefore strike the reader as odd that of the eighteen texts selected, only one, ‘The Story of the Unknown Church’, belongs to the earlier half of Morris’s life. This is mainly because Morris wrote very little prose before the late 1870s, though it also reflects my view that his political involvements dramatically affected the quality of his writing. I decided at the outset to exclude Morris’s poetry, the best of which (with a few important exceptions) belongs to his early life, on the grounds that it needs a volume of its own; and I have included nothing from the later heroic romances, partly because their value seems to me slight, and partly because it is difficult to extract from them. Morris’s expository writing is in my judgement superior to his ‘imaginative’ prose: a general rule to which News from Nowhere is a glorious exception.
Cambridge, 1991
