* * *
1. Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary: Reigned from 1458 to 1490. He was the ideal Renaissance prince: scholar, soldier and statesman. Like Alfred the Great, he was elected to the throne before he reached his majority. Long after his death it was said among the Hungarian peasants: ‘King Matthias is dead; justice is perished.’
2. carles: A carle is a man, freeman, man of the people (Old Norse, but found in Old English from the time of the Danish Kings).
3. For you must know… he were a king’s son: János Hunyadi (c. 1387– 1456), Hungarian general, statesman and national hero. Regarded as the champion of Christendom, he successfully repelled several Turkish invasions. He was at one time rumoured to have been the illegitimate son of the Emperor Sigismund.
1. delator: Informer.
2. St Martin, and St Francis, and St Thomas of Canterbury: All saints with whom Ball might be expected to identify. St Thomas a Becket defied a king and was martyred as a result; tradition holds, moreover, that he championed the oppressed Saxons against their Norman masters. St Francis of Assisi espoused poverty. St Martin of Tours was the soldier who is said to have cut his cloak in half to clothe a beggar. (A painting of the incident is described later in this extract.)
3. Our dead: i.e., those on the rebel side who had fallen in the day’s battle.
4. as thou thyself saidst at the cross: The dreamer had heard Ball preaching at the village cross before the battle.
5. villein: A serf. The villeinage was the lowest and most populous class in the feudal system.
6. the men of the Canterbury gilds: i.e., the cradle of Wat Tyler’s rebellion in 1381. Morris saw the medieval craftsman’s gild (or guild) as a forerunner of the modern trades union.
The words ‘shuttle’, ‘spring-staves’, ‘sley’ and ‘shed’ refer to parts of the old hand-weaver’s loom, which Morris had taught himself how to use. In 1879 he designed and wove a whole high-warp tapestry single-handed. In this passage the narrator is explaining to Ball the principle of the spinning-jenny and the other innovations in weaving that launched the Industrial Revolution.
7. the hundred: Division of a county in medieval England.
8. forestalling and regrating: See ‘The Hopes of Civilization’, p. 310, for Morris’s own definitions of these terms, central to his understanding of the feudal economy.
9. dortoir: Dormitory. Under feudalism, it was only through the Church that churls (i.e., peasants) could rise in society.
10. St Alban’s… Merton: Immensely wealthy abbeys that, since the Dissolution of the Monasteries, have disappeared almost without trace. The Morris & Co. print-works, as it happens, were near the site of Merton Abbey.
11. poll-groat bailiffs: Poll tax collectors (‘poll’ means ‘head;’ a groat was a coin worth fourpence). The introduction of a poll tax was one of the main causes of the revolt.
12. quit-rent: ‘A rent… paid by a freeholder or copyholder in lieu of services that might be required of him’ (OED).
13. I got up presently… against my will: A Dream of John Ball ends where News from Nowhere begins: at Morris’s London home, Kelmscott House, which overlooks the Thames at Hammersmith.
The Thames Conservancy Board was responsible for maintaining the river. Because they took maintenance to include clearing the river-banks of wild flowers and cutting down trees on the tow-paths, Morris often came into conflict with them.
the ‘Great Wen’: London. The phrase is from Rural Rides by William Cobbett (1763–1835). Morris was much influenced by the directness of Cobbett’s prose, as well as by the anarchic tinge to his radical politics.
14. John Ruskin… would call ‘play’: Ruskin (1819–1900) was a major influence on every aspect of Morris’s work. (See Introduction, pp. xii, xxv, xxxiii–xxxiv.) Morris is presumably thinking of ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (see pp. 365–9). For instance: ‘It is not that men are ill-fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.’ Since Morris’s work was a pleasure to him, he thought of it as ‘play’ by comparison with that of a factory-worker. There is also a rich meditation on play in art in ‘Grotesque Renaissance’, a chapter from the third volume of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice.
The text used here is that of the first British edition, published by Reeves & Turner (London, 1891) and subsequently followed by May Morris in The Collected Works. For this edition Morris revised and enlarged the text that had appeared in the Commonweal and in the first US edition, published by Roberts Bros. (Boston, 1890). A further edition was published by Morris himself at the Kelmscott Press in 1892. In the following notes I am often indebted to the only previous annotated edition, edited by James Redmond, London (Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1970; I refer to this edition as ‘Redmond’. In the interests of consistency and readability, I have made a few adjustments to spelling, capitalization and punctuation. This is especially the case with News from Nowhere, there being so many early editions, but I have also taken a few such liberties with other texts as well.
1. Up at the League: The ‘friend’ has just attended an executive meeting of the Socialist League at Farringdon Street in the City. As News from Nowhere was serialized in the League’s weekly paper, the Common weal, it is explicitly addressed to Morris’s fellow ‘Leaguers’, as the end of this chapter makes clear.
2. For the rest… Anarchist opinions: See Introduction, p. xix.
3. a carriage of the underground railway: The London Tube was opened in 1863. The Metropolitan and District lines, which run through Hammersmith (where Morris lived), were already in operation in 1890. The steam locomotives then in use were causing serious ventilation problems and overcrowding was regarded as normal.
4. his own house… suspension bridge: Morris bought Kelmscott House in Hammersmith in 1878. A Georgian building, it takes its name from Kelmscott Manor, the sixteenth-century house he rented in Oxfordshire, which provides the setting for the book’s conclusion. Hammersmith Bridge was built in 1887.
5. 2003: In the Commonweal this date was 1971.
6. Colney Hatch: An asylum for the mentally ill in north London, now Friern Hospital.
7. Crosby Hall: The hall of a fifteenth-century house built in Bishopsgate for Sir John Crosby, a wool merchant, and subsequently the home of Sir Thomas More. In 1908 it was demolished and reconstructed near the Thames at Chelsea, where it still stands. According to Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘Crosby Hall is invaluable as evidence of how sumptuously C15 merchants built in London’ (The Buildings of England).
8. clearing of houses in 1955: Walthamstow was a village in the Essex countryside when Morris was born there in 1834. By the 1890s it was beginning to be absorbed into London.
9. High Beech: Queen Elizabeth’s Lodge was a hunting lodge at Chingford, which now survives as a museum of natural history. High Beech was a village in the forest noted for its beauty and the height of its church spire.
10. as Scott says: Morris was a passionate devotee of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. His set of them can still be found on his bookshelves at Kelmscott Manor.
11. Ne quid nimis: Latin motto: ‘Nothing in excess’.
12. Boffin: From Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Boffin is nicknamed ‘the Golden Dustman’ because he has unexpectedly inherited a fortune from his employer, a wealthy dust-contractor. Morris was a great admirer of Dickens and was especially fond of Boffin, a warmhearted humorous character, whose catch-phrases he liked to imitate.
13. King Street: A major road, now part of the A315. It runs into Hammersmith Broadway, a busy road junction at the centre of the suburb, where the Tube station is situated.
14. Gothic of northern Europe… and Byzantine: Morris did not admire much Gothic Revival architecture. In News from Nowhere he praises design that has roots in ancient traditions but without any purist attachment to particular styles or periods. ‘Saracenic’ is the term Morris uses for the architecture of medieval Islam.
15. Mote-House: A moot or mote (Old English and Old Norse) is ‘an assembly of people, esp. one forming a court of judicature’ (OED). The language of News from Nowhere includes fewer archaisms than the historical romances do, but Morris’s love of English and Norse in their older forms occasionally led him to borrow appropriate words – partly for historical resonance, partly as ornaments. The democratic institutions of Nowhere owe much to the Norse Thing as described in the sagas (see The Story of Grettir the Strong, which Morris translated, and Burnt Njal).
16. Do you still use them?: For the Socialist League’s opposition to Parliament, see Introduction, pp. xix–xx.
17. a queer antiquarian society… public nuisances: Morris anticipates the survival into post-revolutionary times of his own Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (see Introduction, pp. xvii–xviii). He loathed the ‘wedding-cake’ Gothic of the Houses of Parliament, but in practice he sometimes campaigned through the Society to preserve old buildings of historic value that he disliked (e.g., Wren’s City churches; St Paul’s Cathedral is one of the buildings Dick goes on to disparage).
18. Blue-devils… Mulleygrubs: Traditional nicknames for depression or hypochondria.
19. too ridiculous to be true: The old man is referring to the event Guest has just recalled, the dispersal of free-speech demonstrators by violent police action in Trafalgar Square, 13 November 1887 (see Introduction, pp. xx–xxi). The ‘great battle’ of 1952, clearly modelled on Morris’s memories of that confrontation, is described in Chapter XVII.
20. We came just here on a gang… Again 1 pondered silently: Added in 1891.
21. For this the Gods… the tale and the lay: From Homer’s Odyssey, Bk VIII. The nineteenth-century translation is in fact by William Morris. Hammond does indeed quote roughly – which is to say he misquotes!
22. no bed of Procrustes: In the Greek myth, a robber named Procrustes forced his victims into one or other of two beds. He stretched their bodies to fit the big bed and chopped off their extremities to fit the small one. In Morris’s view the centralization of modern society similarly deforms our humanity in the interests of social control. Where sexual relations are concerned, social convention is as rigid and oppressive as the rule of law.
23. How the Man minded the House: A Norwegian folk-tale which Morris found in George Webb Dasent’s Popular Tales from the Norse (1858).
24. a pretty good cook myself: As Morris himself was proud of being.
25. respectable commercial marriage bed: Redmond comments: ‘Here, as so often in News from Nowhere, Morris is elaborating one of the central points of The Manifesto of the Socialist League, which he successfully presented for adoption… on 5 July 1885.’ Redmond quotes this sentence:
Our modern bourgeois property-marriage, maintained as it is by its necessary complement, universal venal prostitution, would give place to kindly and human relations between the sexes.
He adds this note from the second edition of the Manifesto:
Under a Socialist system contracts between individuals would be voluntary and unenforced by the community. This would apply to the marriage contract as well as others, and it would become a matter of simple inclination. Women also would share in the certainty of livelihood which would be the lot of all: and children would be treated from their birth as members of the community entitled to share in all its advantages; so that economical compulsion could no more be brought to bear on the contract than legal compulsion could be. Nor would a truly enlightened public opinion, freed from mere theological views as to chastity, insist on its permanently binding nature in the face of any discomfort or suffering that might come of it.
This cannot have been uninfluenced by Morris’s own unhappy experience of the married state.
26. Fourierist phalangsteries: François Charles Marie Fourier (1772–1837)was a French Socialist thinker. He argued that the capitalist emphasison self-interest had twisted human instincts and desires and that the consequent deformity was embodied in the social arrangements of modern life – in marriage, in the family and in housing. He therefore proposed that a Socialist society would be divided into phalanges, each consisting of about 1,600 people, who would live in communal buildings called phalanstères. To Morris, though he esteemed Fourier (see Chapter XV), this smacked of the regimentation he disliked in Bellamy’s Looking Backward and in many aspects of ‘scientific’ Socialism. As Hammond here suggests, such communes might have been useful as 'refuge[s] from mere destitution', but Socialism (so Morris thought) should ultimately aspire to humaner, more natural forms of social organization.
27. towards the east: The dockland district of London, the East End, was until recently the poorest part of the city. Most of the places referred to in the next few pages are in this district.
28. Hood’s Song of the Shirt: A popular ballad of 1843 which protests against the notoriously unjust conditions of labour that prevailed in the clothing industry at that time. The poet, Thomas Hood (1799–1845), is mainly known for light and humorous verse, but he also wrote several ‘protest poems’ that had some social effect.
29. the Swindling Kens: ‘[Vagabonds’ slang.] A house; esp. a house where thieves, beggars, or disreputable characters meet or lodge’ (OED).
30. Isaak Walton used to fish: Walton (1593–1683) was a Londoner and wrote a book about fishing, The Compleat Angler (1653). Stratford is a suburb of London on the river Lea, which joins the Thames four miles east of the City. Fishing was Morris’s favourite relaxation.
31. It is now a garden: Morris’s writings, including News from Nowhere, influenced the Garden City movement in the United States and Britain. He also affected modern ideas about gardening, notably through the work of Gertrude Jekyll.
32. no tumble-down picturesque… drawing architecture: ‘Picturesque’ artists in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to paint scenes that were wild, disordered and associated with poverty. They particularly favoured humble dwellings in a state of decay.
33. old Horrebow’s snakes in Iceland: Chapter LXXII of The Natural History of Iceland by Niels Horrebow (1752) is entitled ‘Concerning Snakes’ and consists of one sentence only: ‘No snakes of any kind are to be met with throughout the whole island.’
34. Said I: ‘How about… Do you assert that there are none?: Added in 1891.
35. But do you know… very like democracy: Guest is presumably referring to the direct democracy of ancient Athens.
36. the tyranny of society should be abolished: i.e., Anarchism. Morris agreed with most of the aims of Anarchism, but he thought they could be achieved only through the evolution of Socialism.
37. Fourier… understood the matter better: For Fourier, see note 26 above. Fourier was the only major Socialist thinker to advocate ‘the necessity and possibility of making labour attractive’, which, as Morris says in ‘The Hopes of Civilization’ (p. 322), ‘Socialism can by no means do without’. Morris’s theory of pleasurable labour is the most original part of his thought. It derives largely from Ruskin but is modified by Fourier and by Marx’s theory of alienation. In his preface to The Nature of Gothic (pp. 368–9) Morris compares Ruskin with Fourier to the latter’s disadvantage. For a fuller account of these matters, see Paul Meier, William Morris: The Marxist Dreamer, Hassocks (Harvester Press) 1978.
38. to the time when Africa… named Stanley: Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904), journalist and explorer, encouraged and inspired the colonization of Africa. In 1890, after a successful trip to Africa, Stanley was being lionized in London. Though the hero of the national press, he was attacked week by week in the Commonweal, in the same issues as these instalments of News from Nowhere. Morris saw him as a bandit and murderer, who was pillaging Africa to prop up English capitalism.
39. State Socialism: See Introduction, pp. xix–xx.
40. At the end of the nineteenth… had to yield to it: A reference to the successful trades union campaign, supported by the SDF, for an eight-hour day. The Socialist League regarded it as a ‘palliative’ – for the reasons Hammond goes on to give.
41. To explain this you must understand… the crash aforesaid: Added in 1891.
42. for the last sixty years: In the Commonweal, twenty years. Thus, in 1890, Morris had thought of the ‘change’ as coming in about 1910. A year later he altered this to 1952.
43. it seemed as if the end… from yesterday: Redmond points out that Morris is affected here not only by the Marxist idea of historical determinism – the inevitability of the revolution – but also by the Norse myth of Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods. In Icelandic and Old Norse literature the destruction of the world is envisaged as a cleansing process leading to renewal.
44. The exceptions were one… fads of Socialism: This reflects Morris’s disillusionment with the Liberal Party and middle-class radicalism. He had been especially angered by the Liberal press, which, for all its talk of fundamental freedoms, had been silent about the violence of Bloody Sunday.
45. That remedy was… every man who produces: A very Ruskinian passage. In his later work Ruskin treats the words ‘work’ and ‘art’ as synonyms.
46. All this was much helped… common amongst us: Another Ruskinian passage, though note the reference to a well-known phrase from The Communist Manifesto: ‘the idiocy of rural life’ (see note 3, pp. 423–4). This was an aspect of Marx’s thought with which Morris must have had some difficulty.
47. cockney: Not used in the modern sense. It refers to the cocksure tastelessness of the nouveau riche. Morris was especially fond of the word.
48. sele: Happiness or good fortune: another archaism from the Old English sael and the Icelandic saell.
49. I came to the hurdles… was not amongst them: Added in 1891.
50. I turned round… beautiful girl again: Added in 1891.
51. his rather natural blunder: Eton College was founded by Henry VI, 1440–41.
52. I understood pretty well… steam-power carrying: One of the few moments where Morris envisages the value of modern technology for his new society. As this passage illustrates, he was not opposed to labour-saving machinery, though he is unenthusiastic about it. (For a fuller account of his view of machinery, see ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’, p. 304.)
53. the ancient house of the Blunts: i.e., Mapledurham House, built by Sir Richard Blount, c. 1585. The Blounts were a prominent family from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
54. Chapter XXVI: The whole chapter was added in 1891.
55. ashlar: Built of square hewn stone.
56. the little plain of Basildon: Again, the whole of this chapter reflects Morris’s lifelong admiration for Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’.
Morris has been criticized for the subservient roles performed by most of the women in News from Nowhere. It is therefore noteworthy that he here gives the main creative role to a woman in what might have been thought a man’s job. Interestingly, there is also a female stone carver in his very first tale, ‘The Story of the Unknown Church’, p. 7–8.
57. the foot-hills of the White Horse: See ‘Under an Elm-tree’, pp. 361–4, and note 1, p. 423. From his schooldays at Marlborough College, Morris had been deeply attached to this region of England, with its many prehistoric remains and its association with the one English monarch he wholly admired, Alfred the Great (reigned 871–901). The ancient road known as the Ridgeway begins near Marlborough. It passes the stone circle at Avebury, the megalithic tomb known as Wayland’s Smithy, the White Horse carved in the turf of the chalk downs near Uffington and the site of Alfred’s victory at Ashdown. The road ends near the Thames beyond Wantage, not far from where Walter is set ashore.
58. a hatred of civilization impressed upon them: In his lectures Morris continually emphasized the view that art would need to die before it could be reborn. (See for example ‘The Lesser Arts’, p. 253.)
59. the Lotos-Eaters’ land… where it was always afternoon: A reference to Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ (1833). The poem is based on the incident in the Odyssey when Odysseus visits an island inhabited by a people who live in a permanent state of drugged trance. In this way they escape the realities of a harsh world. In News from Nowhere, however, the dream is not an escape but an opening on to a possible reality.
60. mamelon: ‘A rounded eminence or hummock’ (OED). Presumably a prehistoric earthwork.
61. passed a mill… as a Gothic cathedral: Cf. Morris’s praise of the thirteenth-century tithe-barn at Great Coxwell, near Kelmscott: ‘unapproachable in its dignity, as beautiful as a cathedral, yet with noostentation of the builder’s art’ (quoted in J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris).
62. So then they turned… and let things alone: A reference to the Thames Conservancy Board. (See note 13, p. 408.)
63. And the house itself… this heart of summer: Kelmscott Manor, which remains as Morris described it to this day. (The church in the following chapter is Kelmscott Church, where Morris is buried with his wife and daughters.)
64. and I thought of the church-ales of the Middle Ages: Added in 1891. A church-ale was a village festival, so called because ale was the main beverage. In medieval times they were held in village churches.
1. the bettering of all mankind: Morris was soon to react against this ingenuous optimism. At the time of this lecture, he was still a Liberal.
2. the curse of labour: Adam’s punishment in Genesis 3:19: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.’ Commenting on this verse, Ruskin writes: ‘It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no man to live in this world without working: but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work’ (Pre-Raphaelitism). For ‘The Nature of Gothic’, see Introduction, p. xii, and Morris’s preface, pp. 367–9.
3. the crowd of those… capitalists and salesmen: Morris alludes to the Latin roots of ‘manufacturer’ – ‘maker-by-hand’.
4. Let us therefore study it… which we have made our own: This shows clearly that Morris was not a mere ‘historicist’. It was only through study of the past – in design as in politics – that one could envisage a better future.
5. there is little else left… the matchless Hall near it: Westminster Abbey was founded in the eleventh century, but the main part of the present building dates from the reign of Henry III – i.e., the thirteenth century. Morris often bemoaned the countless monuments (mainly from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) that clutter up the building, disrupting the lines and proportions of the design. (See News from Nowhere, p. 69.)
Westminster Hall, the only part of the old Palace of Westminster that survives intact, was incorporated into the nineteenth-century Houses of Parliament built after the fire. It dates from 1090, though its most noted feature, the hammerbeam roof, was built in 1399.
6. ‘restoration’: The present lecture was given partly in order to earn funds for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
7. Now there is one art… and like a man: William of Wykeham (1324–1404), bishop, statesman and public benefactor, founded New College in 1379, two years after the death of Edward III. In Morris’s day he was credited with the invention of Perpendicular Gothic and does seem to have had some architectural experience.
1. ryot: Peasant (Hindi).
2. For example… a piece of cloth: The cubes of glass used in mosaic are usually called ‘tesserae’. In this context, ‘thrums’ are odds and ends of thread to be used in weaving. All Morris says on the innate limitations of any medium derives from Ruskin, though it is much enriched by his own experience as a craftsman. For instance, Ruskin writes:
if you don’t want the qualities of the substance you use, you ought to use some other substance: it can only be affectation, and desire to display your skill, that lead you to employ a refractory substance, and therefore your art will be base. Glass, for instance, is eminently, in its nature, transparent. If you don’t want transparency, let the glass alone. Do not try to make a window look like an opaque picture, but take an opaque ground to begin with. (The Two Paths)
Morris’s own stained glass is living proof of how well he learnt this lesson.
3. Mr Parnell: Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91), the controversial leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party: i.e., a prominent public figure.
4. The first places… from death to new birth: Morris is probably thinking mainly of St Sophia in Istanbul, a building he had not seen but had studied in books. He frequently refers to it, notably in ‘Gothic Architecture’, pp. 337–8, where he gives a fuller account of the developments outlined in the present passage.
5. Perhaps the fact that… the civilized world: This derives, again, from ‘The Nature of Gothic’, where Ruskin categorizes architectural ornament in terms of the kind of labour needed to produce it. He calls Greek ornamentation ‘servile’ because, as he sees it, the classical insistence on ‘perfection’ requires the suppression of the workman’s personality. Modern machine-made work, he argues, takes this form of enslavement even further. The greatest art, which is ‘naturalist’ and ‘revolutionary’, gives freedom of expression to each individual workman or artist, a freedom which confesses to human imperfection.
1. to buy goods cheap… the name of regrating: Cf. A Dream of John Ball, p. 34.
2. A lady writing… long-bow shooting: From the earliest collection of family letters in English, The Paston Letters. The letter in question, from Margaret Paston to her husband John, is dated 1448.
3. Unless we saw… where Alfred was born: The White Horse of Uffington. (See ‘Under an Elm-tree’, pp. 361–4, and note 1, p. 423.)
4. That epoch began… the capitalist farmer: Social changes satirized in More’s Utopia. (See Morris’s foreword to the Kelmscott Press edition, pp. 373–5.)
5. Campanella: Tommaso Campanella (1538–1639) was a Dominican friar of humanistic convictions and also a notable poet in his native Italian. His Utopian fable, The City of the Sun, proposes the abolition of private property. It was written in the Neapolitan prison where he was held for a time by the Spanish Inquisition.
6. finally, the crystallization… its own standpoint: Naseby (1645) was the decisive battle of the English Civil War. Once he had defeated the king, Cromwell suppressed all the radically egalitarian elements on the Parliamentary side. The Levellers, led by John Lilburne (1614–57), were an ultra-republican group in the Parliamentary army. Lilburne was imprisoned for his criticisms of the Protectorate, and a mutiny by his followers was put down soon afterwards in 1649. With the phrase ‘party of progress’ Morris implies a comparison between Cromwell’s suppression of his radical followers and, in Morris’s own day, the Liberal Party’s betrayal of the working-class movement.
7. the whole evolution of history forbade them to do: i.e., according to the Marxist theory of historical determinism. The whole lecture shows the influence of Marx, notably in its use of the phrase ‘class struggle’ and in the tribute to Marx with which it ends.
8. Gracchus Babeuf. François Noël Babeuf (1760–97) was a radical journalist who urged the transformation of the French Revolution into a movement for economic and social communism. He criticized all the leading parties, including the Jacobins, and in 1796 conspired to overthrow the Directory. The conspiracy was discovered, however, and Babeuf guillotined the following year.
9. Caesarism: P. J. Proudhon’s expression for the rule of Napoleon.
10. This new system… became a pauper: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), the first great work of classical economics, begins with these words: ‘The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgement with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.’ That is to say, without division of labour and the consequent destruction of personal creativity in the workman, there could have been no factory system and so no Industrial Revolution. The part played by this method in the workman’s alienation is identified by Ruskin as well as Marx.
11. I have had to study… French chiefly: In 1879 Morris taught himself the forgotten art of high-warp tapestry weaving from ‘a very good little eighteenth-century book, one of the series of Arts et Métiers’. He also visited the famous Gobelins factory in France to study their methods, but he despised the work produced there – largely copies of Neo-classical oil paintings – and wrote that ‘a more idiotic waste of human labour and skill it is impossible to conceive’.
12. prior to’ 4.8:1848 was throughout Europe the ‘year of Revolutions’. In England there was much agitation by the Chartists (see below).
13. Chartism: Working-class movement for the democratic reform of Parliament. The Chartists were active between 1836 and 1848. They were named after the People’s Charter, presented as a petition to Parliament in 1838.
14. Robert Owen: Socialist and philanthropist (1771–1858), founder of model industrial communities at New Lanark in Scotland and New Harmony in the United States. He pioneered the Co-operative movement and was a major influence on the Factory Act of 1819. His view of the role of work in an ideal society is to be found in his book A New View of Society (1813), which influenced Morris’s conception of Socialism. Owen is often thought of as typifying the English ‘ethical’ tradition of Socialism, by contrast with Marx and his ‘scientific’ school.
15. St Simon, Proudhon, Fourier: The founding fathers of French Socialism.
Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), the first systematic Socialist, was also the father of Positivism. In opposition to the destructive spirit of the French Revolution, he advocated a new social order based on industry, science and secularized Christian values.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) was one of the inspirations behind the Paris Commune of 1871. He argued that ‘property is theft’, in that it appropriates the value created by the labour of others in the form of profit, rent or interest without restoring an equivalent by way of exchange. In his view that laws, the police and the machinery of government are merely the signs of an undeveloped society, he shares some ground with Anarchism.
For Fourier, see note 26, pp. 412–13 and note 37, p. 414.
16. a second Caesarism: i.e., the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1851–70). The Emperor fell as a result of French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, which Morris refers to as ‘a race war’. His fall was followed by the brief flowering of the Paris Commune in 1871, the subject of Morris’s poem The Pilgrims of Hope (1885–6).
17. from being one of the most backward… express itself in action: Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64) founded the General Working Men’s Association, the main component of what was soon to become the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The conservative Prussian Prime Minister, Bismarck, at first attempted to compromise with Lassalle., whom he admired, in an attempt to foil the Liberal opposition. After German unification, however, Bismarck (now Imperial Chancellor) changed tack and, in response to an assassination attempt on the Kaiser in 1878, introduced a series of repressive anti-Socialist measures.
1. useful part of its population: ‘Gothic Architecture’ is possibly the most Ruskinian of all Morris’s writings. Two quotations from Ruskin will indicate what Morris adds to his master’s vision. Architecture, says Ruskin in ‘The Nature of Gothic’, is a social arc ‘born of man’s necessities and expressive of his nature’. And in his Lectures on Architecture and Painting he writes: ‘Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture. That is to say, the highest nobility of a building does not consist in its being well built, but in its being nobly sculptured or painted.’ In this view Morris and Ruskin are at odds with the architects and designers of the Modern movement in architecture, many of whom they influenced.
2. there is a revolt… passing fashion: Morris is probably thinking mainly of his audience, members of the Arts and Crafts movement, whose work he had inspired. He must also be thinking of his own masters, the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates, and perhaps too of the Aesthetic movement and Art Nouveau, anti-utilitarian currents with which he was less in sympathy.
3. a fret or a dentil: Fretwork is a form of ceiling decoration consisting of intersecting lines in relief. Dentils are the small square blocks arranged in series which decorate classical cornices.
4. the Church of the Holy Wisdom: i.e., St Sophia, Istanbul (sixth century).
5. Byzantium through Germany: What Morris calls Arab art and Saracenic Byzantine would now tend to be classed as Islamic, thus bringing together Persian, Turkish and Moorish elements. The style originating in the South of France under Roman and Byzantine influence is the Romanesque, to which Norman architecture belongs, while ‘the native English style’ is Anglo-Saxon.
6. the Greek Kaiser: i.e., the Byzantine Emperor.
7. the wall of Tiryns and the Treasury of Mycenae: The fortress and palace of Tiryns and the monumental tomb in Mycenae known as ‘the Treasury of Atreus’. Both are outstanding buildings of the Mycenaean civilization, dating from the fourteenth century BC – i.e., from the very beginning of European architecture.
8. the Battle of Courtray: In 1302: sometimes known as the Battle of the Spurs. Courtrai is in Flanders and was one of the free cities referred to.
9. Yet we admit… was its crafts-master: This acknowledgement of the importance of capitalism in the process of historical evolution is not unprecedented in Morris’s work but it is hardly characteristic. The phrase, ‘the subjugation of nature’, is strikingly un-Morrisian. The whole paragraph is plainly indebted to Karl Marx and his doctrine of historical determinism (cf. ‘The Hopes of Civilization’, pp. 323–8).
1. Mr Bradlaugh, Mr Gladstone, or Admiral Maxse: Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91) was a working-class Liberal MP, well known to be a freethinker, Frederick Maxse (1833–1900) was a radical polemicist on a wide range of social issues. All three would have been thought of as typifying the most progressive of contemporary attitudes.
2. State Communism: i.e., by analogy with State Socialism, which is common ownership by means of State control. A Communist society, in the Marxist system, would be one in which the State, having performed the Socialist task of transforming society, had withered away. This aspect of Marxist theory is fundamental to News from Nowhere. In Bellamy’s novel, Morris suggests, Communism has been attained without the disappearance of the centralized State.
1. a figure which represents… eleven hundred years old: The White Horse of Uffington in Berkshire was one of the prehistoric artefacts Morris learned to love during his time at Marlborough College. It is a gigantic horse (360 ft long by 160 ft high) that was cut into the turf of the chalk downs between 2,000 and 4,000 years ago. In Morris’s day, however, it was thought to commemorate King Alfred’s victory over the Danes at nearby Ashdown in 871.
2. 9s… 10s.: Nine shillings, ten shillings – equivalent to 45 and 50 pence in today’s coinage.
3. ‘excitement of intellectual life’: Presumably alluding to The Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life [Editor’s italics].
1. For the lesson… therefore live in pain: For instance:
And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished… Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek… there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords’ lightest words were worth men’s lives… than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line.
And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front… examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone, a freedom of thought, and rank in the scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.
‘The Nature of Gothic’ was published in book form by Morris’s Kelmscott Press as a kind of tribute. It is printed in Golden Type, which was also used for News from Nowhere.
2. Robert Owen: See note 14, p. 420.
3. Charles Fourier: See note 26, pp. 412–13 and note 37, p. 414.
4. Unto this Last Ruskin’s most rigorous and impassioned attack on nineteenth-century free-market economics and the social evils it was used to justify. First published 1860.
1. Ralph Robinson’s… More’s Utopia: Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), humanist, statesman and saint, composed his great satire in Latin. It was published at Louvain in 1516; a book so critical of the English state was not publishable in England, even though its author was admired and favoured by the English King.
Robinson’s fine English translation was first published in 1551, but Morris used the revised text of 1566 for the Kelmscott Press edition, to which he wrote this foreword. The edition is printed in Troy, Morris’s small-scale adaptation of Gothic type.
2. ‘the best state of a publique weak’: From the title-page of Robinson’s translation.
3. the progressive movement of his own time: i.e., the Protestant Reformation.
4. ‘the cloud as big as a man’s band’: Probably a reference to I Kings 18:44. The little cloud is the first sign of an approaching storm.
5. the surviving Communism of the Middle Ages: Several communistic or egalitarian movements arose in Europe during the Middle Ages. Most of them were violently suppressed. Among the leaders Morris had in mind would have been John Ball, of course, and the Christian reformer who inspired him, the Lollard John Wycliffe (1320–84). For a somewhat Morrisian essay on such movements, see Bede Jarrett, Medieval Socialism, London and Edinburgh (The People’s Books) 1913. A well-known modern study is Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, London (Secker & Warburg) 1957.
6. and though he was not alone… (bodie ‘pauper’): More explicitly attacks the enclosure of common land by powerful landowners wishing to make sheep farms. Countless peasant farmers were dispossessed in the early sixteenth century as a result of this innovation.
7. Cato the Censor: Roman statesman and orator (234–149 BC), noted for his rigorously conservative morality. He introduced a tax on luxury.
8. Jacobin: The radical party in the French Revolution.
9. Whigism: Morris’s contemptuous term for liberalism. The Liberal Party had its roots largely in the old Whig Party. Though the more radical of the two main political traditions, the Whigs were always more oligarchical than democratic.
10. New Birth: Translating ‘Renaissance’.
1. the (then) Democratic Federation: Founded in 1881 in an attempt to organize radical clubs of working men. It changed its name to Social Democratic Federation in 1883 on adopting an unambiguously Socialist programme. In Morris’s day the term Social Democracy tended to be synonymous with Marxism.
2. some of Mill… in its Fourierist guise: John Stuart Mill (1806–73), Utilitarian philosopher, economist and radical politician, wrote three ‘Chapters on Socialism’, which were published in the Fortnightly Review, February to April 1879. They are reprinted in vol. V of his Collected Works, ed. J. M. Robson. As a Liberal, Mill was opposed to Socialism but sympathized with its objectives. Mill, Adam Smith (1723–90) and David Ricardo (1772–1823) are regarded as the three great ‘classical’ economists.
3. Box and Hyndman and Scheu: E. Belfort Bax (1854–1926) met Morris in the SDF and followed him into the Socialist League. For a time they co-edited the Commonweal and collaborated on a book, Socialism: I ts Growth and Outcome (1893).
For H. M. Hyndman (1842–1921), see Introduction, p. xix.
Andreas Scheu (1844–1927) was a Viennese furniture-designer and Socialist, who came to Britain as a political refugee. His book of reminiscences, Seeds of Revolution (1923), includes a chapter on Morris, with whom he felt much in sympathy.
4. Podsnap’s drawing-room: Podsnap is the type of the self-satisfied, self-important bourgeois in Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend (1865).
5. Huxley: T. H. Huxley (1825–95), scientist and essayist, best known for his polemics on behalf of Darwin and the agnostic outlook. Morris seems somewhat unjustly to have thought him the type of the unimaginative materialist.
1. My friend Mr Batchelor… which I still use: Morris discovered the firm of Joseph Batchelor & Son in 1890. Once he was satisfied with Batchelor’s paper, he designed a watermark for it and used no other paper at the Press. In 1895 Batchelor secured Morris’s permission to distribute his product commercially under the name ‘Kelmscott Hand-made’. It was soon adopted by other private presses, notably the Ashendene, Doves and Essex House fine presses.
2. without the thickening… difficult to read: Morris detested the so-called ‘modern’ style of typography, which derives mainly from the work of Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813).
3. of whom Nicholas… from 1470 to 1476: Nicolas Jenson (1420?–1481) was a French printer who studied under Gutenberg and developed the Roman style typeface. He established a press at Venice in 1470.
4. my Roman type: i.e., Morris’s Golden type, named after the Kelmscott edition of The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine (1892). Versions of this type were quite common in some commercially produced books of the earlier twentieth century, notably the Temple Classics, published by Dent.
5. Schoeffer at Mainz… Zainer at Augsburg: Peter Schöffer (1425?–1502) acquired Gutenberg’s printing equipment with Johann Fust. Johann Mentelin (fl. 1468–78) and his follower Günther Zainer (fl. 1460–78) were German printers of the same period noted for their use of splendid woodcuts. All three developed simpler Gothic types to some extent influenced by Roman.
6. contraction… ‘tied’ letters: The use in early printing of standard abbreviations; the pairing of overlapped letters on one piece of type.
7. a black-letter type: i.e., a Gothic one. This is the Troy type, first used for The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1892).
8. a smaller Gothic type of Pica size: The Chaucer type – so-called because of its employment in the most famous of all Kelmscott books, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896). Pica is a type-size, about six lines to the inch.
9. Mr E. P. Prince: ‘Edward Prince… was a sober, old-fashioned craftsman destined to cut the punches for many of the most celebrated private presses of the following generation, including the Doves, Ashendene, and Vale Presses. Indeed, at the time of his death in 1923 he was the last living independent punch-cutter in England, for by then the process of engraving punches had become thoroughly mechanized.’ William S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press, Oxford (Clarendon Press) 1991.
10. First, the face’ … the ‘body’ as possible: The ‘body’ is a rectangular piece of metal having a raised type image on one end; the ‘face’ is the type image, the printing surface.
11. ‘leading: Using thin strips of metal, less than type-high, to separate lines of type.
12. 16mo books: Sextodecimo – based on sixteen leaves, thirty-two pages, to the sheet.
1. that England is going to war: Morris’s letter was written in response to a threat by the Conservative government that Britain would declare war on Russia if she invaded the Ottoman Empire (see Introduction, p. xvi). The Daily News was a prominent Liberal newspaper.
2. for we have before this waged… jailors, alive: i.e., the Crimean War (1854–56).
3. If I had fallen asleep… whom? and Why: For Morris’s use of the dream motif, see Introduction, p. xxix.
4. the dreadful facts… seemed to awake: Eugene Schuyler, the US Consul-General at Constantinople, had published a report on Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria. Walter Baring was a Foreign Office envoy sent to investigate the same atrocities. He denounced the Turkish action as ‘the most heinous crime of the century’.
5. Mr Gladstone’s… rhetoric: The former Liberal Prime Minister, supposedly in retirement, had recently published a pamphlet on the Eastern Question and, at a huge open-air rally of his constituents, denounced the Turkish action in inspiring language. Morris’s enthusiasm for Gladstone was to cool soon after the latter resumed his political career.
6. Mr Freeman’s… letters: E. A. Freeman, a historian, had denounced the massacres in a series of letters to the Daily News.
7. the new-made ‘brave’ earl: The Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had just been elevated to the peerage, taking the title Earl of Beacons-field.
8. if it were not for… Sunday at Clerkenwell: The Patriotic Club, a body of working-class democrats, had demonstrated against the proposed war. It is significant that Morris, entirely new to politics, was already investing hope in the working class.
9. Lord Derby: i.e., the Foreign Secretary.
10. there were more… in Scio a while ago: An allusion to the massacre by Turkish troops of 25,000 Greeks on the Aegean island of Chios in 1822. This was in the early stages of the Greek War of Independence and it touched the conscience and sympathy of people all over Europe, among them Lord Byron, who may be in Morris’s mind here. The Italian name Scio, which derives from a period of Genoese rule, is the name Byron uses in Don Juan when he deplores the massacre.
11. the Porte: The Turkish government was officially known as the Sublime Porte.
1. My eye just now… Sir Gilbert Scott: This is the earliest known letter in which Morris proposes the foundation of a pressure group to keepa watch on the preservation of ancient buildings: what was to become ‘Anti-Scrape’ (see Introduction, p. xvii). Sir George Gilbert Scott(1811–78), architect of the St Pancras Hotel and the Albert Memorial, was the most successful of Gothic Revival architects. As such, he was often entrusted with the ‘restoration’ of major ecclesiastical buildings. Morris despised Scott’s work for its arrogance and superficiality; he particularly deplored its indifference to the surviving texture and substance of medieval building.
2. Your paper has so steadily… ‘restoration’ The opposition had been largely conducted by F. G. Stephens, art critic of the Athenaeum, who as a young painter had been a minor member of the Pre–Raphaelite Brotherhood.
1. the restoration of… St Mark’s at Venice…at once: A proposal was made in 1879 to rebuild the eleventh-century façade of St Mark’s, Venice. This would have involved replacing the mosaics, the best of which date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (the ‘base mosaics’ which Morris goes on to mention are of the seventeenth century). With this letter Morris sparked off a large-scale campaign to save the basilica. He drafted a petition to the Italian Minister of Works, which was signed by Disraeli, Gladstone, Browning, Ruskin and other eminent figures of the day. How influential the campaign was remains unclear, for the ‘restoration’ plan was dropped before the petition arrived.