To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris's Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams 9780773596979

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To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss

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To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams

Edited by Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-4460-4 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4461-1 (paper) 978-0-7735-9697-9 (epdf) 978-0-7735-9698-6 (epub)

Legal deposit first quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication To build a shadowy isle of bliss : William Morris’s radicalism and the embodiment of dreams / edited by Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4460-4 (bound).–isbn 978-0-7735-4461-1 (pbk.).– isbn 978-0-7735-9697-9 (epdf).–isbn 978-0-7735-9698-6 (epub) 1. Morris, William, 1834–1896–Political and social views. 2. Morris, William, 1834–1896–Aesthetics. 3. Radicalism–Great Britain–History– 19th century. 4. Social change–Great Britain–History–20th century. 5. Art–Political aspects–Great Britain–History–19th century. 6. Art– Social aspects–Great Britain–History–19th century. 7. Aesthetics, British–19th century. I. Weinroth, Michelle, 1959–, author, editor II. Browne, Paul Leduc, author, editor pr5087.p6t63 2015

303.48'4094109034

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Contents

Colour plates follow page 146 Illustrations / vii Abbreviations / x Preface and Acknowledgments / xi Introduction / 3 michelle weinroth

1 William Morris’s “Lesser Arts” and “The Commercial War” / 35 florence s. boos

2 Illuminating Divergences: Morris, Burne-Jones, and the Two Aeneids / 56 miles tittle

3 Radical Tales: Rethinking the Politics of William Morris’s Last Romances / 85 phillippa bennett

4 Telling Time: Song’s Rhythms in Morris’s Late Work / 106 elizabeth helsinger

5 The Pre-Raphaelite Tongue: The Politics of Antiquarian Poetics / 124 david latham

6 Translation, Collaboration, and Reception: Editing Caxton for the Kelmscott Press / 149 yuri cowan

7 Morris’s Road to Nowhere: New Pathways in Political Persuasion / 172 michelle weinroth

8 A Dream of William Morris: Communism, History, Revolution / 195 paul leduc browne

9 News from Nowhere Two: Principles of a Sequel / 218 to ny pinkney

10 Redesigning the Beautiful: Morris, Mabb, and the Politics of Wallpaper / 241 michelle weinroth

Conclusion / 274 michelle weinroth and paul leduc browne

Notes / 289 Bibliography / 339 Contributors / 361 Index / 363

Illustrations

I.1 Layered image concept by Kate Lynch, 2011, revealing the portrait of William Morris within his design for “Tile panel of 66 tiles.” Tile panel of 66 tiles designed by William Morris and made by the firm of William de Morgan, 1876. Photograph of William Morris by Frederick Hollyer, 1884 © William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest / 14 2.1 Venus Meets Aeneas on the Shores of Libya, by Edward BurneJones, opening of Book I of William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid (w/c on vellum), 1874–75 / Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library / 63 2.2 Venus Bringing Armour to Aeneas, by Edward Burne-Jones, drawing for William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1874–75 © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge / 65 2.3 Iris Appearing before Turnus, by Edward Burne-Jones, opening of Book IX of William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1874–75 / Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library / 66 2.4 Aeneas Slaying Mezentius, by Edward Burne-Jones, drawing for William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1874–75. © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge / 67 2.5 Cassandra amid the Flames of Troy, by Edward Burne-Jones, page 44 from William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1874–75 / Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library / 68

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2.6 Dido and Cupid, by Edward Burne-Jones, page 26 from William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1874–75 / Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library / 69 2.7 Lavinia, Her Hair Ablaze, by Edward Burne-Jones, opening of Book VII of William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1874–75 / Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library / 70 2.8 Dido Stabbing Herself, by Edward Burne-Jones, opening of Book IV of William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1874–75 / Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library / 71 2.9 The Burning of the Ships, by Edward Burne-Jones, opening of Book V of William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1874–75 / Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library / 73 2.10 Aeneas Displays the Armour of Mezentius, by Edward BurneJones, opening of William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Book XI of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1874–75 / Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library / 81 10.1 Brother Rabbit wallpaper design, by William Morris, furnishing textile, 1880–81. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London / 252 10.2 Rhythm 69, Image 38, by David Mabb. © David Mabb, 2007 / 253 10.3 Chrysanthemum wallpaper design (full width), by William Morris, 1877. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London / 254 10.4 Chrysanthemum wallpaper design (detail), by William Morris, 1877. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London / 255 10.5 Rhythm 69, Image 3, by David Mabb. © David Mabb, 2007 / 256 10.6 Rhythm 69, Image 4, by David Mabb. © David Mabb, 2007 / 256 10.7 Rhythm 69, Image 6, by David Mabb. © David Mabb, 2007 / 257 10.8 Rhythm 69, Image 7, by David Mabb. © David Mabb, 2007 / 257 10.9 Bruges wallpaper design, by William Morris, 1888. Courtesy of Dover Publications / 258

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10.10 Rhythm 69, Image 45, by David Mabb. © David Mabb, 2007 / 259 10.11 Rhythm 69, Image 46, by David Mabb. © David Mabb, 2007 / 260 10.12 Rhythm 69, Image 5, by David Mabb. © David Mabb, 2007 / 265 10.13 Pimpernel wallpaper design, William Morris, 1876. ©William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest / 266 10.14 Rhythm 69, Image 20, by David Mabb. © David Mabb, 2007 / 266 10.15 St James’s wallpaper design, by William Morris, 1881. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London / 268 10.16 Rhythm 69, Image 11, by David Mabb. © David Mabb, 2007 / 268

Abbreviations

AWS

CL

CW

CWOW

LCW

MECW

May Morris, ed. William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist. 2 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1966 Norman Kelvin. The Collected Letters of William Morris. 4 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984–96 May Morris, ed. The Collected Works of William Morris. 24 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1910–15 Oscar Wilde. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Leicester: Blitz Editions, 1990 V.I. Lenin. Collected Works. 45 vols. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels. Collected Works. 50 vols. New York: International Publishers, 1975–2005

Preface and Acknowledgments

The genesis of this book dates back to 2010, when we organized a symposium on William Morris’s aesthetics and radicalism for the Social Sciences and Humanities Congress, held that year in Montreal. Witnessing the alacrity with which leading Morris scholars responded to our call for papers, we realized that before us was a unique opportunity for a focused and fruitful intellectual encounter. Indeed, as it turned out, the event swiftly became a launching pad for a writing project that would harness the excitement of scholars on the cusp of a new era – colleagues from the UK, US, and Canada who were re-evaluating and reaffirming the political and theoretical import of Morris’s creative oeuvre. The time was thus ripe for capturing this energy in a collective publication graced with an overarching vision of past, present, and future research. Far more than a spate of writings dispersed across several continents and publication venues, a collective work, we believed, would do much to move Morris studies onto new terrain. In 2011, thanks to a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, we brought these and other scholars together again for a two-day writing workshop at the University of Ottawa. The meeting consisted of an open peer-review process and of extensive discussions that marked the second and most decisive phase of our book project. On that occasion, our group of authors and their respective contributions coalesced. ❖

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To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss, which seeks to rethink and reappraise Morris’s radicalism, has been pitched to the specialized scholar, but also to a wider readership. We have thus framed Morris’s radicalism in terms of a number of overlapping discourses in Victorian studies, utopian studies, and print culture, but in other fields as well. Current preoccupations in Victorian studies with radical politics and the “uses of the past” also feature as a prominent theme in this work, given its inquiry into questions of cultural appropriation and social progress. As the subject of Morris and violence is now being revisited in the UK and in the US, our engagement with this topic, we believe, is indispensable for any delineation of Morris’s radicalism, notably amid current cultural anxieties associated with “extremism” in today’s world of national, ethnic, and class-driven rivalries. As a counterpoint to questions of violence, our work also capitalizes on the present revival of utopian studies. Finally, our focus on “paratextuality,” reception, and translation underscores the aesthetics of Morris’s literary page and its role in defining a strikingly new style of political discourse. In weaving together these multiple threads, we have sought to show that Morris’s radicalism is tied to issues that are universal and current. To achieve cohesion, it was necessary to develop an overarching framework that could embrace these many elements as a unified whole. The theme of spectrality and its theoretical underpinnings, adapted from Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, proved to be fitting for a figure such as Morris, given his Gothic sensibilities, creations, and intellectual penchant. Indeed, this framework allowed us to insert the discussion of Morris into contemporary cultural theory, while also bringing to light the unity that underlies our book’s diverse range of essays. ❖

A number of organizations and persons made our 2010 and 2011 intellectual encounters possible. We are grateful to the Canadian Society for Aesthetics for including the Morris symposium in their 2010 program and to McGill-Queen’s University Press, and in particular to its executive director, Philip Cercone, for their interest in and support of our book project. We are indebted to the Centre de recherche sur les innovations sociales (crises) for its financial assistance, to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for awarding us a generous Conference and Workshop Research grant, and not least to the Awards to Scholarly Pub-

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lications Program of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) for supporting the publication of our book. We also owe thanks to the Department of English at the University of Ottawa for enabling us to host the workshop in an excellent setting, and to Douglas Moggach, Emeritus Professor at the University of Ottawa, for kindly reading and commenting on the first drafts of chapters to the book. We are indebted to him, as well as to the anonymous readers of the manuscript, for their insightful appraisal and enthusiastic support of our efforts. David Mabb was a keen participant in our 2010 and 2011 meetings, and we are grateful to him for granting us the right to use his thought-provoking artwork on Morris and Russian constructivism. Our thanks to Kate Lynch for granting us permission to use her concept image in the opening of our introduction, as well to Tony Pinkney for bringing this image to our attention. Miles Tittle ably obtained rare images from the illuminated Aeneid, secured copyright permission for their reproduction, and skillfully formatted them. We are grateful for these efforts. Thanks to Anna Sheppard at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Emma Darbyshire and Lynda Clark at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Kajette Solomon at New York’s Bridgeman Art Library, and Gary Heales at the William Morris Gallery for their kind help in enabling us to obtain rare images by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. They always promptly responded to each of our requests for assistance. Throughout the editing process, many people at McGill-Queen’s University Press displayed great efficiency and kindness in addressing our concerns and inquiries. Our very deep gratitude goes to Mark Abley for shepherding our manuscript from start to finish with the utmost of editorial care, encouragement, and judicious advice. He has been an excellent editor in every sense. Last but not least, many thanks to all the authors of this book for their sustained commitment and inspired contributions. Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne

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To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss So with this Earthly Paradise it is, If ye will read aright, and pardon me, Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea, Where tossed about all hearts of men must be; Whose ravening monsters mighty men shall slay, Not the poor singer of an empty day. William Morris, The Earthly Paradise

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Introduction m i c h e l l e w e i n ro t h

Though he authored one of the longest poems in the English language (The Earthly Paradise), William Morris, for many, remains a minor poet, overshadowed by his prowess as a craftsman (a designer of wallpapers, fabrics, typography, tapestries, etc.), as well as by his political activism. Politics and the manual character of his creative achievements have predisposed some to view him as a marginally reputable poet, “contaminated” and “compromised” by his socialist beliefs, or as a merely practical artist, ill-equipped to pursue finer theoretical considerations. If naïveté has been associated with his artisanal works, it is an assumption that has also coloured the popular perception of his overall artistic and intellectual disposition.1 Indeed, a misguided contempt for craft has stymied the appreciation of Morris’s sophistication. In a world where knowledge is rationalized into discrete units and severed into many “solitudes,” Morris’s practical and conceptual ability to unify the polarized spheres of art and politics is, even now, both subversive and unique. And yet, the complexity and path-breaking character of his oeuvre are often missed, if not obscured, by misconceptions.2 This book has a double objective: to delineate and define Morris’s unorthodox radicalism and, in so doing, to uncover the consistency and precocity of his innovative social thought. Our claim is that Morris was not an unsystematic thinker,3 nor a shallow literary artist; and while he has often been recalled in demeaning ways as “but” a designer of domestic furnishings, as a maudlin medievalist or author of facile romances, it is in the elaborate beauty produced by his dexterous hand (whether on wallpaper, dyed fabrics, newsprint, or vellum), that we can discern the

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intricacy of his deepest political ideas – mental designs that are forever calling on us to think again and think otherwise. As Northrop Frye noted years ago, “there is no one in English Literature who raises more fascinating and complex questions connected with the relation of art to society than William Morris.”4

The Ghost Writer “Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio.” (Hamlet)

I.1. Layered image concept revealing the portrait of William Morris in his tile panel design, by Kate Lynch, 2011. Tile panel of 66 tiles designed by William Morris, 1876; photograph of William Morris by Frederick Hollyer, 1884.

Like many a bequest from the dead, Morris’s creative oeuvre has been a gift to posterity, but also an object of political wrangling and conflicting receptions. His legacy continues to fascinate, to infuriate, but also to inspire. His spirit is restless. Fittingly, it writhes like the ghosts that pervade his creative works,5 ensconced as these are within a nineteenthcentury cultural landscape of Gothic romance, spiritualism,6 and magic lanterns. And yet, in spite of its ubiquity within Morris’s corpus of writings, the leitmotif of the spectre features only sporadically in scholarly commentaries.7 Nowhere (at least to date) is this shadowy silhouette

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conceived as the basis of a full-blown analytical framework, a conceptual tool through which to grasp the counter-intuitive, and often elusive, meaning of Morris’s philosophy of art, politics, and social change. Still, the “logic of spectrality” (a coinage borrowed and adapted from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx)8 will act both as an explanatory paradigm and as a launching pad for the ensuing discussion of Morris’s “radicalism” – a notion laced with controversy, yet ripe for critical review. In a purely impressionistic sense, the spectre can be construed as a figurative trope that illuminates key facets of Morris’s cultural identity. Uneasily classified yet pervasive, compelling but complex, his wide-ranging versatility, from aesthetic design to societal reform, recalls the spectre’s omnipresence – hovering, darting, and sinuously permeating the domestic interiors and rural exteriors of Victorian (and other) Englishness. If the ghost offers a suggestive metaphor, it also embodies the very stuff of Morris’s creative fiction: writings replete with dream visions, unsettling visitations, and unexpected phantoms. The spectre is also at the heart of Morris’s philosophy of romance (the capacity for the past to peer through the present), and of his lifelong dialogue with the forgotten wraiths of medieval times. Yet, more than a leitmotif filtering through Morris’s creative oeuvre, more than a literary trope portraying the shape-shifting character of his legacy, the spectre can be construed as a lens through which to grasp the political purpose of Morris’s educative goals: i.e., to rid society of ideological atrophy, to redesign social consciousness thoroughly, and to infuse his peers, and indeed posterity, with imaginable possibilities for a humanly just world. If Morris’s cultural import is most often linked to the dexterity of his hands, to the plasticity of his manual achievements, and to the sumptuous sensuality of his visual creations, the spectres that populate his creative fiction and the attention he grants the Gothic past reveal the extent of his reflections on the spectrality of human consciousness: i.e., on the way we think. For the spectre’s every aspect incarnates some mental drive: its flash apparitions9 – both spectacular and unexpected10 – evoke the startling and involuntary surges of memory or the disquieting return of sundry emotions, from pangs of loss to phantom projections of desire. These affective stirrings, like the nebulous ghost itself, are outwardly invisible. Inwardly, however, they are mirrors of our self-scrutiny and new insights. The spectre may carry with it the spirit of the aggrieved, recalling a past misfortune incurred by nature (e.g., an untimely death) or by human action. Like Hamlet’s

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ghost, who prompts the young prince to act and “set it right,” the spectre may urge us to probe some hidden ill and restore justice. The ghost thus doggedly occupies our conscience; it ignites our guilt and inflames our discontent. A revenant repeatedly returning to confront us, to unsettle the tranquility of home and the comfort zones of habit and routine, its value resides in its disruptive role, in skewing our quotidian perceptions, but also in deepening our self-knowledge and strengthening our moral responsibility. Morris’s cultural legacy is just such a spectre, a spur prompting us to question our encrusted ways of thinking, our unsuspecting embrace of inherited but flawed epistemologies; it is also a disturbing reminder of the widespread misprision and institutional suppression of Morris’s own social thought. Like a vanishing mediator,11 Morris’s creative work has been a pivotal, but much-forgotten, catalyst of artistic innovation burgeoning in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Europe. His treasure trove of designs and accompanying aesthetic precepts have impinged on a host of artistic developments (e.g., art nouveau, the Bauhaus, symbolism, the arts and crafts movement, among others), yet only rarely and ephemerally does his name feature within the pantheon of aesthetic theorists,12 even while the English neo-Hegelian Bosanquet regarded him as “the culmination of German aesthetic thought from Goethe to Hegel.”13 Drawing heavily on renowned Ruskinian principles,14 Morris’s public lectures of the 1870s and 1880s underscored the declining condition of art in Victorian society, as well as the epistemic and political value of seeing aesthetically.15 For all this, he has remained conspicuously absent from the map of philosophy;16 his writings on aesthetics have often been consigned to the “lesser”17 realm of craft, a site of artistic practice spurned by the institution of “high” art, be it modernist or classical. In the area of literary studies, Morris’s name has also been withheld from the limelight. Although strikingly inspirational for several key nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers (Wells, Wilde, Tolkien, Yeats, Pound, among others), Morris’s “literary” material was appropriated, but not credited; instead, it was relegated to the shadows and obscured by the modernist “Greats.”18 As Jack Lindsay suggested in 1958, “without Morris it would be impossible to conceive Yeats’s development into a great poet.”19 At the same time, Yeats “helped to conceal his indebtedness to his acknowledged ‘chief of men’ [Morris] for the ideal or myth of Byzantium.”20 In 1976, reflecting back on “twenty-one years [sic] harvest of

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critical writing on Morris’s poetry and prose,” E.P. Thompson wrote that “apart from one lecture by Jack Lindsay and John Goode’s important study,” there was little he could recommend. In fact, he saw in this dearth “a continuing adverse judgment upon Morris’s poetry.”21 But if Morris’s poetic reputation declined seriously in the early twentieth century, Peter Faulkner suggests that this may be ascribed in part to a literary prescription announced by modernists (e.g., T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and F.R. Leavis) that poetry “should be intelligent and demanding rather than a form of relaxation or escape.”22 The modernists, who would eventually become powerful fashioners of highbrow culture, dismissed Morris’s poetry and dream visions as facile escapism;23 they overlooked the political intricacy and transformative energy of his oneiric literature and implicitly construed his dream worlds as spaces for idle musing, much less the repositories of a bold political imaginary. Conflating Morris’s “beautiful” poetics with the faded beauty of an “etiolated” tradition (T.S. Eliot),24 they wrenched his writing out of its political fabric, assuming that lyrical beauty could not be astute and intellectually robust, only enchanting and naive. Late-twentieth-century English studies, governed by postmodernism and post-colonialism, did little to repair the modernists’ rebuff. Morris scholarship was (and continues to be) treated as an arcane sphere of study, sequestered in the darker recesses of academic debate. In 2000, when the seventh edition of the canonical Norton Anthology of English Literature (NAEL ) included only three of his poems in its thousand pages (and this amid a plethora of works by heavily represented Victorian writers), the stamp of Morris’s eccentricity in mainstream scholarship was sealed. Ironically, in the same thrust, the NAEL featured Morris’s 1883 “Sketch for Windrush” as the cover design of its media (cd-rom) companion. Being a wallpaper pattern, “Sketch for Windrush” foregrounded Morris’s achievements as a Victorian designer of domestic furnishings and as a pioneer of the arts and crafts movement, but it obscured the depth and breadth of his literary, political, and philosophical writings. Today, in Victorian studies conferences or in university curricula, Morris is most often invoked in conjunction with Ruskin and Carlyle, or as a fellow Pre-Raphaelite of the Rossetti circle; but his own literary works are rarely discussed. News from Nowhere marks Morris’s significant contribution to the genre of literary utopias, yet it features in the curriculum as “para-literature.” The few Morris texts included in the canon

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are typically selected from his Defence of Guenevere volume. Even these Arthurian poems suffer from neglect under the shadow of Christina Rossetti’s prolific output and in the consensually favoured aura of Tennyson’s artistry.25 Did Morris “transgress some unwritten law” or disturb the sacred values of the intellectual community? There is no “factual” proof. But he was clearly ushered out of the club with carping comments. Countless aspersions were cast upon his writings, notably on his poetry.26 His literary style was deemed “archaic,”27 his fiction, it was said, lacked authorial intensity,28 and his utopian romance was called impractical, naive, fanciful, or lacklustre.29 A litany of such remarks could perhaps be invoked to explain, if only sporadically and impressionistically, why Morris failed to garner wide-ranging appeal. But these judgments remain matters of taste and cannot, in themselves, rationalize why, in the words of Jeffrey Skoblow, the Morris industry has “operated somewhat on the fringes of the mainstream – Morris [having been] consigned by the literary industry at large to the major-minor bin,”30 or why he stalks the halls of philosophy, invisible to all but the most magnanimous thinker.31 There is, some might say, the “whiff” of subversive politics surrounding his texts, and conceivably this has incurred unease for many, most notably in the academy. But while questions of taste remain “indisputable,” there are abiding issues of epistemological perspective that distinguish Morris’s views markedly from those of his contemporaries; his social philosophy demands, both of his peers and of posterity, to effect a Copernican shift in thinking – a daunting matter, and one that most would rather eschew. None of which is to say that no interesting and valuable work has been done on Morris and his legacy in recent years. On the contrary, there have been significant and excellent contributions by a range of scholars.32 In spite of this, Morris and his work remain marginal subjects of study in the academic world. To be clear, it is not the purpose of this book to lament this misfortune. As Morris so wisely put it himself, recognizing the many misreadings of his life efforts and the price he had to pay for clairvoyance, “we must get used to such trifles as defeats, and refuse to be discouraged by them. Indeed I am an old hand at that game, my life having been passed in being defeated; as surely as every man’s must be who finds himself forced into a position a little ahead of the average in his aspirations.”33

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The aim of this book, and its contribution to the field of Morris studies, is rather to grasp the neglect, if not the misconstruction, of Morris’s oeuvre in a positive and transformative light, and to extract from his often obscured legacy the constitutive components of a theory of radicalism, shaped as it was by the exclusions and rejections he experienced as an artist, literary figure, and socialist.34 At every turn, his insights exceeded the superficiality of common sense; in his discourses, one can discern the strain of someone who yearned to be understood but was not fully heard. Often perceived as simple and naive, his writings and creative works are, in fact, intellectually striking – fascinatingly enigmatic. Like his fictive ghost, the Victorian Dreamer, who exhorts the fourteenth-century priest John Ball to decipher riddles,35 Morris prompts us to see reality in dialectical terms and to treat contradiction and asymmetry as the enriching facets of our human ontology – a perspective decidedly at odds with conventional thinking. A central premise of this book is that dialectical thought, in its manysidedness, is a quintessential feature of Morris’s unorthodox radicalism. The foregoing pages offer the first outlines of this dialectical sensibility by tracing his spectral presence in various areas of the academy. An unsettling energy in an institution’s “political unconscious,” Morris’s posthumous marginality, we might say (in Hegelian terms), is the embodiment of contradiction – the incarnation of some disturbing “other”: e.g., a discrepancy, a neglected sphere of knowledge, or a hidden political truth. When confronted openly, however, this contradiction deepens and intensifies knowledge. It is, in short, a fertile contradiction, and one that marks the starting point of this introductory chapter – an overture to the ensuing essays, but also a theoretical narrative, punctuated by a number of stages, each of which constitutes a defining turn in the unfolding logic of Morris’s odyssey from dialectical thinking to innovative revolutionary praxis. We begin with the idea of spectrality in Morris’s legacy and the split reception of his oeuvre. His sundered legacy, we argue, constitutes an external contradiction that mirrors a conflict he internalized and eventually developed into a sharpened self-awareness. Next, we elaborate on the emergence and significant outcomes of his dialectical thinking, focusing in particular on his theorization of the lesser arts, the politics of the ornament, and his subversive concept of labour. Then we move from Morris’s

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interpretation of the world to an analysis of his distinctive, indeed, unorthodox, approach to changing it – his radically different radicalism. Finally, we synthesize the spectral facets of Morris’s radical praxis, showing how these dimensions are variously reflected in each of the book’s chapters.

Spectral Aspects of Morris’s Legacy 36 With more than a hundred years of perspective, Morris’s legacy has, arguably, been perceived and represented through two constitutive categories of spectrality: as a spectre (ghost) and as a spirit of the age (zeitgeist). The spectre (construed as an annoying spirit) captures the way Morris features within the academic institution. He is the irksome, “subterranean” element that disturbs the establishment and its entrenched assumptions. The spirit of the age, conceived here as a dominant ideology, a zeitgeist, or collective fetish, exemplifies the pervasive reading of Morris’s artistic works as emblematic of floral Englishness: quietist, beautiful, and genteel. Out of the oppositional relationship between these two categories of spectrality (ghost and zeitgeist), we discern the key structures of Morris’s dialectical thought. For the figure of the spectre, which conjures up Morris’s subversive energy, is a type of poltergeist. This demonic spirit is also the zeitgeist’s dark “other” – in other words, its repressed conscience. Such a melding of opposing “spirits” (“demonic” and “holy”) reflects a double dynamic at work in Morris’s legacy, discussed in more detail below. At the same time, it points to a central premise in Morris’s radical thought: that things can be at once here and there – at the margins (e.g., the poltergeist) and at the centre (zeitgeist); at once in the past and in the present; at once public and private; at once political and aesthetic. Opposite entities can be both the same and distinct. Such a view presupposes the coalescence of contrary elements and, in Jameson’s words, creates an “essential restlessness or negativity that fastens onto our thinking at those moments in which we seem arrested and paralyzed by an antinomy.”37 Antinomy, rather than contradiction, has been the mode through which Morris’s admirers have often conceptualized his apparently twosided public identity: for example, now the retiring or cloistered artist, now the fervent political activist.38 Instead of embracing the tension that holds together Morris’s diverse facets, such readers have been, as Jameson

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might say, “immobilized like a ship in the ice.”39 But a logic of spectrality offers an escape route from the rigid confines of polarization. Moreover, in its emphasis on ghosts, the idiom of spectrality presents an alternative way of articulating dialectical thought in terms akin to Morris’s Gothic sensibility. In short, the spectre serves as a conceptual conceit, allowing us to delineate and synthesize a number of defining elements that characterize, on the one hand, Morris’s legacy and, on the other, his social philosophy. As we shall see, the former sets the stage for the latter. As a figuration of our conscience and of our shape-shifting sense perceptions, the spectre (understood as ghost) incarnates diverse instances of dialectical movement. Like dialectics, which is about change and all manner of interaction,40 the spectre’s fluidity is suggestive of “process,” of “becoming” – but also of “mediation.” In this, it recalls the notion that our ontological being (the self and the world it occupies) is not an unadulterated, unitary entity, but a “complex of complexes,”41 involving continuous social and historical development. The spectre also “incarnates” structural continuity afforded by transhistorical connections – social relations, memories, and traditions maintained across time as much as within time. Morris’s legacy, in many ways, embodies the processual and interactive nature of this spectral phenomenon. Original editions and facsimiles of his creative works (e.g., Kelmscott productions) remain touchstones, linking his hands with ours. For having left in his wake palpable residues of his Victorian life (books, artifacts, fabrics, wallpapers, and so forth), he sustains a spiritual presence among us, lingering in controversies and scholarly debates. His legacy harbours political ideas and exhibits an aesthetic disposition that intertwines with ours. In 1884, Morris articulated this dialectical character of change as a historical development “swayed always by the same laws, moving forward ever towards something that seems opposite to that which it started from.” Yet, “the earlier order,” he notes, “[is] never dead but living in the new and slowly mould[s] it to a recreation of its former self.”42 Change, he shows, not only embraces difference and continuity, but interaction and interpenetration, an interlacing of what “was” and what “is” and what has yet to come or become. For “[th]e past is not dead, but … living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.”43 A logic of spectrality suggests, as do Morris’s medievalist romances, that history is not an objective continuum, nor a succession of discrete parts marking the progressivism of human perfectibility, but a fluctuating

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and intermingling of temporalities, an expansion and retraction of temporal scales. Such a view not only complicates our sense of chronology, it also dramatically alters our perception of knowledge, urging upon us a mode of thinking with a demystificatory (read political), rather than merely descriptive (read disinterested), purpose. Governed by an ethical fiat to confront reality’s more intractable facets squarely and stoically, this philosophical view aims to strip away idealism, refusing all selfdelusion that relies on the simplicity of binary judgments and that eschews the strenuous mental demands of probing reality’s sundry contradictions to their core. By this logic, the zeitgeist or spirit of the age is an instance of idealist thought, an ideological screen with which society obscures its knotted relations under the guise of seamless cohesion. And it is the purpose of the spectre, the dark doppelgänger of this zeitgeist, to cast light on society’s skewed self-projections, just as it is the function of dialectics to expose the falsifications of idealist thinking. For every spirit of the age has its spectres – demons that disclose the skeletons of an unsavoury earlier time. So Morris’s legacy has been the ghost of the academy – a casualty of official culture, a treasure trove of invaluable and provocative concepts, sequestered, overlooked, or contained by myth and simplification. And yet, the multi-faceted nature of Morris’s cultural work and its divided reception make it impossible to treat his oeuvre strictly as an obscured spectre. For if his literary achievement has been a silhouette shadowing the works of Tennyson, Rossetti, Carlyle, Ruskin, Wilde, Tolkien, Yeats, among others, his decorative creations, by contrast, have been lauded and heralded as emblems of a prized Victorian aesthetic. The commodification of his patterned art – wallpaper, stained-glass panels, upholstery, and textile fabrics, in short, furnishings for upper-class domesticity – has turned his creative output into an aesthetic zeitgeist (the ruling Spirit) of interior design and the measure of expensive English taste.44 In another ironic twist, this prevailing spirit of elegant aesthetics (vulgarized into kitsch by the mass market) has occluded Morris’s subversive message about the “lesser arts,” the ground from which he mounts a critique against society’s class division, with its reduction of the decorative arts to mechanical labour and its privileging of high art for a select few.45 Yet, Morris’s public identity is far more than an opposition between the suppressed ghost and the ruling spirit of fine English taste, since such a split is but an external relation based on a long-standing perception of

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Morris’s oeuvre as a two-tiered entity: on the one hand, a political and literary countenance, darkened by controversy, dismissal, and neglect, and, on the other, a voluminous output of floral designs made culturally ubiquitous, institutionally legitimate, and aesthetically seductive. Perpetuated by cultural institutions and by the marketing of Morris’s artifacts, this division has led to a widespread misapprehension that Morris’s politics (among which his lectures and later romances) were radical (i.e., subversive) and that his largely creative (i.e., aesthetic) works were entrenched in, and subscribed to, conservative tradition. Clearly, by being both a ruling spirit and a haunting presence, Morris’s legacy compels a double perspective, but of a perilous kind. For in this duality, one is tempted to see Morris’s oeuvre in binary terms (the conservative/traditional artist versus the political radical) rather than as the two sides of his identity, held together in an unstable and transformative tension.

Morris, Spectrality, and Radicalized Consciousness This tension can be grasped more precisely and more deeply if we turn from externality – from typically polarized representations of Morris – to a contradiction internal to Morris himself: the clash between his politics and his class position, a clash most visible in his artistic creations. For the latter were the products of his class privilege, yet they have been emptied of their subversive content and confused, if not conflated, with the conservatism of his social background and with his financial interests as a co-owner46 and later single owner of a decorating firm. This confusion might lead some to see in him a degree of hypocrisy, if not a mitigated radicalism. He was, however, among the first to register this internal contradiction when he reflected on the fate of his commercial enterprise in interior design, hijacked as it was by the consumerist demands of the affluent. The key flashpoint was the conflict he felt between quality-based labour and commercial profit. Indeed, in this agonizing tension between loving artisanal craft and hating commerce, Morris could only sharpen his radical sensibility. His oft-quoted utterance that he was ministering to the “swinish luxury of the rich”47 reveals the nature of his quandary. He saw clearly that his effort to imprint the insignia of an alternative politics onto his intricately wrought decorative furnishings would be swallowed up by the market’s maelstrom of commodity exchange. Designs

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intended as an “aesthetic education” of society48 would be compromised; once for sale, these decorative objects risked becoming vacuous entities, depleted of social meaning and political purpose, yet filled with monetary excess. Not incidentally, since the nineteenth century, the Morris design industry has often been construed as a mark of extravagance, reserved for the few, and this, at the (swinish) cost of the many.49 If the radical message of his creative oeuvre slipped beneath the wave of market interests (wealthy consumer demand, matters of financial need, and so on), this turn of events reflects the invidious position that Morris occupied as a small businessman, intent on bringing about social change. Nonetheless, if in 1876 he could see that his artwork was split between his commercial enterprises and his political beliefs, in 1881, he recognized that while his politics and the commodification of his art were at odds, they converged unhappily but fruitfully within his “bourgeois” radicalism. Morris became ever more radicalized, and ever more radical than his peers, precisely because he grappled with the contradictions of his selfassigned mission to help abolish the infrastructure of Victorian capitalism while being of the propertied class. His middle-class comfort, he realized, was intimately bound up with the fate of his impoverished fellow man on the street just as his capital was inextricably bound to the labour of others. One year before he resigned from the Board of Devon Great Consols (1874), the mining company from which he drew his income, he wrote: “When I see a poor devil drunk and brutal I always feel, quite apart from my aesthetical perceptions, a sort of shame as if I myself had some hand in it.”50 Morris had the capacity to see the plight of the “other” (his doppelgänger) in himself. This specular awareness underlies his radical thinking. He grasped every object or individual as a prism of intrinsic and extrinsic relations, and understood that contradiction can be the stuff of fruitful knowledge rather than of doomed antagonism. This nascent political consciousness is evident in his youthful writings, in his medievalist poetry, early romances, and in The Earthly Paradise. There, he not only expresses social discontent with the world he inhabits, he also nurtures an idiosyncratic, but politically astute, creativity. He explores and reworks the romance form, ponders the politics of dreaming and dream visions, cultivates the ideal of fellowship through the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, and in his study of Gothic architecture, redesigns everyday logic in richly inventive ways, developing a critical sensibility that in the 1870s crystallizes as a clearly defined class-consciousness. Arguably, then,

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the radicalism assigned to him during his Socialist League years is preceded by another equally significant moment of radical opposition when he begins lecturing on art and labour in 1877.51 In delineating a theory of the lesser arts, Morris introduced a philosophical and political analysis that dismantles common-sense notions of work (construed as toil) and situates the objectives of social change at the heart of creative activity – a perspective that outflanks (in intellectual magnitude at least) Commonweal’s both poignant and informative exposure of capitalist injustice. From 1877 onwards, he argued fervently and extensively for the value of the decorative arts, correcting the misperception that the commodities sold at his decorating firm were but “unmeaning pomp.”52 He saw the graphic content of his creative productions as instructive material for educating the public eye, for dispelling the view that (purchased) ornaments are mere adjuncts of utility, “things” devoid of history, and removed from disquieting issues of economics, politics, and ethics. These designs were (and still are) visual capsules of Morris’s materialist philosophy of art.53 In his lectures on art and labour (1870s–1880s),54 Morris presented the decorative dimension of “popular” art as a vital facet of human praxis, of politics and morality. Inspiring the public to consider interior design beyond its immediate appearance, these lectures (notably “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing”)55 underscored a number of key notions: that the ornament (and the ontological need to decorate) is not a wasteful superfluity,56 but an imperative dimension of healthy life; that art and labour, commonly perceived as irreconcilable opposites, can be grasped in unison as “joyful work,” as conscientious effort fused with the gratification of personal fulfillment, “delight in skill [being] at the root of all art”;57 and that such activity is the mark of human dignity, selfrealization, and autonomy. For creative expression, however indebted to tradition, can never be mental tyranny or enslavement to the past, only a dialogue with ancestral sources of inspiration and an affirmation of the specificities of the creator’s own time and place. Although technical, and addressed primarily to an audience preoccupied with art, design, and architecture, these lectures are, in fact, talks with a wide moral and social objective. Each is an exhortation to the public to acknowledge the historical richness of the ornament and its imperative role in society. The square, the round, the diaper, the mosaic, the acanthus leaf, the Roman arch, and the leafy border are all reflective of the cultural merits and limits of a given civilization (Egyptian, Greek, Roman,

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Byzantine, and Gothic). In the Gothic aesthetic, Morris identifies a cameo of co-operative and popular art – accessible to and readily executed by all. Here, too, he affirms the ontological human need for expressive life, for the production and exchange of creative energies. And with this he foregrounds the ancestral motifs of his own aesthetic style: from the diaper, square or round, to “tufts of flowers growing side by side with their tendrils … touching or interlacing” through to “continuous growth as a necessity of borders and friezes.”58 In these disquisitions on the ornament, the spectral history of civilization’s preoccupation with (aesthetic) self-representation comes to the fore; it is a history that haunts the very graphic leitmotifs of his domestic furnishings. Here, too, he effects that dialectical reversal in thinking where the demeaned status of the ornament is annulled and transformed – from frivolous adjunct to the very measure of a healthy political economy. In the same thrust, as he moves the ornament from margin to centre, exposing its intimate relationship with the political, he also introduces another spectral moment, this time in artistic representation. For as the myriad shapes and interlacings in Morris’s designs call forth the ghostly patterns of the past, they also present an occasion for grasping the logic of spectrality that underlies his tripartite theory of pattern work – a coordination of beauty, imagination, and order. Positing that beauty (implicitly, the interplay of sensuous forms and colours) and imagination (the figurative associations provoked by beauty) are held together in a balance of “the material and spiritual sides of the craft,”59 Morris shows that “order” is a coordinate of the sensible and the supersensible, a condition in which representation is at once a “wall against vagueness” and a door “for the imagination to come in by.”60 Neither too abstract, on the one hand, nor too bound to naturalism, on the other, but generating symbolic thought, this mode of representation is achieved by “conventionalizing nature”61 through artifice, producing a style of representation that is at once referential (i.e., recognizable and thus contingent on sense perceptions) and suggestive (i.e., not literal or imitative). Sensuously and materially grounded, it nonetheless lifts off the surface of the paper or fabric with figurative meaning, urging us to treat it as a “visible symbol” of “something beyond itself.”62 This twofold aspect of “order” defines the hermeneutic with which we might parse the entirety of his creative output. As in dialectical thinking and as in spectral logic, order is not a static structure, but a dynamic tension holding together two contrary yet mutually regulating drives. Such

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an exquisite tension applies to the delicate balance Morris sought in matters of creation and reception: in creation, this means the capacity to execute decorative form with inventive autonomy, while acknowledging a debt to the ghosts of tradition. In reception, this means the capacity to read aesthetic forms without slavish adherence to surface appearances (literalism or naturalism), and without blind faith in mystery.63 The central consideration, in both creative and receptive moments, is autonomy, but construed in a Hegelian sense as freedom mediated by necessity, by objective constraint. Morris’s dialectical aesthetic theory can be read as the basis of his social philosophy and the fount of his genuinely distinct radicalism, with its delicate coalescence of opposites. Indeed, we might say that the cutting edge of his ideas is felt less in his reaffirmations of Marx’s doctrine (these being consonant with, but less original than, Marx’s full-blown critique) than in his having pushed Marxist philosophy beyond itself, in having conceptualized art through the category of class, but also class through the category of art.64 To understand his revolutionary thought, we must ponder his 1870s and 1880s writings. Here, his innovative thinking is most powerfully evident in his theorization of the lesser arts, where he dares, unlike Kant and Kantians, to bring material interest and utility into the cloistered chambers of idealist aesthetics, notably, of “the beautiful.”65 Here he challenges a long-standing premise of Western culture – that work is inherently punitive and instrumental, at odds with art or aesthetic judgment. By reconceiving the nature of work as ontologically salutary and gratifying, he develops a theory of aesthetic creation and reception that is fundamentally materialist,66 promising a solution for overcoming the chasm between “creative” and “alienated workers” in terms strikingly advanced for his era, but also for our own. Indeed, in his unassuming lecture on the “lesser arts,” Morris brings to light one of the principal nuggets of his radicalism. With philosophical acumen, he shows that the condition of freedom is not leisure, but labour, a blend of creative effort and satisfaction. Through a reversal of traditional thinking, he abolishes the antinomy sustained by capitalist relations: that is, poorly waged work versus unearned (idle) leisure. In this, too, he changes the whole concept of utopian desire. In lieu of a land of Cockayne, where bounty is enjoyed in sloth and passivity, Morris’s alternative commonweal depends on a totally reconfigured notion of work.67 Whereas the notion of labour is most typically discussed in the social sciences, Morris by contrast expounds on it in extensive lectures on “art,”

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lectures that anticipate the core economic principle inscribed in News from Nowhere. Conceived as creative praxis, his concept of work assumes a specifically human shape in the figure of Boffin. The elegant golden Dustman of Nowhere, with his ennobling daily work, replaces the ghost of Victorian labour – that is to say, an oppressed working-class wraith. Through Boffin, Morris also rewrites the concept of necessity. Once the source of human degradation, it is now but a form of material resistance – the primum mobile of fulfilling effort – and the very condition of freedom. For Boffin’s necessary task – the removal of waste – refers less to the disposal of material detritus than to the elimination of ideological matter: to wit, a system of values that sustains luxury. This Golden Dustman recycles cultural “waste” (in this case, reactionary nineteenth-century novels) into the gold of creative activity (read human wealth). Such “alchemy” reflects Morris’s tour de force as he brings the otherwise alienated practices of art and labour into an illuminating affinity. With Boffin, we might say, dialectics takes on a scintillating fictive form. For Morris, the lesser arts offer a means of contesting the subordination of aesthetics (and notably of craft) to the realm of political reason, public affairs, and the high drama of the “greater arts.” By rescuing the decorative arts from their menial status, he upholds their exemplary character, turning it into an instructive paradigm through which to overcome countless antinomies resulting from class division: for example, fine (elite) art versus exploitative toil, aestheticism versus utilitarian rationalism, manual versus mental labour, masculinism versus effeminacy, and so forth. Scarcely moderate, retiring, or indecisive, he resists all manner of extremes. He thus shuns the art-for-art’s-sake aestheticism of his fellow Pre-Raphaelites, the extravagant hedonism of his modernist peers (e.g., Wilde, Beardsley), and the monetary excesses of his middle-class clients. On the political side, he refuses the confrontational tactics of intransigent anarchism, the austerity and self-abnegation of martyrdom, the fanatical zeal of Jacobinism, and the modernist disavowal of cultural inheritance.

Radically Different Radicalism Clearly eluding easy classification, Morris’s radicalism is also made more enigmatic by the very term “radical.” As George Eliot showed when she cast her protagonist, Felix Holt, the “Radical,” as a red Tory, the term is polysemic and highly contested. According to official history,68 radical-

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ism began with Wilkes in the 1780s, with the call for electoral reform. But the subversive force of this political initiative was stymied and eventually dissolved, turning Radicalism into a tributary of Liberalism, a restrained oppositional movement, and one counterposed to Chartism and more far-reaching calls for social justice. Today’s radicals, as Alistair Bonnett has it,69 are often perceived as unruly or wayward youth, under the sway of black bloc anarchism or fundamentalist terrorism. What manner of “radical” was Morris, then? His support of Gladstone in the 1870s, but eventual disillusionment with the Liberal party over the Eastern question, prompted him to espouse socialism, a standpoint from which he denounced Liberals (or Radicals) who persisted, in spite of their rhetoric, in upholding the pillars of the status quo. If he called himself a socialist, and later a communist, his radicalism was deemed uncompromising and “purist,” a stance linked to 1880s anarchism. Yet, following the watershed of Bloody Sunday (1887), Morris developed serious reservations about anarchist tactics, and, in 1890, broke with the anarchist wing of the Socialist League – a faction of comrades who had usurped his editorial control of Commonweal, and whom he saw as engaging in a facile but perilous “propaganda of the deed.” In April 1890, he complained to John Bruce Glasier that these men “rant[ed] revolution in the streets,”70 yet ignored the veritable complexities of societal transformation. Still, in spite of this dissociation from the violent wing of anarchists,71 Morris’s self-proclaimed communism, his abstention from parliamentary politics, and his wistful but stoic acceptance of the necessary overthrow of capitalism by coercive means have been conflated with extremism and intransigence. At the same time, his radicalism has been mistakenly associated with that of utopian socialists, whose futurist projections eschewed the question of class struggle and the obstacles posed by inauspicious historical conditions. If a number of nineteenth-century anarchists believed in the spontaneous crystallization of ideals through violent action (e.g., Frank Kitz, Joseph Lane) and if key utopian socialists conceived of social change through persuasive discourse (Saint-Simon) or millenarian belief (see Owenite sects), they did not account sufficiently for history’s unforeseen delays and the competing drives of human actors that scuttle men’s best plans. Contrary to his political peers, Morris accepted the uneven rhythms and convoluted trajectories72 defining social change. He refrained from turning model-building and theatrical protests against capitalism into blueprints or dogma. For him, neither the ideal utopian space (e.g.,

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Fourier’s “phalanstery”), nor a physical assault on private property was to be consecrated. He emphasized instead the recursive paths of social transformation, “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”73 Morris’s radicalism is both everywhere (vaguely reminiscent of sundry nineteenth-century social movements), yet nowhere within the conventional taxonomy of political rebels. Nonetheless, we might grasp it more firmly by pondering the dialectic of his “enlarged thinking” (Hannah Arendt) – his capacity to see two sides of the equation at once – and the generosity of spirit that he evinced in political practice. In condemning the destructive tendencies of his anarchist comrades in the 1880s, he nonetheless recognized the origins of their propensity towards violence. In an 1885 letter, he said of the anarchist Frank Kitz: “Like most of our East-enders, he is certainly somewhat tinged with … destructivism; but I like him very much: I called on the poor chap … and it fairly gave me the horrors to see how wretchedly off he was; so it isn’t much to wonder at that he takes the lines he does.”74 Exhibiting magnanimity in fellowship as in political perspective, Morris forgave those of his radical ilk who were prone to making mistakes. Yet, just as he preached a humanist forbearance, he also sustained a clear opposition to the “Monopolists” (i.e., the capitalist class).75 Although he did not discard his own cultural heritage or adopt an austere lifestyle in sympathy with the underclass, he accepted the challenges of revolution, embracing its tensions in a subtle, but often misperceived,76 method of political resistance. To be clear, his vision was not that of class reconciliation or reformism. While he retained the entirety of his inheritances – even those that are constitutive of society’s ills (e.g., private property, elite culture,77 conservative tradition)78 – he subverted these at their core and deployed each as a tool through which to expose and thus indict capitalism’s ongoing “commercial war.”79 This approach to redesigning social consciousness through art allowed him to advocate both against the iniquities of private property and for society’s collective interest,80 while also condemning the violence and extremism of ultra radicals, and the absolutist break of socialists who, in an effort to dispel irrationalism, superstition, and societal hierarchy, would jettison all aesthetic value derivative of traditional culture.

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Working to root out the embedded canker (i.e., capitalism) of Victorian society, Morris rejected a scorched-earth practice of total eradication, in spite of his belief that art under capitalism must perish; for in his mind, a regenerated art (with its attendant merits of fellowship and gratifying labour) could yet sprout from the subterranean levels of history, from the cut-off roots of medieval times. While he aimed for wholesale societal renewal, his theory of totalizing transformation did not consist in rooting out the past and sweeping away the ground of society; it entailed a dialectical unity of uprooting ills, but also preserving certain materials from the past and implicitly from the present as well. Morris sought to rid society of class division and the suppression of full species being. Yet, unlike some modernists, such as Marx in his Communist Manifesto, he also selectively dug for “roots,” for the cultural artifacts of medieval society (see Boos, Bennett, Cowan, and Latham in this volume). He drew the lessons learned from a lineage of popular protest: fourteenth-century peasants, the Paris Commune martyrs, among others (see Boos, Helsinger, and Browne in this volume). But if he upheld the merits of unsung heroes, the ghosts of ordinary men and women, his sensitivity to history’s popular roots did not amount to an irrational adulation of the “People.” In studying the origins of socialism (e.g., barbarism and medieval popular culture), he discerned the signs of an embryonic collectivism and the traces of a future commonweal. In short, for him, the aborted energies of a Gothic past could return to the present, not only as disruptive spirits, but as vital elements of a former era, harnessed for fruitful ends (see Latham and Cowan in this volume). So, contrary to Marx, who sought to exorcise from contemporary thought the ghosts of days gone by,81 Morris refused to let the dead bury their dead. By the same measure, he did not invoke the dead neurotically or obsessively, as Jameson might put it.82 Instead, he sustained a continual dialogue with the past, rejecting a sectarianism that fruitlessly pits modernity against its ancestral heritage. These instances of Morrisian thought compel us to broach new ways of thinking that supersede the Scylla and Charybdis of so many binary oppositions: of conservatism and anarchism, of traditionalism and modernism, and of aestheticism and utilitarian politics. We are pressed to probe Morris’s unique oeuvre beyond this or that “ism,” and are prompted to offer more than merely descriptive references to influences from Ruskin through to Marx. Indeed, our task in this book is to capture his distinct

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vision rather than engulf it in the philosophies of other thinkers. To be sure, Morris’s radicalism cannot be dissociated from Marxist dialectics, medievalist aesthetics, utopian poetics, or from a range of influences he inherited through bookish inquiries or through consorting with the cultural figures of his day (artists, poets, writers). But in order to distill, and thence preserve, the subversiveness of his vision, we must grasp it in terms other than those of his contemporaries or of authors he read. For if, on the surface, his radicalism appears simply to reflect the values of his socialist comrades and the theoretical views of Marxism, there are a number of salient features that distinguish him from the most notable “radical” thinkers of his times (e.g., Marx): his political vindication of decorative (popular) art; his subversive use of the Gothic past in envisaging social change; his candid exposure of subjectivity and self-criticism in radical praxis; and his unabashed embrace of dreaming as an integral component of political thought.

The Lesser Arts as Radical Praxis: The First Eight Chapters In the foregoing pages, we have delineated various dimensions of Morris’s unorthodox radicalism, emphasizing the leitmotif of spectrality and deploying it as a conceptual framework. Although rich in resonances and loosely applicable to any number of features in Morris’s oeuvre, the idea of spectrality takes on a specific character in the ensuing chapters. It refers primarily to two assumptions, each of which reflects a facet of Morris’s dialectical vision (his capacity to think through two seemingly polarized contraries in one mental thrust – for example, aesthetics and politics, the public and the private, the past and the present, dreaming and political praxis). Our first premise presupposes that a one-sided representation of Morris’s identity is apt to reveal the signs of some disavowal or occluded truth: for example, in the appraisal of his radical politics, the matter of beautiful aesthetics, as evinced in literature and decorative art, has often been given short shrift. Conversely, in the appreciation of his art, Morris’s radical views have been typically understated. But in either case, the obscured, if not suppressed, facet of Morris’s complex legacy invariably comes back to haunt us. But the return of the repressed, while unsettling, is nonetheless rewarding, for it leads to the type of enlightenment that Morris achieves when he unearths the sequestered parts of rad-

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ical agency and history, and makes visible that which has been buried in the depths of time and social consciousness. Our second premise pertains to the “spectral” nature of political desire. As Morris turns to the future, he makes visible what is invisible in the present: his imaginative writings (romances and such) are thus spectral texts, phantom representations of an alternative commonweal. Here, the idea of spectrality underscores Morris’s double awareness: that the dream of revolution is at once a realizable goal and a fiction. As a social objective, revolution will indeed crystallize, but unpredictably; it will shift shape as history unfolds. Its representation (the dream vision) will thus only be a spectral image of the future, not a reality. The chapters in this collection offer concrete instances of these two premises and in so doing remind us of the perils of subjecting Morris’s identity to a Procrustean bed of oppressively neat categories. For these invariably produce partial knowledge, and with that, a spectre – the trace of some occlusion or denial. Spectrality as Dialectical Political Identity Morris’s many-sidedness has both enchanted and baffled his admirers. Clearly, his versatility was impressive. But it also raised questions of consistency. In the eyes of some, for example, the pacific ethos underlying his devotion to the lesser arts appears to contradict his graphic depiction of medieval violence, as well as his latter-day claims that the overthrow of capitalism would eventually hinge on armed conflict. In her chapter, “William Morris’s ‘Lesser Arts’ and ‘The Commercial War,’” Florence Boos dispels this apparent anomaly, arguing for the evolving complexity of Morris’s views on violence. His practice and promotion of the peaceable “lesser arts” and his literary portrayals of medieval barbarism were not, she argues, irreconcilable. Contesting recent claims that his early works constituted representations of visceral fulfillment borne of aggression, she refutes the notion that Morris’s early preoccupation with gruesome medieval combat jarred with his later critique of capitalist state violence and with his overall anti-bellicist stance. In covering an extensive range of texts, Boos stresses that Morris’s literary renderings of brute force neither celebrated nor indulged in carnage; they rather highlighted the individual’s moral fortitude amid dire conflict or his mental torment in the face of internecine bloodshed (Sigurd the Volsung). Indeed, his writings emphasize the stoic strength of those beset by

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tragic loss, much less the blind glory and smugness of the victor. Even as he promoted the overthrow of the capitalist state, the prospect of war – commercial or military – filled him with revulsion. Seen dialectically, then, the peace-loving Morris was at one with the Morris who believed in the abolition of capitalism by forcible means. For at every turn, he grappled with the disastrous cost of brute violence and consistently deployed the lesser arts as beacons of hope and forms of recovery for a deeply scarred modern world. The dialectic of Morris’s political radicalism surfaces anew in Miles Tittle’s essay, “Illuminating Divergences: Morris, Burne-Jones, and the Two Aeneids.” Tittle asks how we might reconcile Morris’s involvement in the ornate decoration and illumination of an overtly imperialist epic, The Aeneid, with his efforts to stir discontent in the hearts of English working men over the Eastern question (1876). Do the voluptuous graphics of Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s magnificent visual monument to Virgil’s work suggest a sensibility and ideological stance at odds with the antiestablishment politics of Morris’s 1870s activism?83 And if not, can the aesthetics of luxurious floral design convey the message of Morris’s emerging political dissent? Tittle argues that these tensions can be held together in one thrust, notably if we read Virgil’s epic as an indictment of imperial conquest, if we understand that Burne-Jones’s Pre-Raphaelite illustrations and Morris’s paratextual designs work in concert with the subversive content of the epic poem, echoing the sites of Aeneas’s selfinterrogations and quizzical contemplation before murals portraying horrific human carnage. Whether the radical message of the illuminated Aeneid can be conveyed lucidly and unequivocally in graphic form or whether Morris must turn to alternative media (translation and political discourse) is the sustaining question of Tittle’s enquiry. Most significantly, beyond its indictment of imperial conquest, the illuminated Aeneid uncovers Morris’s emerging reluctance to embrace a radicalism defined by aggressive virility and divorced from the aesthetics of decorative and poetic art. Spectrality as Shared Subjectivity and Self-Knowledge Decorative art, fiction, and poetry are clearly the sites in which Morris reflects on the subjectivity of revolutionary heroes. Like disturbing spectres, these creative forms awaken in their creator and in the public a sense

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of uncertainty and doubt about the stereotypical hallmarks of heroic action: unswerving militancy, untrammelled self-assurance, and the powerful belief in history’s ascending movement towards human salvation. In expressing doubt publicly, Morris was also eager to encourage self-consciousness and vigilant thinking among his own socialist peers, appealing to those who construed themselves as rebels against capitalism, yet were ideologically enslaved to it. Morris recognized that he too was a casualty of commercial war. Yet, he sought as best he could to transcend the categorical thinking of his own fellow travellers (many of them “one-sided-socialists”84) and distinguished himself from all those who pursued their rebellion in extremist fashion: for example, aestheticists, in one instance; anarchists, in another. His radicalism proved at once selfconscious, self-critical, and stoic. Without yielding to hopelessness, Morris recognized that even the most determined and well-coordinated efforts to achieve social change would likely meet up with false starts and setbacks. He understood that societal renewal does not entail a clean break with the past. And this realization brought with it a further acknowledgment: that the complications associated with social transformation – reversals and disappointments – necessarily impinge on the subjectivities of political actors striving after an alternative future. These individuals are likely to be halted repeatedly by crises and deferral of goals. More than a theory (and praxis) of the tasks that must be carried out to achieve a socialist future, Morris’s radicalism is also a philosophy of subjectivity, and notably of coping with apparent failure and enabling radical agents to convert short-term defeats into fruitful, hopeful opportunities. In her essay, “Radical Tales: Rethinking the Politics of Morris’s Last Romances,” Phillippa Bennett foregrounds Morris’s preoccupation with the ethics and psychology of radical agency. She reads the romances not only as representations of socialist activism in medievalist guise, but as moments embedded in Morris’s own socialist praxis. Reflecting on the subjectivity of Morris’s fictive heroes – figures reminiscent of socialist activists – she shows that he was engaging in a self-reflexive mode of political instruction. Through the prism of his narratives, he educated others; but in writing these texts, he also educated himself, elaborating a concept of activism and ideals of radical agency that balanced self-knowledge with agitation, judicious thought with interventionist action. To instruct his peers through this literary form was to engage in a process of self-dis-

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covery, for the fears and hopes he projected onto his fictional characters (those spectral doubles of himself) were ultimately the universally shared stirrings of men committed to social change. To know the foibles and proclivities of others, caught in intractable political wrangles, was to complicate but also enhance his grasp of how collectivities move and struggle forward. Morris’s late romances thus offered him an aesthetic medium in which to probe the activist’s psychological and ethical interior, and, in this, to legitimize self-knowledge as the sine qua non of a remodelled radical hero. If Bennett’s text on the last romances considers political subjectivity, Elizabeth Helsinger’s chapter, “Telling Time: Song’s Rhythms in Morris’s Late Work,” dwells on lyricized intersubjectivity in Morris’s late poetry. Focusing primarily on his socialist chants, she sheds light on his preoccupation with the sublimated vulnerabilities of men on the march – men who muster courage and hope through the unifying rhythms and tempo defined by collective chanting. The throbbing pulse of the chants and the intensified emotions arising from the power of converging voices generate the psychological and social atmosphere suited for an invigorating communion; this is a ritual shared in the face of great odds, reflecting the desperate need for solidarity. Through their politically charged prosody and lyrical time, Morris’s chants create the aesthetic framework in which fellow activists (be they fictive or real) can channel their deep disquiet into collective possibility. Enabling these men to face the juggernaut of often bloody class conflict, Morris’s lyrics of projected defiance are also suffused with the angst that accompanies every human action of this magnitude and kind. His latter-day songs are thus twofold: they embody the political unconscious of the working class (fear, uncertainty, and despair), but through incantatory rhythms, they transmute these same psychic disturbances into a howling spectre – a gathering storm of popular resistance. With the temporal immediacy and entrancing pulse of song, shared fears grow into powerful gestures of protest. If Morris’s political chants produce a spirit of solidarity, a geist turned into a material force, his lyrics restore metre’s oft-forgotten sensuousness, the visceral substrate of an ancient epic tradition, steeped in the culture and rhythmic pulse of the common people. And if modernity has tended to eclipse that corporeality of song, preferring rhyme schemes over the bodily beats of metre, Morris, by contrast, reanimates the role of rhythm in his latter-day lyrics, bringing its sensuousness from past epics into the

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prosodic structures of his politically engaged verse. Such lyrically defined collective emotion, Helsinger shows, spans many eras and binds men into the political community of the present, while linking them to the spectral voices of the past and the imagined, but unknowable, commonweals of future times. Spectrality: New Perspectives on Historical Progress A once widely held view that Morris was a nostalgic appropriator of medievalism, a blithe and sentimental dreamer,85 has more recently been turned on its head. As Gary Zabel avers, Morris “takes a conservative backward looking tradition and subverts it.”86 This transformative move in Morris’s use of the past is the subject of David Latham’s chapter, “The Pre-Raphaelite Tongue: The Politics of Antiquarian Poetics.” Latham suggests that the return to Gothic origins, and to intensive aesthetic activity, was scarcely an index of Morris’s reactionary escapism, but rather a preoccupation with history, “a return to origins, a return required in order to reroute the direction of our cultural history.” This new direction would lead from decadence entrenched in the colonial hierarchies of ancient (Mediterranean) cultures to a future revolutionary civilization contingent on a resurrection of egalitarian Gothic values. Morris’s adoption of an “antiquarian” tongue was thus a conscious attempt to refurbish the values of his Victorian society through art, language, and historiography. Through a scrutiny of literary and visual aesthetics, of radical philology and subversive historiography, Latham shows that Morris’s creative use of an “antiquarian” tongue is not backward tending, but future oriented and transformative. Notable in this essay is the claim that militancy in Morris’s latter-day romances did not dissipate but only found new shape and configuration. His radicalism, then, is not to be sought in conventional idioms of radical protest, but in the intricacies of visual and discursive designs, where drama is less in epic conflict than in the ornamental tensions of a self-conscious poetic prose. In his use of Gothic prosody, Morris reveals the indices of a society in which egalitarian rather than iniquitous social relations are likely to reign. The fourteenth-century idiom he deploys is not the spectre of the past, but a regenerative and redemptive spirit, ushering in a desirable social world. If the label “antiquarian” has been frequently assigned to Morris’s literary quill,87 it has also been ascribed to his fascination for the medieval

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tale, to his bibliophilia and latter-day collection, production, translation, and reprinting of beautiful books – medieval narratives first edited by Caxton. Yet, Yuri Cowan’s chapter, “Translation, Collaboration, and Reception: Editing Caxton for the Kelmscott Press,” dispels any assumption that Morris’s enterprise belonged to the elitist business of antiquarianism. On the contrary, by reviving the fourteenth-century narrative and endowing it with Victorian cultural capital, Morris was instructing the public on the political virtues of the medieval past. Arguably, for him, the medieval “popular” was suggestive of a classless society grounded in collaborative labour, and discernible in the literary texts he resurrected; it was also evident in the co-operative relations consciously applied by Morris and colleagues at the Kelmscott Press. Recuperating discursive relics from the medieval period, authors, editors, and artists were engaged in a dialogue with each other, as well as with the ghostly host writers of former times. Collaborative relations were thus put into practice in the team’s own time (1890s) and across time (shuttling between the Victorian and medieval eras). Through their book-making enterprise, Morris and his Kelmscott colleagues were, in effect, projecting an alternative world that tacitly contested the individualism underlying commercial war. Like Latham’s intervention, Cowan’s chapter reveals Morris’s strikingly innovative use of the past. In resuscitating medieval texts that harboured the embryonic forms of an egalitarian society and in dramatizing them at the Kelmscott Press, Morris scuttled the conventional sequencing of history as an ascending linear trajectory. Spectrality and the Dream of Revolution: Reconfigurations of Radical Agency If the spectre is popularly construed as a disturbing visitation, for Morris, we might say, it is a salutary one; it provokes quizzical musings on matters of radical ethics, aesthetics, political subjectivity, and historical time. Indeed, this rethinking is at the heart of Morris’s thought, since such interrogations reflect the seasoned political thinker who, having learned (and preached) the lessons of social justice, having ventured into the arena of class strife, and having sampled the (aesthetic) fruits of utopian desire, finally re-enters everyday activism with an altered self-consciousness. In Morris, this renewed perspective crystallizes as he redefines the idiom of traditional activism through various aesthetic worlds (poetry, romance,

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decorative art), and most poignantly through his two medievalist dream visions: A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere. These oneiric fictions, we might say, are political spectres writ large, and they add a wholly different complexion to Morris’s self-deprecating remark to Cormell Price that his work was “the embodiment of dreams”88 – a remark typically construed to mean that his oeuvre was ineffectual, futile, and escapist. Ironically, this erstwhile confession uncovers the fount of Morris’s most original ideas. For dream visions formed the fertile bed of his radical thought. In their inward turn from the surface appearances of commonsensical understanding (Verstand) to the deeper shafts of consciousness, Morris’s oneiric writings dispel the pejorative charges typically ascribed to them. Complexly wrought, they dislodge encrusted assumptions, introducing subtle and overlooked shades of meaning. Such reveries also constitute a spectral shadow of daily existence; they rehearse the experiences of their author’s waking life, assigning to it an often altered shape and an occasion in which to release the imagination from received wisdoms. In the mind’s nocturnal spaces, where the surface appearance of diurnal existence is questioned, so, too, are the entrenched approaches to revolutionary praxis. This idea takes shape in Michelle Weinroth’s discussion of News from Nowhere, “Morris’s Road to Nowhere: New Pathways in Political Persuasion.” In the fictional space of the dream vision, with its multiple associations of leafy Englishness and repose, Morris redesigns the conventional notion of political activism. For Morris, the temporary retreat into reverie, into a temporality out of synch with the linear march of street protest, is not a withdrawal from agitation, but another facet of it, as fully engaged as is daily participation in the arena of rallies and soapboxes. This counter-intuitive notion of radical praxis can be seen as an upheaval in thinking, coincident with the reversals that typify dreaming. But if such a view of activism is the measure of Morris’s “eccentric” radicalism, it is not an easy idea to convey. It presupposes the acceptance of a strange epistemology, as well as an altered mode of political persuasion that resists the dogmatic tenor of typical militant rhetoric. Morris’s new style of persuasion achieves its objective by demonstrating the strain of persuasion, by problematizing political education. News from Nowhere, Weinroth claims, dramatizes the strenuous labour of delivering socialist news, but also converts this laborious undertaking into a “stoic” philosophy of communication, conscious of its own persuasive limits. Such po-

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litical discourse is haunted by its own spectral aspect – that what is conveyed in language can only be a representation of a desire or future possibility, yet never its material reality. In short, the spectrality of Morris’s propaganda is a measure of his critical awareness that encouragement must combine with warning, and that political hope must go hand in hand with vigilant reason. Paul Leduc Browne’s essay, “A Dream of William Morris: Communism, History, Revolution,” takes its cue from Weinroth’s insight that News from Nowhere owes its novel and radical nature to its self-reflexivity, and that Morris encourages us to shift our gaze from utopia as place, to utopia as the perennial crisis in representation. Browne shows that Morris articulates a coherent political philosophy that not only answers the question, “What can we hope for?” but also “What ought we to do?” Communism, for Morris, would be a way of life that embodies the principles of substantive equality, freedom, and fellowship, on the basis of a gift economy of generalized reciprocity designed to maximize the exchange of activities; it would thus create the most and best opportunities for fulfillment through work. The bridge to communism would be a process of revolutionary transformation consisting primarily for Morris in education, in “making socialists.” And yet, Morris’s political vision of communism was, as he knew all too well, prone to misconstrual. Browne elaborates on this dialectic in Morris’s educative efforts, arguing that Morris posited various ways of envisaging communism, but also admitted – unlike the overly optimistic nineteenth-century socialists – that the path to that ideal would be tortuous, mired in illusion, and marked by frequent failure: “a long period of half-formed aspirations, abortive schemes, and half measures interspersed with doubtful experiments, disappointment, reaction, and apathy.”89 In his chapter, Browne foregrounds Morris’s critique of reification and the problem of the obscurity of the historical moment where struggles deliver outcomes other than those hoped for or desired. Like utopia, the vision of communism acts as an organizing ideal, but it also features as a continually receding horizon and one to which radical agents can only adhere through a combination of hope and clear-eyed reason. As they move forward, these figures must sustain belief amid the turmoil of social change, but also acknowledge with sober realism the changing timeline and shape-shifting character of their dreams and aspirations. In this sense, Morris’s projections of communism, regardless of discursive form, are instructively spectral; they offer an important reminder

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that what is envisioned is but an image of how we might be, and not a literal truth that will magically leap from the pages of literature onto history. If the first eight chapters in this book revisit an aspect of Morris’s radicalism, overturning the soil of Morris’s legacy to unearth the dynamic complexity of his creative and philosophical work, they each do so most notably through a facet of the lesser arts – the unifying subject matter of this collective study: the art of illumination, of medievalist bookmaking, of romance writing, of political chants, of medieval dream visions, and of “antiquarian” creations, these being the spectral shadows of the greater arts. In so doing, each of the chapters pays tribute to the key values of Morris’s radicalism. For the lesser arts are the embodiments of his political dreams – ethical ideals that would buttress a commonweal of egalitarian, co-operative, and collaborative human relations, free of individualism, idolatry, martyrdom, or destructive competition. The first eight contributions to this book (whether tacitly or explicitly) shed light on Morris’s resistance to the inherently masculinist heroism of conventional radical agency and the value system it tends to enshrine: romanticized warfare, ascetic self-sacrifice, and the cult of singular leadership, with its attendant fetishisms and social hierarchies. In this resistance lies Morris’s most radical intervention. Undeterred by the aspersions cast on the lesser arts as ancillary and effeminate, domestic and antiquarian, Morris vindicates these creative forms and deploys them as a counterpoint to the heightened drama of prototypical socialist activism. In this heretical act, he converts the vocabulary of political agitation and virile revolutionary warfare into the language and temper of political education;90 in this, too, he avoids bombast and promises of salvation associated with religious faith. Rather than conquer and subjugate minds to dogma, rather than convince his public with overweening confidence, he seeks to prepare followers for inevitable quandaries and crises, those obstacles that shape the rhythm of everyday life and domestic experience. In effect, the values embedded in the lesser arts are at the heart of his new mode of political persuasion, one where strident propaganda yields to a more reflective and qualified discourse of fellowship, emotional candour, ethical responsibility, and, not least, to a shared understanding of the fears and hopes that historical setbacks provoke in “fighting men.”91 In shifting from agitation to education in his last years of activism, Morris was essentially re-evaluating the merits and limits of revolutionary agency as we know it – formed as it has been by the cultural matrices of political masculinity, by traditions of revolutionary activism derived

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from age-old narratives of epic conquest and glorified warrior heroes,92 but also from entrenched cultural motifs of heroic self-sacrifice stemming from the earliest forms of ancient tragedy.93 The classic discourse of socialist revolution issuing out of this repertoire has sought to inspire confidence in the daunting venture of social change by foregrounding the pathos of tragic suffering (the misery and struggles of labouring classes), by dramatizing the brave deeds of political fighters for the cause (the martyrs of the revolution), and by projecting redemption or retributive justice (the reign of equality and collectivism for the beleaguered subjects of history). Yet these representations of radical heroism have often foreclosed any self-consciousness or admission of complicating human weakness: insecurity, hesitation, or individual doubt – sentiments held to be beneath the self-possessed and self-denying activist figure. If Morris’s radicalism focuses on the subjectivities of those fighters who fall, rather than on the facile promise of glorious victory, it is because his unique vision of political agency contests some of the most deleterious aspects of modernity – individualism (private property), fetishism (adulated leaders), and masculinism (patriarchy) – still entrenched in “revolutionary” activists themselves. His is a philosophy predicated on dismantling the institutions of capitalist society, but it is also a thorough rethinking of the classic strategies of radical change itself.

Coda In every textual work there is unfinished business. And Morris knew this well. The last two chapters in this book are testimony to that incompleteness, to that ceaseless narrative which governs the persistent debates about Morris’s work, but also to the ongoing appropriations of his oeuvre that usher us into the future. These two discussions probe Morris’s radical thinking through the medium of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury creative and literary art. Tony Pinkney’s presentation of his forthcoming sequel to News from Nowhere brings out the daring nature of Morris’s utopian romance, its inclusion of a self-problematizing narrative within the interstices of its own fiction. Weinroth’s treatment of David Mabb’s work on Morris’s wallpaper motifs and Russian avant-garde art (Rhythm 69) discloses the radically transformative politics inherent in Morris’s domestic furnishings (“Redesigning the Beautiful: Morris, Mabb, and the Politics of Wallpaper”). In these final two essays, we sub-

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scribe to a Caxton-inspired Morrisian principle that texts and works of art may be permeable, open to extension or completion by posterity. This is the basis of Pinkney’s chapter (“News from Nowhere Two: Principles of a Sequel”), which construes News from Nowhere as a porous literary work, with spaces into which future writers might insert their own creative imaginings. Like Pinkney’s intervention, David Mabb’s work on Morris’s designs presupposes that original Morrisian material lends itself to modern interventions, to palimpsestic creations that bring out a hidden complexity, otherwise obscured under the grid of seemingly naive symmetry and floral patterns. Both Pinkney’s and Mabb’s creative works adhere to the logic of spectrality inherent in Morris’s radicalism: for even as they look forward, they are intimately engaged with the past, selfconsciously adopting and adapting their cultural inheritance (Morris’s art) to their own contemporary ends. These two creative interventions are also preoccupied with representations of revolution and revolutionary thinking. Bringing the book to its final pitch, they foreground in their respective ways the aporia of how we can narrate and describe a revolutionary future without being “dwarfed” by the language (signifiers) of the past and without “the content of socialist revolution …[being] in excess of all form, out in advance of its own rhetoric.”94 It is a conundrum that Marx articulates in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and which Eagleton identifies as a form of sublimity, a reality “unrepresentable by anything other than itself, signified only in its absolute movement of becoming.”95 Pivoting on questions of representation, the last two chapters thus focus on the politics and aesthetics of sublimity (Pinkney’s sequel to Morris’s News from Nowhere) and on the politics of transformed Morrisian beauty (Weinroth’s discussion of Mabb’s art installations on Morris’s designs). Pinkney seeks to modify Morris’s text in the vein of twentiethcentury science fiction, disclosing his unease with what he regards as the parochialism of Nowhere, and injecting into his own twenty-firstcentury version an energy that must be harnessed in preparation for the possible vitiation of Nowherian Communism. For Pinkney’s News from Nowhere Two is haunted by the spectre of Stalinism, by the prospect that utopia is ever under threat of dissolution. His sequel to Morris’s utopia is articulated in the idiom of twentieth-century radicalism, with its love of science and technology and its fascination with the sublimity of defiant heroism. Mabb’s work, which fuses the organic beauty of Morrisian design with the modernist angularity of Malevich’s art, offers, according

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to Weinroth, a way of transcending the dualistic thought that has typified the reception of Morris’s aesthetics and politics. Using Rhythm 69 as a graphic illustration of her argument, she shows that Mabb’s visual montage enables us to appreciate the sophistication of Morris’s “lesser” art of wall furnishings, to detect new ways of thinking in its coalescence of beautiful floridity and sublime geometry. Rhythm 69 paves the way for conceptualizing an alternative (Morrisian) category of beauty, a symbolic figure that heralds the ethical, social, and political principles of an egalitarian social order. ❖

In their various ways, each of the chapters in this book takes a leaf from Morris’s speech “How We Live and How We Might Live” so that we might think differently, beyond dualism, beyond the perennial battles of desire and reason that have shaped the narratives of Western philosophy and fettered self-proclaimed “radicals” – as well as their adversaries – to the downward spiral of the status quo.

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William Morris’s “Lesser Arts” and “The Commercial War” florence s. boos

William Morris defended the “lesser arts” as peaceful sources of solace and inner fulfillment, but several of his better-known literary works – The Defence of Guenevere, “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,” some of his later prose romances, and most conspicuously his sanguinary tragic epic Sigurd the Volsung, for example – were agonistic in the extreme. In this essay I will examine the apparent paradox of Morris’s representations of violence, interpret them as sublimated expressions of personal and political conflicts, and argue that his increasingly explicit abhorrence of “commercial war” and British imperialism found resonances in his literary representations of warfare and peace. Morris threw himself into political life in the late 1870s as an opponent of British plans to mount a war in support of Turkish colonial possessions. In his excoriations of “jingoism” (a newly minted word), he also condemned the slaughter of Zulus armed with spears in “Our Country Right or Wrong” (1880) as “a war of which the very soldiers are heartily ashamed”1 and denounced Britain’s military interventions in the Middle East in similar terms: “On my word I cannot explain the [Second Anglo] Afghan war … if ever war was waged for war[’s] sake that has been … I can only say of it further, that the end proposed was ruinous folly, and the means employed villainous injustice.”2 Five years later, in the face of strong British sympathy for General Gordon, slain by supporters of the Mahdist independence movement,3 Morris and other members of the Socialist League passed a resolution condemning the invasion of the Sudan and drafted a quasi-“treasonous” proclamation that expressed their satisfaction at the fall of Khartoum.4

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An avowed “anti-parliamentarian” socialist, Morris also published “The Pilgrims of Hope,” an extended poetic commemoration of the doomed Paris Commune in Commonweal (1885–86), but he was painfully aware that the distinctions between “putsch,” “revolutionary violence,” and (what we would now call) “collateral damage” are readily manipulable. In “What We Have to Look For,” for example, drafted in 1895, he suggested that a socialist revolution would not (and should not) occur through a staged war of revolution: “The idea of successful insurrection within a measurable distance of time is only [in] the heads of the anarchists, who seem to have a strange notion that even equality would not be acceptable if [it] were not gained by violence only.”5 And in “Our Country Right or Wrong,” he also observed that the first casualty of war is (and always has been) truth: “Yes, yes, how we wrap up facts in meaningless phrases till we forget most often what the facts are that they represent, and thus deaden ourselves to terrible realities. Say for instance a very common sort of phrase that is used in despatches of battles, and let us see what it really means: ‘the enem[y’s] skirmishers annoyed us a little as we advanced.’ There’s for you a phrase that does not stick in your memory two minutes as you read your newspaper in the morning train: if you had been among the ‘annoyed,’ a lifetime would not wipe it out from your memory.”6 In his essay on “Equality” (1888), he sketched a plausible parallel between Britain and the Roman Empire, but qualified hopes for the former’s “fall” with a sober (and perhaps prophetic) assessment which anticipated Orwell’s parable in Animal Farm: “[W]here are the [‘]healthy barbarians[’] to come from? From the democracy. I doubt it if things do not alter from what they have been; for surely all I have [been] saying tends to show that though the workers are more useful than the idlers, yet they too are corrupted and degraded by their position. No one can expect to find the virtues of free men in slaves. No[,] if the present state of Society merely breaks up without a conscious effort at transformation, the end[,] the fall of Europe[,] may be long in coming, but when it does come it will be far more terrible[,] far more confused and full of suffering than the period of the fall of Rome.”7 Such remarks reveal Morris’s reluctant, pained recognition that even revolutionary violence may bring harm. In “Socialism” (1885), Morris appealed to his audience to seek forms of self-government which would (somehow) replace their exploiters with “the intelligent of the working classes and the honourable and generous of the employing class”8 – a relatively peaceful transition of the sort out-

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lined in “How the Change Came” in News from Nowhere (1891). In this a revolutionary Federation of Combined Workers and Committee of Public Safety combined to minister to people’s needs, as Old Hammond explains to Guest: “[T]he Committee of Public Safety began to be a force in the country, and really represented the producing classes … now that the times called for immediate action, came forward the men capable of setting it on foot; and a new network of workmen’s associations grew up speedily, whose avowed single object was the tiding over of the ship of the community into a simple condition of Communism.”9 Morris’s most critical assessment of the corruptive force of “revolutionary” as well as other forms of violence, however, appeared a year later in a critique of the “propaganda of the deed”: “I do not believe in the possible success of revolt until the Socialist party has grown so powerful in numbers that it can gain its end by peaceful means, and that therefore what is called violence will never be needed … And here I will say once for all, what I have often wanted to say of late, to wit, that the idea of taking any human life for any reason whatsoever is horrible and abhorrent to me.”10 Patrick Laity has argued in his study of nineteenth-century peace movements that most opponents of wars in that period were not pacifists, but “anti-bellicists,”11 opponents of specific wars. These took positions that roughly paralleled Morris’s assertion in “Our Country Right or Wrong” that although some wars might be necessary or just, his century’s British foreign wars were not among them.12 But the clear ardour and consistency of Morris’s “real-world” opposition to imperial British militarism foregrounds the apparent paradox sketched earlier: how did Morris reconcile his mature rejection of brute power in all its forms with stylized portrayals of individual combat and resistance? Was his ideal of “art” a marginal source of solace in his tales – or worse, an irrelevant decoration, like the elaborately engraved hilts of Anglo-Saxon swords? Did he intend them to be foils for deeper ideals of empathy, solace, and emotion recollected in tranquility? Or were they tacit acknowledgments that human beings may never settle into peaceful and mutual exchanges of the sort modelled in News from Nowhere, and that the “rings” of power, once sought and seized, suborn these ideals as long as we endure? Critical answers to these questions range widely. In “‘The Measured Music of Our Meeting Swords’: William Morris’ Early Romances and the Transformative Touch of Violence,” Ingrid Hanson argues that in early

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romances such as “Gertha’s Lovers,” “the truth of the universe is discovered through manly physical passion, which shows itself in thwarted caresses, accomplished killing and gruesome death.”13 On the other hand, a critic such as Eleonora Sasso, in “‘The Road of War’ and ‘The Path of Peace’: William Morris’ Representations of Violence,”14 interprets such representations of imaginary battles as idealized enactments of courageous resistance. And finally, in “Riot, Romance and Revolution: William Morris and the Art of War,” Phillippa Bennett argues that “the tension between his stated religious hatred towards all war and violence and his emphasis on the value of the heroic spirit in political conflict” in his late prose romances was resolved by their “dramatic and conclusive processes of social transformation through the construct and activities of the [metaphorical?] battlefield.”15 Keeping in mind Morris’s mature conviction that “civil” capitalist society is itself a form of unacknowledged warfare, in what follows I will argue that •

•

•

•

Morris’s view on violence evolved as he aged – as he perceived, for example, that revolutionary and counter-revolutionary conflicts might become as chaotic as their feudal counterparts; in keeping with this evolution, he also fashioned his accounts of violence as systematic critiques, which distinguished systemic violence from little-noticed heroic acts of individual resistance; throughout his life, he construed “the lesser arts” as gentle but enduring forms of such “heroic” resistance; and as he aged, he dwelt more and more on the memorial powers of the “lesser” and “greater” arts to honour such nameless heroism, give voice to the silenced, and provide way-markers to News from Nowhere’s “epoch of rest.”

Art and Solace History, as Tennyson wryly remarked, is “so careful of the type … so careless of the single life.”16 Morris countered such cosmic detachment with a faith in “art for life’s sake” – an impassioned belief that every remnant of preserved art, however modest its execution, and however venal and heedless its owners – embodied the lost ardour of forgotten consciousness. In his introduction to the Kelmscott Press edition of Ruskin’s “The Nature

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of Gothic,” for example, Morris defined art as “the expression of man’s pleasure in labour.”17 In “Art and the Beauty of the Earth,” he argued: “Time was when everybody that made any thing made a work of art besides a useful piece of goods, and it gave them pleasure to make it … if I have any worthy aspiration, it is the hope that I may help to bring about the day when we shall be able to say, So it was once, so it is now.”18 In “Art under Plutocracy,” he wrote: “I want to take counsel with you as to what hindrances may lie in the way towards making art what it should be, a help and solace to the daily life of all men.”19 In this and other essays, Morris also recurred to the notion of such solace and to art, and (artful) work, as its preferred instruments. In “Art and the Beauty of the Earth,” he asserted that “life [in the past] was often rough and evil enough … yet I cannot help thinking that sorely as poor folks needed a solace, they did not altogether lack one, and that solace was pleasure in their work.”20 And in The Earthly Paradise, the spokesman for his “Wanderers” begins: Slowly as in pain, And with a hollow voice as from a tomb, [to tell] the story of his doom, But as it grows and once more hopes and fears, Both measureless, are ringing round his ears, His eyes grow bright, his seeming days decrease, For grief once told brings back somewhat of peace.21 “Peace,” however, for whom, and “solace” for what? Violent loss, of course, is a major source of “grief,” and Morris returned again and again to cathartic sublimations of violent struggle in his epic works.

“Commercial War” What, one might well ask, were the origins of a preoccupation with violent conflict and self-sacrificial struggle in a man whose sole martial credential had been a brief membership in the quaintly named “London Corps of Artist Volunteers,”22 which prepared for a never-realized war with France in 1859–60? Like many other upper-class boys, Morris had been chafed and taunted in school – in his case Marlborough College – and, according to unused notes for J.W. Mackail’s biography, “would

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rush roaring – but only half angry – with his head down & his arms whirling wildly, at his tormentors.”23 In early life he was also subject to intermittent “rages” of a sort that might now be diagnosed as sequelae of a mild form of neurological impairment, which he later construed (in different language) as a genetic forerunner of his daughter Jenny’s epilepsy. As for his social conscience, it may have been an unintended bitter cradle gift in reaction against William Morris père, a successful bill broker and mining speculator, who died unexpectedly in 1847, leaving Morris’s mother with shares in the Devon Great Consols mine valued roughly at £60,000. Morris described his namesake in an 1884 letter to the Manchester Guardian as “a city man and very ‘religious,’”24 and Fiona MacCarthy has suggested an autobiographical interpretation of one of his Commonweal sketches, in which a scandalized father exclaims in horror that his rebellious son might possibly “turn Socialist when he grows up!!”25 In the event, Morris was the only one of his relatives to “turn socialist,” and several of them invested heavily in Devon Great Consols. Perhaps at his mother’s urging, he served a brief term on its directorate from 1871 to 1875,26 a position he held at arm’s length and from which he resigned in disgust in 1875,27 two years before he became an active member of the first mass anti-war movement in British history.28 This experience gave him an intimate knowledge of the practices of a major corporation, and may have prompted guilt; he told Rosalind Howard in 1874 (a year before his resignation) that “when I see a poor devil drunk and brutal I always feel, quite apart from my aesthetical perceptions, a sort of shame as if I myself had some hand in it.”29 Somewhat later, he denounced Britain’s abortive plans to go to war against Russia,30 and cofounded the architecturally reformist Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, advocating preservation rather than commercially driven “development.” It took courage for Morris to defy his father’s example and his family’s financial and social expectations, as well as early Victorian notions of gentility (neatly expressed in D.G. Rossetti’s taunts at Morris’s role as the Firm’s businessman-manager).31 It took even more courage to attack directly the mining and high-corporate interests so closely associated with his family (who would of course have been aware of the publicity given his views) and the imperial wars in which his brother Arthur served. And it must have pained Morris when his socialist allegiances estranged him from former associates; among his friends only Philip Webb, Charles

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Faulkner, and Georgiana Burne-Jones seem to have sympathized with his socialist commitments. In 1883, when epilepsy had begun to damage his daughter Jenny’s mind, Morris wrote Georgiana that “anxiety … has made a sad coward of me … the grief aforesaid is too strong and disquieting to be overcome by a mere inclination to do what I know is unimportant work, [but] the propaganda … is part of a great whole which cannot be lost, and that ought to be enough.”32 Such efforts may have seemed to him modest counterparts of those “times of trial which either raise a man to the due tragic pitch or cast him aside as a useless and empty vapourer,” as he wrote in an 1887 commemoration of the Paris Commune.33 Morris also shared Pierre Proudhon’s and Peter Kropotkin’s view that unchecked economic competition is a form of systematic violence and “commercial war”: “[The Greeks and medieval barons] made war and so does our modern capitalist … this war is technically called competition, and of course you will hear it spoken of as a beautiful & providential thing[:] the stimulus to exertion, the friend of liberty, nay the very bond of Society itself: but don’t be deceived by the mere words; for this Commercial war has all the essential elements of the gunpowder war in it.”34 In “Art under Plutocracy,” he added: “I tell you the very essence of competitive commerce is waste; the waste that comes of the anarchy of war … It fares with it as it does with the older forms of war, that there is an outside look of quiet wonderful order about it … neat as a new pin are the storehouses of murder … nay, the very orders for destruction and plunder are given with a quiet precision which seems the very token of a good conscience; this is the mask that lies before the ruined cornfield and the burning cottage, the mangled bodies, the untimely death of worthy men, the desolated home.”35 The violence and rapacity of these two “wars” reinforced each other, and cycles of production without distributive justice eventuated in a form of madness: “What! You have created too much wealth? You cannot give away the overplus; nay you cannot even carry it out into the fields and burn it there and go back again merrily to make some more of what you don’t want; but you must actually pick a sham quarrel with other people & slay 100,000 men to get rid of wares which when [got rid] of you are still intent on producing with as much ardour as heretofore.”36 The embedded violence of this industrial Hobbesian war of all against all haunted him, and he responded in “Misery and the Way Out” (1884) with something very close to despair: “Here I stand before you, one of

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the most fortunate of this happy class [the professional classes or hangers-on], so steeped in discontent, that I have no words which will express it: no words, nothing but deeds, wherever they may lead me to, even [if] it be ruin, prison, or a violent death … I can only say we are driven by discontent and unhappiness into a longing for revolution: that we are oppressed by the consciousness of the class of toiling slaves below us, that we despise the class of idle slave-owners above us.”37 And, in “Art under Plutocracy,” he writes: “Art [under capitalism] is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die … [But] that change will be beneficent in many ways, so especially will it give an opportunity for the new birth of art.”38 The first passage was a cry de profundis and the second a striking evocation of chiliastic renewal from a secular humanist who had devoted himself to the preservation of historical artifacts. Much later, in “What We Have to Look For,” the last essay he wrote and delivered in public before his death in 1896, Morris acknowledged that “almost everyone has ceased to believe in the change coming by catastrophe.”39 But he also admitted that “I have thought the matter up and down and in and out, and I cannot for the life of me see how the great change which we long for can come otherwise than by disturbance and suffering of some kind … since war has been commercialized, I say, we shall as above said not be called upon to gain our point by battle in the field. But the disturbance and the suffering – can we escape that? I fear not … Can that combat be fought out[,] again I say[,] without loss and suffering? Plainly speaking I know that it cannot.”40 As he approached the end of his life, then, Morris remained convinced that poverty, class division, and social injustice corrupted all who “benefited” or suffered from them. But he no longer believed – if he ever had – that a single uprising of workers and organizers would effect the social revolution he ardently sought. His descendants and those of his contemporaries, he feared, might traverse rivers of fire. But he also clung to a hope – not a certainty – that their descendants might commemorate the dead and emerge from a chasm of suffering into News from Nowhere’s “new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness … in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship.”41

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Early Writings How can one reconcile the romantic battles of Morris’s literary works with the “anti-bellicism” of his temperament and later convictions? In an effort to explore the origins of his aversion to “real-world” violence, I will consider a cross-section of passages from his juvenilia to the last prose romance he drafted before he died in 1896. Morris’s first known publicly submitted poetic effort was “The Mosque Rising in the Place of the Temple of Solomon,” an unsuccessful entrant in the Newdigate Prize Poem contest for Oxford undergraduates in 1855. Its set topic may have attracted him in part at least for its double architectural references to a “mosque” and “temple.” As William Whitla has observed in his edition of the poem,42 the topic was almost certainly intended to elicit a Christian imperialist vindication of Britain’s current presence in the Crimea, and the two winners of the prize duly framed their soliloquies in such muscular-Christian terms. Even at this early stage of his life, Morris, who had read widely in the scholarly histories of the period, would have none of it. In place of the expected Christian verities, he evoked sites and habitations ravaged again and again by religious warriors and the individual and collective grief of their inhabitants. The banners and the obeisances had changed, but the carnage was invariant. One of the poem’s more vivid passages condemned European violence against Muslims: Ah me! They slew the woman and the babe[,] They slew the old man with his hoary hair[,] Thy youth who asked not mercy and the child Who prayèd sore that he might see the sun Some few days more – those soldiers of the Cross. Pray Christians for the sins of Christian men.43 So much for chivalric mercy and the Sermon on the Mount. The bluntness of this passage was remarkable, the more so as Morris was a deep admirer of Amiens Cathedral, from which Peter the Hermit had led his followers to the allegedly holy slaughter of the First Crusade. Christians had also died in the conflict, of course, but their afterlife is uncertain: The warriors who lay dreaming on the hills Lie dreaming now within their quiet graves

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Or seem to dream, for there the white bones lie With nothing moving them …44 Morris clearly expressed in this early poem his lifelong love of the architectural forms – but not the doctrines – of medieval Christianity, and he was soon to renounce his nominal intent to prepare for a career in the Church. His extensive readings in ecclesiastical history had convinced him that “religion” brought not peace but a sword, and its more hypocritical hierarchs were red in tooth and claw.45 Thirty-three years later, he confirmed these views in “Equality”: “I repeat[,] the opposing idea [to egalitarian socialism] is that of a hierarchical government. An idea founded on the assumption of the existence of an arbitrary[,] irresponsible God of the universe[,] the proprietor of all things and persons, to be worshipped and not questioned: a being whose irresponsible authority is reflected in the world of men by certain other irresponsible governors whose authority is delegated to them by that supreme Slaveholder and employer of labour up in Heaven.”46 Or, as he put it more bluntly in “Communism, i.e. Property” (1892): “Religion is gone down the wind, and will no more cumber us unless we are open fools.”47 The end of “The Mosque Rising” appealed not to God but to the dome and the temple rock, conceived in Ruskinian terms as repositories of memory and “conquerors of the forgetfulness of men.”48 Now all is changed – when will the Cross once more Be lifted high above its central dome? Never perhaps. Yet many wondrous things The silent dome has looked on quietly. And truly very many wondrous things The rock on which the temple stood has seen. I wonder what Araunah’s floor was like Before the flood came down upon the Earth[.]49 Also notable in this early poem were its temporal elisions – from temple to rock foundation to a pre-Christian threshing floor – and its ascriptions of quasi-pantheistic wisdom to an architectural structure and an outcropping of rock – a wisdom notably unavailable to human viewers. Much more could be said about Morris’s youthful effort in “The Mosque Rising.” Its refusal of direct narrative and prismatic attention to the dreams and memories of the slayers and slain, for example, fore-

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shadowed the complex dislocations of the Defence of Guenevere and other works. It also suggested that a man repelled at twenty-two by “holy warriors” did not love the medieval period because he viewed it as a time of peace, but because it exemplified in stark temporal displacement the ravages of ideological violence and the solace of art. A somewhat slighter early meditation on violence and the “lesser arts” may be found in “The Story of the Unknown Church,” the first of Morris’s prose tales for The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.50 Its firstperson narrator is an initially unidentified master mason who has created a carved tomb for the west front of a cathedral that strongly resembles the cathedral at Amiens. Morris had already described this edifice lovingly in an Oxford and Cambridge Magazine essay on “The Churches of North France: The Shadows of Amiens,” in which he praised its carvings at length as embedded dramatic narratives, and gave careful attention to its west front.51 Morris and his sometime employer G.E. Street, author of Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages, visited France together in 1856, and John Purkis has remarked that the two men shared Ruskin’s view that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the high point of Gothic architecture.52 In keeping with this tenet, the master mason of the “Story of the Unknown Church” carved his masterpiece in the middle of the thirteenth. One of three craftsmen among Morris’s Oxford and Cambridge Magazine protagonists (the others were Svend of “Svend and His Brethren” and Florian of “The Hollow Land”), the master mason, a man whose life has been blighted by the “collateral damage” of war, is driven to complete his renderings of “the faces of those I had known on earth,” and dies lying “with my chisel in my hand, underneath the last lily of the tomb,”53 an emblem of the passage of life into art. Speaking as a sort of ghost in an undefined atemporal realm, the mason’s shade remarks that “it is now two hundred years since that church vanished from the face of the earth; it was destroyed utterly, – no fragment of it was left; not even the great pillars that bore up the tower at the cross, where the choir used to join the nave.”54 His lifework and with it all the meanings and memories he infused into it have therefore been effaced, for “no one knows now even where [the church] stood,” and he himself, in the land of shadows, does not “remember very much about the land where my church was; I have quite forgotten the name of it.”55 It would be hard to imagine a starker representation of the obliterative violence of war as well as time. The heroes of these early writings, then, are artists who resist the destruc-

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tiveness of history, eschewing religious and cultural wars to create encoded tributes to their own deepest emotions.

The Earthly Paradise The epics of Morris’s middle period celebrate narrative art in its various forms. The Earthly Paradise’s sole artist-protagonist is a sculptor who crafts his ideal mate in “Pygmalion and the Image,” one of the work’s briefer tales. The artistic magus of the entire sequence, however, is the ostensibly “idle” Singer. His lyric interludes precede twenty-five tales, chosen from the lore of northern European, near eastern, and classical cultures, and within these tales, from time to time, “mighty men” “slay … ravening monsters.” The Singer, by contrast, slays no one. His poetic office is to represent human emotions: Midmost the beating of the steely sea, Where tossed about all hearts of men must be; Whose ravening monsters mighty men shall slay, Not the poor singer of an empty day.56 He also calls attention to his irenic role in a statement of intent (“Apology”), an invocation to Chaucer (“The Author to the Reader”), and an introductory “Prologue: The Wanderers,” which sets up the poem’s crosscultural oral recitation in twelve classical and twelve medieval tales. His deeper reflective role is to bind up the tales’ wounds, so to speak, in his transitional lyrics, unexpected first-person intrusions into the tales themselves, and his farewells to the work as a whole (in the “Epilogue” and “L’Envoi”). Some of the work’s protagonists – Perseus, Ogier and Bellerophon, for example – are “mighty” enough, but most of their feats are allegorical and spiritual rather than physical. Ogier returns from a life-beyond-time to save medieval France before he withdraws to this otherworld with Morgan Le Fay; and Bellerophon’s most courageous act is to deflate an eerily amorphous “monster” who is, after all, but a “chimera.” Other, more self-styled “mighty, men” turn out to be miserable failures (“The Writing on the Image,” “The Lady of the Land,” “The Man Who Never Laughed Again”), and one poem – “The Lovers of Gudrun,” drawn from

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the Laxdaela Saga – is a bitterly unheroic tale of fratricidal conflict between former childhood friends. Many of the tales’ most arduous pursuits, moreover – in “The Story of Cupid and Psyche,” “The Lovers of Gudrun,” “The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” and “The Story of Acontius and Cydippe” – are searches for love and solidarity, conceived and portrayed as life’s deepest achievements. Morris set aside, perhaps for personal reasons, “The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice,” in which he drew together the themes of the entire cycle, and whose brave bardic hero embodied the full range of idealized Morrisian accomplishments – at once an arduous traveller, spiritual voyager (to the underworld), faithful lover, and lonely inditer of ever-beautiful songs.57 The Earthly Paradise clearly abounds in images of the “lesser arts” and related crafts – temples, gardens, tapestries, cloths, weaponry, jewellery, letters and songs, as well as weaving, fishing, and riding. But its deepest conflicts are in counterfactual realms of moral and psychological insight, which “living not, can n’er be dead.”58 The Singer’s final lines quietly reverse the “Apology’s” self-deprecation (“No little part it was for me to play / The idle singer of an empty day”),59 and convey the tenuous but persistent power of devotion and collective memory to bridge time and the river.

Sigurd the Volsung By contrast, Morris’s most obviously violent work, a “Northern” narrative which appeared in 1876, remained faithful to its familiar Germanic plot of jealousy, betrayal, dynastic pride, serial revenge, self-immolation, unrepentant murder, and relentlessly obsessive greed (a Nordic warlords’ antecedent of “commercial war,” so to speak). Morris was drawn in the mid-1870s – passionately and perhaps paradoxically – to the plot of the Volsunga Saga, which he described in the introduction to his co-translation with Eiríkr Magnússon as “the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks”60 (another tale of wanton rapine and plunder). In their preface, the two men expressed a hope that prospective readers would find in it “such a startling realism, such subtlety, such close sympathy with all the passions that may move [them] to-day.”61 Morris also described the Saga in two of his

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letters – the first written two years before his death – as a narrative of “wonderful imagination and clearness of outline, without disturbance of the huge and vague figures of the earlier times,”62 and as a spare, dramatic work in which “nothing [was] repeated, nothing overstrained … all misery and despair without a word of raving, complete beauty without an ornament.”63 In another translation – of the Icelandic Eyrbyggja Saga – Morris addressed the nameless Icelandic skáld as a friend, and added the following prefatory verse-homage: Yea, are we friends? Draw nigher then, Thou tale-teller of vanished men, … Thou and thy brethren sure did gain That thing for which I long in vain, The spell, whereby the mist of fear, Was melted, and your ears might hear Earth’s voices as they are indeed. Well, ye have helped me at my need.64 Was the melting of the “mist of fear” perhaps the courage to follow his principles amid an unregarding and resistant world? Morris was not the only socialist to praise Nordic ur-prototypes of The Lord of the Rings.65 In theory at least, Sigurd was a champion of justice who died at the hands of antagonists driven by lust for gold (“commercial war”), empire (“our country right or wrong”), and the inexorable power of the ring’s “thrice-cursed burden of greed.”66 Most remarkable about Morris’s redaction of the tale as an allegorical cycle, however, was its systematic construction as a saga, with all its characteristic devices – echoing, contrasts, parallelism, compression, archaisms, inversions, caesurae, strongly metered lines and other attributes which Anthony Ugolnik has assimilated to Old Norse syntactical patterns.67 Its stark but imbricated contrapuntal echoings and repeated invocations of songs past and future also called attention to the refracted nature of the story, for, as Herbert Tucker has observed, it is a very self-conscious tale, whose protagonists are liminally aware of their unchanging and unchangeable part in a climactic series of convulsions.68 Though the Niblung/Volsung rivalry at its worst was surely a case of “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night” – or in updated language, “mutu-

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ally assured destruction” – the extent to which the characters act roles confined to their scripted dynastic fates evokes a measure of sympathy and detached horror. Consider the murderous Gunnar, for example, an alienated artist and instrument of the warrior-ethic he exalts, who chants as he dies: I have dwelt with the deeds of the mighty; I have woven the web of the sword; I have borne up the guilt nor repented; I have sorrowed nor spoken the word; And I fought and was glad in the morning, and I sing in the night and the end … Odin, I see, and I hearken; but, lo … the bonds on my feet, And the walls of the wilderness round me, ere the light of thy land I meet! I crave and I weary, Allfather, and long and dark is the road; And the feet of the mighty are weakened, and the back is bent with the load.69 Morris’s poem thus preserves a measure of shared sympathy for all victims of violence, noting that those who perpetrate it and those who suffer from it are sometimes the same people. “Art” in this case has traduced itself, and the dirge of Gunnar’s “huge and vague” Untergang becomes a dialectical foil to News from Nowhere’s “epoch of rest.” The effect of this celebration of tragic loss garnered mixed responses; Morris’s contemporary Theodore Watts remarked in an Athenaeum review that “a people cannot read itself into folklore,” and the modern critic Anthony Ugolnik that “[Morris’s] conscious effort to forge a new poetic language was successful in lending a vigorous Germanic diction to his verse and giving a more concise syntactical base to his narrative, but it simply could not re-create the effect of the earlier literature he so admired.”70

News from Nowhere Morris’ best-known work was suffused with tributes to his beloved “lesser arts.” Nowhereans write historical novels, mount exhibitions,

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prepare simple but elegant meals, fashion tapestries and murals, build and ornament stone buildings, enact historical pageants (to celebrate the Clearing of Misery), and design clothes, furniture, fine books, household utensils, silver ornaments, and their own dwellings. As oral storytellers and historians, Dick, Old Hammond, Henry Morsom, Ellen, and others also reflect on the violence of nineteenth-century capitalism and police repression as well as the twentieth century’s “Great Change.”71 (History too is a “craft.”) The more astute representatives of the new society actively loathe the violence they associate with their own (pre)history. When Guest asks his equable guide whether Nowhere has need of prisons, for example, Dick recoils in horror: “Man alive! How can you ask such a question? … [H]ow could [people] look happy if they knew that their neighbours were shut up in prison, while they bore such things quietly? … Prisons, indeed! O no, no, no!”72 More critically, Ellen considers what her fate would have been in the “other country” Guest has described: “I think I have studied the history [of those past days of turmoil and oppression] to know pretty well. I should have been one of the poor, for my father when he was working was a mere tiller of the soil … therefore my beauty and cleverness and brightness … would have been sold to rich men, and my life would have been wasted indeed … I should have wrecked and wasted in one way or another, either by penury or by luxury. Is it not so?”73 Consistent with Morris’s conviction that a people’s art reflects its society (and conversely), Old Hammond tells Guest that “You must not suppose that the new form of art was founded chiefly on the memory of the art of the past,”74 though paradoxically “old forms, revived in a wonderful way during the latter part of the struggle, especially as regards music and poetry,”75 and townspeople and country dwellers teach one another “arts of life which they had each lost.”76 So greatly have things changed since Nowhereans “cast away riches and attained to wealth,”77 in fact, that Ellen reflects: “I think sometimes people are too careless of the history of the past … Who knows? Happy as we are, times may alter … many things may seem too wonderful for us to resist, too exciting not to catch at, if we do not know that they are but phases of what has been before; and withal ruinous, deceitful, and sordid.”78 And when Guest broods on the waste of life throughout history, she responds, “So many centuries … so many ages!”79 Even in the new so-

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ciety, then, genuine art – “lesser” as well as “greater” – has a dual role: to enhance the happiness of the present and preserve the memory of the past.

Morris’s Final Prose Romance A partial gauge of Morris’s final views about the interrelations between courage, violence, and “the lesser arts” may be found in his unfinished last romance, The Sundering Flood, dictated in part to Sydney Cockerell during his final illness. Possible antecedents for The Flood’s plot included Jean Ingelow’s “Divided” (1863), in which two lovers are severed by a widening river,80 and Jón Thoroddsen’s Piltur og Stúlka (1850),81 a respected Icelandic novel to which Morris may have been introduced by Eiríkur Magnússon. The story of two lovers who journey in search of each other also reworked some of the motifs of Love Is Enough, though the locale was quasi-Scandinavian and more detailed (the 1898 Kelmscott Press and Longmans editions even included a map). As Carole Silver has observed, Morris’s final romances embodied “socialism internalized” in their respectful treatment of ordinary people, untrammelled by class and legal restrictions, who dedicate their lives to the fellowship of their communal societies.82 But unlike his last femalecentred fantasy, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, The Sundering Flood focused on a male protagonist’s involvement in a protracted war.83 As Morris fashioned it, this war “was” a quasi-socialist uprising of the guilds of the “Small Crafts” against the King and City, and Morris infused into it some of his political skepticism, his strictures against war, and his contempt for gain-driven and self-interested conflict.84 He also wrote into the tale his lifelong belief that the state of the “lesser arts,” practised here in Wethermel and the Masterless Wood – farming, foraging, travelling, weaving and carving, as well as singing, playing, and composing – offer an accurate measure of the well-being of its people. The Sundering Flood’s hero Osberne is a poet, and his poems are interspersed throughout the first part of the romance. Had Morris lived longer, his protagonist might have continued his spontaneous composition of “staves” in war and peace alike, like Thiodof in The House of the Wolfings. As it was, Morris composed a four-stanza song for Osberne’s courtship of his beloved Elfhild (chapter 10) and a song of celebration and leave-taking on the occasion of his departure from Wethermel at the age

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of eighteen (chapter 36).85 Elfhild, a shepherdess, also pipes and tells stories in her own right. Osberne, a member of a self-governing and egalitarian tribe or community who have “neither King, nor Earl, nor Alderman,”86 has been given a powerful sword, with the condition that it not be used “in behalf of any tyrant or evil-doer.”87 On maturity, he leaves home to defend his relatives and neighbours against the marauding warriors of a southern king, who has held the inhabitants of a port city against their will. He attaches himself to the resistance leader, Sir Godrick (“good realm”), who strives with his bowmen from the Masterless Wood to liberate the town workers of the Small Crafts and, eventually, the Great Crafts, in a series of events that re-enact pastoral variants of Old Hammond’s account of “How the Change Came” in News from Nowhere.88 Before agreeing to serve under Godrick’s standard, Osberne subjects Sir Godrick to a rather stringent interrogation. Has Godrick taken any of his property from others? How does he treat and protect non-combatants? For whom does he fight, and for what ends? Godrick assures him that he has fought and will fight under “just” principles: no looting, humane treatment of non-combatants, punishment of crimes against the populace, and support of a democratic government. All this is good, of course, but it also recalls the words of Jonathan Dymond, the nineteenth century’s best-known assailant of the notion of a “just war”: “In the fury of slaughter, soldiers do not attend, they cannot attend, to questions of aggression … Moralists may talk of distinctions, but soldiers will make none; and none can be made.”89 Similarly, when Osberne asks him what he would do “if those gilds of craft aforesaid should rise up against their King and the tyrants of the Porte, and … sent to thee for help,” Godrick replies that “I [will] go to them with all mine and leave house and lands behind, that we may battle it out side by side to live or die together.”90 In the event, the city is liberated, and its workers claim the right to elect representatives and form a republic: [The departed king’s] back being turned upon his once subjects, many men began to think that belike they might do without him once and for all, when they cast up the use he had been to them in times past. And this imagination grew, until at last a great Mote was called, and there it was put forward, that since the City had a Porte and a Great Council, and a Burgreve [Godrick, elected by

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popular vote] under these, the office of King was little needed there … and next, with little gainsaying, they did away with the office of King altogether, and most men felt the lighter-hearted therefor[sic].91 Godrick endeavours to avoid needless quarrels, and when challenged to a joust replies bluntly that “this is an evil custom.”92 He would also abandon willingly the instruments and battlements of war, for: “See thou, lad, those fair and beauteous buildings … were the work of peace, when we sat well beloved on our own lands: it is an hundred of years ago since they were done. Then came the beginning of strife, and needs must we build yonder stark and grim towers and walls in little leisure by the labour of many hands. Now may peace come again, and give us time to cast wreaths and garlands of fretwork round the sternness of the warwalls, or let them abide and crumble in their due time.”93 After the conflict is over, Osberne refuses to accept a reward of knighthood for his military services, for “his kindred are not and were not of the knighthood, albeit men of honour”94 – a choice which echoes Morris’s own distain for distinctions of rank or class. At the height of his reputation, Osberne makes known his desire to leave warfare altogether and seek Elfhild, his lost love, whose wanderings (with a “Carline” conveniently endowed with magic powers) are also given equal prominence in the last fifth of the tale.95 Had Morris lived, The Sundering Flood might have become a double romance, rather on the model of some of his earlier proliferating tales for the Earthly Paradise. In a last personal encounter, Osborne encounters Godrick on his way to another skirmish and reluctantly offers his services, but Godrick, remarkably, declines, “‘for I have seen thee in a dream of the night and in a dream of the day living at Wethermel and dying on a field near the City of the Sundering Flood.’ Said Osberne: ‘And shall I choose dishonour then?’ ‘Nay,’ he said, ‘where is the dishonour?’”96 Osborne’s pointed renunciation of military life has no counterpart in Morris’s earlier romances, and there is a glow in the dying Morris’s description of his and Elfhild’s life together: “But surely about both of them there was then and always a sweet wisdom that never went beyond what was due and meet for the land they lived in or the people with whom they dwelt. So that all round them the folk grew better and not the worser.”97

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Conclusion As he aged, Morris gradually sharpened his views on the relationship of violence and art, distinguishing between systemic and individual violence, expressing abhorrence of the former and proscribing the latter except under severe restraints and for communitarian ends. Most of his protagonists, in fact – early and late – were not soldiers by trade, but masons, poets, sculptors, teachers, tellers of tales, and seekers after peace and justice. Those with whom he identified most deeply, moreover, were singers, time travellers, and “guests,” who meditated on their own failures and achievements as well as those of their fellows. Again and again, Morris sought to find cyclical continuities in which the defeats of selfless heroes – such as Thiodolf in The House of the Wolfings, or the eponymous hero of A Dream of John Ball – might be seen as anticipations, not of a “heaven on earth,” but of a more Nowherean “earth on earth.” If so, he could take a measure of comfort in a secular eschatology he offered Ball in the little country church: that “though I die and end, yet mankind yet liveth, therefore I end not, since I am a man.”98 The best way therefore to reconcile the implicit conflicts between Morris’s condemnation of imperial wars and “reasons of state,” and the sublimated quasi-allegorical struggles in his poems and prose romances, may be to focus on the allegory and the sublimation. Morris had always viewed armed violence through a lens of strong moral disapprobation in his earliest (and presumably most “naive”) writings. More precisely, he construed moral courage as a self-sacrificial willingness to oppose the strong bearing down on the weak; concluded that the “lesser arts” in all their forms are a saving grace; and decided that anything which affords this grace has the dignity of a “lesser art.” By the time he dictated The Sundering Flood, two decades of historical study and political activism had further convinced him that: • •

•

resistance has often evolved into what it resisted; the “lesser arts,” in all their benign forms, are what keep us “humane”; and without them we are like John Ball’s “proud despiteous rich man,” who is “in hell already, because he hath no fellow.”99

After two “world wars,” several incontestable genocides, and a long and lengthening series of “commercial wars,” in a time when asphyxiat-

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ing oil spills and death by unseen drones are journalistic banalities, it is painfully clear, therefore, that we still search for the secular saving grace of “fellowship” and its “lesser-artistic” handmaidens.

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Illuminating Divergences: Morris, Burne-Jones, and the Two Aeneids1 miles tittle

The fall and winter of 1874 was a dark period for both William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. The latter had suffered months of depression since the summer’s end when his son Philip was sent off to boarding school at Marlborough, and Morris was mired in the protracted bitter process of dissolving the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., a dispute that ruined old friendships and wounded everyone involved. Ideologically, Morris and Burne-Jones were uncomfortably aware of the distance growing between them. Burne-Jones’s attempt to share Italy’s lingering Renaissance wonders with his friend in April 1873 was thwarted by poor timing and by Morris’s increasing preference for Iceland and the northern artistic traditions. Politically, Morris was quickly growing in awareness and convictions, though his lectures and activism had yet to occur. The esteem in which the two artists held each other never diminished throughout their lives, but their priorities and tastes no longer melded as easily as they once had. Following the last meeting of the firm in November 1874, Morris suggested a shared work to Burne-Jones that would occupy the men on their Sunday mornings together for the next year. It was a manuscript of larger format than any Morris had illuminated during his past four years of energetic calligraphic work – a vellum folio copy of Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin, to be scribed by Morris, illustrated with twelve large half-page illustrations by Burne-Jones, and illuminated with many ornamental designs by both artists. Morris’s proposal was conceived with the aim of resuming regular contact with his friend. The idea of a collaborative project inspired both men equally at first, filling them with the shared

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fire which had marked their early partnership. But this was a highly ambitious undertaking, and Georgiana Burne-Jones later recalled that “there were many things to prevent the completion of the scheme, amongst others the temptation Morris felt … to turn the great poem into English verse – which he did.”2 The great unfinished manuscript, now known as The Pre-Raphaelite Aeneid, was finally laid aside for this new translation, and Morris’s Aeneids of Virgil was published in November 1876, un-illustrated and unadorned.

The Pre-Raphaelite Aeneid illumination is an enigma. Its place as the crowning achievement of Morris’s calligraphic quill, the shadowy handwritten counterpart to the Kelmscott Chaucer, has never been seriously questioned. Yet, unlike the famous Chaucer, this precious book has been opened by only a handful of scholars, it has rarely been displayed, and no substantial part of it has ever been reproduced. There have been virtually no critical articles devoted to the manuscript, which is surprising considering that Morris has received well over a century of multidisciplinary scholarly attention,3 but the text’s unfinished state4 and private ownership have made it inaccessible for much of its history. That it was produced in Latin has also encouraged the work to be seen as outside of the purview of English literature, whereas Morris’s published translation of Virgil, though often criticized, has at least been studied.5 Modern interdisciplinary scholars and calligraphers have tended to concentrate on earlier Morris illuminations, now held in libraries and museums. The Aeneid manuscript was influential6 to a handful of important calligraphers, such as Graily Hewitt and Charles Fairfax Murray, and its place in legend was secured by the accounts of those few who had seen it; yet its direct practical impact on calligraphy, ornament, or art in general, was minimal because it was never reproduced or circulated. Indeed, the first time a single page of the illumination was printed, as a plate to accompany her father’s Collected Works of 1911, May Morris tried fervently to compensate in highly detailed words for the illustration’s failure to do justice to the original page.7 If this illuminated and calligraphically transcribed Aeneid appears as an obscure aspect of Morris’s legacy, closer scrutiny of its making and of its frustrated production discloses more than the physical niceties of a venerated antique, now in the sole possession of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

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Probed more deeply, it stands as a significant cultural and political artifact; it reveals not only that the collaborative project ground to a halt for technical and logistical reasons, but that the disruption of the work was also the result of an emerging chasm between two artists. The creative sensibilities of Morris and Burne-Jones had, to a certain degree, grown apart. And this polarization was no incidental event. It constituted, I suggest, a singular moment in Morris’s nascent political consciousness as well as in his evolving strategies for social reform and education. Not only does the production of the illuminated manuscript shed light on a revived medievalist practice (a calligraphic art which, for Morris, tacitly scorned the cheapening of print by mass production), it also poignantly reflects a perennial question in Morris’s public life more generally: how to integrate decorative beauty with radical politics. This chapter treats Morris’s last illuminated manuscript as the meeting point of his aesthetic and early activist agendas, and examines what his artistic interpretations of Virgil reveal of that important encounter. The discussion raises, but also attempts to resolve, the contradictions of such a convergence. How is one to square Morris’s ornate decoration of an overtly imperialist epic with his emerging activism, with his bold outcry against England’s aggression and dominance over other countries, notably in relation to the “Eastern Question”? A number of questions ensue from this central concern. First, how does Morris’s illumination of the Aeneid – ostensibly a paean to the founding of the Roman Empire – fit with his burgeoning anti-imperialist politics of the 1870s? How does the bookish culture of Latin epics, linked to the cultivated elite of the English upper class,8 mesh with the street culture of radical politics? How does the beauty of Burne-Jones’s aestheticism, which complements Morris’s ornate illumination of the manuscript, co-exist with the sublime rhetoric of Morris’s first major political statement, Unjust War: To the Working Men of England? The manifesto was issued as a cheap pamphlet on 11 May 1877, hot on the heels of Russia’s 24 April declaration of war on Turkey.9 In other words, how can the imputed effeminacy of the ornate and “fleshly” aesthetics of this illuminated manuscript co-exist with Morris’s first forays into militant political agitation and anti-war propaganda? Each of these queries presupposes that our appreciation of Morris’s intricately wrought illumination of the Aeneid and Burne-Jones’s accompanying illustrations is caught in a grid of antinomies. And by conventional assumptions it is, for decorative art of medievalist influence is not

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readily imagined as a handmaiden of political activism, and the esoteric culture of the classics is not often associated with the culture of street protest, pamphleteering, or public rallies. The beauty of curvaceous and richly ornamented art conjures up a feminine aesthetic diametrically opposed to the austere virility suggested by the sublimity of activist heroism, and the antiquarian resonances of medievalist art seem to clash with the modernity of Victorian print culture and its technology of mass production. And yet, while these opposites are firmly entrenched in an intractable paradox, the logic of Morris’s two activities is not, in fact, as contradictory as it appears. These apparent discrepancies begin to dissolve as we look more closely at Virgil’s epic itself, which, contrary to its official function as tribute to Augustus’s founding of the post-Republican Roman Empire, constitutes a bitter critique of war, as well as a subtle subversion of the warrior-hero model touted by imperialist (Roman) propaganda. The very content of Virgil’s poem lends itself to this critique. Various instances of ekphrasis in the epic’s narrative, as Michael Putnam has shown, throw into question the unswerving patriotic mission of imperialist conquest.10 Ekphrasis is “a trope signifying ‘speaking forth,’” often expressed as a description of landscape or a work of art within the narrative, and offering a pause in the narration so that the poet can “bring understanding of and clarity to, an entity of interest to the story line as it progresses.”11 In Virgil’s text, it is often tied to the hero’s reflective moments, to his enargeiac contemplation of visuals on artisanal works that portray carnage and pillage, frescoes that tell bitterly of war’s devastating legacy. These musings stop the hero in his tracks, compelling him (and hence the reader) to ponder his actions and impending fate. Around him, the recurring motifs of abandoned and desecrated altars and hearths, and the manifold role played by their sacred fire throughout Aeneas’s trials, underscore the profoundly critical subtext that gives the epic its tragic depth. Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s ornamental representations use these motifs in a visual descriptio that matches the critical subtext of Virgil’s various ekphrases. Close scrutiny of Virgil’s work shows that it was fitting that Morris should recreate and re-present it in conjunction with his 1870s denunciations of imperialism. A substantial body of critical literature supports the claim that Virgil’s text is a lyrical indictment of war and of imperialist ventures, not a glorification of Roman domination.12 It is, I submit, a beautiful but bitter commemoration of loss, just as Morris’s calligraphic Aeneid is in part a celebration of Virgil’s courage in using the pinnacle of

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epical art to question the ethics of empire building and bloody conquest. Arguably, then, the content of the Aeneid does not contradict Morris’s nascent political radicalism; it rather encourages it. Taken as a whole, Morris’s illumination, together with Burne-Jones’s illustrations, “speaks” graphically of the sacrifice of mortal lives to the forging of an empire, and the foregrounding of humanist values and personal loss in the face of violent imperialism. The graceful ornamenting also contributes to a reconstitution of the conventional epic hero, presaging a new model of social change that would be seen in Morris’s later works, and which is discussed herein. But if Burne-Jones’s illustrations can be read as a denunciation of war and of masculinist heroic agency, it must be admitted that such a reading is not the only possible one. In one sense, his images may be construed as a critique of the military tradition and Roman virility; in another sense, they may conjure up a merely decorative embellishment of a great classical epic, and thus a celebration of elite culture and its associated imperialism. As more focused analysis shows, this ambiguity comes not only from the polysemic character of the illuminated text, but also from the growing chasm between Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s interpretations of Virgil. The choice of visual ornament and the manner of its depiction suggests a preoccupation with the sorrow and human cost of those individuals whose destinies are part of an empire’s forging. However, the grace and beauty with which Burne-Jones renders these moments of tragedy to some degree undermines their aura of stifling fate and divine caprice. Unlike the later masterfully harmonious visual rhetoric that frames the Kelmscott Chaucer, there are signs of both internal and external contradiction in the Aeneid images that may be understood by comparing Burne-Jones’s illustrations and unfinished sketches with Morris’s subsequent English translation of the epic, The Aeneids of Virgil. A growing distance emerges between Morris’s evolving use of the Virgilian text and Burne-Jones’s celebration of his newfound love of the Italian tradition. While Burne-Jones, as nouveau-antiquarian miniaturist, was eagerly reviving and transmuting Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Mategna, Morris the antiquarian-cum-activist scribe was watching the rebellions of Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Bulgaria against the Ottoman Empire and vocally condemning their suppression. The Aeneid’s vellum is inscribed with the preoccupations of both men. So a central question remains: can the radicalism of Morris’s calligraphic quill be discerned amid the overwhelmingly aestheticist Burne-

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Jones illustrations, and can his paratextual decorations articulate his political critique in sufficiently transparent form? Can visuals clearly express Morris’s emerging consciousness? And if so, why does Morris so quickly choose to abandon the illumination and affirm Virgil’s work on discursive rather than visual grounds? I suggest that Morris’s efforts to reconcile the seemingly contrary drives of his creative and activist agendas could not be immediately or easily realized (nor made readily accessible to the wider public) in works of classical art, whether visual or literary. He would travel a tortuous path before he could fuse these competing drives; he would move from medievalist illumination to a focus on translation, and would finally turn to his lectures of the 1870s. In these pivotal talks, he would offer the public the clearest insight into the dialectical convergence of ornate design and political radicalism. Morris’s threetiered trajectory marks the unfolding stages of this essay. I start with a close (visual) reading of the illuminated Aeneid, underscoring signs of divergence between its two artists, and the muffled politics of the artifact; I then turn to Morris’s translation of the Aeneid and the subversive, politically charged nature of its prosody, free of Burne-Jonesian aesthetics; in a third and final stage, I consider how Morris gives voice to the radical politics of the lesser arts and to the formation of an alternative epic hero.

1 What discussion and mutual accord passed between Morris and BurneJones during those Sunday morning sessions that began the illumination project is largely unrecorded, and so the degree of Morris’s input or editorial control over Burne-Jones’s designs cannot be precisely determined, but there is evidence of close collaboration. All of Burne-Jones’s seventeen surviving drawings for marginal and historiated initial designs are meant for the half of the text that Morris finished scribing, so the two artists evidently worked in tandem. There are even indications that Morris’s English versification may have served as inspiration during the period of overlapping work on both projects; certainly Morris loved to read his new verse aloud, and it is hard to imagine him not sharing his translation efforts during their collaborative hours. When one compares the master drawings of the illuminated Aeneid to Burne-Jones’s other work of this period and when one takes note of the surprising changes within the short sequence of Virgilian designs, it

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becomes clear that Burne-Jones was increasingly asserting his own creative licence13 athwart Morris’s wishes. He had recently moved beyond his earlier soft Venetian pencil style to a harder-edged Florentine approach, producing drawings which could more readily withstand copying and painting into the vellum manuscript, and was conceiving the half-page designs as a fresco-like narrative illustration sequence, anticipated by his abandoned work on Morris’s Earthly Paradise illustrations. Both the Paradise drawings and the visual designs of the Aeneid pages would soon be resurrected by Burne-Jones for his unfinished Perseus series.14 The figure of Aeneas is a prime example (see figure 2.1, Venus Meets Aeneas on the Shores of Libya). In the opening illustration (first copied onto the vellum page by Morris, from a drawing Burne-Jones had done under his watchful eye, and eventually reworked by Murray until only the face remained of Morris’s work), the hero is bearded and wears an odd mixture of Roman and medieval armour.15 The gaunt, strong, old warrior glares defiantly at the lovely goddess Venus, while the parallel diagonals of her bare arm and the two spear blades Aeneas thrusts toward his immortal mother convey his anger; this mortal son has already suffered greatly at divine hands. Venus’s rosy, flowing skirts and golden nimbus specify the precise moment depicted: she has just revealed herself to her son after posing as a young huntress and is weaving the “cloak of cloudy stuff” that will transport them to the gates of New Carthage. But Aeneas, recently tossed by Juno-ordained storms and mourning the loss of three ships full of Trojans who had escaped the sacking of their city, reproves her: Ah cruel as a God! and why with images and lies Dost thou beguile me? wherefore then is hand to hand not given And we to give and take in words that come from earth and heaven?16 This is Morris’s vision of Aeneas, hardly the unquestioning exemplar of pietas suggested by Augustan moral reform, but Burne-Jones’s visual transformation of the hero soon obscures this character. The almostfinished miniature that opens Book II also shows that same weary, bearded face, bent under the weight of his aged father (Anchises, lamed by a thunderbolt for boasting of the liaison that engendered Aeneas).17 Venus here is surrounded by gold, no mere nimbus around her head but a full aureole. Yet the true sacrifice is seen behind them, in the apparition of the mortal Creusa lost in the burning ruins of Troy. Venus guides the

Figure 2.1. Venus Meets Aeneas on the Shores of Libya, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1874–75.

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family personally and holds Aeneas’s hand fast in a motion that breaks the shining barrier between them and rebukes the dangerous uncrossed space between Aeneas and his divine mother in the first illustration. Venus is here seemingly constrained by the panel border, and her feet almost touch the ground (both signs of mortality, as we shall see) as she leads her old lover, son, and grandson (little Iülus, ancestor and namesake of Julius Caesar) to safety. This is a striking moment and shows Morris’s guidance as clearly as does the first half-page miniature. However, Morris’s sad and rugged soldier soon transforms into an aesthetic closer to Burne-Jones’s ideal. In the half-page miniature (of page 211) where Venus presents to Aeneas his new god-forged arms, his beard has gone (which may indicate a movement from the archaic Trojan warrior to the clean-shaven Roman military ideal), he looks much younger, and he seems to have found time for a nose job (see figure 2.2, Venus Bringing Armour to Aeneas).18 In fact, this Aeneas bears no resemblance to the Aeneas of the first two depictions. His profile is now the mirror of his mother’s, and under his armour he wears flowing pink silk, matching Venus’s peplos. The androgynous beauty and quiet passivity that mark Burne-Jones’s own heroes have asserted themselves, with a resulting loss of emotional depth. This Aeneas is iconic, with no expression and little personified humanity. That the newly forged armour between them is arranged to mimic the hero’s lost armour that Dido burned herself with provides the only grim note in this composition. The calm, balanced symmetry of the tableau places Aeneas on equal footing with the gods for this moment, a ruler rather than a slave. But most of the mortal subjects do not fare so well in Burne-Jones’s depictions. His particular compositions emphasize the fitness of each image to its frame and surrounding space. Figures are aware of their limited space and, bending their heads from the borders, contort their bodies in repeating visual rhythms.19 Aeneas leans in from the corner in the first miniature, his golden armour a more dully burnished echo of the gold vines writhing around the scene, while Venus’s left hand is a hair’s breadth from pressing against the other border (see figure 2.1, Venus Meets Aeneas on the Shores of Libya). Similarly, on page 238, the goddess Iris’s finger barely grazes the left border as her foot lightly hovers above the lower frame. A slender Turnus, in armour now almost fully transformed into Burne-Jones’s standard medieval pastiche, bows low before her (see figure 2.3, Iris Appearing before Turnus).20

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Figure 2.2. Venus Bringing Armour to Aeneas, by Edward Burne-Jones, drawing for Morris’s Aeneid.

Throughout the illuminations there is a silent message in the positioning of figures and frames, one relevant to the narrative: the deities hover suspended within their paratextual spaces but are untroubled by them. The male warriors for the most part bow before them gracefully, as they do before the gods and fates; in an extraordinary battle scene the defiant Etruscan king Mezentius (famed as a contemptor divum, a “despiser of the gods”) is held against the lower corner as Aeneas stabs him through the throat (see figure 2.4, Aeneas Slaying Mezentius).21 The mortal women, however, are continually trapped by the text and ornament: witness Cassandra’s sorrowing face as she peers, half-naked and

Figure 2.3. Iris Appearing before Turnus, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

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Figure 2.4. Aeneas Slaying Mezentius, by Edward Burne-Jones, drawing for Morris’s Aeneid.

bound, from a capital H (see figure 2.5, Cassandra amid the Flames of Troy),22 or Helen of Troy, haggard and fearful as she clings to a column in a capital I.23 Even Dido sits enclosed within the fronds of a leafy historiated Q, grasping the side of the letter itself with one hand, while the serene and reckless figure of Amor/Cupid kisses her, his rosy wings breaking through the bounds of the letter and spreading out into the margin of the page as he hovers beside the queen (see figure 2.6, Dido and Cupid).24

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One woman, however – Lavinia, last wife of Aeneas – is depicted almost in harmony with her surrounding frames. She stands tall and alone in a half-page illustration, her head tilted down beneath the weight of her burning tresses (see figure 2.7, Lavinia, Her Hair Ablaze). The torches from the sacrificial altar have ignited her long hair, but she is unharmed, and the event is called an omen of glorious war and reconciliation for her people.25 The curves and arabesques of her flaming hair echo and almost merge with the arcs of the surrounding border’s foliage. This is paired in the story with the dream-oracle message her father Latinus receives from his father Faunus, warning that Lavinia must marry a stranger who will come from another land and bloodline: Aeneas. The fires wrap the maid from her feet to her head but seem compressed by the top border in a way reminiscent of Dido’s pyre flames. The fires that burn throughout the text and the images are a constant reminder of the gods’ great purposes and of the high cost in pain that mortals must pay to bring those plans to pass.26 It is significant that female characters are paired

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Opposite Figure 2.5. Cassandra amid the Flames of Troy, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid. Above Figure 2.6. Dido and Cupid, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

with fire in Burne-Jones’s illustrations, and there is no image where fire appears without women. Fire is a powerful recurring motif throughout the Aeneid, and BurneJones makes use of its varied implications. To the Romans, fire was a great destructive force, marshalled for warfare but never without peril, only controlled in the forges of Vulcan, the smith god, and the sacred hearth fires of Vesta, the virgin goddess. It also signifies the erotic desire and love that so easily leap beyond control and consume minds and lives, as with the pyre of Aeneas’s armour wherein Dido slays herself (see figure 2.8, Dido Stabbing Herself). In that illustration, as with the image of Lavinia, the sacred fire of an altar’s sacrifice is shown as the communication

Figure 2.7. Lavinia, Her Hair Ablaze, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

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Figure 2.8. Dido Stabbing Herself, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

between gods and mortals. Dido’s body becomes an accusation of guilt directed to the gods who brought Aeneas to her city and now have ordered him to abandon her. Her emotional sacrifice is manifested in literal immolation. By contrast, Lavinia’s burning hair is an omen of future glory for the Latin race, and she is unharmed by her transformation to divine message, though it is also a signal that her future has now been decreed by the gods and that she would contest that fate at her peril. In the Book V frontispiece, as the women of Troy storm forward in a crowd to burn the ships, their hands and the torches they hold are above the frame so the reader’s eye must focus on their enraged faces, but the shore they stand on is the lower border of the miniature (see figure 2.9, The Burning of the Ships).27 The figures are constrained and held to their proper place on each page, but their bodies push against that environment. Here, the torches they bear are a sign of the rage that the goddess

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Iris has ignited in them; they are incensed over the seven years of wandering they have endured. Significantly, Morris takes pains in his translation to tell the source of the flames the women bear to the ship hulls: Shrieking they snatch the hearthstone’s fire and brand from inner parts; While some, they strip the altars there, and flaming leaf and bough Cast forth: and Vulcan, let aloose, is swiftly raging now.28 These hulls are being lit by the penates, the aniconic Trojan hearth gods gathered by Aeneas and tended so carefully during their wanderings, symbols of the cultural continuity between Troy and Rome. This Trojan women’s riot was orchestrated by Juno in an attempt to deny their destiny, but at the level of visual and verse narrative it embodies the frustration of those who have been made pawns of war – the women of Troy foremost among them – and their anger at being so used is mirrored by Aeneas’s constant questioning of his destiny. In an early sketch of this illustration29 Burne-Jones has only three Trojan women in the foreground, one turning back to call to an unseen crowd and one actually firing the curving hull of a ship. The finished work, with five wild faces all alike and only one wide, half-seen eye looking behind, shows a much more determined and united mob, sacrilegiously repurposing the actual fire and branch from their holy altars to deny their fate. Burne-Jones uses fire to show the communication and struggle between humans and gods, and so dovetails with Morris’s symbolic rendering of the tension between mortals and deities. The manuscript explores the ire of the common soldier towards the unseen generals, who sacrifice him for a cause far removed from his own concerns, and the desperation of women who endure loss and displacement at the hands of war. The altar fire, symbol of the fall of Troy and the sustaining aniconic penates, represents both how the disenfranchised mortals are commanded and how they respond to those commands. The fire is also linked to the force opposing Aeneas’s supposed pietas: the raging furor of Juno’s influence, manifested not only in the women of Troy she incites, but in the Carthaginian queen she betrays. In the fiery illumination that opens Book IV, grief-maddened Dido falls on Aeneas’s sword, poised above the draped pyre against which the sword’s hilt is set. Her back bows beneath the straight upper border, which even causes the flames of her pyre to bend and flicker along it (see figure

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Figure 2.9. The Burning of the Ships, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

2.8, Dido Stabbing Herself).30 The empty armour and positioning of Aeneas’s sword make the phallic associations undeniable: Dido is replaying the act that lost her virgin honour, when her sylvan “marriage” to Aeneas in a cave, prompted by Juno, “began the tide of death.”31 An exquisite Burne-Jones drawing32 depicts Juno and Tellus the Earth Goddess watching the entrance of Dido and Aeneas into that cave, as if in an enchanted mirror. The token that Juno offers Tellus to authorize the lovers’ union is drawn as a smouldering reed staff, reminiscent of the hollow fennel stalk in which Prometheus first stole fire from the gods. The first sparks from this token are beneath the joined hands of Dido and Aeneas, recalling the repeated compositional motifs of proffered and refused arms, and of divine fire wreaking havoc amid humanity. Above the watchers, mountain nymphs wail in the storm for this “day the evil came.”33 The outcome of this evil day is seen in Dido’s suicide. If the illustration could move through the next moment as Dido falls down the blade,

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if she were to pull it into her breast with enough force, Aeneas’s sword point might break through the frame and border into the paratextual space only gods inhabit.34 Morris describes the “bale-fire’s light” of Dido’s pyre,35 which is seen by the Olympians and does indeed drive Juno to pity. She sends Iris to perform the hair-cutting rite that will free Dido’s soul, despite her death having been not fated, nor deserved. With her final non serviam, Dido has forced at least this concession from her immortal masters. Moreover, she has orchestrated her death as a male hero’s funeral, falling on her sword to regain lost honour and immolated with battle regalia. Her plea to the gods for justice is underscored by this act, which asserts her as a fallen warrior, a casualty of the gods’ campaign. Though these images can be meaningfully described and analyzed as instances of anti-war sentiment, casual viewers might also read them merely as beautiful glorifications of a tragic epic serving Roman imperialism. To be sure, the subversive element in Morris’s ornate paratextual work and in Burne-Jones’s flowing, delicate figures is not immediately apparent; indeed, whatever political interrogation or dissatisfaction Morris intended, it is not obvious in this project. In short, seen from a graphic perspective, the visual rhetoric of Burne-Jones’s illustrations and of Morris’s paratextual decorations is open to debate. Its voluptuous forms of male and female figures may contest the austerity of Roman classicism and its implied imperialist virility. At the same time, these same decorative elements may be seen as mere embellishments of classical culture, serving the elite institutions of the British Empire. This very ambiguity would have prompted Morris to abandon the Renaissance beauty of Burne-Jones’s quill and reframe Virgil’s epic anew, this time in verse form.

2 If we are to solve the central conundrum – why Morris engaged in decorating a Latin epic that served the cause of England’s ruling class while vehemently protesting against the horror of imperialist war – we must assume that his appeal Unjust War: To the Working Men of England in 1877 was genuine and that, by extension, his fundamental political interest in the Aeneid must have been to indict Roman and English expansionism through art.36 But this desire to use the Virgilian epic as a subversive commentary on empire building could only be consummated effectively if the message was both accessible and meaningful. Morris

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would thus turn from the ambiguous graphic images in the illuminated Aeneid – symptomatic of the growing tensions between himself and Burne-Jones – to the poetic word; in short, from illumination to translation. Yet, even here, the shift would not be unproblematic, for the rendering of Latin and Greek classics into English verse was inexorably tied to the elitist literary trends and conventions of his era. His translation of the Aeneid could only deliver a subversive message through stylistic difference. Morris would thus choose an Icelandic prosody,37 unlike his English peers, and one that marked his anti-canonical stance. This Nordic style of translating the Aeneid was not only a tool to mark distinction; it also embodied his preferred social world – an older culture of communitarian life associated with primitive communism and implicitly critical of the corrosive forces of his own Victorian era. Admittedly, Morris’s adoption of an archaic syntax and vocabulary (and his use of medievalism more generally) lent itself to misapprehension.38 In order to understand the radical strategy at work in his choice to reframe Virgil’s epic in this idiom, it must also be recognized as a thoughtful artistic decision meant to bring the Aeneid into a local tradition, to overcome the estrangement of place and culture while not trying to modernize it, at least not beyond medieval England. William Whitla’s analysis of Morris’s use of language in his translations of Homer’s Odyssey and a fragment of the Iliad is a persuasive guide here. He argues that “Morris’s own comments show that his archaism deliberately situates his translation in a literary and political context, and is part of the widespread debates on the ‘Homeric Question’ raised by F.A. Wolf in his Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795). Wolf proposed a multiple authorship for the poems about a mythic past, that they were originally collections of folk lays, and that they were written in an archaic language, encoding an honour-code ethical system.”39 While it may initially seem difficult to argue that the newer Aeneid could be deeply rooted in collections of older myth and folk tale, as the multiple-author theory asserts for the more ancient Homeric epics, Morris seemed convinced that a communal authorship was probable. Riddehough claims that Morris reproduced “not so much Virgil as the barbaric old materials that Virgil’s art transmuted.”40 Indeed, where else would Morris’s loyalties lie, in this period of his burgeoning political awareness, than with that throng of archaic voices that sustained the oral mythic traditions and quasi-historical tales that ultimately made Virgil’s synthesized epic possible?

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The turn to a Nordic prosody actually predates Morris’s Aeneid. In his translated fragment of the Odyssey’s opening invocation to the muse, written in 1873, Morris is already employing the rhyming anapestic hexameter that the full translation would use fourteen years later.41 It is, significantly, the voice and metre of Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, begun in October 1875, just as the Aeneids of Virgil translation was made ready for the press. May Morris records that the same notebook that holds the beginning of Sigurd’s first draft also contains the start of the Virgil translation dated 14 December 1874.42 As Jane Ennis notes, this is Morris’s adoption of the Langzeile of old Germanic poems, notably the Nibelungenlied saga from which Sigurd is derived.43 For Virgil, however, Morris used the metre and form employed in George Chapman’s Homer (which, coupled with the matching titles The Odysseys of Homer and The Aeneids of Virgil, shows an intentional connection). His rhyming iambic heptameter couplets (or “rapid fourteeners” in Riddehough’s words)44 support a vocabulary that seems, as Riddehough argues in respect to Morris’s Odyssey, to evince a “curious hatred of the Latin element in the English language.”45 Yet his word choice is not so curious when seen as a strategy for reframing the classic in an English tradition. Whitla notes of the Homer translations that Morris’s “Anglo-Saxon diction” is highly accurate, and serves to “suppress … the ethnic otherness” of the ancient epics.46 Simultaneously Morris’s metre choice stresses the classic’s supposed folk origins and seeks to fit them into the English tradition of heroic oral sagas. Morris’s careful respect for the structure of his sources necessitated what Whitla calls “double translation,” first rendering the epic into literal prose without loss of meaning or distortion of lines, and then rewording it into a stylized medieval idiom where Morris’s own poetic input could be subtly woven throughout. This is an early form of his efforts to “align his translation theory and practice with his political goals,”47 that is, to amplify and thus recuperate the otherwise muted voice of the common people.48 The Aeneid is often viewed as a panegyric of Augustus’s time and a textual founding of Rome, providing a dominant voice, an authoritative version of the events that defined the society. Morris sees it rather as a consolidation, a “compilation and plagiarism” of the myriad chroniclers and poets from whom Virgil drew. As Jessie Kocmanová says, Morris is seeking the common voice on which the epic is founded.49 To do this he divests Virgil of the golden frames and ornament of the classical Latin’s

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majesty, and much of the classic setting’s language and style. He does for Aeneas what medieval poets did for Greek myth and legend – recasts it and makes it his own. Morris’s first Aeneid strategy involved matching Virgilian ekphrasis with his own, bringing his own political and social preoccupations to the fore. However, the ambiguity and constriction of his role as co-embellisher hamstrung those initial efforts. His second attempt, in which he worked alone, reconstituted the Aeneid at the most basic level of language and imbued it with his own nascent political concerns – misgivings about the imperial hegemonic roots of the warriorhero – and with the desire to bring the epic to the English tradition so that it could be received in the anti-elitist spirit of an ancient popular culture, like Beowulf and Malory. But if the political message underpinning Morris’s poetic rendering of the Aeneid in 1875 was still too opaque, he would soon bridge the distance between his private art, translation, and the public sphere by entering a sustained program of public education: a series of lectures on the lesser arts, their history, and their social implications. He would explicate the growing revolutionary impulse of his “philosophy of the decorative” in a series of lectures, undertaken shortly after his translation of Virgil’s epic. For Morris’s great faith and interest in the educational potential of the “lesser arts” is not divorced from his time; rather, he recognized the Victorian public’s historically unprecedented interest in and consumption of visual elements, and strove to turn that fascination into a widespread appreciation of aesthetic materials by investing these elements with a deliberate artistic care they had seldom enjoyed since the fifteenth century. He used the Victorian enthusiasm for ornament to arouse social and political awareness. As Morris said in an early public speech,50 new life had to be found for the arts, but he also meant within them: a potential for profound meaning and a utility of spiritual purpose lay in the overlooked possibilities of ornament and design.51

3 As an instance of the revived lesser arts, illuminated books, in Morris’s day, were a potential path to political and spiritual reform. They represented a break with the capitalist machinery that took the means of production out of the hands of the individual artist and that considered beauty and personal expression optional or dispensable. Morris’s orna-

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mental experiments show his increasing preoccupation with conveying the basic principles of his social philosophy, specifically through art. Foremost among these principles was the necessity of ensuring gratifying labour for each individual. This was exemplified in his vision of a resurrected model of medieval craftsmanship where work is not enslavement to an alien external force, but an opportunity for creative self-fulfillment. Morris saw the potential of craft as much more than a degraded lesser art pitted against the exclusivist higher arts, but as an act of satisfying selfobjectification – the inherent right of every human actor rather than the privilege of an affluent few. The force of Morris’s lectures on the lesser arts lies in their affirmation of the ornament, not as a peripheral adjunct, but as an integral component of social and practical existence. Beauty must be part of utility, aesthetics a part of the political, ornament a part of the epical. As he argued in his 1891 lecture “On the Woodcuts of Gothic Books”: All organic art, all art that is genuinely growing, opposed to rhetorical, retrospective, or academical art, art which has no real growth in it, has two qualities in common: the epical and the ornamental; its two functions are the telling of a story and the adornment of a space or tangible object. The labour and ingenuity necessary for the production of anything that claims our attention as a work of art are wasted, if they are employed on anything else than these two aims. Medieval art, the result of a long unbroken series of tradition [sic], is pre-eminent for its grasp of these two functions, which, indeed, interpenetrate then more than in any other period. Not only is all its special art obviously and simply beautiful as ornament, but its ornament also is vivified with forcible meaning, so that neither in one or the other does the life ever flag, or the sensuous pleasure of the eye ever lack. You have not got to say, Now you have your story, how are you going to embellish it? Nor, Now you have made your beauty, what are you going to do with it? For here are the two together, inseparably a part of each other.52 Later in the same lecture, Morris noted that “if books were largely ornamented in this way, some modus vivendi would be found between the ornamental and the story-telling capacity of the art.”53 This modus vivendi, this ease of harmony between text and image, has its parallel in Morris’s striving to imbue the Aeneid’s ancient text with incipient social,

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if not consciously political, resonances. Indeed, this coalescence of the decorative and the narrative (fittingly epitomized in the Virgilian ekphrasis) reflects Morris’s transformative views on the nature of work. The dialectical convergence of the epical and the ornamental is but another expression of Morris’s doctrine of gratifying labour, where work loses its punitive, exploitative aspects and crystallizes into ennobling praxis, an energizing activity shared by every member of society and signifying the supersession of class division. One of Morris’s most innovative contributions to Victorian society is located in his paratext, the synthesis of word, image, and design into multi-faceted physical works whose elements should be interpreted in tandem. Unfortunately, the critical marginalization (pun intended) of his decorative borders has hampered a full appreciation of his philosophy of art, despite his own assertion that the epical and ornamental, the useful and the beautiful, the political and the aesthetic are to be grasped as a harmonious whole. From the standpoint of principles articulated in the “lesser arts,” the illuminated Aeneid can be seen as a casualty of society’s unpreparedness for Morris’s dialectical thinking. The artifact carried within it the seeds of his regenerative ideals: appreciation, even veneration, of craft, which for Morris meant the humane restructuring of work and society. With the Aeneid, Morris reached the end of his direct explorations of calligraphy and illumination, a project that had occupied much of his spare time. The timing and nature of the event suggest that it was intimately connected to the arc of his personal development. His quest for creative autonomy was a factor in the dissolution of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.; the ambitious collaboration with Burne-Jones on the Aeneid challenged that autonomy. The abandonment of the Aeneid manuscript did not indicate a schism between Morris and Burne-Jones, but rather a manifestation of their diverging sensibilities and of the tension within both men. It represented the challenge of Morris’s life: reconciling a profoundly held belief in the innate value of beautiful craftsmanship and of quiet reflection with his exploration of political agency and shared responsibility for social change. Here lay the beginnings of Morris’s effort to investigate the models of epic masculinity with which he and his friend had become so deeply imbued in their youth and to transform them into an alternative model of heroism. Surely, Burne-Jones’s gentle and vulnerable heroes (such as his half-armoured Perseus, whom Arscott notes is “presented at some remove from the impregnable imperial hero”)54 played a

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role in this re-evaluation of the masculine hero, just as we know the Icelandic sagas did. If political agency such as Aeneas’s empire founding is traditionally seen as a masculine duty, artistic life is stereotypically seen as passive, contemplative, even effeminate; yet there are many points where such binary distinctions break down. In the illuminated Aeneid, Aeneas is, admittedly, depicted in rare moments with dynamic power (and this with Morris’s encouragement), most strikingly in Burne-Jones’s image of Aeneas slaying Mezentius; but, here, Aeneas is obeying fate, bowing to divine will as the feminine figures do throughout the illumination. The final image to be considered opens Book XI, and it most clearly shows this mingling of strength, self-sacrifice, and mercy (see figure 2.10, Aeneas Displays the Armour of Mezentius). The manuscript illumination remains unfinished, but the composition is striking nonetheless. Aeneas holds his ponderous shield on his back, between himself and the armour in the branches. His head is bowed against the top border, beneath his scarlet war banner, and he seems to look askance at the empty cuirass hanging beside him. Aeneas’s lightly rendered face is sad, but young, clean-shaven, and handsome. This is Burne-Jones’s younger hero, but the miniature as a whole depicts Morris’s bitter lost soldier. By contrast, in Burne-Jones’s unpublished sketch of Aeneas at the Tomb of Mezentius, Morris’s influence can be seen in the older bearded face given to Aeneas, who has cast aside his helmet as he stands guard over the oak tree supporting the arms of his fallen foe. Aeneas’s actions underscore his humaneness: he has fulfilled the Etruscan king’s dying wish by interring him with his son and allows a truce for burial of the fallen. Sick of slaughter, he takes upon himself the duty of his army and offers to engage Turnus in single combat so the battle might be decided with only one more death. In Morris’s translation, he groans that “otherwhere to other tears the same dread war-fates call”55 and appeals to Turnus to pity his people and consent to the bout. In this, the contemplative beauty of the manuscript’s visuals is transformed, indeed, enhanced. The beautiful is galvanized by the necessity for self-sacrifice, for a productive energy. Aeneas’s great fate is inevitable and, like that of Achilles, is forged onto his shield – not the personal doom of a warrior, but the greater social cause that will be made possible by his sacrifice and individual heroism. L.R. Lind writes that of “the three great classical epic heroes, Vergil’s Aeneas is the most modern in his sense of responsibility, social consciousness and his serious moral purpose. He is committed to a cause that transcends per-

Figure 2.10. Aeneas Displays the Armour of Mezentius, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

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sonal ambitions … it is a cause in which selfhood is merged, to its greater glory, with the welfare of others.”56 These comments reveal a consonance between Morris’s own evolving construct of the sensitive epic hero (evident in particular in his later romances) and Virgil’s Aeneas. Indeed, considered closely, the heroes of Morris’s late romances exemplify this male prototype: they have this “barbaric virtue”57 of placing communal preservation above self-interest and of fighting against imperialistic aggression. In Morris’s romance A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark (1889), the Gothic tribes meet in the face of Romanled invasion to choose their war-duke, Thiodolf the Wolfing, but his first act as unanimously elected leader is to bid them choose a second war-duke from another tribe to help in the campaign. And the mighty warrior then nominated, Heriulf, then says his wisdom is not of the sort that can help them defeat this new foe, and nominates an old and cunning man, Otter of the Laxings. Each man considers not only the will of his people, but also his greater understanding of his own strengths and weaknesses, and then makes selfless decisions based on the good of the tribe.58 It is tempting to consider Morris’s own movement into socialist activism in this sense of a citizen called upon to sacrifice his personal comfort and preferred mode of being for the common need of his people. A key aspect of this leadership role is that a hero makes himself a visible target for criticism and reprisal, not only sharing the vulnerability of the tribe, but as far as possible inviting all such retaliation to fall upon himself rather than on those he defends. Thiodolf’s removal of the magical dwarf-wrought hauberk, which protects his body but corrupts his empathy, is in this vein: he calls the armour “the ransom of a man and the ruin of a folk,”59 and his ally Arinbiorn imagines “the kindreds that I love [filling] the whole earth, and [leaving] no room for foemen: even so it may really be one day.”60 The Morrisean hero is a chivalric humanist and, like Aeneas, holds his people’s well-being as his most noble priority. Similarly, Osberne in The Sundering Flood is elected war leader at a town meeting, and he too takes up his dangerous title out of compliance with the proto-democratic decision rather than from any personal desire for power or glory.61 ❖

The Aeneid’s illuminated aesthetics are integral to the evolving praxis of its makers, Morris and Burne-Jones. Morris’s politics were never marked by intransigent activism or slavishly held, unexamined views, but evolved through episodes of self-reflection and deepening analysis. The Aeneid

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project seen in context – with Morris’s English translation, Burne-Jones’s ambitious Perseus series, and their later paintings and printed projects in sight – marks a crucial intertwining of the epical and ornamental, an experiment that dialectically clarified the paths ahead towards anti-imperialism and a new social role for the minor arts. It was followed by Morris’s first public lectures and discourse, by political study and growth, and finally by the project that superseded this collaboration while owing so much to it: the triumphantly realized Kelmscott Chaucer. Taken together, the two Aeneid interpretations are a symbol of that moment of crisis which brought Morris into public action. Morris later claimed his ideals were already socialist in principle, but his aspirations lagged behind until loss of faith in parliamentary politics and a perceived need for a championing of the working class goaded him into action.62 In 1875, Morris laid down his swan’s-feather quill and gilder’s tip and, instead of completing his last precious illumination, made rather of the Aeneid a plainly printed English ballad that was half-paean, half-dirge, and that might be profitably read by all. As Florence Boos argues,63 it is this period of critical engagement and rejection of imperialist policies that led Morris from his first Ruskin- and Carlyle-inspired critiques of capitalism to fully realize his unique loyalties. In Morris’s remaining years, his equal commitments to practical social action and to the melding of aesthetic and political principles would make his art both uniquely beautiful and profoundly useful.

Appendix: The Aeneid Frontispieces The twelve half-page miniatures Morris and Burne-Jones designed as frontispieces for each of The Pre-Raphaelite Aeneid’s twelve books are now in varying stages of completion, thanks to later hands. Around 1890, Morris sold the unfinished Aeneid to Charles Fairfax Murray, who was determined to finish the volume. Murray accessed Burne-Jones’s drawings and copied them onto the vellum, then hired Louise Powell to do the painting and Graily Hewitt to transcribe the second half of the text and provide gilding. The frontispieces are as follows: •

Book I (p. 1) Venus Meets Aeneas on the Shores of Libya, with a full-page border of burnished gold grapevines against a ground of unburnished gold leaf.

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•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

Book II (p. 29) Aeneas Fleeing Troy with a full-page acanthus and floral border in pen and ink. Book III (p. unknown) Aeneas and the Harpies. Though not copied into the manuscript, the pencil design can be seen at the Fitzwilliam Museum (which owns twenty-nine preparatory drawings made by Burne-Jones for the project ca 1873–74). Book IV (p. 86) Dido Stabbing Herself, with a full-page acanthus border in pen and ink. Book V (p. 113) The Burning of the Ships, with a full-page acanthus border in pen and ink. Book VI (p. 146) Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld, with a full-page acanthus border in pen and ink. This page has not been published. Book VII (p. 181) Lavinia in the Palace of Latinus, with a fullpage painted border with two types of green foliage and berries against a dark red ground. Book VIII (p. 211) Venus Brings Arms to Aeneas, with a fullpage border of white acanthus around blue foliage and white flowers against a dark red ground, each side with a central quatrefoil of pointillé-patterned burnished gold. Book IX (p. 238) Iris Appearing before Turnus, with a full-page border of green vine leaves on plaited tendrils surrounded by curling tendrils with red berries and white flowers on a dark blue ground. Book X (p. 268) Aeneas Slaying Mezentius, with a full-page acanthus border in pen and ink. Book XI (p. 302) Aeneas at the Tomb of Mezentius, with a fullpage acanthus border in pen and ink. This page has not been published before now. Book XII (p. 336) The Death of Turnus, with a full-page acanthus border in pen and ink. This page has not been published.

This information is primarily taken from the catalogue description of Christie’s, The William Morris Aeneid: The Property of the Lord LloydWebber (London: Christie’s International UK, 27 November 2002).

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Radical Tales: Rethinking the Politics of William Morris’s Last Romances p h i l l i p pa b e n n e t t

In June 1872, William Morris sent his “abortive novel” to Louisa Baldwin, apologizing: “It is just a specimen of how not to do it, and there is no more to be said thereof: ’tis nothing but landscape and sentiment: which thing won’t do.” This was to be Morris’s first and last attempt at writing a novel, for he concluded his letter: “So there’s an end of my novel writing I fancy, unless the world turns topsides under some day.”1 It may seem surprising that a man with such literary ability, who, in other areas of his life, demonstrated such commitment and perseverance, would abandon novel writing altogether on the basis of one slight and supposedly unsuccessful attempt. A clue might be found, however, in the words of the protagonist of one of Morris’s own early stories, “Frank’s Sealed Letter” (1856), who claims: “I could soon find out whether a thing were possible or not to me; then if it were not I threw it away for ever, never thought of it again; no regret, no longing for that; it was past and over to me.”2 Morris certainly did not appear to regret unduly his “failure” as a novelist; in earlier years he had similarly discovered that he was not cut out to be a clergyman, an architect, or a painter, and none of these revelations had a detrimental effect on his future work as an artist, writer, and businessman. As the protagonist goes on to say in “Frank’s Sealed Letter”: “But if it were possible, and I made up my mind to do it, then and there I began it, and in due time finished it, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left till it was done.”3 If Morris abandoned one thing, it was because he saw something better suited to his needs and abilities, and one need look no further than the success of Morris and Co. or the time and energy Morris dedicated to

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the socialist movement to find evidence of his commitment and perseverance to something he believed was “possible.” Morris’s decision to abandon novel writing is interesting, however, not because it indicates a perceived lack of ability but because of what it tells us about Morris’s inclinations and motivations as a writer and about how these were influenced by his commitment to socialism in the 1880s and 1890s. If Morris felt unable to write one in the 1870s, by the 1880s and 1890s the novel was unable to satisfy his own needs as a writer and a socialist, necessitating the choice of what he believed to be a more dynamic and relevant mode of writing in both literary and political terms. In adopting the romance as a model for the stories he wrote in the last few years of his life, Morris found a better and more inclusive means of expressing what most interested and concerned him as a writer and a socialist. A number of critics have tackled the undoubtedly thorny problem of interpreting the last romances as socialist narratives, and it is not my intention to rehearse these arguments here. My aim in this chapter is rather to show how, in these final works, Morris was less concerned with demonstrating general socialist principles in practice than with exploring the nature and challenges of political activism and defining the values that underpinned his personal engagement with, and commitment to, the socialist movement. Examining the romances in this way offers an alternative and less restrictive means of accounting for them as narratives written at the end of Morris’s most active socialist period and, more importantly, enables us to understand these works not merely as literary reflections of Morris’s socialism but as an integral element of his political praxis.

The Politics of Form Before considering the specific aspects of Morris’s final stories that support such an interpretation, it is worth considering briefly why Morris, as writer and socialist, evidently found the romance a more amenable form than the novel. As a reader Morris was by no means averse to the novel. In his list of favourite books submitted by request to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1886, a section on “Modern Fiction” includes Daniel Defoe, Dumas the elder, Victor Hugo, and George Borrow; in a marginal note, Morris asserts: “I should like to say here that I yield to no-one … in my love and admiration for Scott; also that to my mind of the novelists of

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our generation Dickens is immeasurably ahead.”4 Novels certainly had a place therefore in the affection of Morris the reader, and May Morris recalls that “there were no happier hours of our home evenings” than when Morris read from “one of the family classics,” which included Huckleberry Finn, as well as Froissart and the Icelandic sagas.5 Nonetheless, the list of novels and novelists Morris considered worthy of attention is notably select in an age when the realist novel held such a dominant place in literary culture. Indeed, Morris appeared to find the subject matter of many contemporary novels at best uninspiring and at worst inflected with bourgeois capitalist ideology. In his 1888 lecture “The Society of the Future” he bemoans the fact that the literary critics of the day spent their time “elevating mere rhetorical word-spinners and hunters of introspection above such masters of life as Scott and Dickens,” while anticipating how, in a post-revolutionary future, the new society “will no longer be able to have novels relating the troubles of a middleclass couple in their struggle towards social uselessness, because the material for such literary treasures will have passed away.”6 Morris expresses this contempt for the content of many contemporary novels even more vehemently in News from Nowhere (1890), when Ellen rebukes her grandfather for his interest in “books of the past days” – a clear reference to the nineteenth-century novel – noting how invariably “towards the end of the story we must be contented to see the hero and heroine living happily in an island of bliss on other people’s troubles; and that after a long series of sham troubles (or mostly sham) of their own making, illustrated by dreary introspective nonsense about their feelings and aspirations and all the rest of it.”7 The stories of most interest to the Nowherians instead appear to be those that adorn the walls of the Bloomsbury dining hall where Guest sits down to eat with Old Hammond, stories “full of incident” with subjects “taken from queer old-world myths and imaginations.”8 Such stories appealed to Morris as much as to the citizens of Nowhere, and they were not the stories being told by the nineteenth-century novel. If Morris as reader thus had very real reservations about many of the novels being written in his era, as a writer he was unable to conform to the constraints of the realist narrative and, more pertinently, what he regarded as its political complacency. This had perhaps already become clear to him when he abandoned his writing of what is now known as The Novel on Blue Paper, but his later commitment to socialism clarified and confirmed it. Critics including Carole Silver, Patrick Brantlinger, and

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James Buzard have discussed Morris’s rejection of the novel as an essentially bourgeois form, Brantlinger and Buzard both, for different reasons, describing News from Nowhere as an “anti-novel” that critiques “a form whose day, it hopes, has passed.”9 Certainly by the 1880s and 1890s Morris’s political beliefs had made it impossible for him to write about the everyday trials, tribulations, and triumphs of middle-class couples. Instead, he began in the final years of his life to write a series of stories that were, to use Old Hammond’s words, “full of incident,” and that simultaneously demonstrated the values and ideals he associated with socialism. Morris himself referred to his final fictional works in his letters and diaries as simply “stories” or “tales,” thus evading precise definition of them in terms of a specific literary form or genre, but inevitably there has been a desire to categorize them ever since. Fiona MacCarthy, Morris’s most recent biographer, refers to these narratives as his “1890s’ novels” and, even more surprisingly, as examples of “early science fiction,” but they are neither.10 The Well at the World’s End (1896) and The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897) are certainly novel-length with fully developed, complex plots, and all these final narratives demonstrate the detailed attention to surroundings and the emotional and psychological realism we would expect from the nineteenth-century novel, but these aspects alone are not enough to justify defining them as such. Indeed they have as much in common with the fairy tale as they do with the novel, with their dwarfs, witch-wives, and wise women of the woods, although May Morris recognized the problem in categorizing them narrowly in this way, too, noting that these stories are “very human” and that “the men and women in them are by no means dim and impossible figures going through their tricks in a land of magic.” Instead, she concludes, “they are the fairy-story of a modern mind,” incorporating “many subtleties” not usually associated with the traditional fairy tale.11 The general consensus in Morris scholarship is to refer to these late works as prose romances – a title applied to them by May Morris in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (1936) – and, if we are to categorize and label these narratives, then they are certainly most closely aligned with the literary romance in terms of both content and structure. The romance – variously defined by critics as a form, genre, or mode – had influenced Morris from his earliest days as a writer of both prose and poetry, as demonstrated in his stories for The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856) and in his first collection of poetry The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858). Carole Silver and Amanda Hodg-

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son have indeed defined Morris’s entire literary oeuvre in terms of the romance, with Hodgson claiming that “his views and beliefs found natural and potent expression in this antiquated form.”12 Hodgson’s description of the romance as “antiquated” is however misleading; the romance mode, as W.R.J. Barron has emphasized, has always been endlessly adaptable and thus enduringly relevant – it is “always eager for new worlds to conquer” and always willing to respond to changing social circumstances and ideals.13 Such adaptability meant that after he joined the socialist movement in the 1880s Morris found the romance the best means of articulating his own political interests and concerns in literary terms. Indeed, Carole Silver claims that because of the influence of his politics, Morris’s final works constitute “a new literary genre,” which she calls “the socialist romance.”14 While Silver’s term is in many ways a valid one, it inevitably tends to suggest that these stories serve as a vehicle for socialist doctrine, and I would argue that their achievement is less prescriptive and more holistic than that appellation implies. Socialism was, for Morris, the means of becoming more fully human, and the romance was the mode that allowed the fullest exploration of what it means to be human, with all the challenges, aspirations, suffering, and achievements that entails. He did not in fact need to evolve a new literary genre because he found in the constituent elements of the romance and the values associated with it a pre-existing means of thinking through and commenting on the nature of his own commitment to socialism and on the processes and values that underpinned revolutionary politics – the only politics for Morris that could establish a world in which everyone had the chance to develop their full human potential. Ultimately Morris recognized the romance as the literary form that was most open to the contemplation of possibilities and most interested in opportunities for transformation, both personal and social – an inherently radical form through which radical visions could be realized.

Telling the Tale Such openness to possibilities is indeed inscribed in the very structure of the traditional quest romance with what Barron describes as its “open-endedness and infinite rewritability.”15 Eugene Vinaver has identified this as an essentially social aspect of the romance in its earliest manifestations, the intention being that writers would bequeath stories to their successors

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for them to continue, each narrative thread being capable of “further lengthening,” either by extension into the past or the future.16 The romance thereby anticipates a community of readers and writers – a community that extends through time as well as space – and it is easy to see how such communal inclusiveness would appeal to Morris as a socialist. Indeed, Morris’s own romances share this quality in varying degrees, not least because each tale effectively ends with the protagonists in their youthful prime, the latter years of their lives being narrated briefly in summary. We are thus told of Hallblithe and Puny Fox at the end of The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891) that “many deeds they did together, whereof the memory of men has failed”; The Wood Beyond the World (1894) concludes that “of Walter and the Maid is no more to be told, saving that they begat between them goodly sons and fair daughters,” while the narrator of The Water of the Wondrous Isles asserts: “Now when all this hath been said, we have no more to tell about this company of friends … save that their love never sundered, and that they lived without shame and died without fear.”17 There is clearly plenty of scope for sequels to all the last romances, and even prequels to some, lending these narratives that freedom from “limitation in time or space” which Vinaver sees as characteristic of the medieval prose romance.18 By refusing the closure usually associated with the nineteenth-century novel, these tales have the potential to be truly communal, shared, and developed across generations of writers and readers – or indeed listeners. For in the last romances, as demonstrated by the narrative voices of their concluding paragraphs, there is a sense of these being tales to be told. The “memory of men” having failed to hand down the tale of Hallblithe’s future deeds signifies Morris’s alignment of his story with the oral tradition of folk and fairy tales, a tradition reiterated in the closing chapters of The Sundering Flood (1897), which are related to the gathered folk of Wethermel by the Old Carline, who tells her listeners: “I must pray your patience, as belike it may be somewhat long for a tale of one night’s hall-glee: and on this night must the tale be begun and ended. Hearken then!”19 This sense of tradition is intensified by the very language of the last romances, with their regular employment of archaic diction and syntax. As Norman Talbot has identified, the purpose of the archaisms in these romances is not merely “decorative” but “highly functional,” establishing “a continuum” of tellers and listeners and thereby identifying the stories as “communal property.”20 These are thus tales ideally suited for telling in those thoroughly communal houses of the future which Morris envisaged in his lecture “Art and

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Socialism” (1884), houses “planned in the rational ancient way” with “a big hall” in which the inhabitants would meet, eat, and talk.21 Buzard asserts that in News from Nowhere the telling of stories is deemed an “eccentric hobby or childish pastime,” making Nowhere “a place inhospitable to story-telling.”22 If the status and function of stories are somewhat ambiguous in Nowhere, it is however worth remembering, as the subtitle proclaims, that this is “An Epoch of Rest,” after the turmoil of revolution, a period in which a relatively new-found ability to enjoy the details of everyday life predominates. It is interesting to speculate whether the future Nowhere might be more hospitable to the craft of tale telling, not least because in the romances Morris wrote immediately after News from Nowhere he is keen to emphasize the fundamentally social aspect of storytelling and its role in fostering a sense of a truly communal heritage and culture. Nonetheless Morris’s last romances are written in and for a pre- rather than post-revolutionary society, and there is a clear political dimension to his narrative approach in these works; the “tale” is the form of “the folk,” and hence what Frederic Jameson describes as “the irrepressible voice and expression of the underclasses of the great systems of domination.”23 In drawing upon these narrative traditions in his final works Morris sought to restore the social nature and function of storytelling while recognizing its subversive and revolutionary potential. He understood that stories have the capacity to inspire and transform, and to tell or listen to the tale can thus become an alternative yet powerful mode of political expression and engagement.

Embarking on the Adventure The stories best suited to this revolutionary purpose were, for Morris, as “full of incident” as those depicted on the walls of the Bloomsbury dining hall in News from Nowhere, and here again he found the romance an appropriate vehicle. One of the characteristic features of the romance is its focus on action fuelled by a spirit of adventure, an attribute celebrated by Robert Louis Stevenson in his article “A Gossip on Romance” published in Longman’s Magazine in 1882. Stevenson laments in this article that “English people of the present day are apt, I know not why, to look somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of tea-spoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one.” It is

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a preference all the more surprising in that the traditional demand in literature for adventure, for “fit and striking incident,” is, Stevenson claims, as fundamental to the human condition as “the desire for knowledge” and “the desire for meat.”24 It is the romance that best fulfills this need for Stevenson, although he also observes that it is the romance’s willingness to depict the “brute incident” that often appeals to the supposedly civilized reader, and I have written elsewhere about the violence in Morris’s own romances.25 Nonetheless, in Morris’s final narratives violence is never the aim of the protagonists, necessary though it might at times be, for these young men and women are motivated simply by a strong sense of adventure and a desire for new events and new calls to action. In The Wood Beyond the World, an unhappily married Walter calls to mind “that the world was wide and he but a young man,” telling his father “I would depart … and see other lands,” while Ralph in The Well at the World’s End is anxious “to seek a wider land, and a more stirring life” than he has at Upmeads.26 This firm reliance on a spirit of adventure goes some way to explain the enduring appeal of the romance for Morris, and in his final narratives May Morris observes how “a large part of the reader’s pleasure in these tales” comes from “the narrator’s enjoyment of the steady flow of romantic adventure and invention.”27 Morris recognizes in these works that the adventure story is primarily about opportunity; to embark on an adventure is to relinquish what is safe and known in order to pursue new experiences and be receptive to new possibilities – to put oneself in the way of something better. And there is always an element of surprise involved in the adventure; the adventurer must make his or her peace with uncertainty, must find that uncertainty liberating rather than threatening. Morris’s delight in the adventure story was complemented by his tendency to conceive and approach his own varied projects and endeavours in this way. He memorably referred to the Kelmscott Press as his “little typographical adventure,” and his approach to socialism was construed in a similar vein.28 The process of social revolution was an “enchanted wood” that socialists must traverse if they were ever to reach “the promised land” of communism. In Morris’s poem “The Message of the March Wind” (1885), the wind’s message is that socialists should “Rise up on the morrow / And go on your ways towards the doubt and the strife,” for ultimately this “uprising to deeds shall be sweet.”29 And Morris desperately wanted to be part of such uprising to deeds, writing excitedly to Georgiana Burne-Jones in 1885: “I rather wish I were thirty years

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younger: I want to see the game played out.”30 Embarking on the “adventure” of social revolution was thus in many ways an exciting and invigorating process for Morris, but he by no means underestimated the difficulties and sacrifices it would involve. It would mean leaving behind the secure and familiar – a rejection of the status quo in the pursuit of something better. The newly recruited socialists would, Morris knew, have to relinquish the comfort of conformity and face disapproval and rejection for their commitment to the cause. “You will run the risk of losing position, reputation, money, friends even,” he warns his audience in his lecture “Art and Socialism”; “nor can I assure you that you will for ever escape scot-free from the attacks of open tyranny.” If they are prepared to join him in the socialist movement, he affirms, “I can offer you a position which involves sacrifice; a position which will give you your America at home and make you inwardly sure that you are at least some use to the cause: and I earnestly beg you, those of you who are convinced of the justice of our cause, not to hang back from active participation in a struggle which, whoever helps or whoever abstains from helping, must beyond all doubt end at last in Victory!”31 Morris spoke from his own experiences as a prominent public figure who had adopted a highly unorthodox position that entailed attacking the very class into which he was born, but he also spoke from a more emotionally intimate perspective. His close friend Edward Burne-Jones “always regretted that Morris joined the Socialist Body”; indeed, reflecting on his lack of support for Morris’s political activism after his death, Burne-Jones claimed that it was “the only time when I failed Morris.” Fortunately, as his wife Georgiana observed, “Morris was strong enough to pursue his way alone.”32 His last romances allowed Morris to explore in fictional terms what it meant to commit unwaveringly in this way to a chosen course, despite the hardships it entailed, for as Northrop Frye has demonstrated, the romance contains “a world of exciting adventures,” but these adventures invariably involve “separation, loneliness, humiliation,” and even “pain.”33 Several of the protagonists commence their adventures through acts of rebellion and departure that drive them from familiar territory and companions into personal journeys fraught with danger and uncertainty, as well as great personal suffering. Birdalone’s escape from Evilshaw in The Water of the Wondrous Isles presents the most demonstrably rebellious of all these departures as she outruns her guardian to the Sending Boat, leaving the witch-wife “tossing her arms and screaming, wordless”

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on the shore, provoked in her rage to hurl an axe at Birdalone, who “sat still, nor so much as turned her head toward the witch-wife” as the boat departs.34 Walter’s adventures in The Wood Beyond the World and Ralph’s quest in The Well at the World’s End are also initiated, if in less dramatic terms, by deliberate acts of disobedience. To reach the eponymous Wood, Walter must first abandon his position of authority among his father’s men and the duty of avenging his father’s death, while also rejecting a warning by the old man who has been there that he “try no such adventure” as traversing the mountain pass that leads to the Wood.35 Similarly, Ralph leaves Upmeads surreptitiously and in direct defiance of an agreement that he will stay at home to fulfill the duties of a son and prospective ruler, confessing to his friends Clement and Katherine: “My father and mother would have me stay at home when my brethren were gone, and that liketh me not; therefore am I come out to seek my luck in the world.”36 In each instance, these acts of rebellion move beyond the merely reactionary dynamic of adolescent disobedience and become the positive expression of the protagonists’ determination to engage actively with their worlds – to risk the trials and rewards of the adventure.

Awakening Desire This engagement expresses itself in the last romances through commitment to a particular quest, and it is the latter, with its emphasis on progress towards a vision or objective, that forms the organizing structure and rhythmic momentum of these narratives. Here again Morris’s literary and political affinity with the romance is evident in that the quest also provided a useful metaphor for Morris in defining the socialist mission. The virtues and attributes associated with the quest – action, commitment, sacrifice, courage, perseverance – were those he regarded as essential for the political activist. Like the quest, the work of social revolution is “long and burdensome,” Morris admits in his lecture “How We Live and How We Might Live” (1884). However, the banding together of socialists showed that “the change is going on.” “Take courage,” Morris thus exhorts his audience, for “a good condition of life is being made possible for us, and … it is now our business to stretch out our hands, to take it.”37 And like the quest, the work of political activism demands a commitment to do something to achieve one’s goals rather than merely to dream or contemplate – “the function of the reformers

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now alive is not so much prophecy as action,” Morris asserts in “The Society of the Future’; “it is our business to use the means ready to our hands to remedy the immediate evils which oppress us.”38 Morris’s repeated use of the term “business” is telling: socialism is a task as much as a theory, a practice as much as a vision. And what motivates both the political quester and the questers of his last romances in their commitment to the task and the practice is desire. Gillian Beer claims that the romance “remakes the world in the image of desire,” a claim that emphasizes its close relationship with the utopian tradition in literature. A.L. Morton has written in similar terms that “utopia is an image of desire,” in that “it will always be based on something that somebody actually wants.” Morris himself acknowledges the close association between the two genres in calling News from Nowhere a “Utopian Romance.”39 This alignment with the literary utopia through the central dynamic of desire reveals the political potential of the romance with its shared interest in transformation, and this was surely another of its attractions for Morris, for whom the desire of a world transformed was the lifeblood of socialism. In his lecture “Communism” (1893) he describes how the efforts of socialists must be channelled into “the conversion of the working people to an ardent desire for a society of equality.” In his political lectures Morris repeatedly attempts to stir the desire of his audiences for such a society, asking them in “The Ends and the Means” (1886): “Have you never thought any of you what a changed world it would be if this fear, the basest of all passions, were absent from our lives? How full the streets would be of pleasant faces instead of those worn and dragged and anxious features which are our wear now-a-days; how merry we should be over our work; how kind would be our intercourse with each other; how delightful, how rich with beauty and pleasure our contemplation of the past and the present, and our hopes for the future?”40 Socialism as quest is hereby demonstrated in Morris’s belief that it was essential for those involved in the socialist movement to have a clearly developed vision of a better future which they actively desired and for which they were willing to take action: “Nay, enduring steadiness of purpose is surely impossible,” Morris admitted in the same lecture, “without some high ideal to aim at, nor will a wise man consent to take pains and trouble, to sacrifice his leisure or his pleasure unless he can see and feel that he has set before him something worthy of all that sacrifice.”41 In News from Nowhere, Guest has the privilege of inhabiting that future temporarily, of having, if painfully briefly, his desire fulfilled, and it is an

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experience that enables him on his return to the nineteenth century to go on “striving, with whatsoever pain and labour must be, to build up the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness.”42 Morris’s political lectures are aimed at stirring such potent desire and concomitant action in his listeners – at what Miguel Abensour calls “the education of desire,” their purpose being, Abensour observes, to encourage their audiences “to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire otherwise.”43 This imperative to desire – but also to desire better, more, and otherwise – is powerfully articulated in the last romances. For Northrop Frye, “the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self,” and in Morris’s final narratives desire is shown to be a powerful stimulus and motivation in the quest.44 In The Story of the Glittering Plain, Hallblithe tells the Wanderers when they reach the land of immortality, “I am consumed with my desire, and I may not abide with you,” leaving this place of restored youth and pleasure to seek his beloved and return to his homeland. In The Wood Beyond the World, Walter is driven to pursue the vision of the Maid and the Lady he sees at Langton, because “sore he desired to see both of them again, and to know what they were.” In Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895), Goldilind finds the courage to escape from her imprisonment, because of her “yearning for the loveliness of the world without” and her “hope of the sufficiency of desire.”45 Desire is in all these instances expressed as a positive force – a constructive dynamic that inspires and drives the protagonists. But it can also be problematic, as Fredric Jameson observes: in certain manifestations, “desire, like its paler and more well-behaved predecessor wish-fulfilment, remains locked into the category of the individual subject.”46 This is best exemplified in The Well at the World’s End in which Ralph, arguably the most desire-driven of Morris’s protagonists, finds that his desire has to be re-educated in order to transcend a potentially destructive individualism and achieve a more constructive and social focus. Ralph’s initial desire to leave his homeland and achieve great things in the wider world is temporarily but powerfully overwhelmed by his desire for the Lady of Abundance, whom he meets early in his journey. This desire is intensely personal and sexual. Ralph’s own sense of purpose and identity is subsumed in it, so much so that on the Lady’s death he withdraws into a selfabsorbed grief and tells Richard the Red: “I desire to die.” The perceptive and more experienced Richard replies: “That way is open for thee on any day of the week. Why hast thou not taken it already?” and when Ralph cannot reply, he observes: “Is it not because thou hopest to desire some-

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thing; if not today, then tomorrow, or the next day or the next?”47 Richard recognizes that desire is a fundamental part of the human condition – that even when desire seems dead, the hope of desiring again remains. Ralph’s desire is eventually re-educated through his reunion with Ursula – an altogether more satisfactory companion in that she complements rather than controls Ralph – and his continuation on his quest for the Well at the World’s End. While the waters of the Well restore vitality and confer longevity, both clearly individual benefits, Ralph’s immediate desire after drinking from the Well is to employ its gifts in action and service. “I am grown eager for the road,” he tells Ursula, having dreamed of his homeland. He concludes of the dream: “Surely then it is calling me to deeds.”48 And these deeds now acquire a social as well as personal aspect, for as he subsequently tells Bull Shockhead on his return journey, “I will go home to my kindred, yet on the road will I not gainsay help to any that crave it.”49

Socializing Desire Morris’s last romances do not therefore advocate the sublimation of personal desire, but rather the successful integration of this desire within the context of the social. It is in this fusion of the personal and the social – in the effective re-educating and refocusing of desire – that Morris’s adaptation of the romance to articulate his socialist ideals is most clearly demonstrated. As Carole Silver notes, Morris “dismisses the alternative aims of questers – treasure and empire – as unworthy of socialists,” thereby distinguishing Morris’s quest romances from those of contemporaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson or H. Rider Haggard. The aim of Morris’s quests is to some extent, as Silver claims, “happiness through wisdom or love,” but they are also much more than that, in that they seek to accommodate and apply these personal achievements in processes of communal restoration and integration.50 While the questing protagonists invariably achieve union with the beloved, those unions hold only limited value or meaning unless they lead to social engagement and social contribution, as demonstrated in the conversation between the Maid and Walter in The Wood Beyond the World when they have escaped from the enchanted Wood and the potential danger of the Bear Folk and are reunited in the wilderness. Walter is loath to leave this wilderness, being on the brink of achieving his dominant desire of union with the Maid,

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asking her: “Where shall we find any place sweeter or happier than this?” But the Maid rejects what essentially constitutes a withdrawal from society, stating: “Beloved, I have deemed that it were good for us to go seek mankind as they live in the world, and to live amongst them. I will tell thee the soothe, to wit, that I long for this sorely … I need the comfort of many people, and the throngs of the city.”51 For the Maid, it is only through engagement with the social world, whatever its dangers, that she and Walter can fully achieve their personal potential and, more importantly, make a proper contribution. When they subsequently meet the warriors of the city of Stark-wall, Walter fears that life in the city “shall be tangled unto us,” to which the Maid retorts: “Then shall thy valiancy prevail to cleave the tangle for us. Or at the least, it shall leave a tale of thee behind, and I shall worship thee.”52 The emphasis for the Maid, as for Morris in his political lectures, is on doing and contributing, even if that is at great personal cost – something the Sage of Swevenham comes to recognize through his contact with Ralph and Ursula in The Well at the World’s End. Having drunk of the Well himself and gained longevity and wisdom, the Sage has lived an isolated life, not daring to use the power bequeathed to him by the Well, as he explains to Ralph and Ursula, “lest I should abuse it, I being alone amongst weaklings and fools”; yet he discerns the chance for him to change his life in fellowship with Ursula and Ralph, wondering, as they depart for the Well: “But now if ye come back, who knows but that I may fear no longer, but use my life, and grow to be a mighty man.”53 Morris’s last romances in this way demonstrate how the concerns, desires, and achievements of the individual can only be effectively expressed and consummated within the context of the social. In doing so they manifest what Ernst Bloch defines as the “warm stream” of Marxism, “that homeland of identity, in which neither man behaves towards the world, nor the world behaves towards man, as if towards a stranger.”54 Ruth Levitas has noted the close connection between Morris and Bloch in this regard, in that the “goal” of both is “the transcendence of alienation,” and such transcendence is clearly manifested in the last romances in which each of the protagonists ultimately confirms their identity in terms of both sexual union and social contribution.55 Furthermore, their “homeland of identity” is, with one exception, found finally within the context of their original geographical homelands; Marcus Waithe observes that “Morris unashamedly emphasizes the continued importance of the home and the household in the utopian situation,”

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and home serves as the exemplar of the social in his final works.56 Hence, while Walter and the Maid construct a new homeland for themselves in Stark-wall, all the other protagonists of these narratives conclude their quests in the places of their birth. Hallblithe, sailing away from the Glittering Plain, rejoices “that he was going home to his Kindred and the Roof of his Fathers of old time,” while Christopher in Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair is “eager well nigh unto weeping to behold his people that he should live amongst” on his return to Oakenrealm.57 In The Water of the Wondrous Isles we are told how Birdalone, on hearing of the town of Utterhay from which she was abducted as an infant, is aware of “some memory of the earliest of her days” stirring within her and “began to have a longing” to go there, while Osberne in The Sundering Flood, having helped to secure a new social order in the City of the Sundering Flood, requests of Sir Godrick: “Let me go back to my folk, and the land that I know and that endures before me when others have faded out.”58 The values of home and fellowship are thus articulated in these romances as both instinct and choice – as unconscious longing and conscious pursuit. It is a combination expressed potently through that dream of Upmeads that drinking of the Well at the World’s End inspires in Ralph, and in his subsequent declaration to Richard the Red: “Where then should I go save to the House of my Fathers, and the fields that fed them? What should I do but live amongst my people, warding them from evil, and loving them and giving them good counsel?”59 In these last romances Morris invariably presents the dynamic of the return as progression rather than regression, for returning home always entails moving forward into new spheres of action and responsibility for his protagonists. Thus in his movement from the idle flirtations and inessential occupations of his youth in Upmeads to a position of leadership and wisdom among the people of his homeland, Ralph exemplifies how the quest can only be fully realized when one’s own abilities and possibilities are brought to bear in the wider sphere of a chosen community. If Morris’s protagonists express themselves initially in acts of rebellion and departure, their quests invariably define their progress from positions of social alienation to social integration, and Morris emphasizes how their hard-won autonomy ultimately finds its most effective and dynamic expression within the social structures they transform and revitalize. Thus in The Wood Beyond the World, having been chosen by the people of Stark-wall, Walter “reigned a King, well beloved of his folk,” while the Maid was celebrated as “the land’s increase, and the city’s safeguard, and

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the bliss of the folk,” and, through their shared legacy, the barbaric mode of king making in Stark-wall was eliminated.60 Similarly in The Sundering Flood the people of Wethermel, under the influence of Osberne and Elfhild, “grew better and not the worser,” while in The Well at the World’s End Ralph’s return to Upmeads secures him a position of leadership through which “he ruled over his lands in right and might, and suffered no oppression within them, and delivered other lands and good towns when they fell under tyrants and oppressors.”61 As Morris recognized: “Fellowship is life, and lack of Fellowship is death.” In the conclusions of each of the last romances the personal qualities of the protagonists generate a new era of social cohesion and a communal commitment to the values of fellowship that Morris celebrates so memorably in A Dream of John Ball (1886–87).62

The Necessity of Hope The last romances end with the completion of the quest, the fulfillment of desire, and the establishment of social stability. Thus, a critic might argue, these are stories with fairy-tale endings, if not fairy-tale characters – and fairy-tale endings are not the stuff of politics. This was certainly George Bernard Shaw’s view of Morris’s final narratives, as expounded in his essay “Morris as I Knew Him” (1936). Morris “needed a refuge from reality,” claimed Shaw, particularly “when his Socialist duties involved some specially grimy job in the police court or at the meetings of the [Socialist] League”; and he admitted: “I have used the Morris stories in that way myself, and found them perfectly effective.”63 But Shaw misses the fundamental point of these narratives. They are not about escape; they are about hope, an altogether more radical and constructive concept. If desire is the central motivation of Morris’s quests, hope is the foundation on which it is built, for as Richard the Red suggests in his words to Ralph, hope – including the hope always to desire something – endures longer than any particular individual desire. The irrepressible energy of Morris’s romances is to a large extent the irrepressible dynamic of hope, and this hope is presented as a radical force in that it motivates the protagonists into revolutionary action in order to fulfill their desires. This union of hope and desire reaffirms the shared territory of the literary romance and the literary utopia. Levitas argues that “utopia’s strongest function, its claim to being important rather than a matter of

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esoteric fascination and charm, is its capacity to inspire the pursuit of a world transformed, to embody hope rather than simply desire.”64 It is an argument as relevant to Morris’s last romances as it is to News from Nowhere, but it also has deep significance for Morris’s political and literary endeavours. Hope was a crucial aspect of what Morris described as his “conversion” to socialism, as he emphasized in his 1894 article “How I Became a Socialist.” Prior to joining the movement, Morris describes how he had “a brief period of political radicalism during which I saw my ideal clear enough, but had no hope of any realization of it.” He continues: “That came to an end some months before I joined the (then) Democratic Federation, and the meaning of my joining that body was that I had conceived a hope of the realization of my ideal.”65 Morris recognized hope as an essentially active rather than passive force, “for when people want a better life,” he wrote in a letter of 1891, “I feel sure that they can have it.”66 As Levitas notes, hope is thus a force that seeks nothing less than transformation. Here again, the connections with Bloch are clear, as Morris anticipates Bloch’s emphasis on hope as a vital and dynamic force in shaping human experience. Hope “is in love with success rather than failure,” Bloch asserts. “Hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness. The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them, cannot know nearly enough of what it is that makes them inwardly aimed, of what may be allied to them outwardly. The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.”67 Bloch’s emphasis on hope as necessarily allied to action is exemplified in Morris’s own commitment to the socialist movement. In a letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones in 1883, he reassured her that she “need not be anxious” about his joining the Democratic Federation, as it was then called, explaining how “those who are in the thick of it, and trying to do something, are not likely to feel so much of the hope deferred which hangs about the cause as onlookers do.”68 Hope was essential for the work of the socialist, just as it was essential for the work of the artist, the craftsman, and the writer; indeed, the central criterion in distinguishing “useful work” from “useless toil” for Morris was the fact that “one has hope in it, the other has not.”69 In his last romances Morris purposefully created work that had “hope in it” and that would thus align his artistic and political ideals. “I suppose the best art to be the pictured representation

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of men’s imaginings,” he contemplated in his 1881 lecture “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing”: “Stories that tell of men’s aspirations for more than material life can give them, their struggles for the future welfare of their race, their unselfish love, their unrequited service: things like this are the subject of the best art; in such subjects there is hope surely.”70 These are the stories of the last romances, and as such they had meaning and value for the socialist in spite of Shaw’s protestations to the contrary. Such stories affect the reader, Morris claimed, by “raising his life above the daily tangle of small things that wearies him, to the level of the heroism which they represent.”71 In doing so, they serve as inspiration rather than escapism – as a call to engage rather than to withdraw. For true hope is always heroic for Morris, while hope without concomitant deeds is at best futile and at worst personally, if not socially, destructive – a distinction he demonstrates in practice in his last romances. In The Water of the Wondrous Isles Arthur tells the wood spirit Habundia how, having failed to find Birdalone, “the thought of my hope and my despair ate mine heart out, and I was of no avail unto any.”72 Withdrawing into the forest of Evilshaw, he becomes “more of a beast than a man,” until Habundia rescues him from his state of physical and psychological breakdown; finally united with Birdalone through Habundia’s intervention, he tells her “I should have died if I had not found thee here: I have been sick so long with hoping.”73 In contrast, Birdalone through years of separation sustains her belief that she will one day find both Arthur and her friends from the Castle of the Quest, but more importantly she consistently takes the necessary action to secure this. Hence, as she prepares to leave the security and companionship she has found in the City of the Five Crafts, “despite of the sundering of friends and the perils that belike lay before her, the world seemed fair to her, and life beginning anew.”74 When she subsequently finds the Castle of the Quest empty and the whereabouts of her former companions uncertain, she nonetheless tells Leonard “there is hope within me,” and continues her search for them.75 Ultimately, when faced with crossing the Waters of the Wondrous Isles without the help of the Sending Boat, Birdalone is encouraged to attempt the crossing as “her heart grew stronger, and she seemed to see herself yet alive and in hope on the other side of the water.” This sustaining vision of herself “in hope” compels her to enter the water naked and without any form of assistance for the journey, for as she tells herself: “Who wotteth what Weird may do, or where the waters may bear me? and there is no swimmer stronger than I.”76 Notably, Birdalone’s

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hope is not merely based on wishful thinking – she trusts to her knowledge of her own abilities as much as to chance, which gives her the confidence, in Bloch’s words, to “throw [herself] actively into what is becoming.”77 This call to courageous engagement demanded by hope was perhaps the most important and enduring of Morris’s messages as a writer and a socialist, and it is thus appropriate that it finds its most poignant expression in his very last story, The Sundering Flood, on which he worked in the final days before his death. Osberne and Elfhild have “lived on in hope” that one day they would be united, despite the Sundering Flood, but Osberne recognizes that it is only by translating that hope into action that it has any chance of being fulfilled.78 He thus determines to leave his homeland and undertake a perilous and uncertain quest in order to find Elfhild, who dwells on the other side of the impassable river, asking her: “How might it ever come about that we might meet bodily if I abode ever at Wethermel and the Dale in peace and quietness, while thou dwelt still with thy carlines on the other side of this fierce stream?”79 As the Old Carline later relates, it is their “truth and good-faith and constancy,” but also their enduring “hope without reward” that sustains them through great personal danger and suffering over the five years they are separated, and that secures their eventual union. In the days of joy that follow, Osberne tells his kinsfolk: “Now forsooth is no hope in my heart, for all the hope has budded and blossomed and fruited.”80 Morris’s last romances are his final statement, as a writer and a socialist, on the necessity of hope. They are no less worthy of consideration than News from Nowhere in that they show that hope “budded and blossomed and fruited,” rather than being deferred. In his lecture “Communism,” Morris acknowledged that converting the majority of men and women to socialism was “such a big thing to bring about, that it will take a long time to do so.” The fact that a conversion on this scale had not yet happened and that “a sudden and speedy change” of society now seemed less likely than in the first years of the British socialist movement meant that he and his colleagues “must now take soberer views of our hopes.” But did that mean socialists were “to give up all hope” of educating people in socialism? “Surely not,” concludes Morris. “Let us use all means possible for drawing them into Socialism, so that they may at last find themselves in such a position that they understand themselves to be face to face with false society, themselves the only possible elements of true society.” Indeed, Morris goes on to assert: “I must hope that we

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can instil into the mass of people some spirit of expectation, however vague, beyond the needs of the year.”81 For socialists, Morris thus insists, hope is not a choice but an obligation, a point reiterated more recently by Raymond Williams, who, in his assessment of the progress and setbacks of socialism in the twentieth century, concludes: “We must speak for hope.”82 It was a willingness not only to speak for hope, but also to act for hope, that defined Morris’s socialism, and in his last romances he shows us what that might mean.

Conclusion “A great romancer should be examined in terms of the conventions he chose,” writes Northrop Frye. “William Morris should not be left on the sidelines of prose fiction merely because the critic has not learned to take the romance form seriously. Nor, in view of what has been said about the revolutionary nature of the romance, should his choice of that form be regarded as an ‘escape’ from his social attitude.”83 The romance, with its interest in desire, its pursuit of transformation, and its justification of hope was for Morris, as a socialist, the most appropriate of literary forms. If Morris was a great romancer, it was because he was also a great desirer and a great hoper, and desire and hope appeal as strongly to one generation of readers as another. Carole Silver suggests that the last romances “are tales to be depicted on the walls of the communal dining halls of Nowhere or to be told around the fireplace of a rejuvenated Kelmscott Manor,” and indeed they are stories in which we can imagine the Nowherians delighting.84 Paul Thompson expresses a similar view, believing that while these stories were created primarily for Morris’s “own pleasure,” they were perhaps also created “for the society of the future, like the Kelmscott Press where he had them printed.”85 But we should avoid projecting the relevance and full appreciation of these romances into a prospective and truly communist future, because to do so is to overlook the very real relevance they had for Morris’s contemporaries and that they continue to have for us. It is also to overlook the status of these final works as an alternative but equally valuable element of Morris’s political engagement and praxis. The writing of these romances was, for Morris, a political act in itself. His choice of form and his use of language constituted a conscious rejection of the nineteenth-century novel and its limited political aspirations, for

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he believed that even those novelists who, in the words of Ellen from News from Nowhere, show “some feeling” for the poor, either “give it up” in the end or at best promote reform rather than revolution.86 This does not however necessitate a reductive political reading of the romances and their purpose. Ruth Kinna claims that Morris “renewed his interest in story-telling” in the final years of his life, believing that “literature was the most useful tool of socialist propaganda,” but the last romances are more subtle and complex than this suggests and go beyond mere political statement.87 They were, for Morris, a way of understanding more deeply what it meant to commit to a revolutionary movement, and of articulating the motivations, values, and actions which defined what it meant to live an “eager life” – that fully human life he believed only socialism could help us to attain.88 The last romances are not complex political allegories or political propaganda, nor do they speak directly of the daily grind of late-nineteenth-century political activism, but they do speak of and for hope – and that, like the tale of the Old Carline in The Sundering Flood, is something worth listening to.

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Telling Time: Song’s Rhythms in Morris’s Late Work elizabeth helsinger

Morris largely abandoned lyric for prose in the last decades of his life. Or did he? Certainly in the 1880s Morris devoted enormous energies to speaking and writing prose for the Cause. After 1886 his major literary works were prose romances. Romance, as John Goode argued in a seminal 1971 essay, became Morris’s “power for seeing the future in the present,” effecting through art “the transformation of individual epistemology” into “revolutionary consciousness.”1 I shall argue, however, that this transformation was also a lyric project for Morris – indeed, that song played a crucial role in the transformational political work of Morris’s writing throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Morris composed a number of songs for socialist gatherings, many of them collected as Chants for Socialists (1885, 1888).2 He had also long embedded song-poems (short lyrics described as sung) in his verse and prose romances, a practice he continued in the romances written in his last decades. The few Morris scholars who have discussed the Chants focus on their discursive messages, praising them as political writing or dismissing them as propaganda, but rarely attending to their specifically lyric strategies.3 The song-poems that Morris included in the late romances have fared no better; they are almost always overlooked in critical discussion. What interests me is what both these kinds of late lyric composition do prosodically: how their rhythms tell the time of lyric poetry differently from prose. Why should that lyric difference matter for the project of epistemological transformation – bringing an as-yetunimaginable future into being in the hearts and minds of present readers – in which Morris’s late writings seem to be engaged? How do these songs tell time, in multiple senses?

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Morris is unusual among poets in the second half of the nineteenth century: he turned from the romantic lyric tradition he inherited to focus on poetry as a culture’s collective voice. To write community into being became both a political and a poetic project. Fellowship, he believed, could be not only taught but realized in the performance of song and story. That project is tentatively explored in The Earthly Paradise (1868– 70), but there community is forged through the exchange of cultural stories whose purchase on the present is unclear. The pursuit of fellowship as a radical political aim more strongly marks his later twenty-year engagement with epic and romance.4 But it also shapes his understanding of lyric when, accepting the necessity of socialist revolution, he turned to differing combinations of verse and prose with short, vernacular forms of chant and song. Rhythm, I shall argue, was central in his efforts to use lyric to forge a social body and sustain it in the complex time it must inhabit. Morris used rhythm to engage both bodies and minds, but did so in order to move those his works addressed5 to desire a common weal, to become a new social body. A certain impersonality, or more-thanpersonal voice, is, of course, a characteristic of song. Songs are iterable. Employing forms and rhythms that belong to a culture, song in this sense is already a collective possession, originating before and surviving beyond the life of any singer. Sung lyric is no longer personal. Morris’s originality lies in his steady effort in later life to mobilize these characteristics of song as an active politics.

Chants for Socialists Rhythm in Morris’s later poetry is ordered movement made more than ordinarily perceptible, a matter for conscious reflection. It is, to be sure, “a framework which controls, inflects, paces, and nuances the meanings of the words it is carried by,” in T.V.F. Brogan’s considered definition, but rhythm is also an independent power with both risks and possibilities to which we must attend.6 Morris deploys metre and rhyme as structures that emphasize compelling movement while preserving clarity – indeed simplicity – of language and syntax, arranged in easily followed, repeating patterns. This is not to say that his poetry sounds like speech: it is meant to be read, chanted, or sung aloud. Following the lead of his beloved Walter Scott (in narrative poems like “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”), Morris first used rhythm to reopen the border between literate and oral forms. Several years before he began

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political work in the socialist cause, he developed a common measure for epic narrative that, as Herbert Tucker perceptively points out, uses midand end-line rhyme followed by marked pauses to evoke the unsounded extra beats that turn heroic hexameter couplets into English ballad measure (rhymed four-beat, four-line stanzas).7 This prosodic melding of English ballad rhythm with the weight and extension of great epic verse, developed for his adaptation of the old Norse saga The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (1876) and used in his translations of other early epics over the next two decades (the Odyssey [1887], Beowulf [1895]), bears for Morris a political meaning: it recovers epic as part of the prehistory of a genuinely popular culture of song. Morris’s first contributions to that culture, songs written for use at political rallies for the working classes and structured to encourage participatory chanting, use forms of ballad metre. The return passage from print to oral performance, he discovered, could amplify the action of language set to a rhythmic beat. “Wake, London Lads!” Morris’s earliest political song, was composed at the request of the organizers of a massive Workmen’s Neutrality Demonstration to protest Britain’s threatened entry into war with Russia in support of Turkey. Morris’s “inspiriting song” opened the large meeting at Exeter Hall in January 1878.8 Wake, London Lads! The hour draws nigh, The bright sun brings the day; Cast off the shame, cast off the lie, And cast the Turk away!9 “When we took our places in the orchestra,” Georgiana Burne-Jones reported, “the whole hall before us was spotted with white leaflets of the new poem and without rehearsal, without confusion, it was sung by the standing mass of people, with a great cheer at the end of each of the five verses.”10 Morris, strongly moved, described the meeting as “magnificent: orderly and enthusiastic.” According to Henry Broadhurst, stonemason, trade union leader, and an organizer of the event, “The effect when the burning words were thundered forth by the vast assembly was electrifying.”11 Morris clearly took note of the particular power those in attendance experienced in the massed chanting of the refrains, heard as deep rolling sound and felt as physical thrill. The strong vibrations of collective voice “thundered forth,” “electrifying” the singers, transforming them from heterogeneous, disorganized individuals to a unified, galva-

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nized (electrified), yet (in Morris’s words) “orderly” mass. Even at this early stage, order was a concern. Chants for Socialists, which he began composing in 1883, incorporate the lessons of this first success in the practical political use of chant and song. “The March of the Workers,” sung to close a socialist meeting in January 1885, became one of Morris’s most popular songs.12 Like others of Morris’s Chants, it is constructed so that the pulse or beat that sets highly structured language in motion will draw those present to actualize the effects its figures ask them to imagine. The chant, using an eightbeat measure (essentially two ballad lines combined) for its first three lines, followed by a fourth line of four beats, is organized into sets of fourline stanzas (rhymed aaab, with the b rhyme repeated at the end of each stanza) followed after every two stanzas by a four-line chorus. Here is the first stanza: What is this, the sound and rumour? What is this that all men hear, Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm is drawing near, Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear? ’Tis the people marching on.13 The opening question (“What is this?”) directs the attention of what is invoked as a great crowd – “all men” – to the chant’s own sound as “rumour,” linguistic noise whose source cannot be pinned down. “Rumour” is not only figured in similes (“like the wind … like … ocean”), but rendered literal, palpable, as rhythmically patterned movement made audible in the lines themselves: three long lines whose front-loaded heavy beating (the rhythm is trochaic) resonates as it gains force by repetition. In the refrain that enters four lines later, where eight beats shorten to four and medial pauses lengthen into line ends, the tramping of poetic feet is more distinctly audible: Hark the rolling of the thunder! Lo the sun! And lo thereunder Riseth wrath, and hope, and wonder, And the host comes marching on.14 The four-line refrain stanza anticipates a repetition of the very effects noted by Broadhurst. Its collective singing or chanting is meant to produce what it names. What is in effect the suppression or delay of the second

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half of each long line postpones the closure of masculine rhyme to the last word of the stanza, in a line itself repeating (in its metrical and syntactic shape, length, and final words) the shortened fourth line of each preceding stanza. If the chant’s implicit invitation – tendered both through its semantic figures and the body’s response to its emphatic rhythms – is accepted, and listeners join the refrain in the second stanza and the chorus, they have effected just what the chorus mirrors back to the imagination: turned up the volume from “rumour” to “thunder.” Morris writes to draw listeners in to make the sound they are told to listen for, and to make it not only with their voices: to become the long rolling lines of gathering force and feeling (“wrath, and hope, and wonder”) by marching to the rhythms of the lines they chant. The strong thrill in producing, hearing, and feeling the “rolling of the thunder” in the vibration of massed sound and the translation of that thrill into physical action is described and facilitated by the rhythmic qualities of Morris’s song texts. Their rhythmic features give the refrain verses momentum and energy, where expressive release comes not only through chanting, but through physical activity – marching shoulder to shoulder – that the text encourages. When that happens, such movement is the action of the song: a living fellowship of voices and bodies acting together with concerted will. Chanted or sung, “The March of the Workers” is designed to mobilize a potent physical and political power to move men. And indeed, one of the important uses socialists made of song was that of collecting participants for large rallies, as socialist bands played to attract listeners to speakers in Hyde Park or London neighbourhoods or led marches through villages and towns to the halls or fields where rallies were to take place. One of the first things Morris did when he organized his breakaway group, the Socialist League, was to put May Morris in charge of organizing a League Band for the Hammersmith Branch. (A few years later, the then very young composer Gustav Holst took over her duties as its leader.) Yet the enactive lure of rhythm brings with it certain dangers, as Morris began to recognize. Concerted action can easily tip over into a violence that Morris always opposed.15 The chants attempt to negotiate a delicate balance, a meta-rhythm, their tone and semantic messages encouraging a certain detachment even as their rhythms urge immediate participation. They are careful to direct those present to listen to what they sing – both the sound and the sense. Morris’s lines insist that chanters and marchers understand what they are doing: the lines not only show but tell us what

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the rhythmic ordering of many men can do. Both showing and telling are forms of education, a leading forth into understanding. The verses’ figures ask to be realized but also to be interpreted: “What is this?” The effects of uniting men in concerted sound and action are spelled out in the refrain as potential powers for both good and ill: “Riseth wrath, and hope, and wonder.”16 While hope and wonder, as Phillippa Bennett argues in this volume, are strong obligations for the socialist desire Morris hoped to foster, wrath may be necessary but remains risky. Morris’s chants were first published under the Socialist League banner on the masthead of Commonweal: “Educate, Agitate, Organize!” Morris means the chants to do exactly that: to educate and organize no less than to agitate. These are lyrics designed at once to arouse desire for the transformative potential of collective action and to talk about it. They impose a rhythm – temporally coordinated, physically embodied – on the voices and movements of a crowd. Meanwhile they set out the causes for grievance and sketch the prospect of a different order; they give particularity to abstractions like “injustice” and “justice.”17 By swelling rumour to the thunder of chanting and marching, they hope to retune bodies and hearts to the collective rhythms of a productive social life yet to be. The Chants depart from longer traditions of political song, both popular and poetic, in their insistence on both listening and acting to a common measure, the shared temporality of ballad and song. In some ways closest to the chant-like repetitive rhythms of protest lyrics modelled on work songs, like Gerard Winstanley’s seventeenth-century “Diggers’ Song” (“You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now”) or some of Thomas Cooper’s or Ernest Jones’s Chartist songs, Morris’s Chants for Socialists nonetheless appeal more strongly than those songs to reasoning and reflection, including reflection on the excitements of the rhythmic power they arouse.18 They do not aim at prophetic inspiration or denunciation like the stirring songs of Blake or Shelley. Morris’s rhetoric is pitched in a lower key. Blake’s “England! Awake! Awake! Awake! / Jerusalem thy sister calls!” or Shelley’s “Men of England, heirs of Glory … Rise like Lions after slumber” make the opening addresses of Morris’s political songs sound almost conversational: “Come hither, lads, and hearken, for a tale there is to tell” (“The Day Is Coming”), “I heard men saying, Leave hope and praying” (“The Voice of Toil”), or “Hear a word, a word in season, for the day is drawing nigh” (“All for the Cause”). But if Morris has not chosen Blake’s “bow of burning gold” and “arrows of desire” (“Jerusalem”) or the stinging goads of Shelley’s “Song to the Men

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of England,” his more modestly offered “rumour,” “tale,” and “word in season” have their own poetic means for awakening that which cannot easily be articulated. Rumour, tale, and word are set in motion by the cumulative force of a poem’s emphatic rhythms. As voice is added to voice and sounded as one, chanting imagines what it would be like to share the “fear” and “wrath,” the “joy” and “hope” and “wonder” of acting together for a common good: Come, shoulder to shoulder ere Earth grows older The Cause spreads over land and sea; Now the world shaketh, and fear awaketh And joy at last for thee and me.19 The Chants were written from what Morris perceived as a position of paradox: they strive to embody the feeling of what cannot be fully imagined until the bases of self and society have been radically altered. Here is another reason for the oddly doubled perspective they offer: listening and chanting, participating and observing, standing apart from the pull of rhythmic fellowship and joining it. In the poems’ figurations of their own emphatic rhythms, listeners and chanters are invited to become something like Morris’s time-travelling personas in A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere. It is from imagined prospects of both past and future that the meaning of the present must be sought.

The Times of Song The prosody in poems like these might be said to point, historically, in two directions. His chants belong at once to what Isobel Armstrong has called, following Hegel, the times of rhythm and of rhyme.20 Morris might have answered, like his Guest and Dreamer, that it could not be otherwise. The Chants rely on rhythm for their primary somatic and semantic effects, as did the unrhymed poetry of ancient Greece (where rhythm is carried by time-based or quantitative metrical structures). Chanting Morris’s poetry realizes the internal force or generative energy of pulsing, time-borne rhythmic motion, pleasurable for its own sake and powerful in its capacity to unite listeners and participants in a shared enactment that is pure presence. But his poetry also makes use of rhyme, which

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emerges as a dominant prosodic presence in late Latin, medieval, and modern verse, where prosody relies on counting stresses or syllables (or both, in modern English). In this respect it is modern, belonging to the time of rhyme in Hegel’s schema. Morris typically rhymes stressed syllables to mark clearly line ends, which almost always coincide with syntactic breaks. Internal rhyme frequently breaks the line in two, with the medial caesura also falling at a syntactic break: “I heard men saying, Leave hope and praying” (“The Voice of Toil”).21 Rhyme thus breaks the flow of pulsing rhythm, emphasizing the semantic and rhythmic articulation of an ordered thought. It creates pauses, sometimes amounting to unsounded beats, through which cognition and reflection can take place.22 It may be useful to pursue Hegel’s distinction a little further. Rhythm can “set the self in motion” (as Hegel phrases it), or in Armstrong’s gloss, “bring subjectivity to life” through “a somatic pressure brought into being by metre’s play with the sound system and stress pattern of its language.”23 Rhythm’s movement is essentially dialectical, altering both language and time and hence the embodied self in relation to both. Rhythm’s power – what Simon Jarvis describes as a form of prosodic thinking – involves, according to Hegel, a double movement of abstraction (recognition by the mind of metre as a sound pattern) and return (participation or enactment through the poem that involves both language and the body).24 This setting in motion of the self, mind and body, takes place in real time (that is, while we read or sing or chant), enforcing a sense of conscious immediacy and physical presence in the duration of each moment while offering a pattern that promises continuance. It permits our perception of time and of ourselves. In Hegel’s “epistemological myth” (as Armstrong calls it), when rhyme becomes a dominant feature in modern poetry it registers a spiritual or mental split from the corporeal.25 The temporality of versification is structured less by the pure presence of an ordered flow that sets mind and body in motion than by the accents and breaks that punctuate it: the ictus or stress, especially when it coincides with rhyme.26 Rhyme both emphasizes these punctuation points and ties them to meaning: rhyme’s accents fall on the roots of words, their meaning elements. Thus, as Armstrong writes, paraphrasing and quoting Hegel: “Accent and rhyme now foreground the ideality of meaning and mind, which are now separated from the corporeality of language, which it ‘strips away.’”27 In modern verse, metre becomes less important than rhyme for poetry, a development that

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supports Hegel’s historical argument for a slowly spiritualizing progress in the human arts. Rhyme is, for Hegel, more “spirit-full,” less corporeal than metre. Morris, schooled by Keats, Browning, and Rossetti, yet in later life immersed in Homer, Beowulf, and the Icelandic sagas, belonged to the time of rhyme but imagined backward and forward to a time of rhythm. Unrhymed, highly rhythmic poetry like Greek epic, as Armstrong points out, had for some nineteenth-century writers a strong appeal: it “lives in unalienated time.”28 In positing a lost time of rhythm and presence, when bodies and minds, culturally shared rhythms and the words they carry, are imagined as united, Hegel’s historical mythopoiesis, as Armstrong notes, has marked affinities with Marx’s. That Morris might tell a similar story about rhythm is not surprising. Long before he read Marx, his sympathies were engaged by Ruskin’s rhetorically powerful condemnation of the division of labour, particularly his polemic against the brutal evacuation of thought and imagination from modern manual labour under capitalism, and the devastating human and aesthetic impoverishment it produced. Ruskin’s condemnation focuses particularly on the destructive effects of work unforgivingly accelerated but broken into tiny, repetitive movements. These, Ruskin wrote, are lived as perpetual cuts and breaks, divisions that separate labourers from designers and from others at work on different parts of the same object and end by fracturing the labourers themselves. His description of men making glass beads memorably translates such divided work into staccato prose: “The men who chop up the [glass] rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail.”29 “It is not, truly speaking,” Ruskin writes, “the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail.”30 We know that Morris was particularly sensitive to the way the repetitive activity of traditional craft work – from writing verse to singing or weaving – could compose minds and bodies to its rhythms while coordinating them in the shared production of a well-made object. The slow, continuous rhythms of the crafts he loved were to him not only a source of pleasure, but essential to mental as well as bodily well-being. These rhythms tuned or integrated his tremendous energies and relieved the

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pressure that sometimes produced ferocious explosions of rage and frustration, as many observers noted. Such rhythmic activities produced therapeutic pleasures that he wanted his friends to share. From the time of his first experiments in verse at Oxford, he formed the habit of reading aloud to friends and family every poem as soon as written, quickly discovering in his own preference for the pulsing flow of long-lined metrical verse a means for bringing others into a literal, bodily fellowship through mimetic listening.31 His belief in the therapeutic effects of such rhythm is mobilized as an explicit counter to the harmful effects of modernity (“the snorting steam and piston stroke”) in his first effort to compose a long poem from the old stories of ancient Greece and Northern Europe.32 The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) is filled with accounts of the healing powers of storytelling and listening, underlined in the collection’s frame story in which the disappointed elders of two cultures find rest and perhaps hope as they listen to the long-lined pulsing rhythms in which these stories are retold.33 Ten years later Morris discovered a more explicitly political potential in rhythm. Rhythm becomes not just the power to unite minds with bodies in the fullness of presence (or to break them apart in modern industrialized labour). It can set the self in ordered motion with others – can carry us across the boundaries of individual consciousness to create a third entity, as yet not fully imaginable. Rhythm might thus combat the physically exhausting, socially isolating effects of modern industrial labour. To echo but alter passages cited above: rhythm can “bring a collective subjectivity to life” through “a somatic pressure brought into being by metre’s play with the sound system and stress pattern of its language,” in an essentially dialectical relationship that works to alter our perceptions of time and of ourselves. Morris was deeply committed to altering his readers’ perceptions of time and of themselves when he produced, with his co-editors H.M. Hyndman (for Justice) and Belfort Bax (for Commonweal), his many articles on socialism. Chant and song, he seems to have realized, would allow him to pursue his campaign of education and organization by other means: he could awaken desire for the collective life through the powers of prosody. Rhythm becomes Morris’s “burning bow” and “arrows of desire.” Through its powers he will make readers, chanters, and listeners feel what it would be like to live as a selfordering, productive social body, and to act in light of the vistas of time that a long history of collective popular action, encoded in songs and tales, brings into view. Or so Morris seems to have concluded by the late

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1870s and 1880s, years when he was also making his verse translations and adaptations of the epics of Greek, Norse, Icelandic, and Old English poets. Their songs and stories, descending from originally oral traditions as shared cultural possessions shaping communal identity across time, became models for Morris’s efforts in the 1880s and 1890s to create a literature for socialism.34 The deep history and long life of Morris’s songs tell another kind of time. Listening through the rhythm for “the word” that it bears, as so many of Morris’s Chants ask us to do, we are listening backwards into a past recalled by a song that is itself a repetition, first sung “When Earth was younger”: “Then great men led us, with words they fed us, / And bade us right the earthly wrong.”35 Through the “words they fed us,” passed on in lay and song, we recover fellowship with those who have gone before and project its extension into the future. Those who hear Morris’s chants are also asked to listen forward, anticipating the songs of their own struggles as they might be sung – and sung differently – in “the wonderful days a-coming,” when “the tale shall be told of a country, a land in the midst of the sea, / And folk shall call it England in the days that are going to be.”36 The time that counts, that confers meaning and duration on the acts of lives bounded, in Morris’s firmly secular imagination, by the short reach and inevitable disappointments of any human life or cause, is the time of a popular poetry’s tales and songs. To join Morris’s chants, participating in the voicing by which a cultural community remakes itself in the world, is also to imagine performing that collective voice in an extending chain of iterative past and future performances of cross-temporal fellowship. The overwhelming presentness of rhythm enacted collectively now, with its heady but dangerous wrath and hope, fear and wonder, is countered by reminders of song’s powers to tell time and tell it again. Morris’s rhythmically emphatic lyrics thus introduce historical and aesthetic distance even as they work to enlist readers and hearers in the exhilarating shared experience of now.

Song in the Late Romances Radical politics and aesthetics come together in the rhythmic lines of Chants. In those songs, I have been arguing, Morris uses rhythm to negotiate a necessarily paradoxical position: writing to bring into being a future social body not fully comprehensible from the present, and risk-

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ing the premature destructiveness of aroused desires which cannot know the future for which they fight. But what of Morris’s other late lyric writing, both before and after the Socialist League’s internal dissensions forced Morris’s departure? I want to look briefly at the songs, charms, and riddles Morris wrote for romances, from The Pilgrims of Hope and A Dream of John Ball through the posthumously published The Sundering Flood. Like the Chants, these songs were few and surrounded by prose. Most could not stand on their own as lyric poems (and Morris does not collect and publish them as such). What is the story their prosody tells? Why are they there at all? Embedding songs in longer narratives was not uncommon in the nineteenth century. Scott, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Morris himself had written such short, non-narrative poems, whose sung performance the surrounding narrative carefully describes. These lyric interludes serve as temporary pauses in the forward movement of narration, offering access to different rhythms, temporalities, modes of thought or feeling, even orders of being through song.37 Morris’s Earthly Paradise weaves songs into the texture of both narrative frame and the tales told within it. We see the place of singing in these worlds, though the culture they represent is more courtly than popular. Most of the songs are love songs and recall medieval European antecedents in early English, French, Provençal, and Italian that inspired a younger Morris and his Pre-Raphaelite friends. They contribute to the delicate tension of frustrated desire that animates the Earthly Paradise.38 But although its scenes of tale-telling stress the importance of shared performance, the songs those tales include do not arouse political desire. Sigurd, a decade later, also narrates occasions for singing: these, we learn, are how this culture tells time. Singing recalls, at formal gatherings from weddings to wars, the society’s collective place in a larger universe. But Sigurd does not give us the shorter songs whose performance it describes (though of course it is itself an adaptation of long narrative poems originally sung). Morris’s next (and last) original verse narrative, The Pilgrims of Hope (1885–86), like the prose romances he went on to write in the next few years, includes the brief songs that resituate its troubled love story. Their prosody speaks of a longer communal history. They interrupt the tale of private tragedy the poem narrates to offer participation in something larger than that story can encompass. Like Sigurd, Pilgrims is written for the most part in hexameter couplets whose unsounded extra beats install English popular ballad

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narrative as a ghostly echo within its epic measures. Its story, however, is contemporary. A country-born hero, his wife, and her lover are radical comrades in working-class London. They are divided by the desires of wife and lover, who die fighting for the doomed Paris Commune. Losses both personal and political acquire meaning for the survivors in renewed commitments to a socialist future. Morris’s narrative opens with ballad echoes that might seem anachronistic in a modern narrative. For its first readers, however, “The Message of the March Wind” spoke of the future. It first appeared as a Chant in the March 1885 issue of Commonweal; Morris reused it to open Pilgrims, serialized for that journal’s readers in subsequent issues.39 The song’s ballad echoes have been redeployed to anticipate the changed ways of thinking that Pilgrims invites. Hark! The March wind again of a people is telling; Of the life that they live there, so haggard and grim … For it beareth the message: “Rise up on the morrow And go on your ways toward the doubt and the strife; Join hope to our hope and blend sorrow with sorrow, And seek for men’s love in the short days of life.”40 A spring wind’s restlessness ushers both the tale’s husband and wife (and Commonweal’s readers) toward London to participate in a story larger than themselves. Morris’s next narrative, the prose romance A Dream of John Ball, uses song both to attract and to estrange its Dreamer and, through him, Morris’s readers. While much critical attention has been given to the temporal complexity of the dialogue between John Ball and the Dreamer, the romance’s songs explore the different temporalities of fellowship before that dialogue begins.41 Morris’s nineteenth-century persona hears three songs when he joins a group of villagers in fourteenth-century Kent awaiting the arrival of John Ball, their expected leader in the peasant rebellion that will come to bear his name. The first is simply described, the second given in the text; both are ballads of Robin Hood, the second “more of a song than a story.”42 Its words, taking a distinctive shape on the space of the page and in the real time of reading, interrupt the narrative with their heightened claims to be felt and heard now. Singing these familiar ballads brings the men and the stranger-Dreamer together as they prepare to join Ball’s growing rebellion.

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The third song is different: it is not Morris’s but a “dark” rhyme attributed to Ball himself in Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicanae: Johan the Muller hathe ygrowude smal, smal, smal; The Kyngis sone of hevene shall pay for alle. Be ware or ye be wo, Knoweth your frende fro youre foo, Haveth ynowe, and seythe “Hoo”: And so welle and bettre, and fleth synne, And seketh pees, and holde therynne. “And so biddeth Johan Trewman and all his felawes.”43 Morris quotes only the opening lines. When the Dreamer meets Will Green, the villager who becomes his guide, “He seemed to hesitate a moment, and then leant forward and whispered in my ear: ‘John the Miller, that ground small, small, small,’ and stopped and winked at me, and from between my lips without my mind forming any meaning came the words, ‘The king’s son of heaven shall pay for all.’”44 Song’s powers are strikingly literalized in the Dreamer’s response: words borne by rhythm and rhyme carry meanings beyond the reach of any individual’s conscious memory. The paradox of the Dreamer’s doubled self – he is himself and another, a nineteenth-century poet and a fourteenth-century teller of tales – thus makes the peculiarity of lyric knowledge, tied as it is to rhythm and rhyme distinct from the matter of the tale, a subject not only for the Dreamer’s reflections but for Morris’s readers’. What kinds of knowledge, of self, or community then and now, will be strange in each to the other? Later the Dreamer and his companions hear Ball’s song again, now sung by many voices of men marching towards the village with Ball at their head: The song still grew nearer and louder, and even as we looked we saw it turning the corner through the hedges of the orchards and closes, a good clump of men, more armed, as it would seem, than our villagers, as the low sun flashed back from many points of bright iron and steel. The words of the song could now be heard, and amidst them I could pick out Will Green’s late challenge to me and my answer; but as I was bending all my mind to disentangle more words from the music, suddenly from the new white tower

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behind us clashed out the church bells, harsh and hurried at first, but presently falling into measured chime; and at the first sound of them a great shout went up from us and was echoed by the newcomers, “John Ball hath rung our bell!”45 As both men and bells take up the measure, they draw Dreamer and villagers into the exhilarating temporality of fellowship now. Fellowship that, as Ball tells them in his address, “is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them, and the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for ever, and each one of you part of it, while many a man’s life upon the earth from the earth shall wane.”46 Fellowship means the same yet differently to the fourteenthcentury priest and to the nineteenth-century socialist poet, as their nightlong dialogue will explore. But it is the song in its singing that first moves the Dreamer beyond what he knows or knows how to say. It awakens his desire for what Morris elsewhere called “a new tongue”:47 “While John Ball had been speaking to me I felt strangely, as though I had more things to say than the words I knew could make clear: as if I wanted to get from other people a new set of words … their grave sonorous language, and the quaint and measured forms of speech, were again become a wonder to me and affected me almost to tears.”48 Through such measured rhymes and sonorous speeches, dreamers and readers can be led out of themselves by desire for the new tongue that will speak a different social body. Morris continued to include brief lyrics that interrupt the unfolding time of narrative in his later prose romances (all but two use them). Some are short stanzaic songs recalling medieval English and European lyrics like those composed for the Earthly Paradise. Other songs are older, like the sequences of two-beat lines, rhymed but also heavily alliterated and often followed by two or more rhymed four-beat lines divided by strong medial caesuras. The War-god’s gale Drave down the Dale And thrusts us out To the battle-shout. We wended far To the wall of war, And trod the way

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Where the edges lay; The rain of the string rattled rough on the field Where the haysel was hoarded with sword-edge and shield.49 The form of these lines recalls the two-plus-two-beat unrhymed, alliterative verse of Anglo-Saxon epic – of Beowulf, which Morris was translating after 1887.50 Sung or chanted to audiences within the narrative, such songs give memorable cultural form to shared emotions of battle or, less commonly, love. In tales, which rarely ascribe interior mental lives to their protagonists, such interludes of song occupy the place of subjective interiority. With their long-familiar rhythms and forms, they shape a culture’s identity by recalling its collective response to the deeds and loves of its heroes. They do so in repeated performances that give the culture its life in time. While the outsize figures who sing such songs may be individual – the questing, love-seeking protagonists of the late romances – Morris’s romance heroes attain their greatness only after they return (as they invariably do) to the fellowship of their communities, often after helping overthrow old hierarchies of wealth and power. Then they can be remembered through the repetitions of song and story that renew the collective life. Metrical and stanzaic form is at once a way of telling time in the prose romances and a place where singers and readers, like the Dreamer, find themselves both inside and outside time, both inside and outside their communities. It is where they can be moved beyond themselves, in multiple senses. I want to look more closely at two other forms of lyric interpolation: song-speech and charm or riddle. What marks each is association with singers who can lead communities beyond themselves because they make use of the enactive powers of rhymed, rhythmically chanted or sung verse – though to use such power, as we have seen, is not without risk. In The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains, in which an older collective way of life is threatened by Romans or Huns, Morris intersperses prose narrative with what we might call song-speech, just such “grave and sonorous language” in “quaint and measured” form as moved the Dreamer out of his nineteenth-century self even as it affirmed his distance from his fourteenth-century companions. Song-speech is written in the common measure Morris had developed for Sigurd and his epic translations. Prose modulates into song-speech when Thiodulf, an elected leader born outside the gens, addresses his House of Wolfings. Exchanges between Thiodulf, the non-human wood spirit he loves, and

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their half-human daughter take the same form. In such scenes rhymed and measured speech has the force of action: it makes something happen, by law or magic. Prosodically, then, for modern readers song-speech looks back to a time before the rise of hereditary kings and bourgeois accumulation, but through the estranged perspective of those like Thiodulf, Wood-Sun, Hall-Sun, Sigurd, or the Dreamer who are not wholly of their communities. Song-speech provides for Morris’s contemporary readers, as they too follow its rhythms in the real time of reading, an experience of living within a community while seeing that community’s place in history as most of its members cannot. Like song-speech, the charms and riddles written into The Glittering Plain, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, and The Sundering Flood represent archaic belief that sung or chanted lyric can itself be a power that does what it commands. To use it, however, may bring alien natural or magical forces into play that cannot recognize what it is to be human. Charms and riddles point contemporary readers back to lyric’s roots and forward to what an awakened desire for living collectively might bring into being. Morris, like Marx, hoped that when the mastery of men is renounced, the mastery of nature that such lyric forms compel might be harnessed for the commonweal. At a crucial moment in The Glittering Plain, for example, the protagonist, trapped in an emotionally impoverished land of perpetual youth, recalls a riddling song from his childhood: I am the oak-tree, and forsooth Men deal by me with little ruth; My boughs they shred, my life they slay, And speed me o’er the watery way.51 The riddle turns, of course, on the oak tree’s transformation from wood to boat. Recalling the rhyming riddle will enable the protagonist to escape so that he may return to his betrothed to take up his place as leader of a new society. The chants taught by their benevolent non-human mentors to Birdalone, the heroine of The Water of the Wondrous Isles, and Osberne, the hero of The Sundering Flood, also allow them to appropriate magical powers in times of need. But the incantatory charm stolen by Birdalone from the witch-mother who adopts and enslaves her, giving power to

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move the witch’s boat to the one who paints it with her blood, is a much more dangerous appropriation: The red raven-wine now Hast thou drunk, stern and bow; Then wake and awake! And the wonted way take: The way of the Wender forth over the flood, For the will of the Sender is blent with the blood.52 Birdalone is, with Ellen, one of Morris’s most attractively strong heroines, a leader of men and women with clearly liberatory political as well as personal goals. Yet, perhaps because she is a woman and so assumed to be closer to the natural world (as her adoption by not one but two foster mothers from that world suggests), her borrowed magic, unlike Osberne’s, leaves even Morris uneasy.53 Although Birdalone invokes the witch’s charm to restore broken human fellowship, the boat must ultimately be destroyed before she is allowed to take her place within the community she has redeemed. Song and chant in the late romances, then, remain a means of sustaining communities under threat and a site of their potential transformation. Rhythm’s exhilarating powers to actualize fellowship now and to inspire hope in an unknowable future evidently continue to make lyric as necessary to prose romance as it was to the educative organizational work of the Socialist League. But just as the Chants, and the songs of Pilgrims of Hope and A Dream of John Ball, attend to the risks as well as to the promise of song’s rhythmic powers, so too song in the late romances is an ambivalent though absolutely necessary resource. Its rhythms represent powers that individuals as well as communities must learn to use. Song, song-speech, charm, and riddle are sites of fear as well as wonder. The world of the late prose romances is not yet that of the socialist future Morris never stopped desiring. But the lyrics embedded within his romances affirm Morris’s belief in the real effects of poetic intervention in the work of both personal and social change. He put his faith – and his amazing energies – into the material forms not only of books and pages, but of the skilful crafting of language into rhythmic song. Telling time through song’s prosodies, Morris still seeks to move readers beyond what they or he can yet imagine.

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The Pre-Raphaelite Tongue: The Politics of Antiquarian Poetics dav i d l a t h a m Storytellers threaten all the champions of control. Chinua Achebe

There are two clear signs of disruption in the pattern of William Morris’s busy life. In 1858 he started working on “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,” but he did not get far with it. That is not a phrase we associate with Morris: he rarely ever started a project without finishing it. This series of dramatic monologues was intended to be his second book of poetry, but he fell in love, married, started a family, and founded a decorative arts firm. For anyone but Morris, those preoccupations would serve well enough to explain an aborted book. But thirty years later there occurred a similar sign of disruption. In 1887 he published his two-volume translation of The Odyssey and then started on The Iliad. But again he did not get far with it. Some of his most memorably heroic lines of poetry suggest his heartfelt identification with the topic of Troy: Sir Peter Harpdon, a Froissartian figure from the 1858 Defence of Guenevere volume, is quick to compare himself with Hector, as they both “like the straining game / Of striving well to hold up things that fall.”1 Why Morris twice stopped his work on a Homeric epic so close to his own personality is a question that draws attention to the heart of his thought. Both disruptions involve Morris’s signature concern with the function of art and the responsibility of the radical artist to develop new directions for art. Most radical is Morris’s development of a Pre-Raphaelite tongue, a lifelong effort that culminated in the antiquarian language he forged for

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the genre of the prose romance. The need for a new tongue arose as his response to our declining civilization. Explaining how language has been so corrupted with the double-tongued words of “our daily-jabber,” Morris concludes that now “poets have to make a new tongue each for himself.”2 As is so usual with Morris, in thinking big he starts with the tall order of changing a primary element that is fundamental to the imagination: he starts with the archetype and aims to change it. But how does a poet attempt to change an archetype, a primordial image of the unconscious? Morris starts by shifting the referent of the image from a southern classical and biblical mythology to a northern medieval and Gothic mythology. With his first book of poetry he introduces the Gothic characters of Camelot alongside the green garden of Eden and the golden pastures of Arcadia. One of his earliest reviewers recognized in this first book Morris’s preference for the “Gothic traditional” over the “Greek academical,”3 a preference Morris would continue to demonstrate in his determined pursuit of the new Pre-Raphaelite tongue. He would redirect and refine this pursuit through several stages, beginning with a communal effort with his Pre-Raphaelite friends to establish an art-for-art’s-sake paradigm for art. We associate this reflexive ideology with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the Rhymers’ Club. We think of Morris as leading the Pre-Raphaelite movement in its other direction, embracing the communal ideology of socialism and the arts and crafts guilds. But Morris combines the two directions, as his two-sided passion – “the desire to produce beautiful things” and “hatred of modern civilization”4 – is echoed in Walter Crane’s definition of the aesthetic movement: “The real meaning of the movement: a search after more beauty in daily life … and the desire for more harmonious conditions.”5 Crane understood how Morris had shifted the focus of the desire for beauty from the individualism of liberalism and the detachment of personal taste to the nature of work and the fellowship of socialism in our daily lives. Morris’s early turn from his classical education to his medieval heritage, and his later turn from preaching public speeches to creating the dream visions of his prose romances, may not always suggest a consistent progression. His public lectures in trade union halls and his Socratic dialogues in Commonweal newspaper columns are part of his “Education towards Revolution” campaign, a direct appeal to stir the crowd and convert the reader to demand political change.6 But the last years of his life he devoted to the antiquarian poetics of a new genre of visionary

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stories, the prose romance praised by Yeats as showcasing the most beautiful language ever written, so beautiful it must be read slowly, as every reader will be reluctant to reach the end.7 Hence, at the end of his life, Morris was producing the opposite effect of his political agenda by encouraging the reader to be slow, to ponder, instead of stirring the reader to action. But by reviewing the several stages of his progression, I wish to show how his development of an antiquarian poetics is consistent with his lifelong political vision, a vision that recognizes a return to medieval mythology as the direct route to a revolutionary future. This essay will thus pursue the consistency of his radical program for revolutionizing our social order through the fundamental structures of language and literature. Starting with his recognition of the need for “a new tongue” for art, Morris exemplifies in his early poetry, his political lectures, his Socratic dialogues, and his prose romances the principles he articulated in his lectures on Gothic culture. In his ambitious effort to revitalize his northern heritage that had been long lost after the Renaissance displaced the rich learning of the Middle Ages, Morris sought to broaden our sense of poetics from the Aristotelean, and our sense of mythology from the colonial mentality of the biblical and classical, in order to inspire us to reach towards a reordering of the imagination by practising the most poetic ways of knowing. The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, the first published book of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, was recognized immediately as championing a new kind of art. Its new Pre-Raphaelite conventions of art – which H.F. Chorley had first distinguished in his 1858 review as “Gothic traditional” rather than “Greek academical”8 and which Morris would later identify as based on the nature of Gothic, on a Gothic spirit that “depended not on individual genius but on the collective genius of tradition”9 – are conventions that issued a challenge whose implications took years to be understood. For Chorley, the Gothic mindscape was a fogland beyond the rational edge of Tennyson: “The Laureate’s ‘Lady of Shalott,’ that strange Dream-land to which sane Fancy can penetrate, has been the point of departure for Mr. Morris.”10 Walter Pater would elaborate on this distinction a decade later, trumpeting Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite poetry as a bold challenge to traditional literature, a new paradigm of an art based on art, which Pater was to call “Aesthetic Poetry”: “This poetry is neither a mere reproduction of Greek or medieval life or poetry, nor a disguised reflex of modern sentiment. The atmosphere on which its effect depends belongs to no actual form of life or simple poetry. Greek poetry,

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medieval or modern poetry, projects above the realities of its time a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or ‘earthly paradise.’”11 As Pater observes in his description of this self-reflexive poetry, dream and vision create the “still fainter and more spectral” realm of a new paradigm for art, the decorative and mythological world of an art based on art. Morris had joined the campaign begun by Dante Rossetti and Théophile Gautier to revolutionize our lives through art. As Matthew Arnold had charged, “most men in a brazen prison live,”12 and the PreRaphaelites sought to free us of all the fetters of conventional norms. With Philip Sidney’s terms in mind, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne understood that to change the brazen lives we live we must change the golden realms we imagine.13 They sought to overturn the paradigmatic roles of art that had shifted in cycles over the centuries from the mimetic focus on nature, the didactic focus on the audience, and the expressive focus on the self. To the names of Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus associated with each of those three paradigms, we add the Pre-Raphaelite poets as the proponents of this fourth paradigm: the artist’s reflexive focus on art itself. With his focus on the artifice of the golden realm of art, the twenty-two-year-old Morris prophetically declared: “My work is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another.”14 Thus, what first disturbed Chorley was celebrated a decade later by Pater as the heroic effort of the alienated artist: “Each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of the world.”15 Ruskin had described this divorce of art from life in nostalgic terms as a division between the medieval past and the modern present: “They were the ages of gold; ours are the ages of umber … We build brown brick walls, and wear brown coats.”16 But with the benefit of time to absorb the Pre-Raphaelite campaign for the new aesthetics, Pater articulated the estrangement as a version of the distinction between the brazen reality and the golden vision: “The basis of all artistic genius lies in the power of conceiving humanity in a new and striking way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of our common days.”17 Swinburne became the vocal proponent of the logical end of this art-for-art’s sake ideology: “The business of verse-writing is hardly to express convictions”;18 “a poet’s business is to write good verses, and by no means to redeem the age and remould society”;19 “the only absolute duty of art is the duty she owes to herself.”20 The Pre-Raphaelite principle of art for art’s sake was

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not intended to excuse artists from considering their responsibility towards external referents. Rather it was a positive assertion that the mental world of art we envision becomes more important than the physical world of nature we experience. Song can provide us with the means to live our lives within a vision of a better world. Still, Morris would eventually lose patience with the apolitical side of the new aesthetics: “Artists … are deprived of the materials for their works in real life … They are driven to seek materials in the imaginative past ages, or into giving the lie to their own sense of beauty by sentimentalizing the life around them.”21 He grew to understand that the effort to revolutionize our lives through art must be turned around: there can be no real change in art until change is achieved in our lives. His interest in the Arthurian age of Britain, the classical age of Greece, the saga age of Iceland, and the barbarian age of Germany was an interest in our heritage, in the mythical origin of each age when art was central to everyone’s life. Obsessed as he was with his fears for the present and his hopes for the future condition of art, he turned to the past to study the decay of the heroic social orders, when the consequential loss of art was still a desperate threat to life rather than the factual condition we endure. This is the subtext of The Defence of Guenevere, his apologia for art: a defence of poetry waged during its initial demise in the late medieval age. Set within the decayed orders of walled gardens in autumn and lands lost in war, the poems depict physical and psychological imprisonment. Framed with singers and storytellers, with old men’s memories and young women’s dreams, lives can be turned into legends and visions into chronicles. A pair of skeletons stirs the teller of the tale “Concerning Geffray Teste Noire” to imagine the story behind the bones, until he no longer sees “the small white bones that lay upon the flowers / But evermore … saw the lady.”22 Geffray is merely an incidental concern, as the imagined lives of the lovers become a tale to tell John Froissart, who “knoweth not this tale just past.”23 Too often the artists lose their way amid the decay. Oppressed by the conventional social order, struggling to rise above the timid, some fail to sustain their artistic integrity, others confuse art with dream and thereby awaken to a nightmarish world. Art is reduced to the fragments of literary conventions, to the allusions that mock lives as “fittes” to be read.24 The sense of loss is thereby intensified in a world so newly fallen from the communal ideal of society. In this first collection the loss is introduced as a loss of faith. “Summer Dawn” is Morris’s version of Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel,” an

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experimental ballad reduced by Morris to an ironic sonnet. No matter how clearly Rossetti signals that his Damozel is an image projected by the lover who is desperate to believe that his beloved remains as a physical body waiting for him to join her in heaven, the poem still retains its insistence that we consider her actual power as a visionary presence. In contrast, Morris’s poem denies the conventional principle of its Petrarchan genre – the power of poetry to immortalize one’s beloved – and thus Morris denies Rossetti’s faith in the visionary power of poetry. Rossetti’s poem epitomizes the Pre-Raphaelite grotesque – the jarring juxtaposition of incongruities – by depicting the erotic prayers of an angel. But however blasphemous Rossetti’s poem first seemed, it relies on a sense of spiritual faith. Morris responds to his friend’s poem with fourteen lines of desperation and despair: Pray but one prayer for me ’twixt thy closed lips, Think but one thought of me up in the stars. The summer night waneth, the morning light slips Faint and gray ’twixt the leaves of the aspen, betwixt the cloud-bars, That are patiently waiting there for the dawn: Patient and colourless, though Heaven’s gold Waits to float through them along with the sun. Far out in the meadows, above the young corn, The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun; Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn Round the lone house in the midst of the corn. Speak but one word to me over the corn, Over the tender, bow’d locks of the corn.25 As a lover prays that his deceased beloved will utter a word of assurance to comfort him in his misery of surviving without her, the poem begins with the conventional sonnet’s testament of love and, moreover, of the power of poetry to immortalize one’s beloved. Though the lover’s grief shows how much she means to him, the imagery he focuses on betrays his loss of faith in his ability to immortalize her. The patient clouds give way to restless winds, the floating sunrise to heavy elms, the warm season of summer to a cold diurnal dawn. The cloud-bars imprison the sun as the poem regresses from a prayer to a thought to a single word,

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the reduction revealing his desperate fear that he will receive nothing from her “closed lips … up in the stars.” From “pray” to “prayer,” from “think” to “thought,” the poem narrows its vision from verb to noun, from action to object, and the rhyme scheme collapses from creative ingenuity to the hopeless repetition of a mechanical muttering of the same word four times: corn, the corn, the corn, the corn (8, 12, 13, 14). In his later work Morris would resist this failure of faith, addressing it as a pessimism that must be overcome with a shared hope for revolutionary change.26 Though some readers may well feel regret over his decision to abort the powerful poetry of his projected “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,” Morris came to recognize that it would have been a regression from the decaying world of Camelot to the dying world of Troy about to be levelled after a decade of siege. The imminent collapse of the dying Troy anticipated the dead society of Morris’s London, those six dehumanized counties of smoke and assembly lines forever on Morris’s mind as a world to change: Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting of the piston stroke. Forget the spreading of the hideous town.27 His abandonment of Troy for an integration of the southern and northern communities of storytellers thus advanced his commitment to restoring medieval mythology to its prominence as the successor to classical mythology. The Earthly Paradise may share the elegiac tone of the aborted Troy “Scenes,” but this more ambitious work – the longest poem in English – is another demonstration of broadening the horizon of storytelling as a means for renewing art and thereby redirecting us from the decadent order of our modern age. This aversion to the social order of his own age was a lifelong passion. Looking back over his life, he explains in a ten-paragraph essay, titled “How I Became a Socialist,” the motive that ultimately led to his conversion to socialism: “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”28 Morris’s “conversion” is not the common process of finding oneself after joining a conservative church group, but rather the process of embracing the ideology of a political revolutionary. Converts are often inspired by a messianic teacher, but Morris learned from the liberal writings of John Stuart Mill and from the hot-headed arguments of anarchist

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opponents to pursue his faith in the opposite direction of what they were teaching.29 He explains in this brief essay how people tinker at perfecting the course of modern civilization as if it were a naturally progressive order evolving towards an ideal state. In contrast, Morris personifies modern civilization as the monstrous force of an “eyeless vulgarity” that blinds us to art. Art he associates with the organic metaphors of seeds, germination, roots, growth, and soil. The “stupendous organization” of our capitalist system is depicted as a master of waste “sweeping away the last survivals of the days before the dull squalor of civilization had settled down on the world” like a cloud of soot, polluting the fertile soil to filth.30 And we are left lost in a verbal mess of modifiers, “a sordid, aimless, ugly confusion.”31 The militant tone of his political essays is seldom heard directly in his poetry and fiction. The overhanging smoke, the snorting piston stroke, and “the spreading of the hideous town” so summarily dismissed in The Earthly Paradise are far more evident in the novels of Charles Dickens. Here in Hard Times is Dickens’s description of Coketown, a vision so similar to that smoke and piston stroke Morris had asked us to forget: Coketown, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune. It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.32

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In the brief two-sentence paragraph that begins his introduction to Coketown, Dickens contrasts fact with fancy, town with tune, triumph with taint, and the generalized abstractions of nature with art, returning us to that Pre-Raphaelite distinction between the brazen world of life and the golden realm of art. He asks us to consider the “key-note” as we read the next paragraph, composed, he implies, like a work of music. What is the keynote? It is the triumph of fact over fancy, wherein fact is represented by the image of the factory, and fancy is reduced to a taint: a trace of decay, of infection, a germ to be eradicated. Dickens selfreferentially foregrounds his own artistry by exploiting the concept of analogy as an obtrusive figure of speech, as he moves from the subtle metaphor of the taint of fancy to the obtrusive simile (the soot-covered brick is “like the painted face of a savage,” the piston is “like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness”) and then to a series of the most unimaginative, repetitious, non-fanciful “likes” that indicate comparisons of large streets with large streets, small streets with small streets, people with people. Fact has indeed triumphed over fancy, as metaphor – half of the heart and soul of art – is all but eradicated by the end of the second paragraph, replaced by tautology. What Pater said about the aim of the new aesthetic art – to overcome the division between style and subject, between manner and matter33 – is here achieved in these two paragraphs, as Dickens presents a passage about monotony in four sentences with four it’s and three it was a town of’s, followed by a long, monotonous sentence with three like one another’s and five the same’s, as the simile is reduced to sameness: not A is like B, but A is simply A. While the smoke and the machinery are personified, the people are dehumanized. The strength and dignity of labour are reduced to a small piston. In contrast, the image of the helpful giant is reduced to the melancholy madness of a worn-out, defeated beast. Archetypally, the unnatural red and black paint, the savage face, and the serpentine smoke suggest the satanic, hellish world wherein industry has thoroughly triumphed over our dehumanized society. The factual is no longer tainted by the fanciful. Our conventional growth from innocence to experience is depicted here as a fall from the purity of ideals to the savagery of corruption, as our modern civilization is revealed to be a condition of regression rather than progression. Dickens will go on in the novel to contend that individual identity cannot arise from the facts of physical life but only from the fancy of our imagination, not from the vast piles of conformity and tautology but from the creative spirit of art.

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We might be surprised to find none of this militant tone in Morris’s fiction. Morris instead reserves it for his political lectures. These lectures, written and delivered during the 1880s, leave Dickens sounding mild. Indeed, at his most militant Morris can make the most Juvenalian irony of Jonathan Swift sound mild, since Morris addresses us directly without the screen of a foolish persona. Here is the powerful climax of his lecture on “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” with Morris identifying the best we can hope for as “the slaughter of men by actual warfare”: Will it be possible to win peace peaceably? Alas, how can it be? We are so hemmed in by wrong and folly, that in one way or other we must always be fighting against them: our own lives may see no end to the struggle, perhaps no obvious hope of the end. It may be that the best we can hope to see is that struggle getting sharper and bitterer day by day, until it breaks openly at last into the slaughter of men by actual warfare instead of by the slower and crueller methods of “peaceful” commerce. If we live to see that, we shall live to see much; for it will mean the rich classes grown conscious of their own wrong and robbery, and consciously defending them by open violence; and then the end will be drawing near.34 As a pacificist, Morris knew full well that wars do not decide who is right but who is left. However, he knew that if the resistance to an uprising is brief, then the casualties of a swift revolution should be less catastrophic than the horror of future generations suffering further exploitation. The motto of his political agenda being “Education towards Revolution,” he was determined to persuade the majority of us to join the revolution so that violent resistance would not last long. He supplemented his public lectures with weekly news columns for Commonweal to extend his broadcast for political reform. Occasionally he experimented further in these columns, mediating the direct address to his readers with more Swift-like fictional devices. “The Reward of Labour: A Dialogue” is set up as a play for three characters, but its genre is an entirely different one: not a stage play, but a Socratic dialogue. The Socratic dialogue is the elite genre of prose, corresponding to the epic as the elite genre of poetry reserved for the noblest treatment of art. The list of three “Persons” establishes at once the dramatic dialectic: “An Ernest Enquirer, an East-end Weaver, a West-end Landowner.”35 The scene is described as “Outside a philanthropic meeting on Social Science,” but as

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the discussion unfolds we learn that there was nothing philanthropic or scientific about the lecture the three attended. After some polite exchanges, the Ernest Enquirer asks the East-end Weaver a long-winded question in the form of a declarative sentence, one full of naive presumptions, just the kind of “chaff” the East-ender expected would follow such a meeting: You heard that gentleman who moved the vote of thanks just now, and who spoke so – well, so elegantly on the compensation which the working classes have for their apparently inferior position; and how necessary it was for the progress of civilization that there should be this division of labour and life; and what a noble position it was for the workers to hold; and how the slight sacrifices they had to make they ought to make cheerfully and almost as a matter of religion, that new religion of Humanity, considering their position as the foundation of all the culture, thought, light and leading which is the glory of Humanity. What did you think of all that?36 The Enquirer blunders on with his presumptions that “skilful, industrious, and useful” East-end workers37 are revered and that the idle Westend landowners, engaged in nothing more than “shooting, horse-racing, yachting, and the like,”38 must be reviled. Instead he learns that the Eastend workers are “skilful, industrious, useful, poor, and despised,”39 while the idle West-end landowners are not “look[ed] down upon” but are “looked up at,”40 and earn £6,000 annually, one hundred times more than the £60 earned by the worker. The Enquirer identifies himself as “a stranger to London,” the fictional device of estrangement becoming Morris’s favourite means to ask why the rest of us fail to demand answers to similar questions about our own lives within this unacceptable modern social order, as the estranged visitor in A Dream of John Ball questions the order of the past and the estranged visitor in News from Nowhere questions the order of the future. After the Enquirer’s questions expose the estrangement of our world from any semblance of fair play, the Landowner can only resort to his class position of arrogance and condescension: “You see, my dear sir, the complexity of civilized society – in short, your question is quite wide of the mark,” as he blusters with nonsense that no one but he can pretend to “see.”41 The Enquirer rejects this nonsense as the “meaningless pes-

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simism” of the idle rich,42 who presume the injustice of the status quo must be preserved as the way of the world. The concluding scene is a telling vignette that epitomizes the whole Socratic conversation. Alarmed by the crowd that has gathered to listen to the questions and answers, a policeman forms his own presumptions about the troublemakers. He roughly catches hold of the East-ender (“you get out of this”), tips his helmet to the West-ender (“Should I get you a cab, sir?”), and leaves the Enquirer “soliloquizing”: “I must try to find out why … Society should mean something else than organized injustice.”43 The crowd disperses, the three go their separate ways – one bullied, one helped with servility, and one left soliloquizing, thinking aloud to himself alone, with little promise of a communal conversion to the new position of knowledge and truth we expect from a Socratic dialogue. The estrangement of a dialogue reduced to a soliloquy is designed to transfer the anger from writer to reader. But Morris would too soon appear to have given up the communal dialogue himself, abandoning his Commonweal lectures for Kelmscott romances. Having “crossed the river of fire” for the public addresses of political journalism, how did Morris decide to turn back in an apparent retreat to the poetic prose of a new genre of literature divorced so far from the brazen world of life? Moreover, why do we find no paragraphs in the prose romances like those from Dickens’s Hard Times, let alone like those from Morris’s own lectures? What makes his romances frustrating for some readers, like E.P. Thompson, after reading the political lectures, is the complete about-face from the pragmatic focus on revolutionizing our lives, as Morris appears to some readers to be making an escape to a passive immersion in the daydream realm of romance. Some of his contemporary readers saw no such withdrawal. At least two of his reviewers in the 1890s read his romances as political allegories. The reviewer of The Roots of the Mountains considered it “a poetical sketch of the Morrisean Millennnium” describing “the ideal sort of life that people ought to live when Socialism carries the day.”44 Five years later, the reviewer for the same Spectator read The Wood Beyond the World as a political allegory in which the Maid, personifying Labour, defeats the Lady, personifying Capital.45 This reductive interpretation annoyed Morris to the point that he wrote an indignant letter to the editor: “I had not the least intention of thrusting an allegory in The Wood Beyond the World; it is meant for a tale pure and simple, with nothing didactic about it. If I have to write or speak on social problems, I always

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try to be as direct as I possibly can.”46 Morris’s explanation is sound. The prose romances are not intentionally didactic; they indeed should be enjoyed as stories rather than decoded as sugar-coated political arguments. However, the early reviewers were right in recognizing a political subtext behind the telling of these tales, as they noted the “tribal communism” in A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark (1889) and The Roots of the Mountains (1890), and the poetic rendering of the socialist cause in The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891).47 I have written elsewhere that Morris’s socialist vision divides into three periods: his lectures on the decorative arts during the 1870s, his lectures on political revolution during the 1880s, and his prose romances during the 1890s exemplify a consistent progression through an aesthetic socialism, a militant socialism, and a visionary socialism.48 In his first two romances Morris depicted the co-operative communities of a mythical barbarism based on the history of Germanic tribal culture.49 In his later romances he wrote and hand-printed the kind of fairy-tale quests we may dream of in a post-revolutionary society. Morris was merely shifting the tone and focus to the next step of his socialist agenda: while his lectures were political texts meant to incite discontent with the brazen world, his prose romances were poetic tales meant to inspire us to envision a golden world. The artifice of Morris’s rhetoric, sometimes labelled as a “Wardour Street English,” prevents some readers from seeing anything political beneath the escapist surface. Archibald Ballantyne was the first to make the charge, introducing the new term in his review of Morris’s translation of The Odyssey. He complains that Morris’s translation – full of “dights,” “mayhappens,” “menfolk,” and “smithing carles” – is “Wardour Street Early English – a perfectly modern article with a sham appearance of the real antique about it.”50 A reviewer of The Roots of the Mountains repeated the charge in The Spectator in 1890, and over the years it turned from a complaint to a compliment.51 Here is a passage from The Wood Beyond the World that exhibits the artifice of Wardour Street English: “Is all well with ship and crew then?” said Walter. “Yea forsooth,” said the shipmaster; “verily the Bartholomew is the darling of Oak Woods; come up and look at it, how she is dealing with wind and waves all free from fear.”

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So Walter did on his foul-weather raiment, and went up on the quarter-deck, and there indeed was a change of days; for the sea was dark & tumbling mountain-high, and the white-horses were running down the valleys thereof, & the clouds drave low over all, and bore a scud of rain along with them; and though there was but a rag of sail on her, the ship flew before the wind, rolling a great wash of water from bulwark to bulwark. Walter stood looking on it all awhile, holding on by a stay-rope, and saying to himself that it was well that they were driving so fast toward new things.52 Alongside the “verily” and the “darling”/“dealing” duo, the shipmaster’s reply to Walter is a monosyllabic line of alliterative w’s and f’s, assonantal e’s, and consonantal r’s and th’s that make no pretense of conveying with verisimilitude the character of a credible shipmaster. In the descriptive paragraph that follows, the ship Walter is invited to view is revealed to be “but a rag of sail” overwhelmed by the vast sea and sky. The ship is in flight from the rolling, heaving waves of the sea and the raining, blowing winds of the sky. In the previous sentence before our excerpt, the ship was said to “be running before the wind”;53 now, as Walter observes from the deck, the ship “flew before the wind.” The sea transforms into a metaphorical geography of mountains and valleys, and “the whitehorses were running down the valleys,” as the stampede of stallion-like surf assaults the ragged ship. Against this tumult of active verbs goes Walter amid an accompaniment of prepositions that calm the pace: he “did on his foul-weather raiment, and went on up to the quarter-deck” and “stood looking on it all awhile, holding on by a stay-rope, and saying to himself.” He is determined to maintain his semblance of permanence amid the drive and heave and whirl of the world, though he acknowledges that “there indeed was a change of days.” Wondering what this upheaval of the world will mean to his life, Walter concludes with a bathetic musing, “saying to himself that it was well that they were driving so fast toward new things.” Morris deliberately leads us to the inarticulate ambiguity of “new things,” a phrase that belittles the momentous change of life the young Walter is about to experience. Morris is concerned with change of a different order. He minimizes the suspense and fear that arise from the conventions of dramatic conflict, his characters faced less with suffering and death than they are with the challenges of telling their tale well. The focus is thus not on individual

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fortune but on the shared experiences of the social community. Weapons are no longer sharpened to “rent” the earth but become the tools for expressing heavenly celebrations, the means for the city to show itself as a communal unity of tossed, brandished, and outstretched spears, swords, and hands: “Straightway then arose a cry, and a shout of joy & welcome that rent the very heavens, & the great place was all glittering and strange with the tossing up of spears & the brandishing of swords, & the stretching forth of hands.”54 The Kelmscott editions of his romances further reduce the dramatic sense of conflict by summarizing each page in a phrase posted as a running header set within the margin. This narrative device serves less as a commentary than as self-referential intrusions that draw attention to the textuality of the plot and the presence of its author: “Now shall the story be told.”55 Conflict is thus limited to the style of language, as Morris relies on the trope of the Pre-Raphaelite grotesque – the jarring juxtaposition of incongruities – to disrupt our conventional perspectives and our sense of decorum. Conflict and metaphor being the two central tools of literature, Morris’s transformation of these tools is a daring approach intended to revolutionize the basic structure of literature. His spokesperson for the utopia of News from Nowhere is a woman (which in itself was a challenge to the patriarchal tradition of literature), who gives a devastating critique of the alleged social realism of Victorian novels and their treatment of conflict as “a long series of sham troubles,” a critique that suggests why Morris resists in his romances the straightforward political passion trumpeted in Dickens’s Hard Times: “As for your books … there is something loathsome about them. Some of them, indeed, did here and there show some feeling for those whom the history-books call ‘poor,’ and of the misery of those lives we have some inkling; but presently they give it up, and towards the end of the story we must be contented to see the hero and heroine living happily in an island of bliss on other people’s troubles.”56 Some of Ellen’s angry impatience is an expression of Morris’s self-deprecating humour, as many of his most profound loves, like history and literature, are dismissed as no longer important in his utopian world. But here, through Ellen, he acknowledges that novelists intent on raising and resolving a series of conflicts are practising a profession that promises no hope for a revolutionary future.

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As the two most basic conventions of literature, any modification of conflict and metaphor is a radical departure from the fundamental traditions of artistry. Like his new approach to narrative conflict, Morris undertook an original approach to metaphor involving a return to the origins of art57 in terms of archetype and mythology. Unlike other PreRaphaelites who were poets and painters too often accused of painting their poems and writing their paintings,58 and thus showing how steeped they were in the literary conventions of narrative whether they were writing or painting, Morris was a writer and designer, an artist whose decorative furniture does not draw on the narrative conventions of literature. Morris learned from the decorative arts to rely in his literature more on the artifice of rhyme and rhythm, as he abandoned the intensity of lyric for the continuity of story, mastering the leisurely pace that balances anticipation with the unexpected.59 Most often the unexpected has less to do with a narrative turn of the plot than with the sound of a word and the rhythm of a phrase. His movement from the passionate lyrics of The Defence of Guenevere to the narrative tales of The Earthly Paradise and finally to the still more leisurely pace of the prose romance involves a shift in the fundamental genres of literature, from the intense compression of metaphor in arresting phrases to the relaxing accumulation of ornamental details in a rational progression of sentences. The first style we associate with poetry, the second with prose, but for Morris the distinction marks a change in the structure of literature, as he is developing the prose poem as a new genre of art. Its decorative artifice is a combination of the enchantment we experience when we hear sung as a song the trance-like refrain of a ballad and when we see hung on a wall the jewellike silk of a tapestry. The opening sentence of Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair sets the leisurely pace of a tale told for the beauty of an ornamental pattern: “Of old there was a land which was so much a woodland, that a minstrel thereof said it that a squirrel might go from end to end, and all about, from tree to tree, and never touch the earth: therefore was that land called Oakenrealm.”60 Trinitarian patterns (“there was … thereof … therefore,” “was a … was so … was that,” “land … woodland … land,” “that a … that a … that land”) are reinforced within a sequence of seven internal rhymes: “land … woodland … end … end … and … and … land.” Such hypnotic patterns transport us from our physical location to a realm of enchantment. The squirrels “never touch the earth” in this

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Oakenrealm, nor will readers touch the mimetic side of reality, as the tale we are reading belongs to the golden realm of minstrel lore: others have told and sung and woven the events from the dreamland of this tale. The only metaphor in this ornamental sentence is “Oakenrealm,” a primitive kenning, the figure of speech that Morris came to favour as he pursued his determination to change the direction of art. Such primitive figures of speech are part of Morris’s campaign in support of a new barbarism that will rescue art from its academic and decadent sophistication: “The arts have got to die, what is left of them, before they can be born again.”61 That the aesthetic, militant, and visionary phases of his socialism share so much in common is too often misunderstood by those who regret his turning from the militant Commonweal lectures to the visionary Kelmscott romances, as he directed his attention to matters of language during the last decade of his life. When we recognize how the visionary socialism of his prose romances in the 1890s is something of a return to the aesthetic socialism of his decorative arts in the 1870s, we understand how his pursuit of a Pre-Raphaelite tongue is charged with a political agenda. Examples of his decorative art reveal a subtle political subtext, but they remain as part of a transitional phase in which he still relies on the two traditional mythologies for metaphor. Three decades before he turned to the prose romance, Morris had radicalized the decorative arts by founding the arts and crafts movement as a communal way of life. Two of his textile designs are typical of his political commitment. Tapestry is the elitist medium, “the noblest of weaving arts,” as Morris identifies it,62 but the lush richness of his Woodpecker tapestry (1885) is subverted by the woven ribbon of poetry politicizing Ovid’s myth of Circe, who spitefully turned the king into a scavenger bird for refusing her love: I once a King and chief Now am the tree-bark’s thief, Ever ’twixt trunk and leaf Chasing the prey.63 Morris updates Ovid by shifting the emphasis from the cruelty of Circe to the poetic justice of exposing the king’s true nature: the selfish exploitation by the privileged royalty who rule our lives. The title of his Strawberry Thief (1883) is telling: the decorative pattern of this most popular design depicts a paradisal abundance of foliage, fruit, and song, while its

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title invites a satirical wink at the capitalist notion of property and the biblical notion of humanity’s dominion over the natural world, as if birds were not our brethren sharing the same environment, but our competitors stealing the fruits of our labour. The Woodpecker tapestry reminds us of the vice of exploitation, while the Strawberry Thief cotton reminds us of the virtue of communal sharing. These textiles rely upon an intertextuality that is traditional rather than revolutionary. Both depend upon the conventional contexts of classical and biblical mythology. Both mythologies are authoritarian, one from a Mediterranean locale, the other from the desert, and the further their geographical reach, the more colonial their points of reference become. As he progressed from the decorative arts of the 1880s to his prose romances of the 1890s, Morris came to recognize the need to move beyond these conventional contexts, understanding that such mythologies are the foundations for organizing the imagination, and that reordering the imagination is essential to revolutionizing our lives. With this paradigmatic shift in mind, Morris explains his interest in overturning the Renaissance perspective of the Dark Ages in favour of a return to barbarism as part of his campaign to undermine the myth of progress, the belief that civilization is a progression from the Dark Ages of medievalism to the rebirth of classical learning during the Renaissance, and thence to the Enlightenment. Overturning this myth of progress in preference for a Gothic revival has led to much misunderstanding, since Morris was attacking the national education system. Like all welleducated Victorians, Morris was steeped in the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. The opposite of an escapist enterprise, his medieval interests are best understood within the Victorian perspective of history as divided into three eras: classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era. Morris’s devotion to history arises from his understanding of originality as a return to origins, a return required in order to reroute the direction of cultural history, as he considered how far we have declined from Eli Cathedral to Gower Street, from Beowulf to “The Rape of the Lock.”64 He embraces the Gothic revival not as an escape from modernism to the Middle Ages, but as a necessary step towards correcting our misguided celebration of the Renaissance as a classical revival, a return to the old knowledge from antiquity. Our modern era begins paradoxically with this Renaissance return to antiquity, looking backward to the decadence of a lost civilization rather than forward to the revolutionary future. Morris sought to restore continuity to modern history by cultivating the

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lost links of his northern heritage in the centuries of communal learning from the Middle Ages. Turning from the Socratic dialogue to the prose romance is thus consistent with each progressive stage of his political development, as Morris was abandoning the hierarchical values of the elitist genre of prose for the communal ideology of the folk genre of romance. The tutor/ pupil relationship of the Socratic dialogue is a power dynamic a socialist would recognize as the hierarchy of a messianic discipleship intended for the purpose of conversion. With the new genre of his prose romances, Morris avoids this air of superiority inherent in the dialogue by abandoning the ironic persona, relying instead on the narrative of romance to instill in his readers a discontent with the status quo of our world. Morris prepares us for this communal ideology in his new political approach with a series of lectures and essays on Gothic culture. The literary language of his prose romances is thus central to his campaign to retrieve art from decadence and to establish a revolutionary civilization. This was no nostalgic escape to the pastoral ideal of a merry old England, but the campaign of a political activist. He insisted that he was “no patriot as the word is generally used,”65 complaining that the “national patriotism we are so noisy about now was born with the Renaissance.” He recognized the Latin influence as a colonizing power that reached the insidious level of degrading the language. Both he and Ruskin had a habit of exemplifying the corruption of their own Victorian age by showing how one word after another had been distorted from its original meaning by generations of liars and hypocrites, leaving a verbal record of our descent from heroic ideals to petty politics. Morris acknowledges that the “terrible sea-rovers who founded the English nation were rough, cruel Jutes and Saxons with ungovernable passions,” but they had none of our vulgarity, a word whose “full signification … is a creation of this [nineteenth] century.”66 He cites as evidence their literature: no doubletongued words, but a language uncorrupted, a sincere, beautiful expression of the courageous ethic of freedom.67 There are no lyrics in English as beautiful and passionate as “those preserved in the ‘Exeter book.’”68 He reminds us that Christianity and its monk-scribes colonized English literature by paraphrasing biblical stories: “Here one does regret that subjection of the native writers to monkish Latin.”69 This colonial mentality reaches the fundamental level of language, the verbal manner behind the narrative matter: “All this was worthy of being told in more life-like manner than the Latin scribbling Monk could compass.”70 With foresight into

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an Orwellian future, Morris condemns the influence of the double-tongue: “Things have very much changed since the early days of language: once everybody who could express himself at all did so beautifully, was a poet for that occasion, because language was beautiful. But now language is utterly degraded in our daily lives, and poets have to make a new tongue each for himself: before he can even begin his story he must elevate his means of expression from the daily jabber to which centuries of degradation have reduced it.”71 Frantz Fanon would identify this process as symptomatic of the colonized consciousness.72 The summary of deceit, hypocrisy, and corruption which Morris sees as accompanying the double-tongue is a revolutionary socio-economic theory, based not on prejudice against the foreign influence of classical and biblical mythologies, but rather on an effort to inspire a new way of thinking about the past and the future, about history and progress, and ultimately about creating an ideal social order for future generations. That the Renaissance was considered not only as a rebirth from the Dark Ages but a return to individual freedom and an overturning of the centralized authority of the church – such were the tenets of the conventional paradigm of progress that both Ruskin and Morris turned upside down. Cranking up Ruskin’s rhetoric in The Stones of Venice, Morris can simply sound angry when he argues that the “traditions of the free art of the Middle Ages” were supplanted by the “slavery imposed on us by the Italian Renaissance” when “academic pedantry” looked “down on the world from the serene heights of cultivated stupidity.”73 But whereas Ruskin sounds racist in his comparisons of lazy Mediterraneans and rugged Northmen,74 Morris adds a radicalized ideology to Ruskin’s conservative aesthetics. Morris locates “the first style of Gothic” in the Byzantine art of Constantinople because it was here that art “was first set free from the fetters of the long centuries of pedantry that followed Rome’s crystallization of Greek art into academic degradation.”75 Gothic art then became a popular art, common to people as a whole,76 the genuine, spontaneous expression of our thoughts and pleasures:77 it was free, progressive, hopeful, and full of sentiment and humour.78 The alleged renaissance of the sixteenth century, according to Morris, marked not a rebirth but a diseased era of death, a return to hierarchy and slavery after 800 years of artistic freedom, an era of pedantry when scholars fixed their gaze backward at ancient Greece and Rome. Its

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pedantry encouraged an elitist art that was proud and contemptuous.79 In contrast to the Renaissance, whose full impact was not felt until the eighteenth century, the Gothic revival was an intellectual revolt aligned with progress, freedom, and sincere art.80 It was based on a “new feeling for history,” which was “almost as it were a religion,”81 and on a new way of looking at our world with an egalitarian rather than a hierarchical ethos: “not dividing history into what is worthy and worthless” (the worthy classical Greece and Rome and Renaissance Italy bracketing the worthless Dark Ages) but rather respecting all eras of history, in the belief that “all that men have done or been is worthy of our study.”82 Hence, Morris championed the Gothic spirit as a consciousness of “the growth and unity of mankind.”83 Interestingly, after locating the origin of the medieval Gothic style to the multicultural art of Byzantine Constantinople, Morris situates the origin of the Victorian Gothic revival in the historical science of eighteenthcentury philology, what he calls the start of the modern study of history.84 He makes it clear that the philologist’s egalitarian respect for the languages of all people should lead us to recognize the ultimate alignment of philology, the Gothic tradition, and socialism. At once poetical and political, Morris’s most fundamental concern is for the word, for the tongue. Morris’s overturning of the conventional paradigm finds support among the philologists who equate Gothic barbarism with progress and humanity, and classical and modern civilizations with corruption and brutality. Civilization is linked with the capitalist system of commerce that had its origins in the Roman urban centres. The Anglo-Saxons burned the centralized Roman cities and settled “in farmsteads along the rivers or the seashore, or in a meadow field amid the woods.”85 Indeed, as Morris explains with his characteristic reliance on etymology, the very word “town,” “which we now use as the generic term for a collection of houses,” shows “by the change from its original meaning how far removed the first English were from city life.” In Scotland, “the word was lately used to designate a single farmstead; while further north the word is still used in its original sense of the cultivated field around a dwelling as contrasted with out-meadows or uncultivated pasture lands.”86 After the Norman Conquest by the “Romanized landlord,” England began to shift from the communal fellowship of the tribal gens to a European feudal system: its development as “a pure branch of the Teutonic family was stopped forever.”87 Again, for Morris the shift was not racial

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but socio-economic: a degradation of fellowship and community consciousness through the colonization that bound a people into a system “developed by Roman provincials,” whereby the colonized “had not even a language of their own, but were compelled to speak a dialect of Latin.”88 The next 200 years were dominated by the medieval craft guilds that grew to establish their control over industry, but “the remains of the tribal custom of the early English” people eventually gave way “to the day of centralization and bureaucracy”: England became part of the continental social order, as “feudalism or the society of status waned into capitalism or the society of contract.”89 The ideals of fellowship were supplanted by the supremacy of individualism: “The craftsmen of the middle ages were all artists,” and “art or beauty” was their work habit, common to all.90 Morris concludes epigrammatically: “In collective art therefore is no martyrdom: the men give their gift of free will joyfully day by day, to the extinction of moody pride, to the fostering of hearty goodwill: not martyrs – but friends and good fellows.”91 Our decline from the Pre-Raphaelite Middle Ages has been social and ecological. The communal values of “town” life were perverted by the competitive attitudes of city life, thereby polluting the earth with the “waste and squalor which the misnamed monster commerce leaves behind.”92 Morris trusts the day will come when “there is a serious strike of workmen against the poisoning of the air with smoke or the waters with filth,” a strike that will restore England to the beauty of green fields, “because that external beauty is a symbol of a decent and reasonable life.”93 But perversion and pollution prevail when the creative work of artists is dehumanized into the commercial routine of machines. The loss is difficult to reverse when it extends insidiously to the loss of verbal articulation through the distortion of words. So thorough is the degradation of our language that Morris has to clarify the etymology of his words. To speak “of the kind of workman whom we today call an artist,”94 he avoids artisan or operative, words “certainly not English, and to my mind there is a smack of insult to them” (“‘operative,’ I take it, is another word for machine”).95 He resolves to “use an English word in their stead; a word full of meaning … the word handicraftsman.”96 He then must explain how the word craft and its adjective crafty have been degraded and misapplied in modern English … they are used to express trickiness or dishonesty

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… while the right meaning of the word craft is simply power: so that the handicraftsman signifies a man who exercises a power by means of his hands, and doubtless when first used was intended to signify that he exercised a certain kind of power: a readiness of mind and deftness of hand which had been acquired through many generations, handed down from father to son: surely a class of men who possess such power is a class to be honoured and thanked rather than nicknamed by foolish outlandish words.97 In “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” Morris shows how a word from the opposite pole, “manufacturer,” is “most absurdly so called, since a manufacturer means a person who makes with his hands.”98 “Handicraftsman” is a kenning, the figure of speech common to Anglo-Saxon poetry, derived from a compound word made up from two images, like identifying a ship as a “sea-farer” or a mother as a “wombman.” The kenning is a favourite device used by Morris in his effort to preserve the ancestral English manner of creative expression. In a single paragraph of his account of “Early England” Morris uses the following kennings: “seaboard,” “seamen,” “strong-thieves,” “yeomen,” “fieldwork,” “shipwrights,” “the sea that fed them drew them on to waylaying its watery roads.”99 Like the Anglo-Saxon diction of Seamus Heaney, such language has a power in sound and sense all its own. To “ken” means to know, and the kenning is a poetic way of knowing, of understanding in memorable, new ways. Kennings act not so much like the double-tongued ambiguity of metaphor, which Aristotle identifies as error, the mistake of saying this is that;100 rather the kenning presents the purity of direct images composed of the compound word, each side of it being a direct image. In The Story of the Glittering Plain, Hallblithe looks up from planing wood with his “spoke-shave” and beholds the “woebegone” faces of maidens; when he realizes that his beloved is not with them, he becomes “the yokefellow of sorrow.”101 In The Wood Beyond the World the father of Golden Walter is “sword-bitten” by “seathieves”102 during a street brawl with pirates; in The Water of the Wondrous Isles Birdalone escapes a “twig-shower” inflicted by the angry witch,103 listens to the witch sing of the bodies of foes reduced to “ravenwine,”104 and later overhears other foes refer to their captured women as their “bed-gear”;105 and in The Sundering Flood Osberne rides a “waybeast” along the road106 and Elfhild is “fern-eased” to sleep in a natural bed of the forest.107 The Anglo-Saxon kenning epitomizes the poetic

I.1 Layered image concept revealing the portrait of William Morris in his tile panel design, by Kate Lynch, 2011. Panel of sixty-six tiles designed by William Morris, 1876; photograph of William Morris by Frederick Hollyer, 1884.

2.1 Venus Meets Aeneas on the Shores of Libya, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for William Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid, 1874–75.

2.2 Venus Bringing Armour to Aeneas, by Edward Burne-Jones, drawing for Morris’s Aeneid.

2.3. Iris Appearing before Turnus, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

2.4 Aeneas Slaying Mezentius, by Edward Burne-Jones, drawing for Morris’s Aeneid.

2.5 Cassandra amid the Flames of Troy, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

2.6 Dido and Cupid, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

2.7 Lavinia, Her Hair Ablaze, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

2.8 Dido Stabbing Herself, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

2.9 The Burning of the Ships, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

2.10 Aeneas Displays the Armour of Mezentius, by Edward Burne-Jones, illustration for Morris’s Aeneid.

10.1 Brother Rabbit wallpaper design, by William Morris, 1880–81.

10.2 Rhythm 69, Image 38, by David Mabb, 2007.

Above 10.3 Chrysanthemum wallpaper design (full width), by William Morris, 1877.

Right 10.4 Chrysanthemum wallpaper design (detail), by William Morris, 1877.

Top 10.5 Rhythm 69, Image 3, by David Mabb. Bottom 10.6 Rhythm 69, Image 4, by David Mabb.

Top 10.7 Rhythm 69, Image 6, by David Mabb. Bottom 10.8 Rhythm 69, Image 7, by David Mabb.

10.9 Bruges wallpaper design, by William Morris, 1888.

Top 10.10 Rhythm 69, Image 45, by David Mabb. Bottom 10.11 Rhythm 69, Image 46, by David Mabb.

10.12 Rhythm 69, Image 5, by David Mabb.

10.13 Pimpernel wallpaper design, by William Morris, 1876.

10.14 Rhythm 69, Image 20, by David Mabb.

10.15 St James’s wallpaper design, by William Morris, 1881.

10.16 Rhythm 69, Image 11, by David Mabb.

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essence of literature, with its language being representational rather than referential, imagining with the magic of images rather than explaining with the logic of grammar. Thus when Morris complains that “our dealings … with the Latinized countries” left his “islands nothing that had any unadulterated flavour of the soil save the fragmentary literature of Ireland and Wales, and the northern border ballads of Scotland and the northern border, and the fragments of songs of early Germanic invaders,” including “the towering Beowulf,”108 and elsewhere laments that this noble literature became “Frenchified … to its great misfortune,”109 his criticism is based on a political desire for a different way of living and thinking conducted by a decentralized, multicultural society: “If we could only have preserved our language as the Germans have theirs, I think we with our mingled [origins] would have made the world richer than it is now.”110 More than any other Pre-Raphaelite, Morris articulated the fundamental reasons for their pre-Renaissance, pro-medievalist position. It was not a conservative interest in the purity of a national heritage, but rather a radical commitment to revolutionizing a hierarchical social order that was based on the authoritarian ideology of classical and biblical mythologies. In the 1870s Morris believed Sigurd the Volsung should be a national epic for his northern culture; by the 1890s he would finish ten prose romances in nine years in his effort to shift attention from the classical epic of the Renaissance to the romance of the Dark Ages, from the verisimilitude of realism to the visionary ornament of romance. A return to barbarism would reverse the centuries of suppression and appropriation of local rituals, with mistletoe and yule logs replaced by the palms and crosses of a foreign culture. Instead of archetypal metaphors with biblical and classical frames of reference, Morris created verbal visions of alternative worlds that were imaginary and eternal, like Camelot, built to music, built forever, and therefore never built at all,111 but always about to be. He will start one romance with the sons of Adam in a commercial seaport and move to the people of the Bear in the Wood beyond the World. In another romance Hallblithe of the House of the Raven and Hostage of the House of the Rose are to wed on Midsummer Night,112 as Morris replaces the spiritual order of Christianity not with pagan religion, but with the co-operative order of folk rituals, of communal customs. His is not a green Edenic garden or a golden Arcadian pasture or a new Jerusalem, but the land of the Glittering Plain, the Acre of the Undying, the Wood beyond the World, the Well at the World’s End, the

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Water of the Wondrous Isles: the realm of words and rhythm. Morris thus directed the last decade of his life to the goal of transforming the archetype in order to shift our terms of reference so that we will come to redefine the universal and thereby practise a new way of thinking.

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Translation, Collaboration, and Reception: Editing Caxton for the Kelmscott Press y u r i c owa n 1

Although several critics have now acknowledged the equal importance of text and decoration in the formation of the Kelmscott canon,2 few have discussed the content of Kelmscott books, preferring to discuss the books’ aesthetic qualities. And yet Morris himself felt the textual importance of these works strongly enough to print them, sometimes as rarities and sometimes as canonical necessities; Kelmscott books were certainly meant to be understood for their literary content as well as appreciated for their merit as exemplars of perhaps the most popular of the “lesser arts of life.” After all, the mandate of the Press was in part to make literary and other material from Morris’s favourite period more accessible to the modern reader. This chapter will describe the ways in which the Kelmscott editions of the fifteenth-century pioneering English printer William Caxton are representative of Morris’s simultaneous stance of receptivity and creativity with regard to the relics of the medieval past. Being for the most part translations themselves, forming a broad characteristic body of medieval popular reading, and reprinting books that were exemplars not only of the book arts at a crucial point in their evolution but of the English language itself in transition to its modern form, the Kelmscott Caxton editions form a focal point and useful case study for understanding how Morris and his friends approached the practices of translating, editing, and publishing. The Morrisian approach to translation was a process of collaborative work between writers and readers; between printers, authors, and translators; and even between the voices of the past and those of the present. The editing and printing of Caxton texts (among

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others) at the Kelmscott Press constituted more than a purely philological or antiquarian endeavour, or even solely a book-making enterprise. As works involving creative co-production, they served as illustrative examples of Morris’s ideal of creative praxis, embodying a dialogue between multiple creators and their audiences that occurred and continues to occur across time. The scholarly conversation about the value of the Kelmscott output has hitherto concentrated largely on the bibliographical, ornamental, and epical dimensions of Kelmscott books. This essay’s focus on the practical example of the printer Caxton and his own collaborative networks and practices will help us, as that medieval example did for Morris, to shift our attention back to the complex relationships between the books’ contents, material form, and circumstances of production. Printing was (and is) a craft that may attach itself to single famous names like those of Caxton and Morris; and yet, like all the “small crafts” that Morris valued, to be truly successful it requires a process of discussion, consensus building, and knowledge sharing among multiple interests and diverse personalities. Indeed, the desire to recover and reconstitute past attitudes and methods with regard to translating and printing has a lot in common with the way Morris approached all his artistic endeavours, so that the notion of translation that I articulate here may be one of the ways in which we might in future answer Nicholas Frankel’s challenge to place the Kelmscott Press enterprise in the context of Morris’s career.3 In each of his projects Morris was willing to rely on the expertise of those close to him; in methods, artistic works, and utopian modes of social organization, he rarely regarded anything as final; and above all he recognized and valued the diversity of the art of the past, appreciating each surviving work for its individual aesthetic and historical significance, finding a place for it in his own aesthetic catalogue of exemplars, and reconstituting it after his own fashion and in his own preferred media. In order to understand this relationship between the material mediation or re-mediation of texts and “translation” considered in its sense of the reconstitution of a text from one language or temporal milieu into another, it might be helpful to think of the creation of the Kelmscott book in three stages, each one corresponding roughly to a different moment of the inception and creation of a work within the tradition of printing as a “popular art,” as Morris called it. The first stage is an activist reading that assimilates past artistic and literary models. The second is a creative process aimed at making the physical book both beautiful and readable. The third is a process of dissemination that seeks

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to make books of historical or intellectual interest accessible and appealing. All three stages are highly social and collaborative, and the process is the same both in the verbal act of translating and in the material action of printing and publishing (compare the assimilative practice that Morris adopted, for instance, when using John Gerard’s 1597 Herball as inspiration for the floral designs of his wallpaper and textiles – a practice continued by his collaborator and successor John Henry Dearle).4 Throughout the printing process there is a strong consciousness of the physical book. The accessibility of the work is at the forefront of Morris’s mind at every stage. And yet, as Marcus Waithe points out in William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers, Morris was well aware of the strangeness of the mediated text – indeed, as Waithe argues, Morris “refuse[d] translation in its total sense.”5 Morris according to Waithe was invested in highlighting the distinctive nature of the translated text’s previous iterations, since they represented an “authentic strangeness” that needed to be “accommodated” by both the translator and the reader6 – thus accounting, incidentally, for Morris’s retention of what now look like archaisms and etymological fallacies. As Waithe’s observation indicates, this process was a two-way street to Morris, for whom textual reconstitution and recovery represent an act of cross-temporal material production simultaneous with the verbal act of translation that produces the text’s words and phrases. It is not just a matter of the translator or editor and his readers coming to terms with otherness, however. In his lecture on “Architecture and History,” Morris shows how ideas and handicraft alike must be susceptible to positive influence by the artist’s exposure to the visible relics of the past. “Architectural work,” writes Morris (and by “architectural” he always means integrative of multiple domestic arts – from the glass in the windows and the decorative tracery in the arches down to the ironwork of door hinges), “is a work of co-operation. The very designer, be he never so original, pays his debt to this necessity in being in some form or another under the influence of tradition; dead men guide his hand even when he forgets that they ever existed. But, furthermore, he must get his ideas carried out by other men; no man can build a building with his own hands; every one of those men depends for the possibility of even beginning his work on someone else.”7 For Morris, although his overarching metaphor here is architecture rather than book production, the principle of collaboration holds across time as well as within the studio or workshop. The Kelmscott Press was

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an opportunity to study past examples of book production, integrating them into the everyday creative life of the present printer and his collaborators; it was a venue for present artistic creativity based on the historical understanding that came out of that study; and it was a medium for disseminating beyond that circle broadly representative texts from the past. It should not be assumed that these stages were strictly partitioned from each other. The organic tradition assumed by Morris entailed, for instance, that the moment of social reading could galvanize writers, printers, and artists to new creative efforts; that the moment of experiencing the disseminated product could be enriched by previous reading of other related books; and that the active moment of design would have the reader in mind. This blurring of temporal boundaries is one of the strengths of Morris’s method; it plunged him so deeply into the extant literature of his favourite eras that the most direct kind of creative engagement with medieval texts – rewriting them calligraphically as manuscripts, artisanally as printed books, or verbally as translations – was the natural outcome. Jerome McGann offers a picture of the Kelmscott Press as representing Morris’s innate sense of the “immediate and iconic condition” of language.8 That word “immediate” is significant and perhaps even problematic for the Kelmscott project, which, as Nicholas Frankel and Damian Rollison have noted, was devoted above all to the conscious re-mediation and re-envisioning of historical literature.9 McGann’s sense of the intimate relationship between the word as it appears in material type and as it flashes on the mind of the reader may be the theory most essential to understanding the connection between text and book at the Kelmscott Press, and yet it is more than an aesthetic or even linguistic act that should be described here: the printed word is a material experience for Morris, instinct with history and evocative of the circumstances of its creation. Just as a writer like Caxton (or Morris) could simultaneously translate and publish a medieval text, so editorial arrangement and typographical display at the Kelmscott Press were often simultaneous processes of textual organization. Two examples of such artistic translation are the Laudes Beatae Mariae Virginis (1896) printed from the thirteenth-century Clare Psalter, and the Psalmi Penitentiales (1894) printed from a fifteenthcentury Book of Hours, both of which belonged to Morris’s collection (now m. 103 and m. 99, respectively, in the Morgan Library). In these two books the written medieval text of Morris’s own experience lies just under the surface of the printed Kelmscott one. The natural errors of

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transcription and typesetting (described in detail by Curtis F. Bühler in his study of the text of Psalmi Penitentiales) may serve to make each Kelmscott edition distinctive in the textual history of each work and perhaps even to give Morris’s editions the same kind of individuality that their manuscript originals have. Given Morris’s gravitation towards representative works of medieval popular reading, though, it might be said that the works re-mediated here by Morris also stand in palimpsestically for whole generic branches of medieval book production: all Books of Hours, and all Psalters. Morris’s fifteenth-century manuscript of Psalmi Penitentiales, for instance, is in an English translation now attributed to Richard Maidstone, so that not only does the reader imagine the Middle English manuscript text under the Kelmscott one, it is possible to imagine the multiple Latin texts and books existing beyond this particular textual state of Maidstone’s translation. This multiplicity of texts is another good reason to be wary of suggesting that Morris was engaged in imprisoning his “original” medieval texts in a definitive modern printed form. Instead, we might think of this corpus of texts as composed of iterations and reiterations, existing and coexisting in a way like palimpsests, overlapping and abutting, each with its own subtle assertions of individuality, distinction, and likeness. As the example of these two manuscripts shows, Morris’s reading and collecting during this period actively connected the reception of old texts to the process of creating new books. Much of Morris’s library was purchased similarly with the aim that it should provide his collaborators with textual and material examples of the popular reading and arts of the Middle Ages. His collecting in the field of medieval popular material culture had a strong influence on his writings about art, culture, and society. In his lecture on “The Woodcut Books of Ulm and Augsburg,” for instance, he emphasizes that the fifteenth-century books to which he was drawn represent (despite the beauty of their construction) a relatively “cheap form of art”; in “Some Thoughts on the Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages” he draws his reader’s attention to the “enormous quantities” of pocket bibles written out in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and in “The Ideal Book” he describes his ideal book as being a “comfortable” piece of domestic architecture.10 Not only was his collecting an ongoing social practice of sharing books and manuscripts that undermines stereotypes of the solitary immersion of a “rare book collector” in his library, it is apparent that throughout his lectures Morris’s language with regard to books and his choice of examples consistently work

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to resist the notion of the “rare book” as an object of cultural mystery and as a commodity. The reading process that inspired the Kelmscott Press likewise emerges as a radical process, of reading not as mere “poaching” on the hegemonic territory of capital and cultural authority, but as an immersive activity, in which any reader is capable of being intimately and actively engaged with the book from the earliest moment of its production. William Whitla suggests an integrative model of “sympathetic translation” to describe Morris’s simultaneous translation and calligraphic inscription of the sagas as an artistic process that links “the conception and meaning of the book to its production, and, simultaneously, to its social function as a co-operative social act,” in which the material text provokes creative activity on the part of both reader and producer. Whitla’s subsequent reading of Morris’s calligraphic practice, as “the mediating act of the scribe that transmits meaning from one culture to another,”11 supports my own argument that for Morris the act of reading is tied to his entrenched sense of the book as a physical object, and that the act of conveying (or, etymologically, translating) the book to the reader is an essential aspect of the process. The historicist project of the Kelmscott Press was an earnest re-sending of old books to new readers, like translating the relics of the past from one physical location to another. Whitla’s theory of “translation” accords with my theory that Morris’s reading is an active and social process, requiring the hands-on participation of present readers (in this case Morris and his collaborators, in their alternating roles as collectors, translators, scribes, printers, illustrators, and editors) to convey past texts to future readers. This intimate relationship of textual editing and making to the act of reception, which is in turn tied to Morris’s entrenched sense of the book as a physical object, has its parallel in the delegation of authority from the translated author to the translator. That this is a cross-temporal relationship is suggested by Caxton himself, as when (for example) in the introduction to his translation of Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend (the most popular medieval collection of saints’ lives) he offers to reward future active readers and editors, submitting his work “hooly of suche as can & may to correcte it / humbly bysechyng them so to doo / and in so doyng / they shal deserue a synguler lawde and meryte / & I shall pray for them vnto almyghty god that he of his benygne grace rewarde them.”12 As we shall see, Morris’s friend, collaborator, and chief editor, F.S. Ellis, would exploit this statement in the interest of a relatively free

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attitude towards textual emendation. The practice of editing at the Press was thus a kind of textual performance; we find Ellis claiming for instance in his “Memoranda” to the Golden Legend that the Kelmscott edition was “intended to be, not a facsimile reprint, but a new edition of the book.”13 Behind Caxton’s words lie the medieval notion of the unfinished work: the idea that the author or maker of a book is sending an imperfect text on to future readers who may do with it what they please so long as they continue to improve it, just as Morris himself engaged in what William S. Peterson describes as a “painstaking procedure of tracing, drawing, and redrawing photographs” of numerous early typefaces.14 This attitude towards originality did not survive intact in the age of copyright. George Wardle tells the story, in his manuscript “Memorials of William Morris,” of Morris’s apparently rather passive reaction to a tradesman who had marketed one of Morris’s designs as his own: Whether he was flabbergasted by the astounding impudence of this speech I do not know but I supposed afterwards that he was struck by the truth at the bottom of the remark – that the power of design, as all other gifts of nature, is not created by the owner & that his possessing such power did not make it his exclusive property. Of course it would be absurd to apply that principle under the present condition of things & Mr Morris took care to insure himself against such accidents in the future. But W. Morris was then pondering those principles of socialism which he openly professed some years later & he gave loyal acceptance to a proposition he would have liked to see generally adopted.15 It is hard not to read this as the influence of something like a medieval attitude towards the authority of the original on Morris’s socialist thought. For him it might certainly be said that the most important feature of a work was not its originality, but its execution. We must shift our focus, therefore, from the translation as an original performance or new work back to the moment where the translated work, the translator, and the act of translation come together. Indeed, translations by early modern authors such as Caxton, Berners, and (later) Philemon Holland seem to have been regarded by Morris as significant English textual performances in their own right, rather than as word-for-word reiterations of another, more “authentic” text. Not only were they historically closer to their originals, but they also provided the

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kind of linguistic accessibility that informed Morris’s view of what translations should offer the reader – retaining enough of the alterity and felicity of medieval words and phrases yet still speaking in a direct, recognizable idiom. What is more, translation (material and/or verbal) in this view takes place in an environment of shared inspiration. It is simultaneously a moment of reception and creation, homage and reinterpretation, and Morris’s translation and printing work alike are the natural exercises of a reader desirous of allowing others the kind of access to medieval texts that he had had. The verbal matter and the material form of works by medieval writers, translators, and printers like William Caxton had played a key role in shaping Morris’s understanding of the past, and the establishment of the Kelmscott Press was rooted in Morris’s own sense of having long been the beneficiary of a similar envoiement or translation.

The Medieval Printer and the Kelmscott Canon Morris’s understanding of Caxton in 1891, like the exhibitors’ understanding of England’s first printer in the quadricentennial Caxton Celebration a few years previously in 1877, was only in part an evocation of the actual life and practices of the medieval printer; rather, he represented a touchstone for English printing history.16 Caxton’s works were of particular interest to Morris because they were written in a transitional form of Middle English that was not too remote from the comprehension of the late-Victorian reader; because they provided near-contemporary translations of non-English works that gave an insight into popular medieval reading; and because, as popular works of history, religion, and literature, they shed light on the social history of the late Middle Ages. Like the medieval printer, Morris positioned himself at or near the centre of a printing network with links outward to various places and people: for instance to Emery Walker’s typographical expertise just around the corner from Kelmscott House; to Joseph Batchelor’s papermaking factory in Kent; to ink manufacturers in Germany; to the Doves and Leighton binderies; and to the reading room of the British Museum. This network also extended across time, to the woodcut illustrators of Ulm and Augsburg; to early sixteenth-century Antwerp, where Thierry Martens had printed the copy of a Savonarola pamphlet (now in the Pierpont Morgan Library), which Morris ordered bound in the same limp vel-

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lum binding with yellow ties that the Doves bindery used for the Kelmscott books; and of course to England’s first printer himself. Indeed, the collaborative nature of the latter’s own publishing practice is marked out in Caxton’s seemingly scattershot catalogue of popular medieval bestsellers, in his dissemination of his own translations from French, Latin, and Dutch writers, and in his similarly decentred network of collaborators and patrons, a network represented by such names as Colard Mansion, Wynkyn de Worde, and Margaret the Duchess of Burgundy. When deciding which books to publish at the Kelmscott Press and how they should be edited, Morris and Ellis showed a strong consciousness not only of the kinds of books that had made an impression on them, but of the way in which such books would be received by subsequent readers. Except for studies of Kelmscott editing practices like Charles LaPorte’s essay on “Victorian Editorial Theory and the Kelmscott Chaucer” or Bühler’s quantitative analysis of the editing of the Psalmi Penitentiales from its manuscript (a significant article not least because it is probably the first to take a Kelmscott edition seriously as text), the “reading interest” of Kelmscott Press books might as well be non-existent. And yet Morris himself felt the textual importance of these books strongly enough to print them, sometimes as rarities (Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey) and sometimes as canonical necessities (The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer). He chose representative texts that gave an eclectic sample of popular medieval reading: not only popular fiction but popular history, legend, and religion. As William S. Peterson points out, “Morris and Ellis were aiming at a readable text of broad literary appeal rather than literary accuracy … the care with which they printed literary documents, some of them previously unpublished, is remarkable; the Kelmscott Press was, among other things, a pioneering attempt at intelligent popularisation of literary works that in some instances were drawn from obscure sources.”17 The notion of filling a need in historical and literary scholarship was another agenda of the Kelmscott Press that its collaborators liked to stress. In his “Memoranda” to the Kelmscott edition of Caxton’s Order of Chivalry, the editor Ellis (after lamenting, in imitation of Caxton’s own editorial, the loss of the culture of chivalry), for example, claims that “the interest that [this book] has now as an historical document is considerable, and the wonder is that it has not been reprinted before this time in our own days.”18 Just as he had integrated medieval artifacts, scraps of balladry, and domestic anecdote into his propaganda, romances, poetry, and lectures, Morris was now positioning his historiography of everyday life at the

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heart of his publishing practice with regard to his choices of representative medieval texts. He in part justified his publication of Caxton’s translation of Raoul Lefèvre (the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye), for example, by calling it “a thoroughly amusing story, instinct with mediaeval thought and manners.”19 Caxton, printer of medieval bestsellers, was therefore central to the Kelmscott Press’s vision of the body of medieval works to be recovered. Five of the fifty-three books ultimately to come out of the Press had originally been printed and translated by Caxton, and all of them were published as substantial editions within the first two years of the Press’s existence: The Golden Legend and The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye in 1892, The History of Reynard the Foxe, The Order of Chivalry, and The History of Godefroy of Boloyne and of the Conquest of Iherusalem in 1893. Caxton’s own translations were used for each of the Kelmscott editions, and the transcribers relied wholly on Caxton’s own texts. An edition of Caxton’s translation of Jerome’s Vitas Patrum, uniform with the Golden Legend, was also floated, according to Sydney Cockerell: “A prospectus and specimen were issued in March 1894, but the number of subscribers did not justify its going beyond this stage.”20 The Kelmscott Press was at least in part an exercise in textual recovery; many of its medieval texts, including The Order of Chivalry, existed in no editions later than the sixteenth century. A few, like the Psalmi Penitentiales and the Laudes Beatae Mariae Virginis, existed only in Morris’s own collection of manuscripts, and it would take even the Early English Text Society in some cases decades to get around to editing such Kelmscott favourites as The Order of Chivalry (eets 1926), Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey (eets 1959), and Caxton’s Reynard the Fox (eets 1970); the Kelmscott Godefroy of Boloyne, exactly contemporaneous with the 1893 Early English Text Society edition, was a bit of a fluke.21 Among the Caxton works chosen by the Press, only the edition of Reynard the Fox could be said not to have been filling a need, since there were a number of nineteenthcentury editions of it already.22 But philology, as we have seen, was of less importance to Morris than were accessibility and broad literary appeal; in this he was simultaneously representative of the social-historiographical interest of his era and distinct from the more genteel antiquarian taste of the previous 200 years. In the previous century, Edward Gibbon had sympathized with a Caxton who found himself pandering to a low audience: “In the choice of his authors, that liberal and industrious artist was reduced to comply

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with the vicious taste of his readers; to gratify the nobles with treatises on heraldry, hawking, and the game of chess, and to amuse the popular credulity with romances of fabulous knights and legends of more fabulous saints.”23 Gibbon’s understanding of historical reading communities is shrewd, although his sense of the popular could not differ more from that of Morris, who saw Caxton’s treatises, histories, romances, and legends as being representative of medieval popular reading culture, whether they partook of a “vicious taste” or not. Far from being “reduced” to printing such representative artifacts of late-medieval popular entertainment, Morris actively sought them out to read and reprint. This impulse to recover and share the everyday reading of the Middle Ages had long been an important part of Morris’s social theories and of Ellis’s medievalist publishing endeavours,24 and like the Early English Text Society before them they had no desire to restrict themselves to merely “literary” texts, if a work like Utopia may even be considered as such. Morris hints to Ellis in a letter of 29 August 1890 that Caxton’s Golden Legend should be chosen over his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye for the first medieval text to come out of the Press because it was the more representative of medieval life and popular religion,25 a view which Ellis took to heart when he edited the work again for Dent’s Temple Classics. Caxton’s otherwise obscure translation of Ramon Llull’s Order of Chivalry and the Middle English Psalmi Penitentiales, now attributed to Richard Maidstone, were chosen for similar reasons, and Godefrey of Boloyne provided an example of a work that partook of both history and romance. Henry Halliday Sparling, writing in 1924, claimed that Morris saw the Golden Legend as a “storehouse of much medieval tradition and religious thought, as well as of much folk-lore and many varied marvels.”26 Though Sparling’s adulatory reminiscences are not always trustworthy, here he seems to have captured the reasoning behind Morris’s and Ellis’s choice of medieval texts: they were looking for interest and amusement, for variety, and for neglected documents of medieval popular culture. When Bernard Quaritch opined suggestively that “Some of the naughty Saints stories will be relished by the numerous readers of Burton’s Arabian Nights,”27 he was not quite so out of touch with Morris’s intentions as William Peterson makes him out to be. The Kelmscott Press did prefer works that a broad modern audience could both read and find appealing. And although it is hard to tell how “popular” Morris expected his choice of texts to be from a modern standpoint, he certainly emphasized the kinds of works that would have

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appealed to more than one possible medieval reading community. The value of the Golden Legend for Morris was in its versatility and its wideranging subject matter, as well as in its position at the intersection of popular religion, history, and romance. It is easy to see, then, why Morris chose to print a work like Caxton’s The Order of Chivalry at the Kelmscott Press: the text had not been previously reprinted; it spoke to the fascination with chivalric behaviour that formed a subcurrent of lateVictorian discourses of masculinity;28 and it was a window into an aspect of the social life of the Middle Ages. The Kelmscott Press was conceived as an ongoing project; it continued for some time after Morris’s death and had many more works in mind than the ones that were ultimately published. Sydney Cockerell’s list of books contemplated by Morris gives a good sample of the possibilities that Morris had in mind, including a collection of balladry and antique popular song, a Latin psalter, Piers Plowman, Huon of Bordeaux, and the Gesta Romanorum. It is a diverse list that goes far beyond the more wellknown projected Malory and Froissart into religious and historical works that in some cases even the Early English Text Society was as yet many years away from printing. In fact, the Kelmscott canon was open-ended, not exclusively medieval, and capable of almost infinite extension; even the works of Dickens were considered for possible future printing.29 Nor had they exhausted the possibilities of even the Caxton canon. The projected Malory would necessarily have been based upon Caxton’s version, since the Winchester manuscript would not be discovered until 1934. And in addition to the promised but unforthcoming Caxton translation of Vitas Patrum, Sydney Cockerell also hints more obscurely at a contemplated edition of Raoul Lefèvre’s History of Jason, again in the Caxton translation.30 England’s first printer, then, was central to the Kelmscott enterprise, although as we have seen it was not necessarily for the myth-making reasons suggested by Sparling or Joseph Dunlap but rather because of the subject matter of his books and the example of his activity in translation and dissemination. It is significant, too, that Caxton was seized upon by Morris and his collaborators as representing not an originary medieval author but a mediator. For the purposes of this chapter, attention to one particular Kelmscott Caxton edition – The Order of Chivalry with its attendant translation of a fourteenth-century French poem – will serve to reveal the ways in which Morris’s collaborators consistently managed to make their presence felt in the texts and paratexts of the Press’s recovery

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and reconstitution of Caxton’s texts, an organic, negotiated process that will suggest further reasons for us to adjust any residual images we may have of Morris as the sole face of the Kelmscott project.

From Translator to Printer: The Order of Chivalry Volume The Kelmscott Press volume known to bibliographers and book collectors as The Order of Chivalry in fact contains three quite different texts. The first text is William Caxton’s 1494 translation of a French manuscript of Ramon Llull’s early-fourteenth-century Catalan Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria, a prose work in which an old hermit describes to a young squire the customs, obligations, and honours appertaining to knighthood. The second text is an anonymous fourteenth-century French narrative poem, L’Ordène de Chevalerie, in which Hugues de Tabarie, a knight from the Crusader kingdom of Galilee, is captured by the Saracen ruler Saladin and made to educate an eager Saladin in the ways of chivalry, after which Hugues is released with much honour. The third text is William Morris’s own translation of L’Ordène de Chevalerie, begun in December 1892 specifically for inclusion in the Kelmscott volume, and titled The Ordination of Knighthood. Of these, the Caxton text was printed first, and finished on 10 November 1892; the other two were printed afterward, and finished on 24 February 1893. It is thus important that we treat each work as separate and distinct; the Kelmscott Order of Chivalry volume should be viewed as an anthology rather than as a single unit. The volume is a remarkable illustration of the spontaneity of Morris as a printer, of his wide-ranging interests in medieval primary texts, and of his method and talents as a translator. It is also a very representative example of the give and take in the collaboration between Morris and his friend F.S. Ellis, who did the bibliographical work of establishing the text of the Caxton work and of the Ordène, and who provided the “Memoranda Concerning the Two Pieces Here Reprinted” at the end. L’Ordène de Chevalerie was first published by the French antiquarian Étienne Barbazan in 1759 in a volume entitled Fabliaux et contes français des XIe, XIIe, XIIIe, XIVe, et XVe siècles (Ellis explains that the 1808 edition, which is the one I will refer to here, was used to provide the text for the Kelmscott edition). In his “Avertissement” to the volume, Barbazan introduces the character of “Hugues, Chastelain de St. Omer [qui] suivit

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Godefroy de Bouillon dans l’entreprise qu’il fit de conquérir la Terre Sainte” (Hugues, Chastelain of St. Omer, [who] followed Godefroy de Bouillon [in the year 1099] in his undertaking to conquer the Holy Land”).31 Barbazan goes on to describe the historical Hugues’s ascension to the rule of the “Princée de Galilée et Seigneurie de Tibériade” – that is, of the crusader principality of Galilee and Tiberias – and comments that “it is by this lordship that he came to be surnamed, by a corruption [of the latter name], as being ‘of Tabarie.’”32 It is also striking that Barbazan attributes the work to Hugues himself (“par Hue de Tabarie,” viii), an attribution followed by later editors even though the chronology is suspect, since Hugues died in 1106 and the poem is said by Ellis to belong to the thirteenth century. In accordance with Morris’s interest in the social life and customs of the Middle Ages, the French poem is, as Barbazan and Ellis agree, full of “détail fort exact et fort circonstancié de toutes les cérémonies qui se faisoient lorsque l’on recevoit un nouveau Chevalier” (“very exact and particular detail regarding all the ceremonies attendant upon the reception of a new-made knight”).33 The poem’s association with the story of Godefroy de Bouillon (of which Morris had already published Caxton’s redaction) gives it a continuity with another work in the Kelmscott canon, while the poem’s revelation of an episode in the life of an obscure, named personage of medieval history speaks to Morris’s interest in recovering the lives of medieval men and women, an interest which goes back at least as far as the Guenevere volume. These associations do not wholly account for Morris’s motives for appending L’Ordène de Chevalerie and his translation of the French poem to the Caxton work. William Blades, in his landmark The Life and Typography of William Caxton, had already seen fit to point out that the works were not connected in more than their theme: “The ‘Order of Chivalry’ has no connection with ‘L’ordène de chevalerie.’ Dibdin, in the Typ. Ant., and Moule in Bib Herald, both err in this matter.”34 F.S. Ellis, in the “Memoranda Concerning the Two Pieces Here Reprinted,” suggests that he and Morris have juxtaposed the two texts in order “to enable those who are interested in the matter to judge how far there is reason to suppose that the one work is drawn from the other.”35 This practice would apparently extend to more than just source study: the volume seems intended to give the reader the leisurely opportunity to compare three different, related articulations of chivalric self-fashioning and behaviour. It is, moreover, significant that Ellis emphasizes a “strange confusion” on the part of “writers and bibliographers,” suggesting not only

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that he has no doubt that the two are not connected, but that part of the purpose of printing them together is at least in part to clear up that bibliographical confusion. The Kelmscott Press was to some extent an exercise in bibliography and textual recovery: in the apparatus, always partial, provided by Ellis to volumes such as The Golden Legend and The Order of Chivalry we can see the traces of a negotiation between Ellis and Morris as to how much in the way of apparatus and textual scholarship the Kelmscott books should provide. I would suggest that Morris saw the inclusion of diverse texts and translations as a way of providing yet more documentation that might bear witness to the life and everyday practices of the past, while Ellis’s intentions were more along the traditional lines of the bibliographer and editor seeking to make available the most accurate and interesting texts. The pair’s interests converged here in this book, where they included multiple texts for comparison, although each of them might have imagined the purpose of such comparison in a slightly different way. Bibliographically as well as in the choice of texts, we might see the Order of Chivalry volume as a collection or anthology – a Sammelband – like the Gawain manuscript or any number of other medieval manuscripts that have been bound together according to a recoverable internal logic. The Kelmscott Order of Chivalry volume was printed in two parts, as attested by the separate colophons for the two parts: on page 102, the first colophon to The Order of Chivalry states that it was “finished on the 10th day of November, 1892,” while on page 151, the other two poems are given as “finished on the 24th day of February, 1893.” There is anecdotal and material evidence that this printing in two parts was not planned from the outset but was a spontaneous choice on the part of the printer and editor. The only traditionary evidence we have for this is Henry Halliday Sparling, who calls the inclusion of the Ordène and Ordination an “afterthought.”36 There is plenty of material evidence, however. Not only do the colophons give separate dates of printing, but the two parts were also printed on different paper and even folded in different formats, although Morris made the signatures continuous, starting with “i” for the Ordène. According to William Peterson, “the second half of the volume, L’Ordène de Chevalerie [and The Ordination of Knighthood], was printed on the larger Flower paper; hence the first part of the book is a quarto and the second half an octavo.”37 Eugene LeMire recognizes the two kinds of paper but suggests that it is a quarto in eights.38 Either way, the discontinuous format over the two parts of the

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book suggests a pragmatic readjustment on the part of Morris the printer that is in keeping with the Kelmscott Press as an experiment in printing, and as a press with a very medieval sense of how texts – sometimes related thematically, and sometimes not – might be thrown together in a Sammelband to conserve space and binding time as well as to create a single volume of a fitting size. The Press, then, had completely finished printing The Order of Chivalry before Morris and his editor decided to complement it with L’Ordène de Chevalerie and The Ordination of Knighthood; indeed, Morris did not even begin the process of translating the Ordène until after the Caxton text had come off the press. J.W. Mackail explains that “the translation had first been made in prose by Ellis. But Morris one day suddenly remembered the fact that the Press, like the firm of thirty years back, ‘kept a poet of its own,’ and turned him on for the purpose.”39 That is not to say that Ellis was, despite the picture I have drawn above of two characters driven by divergent urges towards strict bibliography and romantic historiography, a more prosaic writer; he, too, had made a poetic translation of the text, which he had published at the Chiswick Press the preceding year.40 But once he had decided to make the translation himself, Morris showed his usual decisiveness. May Morris, in her Introductions to the Collected Works of William Morris, recounts how “Mr. Cockerell’s diary for 1892 has the following entry: ‘Sat: Dec. 3. W. M. began the translation of an old French poem from which Caxton seems to have derived the idea of the Order of Chivalry. It was wonderful to watch the words slipping into their places.’”41 He must have finished the 510 lines in very good time for the printing to have begun in January. It is characteristic of Morris’s workmanlike poetic practice that this translation was carried out so rapidly. The manuscript of the translation (now Huntington ms hm 6436) shows relatively few signs of revision, although Morris does show some confusion regarding the title: at first, he calls it literally “The Ordination of Chivalry,” and in the manuscript’s colophon, he even forgets himself so far as to write “The end of the Order of Chivalry.” The ultimate choice of The Ordination of Knighthood for a title is certainly intended to distinguish the work from its companion texts. It is also characteristic of Morris’s writing practice at this period to include notes in the manuscript for his compositor regarding the printing of the text. On the first page, for instance, he calls for a “small big

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bloomer” – that is, one of his floriated initials or “blooming letters” – to mark the opening “T” in “That” and further down draws a box around the “B” in “But” to mark the placement of a small initial. This manuscript may be compared with the manuscript that was printer’s copy for The Tale of Beowulf, now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, which has similar instructions regarding the layout of the page. Morris’s consciousness of the remediation process inherent in the transition from script to print here is parallel to his consciousness of the way the work is in process of being translated from one language to another. Although the Ordination of Knighthood manuscript is not written out so finely, and is probably the only draft of the work, both manuscripts speak to Morris’s method when printing his translations at the Press. Just as with the above-cited printed editions of the Book of Hours and Psalter from Morris’s own collection, the working manuscript copy is here visible like a palimpsest under the Kelmscott printed version. These palimpsestic layers of translation and remediation can be extraordinarily complex, as is the case with the Kelmscott Beowulf, which exists as, first, the literal translation which A.J. Wyatt wrote out for Morris, then as Morris’s working version, then as the printer’s copy. Indeed, such a book implicitly bears the weight of all its other diverse historical versions, back through the translations and editions of the nineteenth century, including Kemble, Thorpe, Grundtvig, and Thorkelin, and extending all the way back to Cotton Vitellius A. XV itself and its two very different Anglo-Saxon scribes. As a piece of printing, the Order of Chivalry volume brings together two parts on different-sized paper in different formats and experiments with a different approach to white-vine decoration on each title page. Comprising a medievalist Sammelband of the fifteenth-century Caxton text, the fourteenth-century French text, and the nineteenth-century translation by Morris, it brings together works that are thematically related, but very different with regard to their form, their historical particularity, and their national origin. The publication of this book by the Kelmscott Press elevated its three texts to the status of medievalist classics and linked the three indelibly and perhaps confusedly in the minds of many readers. May Morris herself had to be reminded of the existence of Morris’s translation by Sidney Cockerell so that it could be included in volume XVII of the Collected Works, while N.F. Blake in his bibliographical guide to Caxton carelessly lists the Kelmscott Order of Chivalry as “edited by F.S. Ellis with verse translation by William Morris.”42 It would

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not be surprising if even some owners who have prized the volume as a genuine Kelmscott artifact have never inquired into the relationship between the three different texts it contains. The Order of Chivalry volume is a very representative example of what I have called the Kelmscott canon, which was broad and inclusive, and capable equally of drawing upon modern and ancient texts in verse and in prose that dealt with fiction and poetry, legend and social history, narrative and anthropology, homily and romance, translation and original. The flexibility of the Kelmscott canon is as important to the legacy of the Press as is its experimental ethos with regard to typography, illustration, and page design. In the process of its compilation – a process involving at various phases illustration, composition, editing, translation, and the drawing together of disparate pages and texts into a single volume – it is exemplary of the manner in which Morris and his collaborators combined textual scholarship and writerly creativity with the accretive and experimental printing methods of the Kelmscott Press.

From Printer to Reader: Emendation, Reconstitution, and Reception Whitla’s metaphor of “sympathetic translation” is particularly useful here, since it usefully conveys the sense of the text as an intermediary between the past writer and present reader, allows for a certain amount of freedom on the part of the translator, and suggests the unsystematic nature of the scholarship behind the collaborators’ translating and editing practices. Morris and Ellis were determined from the start to give medieval works in their original spelling or, for non-English works, with as historically contemporaneous a translation as possible. Although they did not want to make free with their originals, they needed texts which would be accessible. Caxton fit the requirements satisfactorily there as well. He speaks a language which, as Morris puts it, is a transitional “archaeological” curiosity, “belonging to that curious period in the history of the English language when the old had hopelessly gone to pieces and the new had not yet formulated itself,”43 and which was likely to be more comprehensible in the original to modern readers than many earlier texts would be. Caxton’s own translations were accordingly used for each of the Kelmscott editions (just as Berners’s was the obvious choice

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for the projected Froissart), and the transcribers relied wholly on Caxton’s original texts. Since he was dealing with translations, F.S. Ellis may even have felt more comfortable as an editor making his own changes to medieval texts like Caxton’s or Maidstone’s. Ellis justified his emendations quite reasonably, claiming in his “Memoranda” to the Golden Legend that the Kelmscott edition was “intended to be, not a facsimile reprint, but a new edition of the book,” so that “where the text was altogether unintelligible, or absolutely wrong through mistranslation, no hesitation has been felt in correcting it by the Latin original, but instances of the need for this are rare.”44 In this he differentiated his editing from that of, say, the Bannatyne Club, which had earlier in the century, in publishing its lavish editions, aspired to the elite status of a type facsimile. Works such as Gawain and the Green Knight (ed. Madden, 1839) had appeared in this way in print for the first time; but the Bannatyne Club’s intended readership was a small group of rich antiquarians and bibliophiles. Ellis, by way of contrast, claimed that every one of his editorial decisions was aimed at making the text “more readable and intelligible. With this view the contractions of the original are extended, with the exception of the sign ‘&,’ which is retained or extended as required to suit typographical exigencies.”45 In keeping with his modernizing practice, he emended his original silently. Caxton’s “and were cruelle that one of them brake the poynt of hys swerd / ayenst the pavement” in the 1483 edition,46 for example, becomes “and were so cruelle that.”47 Cleverly, Ellis takes this licence based on Caxton’s own words in the prologue to The Golden Legend cited above, pointing out that “it may be observed, that in his preface, not only has Caxton sanctioned such corrections, but has earnestly enjoined them, and added a promise of reward.”48 There is more than a suggestion here that Ellis saw himself in the comfortable role of a collaborator with his medieval original. All of Ellis’s emendations and changes were silent, in accordance with the principle that the medieval (or medievalist) printer/editor was an active participant in the process of textual exchange. In spite of Ellis’s willingness to emend silently, he was also a willing annotator, and there arose a tension among the collaborators as to how much secondary material each edition ought to contain. In the early years of the Press, Ellis had made a concerted effort to include plenty of secondary material in the Kelmscott books he was to edit, but in this he seems to have been

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thwarted by Morris. During the planning of the Golden Legend, for example, he was in contact with the noted bibliographer Edward Gordon Duff. In a letter to Duff, dated from Torquay, 20 March 1892, now in the Huntington Library, Ellis writes that “the author-printer kicks much against introductions”; that suspicion of extraneous detail extended to a bibliography of editions of the Legenda Aurea which Duff (or perhaps even Ellis, since he refers in the letter to Duff’s having agreed to a “request”) had suggested as an adjunct to the Kelmscott Golden Legend.49 In the end, Morris had the last word over his more bibliographically minded collaborator and declined the opportunity to publish Duff’s bibliography, ostensibly because he lacked the appropriate type. Edward Burne-Jones, for one, shared Morris’s dislike of extraneous apparatus: in inscribing his copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer to his daughter, he writes that “I want particularly to draw your attention to the fact that there is no preface to Chaucer, and no introduction, and no essay on his position as a poet, and no notes, and no glossary; so that all is prepared to enjoy him thoroughly.”50 As Morris’s and Ellis’s letters show, Morris was similarly in favour of presenting medieval works with as limited an apparatus as possible – a glossary to the Psalmi Penitentiales, for example, restricted itself to only the hardest “1/2 dozen” words51 – while elsewhere he encouraged Ellis to modernize the letters yogh and thorn. The inclusion of notes is another feature that varies from book to book in the Kelmscott canon: as time went on, the medieval texts of the Kelmscott Press contained successively less in the way of apparatus, until the Chaucer, as Burne-Jones approvingly noted, was published in pristine form, containing none at all. Emendations were likewise silent not only because space was at a premium, but because the inclusion or explanation of textual variants would have interfered with Morris’s attempt to focus attention on the direct experience of the texts and the books themselves. Morris’s approach to apparatus has a lot in common with his attitude towards translation. While Morris would have agreed with Burne-Jones’s comment that removing apparatus from his reprints of medieval texts would make the reading experience more “enjoyable,” his purpose was also to allow the reader to find his or her own approach to the work in question. With regard to the glossary, for instance, because Morris’s own experience of the Middle Ages was holistic rather than rigorously specialized, he felt that it was not necessary to know every old word, since context, use, and repetition would surrender a rough meaning (and if not, Morris always showed himself more than happy to rely upon the ety-

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mological fallacy, as his translation of Beowulf displays in great variety). When it came to printing his own translations, lexical archaism and blackletter type alike were meant to accustom the reader to the text’s origins and analogues in medieval popular culture.

Conclusion: The Medieval Book in Translation Morris’s and Ellis’s popularizing editorial practices with regard to the Caxton canon offer a possible way to simultaneously resolve debates among book historians about the “readability” of the Kelmscott Press books and debates among modern editors about the Press’s commitment to a standard of editorial scholarship.52 Simply put, accessibility was more important than textual accuracy (which, Morris and even Ellis might cavalierly argue, is dependent anyhow upon a constellation of evocative but unreliable texts). Michael Camille, in an essay on the repositioning of medieval texts in nineteenth-century French scholarly contexts, describes among other things how “carefully classified blocks of print and their footnoted apparatus, together with clearly demarcated beginnings and endings, remade texts written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries into nineteenth century intellectual commodities.”53 Morris and his collaborators were engaged in re-remaking those nineteenth-century intellectual commodities into texts and paratexts that would (ideally) not have been entirely alien to either a fifteenth-century reader or a nineteenth-century reader. The result was a publishing practice that, because it relied upon an organic reading experience (integrative, as Kelvin or Frankel might suggest, of text and paratext) rather than an academic one, was more resistant to the pressures of commodification and conformity than other contemporary reprints of medieval works were. To borrow Camille’s terms, the Kelmscott Press aimed to bring back the performative aspect of the medieval text and the consequent emphasis on the reading experience. But such a practice also necessitated the stripping of all but the most necessary apparatus from Caxton’s works: scrapping bibliographies, trimming glossaries, restricting Ellis’s bibliophilic and editorial enthusiasms to the back of the Golden Legend, and in the end excluding them almost entirely from the Chaucer itself. This may be problematic from the strictest modern editorial standpoint, since it might be said to deny the Caxton texts’ long editorial and publishing history. And yet if we consider the Kelmscott Press’s publishing practices, not as

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creating editions, nor even as reprinting texts, but as making translations – as reconstituting medieval words in a modern idiom, both in terms of language and of paratext – we begin to understand the occasionally conflicting directions in which Morris and his many collaborators were pushing and pulling the machinery of the Kelmscott enterprise, always in the interest of accessibility. Peterson aptly characterizes the publishing strategies of the Kelmscott Press as a return to the look and atmosphere of medieval books, and also as a return to a more direct mode of interaction between the modern reader and the medieval text: “Only by peeling off the Renaissance and neo-classical layers of cultural interpretation could [Morris] recover something like the Chaucer of the Middle Ages, and this involved both a careful restoration of Chaucer’s text (including his spelling) and a return to a more medieval style of typography and ornamentation.”54 Peterson’s choice of the word “restoration” is unfortunate here, and not only for its architectural associations; after all, Peterson himself suggests provocatively for instance that the main copytext for the Chaucer was Skeat’s modern edition, and only nominally the Ellesmere manuscript.55 It was certainly not a faithful reprint of the partial Caxton or the suspect Thynne editions with their multiple apocryphal attributions, however widely read they had historically been. Likewise, the metaphor here of “peeling off the layers” is a suspect kind of scraping, since the many Pre-Raphaelite and Morrisian paratexts of for instance the Chaucer complicate the reading experience further and in different directions. Morris’s emphasis on pleasure is undeniable, and the aesthetic and textual choices that Morris made (whether acquiescing to or opposing the desires of an editor like Ellis) seem to have uniformly been made for ease of access rather than in the name of mystification. But it would be still more accurate to say that a reader who follows Morris through his immersion in medieval manuscripts, early printed books, and Kelmscott editions, and who takes into account the discourse of collaborative creativity that Morris, his illustrators, and his collaborators carried on in the library at Kelmscott House, must come to the conclusion that Morris was not engaged in the process of creating “intellectual commodities,” nor even aesthetic commodities. He and his collaborators were recovering, translating, and preserving, however selectively, what he saw as the popular culture of the Middle Ages in an accessible and non-prescriptive format. That they did not in every instance agree on matters of editing and aesthetics accounts for the diversity of the textual and paratextual appearance of each Kelmscott

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book. This diversity in the form and content of the Kelmscott canon is the product not only of Morris’s own restless and experimental nature, but of innumerable moments of negotiation between Morris and his collaborators, medieval and modern. As we have seen, such moments are even occasionally identifiable in the history of the circumstances surrounding the printing, editing, and translation of these relics of medieval popular culture; as we read these moments not only into the material form of each Kelmscott book but into its often complicated textual history as well, the influence of the Press’s collaborators is traceable as it radiates outward, beyond Morris and his immediate circle and indeed far beyond the temporal and geographical bounds of late-Victorian England.

seven

Morris’s Road to Nowhere: New Pathways in Political Persuasion m i c h e l l e w e i n ro t h

1 It is 7 October 1890. Morris approaches the end of his Commonweal phase. He writes to his friend, John Bruce Glasier: “I shall now presently begin to touch up N from N [News from Nowhere] for its book form, & will publish [sic] for 1s/0. It has amused me very much writing it: but you may depend upon it, it wont [sic] sell. This of course is my own fault – or my own misfortunes.”1 Some decades later, May Morris contests her father’s views, insisting on “the abiding place [that the book] has in the affections of those who care for England and who understand something of the passionate yearning that peopled her June meadows and gentle river with a happy throng of Dream-folk.”2 The diverging “prophecies” are both true. Seen together, May’s effusive claims and Morris’s sanguine words innocently prefigure two competing reactions to News from Nowhere (henceforth NfN) that would later typify the book’s twentieth-century reception. Morris’s gloomy forecast (“it won’t sell”) is borne out by certain readers’ discomfort with the narrative’s putatively idealist and sentimental ruralism, its pastoral portrait of a future communist England.3 May’s redeeming words, by contrast, reflect a readerly delight in the story’s English countryscapes.4 Both assertions carry a measure of truth; NfN has garnered praise and celebrity, while also confounding and disturbing its reading public. Fascination with it has endured for more than a century. Still, Morris was not unjustified in his fear of failing to secure immediate and wide-ranging approval from his fellow men/women. In the last lines of the narrative, he discloses

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a suspicion that his fictive construct, wrought of a passionate desire to shape hearts and minds, might be grasped as no more than a flourish of dreaming. Amid and against the many competing appraisals of NfN,5 I turn my attention away from the exercise of uncovering the text’s symbolic meaning, away from judging the plausibility of its utopian representation. Instead, I treat the text as a rhetorical project, beset by epistemological and aesthetic challenges, obstacles that Morris faced in projecting before his peers an alternative future. More importantly, I discern the fertile potential of these challenges and argue that Morris transforms anticipated failure into fruitful possibility, into a hitherto unimagined method of political conversion. In this, I read NfN through the lens of Virgil’s Georgics as an arduous labour of rhetoric. The labour of cultivating the land will serve as my metaphor for Morris’s strenuous and uncertain cultivation of minds. An indeterminate exchange between the ideologue’s dissemination of ideas and the public’s harvesting of wisdom will serve as my paradigm for defining Morris’s revolutionized approach to propaganda. Although widely celebrated today as a singular and distinctive utopia, NfN has been cavalierly repudiated as a pastoral fantasy,6 impractical,7 and “the product of a fragmentary consciousness.”8 Scarcely groundless, then, were Morris’s fears that his vision might be misconstrued. Still, his stoic “prediction” that popularity was beyond his reach does not constitute defeatism;9 instead, it betrays his recognition that the task of swaying public consciousness and public opinion was ambitious, complex, and not instantly achievable. NfN can be seen as the culmination of years of experimentation in persuasion, of self-reflection and inner searching. “How should I speak? How should I narrate? How will I be heard?” These are the queries that Morris threaded into his poetry10 and prose romances well before the heyday of his intense public speaking engagements at the Socialist League.11 In 1868–70, writing his Earthly Paradise, he reflected on the limits of his own capacity to effect change: Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing I cannot ease the burden of your fears Or make quick-coming death a little thing, Or bring again the pleasure of past years, Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears Or hope again for aught I can say.12

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In reality, these poignant confessions are less indicative of any inherent deficiency in communication (the “power to sing”) or false modesty than an expression of the enormous barriers thwarting veritable social transformation.13 The wistful note in the Apology to The Earthly Paradise (“Remember me a little then I pray”)14 conveys Morris’s strained hope that he might capture an audience for a fleeting moment, and that his “murmuring rhyme / [might beat] with light wing against the ivory gate”15 and thus bear a faint imprint on those willing to lend the bard an ear. The pangs of this early epic poem harbour the uncertainties of the later Morris, the political activist who will approach each public knowing that only a few will abide by his tale, and fewer still will be truly convinced by his message. Indeed, the wanderers’ quest in The Earthly Paradise anticipates the perilous and beleaguered journey of Morris’s lifelong proselytizing venture where words were often an impediment to delivering ideas. As May Morris recalls, “it would seem as though he were digging the words out of himself sometimes, so resolved he was to express the thing he had to say to the crowd of faces, so full of the sense of it that he found the saying of it unhandy.”16 To participate in what May described as “the rare moment when speaker and listeners become one, and the spirit of the man has gone out to those he calls upon in the very intensity of his belief”17 would have consummated Morris’s deepest desire; such communion would have embodied true fellowship. Impossible to ascertain whether it was ever fully achieved, more certain is the fact that Morris often faced considerable opposition, even from his sympathizers.18 Conscious of the potential for misunderstanding, he wrote his speeches with meticulous care,19 cognizant of the political and class gap between himself and his public.20 For his working-class audiences he adjusted the ex cathedra style of his early lectures to suit the specific tastes of his immediate crowd. For his reading public, he prefaced a collection of lectures with apologies and qualifications. Written for viva voce delivery, they appeared to the reading eye less seamless than his other crafted orations. Library-hall lectures before a middle-class audience would be inflected one way, outdoor lectures to converted socialists another.21 Yet, while these technical adjustments attended to his listeners’ cultural tastes, dispositions, and hermeneutical needs, Morris compromised neither the content of his message nor the “deep” radicalism of his rhetorical strategy. By 1889, as he was composing NfN, he had, I would suggest, already begun to convert the difficulties he experienced in shaping the public mind into the hallmarks of

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an alternative propaganda. Indeed, his utopian romance can be read, among other things, as an entirely new conduit of political discourse, the early makings of which surface with the newspaper versions of Pilgrims of Hope and A Dream of John Ball. First serialized in the pages of Commonweal, NfN, by its very title, announces its difference, its unclassifiable status as an eccentric piece of (socialist) journalism, set apart from the regular news and editorial articles of the radical press. The work features as an excursus of the imagination; yet its departure from convention reveals not aimless digression, but a significant shift in the fundamental values and modus operandi underpinning nineteenth-century socialist discourse.22 The latter, I contend, builds on the poetics of ancient tragedy (pity, fear, and catharsis) and the leitmotif of sacrifice and redemption inherent in Western culture. Socialist rhetoric, like much revolutionary or transformative rhetoric, derives its ideological potency from the recollection or re-enactment of a ritual sacrifice, the heart of ancient tragic drama, and the crucible of agony that foregrounds the image of a suffering hero. The latter, being a source of pathos, induces sympathy and a call for salvation. In the nineteenth century, such a hero is typically the proletariat – the social class in dire distress. The latter’s pathos allows socialist ideologues to stir public consciousness; with the trope of terror (inspiring fear), these tribunes outline the injustices of capitalism; and with sermons on the workers’ moral and physical endurance, they generate bittersweet pride in fortitude and cathartic relief from social degradation. In their self-assigned epic mission, they promise a utopian future or a solution to the plight of the underclass. In short, the poetics of classical tragedy, combined with the guiding spirit of an ardent leader, can be seen as the driving elements of a prototypical idiom of nineteenth-century socialist discourse, exemplified in Commonweal.23 Nor are these organizing categories of persuasion to be discerned exclusively within its pages. The three basic moments of socialist rhetoric are writ large in Morris’s three serialized literary works, published in Commonweal between 1885 and 1889: Pilgrims of Hope evokes the mood of pathos and the pain of martyrdom; A Dream of John Ball conveys the anticipated terror of capitalism (the slavery incurred by the bourgeois market, as explained to John Ball by the Victorian Dreamer); and NfN offers the cathartic promise of redemption. Taken as a type of trilogy, these three works constitute the matrix of traditional socialist propaganda; yet taken individually, each of these texts, paradoxically, constitutes a subversion of the traditional character of socialist rhetoric,

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with its rousing melodrama and triumphalism. By introducing literary genres such as the dramatic monologue (Pilgrims of Hope) and the medieval romance (A Dream of John Ball and NfN) into the pages of the socialist press, Morris modifies the prototypical model of socialist rhetoric, most often wrought of tragic and epic forms. In this way, he ensures that his proselytizing does not engender false hopes or populist sentiment, but a realistic perspective that both cautions and encourages all those who must contend with the discouraging setbacks of social change. If Morris’s outdoor (agitational) propaganda shares aspects of traditional socialist discourse, his quieter educational style – the kind he weaves into the pages of Commonweal through poetry and fiction – breaks with classic revolutionary rhetoric. In this, he traces the beginnings of a new persuasive idiom, one that replaces the tragic, epic, and messianic elements of dominant socialist agitation with the quizzical features of medieval romance, which is typified by a dreamer’s quest for truth amid the treacherousness of appearances. Morris’s novel approach to political discourse prepares followers for an uncertain journey. There are no false promises here, no projections of messianic coming. Instead, this radically new mode of propaganda (embodied in texts such as NfN) is fuelled by its candid admission of difficulties and strengthened by its capacity to add fervent hope to sober realism. Fusing Arcadian, georgic, and utopian traits, NfN is more compelling than one-sided seamless doctrines, and more convincing for its incompleteness. Subtitled “Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance,” it resembles the fragmentary character of Virgil’s eclogues, these being but drafts or poetic selections.24 At the same time, it encourages a vision of wholeness in which contraries are conceptualized as one complex reality: for example, activist energy and pastoral musing; utopian speculation and journalistic “truth”; decorative art and utility; travelling in time and staying at home. This coalescence of opposites can be ascribed as much to Morris’s exposure to Roman pastoral forms (Virgil’s eclogues combined visionary politics and eroticism) as to his inherent predisposition to dialectical thought25 and its generous embrace of contradiction. In its plea for a new political discourse, NfN seeks to re-educate the public mind, confront its readers with epistemological puzzles, with salutary questions. Its creative paradoxes and reversals of entrenched cultural archetypes set the stage for disrupting assumptions grounded in a binary logic. That such a radical project would have encountered obstacles is beyond doubt. That Morris was aware of these barriers is also clear from

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the narrating voice he adopts in NfN. But that these difficulties were the sites in which he would develop an unprecedented and indeed counterintuitive mode of promoting his views has yet to be argued. Such is the objective of this chapter, which aims to discern and discuss the typical hermeneutical problems underlying Morris’s utopian romance and then to rearticulate them as the key categories of a prolegomenon to his pathbreaking language of social change.

2 It is hardly original to claim that NfN, which was first published in the pages of Commonweal, served as a fictional medium for Morris’s propaganda. Yet this view26 does not reveal the extent of NfN’s innovation in rhetoric. Clearly, parts of Old Hammond’s dialogue with Guest can be read as echoes of Commonweal’s sundry articles on international and domestic politics, as extensions of Morris’s arguments on anarchism, industrial action or on the extra-parliamentary way forward. Hammond’s extensive disquisitions on class struggle and the road to “Nowhere” obviously reflect (at least in part) Morris’s political beliefs. But, what of the oneiric, erotic, and lyrical descriptions in the romance? How would the typical Commonweal reader,27 inclined to read the paper’s news as factual information on the injustices of capitalism, construe the pastoral and utopian facets of NfN? Most likely, as secondary material,28 literary ornament, an entertaining fantasy of a communist future – the colour supplement to the standard Victorian news story portraying dreary quotidian nineteenth-century life. Guest’s daydreaming on the banks of the Thames would likely be seen as romantic effusion, luxurious speculation, a potentially detrimental distraction from the “rigours” of political thought29 or from the design of a viable program for societal transformation. Such a public would read NfN selectively, forage for the text’s didactic wisdoms on revolution, and consign its Arcadian and utopian reveries to a “decorative” periphery.30 But if Morris is true to his word that all organic art must integrate and calibrate its epical and ornamental qualities (the telling of a story and the adornment of a space),31 we can safely assume that readings of NfN ought not to privilege its explicitly “political” discussions over the narrative’s lyrical depictions of rural scenery. For these discursive ornamentations of narrative space, like Morris’s floriated initials and leafy Kelmscott designs, direct our hermeneutical eye to the neglected

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subtlety of his vision. In these frames of thick foliage, be they visual or discursive, Morris foregrounds not only the imperative to value “interlacings”32 – entwined perspectives and converging realities – but also the need to restore and revitalize the forgotten politics of pastoral. To many, in particular to those who have associated social change predominantly with industrial action and urban strife, the pastoral dimension of NfN has been confounding and awkward. Indeed, the task of reconciling Hammond’s portrayal of class struggle in “How the Change Came” with Guest’s musings on pastoral landscapes has caused readers significant unease. Because of its ruralist passages, Morris’s biographers and twentieth-century scholars have regarded NfN as an escapist Arcadia, insular, fantastical, and naive. Such charges derive from the premise that pastoral is either apolitical or at odds with transformative politics. Tacitly, such an assumption favours the cleavage between Morris’s socialist praxis and his aesthetics of contemplative repose. Roger Lewis’s claim that pastoral “could not carry the weight of Morris’s revolutionary gospel”33 rests on the notion that the bucolic literary form is disengaged from political concerns and/or constitutes the ideological preserve of the English aristocracy, the landowning class.34 To be sure, since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pastoral landscape painting and the exploitation of ruralist scenes for the purposes of arousing nationalist fervour have turned belletristic and painterly pastoral forms into a tool of Tory persuasion.35 Identified with cultural and imperial privilege, with the “classrooms of the British Empire,”36 pastoral has also offered a critique of the establishment, while discouraging any “radical disturbance of the social order”;37 meanwhile the Georgian poets who deployed ruralist poetry as a therapeutic refuge from postwar trauma contributed most flagrantly to pastoral’s reputation as an aesthetic medium for civic withdrawal.38 Read literally, as a sentimentalist, mimetic depiction of country life, or as an idealist portrait of repose in the green shade, or as the ideological trope that obscures exploitative agrarian labour, pastoral can, indeed, be construed as the epitome of poetic detachment from the polis or as the handmaiden of conservative English discourse.39 Yet the Virgilian (and Theocritean) tradition from which pastoral emerges is scarcely devoid of political concerns; it is a reaction to Rome’s prevailing political crises. Nor is it a sphere of blithe rusticity. The pastoral genre is steeped in the economics of labouring the land.40 Productive work, economic survival, sustainable ecology, and societal well-being are its driving preoccupations. A subtle and realist treatment on agriculture, the Georgic poems offer

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instructions – practical, moral, and philosophical.41 They are inspired by Hesiod, the earliest of economists. In the Eclogues, Virgil’s Arcadia is intentionally situated in a remote mountainous region of Greece, where poetic paradise can be conjured in the imagination; as such it is an allegorical construct. With its distancing strategy, it is both carnivalesque and subversive, satirizing the urban establishment to an urbane public,42 but also dwelling on the economic issues of a war-torn era – land confiscation following the battle of Philippi.43 Virgil’s fourth Eclogue is most noted for its anticipatory vision of an epoch of peace and plenty, free of greed and ambition, and heralded by the birth of a Christ-like child. But while utopian thought is most salient in the last Eclogue, it underpins all the poems, influenced as they are by the Lucretian and Epicurean theories of ideal existence.44 Yet, for all this, pastoral does not readily or commonly evoke the idea of “the political” or the concept of “radical politics,” precisely because cultural stereotypes, both from Virgil’s era and beyond, have overshadowed such a connection. Pastoral’s typical features – umbra (the cool, moist, and shady grove) and otium (repose) conjure up the pleasures of Arcadia: that is, streams, riverbanks, soft grass, and moss, a place of languorous ease and withdrawal.45 This realm of Epicurean ataraxia or disengagement from the animated world of the political arena conflicts with the prevailing attitudes of the Roman Republic. “To the traditional Roman, umbra … [is] equated with sloth (desidia or segnitia) … Conventional opinion, both before and after Vergil, associate[s] shade with softness and effeminacy, and hot sun with work, toughness, and fortitude.”46 In these contrasting atmospheric and topographical conditions of sun and shade resides Cicero’s didactic affirmation of consensually held Roman values: “Let the forum yield to the camp, leisure to military life, the pen to the sword, and shade to the sun.”47 This morally charged opposition of sun and shade finds its modern, somewhat transposed, equivalent in the country (shade) / city (sun) divide, featured in the value system of twentieth-century English Marxists, particularly those vindicating William Morris. As with the Romans, socialists adhered to a moral precept in which male virtú was upheld in “activist” duty, grounded in urban politics, and set against the sensuous beauty and sentimentalism evoked by the Tory discourse of the English countryside.48 While Morris’s Marxist admirers did not resort to militaristic Ciceronian exhortations, they did urge their followers to grasp the significance of class war and, if necessary, to take to the streets, demon-

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strate, and protest. In this narrow sense, urban politics is to twentiethcentury socialist movements as Cicero’s camp is to the Roman Republic. In both instances, the rural sphere of “repose” is discredited. For socialist discourse, the shade of the English grove not only recalls the sloth of the privileged “idle classes,” but the potential for mental sloth among those it seeks to convert. Thus, Morris’s fervent Marxist advocate, Robin Page Arnot, suggests that NfN’s intoxicating descriptions of nature risk disabling the reasoning powers of a socialist readership: “This atmosphere, this fragrance of the Garden of England in which this Communist dialogue is written, so overpoweringly assails the senses … that many who wander there hear the News from Nowhere, but do not hearken to it; remember the fragrance of the garden, but nothing of the men who dwell therein.”49 Arnot’s primary gripe here is not the pastoral world’s effect on physical virility, but its nefarious impact on the robustness of rationalist thought. Mental inertia or nebulous thinking, incurred by the drugging effects of the fragrant English (or Greek) bower, is a nagging worry. That the pastoral form should prove hypnotic is equally unsettling to David Leopold. In his 2003 edition of the book, he writes that readers of NfN have been “mesmerized by the ‘wide sunny meadows of Hammersmith’ … ‘the whispering trees of the orchard in Trafalgar Square’ and the ‘beautiful rose gardens’ laid out on the side of Endell Street … [They] often overlook the fact that London remains a great city.”50 For the socialist activist or theorist, pastoral delights can incur a mental lassitude, detrimental to effective praxis; the polis is deemed the heart of politics, the shade secluded leisure, where civic duty has been abdicated. But Virgil, contrary to his Roman peers (and Morris, contrary to his own socialist comrades and adherents) disrupts this moral dichotomy. Umbra, and the otium enjoyed therein, does not imply degeneration but revitalization. In the portrayal of the placid pastoral musician, Tityrus, the archetypical shepherd in repose, Virgil appears to subscribe to the Epicurean ideal of ataraxia, disengagement from the heat of civic conflict and a state in which “the individual may acquire true liberty”51 and even discover general harmony.52 This withdrawal into a space detached from economic, political, and military strife offers a clean slate for reconceiving the fundamental tenets and priorities of human existence. Such umbra is conducive to peace of mind, and therein, to philosophical tranquillitas. Otium is thus not destined for sloth, but for untrammelled mental activity, and ultimately for societal regeneration. Virgil makes this apparent

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in the respective allegorical meanings assigned to his characters: “shaded relaxation,” enjoyed by the mellow and magnanimous Tityrus, “is a concomitant of political stability,” of peace and liberty; “exile suffered by Meliboeus in the heat of the sun” is linked to tension, anxiety, slavery, and discord.53 Just as the Eclogues are suffused with political consciousness, reacting to the fractiousness of the Roman state after its imperial victories (the conquests of Carthage and Corinth),54 so the Epicurean influence on Virgil (via Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura)55 introduces ataraxia as a politicalcum-philosophical solution to compelling human matters: notably the “alleviation of human misery.”56 Indeed, Lucretius (carrying forward Epicurus’s legacy) sought to revolutionize humanity by promoting a liberating tranquility of mind, a “beatific state”57 signifying “freedom from anxiety.”58 Virgil’s otium, or shade of repose, is arguably the site of such mental ease and calm, achieved through disengagement from civic conflict.59 Arising from this state of serenity is an opportunity for creative political thought and for building, along an Epicurean model, a utopian community of friends “living in accordance with common principles in retreat from civic life.”60 In this context, otium refers to an enjoyment of “the simple amenities” of the shade,61 of rest, and abundance of food – the conducive, indeed, imperative conditions for a salutary social order. In this sense, Epicurean disengagement is a re-engagement with a new form of civility, cultivated on new, fertile, and propitious ground – a ground reminiscent of Nowhere, where economic prosperity, nature, and social life are at their finest.

3 This politics of disengagement is central to my reading of Morris’s romance, and notably to its opening pages. For in this crucial incipit, the protagonist storms out of the “forum”62 – the debate at the League – abandons the negotium of this activist sphere, and enters the Nowherian realm of otium. In his rejection of some basic rhetorical strategies and visions of social change touted by his co-revolutionaries,63 his “withdrawal” into what later turns out to be the Nowherian Arcadia is not an apathetic retirement from negotium. It is a burning desire to secure a space apart – liberated from the frustrations of circular and interminable discussion – a place for thinking through the fundamental principles of a humane social

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world and the most effective rhetorical means for delivering its merits. This zealous urge to visualize an image of “how we might live” is captured in the repeated phrase, “If I could but see a day of it … if I could but see it! … If I could but see it.”64 Repetition here reflects the protagonist’s struggle to see alternatives and the strain required to break the recalcitrant yoke of his Victorian epistemology and glimpse the landscape of a radically altered society. Indeed, Morris’s striving is more than playful science fiction and speculative prognostication; his effort to imagine Nowhere amounts to an ambitious reconceptualization and wholesale reconstitution of our ways of thinking and co-existing. If the process of imagining Arcadia is challenging, requiring propitious conditions (for example ataraxia), the process of conveying its merits is even more daunting. This difficult transmission of Arcadia is hinted at by NfN’s uneasy crowning line: “If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.”65 In this hopeful but uncertain coda, Morris underscores the laborious toil of his persuasive project and the unpredictability of its results. The hardships and unforeseen contingencies of farming depicted in the Georgics recall Morris’s agonizing endeavour; and just as Virgil’s lyrical verses on farming are not merely treatises on agriculture, but musings on metaphysics, ethics, art, and death,66 so Morris’s thoughts on how he might speak of Arcadia extend beyond linguistic strategy. They refer to a philosophy of communication grounded in a set of wholly refurbished human values. To grasp the novelty of Morris’s propaganda is to see it as a reflection of Nowhere’s constitutive conditions of creative praxis: joyful labour, equality, and variety, elements starkly at odds with the status quo. The major hurdle in conceiving and describing a new world is thus epistemological. Indeed, for Morris, it entails reconfiguring the dominant Victorian constructions of time and space, in order to prepare his readership for a new Weltanschauung. In the opening pages of the romance, hurried and humid conditions of noxious train travel turn into the rejuvenating leisure of bathing and boating. Victorian grime dissolves in the freshness of the sparkling Thames. Haste morphs into serenity; urban stench dissipates into rural beauty. Modernity’s measures of progress – spatio-temporal ideals that privilege rapidity in industrial development and urban growth – must each yield to their respective contraries. Modernity’s rapid pace is slowed down, intensified, and varied; the rationalization of time and routine is superseded by an elastic structure of temporality, suited to the changing desires and constant needs of a community of co-operative individuals. London, the teeming Victorian metropolis, is no longer sev-

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ered from its pastoral origins, but embraces and subsumes these under its dialectical unity: it is at once country and city. If Morris’s introductory pages allow him to fictively and suggestively reconfigure capitalist models of time and space, these changes serve as the foundation of a seemingly simple, but in fact complex and hitherto unimagined economic model: labour as pleasure, a counterpoint to the drudgery of alienated work.67 Three narrative episodes provide examples of this model: an encounter with Dick, the waterman; the purchase of tobacco; and the Obstinate refusers. But William Guest’s skeptical, even stunned, reactions to Nowherian economics reflect Morris’s awareness that his persuasive project will be hampered by difficult reception. His contemporaries will likely scoff at his futuristic ideas. Initially embodied in William Guest, these readers will prove to be obstinate refusers of his proposed economics, more recalcitrant in fact than the Obstinate Refusers of his utopian romance. The first signs of obstinacy are evident in Guest’s reluctance to accept the boatman’s disclosure that exchange value is nowhere to be found in Nowhere. Refusing to be paid for his ferrying services, Dick the boatman says: “You think that I have done you a service; so you feel yourself bound to give me something which I am not to give a neighbour, unless he has done something special for me. I have heard of this kind of thing; but pardon me for saying, that it seems to us a troublesome and roundabout custom; and we don’t know how to manage it.”68 Flummoxed by such comments, Guest suspects that his hospitable riverman is insane, a resident of Colney Hatch. Admittedly, his judgmental reaction may be his initial response to the inherent absurdities of the oneiric, to the wonders of his dream vision that are at once delightful and inexplicable, charming but nonsensical. More likely, however, Guest’s incredulousness reflects his entrenchment in the logic of capitalist economics. His is a naturalized perception that capitalism and its attendant values are the unquestionable and ineradicable norm. But Morris, with the help of his fictional character Dick, will seek to scuttle this entrenched way of thinking, symptomatic as it is of Victorian common sense. Yet, he will only achieve his persuasive end slowly and in small doses. Acting (at least in this instance) as Morris’s mouthpiece, Dick remarks: “I can tell that you are a stranger, and must come from a place very unlike England. But also it is clear that it won’t do to overdose you with information about this place, and that you had best suck it in little by little.”69

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In attending to questions of pacing, Morris openly and, indeed, fictively anticipates the enormous difficulties arising from his rhetorical project. His readers will need to exert a Herculean epistemological effort to grasp his “utopian” vision. For the latter is the result of a Copernican shift in thinking that challenges two entrenched types of social interaction in Western culture: on one side, the dominant economic form of postfeudal history, notably, commodity exchange, and, on the other, the logic of gift-giving practices defined by religious sacrifice. Nowherian economics by contrast rests on an utterly different set of premises. It involves giving hospitality and exchanging labour, where “giving” and serving others represent an exchange of pleasure based neither on the rigid equivalence of exchange value nor on the exceptionality and heightened aesthetic power of special offerings, typically encumbered by agonizing relationships of sacrifice and debt. “Giving” in Nowhere is the Nowherians’ “business,” a daily happening and professional responsibility. It is not extraordinary or special, but normal – the central axis of social activity. Such business is also free of the uncaring and impersonal nature of exchange value. Nowherian business (contrary to capitalist tips that constitute mere “mementos” or shadows of amicable recognition) is a type of fellowship; for only social trust integrated into a flexible but rhythmic exchange and sharing of labour (of joyful work) can grant this economy its indispensable diversity, assuring everyone their due rest, their energizing praxis, and their rotational production of goods and services. Not incidentally, Guest’s earliest and most visceral experience in this world is defined by “measureless wonder,” by Nowhere’s unquantifiable quality and prevailing ethics – incommensurate with a system of counting and counting-houses. Numerical equivalence, quantification, and cumulative debt are anathema to Nowhere. In Morris’s utopia, individual and common good converge on a ground of social trust that is constantly reactivated and reinvigorated by life’s daily demands. But Dick’s poignant remarks on Nowherian economics cannot serve as an immediately graspable or applicable economic blueprint. Uttered casually in the course of conversation, these comments remain intentionally suggestive. Morris refuses to offer specific details, precisely because any literalist reading of his proposed model would instantly dash its heuristic purpose. His aim, rather, is to subject his hero to a disorienting baptism in the Thames, to compel him to recognize the river (in the

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manner of Heraclitus) as dramatically changed and yet the same. If such an estranging initiation does not immediately convert Guest, it compels him (and Morris’s reading public, of which Guest is a projection) at least to question his entrenched assumptions about economic exchange. The dream vision’s slow, incremental shock effects continue to disrupt Guest’s presuppositions; the epistemological tangles of his shopping expedition are crucial. Here he is confronted not only with free service, but with a limitless supply of free goods – in this case, tobacco. And while non-payment for a “commodity” is once more astonishing to the Victorian visitor, in this instance it is the absence of price and the freedom to take a limitless quantity that seem most dismaying. Guest is able to request as much tobacco as he needs for his journey. Nothing is weighed or quantified. Should he lose his pipe, it will, according to the young shopkeeper, serve another in need. In this social economy of giving, serving, and working, there is neither dearth nor selfish accumulation. There is thus no waste – neither useless toil (wasted human life) nor wasted property. Each takes freely what she or he requires; property is collective and easily transferable, accommodated to contingent and specifically defined needs. But amid this fluidity of recycled objects and activities, a firm Morrisian principle stands untrammelled. Each good must contain within its moment of production and reception both utility and beauty. Just as the young girl at the shop takes pleasure in her usefulness to others, so the object that she provides must be both useful and beautiful. As she explains to Guest: “I have chosen one [a tobacco pouch] for you; it is pretty and will hold a lot.”70 Her immediate compensation for this service is a gratification experienced in the satisfaction that she gives others. “It is such a pleasure to serve dear old gentlemen like you; specially when one can see at once that you have come from far over sea.”71 For the foreigner who does not know the Nowherian customs, the shopkeeper must be more emphatic in ascertaining her clientele’s pleasure; refusal of generous help (of which Guest is initially guilty), and reluctance to embrace creative splendour, are shockingly aberrant gestures. But under normal Nowherian circumstances, no sentimental gratitude is required. There is a tacit knowledge that all are generally appreciated for their participation in the community and that profuse expressions of thanks are neither expected nor extorted as compensation for service. The Nowherians’ affable and genial disposition is the veritable “measure” of their overall satisfaction. Their cheerfulness marks their sated desires. In

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this, they amply compensate their givers. Like Tityrus, whose magnanimity reflects his life of plenitude in the shade, the Nowherians’ natural and economic prosperity underpins their generosity and inner peace. To be sure, the young shopkeeper will expect recognition and admiration from a stranger who needs to be made aware of the imperative of beautiful utility. But beyond that, she will require no further compensatory recognition. She is conditioned to abide by a regulatory social trust: what is given will eventually satisfy not only the “buyer,” but any number of unspecified others. This tacit knowledge guarantees her deferred compensation.72 As a Nowherian “merchant,” she engages in an act of paying forward, of investing her efforts in the network of social relations, all involved in mutual service. Nowherian economics break radically with a system of exchange value and with the morally coercive rules of gift reciprocity. They introduce a societal freedom and a spontaneity that sustain vitality and continual consciousness of collective responsibility. The Nowherian exchange of labour is highly supple. The episode of the Obstinate Refusers reminds us that Nowherians can opt out of the one very collectivist task of hay harvesting. Not only is this an index of the Refusers’ fervent desire to compensate furiously for lost work – such is the intense pleasure that it affords them – it is also the symptom of Nowherians’ need for otium, a space removed from the normal merrygo-round of labour “transfers.” Paradoxically, this site of retreat lends itself to mentally and manually energizing activity, away from the “madding crowd.” Nor does this “dissent” imperil Nowhere’s cohesive social fabric. Rather, it is the mark of flexibility, difference, and liberty. The elasticity of Nowherian “politics” is the secret of its economic sustainability. Nowherians are clearly not atomized individuals, governed by some principle of conformity to rigid laws or authoritarian power. Possessed of a collectivist conscience, each individual enjoys a relative autonomy. And such autonomy is but the mirror image of a collective trust in the necessity of individual difference. The larger social group of Nowherians is thus confident that Philippa and her daughter’s “refusal” of the haysel ritual is scarcely an irritant or disruptive factor. Trust in this temporary withdrawal from the dominant practices of the social whole is the belief that variations and departures from some central axis of cooperation will advance the Nowherian collective good. So, too, the young shopkeeper can happily claim that even Guest’s possible loss of the pipe will not have wasted her generous “transaction.” In the long run, it will benefit others down the road.

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In the context of Victorian capitalism, the “obstinate refuser” might be more of a disruptive figure. William Morris himself is the quintessentially obstinate refuser among his socialist comrades. He leaves the League debate to reflect more intensively on political matters in a Nowherian otium. Morris’s dream vision is thus his most powerful gesture of refusal. Through it, he jettisons the “identity thinking” (Adorno) imposed on him by his Victorian world. For Morris, as for Shakespeare, “measure for measure” in society presupposes false absolutes, equivalences that conceal an underlying asymmetry. Similarly, for Marx, the “perfect” economic equation, presented rhetorically as an equality of free agents coming to buy and sell commodities at the market, is but a deceptive appearance.73 For exchange value is contingent on an equation between commensurate things, while belying an inequality between people (e.g., the capitalist and the exploited labourer). Comparably, certain gift-giving practices are defined by an equation between measureless absolutes – for example, the sacred gift (the gift as sacrificial act) and the guilt incurred for the receiver. The equation in this second instance is that of two measureless negatives. In both of these models (whether capitalist or religious) there is the appearance of equality, but each model comes with some form of extreme pain or loss. Neither of these models applies to Morris’s utopia. Here, the exchange of labour does not involve extreme pain or loss; nor does it convey the mere appearance of equality. It is neither about polarized extremes (sacrificial gifts and endless guilt/debt), nor about the hollow symmetry and merely formal equality of commodity exchange, but about an asymmetry that paradoxically achieves a substantive equality among all Nowherians. This equality is unquantifiable in numerical terms, because it is dynamic and varied. Like changing partners in a waltz, Nowherians are satisfied by their continual and often serendipitous exchange of work, and herein lies the basis of their well-tempered disposition. Conversely, their economic system, though ever vibrant, is stabilized and maintained by their mutual satisfaction, by a circulation of tasks and experiences that serves to fulfill the pleasures of each and all. Clearly, Morris’s construct of Nowherian economics favours qualitative, indeterminate measure over the quantifying, determinate rationalizations of commodity-based society.74 This preference for the “incommensurable,” for the “unquantifiable” holds the secret of his novel propaganda and sets the conditions of an experiment in persuasion. The rhetorical project, however, is complex and confounding, since Morris seeks to convince his contemporaries with epistemological

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assumptions fit only for another era, for a non-existent (utopian) world. There is no immediately recognizable idiom in the Victorian context (or in ours, for that matter) that can instantly capture the specifics of Morris’s desired future commonweal and the exact means of attaining it. The hazy dream vision must serve as his most apt vehicle; and the delineation of “incommensurable” economic and social relations must offer, not only the paradigm according to which his fellow beings might one day live, but according to which they might begin, in their own era, to interact and communicate more magnanimously and self-critically. For Morris, the reconstitution of humanity will not spontaneously crystallize after the revolution; it will have to be an integral part of it, since the future plants its roots in the now. Having been repeatedly and widely misunderstood throughout his public life, Morris is conscious of his risky venture. Still, his reconstruction of the conventional modalities of revolutionary rhetoric75 is as much a way of turning loss into gain as it is the designing of a radically new approach for disseminating political ideas. He thus transforms potential defeatism into “tempered meliorism.”76 The strenuous ideological conversion of his peers, fraught as it is with persuasive “failure,” is turned into a fruitful rhetorical act. This striking conversion of despair into hope, of miscommunication into a salutary stoic philosophy, is made evident when he weaves two defining aspects of Nowherian economics into his counter-intuitive propaganda: (1) the non-exceptionality of the giver (e.g., the sculler, the weaver, the dustman, etc.); and (2) two aspects of Nowherian economic exchange – “nonequivalence” and “deferred compensation.” Working with these two categories, I now turn to discussing the premises on which Morris builds his new paradigm of persuasion.

4 Just as Morris’s utopia is contingent on an “equality of condition” among its members77 and on a circulation of tasks, so his new rhetorical form must be defined by fellowship between rhetorician and public, as well as by a decentralization (or democratization) of the rhetorician’s role. Exceptionality, Olympian height, and enchanting charisma, epitomized by Machiavelli’s prince, must be forfeited for a wholly other status. In short, the ideologue must be a fellow of his public, not an exceptional leader;

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he must demystify his own discourse and show its internal workings, exposing his own labour uninhibitedly, as do the emancipated Nowherians. Genius figures and their attendant worshippers must be held at bay. For Morris is not interested in adoring recognition, but in fellow feeling. In NfN, he dismantles the pedestal of the aloof ideologue by complicating and obscuring the narrating voice. The propagandist-author passes on his narrating task to an intermediary third person, a sympathetic friend of a friend (the central protagonist, William Guest), who proceeds to deliver the tale, moving from indirect to direct discourse. Just as Nowherians transfer their respective labour to each other, so Morris shares his persuasive task with others. No exceptionality need be ascribed to any one rhetor. Indeed, while Guest is held to be the reporter of news from Nowhere, Morris’s veritable mouthpieces are the Nowherians themselves, each conveying an aspect of their way of life to the Victorian visitor. Yet none assumes any exclusive importance; only the ensemble of interactions with Guest and his immersion in this richly dialogical world of lively inhabitants can serve as the complex conduit of the Morrisian message. The non-exceptionality of the rhetorician not only tallies with Morris’s Epicurean precepts of balance and equality, it also dispels any fetishized power associated with an elite ideologue; it recalls that no single oracle can dictate the actions of a following. No monolithic doctrine can guarantee an immediate and perfect reception, for historical contingencies, varying social sensibilities, and world views are ever apt to modify and disrupt intended meaning. In the celebrated lines of A Dream of John Ball, Morris captures the convoluted and chance-driven trajectory of a radical political doctrine, volleyed as it is in the fray of clashing political wills and colliding energies of social change. “I pondered … how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”78 In this wistful but realistic aside, the nineteenth-century Dreamer proffers a cautionary note, dispelling any illusion that revolutionary propaganda can be immediately translated into corresponding action. Charged slogans – words intended as suggestive images of future possibility – are read literally and thus misconceived. Yet they surface in new incarnations through the gestures and political drives of others. In perceiving this unfolding of events and evolution of meanings as the convergence of human agency and happenstance, Morris revisits the leitmotif of The Earthly Paradise. Within a consciously designed grid of

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seasonal regularity, the long poem underscores the unexpected. Morris’s highly crafted literary structure reinforces constant mutability. Life’s joys are continually threatened by chance and adversity. The “Prologue” repeatedly reflects the disruption and subversion of human goals. Efforts at holding the unpredictable at bay are doomed to failure. Still, in the face of mutability, Morris invokes the human impulse to sustain hope, fellowship, and comforting ideals. He combines this persistent faith with a stoic acceptance that desire cannot be immediately sated – there is no natural law of exact equivalence between want and fulfillment, only asymmetry and deferral. If A Dream of John Ball foregrounds the uncertainties of political discourse, it nonetheless converts these insecurities into the first outlines of a new mode of political persuasion.79 Yet, it does so darkly, in the quizzical preoccupations of a medieval rebel priest, weighing the powers and limits of his actions. In NfN, Morris takes this new approach to rhetoric even further, illuminating it with the brighter tones of his Arcadian ideal and its “measureless” beauty. His refurbished propaganda blends the luminosity of NfN with the darker mood of The Earthly Paradise. For in its dual function, the romance embraces both the beauties of Arcadia – the projection of a sunny social world – as well as an exposition of the duress and unpredictability of cultivating minds, figuratively comparable to the uncertainties of the farmer’s labour depicted in the Georgics.80 In his propagandist model, Morris manages to transform despair, resulting from thwarted reception, into a persistent hope derived from values inherent in Nowherian non-equivalence and deferred compensation. For even in Nowhere, pleasure is not received as manna from heaven, but is joyfully harvested, extracted from salutary effort, from gratifying expenditure of energy. Thus the young shopkeeper delights in the knowledge that she will be of service to others. Her compensation will be deferred as she counts on the conscience (rather than on the accounting) of her fellow Nowherians to act as she does. This counterpoint to the instant gratification and fetishized immediacy of capitalist commodities translates itself into Morris’s recognition that the measure of successful socialist rhetoric cannot be sought in exact one-to-one correspondences between rhetor and receiver, since transformative propaganda is compelled to straddle the defective conditions of modernity with the ideals of a desired future; as such, it needs to embrace the indeterminate relations between those who deliver the news and those who receive it. Morris’s choice to use the medieval romance form for his alternative journalism

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ensures that literalism (one-to-one equivalence in language) is replaced with mediated, figurative readings of NfN, the necessary hermeneutical cues for grasping non-equivalence and deferral, poignantly expressed in the text’s final pages. At the end of his journey, and poised on partaking of a festive meal with his Nowherian friends, Guest reaches the height of his ecstasy. But suddenly the cheerful faces that once greeted him so warmly wax cold and distant, ushering him out of their circle, as it were, and withdrawing their gazes from his. Ellen’s fading demeanour seems to say to Guest: “You cannot be of us, you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you.”81 Her facial expression reminds Guest that he will never catch up with the Nowherians. As with Zeno’s paradox, the historical and epistemic gap between his England and Nowhere cannot be closed. To allow Guest to consume the fruits of the Nowherian harvest would be to annul the heuristic role of the utopian romance. Guest’s forced departure from Nowhere guarantees that he will awaken from the immediacy of his dream and read it figuratively, not as oracle or political prophecy, but as inspiration. The wistful ending is a fictional necessity that urges our hero (and Morris’s reading public) to resist the pleasure of instant reception, to engage in an act of translation, and to adapt the enriching sojourn in Nowhere to the needs of another era. For like any visitor’s return home from utopia, Guest’s retold experience is likely to meet with skepticism. Being a dream vision, the visit to Nowhere remains hazy and elusive. As such, his reported holiday is neither a transparent utopian blueprint (e.g., Looking Backward) nor a sellable commodity (Morris predicted that his book would not sell) exhibiting the merits of a future world; rather, it is a journey of critical inquiry and self-reflection, to be shared in that spirit with future readers. For the voyage to Nowhere brings with it a new understanding of the dialectics of social change: the realization that the desired commonweal beyond is not a destination, far removed or dissociated from the present, to be entered punctually at the portals of paradise. Humanly “wrought” and sought after, the desired future is always partly embedded in the present, prefigured in efforts of social betterment. These entail not only the projection of how we might live beyond, but the modification of how we conceive and speak of the Noch-Nicht (Not-Yet) now. The ideals assigned to the future must inform the rhetorical and reading practices of the present. In many ways, NfN is a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman; but more than a moral education, it emphasizes epistemology and hermeneutics. It

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redesigns the concept of political rhetoric, transposing it from a deterministic program of social control into a discursive engagement with public thinking, amenable to discontinuity and contradiction. This approach to ideological persuasion turns problems into solutions, conceiving disruptions as catalytic moments in history’s unfolding rather than as permanent breaks. In this, it also explodes the antinomy of success and failure, showing, as Jameson has it, that “history progresses, not by way of victory but by way of defeat: and that if our eyes are trained to see it, we can find this dialectic at work everywhere in the record of our collective experience.”82 If persuasion is inherently bent on achieving success, on conquering the minds of a given public, Morris’s remodelling of political discourse could be regarded, by most standards, as a failure. Misreadings and misconstructions of his words and propagandist texts abound. His self-conscious rhetorical voice underscores complexity and doubt rather than self-possession and conviction. And yet, his is a Hegelian alternative to conventional wisdom, showing that “success” and “conquest” are onesided notions, secretly harbouring their own failures. In this same vein, Jameson’s remarks about Virgil’s monument of lyrical propaganda are apt. The Aeneid, he writes, “emerges not merely as a melodic and complacent epic celebration of the triumph of … the empire in all the glory of its own ‘end of history’… it also looms in a kind of exact double and simulacrum of itself, through the appearance of its triumphalist verses, as the bitter critique of empire itself, as the implicit denunciation of the latter’s brutality and carnage.”83 By utilitarian accounts, NfN might also be deemed a failure. Published amid journalistic news stories, the text is more akin to a travelogue than to a report on current events. No demographic facts or specifics on the administrative character of Nowherian society are offered. Guest’s reporting dwells on subjective and oneiric impressions, and on the misunderstandings that frustrate his communication with his hosts. Beside the narrowly utilitarian interests and language of contemporary journalism, his intermittent reveries and anticipations of loss amid effusions over landscape and architecture could be construed as indulgent subjectivity or aesthetic extravagance. But while egregiously playful and self-reflexive, NfN is nonetheless a commentary on political “preaching.” First serialized in the radical press, it calls into question the dominant notion of news – the authoritative, unselfconscious delivery of information that assigns itself unassailable truth value. Unsettling our common-

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sensical assumptions, NfN proposes a pastoral discourse,84 dwelling on the multiple challenges of “reporting on” an ideal future. The difficulties become immediately apparent as Guest’s chronicles of Nowhere are but vignettes.85 There is no true-to-life documentary nor any manual on building an alternative commonweal. And such indeterminacy is at the root of the text’s problematic reception,86 most notably the claim that it is ineffectual and suffused with a “homogeneous sensuous mist,” as Alfred Noyes had it.87 But a modicum of opacity and vagueness allows Morris to eschew detailed prescriptions for social change. He wishes his public to read texts (political discourse) and contexts (history) beyond the letter. In the controversial sphere of pastoral, where socialists have worried over the hypnotic languor of rural repose, Morris is ironically at his most Marxian. For the Nowherian shade harbours a set of values coincident with Epicureanism, the theory that underpinned Marx’s doctoral work. Beyond Epicurean notions of simple but gratifying lifestyles, Marx was keenly interested in Epicurus’s views on the swerve of the atom, and rejoiced in the discovery that the atomic swerve was not cause for despair, but liberation from rigid teleology.88 This hope for historical progress recalls Morris’s own efforts to seize possibility from alleged failure.89 Like the swerve of the atom that suggests a liberating deviation from its expected orbit, the “misperceptions” of Morris’s unorthodox views by his public can be grasped in two ways: despairingly as a departure from intended meaning or more positively as the autonomy and enriching hermeneutical odyssey of the reader. This latter view coincides with Morris’s dialectical reversal of error (or misapprehension) into fruitful potential – a conversion of the disappointments of “failed” persuasion into an expansive philosophy that underscores mediation, deferral, and asymmetry over the illusions of equivalence and identity thinking. In responding to Bellamy, Morris effectively indicted such one-dimensionality; in resisting the rationalist systematicity and administrative logic of mainstream utopias, he opted for the waywardness of the dream vision with its implicit prohibition against literalist readings. To be sure, Morris was fully conscious of the problematic reception of utopias: either as societal blueprints or as dreary technical and didactic treatises.90 NfN is thus not another utopia, but a romance, labelled utopian in self-conscious anticipation of its reception. It is likely to be seen by most as extravagant and unfeasible,91 and as Morris wrote: “It won’t sell.” In this sense, the term “utopian” refers less to the specific narration of an undefinable

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communist world than to a rhetorical topos required for the cognitive modelling of such a world. And true to Morris’s philosophy of art, the topos is ludic, reflecting the very experimental and speculative nature of his discourse – a creative play with ideas and possibilities, a break with the imprisoning rules of realism, and an occasion for turning arduous persuasion into an amusing narrative of mental adventure. Morris’s utopian romance scoffs equally at the aridity, seriousness, and one-dimensionality of mainstream utopias, and at the self-importance exuded by contemporary journalism, a form of news that assumes the mask of unadulterated truth while denying its ideological fictions. Featuring as entertaining fantasy, NfN implicitly satirizes the news report that deems itself purely objective and devoid of romance. But through its own fictional world, it undertakes an even more significant task: it raises the intractable problem of how we might deliver news about that which we do not know. Thus, in a Kantian shift, Morris problematizes the question of propaganda in the very act of persuasion. He turns the portrait of an imagined social world (his apparent object) into a discussion of authorial subjectivity and into a candid engagement with the socialist’s deepest fears – fears (as in the Georgics) that the discourse of social change will be an arduous and uncertain cultivation of minds – and hopes (as in the sunny and generous dispositions bred in Arcadia) that time, enjoyed in otium, with its propitious conditions for renewed social praxis, will one day bear fruit. The novelty and radicalism of NfN lie in the text’s self-reflexivity and in its efforts to adjust our optics from the problem of Nowhere to the problem of News, from utopia as place, to utopia as the perennial crisis in representation. And contrary to received wisdom, it is within the sphere of pastoral aesthetics, where art comments on art, that Morris broadcasts his news in ways more subtle and far-reaching than any “fact”-laden article from the contemporary press.

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A Dream of William Morris: Communism, History, Revolution pa u l l e d u c b r ow n e

Disgust with a world of “filth” and ugliness1 bred in Morris a “hatred of modern civilization.” Yet, his radicalism might simply have led into the blind alley of a romantic anti-capitalist2 “railing” against modernity had the rise of socialism not shown him a way forward.3 In his own eyes, then, Morris was always a radical, but his radicalism deepened, changing into socialism (or communism – for Morris the two words were synonymous). Morris illustrated some principles of communism in his most famous work, News from Nowhere, but also outlined them in a series of shorter lectures and articles. He fashioned these principles out of harsh criticism of the hatefulness of life under capitalism. He exposed the ugliness not only of the built environment, but also of human beings themselves, both capitalists and workers – on the moral level, to be sure, but on the physical one as well. Morris’s readers soon become familiar with his anger at the ways in which capitalism stunts and defaces the human body, and with his eager longing for a world in which men and women would achieve their full potential of physical health, strength, and beauty. His ideal of communism entailed the transformation of human beings in their totality. When one pulls together the basic principles of communist society as Morris viewed them – equality, beauty, fulfilling work, free time, the satisfaction of needs, the development of capacities – it becomes evident that he had a very well-developed and sophisticated political philosophy, one that is perhaps more coherent and systematic than is often thought. Many of his ideas resemble those of thinkers such as Rousseau or Marx, which

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is scarcely surprising. But Morris’s originality is also highlighted by comparisons with recent work on twenty-first-century socialism by István Mészáros and Michael Lebowitz, or with theories of giving developed by contemporary anthropologists, such as Alain Caillé, Jacques Godbout, or David Graeber.4 Such comparisons bring to light Morris’s grasp of the transformation of time and space or of the workings of mutuality under communism. If all Morris had done was to sketch a vision of communism, however well conceived in the light of political philosophy, had he not done much more, he could be open to accusations of ineffectual utopianism. Even on the Left, voices legitimately question the kind of utopian thinking in which Morris has appeared in the eyes of many to be engaging. Leo Panitch, for example, has recently stated this problem quite trenchantly: “There were more writings on what a future socialism would look like in the last two decades of the twentieth century than probably ever before. But the detailed pictures of a socialist order they painted … have been exceedingly sketchy on two crucial things. One is immediate demands and reforms. And the other is how the hell would we get there. What are the vehicles? What are the agencies? How are the vehicles connected to building the agencies?”5 Panitch’s words very much express the attitude of Marx and Engels. Indeed, the question “How shall we live then?” (the title of one of Morris’s speeches) was often pushed aside by socialists after Marx because it was regarded as speculative next to issues of strategy and movement building. As Herbert Marcuse wrote forty years ago: “Up to now, it has been one of the principal tenets of the critical theory of society (and particularly Marxian theory) to refrain from what might be reasonably called utopian speculation.”6 To be sure, Marcuse went on to say that it was time to rehabilitate utopian thinking, because the global contestation of the imperialist order had highlighted the urgency of thinking of new forms of society. Prospective thinking did indeed become much more acceptable among socialists, but, as Panitch points out, this trend appeared to have been inversely proportional to the clarity of revolutionary endeavour. Around the time Marcuse wrote those words, Georg Lukács pointed out: “We live in an age of utopian socialism … everything should be started anew.”7 Recently, radical popular movements have been active across the world, from New York to North Africa, and from

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Chile to Quebec. However, they still do not have answers to the questions raised by Panitch. Yet, as these movements strive to clarify their purpose and strategy, Morris’s political thought becomes even more topical and relevant, for he offers us much more – and in fact something else – than a vision of utopia. The full originality of Morris’s political thought comes to light in literary works, such as A Dream of John Ball or The Story of the Glittering Plain, in which Morris displays a sophisticated understanding of the contradictions and pitfalls of the struggle for social change, presents a theory of how historical conditions impede or enable collective action, and elaborates a penetrating analysis of reification and of the role of ideology in social transformation. Dreaming of the future plays a particularly important pedagogical role here. Morris was less interested in painting “detailed pictures of a socialist order” than in “making socialists.” Dreaming of the future in this sense appears as an important moment in conferring a broader and deeper meaning on the “immediate demands and reforms”; but it may also clearly emerge from the struggle for the latter, as part of thinking of the “vehicles” and “agencies” evoked by Panitch. For the purposes of this chapter, we can distinguish three moments of dreaming of the future with Morris. The first part, “How shall we live then?” sketches a synopsis of Morris’s concept of communism as it emerges from his political writings and his most famous work, News from Nowhere. Here, we see Morris dreaming of an “epoch of rest.” But the dream is neither a prophecy nor a forecast; certainly it is not intended as a report on the future. Its purpose is to disturb entrenched beliefs and to show that a different society is conceptually possible. Like his contemporary Marx, Morris thought that communism would be made by men and women in the course of hard and often bitter struggle. A second moment of dreaming in his work dwells on the latter and the travails it would likely entail. Consequently, the second part of this chapter, “How men fight,” discusses how Morris imagined the revolution. Far from being a utopian socialist, Morris had a clear and sober understanding of the possibilities and problems of effecting the transition from capitalism to communism. However, the dream of revolution is no less a rhetorical construct than the dream of communism. The third part of the chapter, “A thing that men shall talk of soberly,” examines Morris’s

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own awareness of this. Through the dream, his writings explore the problems of fetishism and reification in radical thought. The first part of the chapter presents the dream as an object of contemplation; in the second, the dream is a call to action, and especially an exhortation to find courage; in the third, the dream becomes reflexive, critical, an epistemological device for rethinking not only capitalism, but also the revolutionary subject.

“How shall we live then?” Morris sums up the essence of socialism in the notion of the equality of condition, in a definition that brings together a number of fundamental concepts: property and wealth, freedom and domination, the division of labour, the allocation of the opportunities to work, fellowship and solidarity, economy and waste: “What I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers nor heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all – the realization at last of the meaning of the word commonwealth.”8 Equality pulls them all together for Morris as the essence of an entire system of society. Indeed, Morris boldly suggests that there are but two types of social organization: equality and slavery.9 This might seem an extraordinary trivialization of historical and sociological diversity. What of feudalism and capitalism, for example, neither of which could on the face of it be reduced to slavery, and even less to equality? Morris immediately explains the difference thus: slavery designates social systems that seek to use “the natural diversity of capacities” to create an elite that lives by exploiting the rest of the population; equality recognizes that the rule of the strong is not as such the rule of the best, and that only a society that satisfies the needs of all can realize the potential of each to develop his or her capacities, for the greater benefit of all. In evoking need, Morris goes beyond the political sphere to touch upon the economic foundation of society. His “equality of condition” embodies a notion of substantive equality that has much greater scope than the formal “equality of opportunity” embodied in the civil and political

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rights of liberal democracy (e.g., the right to free expression, to property, to the vote). It may be useful to compare Morris’s concept of slavery with István Mészáros’s notion of capital. Developing Marx’s theory of alienation, Mészáros argues that the capitalism of the nineteenth century criticized by Marx (and Morris) was merely one form of the rule of capital – the latter consisting in the rule of alienated labour over the worker. The societal organization of production, which mediates the reproduction of human societies in their interaction with nature, assumes under the system of alienated labour a variety of hybrid forms, ranging from nineteenth-century competitive capitalism to the twentieth century’s welfare capitalism and “really existing socialism” (i.e., the social system that existed in the Warsaw Pact countries). Mészáros seeks to demonstrate that the rule of capital is so totalizing that no reform of any of its parts will suffice, but that human emancipation can only come about through the complete abolition of the “capital system” and its replacement by a “communal system” based on radically different principles – principles very similar to those highlighted by Morris.10 Read in this light, we can understand Morris’s bold statement that there are only two systems, equality and slavery, as the radical assertion that the only genuine alternative to the rule of capital (in Morris’s words, “slavery,” or as he also says, “mastery”) is equality: communism, he wrote, “is a state of society the essence of which is practical equality of condition.”11 Far from treating everyone as though “one size fits all,” this equality would be practical, because it is “modified by the desires and capacity for enjoyment of its various members.” This economic basis of communism is thus predicated on the specificity and diversity of individual needs and capacities; borrowing the words of the Communist Manifesto, we can say that it is “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”12 Indeed, Morris adds that the ethical basis of communism would be “the habitual and full recognition of man as a social being so that it brings about the habit of making no distinction between the Common welfare and the welfare of the individual.”13 The economic and ethical sides of this communal system of equality – the abolition of alienation and the replacement of heteronomy by an ethical system rooted in autonomy – are indissociable. Indeed, the condition of its establishment would be the eradication of any institutional

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power that stands apart from the associated individuals themselves and wields power over them. In other words, the communal system would be the outcome of the elimination of capital and the state. Let us look at this more closely. To begin with, substantive equality would find expression in two revolutionary changes: the abolition of private property and the elimination of the capitalist division of labour. Under the communal system, as we come to understand in reading Morris’s image of it in News from Nowhere, there would be no private property. All land, every part of the built environment, all means of production, even the means of consumption, would be held in common. The example of the pipe that Guest acquires in News from Nowhere is indicative. When he worries that it is too precious and that it would be a shame were he to lose it, he is told that such an eventuality would merely lead to someone else acquiring it and using it. Clearly, in Morris’s vision of the communal system, all such objects would be meant to circulate freely. Individuals, too, would circulate constantly, passing from one part of the country to another, from one house to another, sharing space and goods. The right to all does not entail a Hobbesian war of all against all, because individuals would not be motivated by a restless and ceaseless appetite for possession and admiration, nor by a constant fear of the Other. Their universal right would be matched by their sense of responsibility to each and all. Thus, all would participate in the upkeep and development of the natural and built environments. Morris thought that work ideally should offer three rewards: its products, rest, and pleasure in its accomplishment.14 Under the communal system, individuals would find all three: pleasure in working, enjoyment of rest, and the products not only of their own work, but as well of everyone else’s, in the form of a world of peace and plenty. To be sure, not everyone could use every house or every object of utility simultaneously. But there would be enough, and good enough, for all – with each prepared to await his or her turn, for all goods would be shared. But there is a further, crucial, dimension to this. The communal system would supersede the private property not only of things, but also of human beings. While the means of production and consumption would no longer be private property, labour power would cease to be property at all: as an individual’s labour power would no longer be property to be bought and sold, neither would it be something to be loaned, commandeered, stolen, or coerced by anyone else, individual or community. Labour

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power would be indissociable from the whole human being. Such would be the revolutionary outcome in the communal system of the abolition of wage-labour. Not only would there no longer be individuals deprived of means of production (and thus compelled to sell their labour power in order to be able to survive), but individuals would be whole, their capacity to work and create harmoniously integrated into all other aspects of their being. The corollary of the abolition of private property and of the emancipation of labour under the communal system would be the elimination of the two forms of the division of labour that prevail under capitalism: the vertical division of labour within enterprises (that Morris refers to as “mastery”) and the horizontal division of labour mediated by the market (that he calls “commercial war”). With the abolition of capital, the rule of alienated labour over workers would be replaced by free, conscious, egalitarian, and collective decision making by the associated producers. The command structure of capital would disappear – politically, as the state would wither away, and economically, as no one would any longer work for a boss, either private corporation or state. Not only would there no longer be wage-labourers seeking to earn a living by selling their labour power, but there would also no longer be subordinates and subalterns taking orders from power holders.15 In addition to the hierarchical organization of work, the market and money would disappear. Economic relations would no longer be characterized by the exchange of property, but by the exchange of activities – what Morris refers to as “the conscious mutual exchange of services between equals.”16 This is not at all the “service economy” as we understand it today, for the latter is all about separating labour from the labourer, either in the form of “dead labour,” that is, labour expended in the past and reappearing in the guise both of individual products and of the very institutions of the capitalist economy (e.g., “value”), or in the form of “living labour,” grasped as a part of the worker’s being that has been objectified as something quantifiable and alienable. The exchange of activities has nothing to do with trading such alienated quantities of labour. It has to be understood in the light of the inseparability of work and labour power from the individual as a whole. In such a situation, work is not performed as part of a market transaction, but purely as a process of fulfillment of self, carried out alone or in concert with others. The exchange of activities on one level can be understood as a matter of each person doing what he or she is good at, and contributing that

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activity to the common good. Thus, in News from Nowhere, Dick offers a number of services to his fellows: rowing, working metals, mowing, and so forth. He does these things because he is good at them and is happy to give the benefit of his activity to the community. But there is a deeper meaning to the exchange of activities. Work is one of the most fundamental human needs, if not the most fundamental. The wretchedness of capitalist society all stems from the inequality that allows some not to work and forces others to work in subaltern and exploitative conditions, depriving all of the fulfillment of one of their most essential needs. In Morris’s communal system, the great dread, expressed by Dick in News from Nowhere, is that there might be a shortage of work.17 This is not a fear of unemployment causing workers to lose their wages and reduce their consumption. It is a concern that the possibilities of fulfilling labour might not be numerous enough. The fundamental social glue of this society is the fact that all and each give each and all opportunities to work,18 that is, to fulfill themselves, by providing resources, time, mutual aid (interdependence), and needs to be met. Morris thus defines communism as “freedom from artificial disabilities; the development of each man’s capacities for the benefit of each and all.”19 Instead of commodity exchange, the basis for the allocation of wealth under the communal system would be the maxim, “to each according to his needs, from each according to his capacities.”20 The incentive to accumulate ever greater amounts of wealth and power would no longer make any sense. Freed of economic relations of compulsion, individuals would be emancipated from fear and greed. They would also be liberated from the social and ecological burden of waste. As Morris points out, waste is the essence of capitalist society, not least because such a society must produce a surplus sufficient to support a ruling class, a monarchy, sundry state institutions, armed forces, imperialism, and a mass of corruption.21 Under relations of substantive equality, none of that would exist. The productive forces of society could be turned away from the generation of ever more mountains of stuff and be devoted to the fulfillment of each person through a renewed form of labour: “I believe that a Communal society would bring about a condition of things in which we should be really wealthy, because we should have all we produced, and should know what we wanted to produce: that we should have so much leisure from the production of what are called “utilities,” that any group of people would have leisure to satisfy its cravings for what are usually looked on as superfluities, such as works of art, literature, the unspoiled beauty of nature; matters

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that to my mind are utilities also, being the things that make life worth living and which at present nobody can have in their fullness.”22 The communal system, as Morris imagines it, would thus supersede the separation between necessary and free time, between necessary and superfluous goods, between the useful and the beautiful, thanks to a complete transformation of the nature and purpose of work. Morris’s concept of work under communism comprises three revolutionary dimensions: work as art – the unity of utility and beauty; disposable time – the unity of work and leisure; and generalized reciprocity – the unity of selfinterest and disinterestedness. In describing the nature of work in a communal society, Morris harks back to an earlier era, in which he believes work was not carried out under conditions as alienating as those of capitalism. In doing so, he presents art as an exercise in intellectual and manual labour that is the expression of an inborn instinct of every “complete man” – that is, every human being not subject to alienating conditions. He also claims that art is not a manifestation of the individual apart from society, but rather of co-operation and community. Such art, which he equates with useful, pleasurable work,23 “man’s expression of his joy in labour,”24 is rewarded by the beauty it creates and by the recognition it draws from others.25 The alienation that prevails under capitalism, by separating the worker/artist from product, activity, community, and from the full expression of human possibility, thwarts the artistic instinct, sunders work and art, fragments work itself, and produces a world of ugliness. Co-operation between equals has been replaced by the slavery of the division of labour. By contrast, craft work in the Middle Ages allowed an artisan to invest his or her whole person into a work at a pace and for a duration that allowed the full development of capacities and intelligence. The realization of utility was at one and the same time the creation of beauty – that of the product, but also that of the producer.26 Under the communal system, this would once again be true, according to Morris, but clearly at a higher level, since the abolition of all private property and hierarchy would make way for a new world in which all human beings could finally enjoy the pleasure and fulfillment of joy in labour. The communal system as Morris imagines it would also transcend the division between work and leisure. The development of productive forces over the course of human history has made it possible not only to meet the most basic subsistence needs of an ever-expanding population, but to broaden the meaning of subsistence and to produce an ever greater

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surplus in order to fulfill other needs, desires, and ambitions – notably supporting unproductive ruling classes, with their luxurious lifestyles, machineries of war, and so on.27 Capitalism has developed the productive forces in immeasurably greater ways than all previous modes of production. In doing so, it has created the possibility of reducing the share of total social labour devoted to the reproduction of society (the percentage of work time devoted to subsistence) and of freeing up an enormous amount of disposable time (time that could be used for the free, fulfilling, creative activity of each individual). Indeed, the drive to reduce production costs leads firms to seek constantly for new ways to reduce the amount of labour time required to produce commodities.28 Yet, rather than extend the benefits of disposable time to all, the capitalist mode of production harnesses the vast majority of individuals to the relentless accumulation of capital, so that the enjoyment of genuinely disposable time remains for most a dream.29 Capitalism divided the time of “work” (i.e., of wage-labour) from “leisure” time (i.e., all other activities). To this day, even though the line between the employer’s time and the employee’s has gotten blurred in many jobs, as “flextime” and “telework” spread, work is generally understood as wage-labour (as in the expressions “going to work” or “being at work”), and only this kind of work is included in official economic statistics, such as the gross domestic product or the national accounts. In the meantime, unwaged work, in particular the time of domestic work and care work (still largely carried out by women), makes up the countless hours of labour never accounted for in the official statistics and leaving little time for “leisure.”30 Throughout the history of capitalism, “working time” has been a central object of struggle between capitalists and workers. Two of the key demands of the 1848 Revolution in France concerned the right to work and the length of the working day. Since workers could not survive without a wage, they demanded the right to a job that paid wages. And, because they wished to have as much time as possible that was their own to govern, they demanded a shortening of the working day to eight hours. Such struggles would fall short of their revolutionary potential were they only to seek to expand “leisure time” without challenging the very division between “work” and “leisure.” For that division is essentially the opposition between heteronomy and a limited autonomy; it is a condition of alienation, in which the workers are dominated by a world of institutions that are the product of their own collective activity. Emancipation

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from the rule of capital would mean the reappropriation by the associated producers of their own work, their own time, their own individual and collective relationship with nature. This would supersede the division between labour and leisure, between “necessary work” and “free activity.”31 The communal system as Morris envisaged it would be neither a market economy, for it would not be based on the sale or barter of commodities, nor an economy of redistribution, for no centralized agency would tax the population and allocate wealth. It would not be patterned after domestic administration either, for equal members of communist society would in no way resemble the particular, parochial, and hierarchical family groupings of such a form of organization. It would be a gift economy of generalized and serial reciprocity.32 An economy of reciprocity, because not only would each both give and receive from others (“to each according to his needs, from each according to his capacities”) but none would give without receiving or receive without giving. Generalized and serial reciprocity, because relations of giving and receiving between individuals would be mediated by society as a whole: each would either give to all and receive from the whole, or each would give to another, knowing that the latter would give to a third, who would give to a fourth, and so on. And finally, a gift economy, because economic relations would be based on Mauss’s “prestations totales”:33 unlike wage-labourers, who give what is most essential of themselves, their capacity to work, in exchange for the means to purchase commodities they did not make, the members of communist society give entirely of themselves to the collectivity, but they also have the absolute right to be supported and helped by the latter at every step of the way. As David Graeber puts it: “No accounts need be kept because the relation is not treated as if it will ever end. Whatever one might conclude about the realities of the situation … communism is built on an image of eternity. Since there is supposed to be no history, each moment is effectively the same as any other.”34 Such a system institutes a moral order (rather than a state) of fellowship, in which each gives unreservedly of him/herself to the collectivity, in which all do so equally, and in which all therefore live and work in solidarity, the debt incurred by each being a debt owed to all. In many ways, this is the model proposed by Rousseau in the Social Contract: “Giving himself to all, each gives himself to no one; and as there is not one associate over whom one does not acquire the same right that one gives up to him, one gains the equivalent of all that one loses, and more strength to conserve what one has.”35 For Rousseau, of course, this was meant to

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be a strictly political order. The general will thus constituted was sovereign, but its expression was juridical. Morris’s communal system, however, is a political economy in which the state has withered away and there are no longer laws in any formal sense, in which the distinction between the economic and the political has vanished along with class distinctions, private property, and the division of labour. But it is a moral order, nonetheless, as Morris emphasizes in the portrait he draws in News from Nowhere, one that is graven not on marble or brass, but in the hearts of citizens, and that takes on the force of habit, to evoke Rousseau’s simile.36 Once again, the key to the whole edifice is equality (as it is in Rousseau’s concept of the social contract). Whereas the formal equality of capitalism conceals a substantive inequality, the asymmetry of giving among individuals in Nowhere is compensated by symmetry at the level of totality: everyone receives according to their needs and everyone contributes according to their capacities. Ultimately, contingent inequalities at the level of individual relationships are trumped by necessary equality in social life taken as a whole. In this sense, we can say with István Mészáros that equality is one of a set of interrelated premises and principles of a socialism for the twenty-first century, but that it is also primus inter pares, for it is the condition of all the others.37 Finally, this gift economy of generalized reciprocity supersedes the opposition between self-interest and disinterestedness. In this model, to give is neither to be selfish nor to sacrifice oneself.38 It is in the interest of each and all to give and to receive. However, individuals’ actions are not motivated by any sense of personal profit: rather, they aim at the good of all. Thus, the inhabitants of Nowhere look after their own persons (they are healthy, fit, well dressed, proud, and considerate), but also look out for each other, look after the built and natural environment, and participate happily in collective endeavours for the sheer joy of work in fellowship. Indeed, fellowship, like equality, is a crucial principle in this vision of communism. In a world in which no one owned property and in which none had power over others, individuals would only have each other. In the words that Morris attributes to John Ball: “Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them, and the life that is in it, that shall live on for ever and ever, and each one of you part of it, while many a man’s life upon the earth shall wane.”39

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How satisfactory can such a political philosophy of the withering away of the state be? What is to prevent the members of such a communist society from entering into conflict, because individuals interpret social norms differently, but there is no established authority to impose a common definition?40 What is to prevent the tyranny of the collectivity over the individual (as feared by John Stuart Mill and other liberals even under the democratic rule of law)? As Douglas Moggach has pointed out,41 post-Kantian perfectionists, such as Fichte or Hegel, believed that in a just society “each individual is apportioned, at least metaphorically, a ‘space’ in which to pursue one’s own private conceptions of happiness,” and that “there must be a mechanism for the enforcement of right, not a mere reliance on virtue or custom, to guarantee the grounds for the spontaneous action of the self.” In Morris’s sketch of the principles of communism, as I have argued, there would be custom rather than law enforced by the state. What is this custom? In the spirit of Rousseau’s volonté générale, each gives him/ herself completely to the whole and, as part of the whole, receives each other in his/her totality. Rather than a system of laws regulating a marketplace – the animal kingdom of the spirit (Hegel) – we have a system of generalized reciprocity built into the very fabric of society itself. Here, I do not need to limit myself, because the pursuit of my happiness entails engaging in creation for my own benefit and that of everyone else. It entails doing so in a context in which all are doing this, giving their efforts to others and seeking out opportunities for others to do so. As I have argued, the antinomy of interest and disinteredness is overcome in this model of generalized reciprocity: I give myself unreservedly to the others without demanding payment, because it is right to do so; but it is in my interest to do so, both because I know that if we all do it, I will benefit from it, and because doing so is inherently pleasurable, because it brings me the gratification of work (product, rest, pleasurable activity) and of fellowship. Freedom for Morris has a collective dimension: it is not about each having a “space apart,” because we can only have spaces together, we can only be free in fellowship and equality, and our happiness is predicated on these conditions. Artistic representations and scientific analyses of the condition of the isolated individual in capitalist society over the last couple of hundred years are eloquent in this regard. As Morris has John Ball point out, we cope with our wretchedness thanks to the fellowship that we enjoy: fellowship is heaven, its absence is hell.

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The condition of all of this is, however, the necessary interdependence of freedom, equality, and fellowship (liberté, égalité, fraternité): the whole edifice must collapse if any of these three pillars is missing or deficient. This would be the problem if large numbers joined the “Obstinate Refusers” in News from Nowhere: they would not threaten the freedom of the others in principle, or even their equality, really; but their actions are wanting on the level of fellowship. They seclude themselves in a space apart, no longer sharing – the issue not being property, but activities. Fellowship alone can become mob rule, the tyranny of the majority; equality alone can mean stifling the individual; freedom alone can mean oppression. Only their synergy can constitute emancipation. How to prevent backsliding? Morris’s wager is that a form of society founded on the exchange of activities, as defined above, would make it possible to reconcile the general will (the higher pursuit of the common good) and the will of all (the sum of individual interests), without any external mechanism of enforcement. The existence of any kind of repressive mechanism would undermine the three pillars, for it would institute inequality and the externally imposed limitation of freedom. In chapter 14 of News from Nowhere, Morris suggests a process of consensus building and a decision-making mechanism. Interestingly, the example he gives of a project requiring a decision is the construction of a bridge – an apt symbol, since it represents the process of transition to the new order.

“How men fight …” “Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell.” However, as Morris has John Ball say, “it is for him that is lonely or in prison to dream of fellowship, but for him that is of fellowship to do and not to dream.”42 Morris’s evocations of communism were intended as reflections and conversations within the context of the revolutionary movement. That they were an important part of this becomes clear from Morris’s statement that he did not believe in “Catastrophical Communism”: “I do not believe that our end will be gained by open war; for the executive will be too strong for even an attempt at such a thing to be made until the change has gone so far that it will be too weak to dare to attack the people by means of physical violence. What we have to do first is to make Socialists.”43 A key task of communists, then, will be education. Morris also stresses that workers will also learn through the struggle and become capable of

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managing their own affairs, an idea illustrated in chapter 17 of News from Nowhere (“How the Change Came”). As we have seen, Morris’s vision of communism entailed the development of a community of individuals committed to equality, fellowship, and sharing. It would require the eradication of the fundamental practices, concepts, and values of capitalism. Imagining the bridge44 from “here” to “there,” from capitalism to utopia, is no simple matter. In his Social Contract, Rousseau raised this problem of transition, but proposed a magical solution: the intervention of a Legislator who would see human passions, yet not experience them, found the laws but not wield sovereignty. As a revolutionary socialist, Morris saw the solution more concretely, in a process of historical transformation. Merely to assert this, however, is to invoke magic no less than Rousseau, as Morris well understood. Two processes – one objective, one subjective – would be necessary. A society founded upon the principles of substantive equality and the exchange of activities cannot be decreed into existence but must be the fruit of historical development. That means that its historical conditions must be established. A theory of transition must consider a process of education aimed at forming a new ethical life, a new consciousness, but one that must be embedded in praxis and durable relationships. Not only overtly “political” action and education, but also the transformation of work and art, would have a central function in the emergence of the new consciousness (as illustrated also in News from Nowhere). Work has a social productivity: even when aimed at satisfying immediate needs, it also produces means of production that can be used again.45 These include human capabilities – knowledge and skill obviously, but also institutions, structures of feeling, a wealth of social capacities to shape relationships, whether politically, organizationally, or interpersonally. Love, friendship, care, solidarity, fellowship (as well as hierarchy, prejudice, oppression) do not simply grow from some primal sympathy but are bred and cultivated in us by historical development and education. Each generation must renew or lose them! Morris’s The Story of the Glittering Plain makes it clear that one cannot simply jump straight into complete fulfillment, but that one must come to it via a process of individual and collective development and education. The story’s protagonist, Hallblithe, is a courageous, determined, and resourceful man, but he is also guided by the ethos and expectations of his clan. All of his actions are rooted not merely in his subjective

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attachment and longing for his beloved, but in his powerful sense of belonging to a community and having to live up to its codes and values.46 Hallblithe is driven to pursue his rescue of the Hostage single-mindedly, despite all the blandishments of the Land of the Glittering Plain, because he is not an abstract individual but at all times and necessarily a warrior of the Clan of the Raven. To assert this is to deny neither contingency nor freedom: all of Hallblithe’s upbringing and conditioning has prepared him and furnished him with resources to deal with the unplanned and unpredictable stuff of reality, with all the incidents in his adventure, both dismaying and promising. Still, he must choose how to act with respect to the people of the Isle of Ransom and of the Glittering Plain, whether to trust the Sea-Eagle, what to make of Puny Fox’s snares and schemes. Social structure and historical tendencies are fundamental. Yet the individual must still make choices, often fateful ones that lead to a “period of consequences.”47 We can therefore speak of determination (in the sense of Bestimmung) in Morris’s work, but not of determinism. Morris is not telling us about iron laws of history, but of the indeterminacy-withindeterminacy of social change. Thus, although characters such as Hallblithe are very much the products of their society, embedded in cultures, traditions, and institutions, they are also individuals, who make choices and bear the consequences of doing so. In every one of Morris’s romances, the protagonists constantly display their competence. If we think of Ralph and Ursula in The Well at the World’s End, we could certainly deem that everything they become is the result of others leading them on with narratives that are at best partial, at worst mendacious and manipulative. Yet, all of their actions are also the result of choices they make according to what they know. It could appear that destiny or a “cunning of reason” is at work in Ralph and Ursula’s finding the Well, drinking of it, becoming lucky, and triumphing over all foes in order to bring about a new and better political order. Putting aside such teleology, we could also read the story in a different way: Ralph and Ursula need to believe in their quest, in order not only to travel through many lands, defeat various enemies, and make many friends, but also to develop their capacities, their relationship, their courage. Like John Ball, they must believe in the goal, even though its pursuit may lead them to an unsuspected outcome, and there must be widespread belief in their quest among others. Morris thus displays a concept of history as open-ended, “an ability to read the future as a structure of

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orientation and to see each lived moment as a complex of interpenetrating temporalities, none of which can boast closure.”48 Morris systematically debunks all easy optimism. The masses move from one form of oppression to another, from one form of ideological subjection to another, and the forms of oppression and ideological submission become more and more pervasive, powerful, and hard to withstand. Those who resist do so often in the foreknowledge of the torture they will endure, with no certainty of the outcome of their struggle. History may be open-ended, but it is not empty of determinations. The “final goal” is extraordinarily difficult to reach. If individuals are not simply the passive vehicles of historical forces, but subjects making choices, they must do so in circumstances not of their choosing,49 struggling to discern some pattern and meaning in “the nets and toils of violence” and “the embittered debris of history.”50 In a tale such as The Well at the World’s End, all of the protagonists’ deeds and encounters may lead on to some happy end. But the tide of history may not allow for that. Thus, Morris’s Dreamer explains to John Ball that the struggle against villeinage will in fact be successful, though the peasants who waged the struggle will apparently be vanquished: These men are strong [but] simple … The victory shall they have and shall not know what to do with it; they shall fight and overcome, because of their lack of knowledge, and because of their lack of knowledge, they shall be cozened and betrayed when their captains are slain, and all shall come to nought by seeming; and the king’s uncles shall prevail, that both they and the king may come to the shame that is appointed for them. And yet when the lords have vanquished … yet shall their victory be fruitless; for the free men that hold unfree lands shall they not bring under the collar again, and villeinage shall slip from their hands, till there be, and not long after ye are dead, but few unfree men in England; so that your lives and your deaths both shall bear fruit.51 The fruit of the struggle will be such as no one had hitherto imagined, in the form of wage labour, and many centuries will have to pass before men and women can begin to comprehend their condition. Living at the time of the rise of capitalism, “they shall indeed feel the plague and yet not know the remedy,” and eventually “men shall be cozened into thinking

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that it is of their own free will that they must needs buy leave to labour by pawning their labour that is to be.”52 Nor shall the problem simply be an inability to grasp “what is doing around them,” for there will always be the hope among the workers that they might succeed as individuals in escaping wage slavery and becoming capitalists themselves. Also, the very pernicious logic of their situation will pit the wage-labourers against each other in bitter competition.53 A long and tortuous historical process will have to unfold, “a long period of half-formed aspirations, abortive schemes, and half measures interspersed with doubtful experiments, disappointment, reaction, and apathy,”54 before the conditions will be ripe for revolution. Even when a clear consciousness of the revolutionary imperative has finally grown among some, many will still cling out of fear to the old illusions. Morris warns of chaotic times of internecine strife among the working class, of reversals, failures, and betrayals, before the great transformation at last occurs. The twentieth century proved how correct Morris’s understanding was, as the global working class, far from uniting as the Communist Manifesto exhorted them to do, split along national and sectional lines, and as the organizations built to advance the cause of the proletariat came to dominate the latter and thwart its emancipation. These are remarkable ideas to emerge in the context of a nineteenthcentury European socialist movement that mostly looked forward with boundless optimism to the coming triumph of socialism. One need only compare Morris’s depiction of the hard and bitter path to socialism with Marx’s words in the Communist Manifesto or in chapter 32 of the first volume of Capital55 to be struck by the contrast. Rosa Luxemburg56 was perhaps the only Marxist among Morris’s contemporaries to emphasize that the transition to socialism would be a long process punctuated by recurring defeats. She postulated that the proletariat would learn from its failures and grow into a revolutionary subject capable of replacing capitalism with a new social order. Her tale of these repeated defeats, against a backdrop of successive world wars brought about by capitalist accumulation, and her evocation of the desperate choice between socialism and barbarism, echo Morris’s words in A Dream of John Ball or in “Equality.” Writing in 1890, Morris evokes the corruption and degradation of the workers by capitalist exploitation: “No one can expect to find the virtues of free men in slaves. No, if the present state of Society merely breaks up without a conscious effort at transformation, the end, the fall of Europe, may be long in coming, but when it does come it will

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be far more terrible, far more confused and full of suffering than the period of the fall of Rome.”57

“… a thing that men shall talk of soberly …” While apparently more real than the idealized principles of communism depicted in the first part of this chapter, “heroic” narratives of waging the class struggle and building the movement are just as much a rhetorical moment. Like the evocation of the “final goal,” representations of the movement may inspire such revolutionaries while helping build fellowship.58 This moment, too, must be superseded by another move, which brings back into consciousness the ambiguous and often misleading character of the dream vision (see the Introduction to this volume). This is a major contribution of A Dream of John Ball, in which a man tells of his dream about a man of the past dreaming about the future, in the process inspiring us to dream in turn and to think critically about dreaming. Reconstructing the past is a fundamental epistemological problem for historians. But how do we reconstruct a future, since no one has yet constructed it? Clearly, we cannot and do not. We can no more imagine our future than John Ball could imagine his. Could Morris have been clearer? John Ball is baffled and bewildered at the Dreamer’s account of what will succeed the disappearance of villeinage. “Poor man,” the Dreamer says to him59 – and to us, who might entertain ideas about what the future may hold for society. Yet, Morris is no less adamant that John Ball had to live by his ideal of a future world of fellowship. Morris’s account of “how we shall live then” is as much a vision of our future as John Ball’s sermon on fellowship was an accurate picture of the society that succeeded feudalism – in other words, it is as much fantasy as realistic prospect. What is Nowhere, then, that “eyewitness account” of a visit to communism? “If I could but see it! if I could but see it,” thinks Morris’s time traveller.60 What does he see? What is he glimpsing, if not a reflection of his/Morris’s own desire? And doesn’t Morris tell us quite unequivocally to beware of mere visions, mere seeming, in A Dream of John Ball, The Story of the Glittering Plain, or The Wood Beyond the World? In speaking to John Ball, the Dreamer compares the illusions we have about the future to a landscape “enchanted by the gleam of the moon” and asserts that we shall only see things as

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they are in the cold, grey light of morning, when all enchantments have been stripped away and things appear as they truly are: Rather shall that day-dawn be cold and grey and surly; and yet by its light shall men see things as they verily are, and no longer enchanted by the gleam of the moon and the glamour of the dreamtide. By such grey light shall wise men and valiant souls see the remedy, and deal with it, a real thing that may be touched and handled, and no glory of the heavens to be worshipped from afar off … The time shall come, John Ball, when that dream of thine that this shall one day be, shall be a thing that men shall talk of soberly, and as a thing soon to come about, as even with thee they talk of the villeins becoming tenants paying their lord quit-rent; therefore, hast thou done well to hope it.61 Dreaming is a necessary moment. This is neither because it tells us what “there” will be, nor because it tells us how to get “there,” but because it holds a mirror up to our selves: it is an instrument and a time for rethinking and reimagining ourselves and each other. But it must also be a process, not only a “place” to which we go, but from which we can draw insights, vision, and hope to carry forward the movement. The dream of communism is elusive, not least because it can never just be the goal; it must also be the bridge, and one, moreover, that must be crossed in both directions. “We live on archipelagos / and that water these words what can they do what can they do,” writes Zbigniew Herbert.62 Words and actions can and must build the bridge over the archipelago, the mediation between imagination and practice, not in order to abandon imagination, but rather to nourish and enrich it, ethically and politically,63 to lay the groundwork that may one day make the “remedy … a real thing that may be touched and handled … that men shall talk of soberly.” Dreaming can and must be an indispensable part of the moral and epistemological education of socialists. In divulging one’s true hopes and desires, one also affirms one’s fundamental aims, clarifies one’s thinking, and reveals one’s true character: “Those of us with a grain of imagination in them cannot help speculating as to how we shall live [after the revolution]: and the expression of the results of our speculation, of our hopes and fears, will certainly give our friends and associates some insight into our characters and temperaments, will make us know each other bet-

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ter.”64 For Morris, dreaming thus had a moral significance: in putting aside the artificial, reified language of “party formulas” and “machine politics,” the telling of one’s dreams would lead to greater mutual knowledge and make for “better friends.” The collective narration of dreaming was a process of mutual education and, thus, transformation.65 Beyond simply establishing goals and marking the path to be followed, beyond simply inspiring hope for the desired outcome, Morris’s dreaming involves a process of critical and prospective thought. In a movement of rotation, it raises thought away from its immediacy and, in crystallizing the ideal moment, yields perspective, consciousness, selfconsciousness. Articulation of the ideal moment is thus indispensable for social change.66 Yet, important as that mediation is, it must itself be superseded to avoid being reified.67 A further rotation is required to rescue the dream vision from being merely a literary artifact. This further rotation is supplied by a historical-philosophical analysis and practical furthering of the conditions of its emergence in the real world – a doctrine of revolutionary change, so well expressed in A Dream of John Ball. Rejecting mere utopianism, Morris indeed regarded himself as “a practical Socialist.” Communism would be no Selbstläufer: it would not appear out of nowhere. Men and women would need to achieve it through arduous and prolonged struggles. István Mészáros compares transforming society to rebuilding a house in its totality without tearing it down: The process of socialist transformation – because it must embrace all aspects of the materially grounded complex interrelationship between capital, labour, and the state – is conceivable only as a form of transitional restructuring based on the inherited and progressively alterable leverage of material mediations … It is not possible to pull down the building in which we all live and erect a wholly new edifice in its place on totally new foundations. Life must go on in the shored-up house during the entire course of rebuilding, “taking away one storey after another from the bottom upwards, slipping in the new structure, so that in the end none of the old house should be left.” Indeed, the task is even more difficult than that. For the decaying timber frame of the building must be also replaced in the course of extricating humankind from the perilous structural framework of the capital system.68

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While no doubt agreeing with this, Morris would point out that some features of old buildings, perhaps ones that have been covered up or neglected by owners intent on “home improvements,” ought to be uncovered, repaired, and once again given pride of place. Is this not a central intent of all of Morris’s artistic and literary work, of his campaign to save ancient buildings, of his celebration of the craftwork of the Middle Ages? It might make sense to focus exclusively on the revolutionary overthrow of the state, if that seems both possible and imminent, as so many nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialists and communists believed. But if one grasps it as a longer-term process, as Morris appears to have done, then it must be conceived as a much broader movement occurring across all spheres of society and at every scale. Telling the dream is essential, that many might dream it together. Telling calls for tools and pathways, such as a public meeting, a newspaper, a printing press, a Web page, a blog, social media, such as the recruitment of many speakers and writers, such as the formation of a political party to educate its members, train new recruits, and carry forth the ideas. But more is required. Learning happens in “macro” processes such as revolutionary confrontations, but to be deep and enduring it must be mediated with “micro” processes that occur in everyday life, in order to combat the ways in which the latter is regularly depoliticized, privatized, and channelled in reified paths, and consciousness is dragged back from the high of collective action on the street to the hopelessness of the status quo. The trick is not simply, as Marxist-Leninists and assorted religious revolutionary groups of our time have believed, to enrol a core group into the total institution of a party, or of an autonomous collective, in which they live a completely different sort of everyday life. The key is to develop new pathways within everyday life in a “capillary” fashion, through new forms of involvement in waged and unwaged work and action, through social innovation in the relationships of work, through the development of new relationships to the product and the activity of work – in other words through the cultivation in a Morrisian spirit of the “Lesser Arts.”69 This can then develop into the social basis of transformative movements and collective actions directed at the state and capital on the meso and macro levels – a basis through which the learning process at the heart of the revolutionary movement can occur and be lasting, through which new dreams may emerge and old dreams be renewed.

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Morris stated more eloquently than any the obscurity of the historical moment, in which struggles always yield something other than was hoped for, in which the object of hope must change yet is carried forward in new struggles by other actors. Warning of the perils of, as it were, dreaming under the spell of moonlight, Morris reminds us to face social reality in the cold, grey light of morning. The goal to be attained and the means that will lead there, come to appear as moments to be superseded themselves, both historically and theoretically. The key is to find the dynamic balance between being and becoming, between what is and what ought to be, between the realities of the present and the imperatives of the future.

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News from Nowhere Two: Principles of a Sequel tony pinkney

How do we think with Morris about the future, both the future we are likely to get on current trends and the future we would ideally want to have? The very phrase “thinking with Morris about the future” perhaps sounds a little too neighbourly, to borrow a favourite term from News from Nowhere, a little too comfortable or even complacent. To “think with him” is to accept some of his key values and judgments – no doubt about that – but it may also be to extend them, to problematize them, to rework and on occasion reject them, in the light of the 130 years of cultural and political history that have gone by since Morris committed himself to socialism in 1883. For if we share with him the utopian goal of a socialist or communist society, we also know, after the political history of the twentieth century, that both these precious adjectives may be barely usable today. For “socialist” has come to mean the political practice of social-democratic parties which have been almost totally subsumed to capitalist values, while “communist” is compromised by the violence of Stalinism and Maoism to the point where the recent project of reinventing its “idea”1 seems decidedly problematic. I wish to suggest that a productive way to do such thinking-with, but also such recasting and reworking, would be to write a sequel to Morris’s own great exercise in futuristic speculation, News from Nowhere, a sequel which we might entitle News from Nowhere Two on the model of the relation of B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two to Thoreau’s original Walden. The personal starting point of this project was a disturbing dream I had a few years ago of being on a Time Team–style archaeological dig in the grounds of Kelmscott manor and, with my eager trowel, suddenly and

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traumatically excavating broken pieces of the exoskeleton of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s deadly Terminator cyborg; “Three times one night this vision broke my sleep,” to adapt a chilling line from The Earthly Paradise.2 What were such dystopian intimations doing in what, for Morrisians, is the very heartland of utopia itself? According to his daughter May, Morris used to remark that “When you are using an old story, read it through, then shut the book and write it in your own way” (May Morris likes this remark so much she in fact quotes it twice in her Introductions to the Collected Works).3 Could we then apply this Morrisian maxim to News from Nowhere itself? One hundred and twenty or so years after its first publication in Commonweal in 1890, it certainly now counts as an old story, so what might it mean to read it through, shut the book, and write it in our own way in 2012? How might we elaborate the principles that ought to guide such a retelling or rewriting, which is also necessarily a political rethinking of that Morrisian future vision? Is News from Nowhere simply an “old story,” in the way that any other literary text from the 1890s might now be? I don’t think so. It is surely, for English readers at least, our great socialist utopia, possibly – even bearing Thomas More himself in mind – our great English utopia tout court; and it is certainly, in A.L. Morton’s fine and suggestive phrase, our “first Utopia which is not utopian.”4 Not that it is a sacred text, sealed off in some transcendental realm of its own; but it is certainly a major and formative work for us, not just any old story. “Read it through, then shut the book,” Morris continues, in his mini-manual for rewriters and updaters; but this, too, sounds a little hasty to me. We shall want to read Morris’s utopia not once, but many times, to read it more and more carefully; and if we do aspire to rewrite it, we will have the book open beside us throughout that operation, making much use of it and feeling confident that it will have a good deal of guidance to give us about what the rewriting process should be. And finally: “write it in your own way.” Yes, indeed; this must be a sequel for us, consciously and overtly for our own historical moment, and not a historicist project that attempts a speculative reconstruction of what Morris himself might have thought a News from Nowhere sequel should look like. But to “write it in your own way” might, in its shoulder-shrugging briskness, seem to license pretty well any kind of retelling; and that is a freedom we shall want to resist. Indeed, this will be the issue which principally occupies me here: how can we make the rewriting of

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News from Nowhere a narratively and politically disciplined operation, rather than a carefree penning of more text? Lenin used to speak, in a rather chilling phrase, of the “iron discipline of the Party,”5 but the literary discipline that I shall sketch out here will certainly not be as rigid as that (and indeed will ultimately contain a place for mischief within it too). Yet it will be a discipline nonetheless, a set of constraints and determinations – which are also opportunities – upon our sequelizing of Morris’s utopia which does in my view set measurable limits to that necessary rewriting project. So let me offer a checklist of the opportunities and constraints which may guide this project of taking Morris’s old story and rewriting it in our own way. Since seven is such a magical number in literary and cultural studies (and Morris’s own poetry), all the way from Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture through William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity to Christopher Booker’s recent Seven Basic Plots, I have laid out these factors in seven categories, some of them external to News from Nowhere itself, others of a more internal nature. First, the general question of the appropriacy of utopian sequels. There are plenty of them, since there is a healthy tradition of self-sequelizing within the literary genre of utopia. Twenty-nine years after the appearance of Erewhon, which was an important book to William Morris, Samuel Butler published Erewhon Revisited (1901). Edward Bellamy, whose literary impact on Morris prompts (but also perhaps deforms) the latter’s utopia in the first place, followed up Looking Backward in 1889 with a sequel, Equality, in 1897. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was a friend of May Morris’s, was rather brisker in this respect: just a year after the appearance of her feminist utopia Herland, she published its sequel, With Her in Ourland (1916). Moreover, what counts here is not necessarily the sequel that the original utopian author provides, since many other writers may be moved to provide a sequel too, either extending or contesting the initial vision of the good society. To stick with examples close to Morris himself, there are estimated to be no less than 150 sequels or other fictional responses to Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Given that Morris’s own main utopian rival has this many sequels, we might in fact feel rather disappointed that News from Nowhere itself so far has only one, by George Duncan, which is a genial piece of writing, but not particularly theoretically or politically searching.6 There was certainly a healthy culture of sequel writing in socialist circles around Morris in the late 1880s and 1890s; no text, it appears, was

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too sacred to have a socialist sequel tacked onto it. Henrik Ibsen was, as we know, a deeply important figure for the young socialists: Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling, and May Morris (who used to drag her father to performances too) were all particularly taken with his new drama, and it was above all The Doll’s House which made a great impression. And yet reverence for Ibsen did not stop a busy practice of rewriting and transforming this play. Eleanor Marx and Israel Zangwill wrote a twenty-page follow-up entitled “A Doll’s House” Repaired; and when Walter Besant wrote his own sequel to that play from a hostile conservative viewpoint, George Bernard Shaw felt it necessary to wade in with a short story entitled “Still After the Doll’s House: A Sequel to Walter Besant’s Sequel to Ibsen’s Play.” So, socialist sequels to the second power in this case. Moreover, William Morris himself gives us a number of sequels or near-sequels within his own copious literary oeuvre. In the early poetry, “King Arthur’s Tomb” is a sequel to “The Defence of Guenevere.” In the Germanic romances, The Roots of the Mountains is effectively a sequel to The House of the Wolfings, telling the story of the same Gothic tribes several centuries later. Individual characters across works have been seen as sequels to each other, with critics taking Birdalone in The Water of the Wondrous Isles to be a version of Ellen from News from Nowhere (so if we are modelling Ellen’s later adventures in a sequel, we shall want to keep Birdalone in mind as a source of narrative possibilities for her). I am even inclined to consider Morris’s 1891 additions to the original Commonweal text of News from Nowhere (which include, among other things, the road-mending gang, thoughts on Nowhere’s foreign relations, and the Obstinate Refusers chapter) as constituting something like a proto-sequel in their own right. So across various literary levels – within the genre of utopia itself, in the writing practices of both Morris’s socialist circle and his own literary career – sequel writing is a familiar concept. Second, there are many ways in which News from Nowhere itself points to alternative narrative and political possibilities, to stories outside and beyond itself. It is, after all, as its subtitle concedes, only “some chapters” from a utopian romance, so other chapters – additional writing, new thoughts, missed angles and details – are certainly possible, perhaps even desirable. It is a vision of the future elaborated by only one of the six speakers present at the Socialist League meeting which opens the book: William Guest gives us his version of socialism, but what might the other five, including those who had “strong but divergent Anarchist opinions,”7 have offered us if they had been given the narrative opportunity?

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“Divergent” is an important term here, clearly; whatever those other, lost stories might have been, they would certainly not have all been cast in one mould. Moreover, there are important indications within the body of the book itself, first that all is not quite well with the Morrisian utopia, and second that there are challenging futures to come beyond it. Old Hammond announces early on that he is “old, and perhaps disappointed,”8 which doesn’t sound too encouraging. Later he complains that the young Nowherians are not interested in his tales of the past; and at one point, even more extraordinarily, he employs the term “counter-revolution,”9 as if he knows rather more about future political developments in Nowhere than he is willing to share with us. He refers also to “the world’s next period of wise and unhappy manhood, if that should happen”;10 and Ellen too is anxious about this, worrying that, given the lack of historical awareness in her culture, “times may alter; we may be bitten with some impulse towards change, and many things may seem too wonderful for us to resist, too exciting not to catch at, if we do not know that they are but phases of what has been before; and withal ruinous, deceitful, and sordid.”11 Grim words indeed; and Ellen’s underlying vampiric metaphor – bitten with a desire to change – suddenly rewrites the utopian architectural Gothic of Ruskin and Morris as the altogether scarier Gothic of Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker. “What is to come after this?” Guest asks Henry Morsom in the craft museum at Wallingford, at which the old man laughs and replies, “I don’t know … we will meet it when it comes.”12 Old Hammond and Ellen’s expressions of anxiety about Nowhere’s future may suggest that they will indeed have to meet some sustained challenge to the values of Morris’s utopia in the not-toodistant future. So the text itself is strongly marking out the place of its own sequel, is almost enjoining upon us the responsibility of writing it. We also need to think through the strange relationship between News from Nowhere and The Story of the Glittering Plain, which Morris seems to have written simultaneously with it. For while the former was recommending utopia to the working-class comrades in Commonweal, the latter was rejecting the apparently utopian world of the Glittering Plain as a false and sterile stasis, and recommending instead a return to the arduous struggles and rugged terrain of the Isle of Ransom. So Morris’s antiutopia is written in the very same gesture and moment as his utopia itself, as if these two texts are the dialectical mirror image of each other, whose complex relationship we still have not fully understood. To what

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extent, it is still necessary to ask, does The Glittering Plain qualify or even negate the political impulses of News from Nowhere itself? Third, the twentieth century has given us some powerful new concepts of utopia, tied to its own formative political experiences; and we cannot now think of News from Nowhere outside these, either as literary critics or (in this essay) as would-be sequel writers. I will come on to these concepts in a moment, but we should first note that there is a certain appropriateness to the rethinking/rewriting task I am suggesting because News from Nowhere itself recasts the utopian tradition, and thus implicitly generates new concepts of utopia in the process. Many critics have registered their sense that Morris’s utopia is some kind of unprecedented break in the utopian tradition as that comes to us from More, Campanella, Bacon, Butler, Bellamy, and others. Miguel Abensour theorized this break best when he contrasted News from Nowhere, as a “heuristic” utopia concerned with the “education of desire,” with the classical tradition of systematic utopias devoted to meticulously detailed and often rigidly geometrical “politico-juridical” institution-building.13 Morris’s utopia, always notorious for the vagueness of its institutional detail, is concerned with the phenomenology of utopia, with giving us the very feel of the new society, its physical textures, its natural pleasures, its new egalitarian human relationships. So if News from Nowhere itself reworks the utopian genre, taking us at a leap from classical-systematic to heuristic utopia, then it is open to remodelling in the light of later theoretical breakthroughs in utopian thinking. I want to highlight just two of these here. The first comes to us from H.G. Wells, in his still impressive A Modern Utopia of 1905, where he formulates the notion of a “kinetic utopia.” In the pre-Darwinian epoch, Wells argues, utopias were necessarily static and perfectionist, fitting human life into their Procrustean geometric symmetries; but postDarwin, a satisfyingly “modern” utopia will have to be kinetic, will have to contain built-in principles of change and development, and will have characters who are genuinely individual rather than the empty ideal ciphers of so many classical utopias. Wells is ambivalent about Morris in A Modern Utopia, admitting that there are some promising elements of idiosyncrasy in News from Nowhere, but in the end tending to consign it to the discredited static utopias of the past. Whether this is fair or not is arguable, and I have tried to show elsewhere, in literary-critical mode, that there are in fact important elements of kineticism in Morris’s text, particularly in and around the figure of Ellen, who is an extraordinary

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irruption of new energy into the last third of the book. But I want now to take this argument one stage further and suggest that we imagine a kinetic sequel to News from Nowhere, one that would give full head to those latently kinetic forces within the work itself – which we will then take still further in the light of our own political preoccupations. If we must aim, then, to “kineticize” News from Nowhere, we shall also want to think it through again in the light of the most suggestive theoretical concept in utopian studies of recent decades, which I take to be Tom Moylan’s notion of the “critical utopia,” as first developed in his book Demand the Impossible. As exemplified in the fictions of Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany, and Marge Piercy, “critical utopias” are works that problematize utopia both thematically-politically and formally, without for all that simply tipping over into the genre of anti-utopia or dystopia. And I would want to weld Moylan’s new generic term onto Fredric Jameson’s argument that utopias necessarily fail, again both thematically and formally, and that in so doing they show us the limits of what we can currently think, rather than breaking through to new positive representations in their own right.14 In a “critical utopia,” as I use the notion here, utopia is in danger, is on the way to going wrong (thus the Soviet experience registers itself within the concept), but it is not yet beyond salvage, because regressive tendencies do not yet quite outweigh the original revolutionary impulses of the new society (the resurgent utopianism of the 1960s thereby makes itself felt in this notion too). And this is all happening in a work that is peculiarly self-conscious about its own status as writing, which it may signal by, for example, including within itself a character who is writing a utopia that may or may not turn out to be the very work in which he or she appears. So whereas the kineticism of a Wellsian utopia is simply an empty kind of historicity or change for its own sake, the kinetic drive of a critical utopia is more politically specific: it is concerned with the breakage and possible mending of utopias, their degeneration and possible redemption and relaunch. Since Tom Moylan has powerfully theorized what Le Guin, Russ, Delany, and Piercy in their utopias gave us in the practical state, then we shall certainly want to think News from Nowhere through in these terms too. And after all, in some crucial places in his work, as in that profound meditation on political defeat in A Dream of John Ball, Morris himself knows exactly this: that what you fight for is by no means always what you get, even when you think you win, and that you may have to fight for your original goal all over again, under a different name and by dif-

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ferent means. And if we do not rework News from Nowhere along these Moylanesque lines, then we may have to consign it to a discarded past of excessively naive utopias, to a happy Hobbitland of texts which never spotted the twentieth-century political totalitarianisms ahead. I believe that Morris’s utopia can respond productively to both the Wellsian and the Moylan-Jameson generic concepts I have been sketching here, in terms of both literary criticism and further creative writing (or sequel). Fourth, if things are indeed potentially going awry in Morris’s utopia, as Old Hammond and Ellen suggest, then where are such troubling developments poking their ugly heads through in the genial, placid, neighbourly Thames valley that Morris depicts in his book? Well, the text does present us with some dissident voices, with old Grumblers and Obstinate Refusers. Such figures have often been taken as an index of the welcome openness of this utopia, of the degree to which it encompasses plurality rather than forcing all its citizens into the anonymous cultural uniformity of the classical utopian tradition. But might there be more to it than this? May such dissident figures ultimately form the basis for a sustained political challenge to Morris’s socialist utopia? The occasional scholar has thought so. I have in mind a troubling passage from J.M.S. Tompkins’s admirable book on Morris’s poetry. Though she is aware of the limitations of her own literary approach and modestly tends to leave the politics to E.P. Thompson, she nonetheless comes up with some very sharp political observations on News from Nowhere. For she notes, first, that “the Epoch of Rest is not presented as permanent. It has been achieved by men and can be lost by them”; and she then actually names the social agency that may effect this disastrous political reversal: “The Grumblers … may be significant here and their discontent with peace and leisure no mere comic anachronism but a genuinely reactionary tendency, capable of gathering destructive force.”15 Has there ever been a darker reading of Morris’s utopia than this? Barbara Gribble once wittily remarked that she wanted to see Morris’s utopians tested by a plague and an invasion of aliens;16 but Tompkins’s construal of News from Nowhere suggests that the dangerous “aliens” are already internal to Morris’s utopia, not just a force from the outside. Suppose, however, that Tompkins’s “inside” and Gribble’s “outside” do indeed link up in a challenge to the central Morrisian vision, that the internal dissidents make common cause with politically hostile forces outside Nowhere, as Murugan and the Rani do with the external military forces of Colonel Dipa in Aldous Huxley’s Island (destroying the Pala

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utopia in the process), or as anti-Ecotopian dissidents attempt to do with United States military forces in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (unsuccessfully, in this case). Morris in News from Nowhere does not programmatically take the position that Wells does in A Modern Utopia – that nothing less than the entire world will do for utopian construction – so there may well be pockets of capitalism beyond Nowhere’s frontiers that could yet pose threats to its existence. After all, Morris did add some thoughts on Nowhere’s foreign relations to the 1891 version of the text, as if he felt that its initial vision of “socialism in one valley” was rather too constraining. Moreover, there are searching questions to be asked about the role of technology in News from Nowhere – not about the absence of it, which is the usual objection, because it is there after all, in the form of the mysterious “force” that propels the force-vehicles on the Thames. So new energy sources and technologies have been developed in Nowhere, but why does this process seem so opaque, socially speaking? Who has invented these force-barges, who manufactures and distributes them? Why, in a society that is supposedly transparent, do we see so little of this? I have my worries about what is happening here, a sense that specialist technical social forces are developing that seem quite cut off from the main currents of Nowhere’s neighbourly, low-tech lifestyles. Do they operate, I wonder, from the site of what used to be the Harwell Atomic Research Station in the Thames valley? Are we in the presence here of a social dissociation as radical as that which separates the international computer network, the City of the Mind, from the environmentally benign lifestyle of the Kesh people in the California valley of Ursula Le Guin’s utopia Always Coming Home? I want to relate this concern to that extraordinary narrative event of which Walter Allen informs us late on in the book: “the earthquake of the year before last.”17 An earthquake, in the Thames valley? What exactly is going on here? Are we really to believe that if William Guest had arrived in Nowhere a couple of years earlier he would have found the Hammersmith Guest House and the other new buildings reduced to rubble, and the social structures of utopia stretched to the limit to cope, if not actually shattered in the process – a testing of utopia as severe as that extended drought which devastates Le Guin’s Anarres in The Dispossessed? So I suspect there is a major story here that the book is not telling us, and to my mind it goes something like this. A great earthquake

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rocks the very foundations of the Morrisian utopia. To cope physically with the destruction, the Nowherians have to turn increasingly to the inventors and distributors of the “force,” to the new energy source and its associated technologies, which will alone let them reconstruct the material fabric of their society. At this point, the technical specialists of the force, who have already been somewhat dissociated from the mainstream neighbourly values of Nowhere, begin seeing themselves as the new driving force of their culture and want political and economic rewards commensurate with that role, to the point where they would have all the prestige and privilege of the members of the scientific House of Salomon in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. As they do so, they make political contact with the assorted Grumblers and Obstinate Refusers who already represent various kinds of dissent from Morris’s utopian values, and suddenly, almost without anyone realizing it, a political movement is built which not only has an anti-Nowherian ideology of its own but also possesses the technical means – energy, technology, and ultimately weaponry – to enforce its will upon the unwitting neighbours of the Thames valley. Suddenly, that is to say, the Nowherian revolution of 1952–54 is in grave danger of reversal. Fifth, if we are going to model a narrative and political sequel to News from Nowhere, then how, as I asked earlier, can we do this in a disciplined rather than freewheeling way? How can we accurately map the untapped narrative potential which Morris’s utopia itself contains, and then find specific and meaningful ways to take those forward, to connect them each to each, rather than just throwing such elements up into the air like a pile of jack straws, and noting in which random order they come down? That there is plenty of untapped narrative potential in Morris’s utopia I can establish by means of a rapid checklist of the text’s many minor characters, all of whom are ripe for further development in a sequel. We can in fact give ourselves a quick test on this. Who, for instance, are George Brightling, James Allen, and Nelson? I suspect that many readers do not recall these figures, despite the fact that all three names occur in the first fifty pages of the book when the reader’s attention should be at its liveliest and most retentive. So let me refresh our collective memory. Nelson shares the rather dreary classical house at the British Museum in which old Hammond lives; he has just been covering the walls of his room all over with medieval books. George Brightling lives close to Bob the weaver and is on the lookout for a stroke of work, so he may later step in to

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relieve Bob as waterman. James Allen has at his disposal a carriage and horse, and sends them across for Dick to take William Guest to the British Museum. Or let us shift to the other end of the Thames and ask some interpretive rather than just factual questions about minor characters we meet upriver. Why do relations between Phillippa and her daughter seem so oddly strained, and why does the latter, in particular, get more attention from the text than her very fleeting role in it deserves? Who is the young man engaged on literary work at Bisham, what might he be writing, and why is he so keen for Guest and company not to leave? All of these minor characters – and there are plenty of others in the book – seem ripe for further development, and some of them may prove very crucial indeed. That enigmatic young literary man at Bisham, for example, is in my view writing nothing less than News from Nowhere Two itself; he is the very principle of a sequel tucked secretly away within the original work itself. If there is indeed, then, plenty of undeveloped narrativity in News from Nowhere, then how may we take this forward in a disciplined manner? My answer here is that we shall need to draw upon the narrative paradigms offered us by some of the most powerful of our own recent postmodern utopias (I have already been doing this in a minor way in this essay, with my Le Guin and Callenbach references); and these narrative models are of course not innocent, for they will simultaneously embody and enact the political quandaries that most concern us around the issue of utopia today. What I am trying to effect here is the equivalent in the literary field of what the Morrisian artist David Mabb has been attempting for some time now in the visual field. Mabb clashes together elements from Morris designs with motifs from the early-twentieth-century Soviet avant-garde, and the result is an unsettling montage that is reducible to neither of its two components, but is certainly not a simple reconciliation or Hegelian Aufhebung of them either. Let me offer an idea of how this might work by running swiftly through the recent utopias which have meant most to me in this respect. Le Guin’s incomparable The Dispossessed is surely the wisest and ripest of all the utopias that emerged from the social movements of the 1960s. It was Le Guin’s great work, above all, that first made me feel the need for a sequel to News from Nowhere. What she shows so persuasively in the text is that revolutions, however admirable, can go wrong, and that they will have to be fought for all over again. That, I think, is exactly

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where we are in Morris’s utopia, as Ellen and old Hammond have both shrewdly surmised; and just as it is the brilliant young Shevek in Le Guin’s book who will have to reactivate the anarchist energies of the Odonian society through his Syndicate of Initiative, so it will be that charismatic young woman Ellen herself, extraordinary new element in Morris’s text that she is, who will reactivate the revolutionary socialist values of her world against its tendencies to political degeneration. Ellen herself tells Guest that the other Nowherians “fell to making stories of me to themselves,”18 and we, like Guest himself, will want to join in that process of story-making, for she is indeed a sheer principle of narrative generativity in the text. And if we want to know more about Ellen’s sexual rather than political future in a Morris sequel, we might well contemplate, as a promising narrative model, the young queen Hiordis, who saves the Volsung line from extinction early on in Sigurd the Volsung. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge also gives us a utopia just beginning to go wrong, as the Green values of that world come under complex assault in disputes about zoning and planning laws. And what we then get is another crucial piece of the narrative jigsaw which will be our News from Nowhere sequel: with the younger utopians baffled, the elderly, reclusive, depressed former activist Tom Barnard will have to come out of his retirement on Rattlesnake Hill and lead the renewed battle for ecological utopia, ultimately dying in the process. That is a model we can surely take over to old Hammond in Morris’s utopia: the Sage of Bloomsbury will also emerge from his reclusive existence in the British Museum and rejoin the political battle, inspiring the youngsters and eventually sacrificing his own life as he does so. Pacific Edge is, moreover, a utopia which contains a character who is himself writing a utopia, which might turn out to be the very novel itself. This self-reflexive model can be extended to Morris’s young literary man at Bisham. I shall also want to draw on Robinson’s great Mars trilogy, surely the definitive work of science fiction of the 1990s. For if a revolution does indeed have to be made again, then how shall we make it differently the second time so that processes of decay and recidivism do not subsequently set in? The Mars trilogy dramatizes this issue very effectively: the first Martian rebellion against transnational domination goes down in a wave of torture and bloodshed, so the second revolution, to which some of the genetically enhanced original Mars settlers live long enough to contribute, will have to be made very differently, more complexly and more wittily, as it were, if the same dire fate is not to befall it.

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One of the ways in which we might learn how to make our second revolution differently is by summoning the great utopians of the past to our side to advise us on how to do so. We have a wonderfully zany example of this in R.A. Lafferty’s strange little book, Past Master, in which the citizens of a struggling utopia decide to employ time-travel technology to snatch Sir Thomas More from the deep past to help them in their troubled present – with very mixed results, one must say. So it is that the inhabitants of News from Nowhere Two are themselves going to have to invent time travel (Bob the weaver’s passion for mathematics will come in very useful here), so that they can summon the “past master” William Morris/Guest to their side once more. We tend to assume that after Guest has returned to the late Victorian period at the end of News from Nowhere he just gets on busily with his socialism. But suppose, instead, that he is desperate to return to that lost twenty-second-century future, ransacking his mathematician friend Charles Faulkner’s papers for clues as to how to construct a Wellsian time machine to do so? These, then, are just a few of the ways in which I believe we shall be able to model a Morris sequel, clashing together our old Victorian utopia with a host of postmodern paradigms and motifs, exactly as David Mabb does with his own visual materials, to produce a literary thoughtexperiment that may both answer some of the familiar criticisms of Morris’s own utopia (too pastoral, too static) and contribute to our own search for new models of political change today. Sixth, what guidance might we find in the great literary-critical maxims of Morris’s own nineteenth century to help us with our remodelling project? The resonant critical slogans of Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde – to “see the object as in itself it really is”19 and to “see the object as in itself it really is not”20 respectively – might seem to offer as wide a range of possibilities as we could want; but they in fact turn out to be unhelpful mirror images of each other. Arnold’s objectivism depends on a notion of disinterestedness that has been shot to pieces by all subsequent brands of political criticism. As a maxim for writing a sequel, it would involve hewing so closely to the original text, subjugating one’s own creativity so thoroughly to it, that one would finally end up copying out that original word for word rather than genuinely elaborating upon it. On the other hand, Wilde’s flamboyant counter-slogan certainly licenses creative transformation of the original object or text, but such is his mischievous subjectivism that there are now no limits, no checks. In the case of Morrisian sequel writing, we would be in danger of being so aggressively

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inventive that we might end up with something that was a fully fledged, autonomous utopia in its own right and no longer bore any recognizable relation to News from Nowhere at all. So I turn to another Wildean formulation, which seems to me rather more helpful here. This new slogan comes from Wilde’s “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” which he published in a magazine called Chameleon in December 189421 (so Morris could have read them, though we have no evidence that he actually did). These are general maxims for living rather than specifically literary principles, but we can adapt them to our own purposes here. In the thirty-odd thoughts which Wilde offers us, we come across this modest formulation, so much less exhibitionistic and epigrammatic than he normally is: “One should always be a little improbable.”22 This gets us beyond the sterile opposition of “as in itself it really is” versus “as in itself it really is not”; but all now crucially depends on where we put the stress in this new Wildean formulation. “A little improbable”: so far my emphasis in this essay has, in effect, been on “little,” for I have been trying to demonstrate the ways in which writing a sequel to News from Nowhere should be a disciplined procedure, opening out political and narrative implications already in the work and drawing in tightly organized ways upon narrative and political paradigms available to us in our best postmodern utopias. But perhaps one should not overdo this emphasis; perhaps we should also stress the “improbable,” the element of the zany, the weird, the unpredictable, which might also enter the construction of a Morrisian sequel. It is here that we should at last evoke Morris’s own account of how to understand utopias when, in his review of Edward Bellamy in June 1889, he famously announced that “the only safe way of reading a Utopia is to consider it as the expression of the temperament of its author.”23 Two factors come into play here, inseparable in practice but distinguishable in theory. The first is an element of mischief inherent in the genre of utopia (which is after all founded on a pun: good place/no place), a sort of built-in momentum whereby its encyclopedic system-making, its paranoid attempt to map out in advance every last detail of the new society, necessarily tips over at points into excess, wit, satire, nonsense. After all, Thomas More’s utopian narrator, Raphael Hythlodaeus, is blessed with a surname which means “dispenser of nonsense,” and the necessary exposition of ideal social arrangements in the main text spins off in the paratext into the ludic invention of a utopian alphabet and a sample of

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utopian poetry; C.S. Lewis, we should remember, considered the whole of More’s Utopia to be an extended jeu d’esprit. In Bacon’s New Atlantis one would be hard pressed, in the exposition of the projects of the House of Salomon, to say what is regarded as scientifically practicable at some future point and what is intended as leg-pulling nonsense in the first place (“some perpetual motions”).24 And in Butler’s Erewhon, which, as I have noted, was an important text for Morris himself, the mischiefmaking impulse runs so deep that the boundary between utopia and satire can be very difficult to draw indeed. The second factor is, as Morris suggested, the aberrant subjectivity of the author him or herself. However much the utopian writer sees him or herself as nothing more than the midwife or T.S. Eliot–style “shred of platinum”25 to the wider vision of the collective movement, there must always be little corners of the work where his or her subjectivity comes embarrassingly into play, curious aspects of the future which are like projected fetishes from the author’s own present (Morris’s elaborately decorated Japanese-style pipe might be one such fetish in News from Nowhere itself). In all the utopian system building, then, there are going to be necessary elements of unwitting mischief, silliness, and excess. In my own sequel to Morris’s utopia I want both to play with elements from Morris’s own work which, for whatever reason, he does not allow into his utopia, and to give rein to some of my own personal enthusiasms there too. I am haunted by the towers which are such a feature of the medievalist world of Morris’s early poetry, as in his “Rapunzel” poem or, more obviously, in “The Little Tower” or “The Tune of the Seven Towers,” and I was always mesmerized by that splendid building (sadly now demolished), the Mathematics Tower in Oxford Road in Manchester. What on earth, I wondered, craning my neck back to look up at it, actually went on up there? It seemed to me that you could almost hear the buzz of abstruse mathematical thought above the traffic noises down below on the busy highway. And what a beautiful concept anyway, a tower purely for mathematicians! So I am a bit dismayed by the modest horizontality of so much of Morris’s own utopia – in contrast, say, to Sigurd the Volsung, which at one point celebrates being “on the tower-top of the world”26 – and intend to remedy that deficiency by having a gleaming Mathematics Tower of my own in the Nowherian Oxford of my Morris sequel (picking up the mathematical house of Bacon’s New Atlantis); it will be modelled, with help from my son Justin who is a postgraduate student in biophysics at Oxford University, on some of the new

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scientific buildings there today. This will introduce the vigorous intellectual life that is lacking in News from Nowhere itself (except in the mathematical interests of Bob the weaver), but will also serve to reflect on the political ambivalences of such abstract thought – a theme which comes to me from the writings of Raymond Williams (his novels almost more than his theoretical works). This utopian Oxford mathematical tower will necessarily be the place where the time-travel technology necessary to pull William Guest back to Nowhere again will be invented. I also want, as a little corner of creative space all for myself, to introduce bicycles into News from Nowhere Two, being sad that they don’t figure – as historically they might have done – in Morris’s own utopia. In this, I am being true to the spirit of May Morris rather than of her father, for May was a keen cyclist who was often to be found pedalling across the Kelmscott landscapes in all sorts of weather. And to crank up the mischief still more, and by way of over-compensating for the horizontality of Morris’s Nowhere, I intend these to be the flying bicycles of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge, bicycles with propellers and wings that achieve flight purely by means of human muscle power (but then, if everyone in utopia is as superbly athletic as Dick Hammond or Ellen, what is the problem with that?). So I envisage these flying bicycles winging their way over the fields of Kelmscott in the opening scenes of my sequel and have a notion that they may play a strangely decisive role in the great battle that will have to be fought all over again in Trafalgar Square, that Morrisian omphalos, when Ellen and company come down river again, as they must. From a tower or a flying bicycle, you get a satisfying overview of the Thames valley in ways you don’t when you are paddling about on the river down below; but by the same token you are also then surveying that landscape with a detached, alienated, perhaps ultimately domineering eye, as the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman, in Audenesque parlance. Seventh, let me offer some detailed remodelling of one central narrative strand of both Morris’s utopia and of our putative sequel to it. After William Guest has done his brief tour of the new London with Dick and absorbed its history and principles from old Hammond in the British Museum, he, Dick and Clara embark by boat up the Thames to Kelmscott Manor, and are joined by Ellen at Runnymede. But in News from Nowhere Two Ellen, Clara and other utopians at Kelmscott manor will make their way down the Thames, gathering reinforcements on the way, for a final showdown – a Norse Ragnarök or Twilight of the Gods – with

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the forces of reaction in London. What is at stake in this reversal of direction of the central Morrisian river journey? The upriver journey in News from Nowhere takes us from the city to the country, from culture to nature, from the present to the past, from the new architecture of the Hammersmith Guest House to the time-hallowed architecture of Kelmscott manor, from the tidal Thames to its freshwater source, which is also a spring or origin of Englishness itself. In my view, however, this cannot be the end of the matter. We are very familiar with the circular journey motif of Morris’s late romances. If Hallblithe makes his way out from Cleveland-on-sea to the Isle of Ransom and then on to the Glittering Plain, he must subsequently break out of the false enclosure which is the Plain, struggle back to the Isle and its ordeals, and finally return home to Cleveland again. Birdalone in The Water of the Wondrous Isles makes her way out across that great lake, but subsequently she will travel all the way back across it again. In The Well at the World’s End, Ralph’s quest takes him from the tiny kingdom of Upmeads through all sorts of human adventures and geographical ordeals to the Well at the World’s End itself; but having drunk of its rejuvenating waters, he and Ursula make their strenuous way back to Upmeads, fighting for justice and a new order at each of the corrupt kingdoms they had formerly passed through. Morris’s utopia has thus only given us half of the necessary story and we should apply his own romance paradigm to envisage a journey back down the Thames, which will also be a fight for justice at every twist and turn of the river. To be a Pilgrim of Hope, as Morris well knows in his poem of that title, you have to move from the country to the city. In Morris’s utopia, Ellen, who had formerly been isolated at Runnymede, is fully reintegrated with the other younger utopians at Kelmscott and no doubt she will play her part in the hay-making ahead. But reintegrated to what end, we may ask? In my view, her spell at Kelmscott will be a profound stock-taking, politically speaking; she will realize that the abstract fears about her society that she expressed to William Guest have become actual, that politically regressive tendencies are already well under way. We will certainly have to provide a social and narrative context at Kelmscott for Ellen to break through to this realization; and that new material will see Dick Hammond, the Huxleyan “Muscle Man” of Morris’s text, with his hasty temper and his “air of proprietorship” at the end of the book, being drawn in the other political direction, towards the “dark side of the force,” as the Star Wars fans among us might say. It is when Ellen has grasped what has happened to Dick and others that she will

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resolve that she must combat the regressive tendencies, that she must gather her own pilgrims of hope and take them back downriver to London. Meantime, old Hammond will come to a similar realization in Bloomsbury. He will be re-committing himself to political struggle and summoning progressive forces to his side as he does so, including the road-mending gang introduced by Morris in the 1891 version; and he will recapture in the process some of the vigorous revolutionary energy of the early days of the new epoch about which he speaks so fervently to Guest in the British Museum. We learn in News from Nowhere itself that Ellen and old Hammond were once pupil and teacher; and it is when the Ellenites and Hammondites link up after the journey of the former downriver that a critical mass will be reached and battle between progressive and regressive forces in Nowhere can be fully joined. It may be that blood will flow in Trafalgar Square again, as it had on Bloody Sunday in 1887 or in the massacre of 1952. But it may also be that new models of political action, new practices of the radical occupation of public space, can let this second Nowherian revolution succeed less tragically than first time round. Let us think too about the aesthetics of the journey upriver in Morris’s utopia. This is devoted to a cult of the “beautiful,” to that genial, gentle, meanderingly English world of willow trees, reed warblers, and Thames tributaries that Morris evokes so movingly in many of his designs. It is an aesthetic best summed up in his first-ever public lecture, where he speaks of England as “a little land ... little rivers, little plains, swelling, speedily changing uplands, all beset with handsome orderly trees; little hills, little mountains, netted over with the walks of sheep-walks: all is little.”27 What is interesting about this moving formulation in its original context is that no sooner has Morris evoked it than he admits his frustration with it: “it would indeed be hard if there were nothing else in the world, no wonders, no terrors, no unspeakable beauties.”28 He is here clearly glancing at that traditional aesthetic opposite of the beautiful, the sublime, which was for him so powerfully exemplified in his Iceland trips of 1871 and 1873. So if News from Nowhere’s upriver journey to the source of Englishness is governed by an aesthetics of the beautiful, we shall want our more troubled downriver journey in the sequel, towards an unpredictable future, a turbulent city, even the open sea ultimately as a symbol of all this, to be under the sign of an aesthetics of the sublime. This emphasis also relates to a dissatisfaction with Morris’s major model for Nature in News from Nowhere, which is that of the garden where nothing is spoiled and nothing is wasted. If that works well enough

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as a counter-slogan to Victorian environmental despoliation, it will not satisfy the deep-ecological impulses of much contemporary Green politics, which hankers after wilderness rather than garden, a Nature which is (at least in part) not yet humanized. We will accordingly want to push back, in terms of historical reference points and models, a good way behind Morris’s own medievalism. To do so, we will have to expand the geographical framework of News from Nowhere, in order to break out of a certain narcissism that threatens the text. From the moment in the British Museum where the visitor to utopia, William Guest, recognizes the utopian expositor, old Hammond, as a mirror-image of himself, there is a danger of narcissism: if Hammond is Guest’s grandson and Dick therefore his great-great-grandson, then it can come to feel as if all the inhabitants of Nowhere are Morris descendants, as if the whole thing is a single family writ large. This danger also threatens spatially as well as temporally. This is a utopia which begins at Kelmscott House in London and ends at Kelmscott manor in the Oxfordshire countryside, almost as if the river Thames were a Coleridgean snake with its tail in its mouth – the two Kelmscotts giving a satisfying organic closure to the text, geographically “rhyming” with each other as it were. Moreover, the entire action of the book takes place in the Thames Valley, in that enclosed bowl which has little of the exhilarating verticality that is so often a feature of Morris’s later romances. To break out of this geographic-narcissistic enclosure, News from Nowhere Two will give a lot of attention to the Ridgeway, that elevated ancient roadway which runs from Overton Hill near Avebury for some forty miles to the Thames at Streatley, and which encompasses Uffington Castle, the White Horse, Dragon Hill and Wayland’s Smithy in the hills above Kelmscott. These are places that were indeed special to Morris himself, but which alas do not enter his utopia, yet for us they resonate with a sense of more ancient time frames, of a pre-garden, pre-medieval encounter of the human and the natural. The Megalithic or Great Stone Culture of Avebury, the West Kennet Barrow and Wayland’s Smithy take us back beyond the Beaker civilization to the Neolithic and even the Palaeolithic, beyond the very first farming in this area to hunting and gathering cultures of an extremely distant past. We can relate the prehistoric and mythic meanings of such enigmatic artefacts to specific political possibilities in the present of Morris’s utopia by deploying another narrative paradigm from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. For just as Hiroko

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Ai and her team of scientists break away from the official Mars settlements to exist in purist isolation in the secret colony of Zygote, so, my wager goes, have groups of Nowherians gone to make another kind of life among the Ridgeway hill-forts, one which is more rugged, more deeply-ecological (but also, paradoxically, more scientifically advanced) than the benign low-tech medievalist garden-culture of mainstream Nowhere down below. This will mean, however, that they have also remained impervious to the politically degenerative tendencies within Nowhere itself, and thus constitute a resource in the effort to revitalize the Nowherian revolution against the “counter-revolution” (old Hammond’s term, as I have noted) which now threatens it. Indeed, Ellen will meet the Hiroko-figure of News from Nowhere Two, who may turn out to be none other than old Hammond’s estranged wife, on the White Horse downs, in what will be one of the crucial political turning points of my Morris sequel. So: wilderness, the prehistoric, the mythic – the metaphor of the Morrisian garden doesn’t let much of this into his utopia, but it will be crucial for our sequel to accommodate such deeper forces. But how are we going to turn the placid Thames Valley into the sublime – a question that in itself shows how powerful the grip of the last third of News from Nowhere is on our collective imagination? For Morris himself experienced the Thames very differently on other occasions, as in his self-declaredly “insane” attempt to fish on the upper river during the floods of November 1875 or his experience of the Northern Lights on the Thames trip of August 1880.29 And there are also contemporary literary representations of the Thames in sublime mode, as in Grant Allen’s short story, “The Thames Valley Catastrophe” of 1901, in which a devastating splitting of the earth’s crust fills the valley with a great sheet of molten basaltic lava which destroys everything in its path. Allen, too, seems to have felt that there were not enough imposing towers in the Thames valley, for in his tale, on the site of what was once the village of Cookham, there now stands the “Look-out Tower of the Earthquake and Eruption Department [which] dominates the whole wide plain of the Glassy Rock Desert.”30 News from Nowhere Two is, after all, going to be much more science-fictional than Morris’s own utopia, and it will therefore be science-fictional struggles between the forces of good and evil, between Ellen and her utopians and the force-vehicle manufacturers and their anti-socialist allies, that will recast the downriver Thames trip in sublime mode. The terrifying ring of fire that Sigurd has to ride through on

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Hindfell in Sigurd the Volsung or the eerie, other-dimensional Hollow Land into which Florian falls in that early story will certainly be recreatable by the high-tech weaponry of the political enemies that Ellen and company will face as they journey down the Thames. None of us has yet taken the full measure of what the undefined “force” of Morris’s utopia is capable of, but that, in the wrong hands, it can wreak havoc in the Thames meadows, there can surely be no doubt. In Trafalgar Square, as in 1887 or 1952, matters will again come to a head. Morris’s utopia contains dark hints and implications to which, having seen the degeneration of the Soviet revolution, we are more attuned than his contemporaries, and a sequel will concretize these and put them into narrative motion: old Grumblers, Obstinate Refusers, force vehicle manufacturers. But though a critical utopia may be going wrong, it is not yet beyond salvage. If the reversal of the Morrisian revolution is further advanced in News from Nowhere Two than that of the Odonian revolution on Anarres in The Dispossessed, it is not, for all that, terminal, for Morris’s text also gives us key political and narrative resources in a renewed struggle for socialism: Ellen, old Hammond, and William Guest himself, retrieved by time travel technology. They will link up with the Ridgeway community I have sketched, the young man at Bisham and other Thamesside dwellers, and the road-menders in London to constitute a significant force for renewal. And if the revolution is indeed renewed in another Trafalgar Square confrontation, we should not model this in Leninist terms, as with those epic scenes of crowds storming the Winter Palace in Sergei Eisenstein’s film October. Rather, the utopian tents of the upriver Morrisian journey (we heard that they were becoming too numerous at Medmenham and then saw them in the fields around Kelmscott for the hay-making) may become political tents in Trafalgar Square, as the Occupy movement so admirably demonstrated to us in late 2011 in Zuccotti Park, St Paul’s Cathedral and elsewhere. What imaginative political practices – with flying bicycles meantime circling mischievously around in the skies overhead – might then lead to ultimate success in a News from Nowhere sequel remain to be fully invented, just as they do in our own tricky political moment. For we have the current dispersion of the Occupy movement (at the time of writing – March 2012) to show us just how difficult it is to sustain and generalize such non-conventional radical practices.

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What will have been learnt by all of this? How will a second socialist Nowhere differ from its first incarnation in Morris’s own utopia? We could speculate, a little fancifully, that after their second revolution the Nowherians might institute those curious bio-chemical tests of children practised in Huxley’s Island, whereby potential little Hitlers or Stalins are detected in advance and therapeutically treated before they can become dangerous adults; any future “Muscle Men” like Dick Hammond will no longer prove an eventual political menace. Beyond such new local social technologies, we can also summarize some of the major political lessons that the Ellenite revolutionaries will have thoroughly absorbed: that a utopia – whether Nowhere or Anarres – must not forget its own history of emergence through struggle (for if it does, it will be condemned to repeat it); and that technology must never again be allowed to split off from the wider community into some autonomous enclave of its own where it might ultimately become the social base for the disaffection and dissidence which any open utopia of the Morrisian type will have to tolerate. We can put this latter point in more literary-generic terms, too. If the foundational split within the modern Western utopian tradition between pastoral and high-tech utopias – More versus Bacon, Morris versus Bellamy – is not healed, if the green utopia does not somehow fold its high-tech mirror image back into itself, then those technological forces and resources will be available for capture by the political enemy. Our second version of Morrisian socialism will thus finally have thoroughly renewed its intellectual life, which will simultaneously be the renewal of its politics, too, for socialism, as Raymond Williams used to remind us, will be more complex than capitalism, not much simpler.31 Which means that News from Nowhere Two might in some respects be the book that News from Nowhere itself could potentially have been, if Morris’s urgent need to contest Edward Bellamy’s political vision had not pushed him arguably too far in the direction of simplicity, pastoralism, the beautiful. Let me conclude, then. Many critics over the years have offered their own modifications to News from Nowhere. Oh, they will exclaim, if only Morris had given Guest time to visit that splendid medieval barn at Coxwell just outside Kelmscott; or if only he had allowed a working-class rather than middle-class Victorian socialist to visit the far-distant world of Nowhere; and so on. Someone should certainly tot up all these suggested minor variants and write an essay about them. The notion of a

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sequel to Morris’s utopia is then simply a systematizing of this already familiar literary-critical practice, letting it tip over from criticism to creative writing; and at a time when, in the wake of the much-touted “death of theory,” creative writing has become such a strong presence in university departments of English Literature in the UK, that seems timely enough. Many of the suggestions that have been made seem modest enough, and I think of many of my own recommendations above as being in that mode too. We then simply have to recall that, in the view of some Kabbalists, Yahweh will make the world whole, just as we shall build a fullscale Morris sequel, by a series of rather minor adjustments, by being in Wildean fashion just a little peculiar. Such, then, are the seven principles on which I intend to construct News from Nowhere Two; but B.F. Skinner’s narrator in Walden Two also refers to Waldens Three, Four, Five and Six, indeed to “all the Waldens.”32 Since Morris in A Dream of John Ball announces “the change beyond the change,” we might also need to be thinking about the sequel beyond the sequel and should start giving some preliminary thought to what News from Nowhere Three might look like. I would wager that Ellen’s child by old Hammond (the Hiordis-Sigmund model) might take the political story forward in interesting ways and would be a figure as full of social promise in his day as Sigurd the Volsung was in his (but then, look at what happened to him). However, the full-scale modelling of News from Nowhere Three is no doubt a literary and political task for my son rather than for me, for the Yeatsian young in one another’s arms rather than those of us, like myself, who are about to reach William Guest’s own ripe age.

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Redesigning the Beautiful: Morris, Mabb, and the Politics of Wallpaper m i c h e l l e w e i n ro t h

Having rethought Morris’s radicalism from a number of perspectives, we may now revisit the vexed question of beautiful art and radical politics1 that underlies Morris’s legacy. I see this central concern as linked to eighteenth-century idealist aesthetics and buttressed by mainstream assumptions that beauty is sensual, voluptuous, and feminine, that it is represented in art executed by a gifted, privileged few, and that it is commodified for the benefit of an elite. In British modernist or avantgarde circles (but elsewhere, too), such art is perceived as the emblem of middle-class propriety or the symbol of a conservative social order,2 wholly at odds with Morris’s refusal of the status quo.3 Seen from this angle, Morris’s revolutionary energies appear incompatible with his reputation as the meditative artist of pastoral beauty or with his preference, in visual, poetic, or narrative designs, for flowing forms of thick foliage, feminine curvaciousness, and expressive colour. But this incompatibility depends on a polarized reading of aesthetics and politics, expressed semiotically as idealist beauty and sublimity. The former is suggestive of a conservative social order, evoking repose, equilibrium, and contemplative pleasure; the latter conjures up strenuous social revolt, fractious class war, and the dark unknown of future struggles. In this closing chapter, I use artist David Mabb’s exhibit Rhythm 69 to peer into and out of the paralyzing antinomies that have gripped Morris’s legacy. Figuratively, this graphic work brings the sundered representations of Morris – the symbol of disruptive revolutionary change and the image of quietist Englishness in ruralist guise – into a mutually

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transformative encounter, prompting viewers to reconceptualize encrusted notions that have previously identified Morrisian pastoral art with the English ruling class and radical politics with anarchist storm. In scrutinizing Mabb’s work, my aim is to revisit the meaning of Morris’s radicalism in the least likely place: amid the minutiae of wallpaper designs, areas of his aesthetic production that are often spurned or relegated to commercialized culture. In these spheres of craft and interior design, both Mabb and his Morrisian ghost compel us to rethink our time-worn assumptions about radicalism. For Mabb’s creations open our eyes to Morris’s own educative task, namely, to cultivate and thus defetishize public consciousness through interior design, and to advance a wholly new category of beauty within that most depoliticized art of wallpaper patterns. Expounding on these observations, I conclude that Morris’s refurbished aesthetic of the beautiful harbours the constitutive (albeit embryonic) principles of his dialectical social thought and the grounds of an alternative future society.

David Mabb Presents Rhythm 69 4 Rhythm 69 (2007) is an installation of seventy 20⬙ ⫻ 16⬙ canvases of painted wallpaper mounted on canvas. It is made from a William Morris 1960s block-printed wallpaper sample book produced by Arthur Sanderson and Sons. In the book, each wallpaper was cut down to a 19⬙ ⫻ 15⬙ page, irrespective of the individual patterns’ repeats. The sixty-nine pages of wallpaper from the book have been glued in sequence onto sixty-nine separate canvases marginally larger than the pages. Images from a Kazimir Malevich–inspired Hans Richter storyboard are painted sequentially onto each page. The first canvas has an image from the front of the wallpaper book of a Sandersons shop from the 1960s with the word “Rhythmus,” in reference to Richter’s original films (see below), which functions as a title page. Malevich’s experimental painting led avant-garde artists in Russia into pure abstraction, a language of geometric forms that rejected the representation of nature. The primary context is a concern with the material properties of art, treating painting as a thing in its own right – a radical materialist concept. Malevich’s three-page film script, “Artistic and Scientific Film – Painting and Architectural Concerns – Approaching the New Plastic Archi-

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tectural System,” was produced for Hans Richter in 1927, after he had seen Richter’s work at the Bauhaus and recognized its similarity to his own early Suprematist paintings. In this script, Malevich used written notes and drawings to set out a historical narrative that led directly to Suprematism, in order to illustrate his ideas for an “artistic-scientific” film5 in anticipation of his collaboration with Richter. Richter, one of the originators of experimental avant-garde film, was very influential within early modernism. In 1970, Richter made drawings which were a synthesis of his own Rhythmus drawings and films6 and Malevich’s Suprematist script.7 The drawings (unlike Malevich’s script) are laid out with the images running down the pages vertically, like frames in a reel of film. Most of the small individual drawings or frames in the storyboard are simple, with examples of marginal composition, vacant spaces, and single vertical strips as well as different-sized squares, circles, rectangles, and crosses. The title “Rhythm 69” borrows from the early works of Richter; his Rhythmus series were numbered after the years in which they were produced. The number 69 was arrived at by the number of wallpaper samples in the pattern book, but it can also be interpreted as a sexual innuendo, suggesting the form of dialogue between Morris’s patterns and the Richter storyboard. The paintings are hung in a grid that can be seen as a metaphor for the regulative practices of industrialized society, which both generates and contains the paintings’ utopian potential. The methodology used in both works is one of dialectical montage, where a “third meaning,” an abstraction resulting from the juxtaposition of separate representations, is produced. Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project describes such an image as “that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.”8 The “third meaning” or abstraction that is promised from the dialectical process appears stuck or frozen, offering itself up to the future. ❖

David Mabb’s 2007 installation speaks clearly to the knowing art historian, to the viewer conversant with Suprematist art; but to eyes unfamiliar with Malevich’s aesthetics, the exhibit provokes an uneasy reception, a sense that the much-prized Morrisian image of nature has been shattered and intruded upon by black, white, and red shapes, variously inserted into fragments or cut-outs of Morris’s celebrated designs. What

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then is the purpose of Mabb’s montage of Suprematist and Morrisian art? Perhaps to act as catalysts of new thought, to scuttle the reflexive viewer response that the Morrisian wallpaper design is merely a commodified pastoral image, exuding a charming, but dated, English innocence. Indeed, Mabb’s manipulation of the Malevich motif in Rhythm 69 works to break apart this impression of Morrisian “prettiness,” one that over time9 served Britain’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century interior design industry, but also irked the avant-garde artist, eager to foreground Morris’s dissenting politics by injecting “ugliness” (read militancy) into the Morrisian canvas. Steve Edwards sees Mabb’s art in this vein. To introduce “ugliness”10 (if that is what it is) into the wallpaper patterns is to violate an aesthetic of beauty that has for so long acted as the handmaiden of a culturally mannered and seemingly peaceable English society, propped up, as Morris would say, by commercial war.11 True, Mabb’s Rhythm 69 has reappropriated, skewed, and redesigned the original Morris templates. But if this act of painting over the aesthetic “property” of the establishment is intended to disfigure the cultural veneer that has obscured Morris’s revolutionary politics, Mabb’s artistic work presents yet another twist: it confirms that Morris’s subversiveness resides as much within his creative patterns as it does externally (i.e., in his late-1870s/80s activism). Rhythm 69 thus exposes not only its creator’s interventionist art, but a comparably destabilizing dynamic within the interstices of Morris’s wallpaper designs themselves. In closely exploring Mabb’s artistic palimpsest, we shall see how the appearance of sheer repetition12 in wall coverings is transfigured into an aesthetic of dialectical movement and growth – the site of Morris’s radical vision. With the insertion of geometrical motifs into stylized images of English flora, Rhythm 69 achieves an alienating effect that initiates the process of dismantling cultural presuppositions about the status of Morris wallpapers. On the surface, we are struck by an awkward convergence of two contrary images and artistic styles; the eye dwells on a surface tension. Modernist geometrical shapes appear to proffer the flowery pictures their seemingly wanting political verve; but a second or third viewing shows that political subtleties are inherently present within the floral pattern itself. The Malevich form (square, rectangle, or circle), I suggest, does not add any revolutionary content to Morris’s designs; rather it disorients an English public for whom Morris patterns are a signature of fashionable taste or mark of class distinction. Tracing over those images of pleas-

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ingly organized foliage and flowers with Russian modernism, Mabb disturbs the commonplace assumption that Morris’s wallpaper oeuvre is an exemplary form of “homegrown” English art. And here the expression “homegrown” captures a double significance: an intuitively felt sense of home, an Englishness popularly associated with Morris himself, as well as an organicism of floral patterns, which, to the undiscriminating viewer, loosely, but misleadingly, evokes a Burkean conservative social order – jealously guarded as natural and politically unshakable, yet anathema to Morris’s dissenting political ethos. To those admirers who lovingly embrace Morris’s wallpapers, cherishing each work of art as an object of personal affection, Rhythm 69 may come as a desecration of a “sacred” cultural heritage. To the connoisseur or mainstream Morris fan, the images, recalled by name (Acanthus, Pimpernel, Chrysanthemum, Daisy, Honeysuckle, Willow, etc.) are estranged by their convergence with Malevich’s Suprematism. Morrisian “authenticity” has, they might say, been marred. An established English aesthetic, predicated on a “native” English knowledge of botany, has been grafted to another (foreign) specimen of art. Contrary to the traditionalist search for authenticity that probes roots and origins, digging in biography and archival artifacts for the ur-Morris, Mabb’s quest for authenticity (for the real Morris) arises out of a creative hybridization that dislodges at least two presuppositions: namely, that Morris’s art, grounded as it is in the motifs of a bucolic Englishness, offers easy viewing, wholly incompatible with the dark mysticism and futurist science of Malevich’s formalist design – and, by extension, that Morris’s aesthetics of organicism cannot coexist with the politics of (Soviet) revolution. But Mabb’s exhibit suggests that through a paradoxical convergence they can, and that the encounter of these apparently opposed styles provokes both the viewer’s initially bristling response (a refusal of such a hybridizing artistry) and a subsequent moment of deepening appreciation. In its own graphic and symbolic terms, Rhythm 69 wrenches mainstream viewers out of their dualist preconceptions, compelling them to complicate and reconsider their first readings of Morris’s wallpaper art. For, just as Mabb’s artistic technique entails stripping and refinishing material surfaces, dismantling and reconstructing Morris’s wallpaper book, so it involves stripping away prejudicial standpoints defined by the reified Morrisian aesthetic.13 As a gesture of protest, this deconstructive intervention introduces flaming crimson and black austerity (suggestive of violent insurrection) into the serene and physiologically satisfying hues of Morrisian wallpaper

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schemes, abrading not only the conservative and commercialized image of Morris, but the conservatisms of a nineteenth-century past. Yet, paradoxically, Mabb’s artistic act replicates the disruptive, and indeed subversive, impact of a “lyric intensity”14 deployed by his own Victorian ancestors – the Pre-Raphaelites. These nineteenth-century forebears, now canonized by the academe, were the modernists of their day, resisting the then-prevailing cultural and artistic codes. Their use of striking, if not jarring, colours (both poetic and painterly) and their stylization of “strained gestures, contorted bodies … unusual colours and colour combinations”15 were often “puzzling or offensive departures from expectations that art would be beautiful.”16 They violated the decorum of the Royal Academy, injecting the grotesque into their expressive works to reflect their own estranged and discordant relation to modern society.17 As Elizabeth Helsinger shows, Morris’s Defence of Guenevere poems epitomize this lyric intensity. With their use of strident colour schemes and twisted bodily postures, these poems foreground the complexly wrought, tortured psyche of their characters, purposefully disturbing the reader with sensory jolts and periodically “triggering [an] abrupt transition to a different state of consciousness.”18 This, we might say, is the aesthetic signature of Morris’s 1850s poetic and graphic warfare against his age, reinforced through contact with his Pre-Raphaelite consorts and fuelled by his passion for the brilliant reds, blues, and golds of stained-glass craft and medieval heraldry.19 In its use of black, white, and striking reds, Rhythm 69 has a generally comparable “lyric intensity,” and with this forceful sensory dynamic, it harbours a subversive end: to unsettle complacent perceptions of Morris’s designs through shock, to incur a shift in viewers’ consciousness and thus dissolve perceptions of Morris as the escapist artist of Victorian interior design. Continuities between Morris’s and Mabb’s politically informed artistries are thus clearly present. Both Mabb’s Malevichian and Morris’s 1850s aesthetics violate artistic rules and conventions. Both might be deemed grotesque, heretical acts, both offensive to their respective cultures. But, in their own ways, both are legitimate moments of (youthful) artistic revolt, expressions of indignation levelled at the injustices of contemporary society. Such “green” dissent represents a starting point in revolutionary thinking; yet it stops short of a mature perspective, the seeds of which may be discerned, at a later date, in Morris’s wallpaper designs and, analogously, in Rhythm 69’s nuanced use of these decorative works. For here, while Mabb’s deployment of modernist motifs

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may recall the early phase of Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite rebellion, his reworking of the wallpaper patterns also resurrects the deeper radicalism in Morris’s more advanced phase of dissent – the 1860s/70s20 – where the shock effects incurred a decade earlier yield to a twofold aesthetic of social refusal, but also of care for an increasingly traumatized Victorian sensibility.21 The wallpaper art thus embraces both critique and therapeutic revitalization in one visual moment. So, too, Mabb’s Rhythm 69 brings together Suprematist geometrical forms (squares, rectangles, crosses, and circles) and the Morrisian Elysium, exhibiting both the symbolic vocabulary of defiance – the brutal assault of jangling colour, of aesthetic raging against “how we live” – as well as a multi-layered graphic of human betterment, evoked in the complex patterning of wallpaper pictures. Together these two creative styles form the parameters of a Morrisian and Mabbian utopian project, defined, as Louis Marin has it, by neutralization and figuration. As Phillip Wegner explains, “Neutralization refers to what … scholars of Utopia such as Darko Suvin have called the critical ‘estranging’ work … or what Jameson describes as a ‘point by point negation or cancelling’ of the historical and ideological context from within which the particular utopia emerges … Such an indispensable critical operation is, however, only a first step, clearing the stage for the productive creative operation that Marin calls utopian figuration … Neutralization, deconstruction … of the ideological parameters of one social situation [thus] opens up the space for the construction of something new.”22 Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite negation of Victorian aesthetic decorum and Mabb’s assault on conventional perceptions of Morris are two such instances of neutralization. As artistic contestations of the status quo, as works of estrangement, twisting away from habitual modes of thought, they produce a space for sketching alternative societal models. Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of artists, each venerating nature and sensual beauty in the collaborative architectural designing of Red House, and in the creation of intricately wrought furnishings, is one such creative modelling. Rhythm 69’s fusion of Morris and Malevich’s artworks is yet another example of neutralization and figuration, opening on to a postcapitalist imaginary.23 In neither case, however, is there a delineation of a “fully-formed historical situation,” as Wegner would put it;24 rather, a desired world, defined by an “absent referent” (Marin), is sketched out. In Morris, the absent referent can be seen as a set of principles or values: political, ethical, and epistemological precepts for social change, situated

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in the visual dynamics of his wallpaper patterns, and suggestive of a new (but invisible) social order – a Noch-Nicht. As Wegner says of utopian texts, these artisanal graphics are “pre-theoretical.” They cannot articulate explicitly the content of their utopian vision, for they constitute nondiscursive “speaking pictures” or “utopian figurations” (Marin) of “history-in-formation.”25 To argue thus is to see Morris’s ubiquitous yet overlooked “pre-Marxist” creations as embryonic and politically fecund ground for his intensifying radicalism. Indeed, his revolutionary ideas were in aesthetic gestation well before the 1870s lectures and the Commonweal writings. Arguably then, modernist shock in his 1850s creative work and the therapeutic value of his 1860s wallpapers26 anticipate the two driving principles of his 1880s activism: agitation (i.e., shock) and education (i.e., political diagnosis and care/proposed cure),27 these being guiding precepts of the Socialist League. In its own artistic way, Mabb’s Rhythm 69 encompasses these same two facets of social change – the disturbing ostranenie effect of sublime discordance expressing rebellion (see Rhythm 69’s Russian avant-gardist symbols and re-colouring techniques) and the quiet but sustained cultivation of the public eye, achieved through its rhythmic unfolding of sixty-nine rectangles. In this, Morris’s wallpaper designs and Mabb’s contemporary use of them are at once “agitational” (mentally energizing) and educational (therapeutic and potentially redemptive). They supersede the initial stage of discontent and despair (aesthetic rupture and protest), but also offer continuity and compensation; through gentle persuasion, they promote new ways of seeing reality and offer reassuring hope as balms for society’s damaged psyche. But in what specific sense can we speak of graphic design as a site of prefigured political radicalism? I suggest three possible approaches to the question. Through the palimpsest of Rhythm 69, I read Morris wallpapers (1) as a semiotics of political alternatives; (2) as a site for epistemological renewal; and (3) as an aesthetic re-creation of the movement of social consciousness in times of historical change.

The Semiotics of Political Alternatives At a semiotic level, Morris’s wallpaper patterns are visual slogans representing his political advocacy for the “lesser arts”; they are emblems of transcendence, heralding the solution to modernity’s iniquitous division

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of labour.28 Morris’s specialized pursuit of various crafts, albeit tied to business interests, contains the seed, if not the early moment, of his evolving revolutionary objective: to universalize the practice and enjoyment of art and thus to abolish “fine” art and its class-based exclusivity. By vindicating the cause of “craft” work, Morris prescribed for contemporary art (which had either been proletarianized and cheapened into mass-produced objects or rarefied into social privilege) what classic Marxist theory prescribed for socialist revolution: apocalyptic destruction yielding new growth.29 And where the Marxist doctrine called for the elimination of class divisions, and thereby the abolition of the proletariat (in order for the working class to gain its full species-being), so, in Morris’s appeals, contemporary art would die while the lesser arts would re-emerge as genuinely popular art, a creative praxis signalling an enhanced humanity. Representing Morris’s most significant contribution to social transformation, craft work captures the essence of Morris’s injunction that art be beautiful and useful, and implicitly that producers and consumers in every walk of life share equally in aesthetic fulfillment. Decoration of this sort brings the pleasure of art from exclusive social circles to the universally shared world of quotidian, domestic activity. Through that shift, this pleasure is transmuted. David Beech rightly notes that such a philosophy of art is echoed in Mabb’s exhibits, where “wallpapers feature as wallpapers,” not as framed designs “belonging to the history of painting.” In this, Mabb’s installations implicitly acknowledge “that Morris’s wallpapers were always destined for homes, not museums,”30 an objective rooted in a Morrisian theory of art that treats the appreciation of beauty not only as a mode of consensus, as a judgment of taste for the pleasure of consumers, but as a material practice serving the creative needs and gratification of producers. Unassumingly, yet powerfully, Morris’s materialist philosophy drives a wedge into a vast Western tradition of Kantian-influenced aesthetic theory. It presupposes the complete undoing of class society and the wholesale recasting of art, transforming it from an idealist adjunct of life into a universally imperative facet of human activity.31 But the wallpaper designs are not merely semiotic entities, they are also repositories of an acentric aesthetic32 reflecting Morris’s hope for an “equality of condition,”33 in which “no man is good enough to be master over others … [and in which] equality of fellowship is necessary for developing the innate good and restraining the innate evil which exists in every one.”34 Indeed, “it is only a society of equals which can choose the life it will live, which can choose to forgo gross luxury and base

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utilitarianism in return for the un-wearying pleasure of tasting the fullness of life.”35 Such an affirmation of equality can be discerned in the non-hierarchical nature of Morris’s design form, in which no central figure dominates the ground; even within the landscape of flora and fauna, no one shape or representation prevails. This graphic index of an egalitarian social philosophy is supported by Morris’s claim that the heightened and heroic (and thus hierarchically elevated) character of the greater arts is unsustainable for everyday existence: In the best art all these solemn and awful things are expressed clearly … with such life and power that they impress the beholder so deeply that he is brought face to face with the very scenes, and lives among them for a time; so raising his life above the daily tangle of small things that wearies him to the level of the heroism which they represent. This is the best art; and who can deny that it is good for us all that it should be at hand to stir our emotions: yet its very greatness makes it a thing to be handled carefully, for we cannot always be having our emotions deeply stirred: that wearies us body and soul; and man, an animal that longs for rest like other animals, defends himself against the weariness by hardening his heart, and refusing to be moved every hour of the day by tragic emotions; nay, even by beauty that claims his attention over-much.36 The consuming and exhausting intensity of “great art” must thus be reserved for the rare occasion, while the tempered and evenly distributed motifs of pattern designs, achievable by everyone and accessible to all, must constitute the art of everyday life. Moreover, “lesser” art is not tied to heightened moments of martyrdom, heroism, or Romantic genius.37 These categories underpin a condition of mastery and slavery, which Morris abhorred and strenuously sought to overcome. Mabb’s Rhythm 69 similarly renounces those Romantic tenets of originality, authorship, or genius, which are the measures of an unequal society of exalted leaders and subaltern masses.

Epistemological Breakthroughs If the wallpaper patterns are graphically suggestive of an egalitarian politics and societal balance, they are also sites through which to imagine and comprehend the convoluted pathways of historical change and emerging

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social consciousness. Although Morris’s designs are not intended to engage in optical tricks, their recurring forms and graduated changes serve as stimulants for the eye and the mind, prompting a more intense hermeneutics of the wallpaper. Swift scanning of its surface patterns turns into scrutiny; what first appears as static repetition on two-dimensional surfaces becomes kinetic, multi-fold, and multi-levelled. Gradation in colour schemes and recurrence of motifs contribute to what Helsinger considers a therapeutic antidote to modernity’s rush of information and accelerated life tempo. Implicit in gradation is the idea that gradual change (e.g., a spectrum of hues) and recurrence (e.g., the reappearance of lines, shapes, and colours) are both means to slow down the eye’s assimilation of pattern. The effect is rhythmic and disarming. Like Louis Marin’s concept of utopia, these two artistic techniques serve to neutralize first impressions, clearing space for secondary and tertiary readings. Through a conventional optic, gradation and recurrence would seem to produce a naive repetition of motifs, unremarkable, and easily relegated to the secondary status of “background” furnishings. And yet, this first impression dissolves the more the eye is riveted to Morris’s graphic choreography and engaged in the neural force of its rhythmic pattern. Here, the mind’s conscious and foremost judgments recede as the sheer pleasure of visual symmetries prevails. At odds with the pace of external modern life, such rhythm brings the whirring preoccupations of frenzied life to a halt, energizing the perceptual senses to crave more time, to linger with the unexpected, and to break down preconceptions. In a sphere of mental retreat from reflexive thinking, new perceptions are spawned through the design’s structural cohesion, but also through a mystery that impels the viewer to see beyond the immediate.38 Morris speaks of the key components of the lesser arts in terms of beauty, imagination, and order. For him, “order invents certain beautiful natural forms,”39 which will remind the “reasonable and imaginative person … not only of the part of nature which, to his mind at least, they represent, but also of much that lies beyond that part.”40 Order, produced by “the conventionalizing of nature,”41 and binding together beauty and the imagination, constitutes a coalescence of two types of aesthetic reception: the immediate recognition of an object and its referential meaning; and a transcendence of that representation, a supersession of the visible. Morris’s concept of “order” recalls the complexity of the spectre, that fluid entity which captures the unity of what is (here) and what is not; for instance, represented botanical forms are what they appear to be graphically, but they are also far more. These patterns can thus be construed as educational motifs,

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Figure 10.1. Brother Rabbit wallpaper design, by William Morris, 1880–81.

visual cues that prompt salutary self-doubt and underscore the merits of slow, mediated, dialectical thinking. On a canvas where Morrisian colours unfold incrementally through subtle variations,42 and where recurring motifs produce looping returns of tendrils and foliage, movement can never be straightforward. The eye and the mind are constrained by the convolutions of shape, by the time that is required to grasp their coherence. But the epistemological result is surprisingly rich. Repetition betrays its illusory character; in effect, it is but recurrence. Close scrutiny shows that the self-mirroring and reappearing images are not exact self-reproductions. Imperfections or deviations from machine-like perfection in the hand-crafted work are pervasive. See, for example, the respective eyes and ears of the two rabbits in Brother Rabbit (figure 10.1). Rhythm 69 sensitizes our eyes to that phenomenon in Morris’s original wallpapers by consistently disrupting their prima facie symmetries. Upon a first viewing, image 38 (see figure 10.2) appears symmetrical: a square is set precisely in the centre of Morris’s wallpaper unit; yet in reality, Mabb’s inserted square sits in an off-centred position relative to Morris’s original design. In this, Mabb shifts our eyes from the rigid symmetry of the wallpaper’s organizing grid to its often marginalized entities, obscured by the panoramic viewing that a quick glance tends to afford.

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Figure 10.2. Rhythm 69, Image 38, by David Mabb, 2007.

As in Morris’s whole creative enterprise, symmetry is proven to be illusory; the shadow or reflection of the self, the embodiment of returning motifs (whether in memory, ghosts, or romances) is never a veritable replica of a template. Recurrence, unlike repetition, is always differentiated from an original or previous moment. It suggests a return to a beginning that proves alien or slightly refurbished, modified by the passage of time and intervening experience. The innocence of the original viewing is forever lost. If repetition in the design is, in fact, discerned, the impression is the result of a predisposed, ideologically informed, perspective that imposes a reflexive reading, blind or resistant to contradictory detail. As Morris himself says, “in many or most cases we have got so used to this ornament, that we look upon it as if it had grown of itself, and note it no more than the mosses on the dry sticks with which we light our fires.”43 Alternatively, the cursory glance captures repetition because of an additive, linear apprehension in which shapes are treated as an unerringly repetitive and forward-moving series of motifs. Yet the longer the eye dwells on this series, the more this “mathematics” of looking shifts from

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Figure 10.3. Chrysanthemum wallpaper design (full width), by William Morris, 1877.

“simple” to “compounded” assimilation of contradictory and multiplying forms. A more intense and penetrating gaze upon the wallpaper motifs generates a multi-level experience, layered by a succession of memories and superimposed impressions. The result is a déjà vu effect in which uncertainty punctuates each scrutiny and the eye is forced to return to its original vantage point to confirm or reappraise its first perceptions. In each instance, the eye’s return becomes a variation of an earlier viewing, and the attempt to grasp the innocent first glance is frustrated. The viewer is thus compelled to read the design under conditions of flux and continual review. For, on the one hand, to look at the full-width version of the design from a distance is to approach it ideologically, to capture a deceptively stable panoramic view of symmetrical configurations, devoid of the detail or the intricate and continually changing states of colours and forms (see figure 10.3).

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Figure 10.4. Chrysanthemum wallpaper design (detail), by William Morris, 1877.

On the other hand, to seize the nuance in the design, the eye must crop the whole into sections, each of which becomes a new angle from which to consider an adjacent motif, each of which will introduce a new slant in a continually self-refurbishing process (see figure 10.4). This visual experience is intensified in Mabb’s images 3 and 4, and images 6 and 7 where, much apart from new colourings, the same underlying pattern is dramatically modified by a process of cropping, slight repositioning, or by blocking out parts to highlight details that may have been obscured by the bird’s-eye view of the overall wallpaper pattern (see figures 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8). Resisting static repetition, Morris’s wallpaper patterns compel the viewer’s layered perspective (predisposed by a memory trace of past viewings) to confront hitherto unnoticed content, the sudden appearance of the “wondrously” new. In the Bruges wallpaper (see figure 10.9), the

Top Figure 10.5. Rhythm 69, Image 3, by David Mabb. Bottom Figure 10.6. Rhythm 69, Image 4, by David Mabb.

Top Figure 10.7. Rhythm 69, Image 6, by David Mabb. Bottom Figure 10.8. Rhythm 69, Image 7, by David Mabb.

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Figure 10.9. Bruges wallpaper design, by William Morris, 1888.

parallel ribbons, gently undulating on their diagonal lines, define the dominant movement of the design; they constitute the path along which the weaving foliage and petals move upwards. On the larger space of a wall, these lines recur and advance. Tilted on an angle, they move upwards and onwards, pulling the viewer’s perspective in their wake. But this forward-moving energy is also forestalled by the lateral extensions of the foliage, subdominant motifs that draw the viewer’s eye back to the recessed and overlooked areas of the wallpaper. Rhythm 69’s images 45 and 46 magnify this experience of sudden discovery amid the subdominant motifs. As two reconfigurations of

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Figure 10.10. Rhythm 69, Image 45, by David Mabb.

Bruges, they show how the repositioning and shrinking of the square superimposed on the original pattern moves the eye towards a hitherto neglected area that now captures the viewer’s attention as something strangely missed in the first viewing. Image 45 is reincarnated in image 46, yet in utterly new form, for the black square has been displaced to a section of the Morris design which was not originally a central preoccupation. In image 46, a portion is highlighted as a call-out and granted greater centrality, but it appears differently in relation to the wallpaper’s guiding marker: the ribbon ornament running diagonally on the right side. The latter is more visible in image 46, where the lens focuses on a patch of design situated a notch lower than in image 45. What was a mere shadow in the lower right-hand corner of image 45 appears as a full extension and flourish of leaves in the centre right side of image 46 (see figures 10.10 and 10.11). In 1879, Morris stressed that “in all patterns which are meant to fill the eye and satisfy the mind, there should be a certain mystery. We should not be able to reach the whole thing at once, nor desire to do so, nor be

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Figure 10.11. Rhythm 69, Image 46, by David Mabb.

impelled by that desire to go on tracing line after line to find out how the pattern is made.”44 Mystery or the unexpected clearly inhibit the viewer’s instant grasp of the total graphic scheme. And this is desirable, as Morris points out, for it enables the viewer to recognize that breaks in visual apprehension are part of an expanding human awareness. They prompt the viewer to read beyond the letter or the immediacy of graphic form. Morris is wary of the illusions of naturalism. The wallpaper’s ornate aesthetic of intertwining growth and the demands it imposes on the viewer’s eye have wide-ranging implications; they articulate the perceptual confusions and epistemic breakthroughs experienced by individuals beset by life-altering events. Morris’s later romances flesh out these epistemic conjunctures in figures such as John Ball, Hallblithe, Walter, Ralph, or Birdalone. These characters strain to discern the complex net of social relations and obstacles in their path. They must act in opaque circumstances, guided only by the conflicting tales they receive from sympathetic or inimical others. Unable to visualize their destinies, they grapple with the meaning of their many tribula-

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tions. Thus, desperately wishing to see the end of his own political struggles, John Ball beseeches the Dreamer to trace for him the outcome of the Peasants’ revolt. But even the Dreamer, with his considerable hindsight, can only offer riddles and fragments of knowledge. For John Ball, as for other pilgrims of hope, a glimmer of totality can eventually be captured, but only over time, and through lived experience. And this is the epistemological lesson of the wallpaper aesthetic, which necessarily eludes our instant mental grasp but grows sharper as the eye plows through a network of gradations, recurrences, and shifting planes. We must live and labour to see the whole.

Patterns and Paradigms for Envisaging Social Change The quizzical response, which each of these graphic and narrative motifs provokes in its readers, encapsulates Morris’s preferred hermeneutic for grasping the uncertain, often tortuous, direction of social consciousness amid historical change. This is evident in the aesthetic of gradation that Morris deploys in his designs, where gradation involves slow incremental change, while each increment also involves recurrence – a reincorporation of what was with something new. Here the viewer’s eye is both guided and curbed in a double dynamic of encouragement and warning. Guidance and restraint are central to Morris’s later propaganda.45 Political education entails reinforcing a number of inspirational and regulating principles (fellowship, joyful labour, equality of condition, freedom, etc.), while also dispelling any blithe or blind faith in the swift consummation of such ideals. Thus, when Morris uses the romance form as a conduit of his propagandist work, it serves as a measure of hopefulness and encouragement, but never as simplification. On the contrary, through the spectral recursiveness of dream visions, those mental embroideries that incur bewilderment and self-questioning among his heroes, Morris underscores both the inspirational and cautionary nature of a circuitous educative task. Gradation in visual colour schemes and in the patterning of his narratives reflects the progressive, but penetrating, cultivation of social consciousness, a gradual education in sensibility that pervades Morris’s works. It is a sustained political endeavour that begins with his first writings and stretches into his late romances. Each of these creative pieces acts as a returning dream, slightly or substantially modified; each is a mise en

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abyme, a dream embedded within a dream, typical of his narratives’ visionary episodes and graphically evoked by the movement of interlacing rich foliage in his designs. So, too, each of his creative works is infiltrated by the ghostly return of past texts and visuals. Just as Morris carries forward, but transmutes, The Earthly Paradise into News from Nowhere, so, in The Story of the Glittering Plain, he looks back, reworking the utopian romance with strains of satire and authorial self-consciousness. His whole oeuvre is a recursive pattern of resurfacing themes and images, continually reaffirming his central ethical and political ideals, and strengthening them with the deepening knowledge that only life’s circuitous journeys can proffer. If this central aspect of the wallpaper pattern – gradation as recurrence and change – is about diversifying and reinforcing the delivery of Morrisian principles, it is also about a modality of expression in political persuasion that guards against the perils of doctrinaire thought. Gradation, in which recurrence trumps repetition, is consonant with two interrelated aspects of Morris’s philosophy of political education: (1) his refusal to offer prophecy or prediction in proselytizing speech and (2) his rejection of all slavish imitation of nature and past art. For repetition, which engenders possibilities for prediction, presupposes a determinism tied to the tyrannical replication of design achieved through machine work. In both art and political discourse, then, repetition chafes against Morris’s values, notably against his injunction that artists (among others) abstain from imitative practices.46 Recurrence, by contrast, accommodates his advocacy of structured coherence,47 combined with chance, deviation from deleterious sameness, and opportune breaks for historical renewal. While the wallpaper patterns appear to offer perfect symmetry and uniformity, their graphics are approximate and constantly express the energy of lines bursting through the constraints of pattern: “Rational growth,” as Morris writes, “is necessary to all patterns, or at least the hint of such growth; and in recurring patterns, at least, the noblest are those where one thing grows visibly and necessarily from another. Take heed in this growth that each member of it be strong and crisp, that the lines do not get thready or flabby or too far from their stock to sprout firmly and vigorously; even where a line ends it should look as if it had plenty of capacity for more growth.”48 As such, these patterns are symptomatic of the elements of chance and digression that Morris underscores throughout his prose fiction, poetry, and lectures.49 For where his articulated visions of “how we might live” offer encouragement, illuminating the desirables of

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an alternative world (freedom, equality, dignity, metabolic balance between nature and humanity, and so forth), contingencies along the way are invariably present. Morris never fails to underline these disappointing delays,50 yet they are to be admitted as part of the material and epistemological journey that moves society forward. Indeed, if, amid the intertwining tendrils of the wallpaper patterns, Darwinian struggle or unwieldy proliferation is discernible (as Eisenman shows it is),51 Morris’s patterns are implicit warnings against possible hazards and crises ahead. The shape of things to come is not predetermined by divine justice. Neither the earthly paradise of the past nor that of the future can be construed as a static hortensus conclusus. Each square of wallpaper is a web of change, marking a state of gestation, continually replaced by new energies and new viewings of history just as each embodies the continually pulsating rhythms of growth, recession, and interrupted pattern. Mabb’s sixty-nine images are thus instances of provocative discontinuity, decidedly non-teleological and always open to variation. They exude a dynamic energy, and our eye is drawn into details, which, seen from different angles, achieve a frustrating but fruitful elusiveness. Taken as separate frames, and viewed in their concentrated complexity, these individual images draw the eye into a kaleidoscope of change, of moving shapes and hues, in short, of moving pictures. Thus, while, they are conventionally seen as the covering of an immovable wall, the wallpaper designs turn into animated pictures. They “come to life,” thanks to the syncopated rhythms of Mabb’s designs, and break apart the regularity of Morrisian patterns through a clash of colours (intense versus pastel hues) and symbolic (geometric versus floral) forms. But if dynamism can be witnessed in the fusion and confrontational encounter of Malevichian and Morrisian motifs within each rectangular image, dynamism and movement can also be discerned across the spectrum of Mabb’s sixty-nine wallpaper designs. Viewed horizontally, his series of frames52 acquires a continuity otherwise unseen when his images are considered as individual entities. And this continuity is reinforced by a linear development discernible when we connect the range of motifs and note an emerging pattern from one rectangle to another. Continuity is further underscored by the spectral presence of Richter’s storyboard (a sequence of cinematic frames Richter conceived for his own film, Rhythmus) that Mabb’s Rhythm 69 internalizes in its own sequence of geometric forms. In using Richter’s storyboard53 as the template of a horizontal sequence of images, Mabb compels us to consider his break

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with traditional readings of Morris, but also to appreciate his artistic ties to a heritage of radical innovation in twentieth-century revolutionary art. Rhythm 69 is at once a display of shock effects and of reassuring continuity, a horizontal movement of forms that trains the eye to look beyond each frame, across a spectrum of pictures, now autonomous, now interdependent. Although this continuity has been projected digitally in a slideshow of Rhythm 69,54 the illusion of cinematic animation can be detected without the aid of technology. For the movement inherently present in Rhythm 69 is visible in the unfolding pattern of shapes moving across the line of sixty-nine frames, where each rectangular piece echoes something of its neighbouring picture and passes on something of its own motif to the next image. A horizontal viewing of Mabb’s sixty-nine frames highlights the spectral motion underlying this otherwise static installation. And this effect is the result of a dialectical viewing that takes static images and converts them into the frames of a moving picture. If viewing the individual rectangular frames disrupts expected patterns and pre-given assumptions about Morris’s aesthetic, the horizontal viewing of Mabb’s exhibit produces a restful coherence based on a creative appropriation and echo of past works of art (e.g., Richter, Malevich, Morris). This very combination of rupture and continuity accords with Morris’s own radical activism: at once agitational (disruptive of capitalist values) and reassuringly continuous with past traditions, with spectral shards and residues of medievalism, suggestive, at least for Morris, of a communist future.

Redesigning the Beautiful In a prefatory text entitled “Some Introductory Notes on My Morris Works,” Mabb writes of Morris’s wallpaper designs: “Although they constituted a radical break with the past when produced, their critical charge is now buried beneath the comfortable blanket of time; Morris’s designs now seem to lack the inherent contradictions and problems that generated them; stripped of their critical context, they make Morris’s Utopian project appear a nostalgic yearning for a place where the sun always shines.”55 To be sure, the “blanket of time” and Morris’s contested legacy have obscured the historicity of his artisanal patterns. Yet Rhythm 69 succeeds in scraping off the hardened surface of mainstream (com-

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Figure 10.12. Rhythm 69, Image 5, by David Mabb.

monsensical) thinking that has encased elements of Morris’s oeuvre; it compels the public’s eye to move into the depths of patterns that were for so long construed as mere superfluities, background space, recessed decor, or forgotten ambience.56 Note, in figure 10.12, the salience of leaves and stems that otherwise rest embedded, recessed in the intricate layout of the overall design. Both semiotically and artistically, Rhythm 69 moves the very background furnishings into the foreground of public art, and into the heart of current debates about Morris. In so doing, it endows them with their much-denied legitimacy. The sixty-nine pictures remind us that Morris’s wallpapers are not only restful, nature-inspired motifs, but also hints of nature’s writhing growth, anticipatory of decay. Quivering petals, windswept leaves, and heavy flower heads droop with an over-ripeness that marks their imminent demise. See Morris’s Pimpernel pattern and Mabb’s version of it with the added black frame (figures 10.13 and 10.14).

Right Figure 10.13. Pimpernel wallpaper design, by William Morris, 1876. Below Figure 10.14. Rhythm 69, Image 20, by David Mabb.

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In short, if dark tones and wistfulness permeate these images of fragile beauty, such moods recall the brooding tenor of The Earthly Paradise or the unsettling hints of imminent change that the cheerful Dick confronts in his last pang-ridden exchanges with Guest in News from Nowhere. Mabb’s Rhythm 69 compels a second look at this “lesser” art of interior design, reversing cultural biases that deem it either a form of blithe, parochial beauty or a wasteful accoutrement of middle-class leisure. For the power of Mabb’s montage work is (1) its capacity to capture the essence of the wallpaper aesthetic itself, a self-mobilizing array of symmetrical and asymmetrical energies that continually play against each other, producing new configurations with added viewing; and (2) its intensification of a “hermeneutic of reappraisal,” which the Morris designs mutedly demand of the viewer through their sheer intricacy and kaleidoscopic movement. In Mabb’s work, this hermeneutic of review is provoked by an artistry of superimposition that both echoes and exaggerates the layering technique inherent in Morris’s original designs. In the work of both artists, the manipulation of two- versus three-dimensional planes disorients the eye, producing a necessary and salutary estrangement. In Morris’s patterns, for example, flat, two-dimensional backgrounds serve as the canvas for a second layer, a three-dimensional plane of unfurling leaf motifs and seemingly full-bodied flowers. Where Morris mixes the flat, symbolic motif with the non-illusionistic but three-dimensional representation of nature, Mabb slices the twodimensionality of geometrical forms into the three-dimensional look of Morris’s curling leaves and petals. Morris works upwardly from simplicity to complexity; three-dimensional complexity appears to arise out of the (apparently) naive two-dimensional reproductions of nature. Mabb reverses this process, injecting the two-dimensional square or circle into the layered floral designs; but, paradoxically, by introducing a simple plane into the three-dimensionality of Morris’s wallpaper pattern, he achieves further complexity and depth, as in image 11 of Rhythm 69 (see figures 10.15 and 10.16). In this close, if not intimate encounter with Morris’s designs, Mabb displays a willingness to interact unreservedly with the Victorian past, while underscoring his own artistic signature. His aesthetic diverges from Malevich’s geometrical mysticism and “cosmic” triumph over the existing world. Clearly distinct in their modernisms, Mabb and Malevich mirror the divide between two types of radicalism: the one (Malevich’s) which challenges the status quo through total refusal (le grand refus),

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Left Figure 10.15. St James’s wallpaper design, by William Morris, 1881. Below Figure 10.16. Rhythm 69, Image 11, by David Mabb.

aspiring to absolute rupture while never, however, fully achieving such a purist break; and the other (Mabb’s) which resists and disturbs the status quo through critical engagement. In the language of Kantian aesthetics, we might say that Malevich’s art fully incarnates the mathematical, religious, and supersensible character of the sublime, with its perilous excesses. Although wrought of those classic markers of the beautiful –

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symmetry and proportion – Malevich’s black square emerges from, but also breaks with, the “proportions” of commonsensical or traditional representational art. In Suprematist and Übermensch-like fashion, the Russian artist aspires to groundlessness and treats the square (that Russian orthodox icon) as a mystical window or boundary looking onto the ineffable beyond of a fourth dimension.57 However, as an icon of communist propaganda, exemplifying the global transformation of humanity and its epic journey into the untrodden cosmic space of the future, Malevich’s Suprematist philosophy conflicts with the egalitarian and dialectical precepts of Morris’s socialist thought. As such it does not endow Morris’s images with revolutionary content. This said, in its alienness, it usefully casts a shadow on the mainstream readings of Morris’s now embedded symbols of home-grown Englishness. An exhibit such as Rhythm 69, which fuses Malevich’s and Morris’s archetypal motifs, each starkly different from the other, lays before us a model of the dialectical interaction between otherwise polarized and contrasting categories of Western aesthetics (beauty, the judgment of taste or structure of political consensus projecting the status quo in its finest form; and sublimity, the disruption of the existing social order). These are fundamentally the two horns of the antinomy that severed the Morris legacy for decades. Mabb’s hybridizing technique, his graphic interlocking and intertwining of two contrary aesthetics into one image, yields not only a means of modifying each of the two horns of the antinomy (a reconceptualization of the meaning of the radical and conservative Morris), but also a Gramscian view of political education. For in reconstituting the semiotics of the most disparaged of art forms (wallpaper art), Rhythm 69 asserts its critique through dialogue rather than through distanciation. Mabb’s politically informed artistic project would seem to acknowledge that, whatever its parochial or conservative limits, commonsense culture is the very terrain upon which social consciousness must be disrupted and defetishized. In the words of Gramsci, “a philosophy of praxis must be a criticism of ‘common sense,’ basing itself initially, however, on common sense in order to demonstrate that ‘everyone’ is a philosopher and that it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone’s individual life, but of renovating and making ‘critical’ an already existing activity.”58 On two sides, Mabb’s Rhythm 69 interacts with modernity’s aesthetic contraries, achieving thereby a double transformation. In one instance, it dispels the stereotypical associations tied to each (that is, to beauty and

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sublimity); in another, it opens a space for imagining the contours of an aesthetic category that transcends these polarized figurations as we know them. Thus, with Malevich-style sublimity (notably, the Suprematist square), Rhythm 69 annuls a contemporary archetype of beauty (embodied in the floral wallpapers) and the structure of purposiveness, widely held to be the conventional semiotic of societal harmony (à la Kant). In the same thrust, the exhibit debunks the commercialized image of beauty (the Morris designs turned kitsch) and extracts from their depth Morris’s political-moral-epistemological objective: to enlighten contemporary social consciousness artistically. But just as it rescues the weighty import of Morris’s original designs from the sphere of passive contemplation and privileged consumerist leisure, Rhythm 69 also enables us to conceptualize a core feature of Morris’s creative enterprise: notably, to rethink traditional assumptions about beauty. The exhibit opens a space for sketching an alternative aesthetic, and one that cannot be captured in any single floral, representational, or geometric image, but in a dynamic relationship between viewer and object (e.g., wallpaper). Beauty, as Morris conceives it, cannot be grasped with reflexive immediacy as Kant has it, for aesthetic satisfaction is (at least partially) achieved through the joy of mental labour, through increasingly deepening apprehensions of the object, each superseding earlier perceptions. It is, as Jameson would say of utopia, an operational exercise of the mind, prompted by sensuous representations. Thus, in the case of wallpapers, beauty is not discerned in any one floral shape, or in any combination of petals that constitute a preferred flower – pimpernel, chrysanthemum, tulip, or daisy (even while each of these may inspire pleasure-forming memories and associations). It is grasped through an enriched perceptual awareness of visual stimuli that energize the mental faculties (constituting “something which reminds us of life beyond itself, and which has the impress of human imagination strong on it”). Beauty, then, is not the product of imitative creation or of mindless reception; indeed, it does not “drive us to unrest or callousness.” And if it does not engender reflexive reception, as in Kant’s category of the beautiful, neither is it sublime – that is, removed from the ordinary person’s creative imagination or understanding. Rather, it is “something that it is possible for us to get.” As such, it transcends the opposition between fine art and alienated, imitative work, embodying instead the creative pleasure that every member of society deserves and can easily attain; it is

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“something which can be done by a great many people without too much difficulty and with pleasure.”59 This redefinition of beauty, as evidenced in wallpaper designs, takes us beyond the satisfactions arising from a phenomenology of aesthetic reception. Insofar as Morris’s concept of the aesthetic is materialist, it encapsulates both the receptive attitude of subjects contemplating a form of beauty, as well as the productive and co-productive moments that generate that ideal. For Morris, gratifying aesthetic reception rests on the universally shared premise that the enjoyment of beauty is available to each of society’s members and is free of exploitation or privilege. Art is not for the few, but for humanity as a whole. In that sense, Morris’s aesthetic ideal is ethical and political: it fuses beauty and sublimity, and hoists itself onto a higher rung, where it becomes both the symbol and embodiment of an equitable societal order,60 a commonweal governed by a principle of flexible yet proportionate measure (equality and variety),61 vividly delineated in his famous portrait of the “little land”: For there indeed if anywhere, in the English country, in the days when people cared about such things, was there a full sympathy between the works of man, and the land they were made for. The land is a little land; too much shut up within the narrow seas, as it seems, to have much space of swelling into hugeness; there are no great wastes overwhelming in their dreariness, no great solitudes of forests, no terrible untrodden mountain-walls: all is measured, mingled, varied, gliding easily one thing into another: little rivers, little plains; swelling, speedily-changing uplands, all beset with handsome orderly trees; little hills, little mountains, netted over with the walls of sheep-walks: all is little; yet not foolish and blank, but serious rather, and abundant of meaning for such as choose to seek it: it is neither prison nor palace, but a decent home.62 In this passage from “The Lesser Arts” – a passage so readily mistaken for a rapturous discourse on conservative English chauvinism63 – Morris consciously eschews patriotic fervour. He neither praises nor blames this topography, but says “that so it is,”64 and uses it to trace the parameters of an alternative commonweal. Indeed, his portrait of the “little land” exemplifies an aesthetic of beauty that epitomizes dialectical balance: such an aesthetic transcends the small community’s parochial inwardness

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(instanced by some people “who praise this homeliness overmuch, as if the land were the very axle-tree of the world”)65 and the complete refusal of Englishness (evidenced by “those who scorn it and the tameness of it”).66 Here, as elsewhere, Morris identifies and overcomes the two prongs of an ideological dichotomy: those who praise this homeliness (chauvinists who celebrate Englishness as a clearly circumscribed and superior national space) and those who repudiate nationalist sensibility as inward and conservative, bounded by restrictive borders that confine it to a narrow (and “tame”) political vision. Morris’s vision thus annuls introverted chauvinism on one side and total disavowal of national identity on the other. By dispelling these extremes, his “little land” figuratively captures a sense of proportion that accommodates the imperatives both of social identity (to be anchored in a place called home with its attendant fellowship and social warmth) and of civic respect for otherness. This is a zone of comfort, yet also one of constantly self-adjusting equipoise that not only precludes the enclosures and myopia of exclusionary fellowship, but also wards against the empty identity of abstract citizenship. Recalling in this passage the importance of “wonders, terrors, and unspeakable beauties,”67 Morris ensures that the outlook of those who occupy this “little land” is neither inward nor blindly egoistic. A modicum of sublimity experienced in these mysteries of nature serves as an energizing force that refreshes and sustains the health of a community’s political perspective. But at no point is sublimity celebrated as such. For in its pure form, it can conjure up excess (privation and dearth) and extremism, which Morris abhors. “The land is a little land; too much shut up within the narrow seas, as it seems, to have much space for swelling into hugeness: there are no great wastes overwhelming in their dreariness, no great solitudes of forests, no terrible untrodden mountain-wall.”68 In short, the “little land” embodies an ethically grounded aesthetic that affirms individuality by bringing the subjective needs of the individual and the objective demands of the collectivity into a mutually and reciprocally validating relationship. Repudiating the extravagances of individualism, this aesthetic also rejects ascetic self-denial. Thus, in economy, it precludes dearth and decadence; in social relations, it forestalls anguished solitude and blind conformism; in art, it condemns frivolous pomp and puritanical purism. As an expression of a societal ideal, this redesigned aesthetic is Morris’s redemptive vision, boldly situated at the heart of the political.

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Redesigning the concept of beauty, Morris not only draws on the features of a certain topographical space for his rhetorical ends, he also builds his aesthetic model on a type of human praxis incarnated in the lesser arts. The ethos implicit in the spatial, topographical forms of the “little land” is at one with that of an art form that represents the politics of a society devoid of extremes (e.g., flaunted wealth, regal height, oppression, slavery, arrogance) and the societal divisions that they are likely to breed. “For as was the land, such was the art of it … it strove little to impress people either by pomp or ingenuity: not unseldom it fell into commonplace, rarely it rose into majesty; yet was it never oppressive, never a slave’s nightmare nor an insolent boast: and at its best it had an inventiveness, an individuality that grander styles have never overpassed … never coarse, though often rude enough, sweet, natural and unaffected, an art of peasants rather than of merchant-princes or courtiers.”69 As Lutchmansingh has pointed out, Morris’s “ideal stems partly from a concept of the purity of design and of beauty without ostentation.”70 But the origins of this preferred aesthetic can be traced back to Morris’s disgust with a profit-driven market, buttressed by the pillars of asceticism and poverty on one side, and luxury and waste on the other. Exemplified in the praxis of beautiful craft, Morris’s aesthetic of beauty is, to put it plainly, an encapsulation of communistic society, a world where creative (i.e., unalienated) and collaborative work go hand in hand, and where co-production implies enlightened and sensitive reciprocity between coproducers and consumers. Morrisian in every way, this category of beauty is nothing less than the constitutive ground and symbolic figure of a salutary future commonweal – ethical, ennobling, and universal.

Conclusion m i c h e l l e w e i n ro t h a n d pa u l l e d u c b r ow n e

Throughout his public life, Morris strove tirelessly “to build a shadowy isle of bliss.” His was a daunting, at times intractable, project. For how shall one build an isle? An isle of bliss? A shadowy isle? The phrase is a reminder that Morris’s utopia was no pre-lapsarian state of Edenic peace; it was a silhouette of political desire, frustrated by setback and sustained by undying hope. The “happy poet,” as Yeats dubbed him, was under no illusion: bliss could not be achieved under capitalism’s condition of commercial war. The task was to build a place for it, not just to find consolation in its evocation. Morris thus sought to transform social existence at its core, through political agitation and organization, to be sure, but most fundamentally through the “lesser arts.” Rooted in the old English blíths, bliss denotes gladness. Originally signifying earthly joy, it has come through confusion with “blessed” to mean a form of heavenly happiness, a state of perfection – the stuff of utopia.1 Yet, Morris’s desired bliss is scarcely celestial. Unattainable in societies riven by oppression, it nonetheless forms the Noch-Nicht (Bloch) of the existing world. As such, it haunts all of history as the spectre of a life truly lived, a life fulfilled, a life in which one does not weary of one’s mirth.2 In striving “to build” an earthly paradise, and in tapping into our dreams and discontents, Morris expands and deepens our vision, and this with the utmost realism. He makes no pretence of dispelling “the heavy trouble, the bewildering care / That weighs us down who live and earn our bread.”3 He is conscious that his isle of bliss is spectral, a billowing shadow, only dimly discerned. We strain our minds to glimpse it in the ideological fog of late capitalism, but it is easily missed. In the “steely sea”

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wherein “all men’s hearts are tossed” and prey to “ravening monsters,”4 this political desire is a contested utopia, railed at by carping critics. Still it lives on, impervious, mocking its hecklers like a darting spectre that deftly eludes their every swipe. Morris’s “shadowy isle of bliss” is both nowhere and everywhere, for it has yet to be “built.” A void at the heart of human life, it cries out to be filled, to be made real. But for it to emerge from the shadows, “mighty men” must slay the demons of blind prejudice and come to see it in its most essential light. ❖

Like his isle of bliss, Morris’s radical social vision is not easily grasped. Multi-faceted, it cannot be confined to one discipline or field of scholarship; nor can it be circumscribed by any political label or deemed an eclectic array of ideas drawn from many sources: for example, Marxism, anarchism, pre-Raphaelitism, modernism, or utopianism. Nonetheless, the richly layered concept of spectrality, with which we launched this volume, allows us to grasp Morris’s work and disposition in their unity and internal tensions.5 This said, much of what characterizes Morris’s radicalism most quintessentially is spectral not only because it is dialectical (enabling us to embrace two contrary, and seemingly incompatible, ideas in one mental thrust), but because it dislodges and unearths deep-seated assumptions, fears, and taboos associated with gender, desire, and the domestic: those ravening monsters that have plagued men of all political stripes. In short, it embodies the political unconscious of radical agency. Morris’s unabashedly pastoral utopia and his decorative arts – both cornerstones of his transformative philosophy – have haunted those who would see “epic” activism in the public arena as a mark of genuinely radical praxis, or those who would construe Morris’s preference for all things pleasure-forming and homespun as signs of a compromised virility. If some have doubted his radicalism, it is because they have construed his domestic arts, along with his utopian dreaming, as ancillary components of social change. In this volume, we have sought to dispel those doubts, arguing that Morris’s view of social transformation breaks with traditional assumptions: its focus is on poësis, in the sense of craft, but also on the “making of socialists,” rather than on insurrection. In a Morrisian spirit, each chapter in this book questions received scholarship and grapples with a facet of Morris’s work that is typically deemed extraneous to radical agency and consigned to the margins of the political. Our claim is that

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Morris’s most revolutionary ideas can be traced back to these so-called peripheral spaces. For many of his creative efforts have dwelled on margins – on “fringe” associations, para-textual borders, “para-literary” genres (e.g., the utopia), political chants, as well as on dreamers, guests, and ghosts who stand at the crossroads of time. To eschew these instances of marginality is to misread Morris’s subversive outlook, but also to spawn two dubious views: that his decorative creations (wallpaper, tapestries, floral borders, romances, illuminated manuscripts, oneiric visions, and so forth) are but fancy and frivolity, empty of political content, and that the strength of his radical praxis is undermined by his predilection for these “minor” arts. News from Nowhere takes the full brunt of such criticism. Its portrayal of a communist future has caused unease and irked even sympathetic socialist readers. This reflects an underlying discomfort with Morris’s affinity for romance per se. As conventionally understood, romance evokes a range of emotions and affective drives that unsettle the (masculinist) values ascribed to revolutionary agency.6 Those proposing radical social change have most commonly resisted the coupling of literary romance with the hard-nosed business of revolution, since exemplary political activism has traditionally been associated with prototypical figures: men of intellectual acumen, self-possession, and ascetic selfrestraint. Undeterred by personal need or petty desires, these self-denying actors hold at bay all maudlin sentimentalism, “idle” contemplation, and the “undisciplined” logic of fantasy – those “deleterious” traits attributed to romance, and to Morris himself. Recall Engels’s characterization of him as “a sentimental socialist”; recall the pervasive claim that Morris’s relation to the past consisted in a blind worship of the Middle Ages, and that the lulling pace of his Earthly Paradise is soporific. Not least, recall Raymond Williams’s remark that Morris suffered from a “fragmentary consciousness” and that the weaknesses in his work lie in his romance writing.7 In rethinking Morris’s radicalism, this book has adopted a twopronged approach. It has focused on his concept of how “men” (should) “fight” for an alternative world and on how “men” might live (and work) there. We have shown that Morris’s proclivity for romance (as literary genre and, indeed, as epistemological category) scarcely diminishes the strength of his revolutionary vision. Nor does it betray wanting theoretical sophistication.8 In fact, the chapters in this volume show that Morris’s use of romance is both innovative and politically informed. In

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words reminiscent of Marx, Morris sees romance as “a true conception of history,” but also as the “power of making the past part of the present.”9 This now-celebrated definition entails “seeing bigly and kindly,”10 but also doubly – seeing two or more historical perspectives in one mental thrust. Beyond this, Morris’s particular reading of romance reflects yet another moment of his unorthodox use of the literary. Having converted the traditional genre of romance from “the art of the ‘horse-riding aristocracy’ into the art of the community,”11 he deploys it as an aesthetic medium through which to educate his fellow men on the dialectic of individual and society (see Bennett, Browne, and Weinroth’s Road to Nowhere in this volume). In 1959, E.P. Thompson wrote that Morris was “one of our greatest men, because he was a great revolutionary; a profoundly cultured and humane revolutionary, but not the less a revolutionary for this reason.”12 Likewise, we have argued here that Morris was a great revolutionary because of the humanity he both exuded and affirmed through his romance writings, as well as through the “lesser arts” of which romance is a part. And he was no less a revolutionary for this reason. He managed to blend analytical rigour and acerbic protest with empathy; activist energy and moral principle with contemplative repose; political persuasion with open self-doubt; ardent hope with realism; and decorative artistry with the travails of propaganda. Often seen as incompatible contraries, these elements, in Morris, were intertwined. In this respect, he stood apart from, but also outflanked, many of his radical peers.13 They tended to be inspired and sustained in their political struggle by an epic and tragic imaginary,14 since they anticipated that crisis and change would play out on the stage of high political drama (i.e., tragedy). Their ambition to transform society was massive, the scale of their aspirations epic. The intensity of their mission exceeded the low-key temper of everyday life and the modest hopes of the ordinary citizen, for the gravity and magnitude of their political project was modelled on exceptional figures (heroes and martyrs), widely cultivated and heralded by the “greater arts.” Yet the tragic narrative in which they were plunged and the epic heights towards which they strove had risks, such as the emergence of a sense of superiority and awesome grandeur surrounding their leaders (one thinks of the cults of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao in the twentieth century, but also of Che Guevara), inimical to the universal (democratic) good that radicals (e.g., socialists) sought to achieve. The question remains: how to overthrow the capitalist state without replicating dis-

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empowering leadership, without fostering myopic individualism, ruthless strategy, and, not least, tolerance of atrocity – those traditional means of securing and preserving hegemonic power. If, as Terry Eagleton has it, “a traditionally conceived Humanität will be brought to birth by those whose humanity is most crippled and depleted,”15 and if “an aesthetic society [à la Schiller] will be the fruit of the most resolutely instrumental political action,”16 how will that Humanität emerge unscathed? It likely will not. The imprint of trauma will remain. If News from Nowhere is any indication of Morris’s view, humanity will bear the scars of those dubious means for some time, and it will be at least two hundred years before it will heal. Indeed, the entry of Guest into Nowhere signals the inexorable trace of a ruinous past. Even the seemingly blithe Nowherians are not completely oblivious to their history; they shudder at the evocation of commercial war and the vindictive violence inherent in the capitalist prison system. Morris’s spectral (read dialectical) philosophy of the interpenetration of historical eras leads one to conclude that coercive means for noble ends17 would, in his eyes, necessarily leave its impact on future generations. Recognizing that an utter eradication of commercial war would entail a tragic conflagration, and having learned the dreadful consequences of violent conflict (be it in state repression or in legitimate revolt, such as the Paris Commune), Morris refused to celebrate the victor’s aggression, the flaunting of war’s spoils, and the adulation of heroic leadership.18 He sensed that the transcendence of capitalism might entrench the dubious means by which such a victory would be achieved. In his effort to steer his fellow Victorians away from this possibility, he chose a literary genre, romance, that would contest some of the main traits of the epic: imperialist domination,19 conquest, and the occlusion of history’s ordinary folk. With unsuspected power, he “resuscitated”20 and radicalized the romance genre, a type of story written in the widely shared idiom of the vernacular, resistant to the elitism and genius cultivated by the epic mode, and dubbed by some as the narrative of the “loser.”21 In an ironic twist, then, he saw more deeply than many of his contemporary and future critics – those who doubted his blend of medievalist and radical thought and those who spurned him for his alleged escape into the mists of romance. Focusing predominantly on the lesser arts, several of the chapters in this volume shed light on Morris’s resistance to idealized militancy and military heroism (see Boos, Tittle, Latham, and Weinroth). Florence Boos, for instance, reflects on this aspect of the early romances: there, the

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ghostly voices of the besieged are often his most articulate mouthpieces; they whisper the cries of the forgotten, which official art and public discourse have suppressed. In oneiric fiction and medievalist verse, Morris captures a history from below, scattered eyewitness accounts, runes of private memories, crushed desire, and personal despair. All of these are at odds with more mainstream portrayals of epic triumph. In thus amplifying the utterances of human emotion, otherwise drowned out by romantic tales of clattering swords and bloody strife, these early works prefigure Morris’s preoccupation in later years with the turbulent interiority of “fighting” men – men such as John Ball who are committed to, but daunted by, the formidable prospect of social revolution. In essence, then, Morris’s romances as a whole show the underside of epic bravado, its undertones of self-doubt, its tremors of fear, its unsettling dilemmas. They pave the way for his new mode of rhetoric, consciously crafted to promote and achieve fellowship through discourse,22 and tacitly critical of the relations of domination and subordination endemic to the excathedra style of epic poetry and elevated charismatic speech (see Latham in this volume). Morris’s countercultural stance reflects both political maturity and courage; he is willing to complicate and qualify the ideal of revolution – even when the ideal must be preserved from dissolution so that the spirits of working men may be bolstered and sustained. In such a context, he dares to temper the exuberance of dreaming, to break the élan of great socialist aspirations with words of prudence, and, in so doing, to ward against delusions and bitter disappointments (see Browne and Helsinger in this volume). All this would seem to chafe against forms of activism traditionally inspired by an inflexible, self-righteous, and agonistic discourse, steeped in messianic promises of future salvation. Indeed, Morris’s counterintuitive approach may have been unsettling to some, but its purpose was to infuse revolutionary ideals with a realism that would strengthen his fellow radicals’ capacity to talk “soberly” (as he puts it in A Dream of John Ball) and maintain a stoic faith in a tortuous political journey. In his demystification of romanticized militancy and epic heroism, we can see shades of Morris’s preferred radical political actor,23 a figure willing to relinquish the facade of utter self-sufficiency and invincibility expected of modern masculinity, a figure capable of openly sharing his doubts and personal limits without fear of losing his male dignity. On the contrary, this actor’s individuality is guaranteed by his capacity to see him-

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self in others and, reciprocally, to encourage others to recognize their own condition of interdependency in him. As Morris stated in an early lecture: “It is good for a man who thinks seriously to face his fellow, and speak out whatever really burns in him, so that men may seem less strange to one another.”24 In allowing his inner disquiet to peer through his outward countenance of self-possession, he is no less of a revolutionary for his disclosure of unease. Even as he is driven by the will to overcome great obstacles, he remains cognizant of his own limits. The strength of his radical praxis accrues, as it does in the heroes of Morris’s late romances,25 through candid self-knowledge. Indeed, what makes this political rebel distinct and genuinely radical is his capacity to reckon with his own subjectivity and to embrace those spectres of private sentiment (utopian desires and dread of defeat) that others have held at bay. Those who have questioned the coalescence of decorative aesthetics, open subjectivity, and militant politics in Morris’s radicalism have also imputed to “his preoccupation with romance and his socialist interests” a “schizophrenic contradiction,” as Northrop Frye put it.26 We can see this “schizophrenia” in Morris’s sundered legacy, in his claimants’ inability to countenance the apparent contradictions in his life and work. But contradiction need not be construed as a paralyzing antinomy (as “schizophrenia”), but as a source of deepened knowledge. For Morris’s capacity to embrace at once the domestic arts and revolutionary politics is scarcely paradoxical if we admit that his decorative creations are in themselves revolutionary practices; they rest on a dialectical category of joyful work, the basis of Morris’s Communist philosophy of how we might live. With such a notion of labour, the rigid antinomy between beautiful ornament as luxury and routinized (political) work as ascetic toil is abolished, the capitalist division of labour is annulled, and the “effeminacy” and menial “domesticity” ascribed to the decorative arts disappear. Though often construed as facile, naive, or unfeasible,27 News from Nowhere brings this strikingly new idea (the conversion of exploitative toil into emancipatory praxis) to fictive life. Far more than individualistic self-fulfillment, this concept of labour is grounded in reciprocal pleasure, in a mutually beneficial exchange of offering and receiving satisfying work. Morris fleshes out this notion, awakening in our minds the possibility that one can live differently and better, not in the sense of having better tools (more “advanced” technologies), but better social relationships. Life in Nowhere is thus less complicated – hierarchies and commercial relations have been eliminated – but decidedly more complex than

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ours. Based on a model of gift exchange, mutual aid, and generalized reciprocity (see Browne in this volume), their commonweal offers no formula for solving problems, no technical fix with ready-made answers. Theirs is a society of human rather than technological complexity,28 where freedom, equality, and fellowship are indispensable mutual conditions. On two fronts, then, Morris’s reconfiguration of radicalism involves a Copernican shift in thinking. At one level (“how men fight” for an enhanced society), he asks that we relinquish Olympian heroism and masculinist subjectivity; at the level of coexistence (“how we shall live”), he asks that we renounce competition (i.e., class division) and adopt collaborative relations. In the abstract, these two demands appear simple. In reality, they are of the utmost difficulty; for they involve the making of a new humanity – a task fraught with controversy and buffeted by prejudice, a task as imperiled by skepticism and misreading as is that “shadowy isle of bliss” that sits “midmost the beating of the steely sea.” ❖

Our discussion of Morris’s unique political vision would not be complete without mention of Robin Page Arnot, A.L. Morton, and E.P. Thompson, twentieth-century communist historians who shaped the conceptual vocabulary with which contemporary scholars29 have articulated Morris’s unique revolutionary praxis. Their views have been much debated.30 However timeworn they may seem now, however ensconced in the distant past, they form the scholarly (and ideological) crucible from which our own twenty-first-century appraisals of Morris’s radicalism emerge. In fact, with the 2011 re-edition of Thompson’s Romantic to Revolutionary,31 aspects of that past history resurface today as a plethora of “radical” social movements are currently taking shape throughout the world. These three twentieth-century voices (most notably E.P. Thompson’s) are our intellectual ghosts; and while we do not fully embrace their views on Morris, we cannot ignore the significant path they blazed. Here, in these closing pages, we identify our points of convergence and divergence with their claims, underscoring all the while the significant but often unrecognized merits of Morris’s unorthodox radicalism. Robin Page Arnot (1934), A.L. Morton (1952), and E.P. Thompson (1955/76) each, in their own way, contributed to the image of Morris as the ideal “Marxist” revolutionary. Each brought to light Morris’s perspicacious critique of capitalism and discerned therein the traces of a Marxist political theory. Each strenuously fought off the myths that

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proliferated both during and after his lifetime. If some, such as Engels, doubted the seriousness of Morris’s utopia, A.L. Morton swiftly underscored its scientificity. News from Nowhere was the first non-utopian utopia, he wrote,32 free of that impracticality and chimerical fantasy typically ascribed to the utopian narrative. If Morris’s artistic endeavours bred a common belief that he was but a bourgeois designer of wallpapers and fabrics, a quiescent aesthete, Robin Page Arnot painted the portrait of a tireless activist, utterly devoted to the socialist cause, a genuine revolutionary Marxist, distinct from the milk-and-water radical touted by sundry social democrats and reformists. As for Morris’s intellectual and aesthetic penchant, if it stemmed from a romantic tradition, E.P. Thompson stressed that it was of the rebellious, anti-capitalist kind inflamed by the Sturm und Drang of nineteenth-century revolt, by Carlyle and Ruskin’s verbal skirmishes against an “age of shoddy.” These romanticist stirrings of discontent (to be distinguished from the contemplative, solipsistic, and maudlin tendencies of conservative romanticism), fed into Morris’s growing political consciousness, precipitating his official espousal of Marxism in 1883, averred Thompson. Romanticism’s “moral critique of capitalist process was pressing forward to conclusions consonant with Marx’s critique, and it was Morris’s particular genius to think through this transformation, effect its juncture, and seal it with action.”33 Communist representations of Morris did not materialize ex nihilo. They arose from his embattled legacy and reflected the ire and militant zeal of his apologists, who were eager to dispel the (tendentious) liberal/ conservative view that his revolutionary politics were an aberration, a “stain” on his reputation as the gentle Victorian artist and visionary English poet.34 In this ideological tussle, Morris’s communist apologists drew their verbal arsenal from the idiom of “Marxist science” (Arnot, Morton), but also from a cultural predisposition towards heroic deeds and epic masculinity. In his William Morris: A Vindication, Robin Page Arnot defined the authenticity of Morris’s revolutionary socialism in terms of a fight “for the overthrow of capitalism and for the victory of the working class.”35 In a more elaborate fashion, Thompson’s biographical narrative fused political critique with poetic flourish; it extolled the merits of Morris’s defiant disposition (his fighting spirit) and emphasized his revolutionary fervour. Unwavering activism, moral realism, and sharp political acumen were implicitly the hallmarks of an exemplary radicalism.36 Seen in retrospect, Thompson’s Romantic to Revolutionary, combined with the work of his predecessors and later interventions (e.g., Stanley

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Pierson, Paul Meier, Miguel Abensour, John Goode), constitutes the most sustained scholarly discussion of “Morris, the socialist revolutionary”; yet, as such, it is not a dispassionate biographical document. It has a clear political agenda: to indict and resist capitalism while also exposing the limits of “economistic” and “rationalist” Marxism. Its stance reflects the type of feisty radicalism that Thompson ascribes to Morris. In his 1976 Postscript, displaying acerbic wit and adroit polemics, Thompson ably knocks out his scholarly peers (Pierson, Meier, Willard Wolfe, J.W. Hulse). However poised and gentlemanly, such verbal pugilism, it would seem, spurs the author on to advancing a vigorous self-defence.37 This skill in robust repartee is not unrelated to Thompson’s admiration for Morris’s political “jousts”38 (Thompson’s own expression) with Gradgrind and capitalism. It is difficult not to see in communist representations of Morris a rhetoric governed by warfare. Another determining feature is the epic character ascribed to Morris’s activism. In its original 1955 version and in its later incarnation in 1976, Romantic to Revolutionary reads as a type of epic itself, an extensive narrative reflecting the scope and significance of its hero’s political odyssey. The biography is also suffused with a “romantic” fervour, betraying Thompson’s own leanings. Traces of this may be found in his 1950 poem “The Place Called Choice.” As Bryan Palmer has it, these lines capture a crucial facet of Thompson himself: “Edward Thompson carried no candles for the causes of humankind; his sense of human need and commitment was too great. He shouldered more than mere light; his blasts of intervention were powered by rage as well as by love. Even when he was whispering for effect his voice was loud, his presentation dramatic, his every word and gesture explosive. When Thompson set his sights on evil, it was with a cannon.”39 In Palmer’s view, Thompson’s dissent can be read as an illustrative instance of romantic sublimity, the aesthetic category of tempestuous rage and revolt with which he, in turn, portrays Morris, the obstinate refuser and critic of commercial war. Precisely through this aesthetic signature, and through self-projection, Thompson, like other communists, distinguished the Victorian hero from the claims of those who deemed him a gentle socialist;40 to them, this image framed the Victorian figure as “genteel” – excessively close to the ruling English elite and its privileged world of beautiful artifacts, domestic furnishings, and rural bowers. Not only would this attribute of gentility efface, if not subdue, Morris’s revolutionary colours, it would, potentially, “emasculate” his political identity.41

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As argued in Reclaiming William Morris,42 the struggle over Morris was a war not only of words and persuasions, but of two aesthetic categories (intimately linked with political discourse):43 the conservative beautiful and the communist sublime.44 Each was a torn half;45 each was polarized from, and pitted against, the other. A war of representations thus dogged Morris scholarship for decades, and it reflects in cultural terms the way in which Morris’s identity was severed between Marxist and non- or anti-Marxist readings. Those who attempted to promote his revolutionary ideas as socialist or Marxist rendered his profile in the language of sublimity; those who resisted that appropriation and heralded him in anti-Marxist terms portrayed him in the idiom of beauty. In resisting this trend, our aim has been to rethink and highlight Morris’s radicalism: (1) by eschewing the divisive aesthetic categorization of Morris’s legacy as either beautiful or sublime, situating his politics instead within a reconstituted category of beauty that transcends these opposites (see Weinroth, “The Politics of Wallpaper,” in this volume); and (2) by probing his counterintuitive and inherently different logic in terms that are germane to him, rather than through a vocabulary exclusively derived from Marxist, anarchist, or other doctrines.46 In one respect, our objective recalls Thompson’s 1976 riposte to his critics, in which he seeks to undo the Morris–Marx equation that was ascribed to his biographical work.47 Arguing for the originality of Morris’s thought, Thompson states: “The important question might be not whether Morris was or was not a Marxist, but whether he was a Morrisist,” for Morris’s genuinely revolutionary qualities were “elsewhere.”48 In a similar sense, the objective of this book has been to define a specifically Morrisian radicalism rather than one contingent on or derivative of others. But if Romantic to Revolutionary underlines the originality of Morris’s radical praxis, Thompson’s reasoning is substantially different from ours. Indeed, Thompson argues that the fusion of romanticism and Marxism is central to defining Morris’s uniqueness. The romanticism that Thompson invokes is typified by its sublime (rather than beautiful) traits, by a cultural movement of revolt, energized by its anti-capitalist choler, by its blasts of Carlylean invective, and by its Ruskinian indictments of modernity’s assault on nature and humanity. For Thompson, such a culture of refusal and rebellion plausibly explains the origins, but also the peculiarity, of Morris’s social discontent and the accruing energy of his activist efforts. And yet, this Thompsonian portrait does not in itself

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convey the truly subversive quality of Morris’s radicalism. Notwithstanding Morris’s eccentricity, it puts forward the image of a classic (and quite familiar) revolutionary figure. At the level of theory, however, Thompson is more daring, for there he uninhibitedly embraces Morris’s very controversial category of utopia, complicated as it is by that “emasculating” or theoretically “debilitating” element of desire that has irked “rationalist” Marxists. But in focusing on the stormy character of anti-capitalist romanticism, and in showing how that heritage shaped Morris’s political agency, he rescues Morris from those who would consign him to the heap of utopian socialists and other like-minded idealists. By endorsing Morris’s “education of desire,” Thompson ventures to step out of the Marxist discourse of “scientific socialism,” but not out of its culture of sublimity. Like Thompson, we have sought to emphasize the distinctiveness of Morris’s transformative vision, and, in this, we have avoided treating Marxism as a necessary benchmark or vocabulary for delineating Morris’s path-breaking ideas. But in so doing, we have also side-stepped the competitive fray in which his legacy has been polarized into aesthetic contraries. If Thompson’s portrayal situates Morris in one of these two camps, that of romantic sublimity, ours locates Morris’s deeply radical politics in a sphere apart, in a redesigned construct of beauty. The latter aesthetic is materialist and unique, and can only emerge from a process of thinking beyond the conventional (Kantian) boundaries of beauty and sublimity, as well as from a reappraisal of Morris’s sustained interest in medieval culture. We need only look at his exploration of the medieval romance, with its epistemological reversals and oneiric dislocation of conventional logic, or at his study of Gothic architecture, where the fourteenth-century monument discloses history’s interpenetrating temporalities.49 Morris’s formative forays into medievalism clearly shaped his aesthetic creations; but in these intricately crafted works he also sharpened his inherently anti-Cartesian philosophical penchant, his capacity to decipher reality’s tangled weave and handle its often frustrating knots and imperfections. While often repudiated as a source of reactionary idealism, Morris’s medievalist preoccupation can be seen in a wholly different light as the basis on which he would later mount his mature and nuanced views of social change.50 For he did not simply borrow these key elements from the Gothic era; he reworked and reconstituted them in novel ways, eventually fusing them with his socialism. The medieval romance, the pastoral

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dream vision, utopian dreaming, medievalist linguistic forms, popular medieval narratives, the lesser arts, and ancient oral traditions – the subjects of each of the chapters in this volume – were all culled from this era, yet rethreaded into the intricate web of his socialist politics. Clearly, Ruskin and Marx shaped and sharpened Morris’s socialist vision; but merely to ascribe the peculiarity of his radicalism to the romantic heritage is to miss the distinctive quality of Morris’s unusual political thought. Inspired by the aesthetic practices of medieval times where art combines with everyday labour, the “minor arts” serve as the basis of Morris’s revolutionary paradigm, generating a materialist aesthetic of beauty that portends the end of capitalism’s class division. This radicalism acquires its signature mark in the reinvention of work as a social ideal. No longer the site of austerity and toil, work, reconceived, becomes satisfying and fruitful human effort, and aesthetic pleasure in labour. In positing that it must be attractive and desirable, rather than a mortification of the flesh, Morris allows work to regain its legitimacy in the company of art, and for the two to coalesce. Together they form a unique whole – a model of beauty suffused with the ethics of fellowship and equality. While this concept is related to Morris’s romantic heritage, it is more specifically derived from Ruskin’s preoccupation with medievalist architecture. So while Morris is the legatee of a romantic inheritance, his revolutionary spirit is most quintessentially shaped by the medievalist insights of his fellow Victorians. Governed by principles of pluralism and fellowship, he refused the “genius” and individualism associated with romantic rebellion, with its Olympian sublimity and aloofness from the masses – a veritable impasse for social change. Rather, his creative and political endeavours contributed to a materialist aesthetic of beauty, grounded in the egalitarian values of the lesser (popular) arts, which he sought, as best he could, to put into practice through his socialist activism. The result was a fertile but unexpected fusion of the medieval and the modern that continues to give Morris’s socialist radicalism its uniqueness and singular potency. Scarcely the happy poet, the author of blithe romances, the fanciful utopianist, or the unsystematic thinker51 that many have called him, Morris features among the most sophisticated nineteenth-century social theorists; yet his significant import has often been overlooked. Each of the chapters in this volume has implicitly exhorted readers to look again, reassess received assumptions, and discern the depth of his intellect. As Thompson noted, “we may see in William Morris, not a late Victorian, nor even ‘a

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contemporary,’ but a new kind of sensibility.”52 In effect, it is with that novel sensibility that we, and many other scholars, continue to grapple. ❖

After an intense and lengthy reaction to his critics and scholarly peers, Thompson’s Postscript to Romantic to Revolutionary ends on a note of humility and candour, consonant with the tenor of Morris’s own latterday self-reflections: It might seem that, in the revaluation proposed in this Postcript, I’ve been setting myself up as yet one more “claimant” of Morris, in the attempt to attach him to an idiosyncratic Thompsonian position. But the case is the reverse. Morris, by 1955, had claimed me. My book was then, I suppose, already a work of muffled “revisionism.” The Morris/Marx argument has worked inside me ever since. When in 1956, my disagreement with orthodox Marxism became fully articulate, I fell back on modes of perception which I’d learned in those years of close company with Morris, and I found, perhaps, the will to go on arguing from the pressure of Morris behind me. To say that Morris claimed me, and that I’ve tried to acknowledge that claim, gives me no right to claim him. I have no licence to act as his interpreter. But at least I can now say that this is what I’ve been trying, for twenty years, to do.53 Crowning Thompson’s entire postscript and revised work, these closing words constitute a moment of self-re-evaluation reminiscent of Morris’s own self-critical posture in politics, his efforts to see things “bigly and kindly.” If, in 1976, Thompson upholds the necessity of embracing utopia within radical thought (and this against ideological prohibitions), we, in this volume, have adopted that expansive outlook, revisiting the spectres of romance, “sentimentalism,” and “simplicity” that have irked his admirers, and for which he has been cast as an idealist. Indeed, in these putative flaws, we have discerned the merits of Morris’s politics of pastoral, of romance, of dreaming, of antiquarian language, of English place, of the domestic arts, and of the everyday. We have discovered the complexity of Morris’s dream of communism, his use of romance as a Bildungsroman for ethical radical praxis, and the imperative of “place” as the conceptual ground upon which social change can be imagined and conceived. This web of Morrisian themes has been the object of perennial criticism and

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disapproval (be it from the proponents of radicalism or from the academy); it has been deemed retrograde, incompatible with contemporary politics, or beneath the esoteric discourse of current literary theory. Yet many of Morris’s human concerns, when articulated through seemingly fanciful literary expression and densely wrought designs, have been misperceived and underestimated, jettisoned cavalierly, and consigned to the pyre. If the objective of this book has been to recover these rejected Morrisian elements, it has also been to foreground them as instances of unusual thought, and to mark these as the sites in which his deepest and most arresting revolutionary ideas have taken shape. In short, our task has been to revisit his works with greater open-mindedness, to cast light on its missed strengths, but also, and more importantly, to shift the perception of his work from margin to centre. Though we will not have changed the world in this modest redemptive gesture, we may nonetheless have begun to open a space for debating and rethinking the contested meanings of “the political,” “the aesthetic,” and “the radical” – categories of discussion that will inexorably haunt the question of social change.

Notes

introduction 1 “The idea that Morris was a facile writer who knew nothing of the struggles of creation is another of the legends about him which will not stand up to critical examination. One common conception of Morris is that he composed absolutely effortlessly, pouring out streams of verse almost as it were automatically” (Kocmanová, The Aesthetic Purpose of William Morris, 77). For an example of this view, Kocmanová cites Dixon Scott. The latter claimed that “from the Life and Death of Jason onwards Morris’s further poetry is only the expression of how Morris, by adopting a “snug social philosophy” which was “as simple as his mind” defeated his own poetic genius” (Kocmanová, The Aesthetic Purpose of William Morris, 82–3). Other instances of Morris’s imputed naïveté can be found in commentaries on his News from Nowhere. See Hapgood, Margins of Desire, 19. 2 For a discussion of some of these misconceptions, see Kocmanová, The Aesthetic Purpose of William Morris, 75, 76–83. Lawrence Lutchmansingh also remarks: “In his own day too, Morris had despaired of his position being properly understood – so far had the process of capitalist deformation of human labour and the bourgeois misappropriation of the creative faculties penetrated the popular consciousness … [and further], the superordinate place which Morris accords to medieval art and the centrality of the aesthetic in his analysis have ironically contributed to the underestimation of his utopian vision” (Lutchmansingh, “Archaeological Socialism,” 8, 15).

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3 E.P. Thompson remarks: “As a theorist of the arts – despite all his profound insight – [Morris] failed to construct a consistent system, and muddled his way around some central problems” (Thompson, Romantic to Revolutionary [1976], 717). David Gorman writes: “Morris’ approach to aesthetics was unique amongst communists. Despite the centrality of art to his concerns, he did not have a fully worked-out theory of aesthetics. His approach was instinctual, intuitive. It would not be easy to extrapolate from his writings a whole theory of art, and such an attempt might be ill-advised” (Gorman, “Art, Work and Communism”). 4 Frye, “The Meeting of Past and Future,” 303. 5 See The Story of the Unknown Church; A Dream of John Ball; and News from Nowhere. 6 On late-nineteenth-century spiritualism and Morris’s News from Nowhere, see Pinkney, “News from Nowhere as Séance Fiction,” 31. 7 See Matthew Beaumont, “News from Nowhere and the Here and Now,” 33–54; Pinkney, “News from Nowhere as Séance Fiction,” 29–47. 8 Derrida’s text has spawned much controversy and fruitful debate. The idea of spectrality has served the analytical ends of a number of literary critics. See Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic, Antonis Balasopoulos’s “Ghosts of the Future,” 1–19, and Matthew Beaumont’s The Spectre of Utopia. Working with Jameson’s reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx (see “Marx’s Purloined Letter” in Valences of the Dialectic), I use the expression “spectrality” in a non-deconstructionist sense to designate an analytical framework for understanding Morris’s dialectical vision and his resistance to conventional thinking (i.e., ideology, common sense, or, as Hegel has it, Verstand). I also use this term to portray Morris’s haunting presence in the academy, a disturbing, ghostly voice that unsettles the institution’s received wisdoms and relativizes their legitimacy. Through his often estranging and eccentric intellect, Morris compels his sympathetic readership to dismantle and discard entrenched ideological assumptions. We might refer to him as “anamorphic,” in the sense of Matthew Beaumont’s reading of spectrality in The Spectre of Utopia. Building on Derrida’s fleeting reference to the visor effect – an alienating gaze from the masked face of Hamlet’s father – as well as on Darko Suvin’s notion of estrangement and Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, Beaumont establishes a connection between the epistemological dislocation incurred by the spectre and the concept of “anamorphosis”; for, like anamorphosis, the spectre of utopia (and the alienation effect endemic to science fictions) can alter our epistemological categories and move us to-

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wards transformative possibilities. “Anamorphosis,” he writes, “creates what Daniel Colins has called an ‘eccentric observer,’ a spectator whose dynamic, tangential relationship to the picture plane undermines ‘those one-eyed regimes built upon singular assumptions about the proper point of view.’ It demonstrates that the dominant perception of reality is not natural but cultural: and this, potentially at least, is politically enabling, because it reveals that reality can be altered” (The Spectre of Utopia, 258). On these same lines, one might argue that the authors in this volume are “eccentric observers” (or readers) of Morris, compelled to reconsider their habitual evaluative criteria and appreciate his whole oeuvre as a process of estrangement that both annuls the legitimacy of mainstream perspectives and opens up alternative vistas for reconceptualizing the literary, the aesthetic, and the political. See the sudden and spectacular appearances on the scene of the Dreamer in A Dream of John Ball and William Guest in News from Nowhere. The spectacular and unexpected features of the spectre are linked to the Latin spectare and specere (to look at) and to the Latin apparere (to come forth); each of these etymological resonances pertains to the spectre’s startling and fleeting appearance, to its spectacular and arresting character. As a haunting element, the spectre prompts us to doubt our first assumptions and to think again. I borrow this expression from Fredric Jameson. See “The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller,” in Ideologies of Theory, 3–34. Paul Guyer notes that in philosophical discussions of aesthetics, Morris’s thought has been overlooked. See Guyer, “History of Modern Aesthetics,” 761–70. See Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 92. Morris was particularly influenced by Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Modern Painters. See Morris, “Art: A Serious Thing,” 39. Morris’s philosophy of art has been eclipsed from most anthologies and treatises on aesthetics. Jeffrey Petts addresses this lacuna, affirming the importance of Morris’s theory of art as a form of aesthetic education. See Petts, “Good Work,” 31, 43. By “lesser art,” Morris is referring to the decorative arts that had been degraded into mechanical and trivial artistic practice. In their former incarnation, the lesser arts constituted a vital and popular art, distinct from their modern status. See “The Lesser Arts,” CW 22:3–4. Kocmanová, The Aesthetic Purpose of William Morris, 75–6.

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Faulkner, William Morris and W.B. Yeats, 4. McAlindon, “The Idea of Byzantium,” 307. Thompson, Romantic to Revolutionary (1976), 764. Faulkner, The Critical Heritage, 22. Northrop Frye writes: “In terms of value judgments, that half a century ago were practically unquestioned, all this suggests that Morris is the worst example in English literature of what Eliot meant by dissociation of sensibility. But even these value judgments are no more immortal than any others” (Frye, “The Meeting of Past and Future,” 307). Faulkner, The Critical Heritage, 23. Faulkner, “Morris and Tennyson,” 15–51. For a study of the reception of Morris’s poetry and the “ridicule which was frequently heaped” on his poetic style, see Litzenberg, “William Morris and the Reviews,” 413–28. For other critical reviews, see also, among others, Faulkner, The Critical Heritage, 182–8. Anonymous, Unsigned Review of Roots of the Mountains, 208–9. Arata, “On Not Paying Attention,” 203. Hewlitt, “A Materialist’s Paradise,” 818–27. See Skoblow, Paradise Dislocated, xiv; Litzenberg, “William Morris and the Reviews,” 413–14. See Petts on Guyer in “Good Work and Aesthetic Education,” 31. To name just some of them: Armstrong, “A New Radical Aesthetic,” 227–46; Bennett, “A Legacy of Wonder”; Bennett and Miles, eds, William Morris in the Twenty-First Century; Beaumont, “News from Nowhere and the Here and Now,” 33–54; Brantlinger, “News from Nowhere: Morris’s Socialist Anti-Novel,” 35–49; Brennan-Smith, “Knight and Lady as One”; Buzard, “Ethnography as Interruption,” 445–74; Faulkner and Preston, eds, William Morris: Centenary Essays; Frankel, Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s; Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts, and “William Morris before Kelmscott,” 209–38; Herbert, “News from Nowhere as Autoethnography,” 85–106; Herbert, “Dissident Language in the ‘Defence of Guenevere,’” 313–27; Kelvin, “Patterns in Time,” 140–68; Kinna, “William Morris: The Romance of Home,” 57–72, and “The Relevance of Morris’s Utopia,” 739–50; Kirchhoff, William Morris: The Construction of a Male Self, and “Heroic Disintegration,” 75–95; Latham, ed., Writing on the Image, and Haunted Texts; Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism; McGann, Black Riders; Miles, “Binding Men,” 89–102; Petts, “Good Work and Aesthetic Education,” 121–3; Pinkney, “News

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from Nowhere: Modernism, Postmodernism”; Plotz, “Nowhere and Everywhere,” 931–56; Skoblow, “Beyond Reading,” 239–58; Skoblow, Paradise Dislocated; Vaninskaya, “Janus-Faced Fictions,” 83–98, and William Morris and the Idea of Community; Waithe, “News from Nowhere, Utopia and Bakhtin’s Idyllic Chronotope,” 459–72, and William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers; Ward, “William Morris’s Conditional Moment”; Weinroth, “Redesigning,” 37–63. See also Florence Boos’s voluminous publications on Morris and her online Morris project: http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/about.html. Morris to Andreas Scheu, 15 August 1889, CW 20:xlvii. For a discussion and documentation of these exclusions and rejections, see Gardner, “An Idle Singer.” See Weinroth, “Redesigning,” 44–9, 52. In this section, I have drawn on Jameson’s conceptual vocabulary (as used in “Marx’s Purloined Letter”) to articulate the dialectics of Morris’s sundered legacy. Jameson, Valences, 50. See Waithe, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers, 33–72. Jameson, Valences, 51. See Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic, 59. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, 2: Marx, 146 and passim. Morris, “Paper Read at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the S.P.A.B.,” AWS 1:126. Morris, “Preface to Medieval Lore,” AWS 1:288. See MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life, 209. See Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” CW 22:3–4. Note also that he was a shareholder of Devon Great Consols mines. MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life, 210. See Francis Fowke’s idea that to be decorated by Morris and Co. the buildings of the South Kensington Museum “should be instructive and inspiring” (MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life, 212). The commercial enterprise was launched in part to reform Victorian aesthetic taste, but also to guarantee his economic survival (MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life, 209). Morris to Rosalind Francis Howard, 20 August 1874, CL 1:230. Bradley J. Macdonald has noted: “Prior to his conversion to socialism in 1883, these lectures represented (as Morris claimed in a letter to Andreas Scheu of 5 September 1883) ‘socialism seen through the eyes of an artist,’ and were extremely important conceptual platforms for the

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notes to pages 15–19 constitution of Morris as a socialist” (Macdonald, “Morris after Marcuse,” 42). Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” CW 22:4. See Weinroth, “William Morris’s Philosophy of Art.” These lectures were delivered to audiences typically comprising artists, architects, and civic leaders. See Petts, “Good Work and Aesthetic Education,” 31. Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing,” CW 22:175–205. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 181. Ibid. Ibid., 179. In offering this counsel, Morris may just as well be talking about political actors seeking to define their own paths of social change while paying tribute to historical precedent. Gary Zabel writes: “If we exclude some underdeveloped propositions by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts, the Grundrisse and other writings as well as similarly scattered passages by Engels, Morris is the first socialist writer to frame a theory that locates art squarely within the general life process of society. In this respect, he is the earliest representative of an extraordinarily creative tradition, a tradition that includes such central figures as Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Raymond Williams” (Zabel, “The Radical Aesthetics of William Morris”). See Weinroth, “William Morris’s Philosophy of Art.” Ibid. The title of his 1883 lecture “Useful Work versus Useless Toil” is thus not incidental. Maccoby, The English Radical Tradition, 1–16. Bonnett, Left in the Past, 6. Morris to John B. Glasier, 6 April 1889, CL 3:51. This is not to say that all anarchists were inherently or ideologically predisposed to violence. Clearly, anarchists were (are) not all of one doctrine. There are at least three types (if not more) that can be identified. There are some obvious differences between Morris and anarchists, but also some important overlaps. With an anarchist such as Kropotkin, a

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cultivated thinker, endowed with the same financial ease that Morris enjoyed, the similarities and differences are significant but nuanced. See Kinna, “Morris, Anti-Statism, and Anarchy,” 215–28. See Morris’s A Dream of John Ball and the tortuous route of social change discussed in the exchange between the fourteenth-century priest and the Victorian Dreamer. Morris, A Dream of John Ball, CW 16:231–2. Morris to J.L. Joynes, 3 February 1885, in Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1976), 376. Morris, “Communism” (1893), 238–9. So often this nuanced radicalism is conflated with “milk and water radicalism” or even with reformism. He translates the classics (Homer and Virgil), the culture of an elite educational system, but does so subversively. See Whitla, “Morris’s Translation of Homer’s Iliad 1.1–214,” 84–121. He is an art collector yet does not subscribe to genteel antiquarianism. See Cowan in this volume. As Lutchmansingh has argued: “It was Morris above all who re-directed [the] originally conservative and nostalgic impulse [of Victorian medievalism] toward a revolutionary heuristic purpose and incorporated its historical force into a dynamic utopian vision” (Lutchmansingh, “Archaeological Socialism,” 16). Boos and O’Sullivan, “Morris and Devon Great Consols,” 11–39. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, MECW 11:107. Jameson, Valences, 144. A Morrisian aesthetic of beauty inspired by English flora and medievalist design joined to the promotion of radical societal transformation confounded both Morris’s peers and later admirers. Morris, “On Some Practical Socialists,” 52. Frederick Engels to August Bebel, 18 August 1886, MECW 47:471; and Frederick Engels to Laura Lafargue, 13 September 1886, MECW 47:484. Zabel, “The Radical Aesthetics of William Morris.” See, for example, Mowbray Morris, unsigned article, 407; see also Anonymous, unsigned review of Roots of the Mountains, 208–9; for further instances of this reaction to Morris’s language, see Jones, “The Reception of William Morris’s Beowulf,” 197. Morris to Cormell Price, July 1856, CL 1:28. Morris, “Equality,” 57. See Weinroth, “Redesigning,” 37–63.

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91 See The Pilgrims of Hope in Commonweal, with its use of the intimate mode of dramatic dialogue and its focus on the plight of the defeated. 92 See Dudink et al., Masculinities in Politics and War, 116–32; Mosse, The Image of Modern Masculinity, 126; Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 64, 65, 72; and Moran, “‘To Hesitate Is Cowardly.’” 93 For more on this, see Weinroth’s “Morris’s Road to Nowhere” in this volume. 94 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 214. 95 Ibid. chapter one 1 Morris, “Our Country Right or Wrong,” 74. 2 Ibid., 85. 3 Tennyson, “Epitaph on General Gordon,” in Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, 1344–5. 4 Morris, “Commercial War,” 48. 5 Morris, “What We Have to Look For,” 42. 6 Morris, “Our Country Right or Wrong,” 64. 7 Morris, “Equality,” 64. Morris delivered this talk many times between 1888 and 1890. In “Our Country Right or Wrong,” he reflects that even a war of liberation may not bring unmixed gain; now that “the Montenegrins have gained their … freedom” [from the Ottoman Empire], one may ask: “They have learned war; can they learn anything else” Morris, “Our Country Right or Wrong,” 60). 8 Morris, “Socialism,” 34. 9 Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:119–20. 10 Morris, “Communism, i.e., Property,” 20; see also “Communism and Anarchism,” AWS 2:326: “To make the workers conscious of the disabilities which beset them; to make them conscious of the dormant power in them for the removal of those disabilities … here … is the work of patience, but nothing can take the place of it … the doing of it speedily and widely is the real safeguard against acts of violence, which even when done by fanatics and not by self-seekers are still acts of violence, and therefore degrading to humanity, as all war is” (italics in original). 11 See Laity, The British Peace Movement; Ceadel, Thinking About Peace and War. See Morris’s sharp criticisms of recent British wars in Afghanistan, Egypt, and South Africa, as well (Morris, “Our Country Right or Wrong,” 30, 45–6).

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12 Even the Crimean War, though in his view well intended, later seemed to him to have been a mistake. In his argument against war with Turkey, Morris imagined an opponent who might reason that “we are in a kind of way responsible for their usage, for we have before this waged war to keep the Turks, their jailor, alive, thinking that we could make them a respectable and even a progressive people … such fools we were! … we meant no harm then, and now we mean good and will do it” (“England and the Turks,” AWS 2:484). 13 Hanson is surely right about a tactile and combative tone in Morris’s early romances – written in a period of life when he relished the sport of single-stick, and during which he would have been influenced by general public support for the Crimean War. Some of her descriptions of violence as “bodily contact,” however, would seem to conflate mere physical touching, as in fencing, with the infliction of serious harm: “The stories create a world whose centre is neither symbolic religious acts nor strategic economic ones, but rather tactile interactions which locate meaning and truth in the body and its relation to the world” (Hanson, “The Measured Music of Our Meeting Swords,” 449). 14 Sasso, “‘The Road of War’ and ‘The Path of Peace,’” 483–96. 15 Bennett, “Riot, Romance, and Revolution,” 29, 30. In “The Defence of Guenevere: A Morrisean Critique of Medieval Violence,” I consider Morris’s portrayal of a society in which endemic violence required extreme forms of resistance. I argue that in their evocations of ruptured or fragmented forms of memory – foreign refrains, forgotten artworks, untransmitted stories, anonymous songs, and other forms of indirect witness – the poems of The Defence testify to Morris’s lifelong ardour for the historical palimpsest of “the lesser arts” as preservers of a tenuous and redemptive cultural memory. As will be clear, my own views are consonant with those of Sasso and Bennett. 16 Tennyson, “In Memoriam,” in Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, section 55, 910. 17 Morris, “Preface to the Nature of Gothic by John Ruskin (1892),” AWS 1:292. 18 Morris, “Art and the Beauty of the Earth,” CW 22:163. 19 Morris, “Art under Plutocracy,” CW 23:164. 20 Morris, “Art and the Beauty of the Earth,” CW 22:163. 21 Morris, “Prologue: The Wanderers,” CW 3:5, lines 66–72 22 In the winter of 1859–60, Morris camped in Wimbledon with Edward Burne-Jones, D.G. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Frederick Leighton,

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32 33 34 35

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notes to pages 39–42 John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and G.F. Watts, and marched at one point through London in uniform (MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life, 170; Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 1:161). William Morris Gallery, Mackail notebooks, 1849. MacCarthy, A Life, 24. Morris, “The Boy Farms at Fault,” in MacCarthy, A Life, 24. Harvey and Press, William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain, 24, 87 An account of this lead- and arsenic-mining operation may be found in Boos and O’Sullivan, “The Devonshire Great Consols.” This was “The Eastern Question Association”; see A.J.P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers. Morris’s brother Arthur, a colonel in the 60th Royal Rifles, later served in the sack of Peking. See Morris to Emma Shelton Morris, 27 December 1885, CL 2:506. On 3 March 1881 Morris wrote Jane that he would attend a reunion of four of the siblings: “Tomorrow I go down to Hadham to see the last of Arthur before he goes to India: lucky he, that he didn’t have to run down the hill at Majuba, though I see that his old battalion seem to have run the fastest & so lost fewest men” (Morris to Jane Morris, 3 March 1881, CL 2:29). Morris to Rosalind Francis Howard, 20 August 1874, CL 1:230. Italics mine. See Morris, “England and the Turks,” in AWS 2:483–7. Comments on Rossetti’s epistolary references to Morris appear in Boos, “Old Controversies, New Texts: Two Recent Books on Pre-Raphaelitism,” 172–85, and in Boos, “The Year’s Work in Victorian Poetry” (2003–10). Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, 21 August 1883, CL 2:217. Morris, “Why We Celebrate the Commune of Paris,” in Commonweal, 3, 62, 89–90; reprinted in Salmon, ed., Political Writings, 233. Morris, “Commercial War,” 52–3. Morris, “Art under Plutocracy,” CW 23:186. See also “The Depression of Trade”: “But in a condition of things where all produce as all consume, peace is possible … and only in a condition of peace can we make the most of the gifts of nature, instead of wasting them as we do now” (Morris in LeMire, Unpublished Lectures, 133). Morris, “Socialism,” 33. Morris, “Misery,” in AWS 2:156, 158. Morris, “Art under Plutocracy,” CW 23:172–3. Morris, “What We Have to Look For,” 42.

notes to pages 42–5 40 41 42 43

44 45

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Ibid., 44–5. Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:210–11. Whitla, “The Mosque Rising,” 43–82. Morris, “The Mosque Rising,” lines 276–81 (italics mine). Morris’s response here is reminiscent of Henry Hart Milman’s account: “No barbarians, no infidel, no Saracen, ever perpetuated such wanton and cold-blooded atrocities of cruelty as the wearers of the Cross of Christ (who, it is said, had fallen on their knees and burst into a pious hymn at the first views of the Holy City), on the capture of that city. Murder was mercy, rape tenderness, simple plunder the mere assertion of the conqueror’s right. Children were seized by their legs, some of them plucked from their mother’s breasts and dashed against the walls, or whirled from the battlements. Others were obliged to leap from the walls, some tortured, roasted by slow fires. They ripped up prisoners to see if they had swallowed gold. Of 70,000 Saracens there were not left enough to bury the dead: poor Christians were hired to perform the office. Every one surprised in the Temple was slaughtered, till the reek from the dead bodies drove away the slayers. The Jews were burned alive in their synagogue. Even the day after, all who had taken refuge on the roofs … were hewn to pieces; still later the few Saracens who had escaped, not excepting babes of a year old, were put to death” (Milman, “Incidents of the Crusades,” in History of Latin Christianity 3:238–9). Milman’s account in turn follows that of Edward Gibbon. See Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of Rome, 6:75–6. Morris, “The Mosque Rising,” lines 171–4. Morris’s university reading included J.M. Neale’s History of the Holy Eastern Church, J.C.L. Sismondi’s A History of the Fall of the Roman Empire, H.H. Milman’s History of Latin Christianity, and of course Gibbon. (Mackail, The Life of William Morris 1:37–8) Morris, “Equality,” 59–60. Morris, “Communism, i.e. Property,” 18. Ruskin, “The Lamp of Memory,” 131. Morris, “The Mosque Rising,” lines 293–300. Morris, “The Story of the Unknown Church,” CW 1:149–58. Morris, “Churches of North France: The Shadows of Amiens,” CW 1:349–66. On this, see Boos, “Socialist Aesthetics and the Shadows of Amiens.” Purkis, William Morris, Burne-Jones and French Gothic, 21, 24.

300 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

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notes to pages 45–50 Morris, “The Story of the Unknown Church,” CW 1:158. Ibid., 149. Ibid. Morris, “Apology,” CW 3:2, lines 39–42. On this, see Boos, “‘The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice,’” 58–86. Morris, “Apology,” CW 3:1, line 19. Morris, “L’Envoi,” CW 6:333, lines 111–12. Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, trans., The Story of the Volsungs, CW 7:286. Ibid. Morris to Franklin Peterson, 12 September 1894, AWS 1:475. Morris to Charles Eliot Norton, 21 December 1869, CL 1:99. Morris, “Prefatory Verse Homage to Morris’s and Eirikr Magnusson’s Translation of the Eyrbyggia Saga,” in Mackail, Life of William Morris, 1:263–4. Friedrich Engels, for example, in a review he published under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald, had written in 1840 that “all of us … feel in ourselves the same zest for action, the same defiance of convention which drove Siegfried from his father’s castle … we want to overrun the barriers of prudence and fight for the crown of life, action. The philistines have supplied giants and dragons too, particularly in the sphere of church and state” (“Siegfried’s Native Town,” 197). See Bennett, “Riot, Romance and Revolution,” 25. Morris, “The Contention Betwixt the Queens,” Sigurd the Volsung, Bk 3, CW 12:210. Ugolnik, “The Victorian Skald,” 39–67. Tucker, “All for the Tale,” 373–94. Morris, “Of the Slaying of the Niblung Kings,” Sigurd, Bk 4, CW 12:299. Watts, “Unsigned Review,” in Faulkner, ed., The Critical Heritage, 232; Ugolnik, “The Victorian Skald,” 63. News from Nowhere, CW 16:129–30. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 134. Ibid. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 200.

notes to pages 50–3 78 79 80 81

82 83 84

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90 91 92 93 94 95

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Ibid., 194. Ibid., 203. Ingelow, Poems, 1–9. Timo, “‘An Icelandic Tale Re-Told,’” 12–16. Morris would also have had an English-language version available, since it was translated by Arthur M. Reeves as Lad and Lass: A Story of Life in Iceland. Silver, “Socialism Internalized,” in Boos and Silver, eds, Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, 117–26. Presumably this war is one between conquerors from the south and northern German tribes, since “the Roman” is mentioned at one point. “The values Morris and his Socialist comrades espoused are here articulated in dramatic and inspiring form, and with an immediacy and conclusiveness that nineteenth-century political propaganda could never achieve” (Bennett, “Riot, Romance and Revolution,” 33). Morris, The Sundering Flood, CW 21:135–41. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 51. Boos, “Gender Division and Political Allegory in the Last Romances,” 12–23. Dymond, An Inquiry into the Accordancy, 77. A parallel may be found in Morris’s view that truth is the first casualty of parliamentary politics (into which Godrick is later co-opted). See Morris, “Equality,” 51–70; “Socialism,” 19–35; and “What We Have to Look For,” 41–51. Morris, The Sundering Flood, CW 21:146. Ibid., 181–2. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 148. As is consistent with his views on the association of religion and class hierarchy, Morris’s last romance comments obliquely on arbitrary features of medieval religion; when Osberne’s mentor Steelhead takes the wounded Osberne to a hermit leech, for example, Steelhead tells the latter, “Thou hast in thy mouth, my friend, deal of holiness that I know nought of. But … if thou heal my friend verily I will call thee Holy” (Morris, The Sundering Flood, CW 21:189). In chapter 64, Elfhild and the Carline seek aid from a monastery, they receive help, but only after evincing that they are people of means and donating an expensive offering. Ibid., 250.

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97 Ibid., 246. 98 Morris, A Dream, CW 16:265. 99 Ibid., 231. chapter two 1 A much earlier draft of this article was presented as a conference paper, “Last Illumination: The Meaning of William Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite Aeneid,” at the symposium on “William Morris: Radicalism and Aesthetics” at the 2010 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Montreal. My thanks are due to Michelle Weinroth, who contributed greatly to the shaping and guidance of this chapter’s final form, as well as to Paul Leduc Browne, Elizabeth Helsinger, and the other contributors to the symposium and book for their generous and helpful suggestions. 2 Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2:156. 3 Aside from some brief discussion in larger works, the commissioned 1934 Brinton Cox essay, and a short descriptive 1979 article by Ulla Mickelsson, it seems that until now the Aeneid manuscript has never been studied at any length in print. 4 Around the time he was setting up Kelmscott Press, Morris finally sold the unfinished Aeneid manuscript to Charles Fairfax Murray (by this time an eminent art dealer and collector). Murray undertook the completion of Morris’s vision, resumed the transfer of Burne-Jones’s designs into the manuscript, and recruited Louise Powell to provide the painted decoration, as well as the esteemed calligrapher Graily Hewitt to write the remaining six chapters and to add the lettering in blue and gold. 5 Of the oft-times sharp criticism of his Virgil translation, Morris commented in a letter to Henry Buxton Foreman (who had read proofs for the book) that “if I alter anything ’tis out of respect to my friends to Virgil & to myself, and not for the gaggling of critics: the more they gaggle the less I shall care” (Morris to Henry Buxton Foreman, 14 September 1875, CL 1:270). 6 The illumination was conceived as a landmark achievement from the beginning: like the Chaucer, there was nothing accidental about its fame: the project is described as a coming triumph and an influential work from its first mentions in letters by Morris and Burne-Jones. 7 See May Morris’s description in CW 11:xxviij–xxix. 8 The centrality of classical Latin and Greek texts for educated Victorians

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is difficult to imagine today, when familiarity with Latin and Ancient Greek is such a rare accomplishment. See Henderson, The Letters of William Morris, Appendix 2, 388–9. Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs. Ibid., 1. Martindale, The Cambridge Companion to Virgil. The designs for the twelve half-page miniatures (one for the frontispiece of each of the poem’s twelve books) leap ahead of the finished calligraphy. Notes by Burne-Jones in the Aeneid manuscript’s pages indicate precisely where each illustration belongs in the text, with only one exception. See Christie’s, The William Morris Aeneid, 30. For an illustrated overview of the full series, see Fröhlich, “The Perseus Series,” 103–35. Morris, Aeneid manuscript, 1: “Venus meets Aeneas on the shores of Libya.” See Christie’s The Estelle Doheny Collection Part VI, 91, and Christie’s, The William Morris Aeneid, cover and 19; see also a detail and Burne-Jones’s pencil drawing, 32, 33. Morris, Aeneids of Virgil, Book I: CW 11: 12, lines 407–9. Morris, Aeneid manuscript, 29. “Aeneas flees from Troy with his father, son, and his wife Creusa” is unfortunately not reproduced in either Christie’s catalogue. It can be seen at http://tinyurl.com/92jj2f3. Ibid., 211. “Venus presents Aeneas with a gift of arms.” See Christie’s The Estelle Doheny Collection Part VI, 97; Christie’s, The William Morris Aeneid, 27. Even incomplete and imperfect, the Aeneid manuscript is a testament to Morris’s oft-repeated edict that illustration and ornament must be part of the harmonious whole of the page. Morris, Aeneid manuscript, 238: “Turnus visited by the Goddess Iris.” See Christie’s, The Estelle Doheny Collection Part VI, 98; and Christie’s, The William Morris Aeneid, 36. Ibid., 268: “Aeneas slays Mezentius.” See Christie’s, The William Morris Aeneid, 35, and Burne-Jones’s pencil design for the miniature (from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), 34. Ibid., 44: “Cassandra chained” historiated initial. See Christie’s The Estelle Doheny Collection Part VI, 44; and Christie’s, The William Morris Aeneid, 31, alongside Burne-Jones’s pencil design. Ibid., 50: “Helen hiding at the doors of the temple of Vesta” historiated initial. See Christie’s, The William Morris Aeneid, 38, alongside BurneJones’s pencil design.

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24 Ibid., 26: “Cupid embraces Dido” historiated initial. See Christie’s The Estelle Doheny Collection Part VI, 26; and Christie’s, The William Morris Aeneid, 7, 24. 25 Ibid., 181: “Lavinia, her hair ablaze.” See Christie’s The Estelle Doheny Collection Part VI, 92. 26 For a remarkably thorough paratextual analysis of framing devices and narrative, see Whatling, “Narrative Art in Northern Europe.” I have elected not to use his specific terminology here, but his categorizations (such as chronotopic and conversational frames) could greatly clarify the discourse of framing as ontological marker if their use were more widespread. http://www.medievalart.org.uk/PhD/Contents.html. 27 Morris, Aeneid manuscript, 113: “Iris in disguise incites the women of Troy to burn the ships.” See Christie’s The Estelle Doheny Collection Part VI, 13; and Christie’s, The William Morris Aeneid, 22; the final Burne-Jones pencil design, 23, 41. 28 Morris, Aeneids of Virgil, Book V, CW 11:105–6, lines 660–2. 29 This drawing is privately owned, but reproduced in Lochnan et al., The Earthly Paradise, 74–5, and fig. A:26 on page 75. 30 Morris, Aeneid manuscript, 86: “Dido, maddened with grief at the departure of Aeneas, falls on his sword in the bed they shared.” See Christie’s The Estelle Doheny Collection Part VI, 86; and Christie’s, The William Morris Aeneid, 20; Burne-Jones pencil design, 21. 31 Morris, Aeneids of Virgil Book IV: CW 11:71, line 169. 32 This 1874 drawing is held at the Fitzwilliam Museum and was never copied into the manuscript, but it is reproduced in Duncan Robinson, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and the Kelmscott Chaucer, 46, fig. 9. 33 Morris, Aeneids of Virgil, Book IV, CW 11:71. 34 Aeneid manuscript, 86: “Dido, maddened with grief at the departure of Aeneas, falls on his sword in the bed they shared.” 35 From Old English bæ-lfy-r funeral fire: bæ-l pyre + fy-r fire. See Aeneids of Virgil, Book IV: CW 11:85, line 661. 36 Morris, Unjust War: To the Working Men of England, in The Letters of William Morris to His Family and Friends, edited by Philip Henderson, 388–9. Seeing parallels between the British Empire of the Victorian era and ancient Rome, Morris rejected the assertion of his day that Britain was comparatively philanthropic, or practising a form of defensive imperialism. Eric Adler, for example, quotes R.F. Betts: “When comparisons were made between the ideologies of Roman and British imperialism, it

notes to pages 74–6

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was frequently asserted that Rome had been tyrannical and exploitative, whereas Britain was frequently humanitarian and commercial. Therefore, the two empires were forced to part company in the minds of most imperialists over policy” (Adler, “Late Victorian and Edwardian Views of Rome,” 197n58). There is also the possibility of another connection between Morris’s translation work with Eiríkr Magnússon and his vision of Virgil’s saga. Hélène Tétrel identifies a tradition of medieval Icelandic manuscripts retelling the Roman story, often in imitation of the post-Galfridian Brut and Historia Romana, connecting the lineage of Troy to Scandinavian heroes and so claiming Aeneas as a proto-Icelandic warrior (Tétrel, “Trojan Origins and the Use of the Aeneid,” 490–514). Morris’s use of archaic English language in his original verse and translations has been given critical attention since his lifetime, much of it dismissive or hostile. The sharp division of opinion over the quality and suitability of Morris’s Aeneid translation continued for decades. In one 1909 textbook, it is confidently claimed that “there are many translations from Virgil, the best in the English being by William Morris and the best in the German by Richard Wagner” (Holst, The Teachers’ and Pupils’ Cyclopaedia, 5:2035–6). By contrast, the preface for a 1907 translation of the classic sneers: “Nor is William Morris’ attempt to devise a new metre anything but disappointing. It is surprising that so delightfully endowed a poet should have so often missed the music of Virgil’s verse as he has done in his translation, and the archaisms with which his work abounds, though they might be suitable in a translation of Homer, are only a source of irritation in the case of Virgil” (Maine and Taylor, The Aeneid of Virgil, xiv). Whitla, “William Morris’s Translation of Homer’s Iliad,” 75. Riddehough, “William Morris’s Translation of the Aeneid,” 338. Whitla,“William Morris’s Translation of Homer’s Iliad,” 78. May Morris, CW 11:xxi. Ennis, Sigurd by William Morris, vii–ix. Riddehough, “William Morris’s Translation of the Aeneid,” 344. Riddehough, “William Morris’s Translation of the Odyssey,” 558. Whitla,“William Morris’s Translation of Homer’s Iliad,” 101. Ibid., 81. Whitla’s analysis of Morris’s translation of Homer applies mutatis mutandis to Morris’s translation of Virgil: “Morris reads Homer not as ‘noble’ but as an epic from the people, and hence the act of translation

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notes to pages 76–89 is a political act of cultural recuperation – of the voice of the people long dead to speak to the current age” (ibid., 84). Kocmanová, The Aesthetic Purpose of William Morris, 88. Morris, A Speech by Mr Morris from the Cambridge Chronicle, 7. Morris, The Decorative Arts: Their Relation to Modern Life And Progress. Morris, “On the Woodcuts of Gothic Books,” AWS 1:320. Ibid., 336. Arscott, Interlacings, 62. Morris, Aeneids of Virgil, Book XI, CW 11:96. Lind, Vergil’s Aeneid, ix. Talbot, “William Morris and the Bear,” 96. Morris, The House of the Wolfings, CW 14:70. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 162. Morris, The Sundering Flood, CW 21:82–3. Salmon, “‘The Down-Trodden Radical’: William Morris’s Pre-Socialist Ideology,” 41. Boos,“Dystopian Violence,” 20. chapter three

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

Morris to Louisa Macdonald Baldwin, 22 June 1872, CL 1:162. Morris, “Frank’s Sealed Letter,” CW 1:309. Ibid. Morris to the editor of Pall Mall Gazette, 2 February 1886, CL 2:517. May Morris, “Introduction,” CW 22:xvii. Morris, “The Society of the Future,” AWS 2:464–5. Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:149, 151. Ibid., 100. Buzard, “Ethnography as Interruption,” 47. See also Brantlinger, “Morris’s Socialist Anti-Novel,” 35–49, and Silver, “Socialism Internalized,” in Boos and Silver, eds, Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, 117–26. MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life, ix–x. May Morris, “Morris as a Writer. Part VI. Later Years,” AWS 1:506. Hodgson, The Romances of William Morris, 10. See also Silver, The Romance of William Morris. Barron, English Medieval Romance, 7.

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Silver, “Socialism Internalized,” 126. Barron, The Arthur of the English, 65. Vinaver, Form and Meaning in Medieval Romance, 12. Morris, The Glittering Plain, CW 14:324; The Wood Beyond the World, CW 17:129–30; The Water of the Wondrous Isles, CW 20:387. Vinaver, Form and Meaning in Medieval Romance, 12. Morris, The Sundering Flood, CW 21:196. Talbot, “‘Whilom as tells the tale,’” 17. Morris, “Art and Socialism,” CW 23:199. Buzard, “Ethnography as Interruption,” 465. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 105. Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance,” 73, 74. Ibid., 69; see Bennett, “Riot, Romance and Revolution,” 22–35. Morris, The Wood Beyond the World, CW 17:1–2; The Well at the World’s End, CW 18:3. May Morris, Introduction to The Wood Beyond the World, Child Christopher, Old French Romances, CW 17:xvi. Morris to William Bowden, 3 January 1891, CL 3:252. Morris, “The End and the Means,” AWS 2:422; “The Message of the March Wind,” CW 9:123. Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, 28 April 1885, CL 2:426. Morris, “Art and Socialism,” CW 23:214. Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2:97. Frye, The Secular Scripture, 53. Morris, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, CW 20:52, 51. Morris, The Wood Beyond the World, CW 17:21. Morris, The Well at the World’s End, CW 18:13. Morris, “How We Live and How We Might Live,” CW 23:26, 25. Morris, “The Society of the Future,” AWS 2:453–4. Beer, The Romance, 79; Morton, The English Utopia, 11. Morris, “Communism,” CW 23:266; “The Ends and the Means,” AWS 2:432. Morris, “The Ends and the Means,” AWS 2:420. Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:211. Abensour, “William Morris: The Politics of Romance,” 145, 146. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 193. Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain, CW 14:290; The Wood Beyond the World, CW 17:5; Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, CW 17:172.

308 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

notes to pages 96–104 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 68. Morris, The Well at the World’s End, CW 18:212. Morris, The Well at the World’s End, CW 19:86. Ibid., 99. Silver, The Romance of William Morris, 162. Morris, The Wood Beyond the World, CW 17:114. Ibid., 115. Morris, The Well at the World’s End, CW 19:42. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:209. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 110. Waithe, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers, 197. Morris, The Glittering Plain, CW 14:297; Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, CW 17:251. Morris, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, CW 20:262; The Sundering Flood, CW 21:184. Morris, The Well at the World’s End, CW 19:137. Morris, The Wood Beyond the World, CW 17:128. Morris, The Sundering Flood, CW 21:246; The Well at the World’s End, CW 19:243. Morris, A Dream of John Ball, CW 16:230. Shaw, “Morris as I Knew Him,” AWS 2:xxix. Levitas, “For Utopia,” 28. Morris, “How I Became a Socialist,” CW 23:277. Morris to Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, 8 June 1891, CL 3:310. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:3. Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, 3 September 1883, CL 2:222, 223 Morris, “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” CW 23:99. Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing,” CW 22:176. Ibid. Morris, “The Water of the Wondrous Isles,” CW 20:346. Ibid., 347, 351. Ibid., 279. Ibid., 290. Ibid., 313. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:3 Morris, The Sundering Flood, CW 21:242. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 190–1, 245. Morris, “Communism,” CW 23:266, 269, 270. My italics.

notes to pages 104–7 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

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Williams, Resources of Hope, 322. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 305. Silver, The Romance of William Morris, 157. Paul Thompson, The Work of William Morris, 178–9. Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:151. Kinna, The Art of Socialism, 185. Morris, “The Aims of Art,” CW 23:97. chapter four

1 Goode, “William Morris and the Dream of Revolution,” 239. In Goode’s acute argument, Morris turned to romance rather than realism “to explore in dramatic terms what it means to the experiencing mind to bring socialist values to an understanding of historical change” (247). See also John Plotz, who argues that for Morris romance was a “socialist critique of the novel’s dependence upon difference”; his romances “relentlessly conceptualized” a “refusal of personhood” (Plotz, “Nowhere and Everywhere,” 943, 949). 2 A number of the chants were republished in Poems by the Way (1891), Morris’s one late collection of lyric poetry, which gathered together a number of short occasional poems written over the preceding several decades. 3 While there has been some critical interest in Chants in recent years – particularly Christopher Waters’s valuable work excavating their continuing popularity as political song – they are rarely considered as part of Morris’s lyric oeuvre. The best single discussion of Chants is Christopher Waters, “Morris’s ‘Chants’ and Socialist Culture,” 127–46. On music and socialism, see also Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914, 97–130, and Salmon, “The Communist PoetLaureate,” 31–40. Critics who have written about the chants as part of Poems by the Way have of course acknowledged their lyric forms, though here too the emphasis has been on thematic and imagistic continuities with other poems in the volume. Among the best of these discussions are Latham’s introduction to a recent edition of Poems by the Way, v–xxxiv, and Goodwin, “The Summation of a Poetic Career: Poems by the Way,” 397–410. 4 Besides Goode, on the convergence of aesthetics and politics in Morris’s late romances, see Spear, “Political Questing,” 175–93; Silver, The Romance of William Morris, especially 108–92; the essays collected in Boos

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notes to pages 107–11 and Silver, Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris; Skoblow, Paradise Dislocated; Weinroth, “Redesigning the Language of Social Change,” 37–63. On Morris’s later epics, see Tucker’s excellent discussions of both poems and translations in Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 512–22, and his “All for the Tale,” 373–432. Unlike Shelley or even Burns, Morris chose to speak in the first person plural as one of the fellowship he invoked – “as one of the oppressed,” but also as one of those to whom socialism offered hope; see Waters, “Morris’s ‘Chants,’” 141, quoting J. Bruce Glasier, Socialism in Song, 5. But Brogan also insists on rhythm as itself poetic action, not simply the vehicle of meaning: “The rhythm of a line is not an imitation of a rhythm in life or even in speech … it is an enactment of a rhythm that is delivered for cognitive processing at the same time that lexical or emotive or imagistic information is delivered.” See Preminger and Brogan, The New Princeton Encyclopedia, 986. See Tucker, Epic, 512–13. This seems to me an excellent way of thinking about the pronounced medial and final stresses and pauses in Morris’s verse more generally. For the way our preference for four-stress lines arranged in four-line stanzas can encourage us to hear the short lines in ballad metre (4343 or 4443) as four-stress lines with a final unsounded beat, see also Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, 58–62. On Scott’s “Lay” and its play with the oral-print border, see Tucker, Epic, 121–7; also McLane, Balladeering, esp. 153–68. MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life, 383–4. Morris, “Wake London Lads,” qtd in MacCarthy, A Life, 384. Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2:83–4. Broadhurst, quoted in MacCarthy, A Life, 384. It was first published in the February 1885 issue of Commonweal. See MacCarthy, A Life, 510, and Waters, “Morris’s ‘Chants’ and Socialist Culture,” 140, for accounts of its performance and popularity. Morris, “The March of the Workers,” CW 24:410, lines 1–4. Ibid., lines 9–12. See Florence Boos’s chapter in this volume. “Wrath, and hope, and wonder”: Morris had very ambivalent feelings about violence; while accepting the necessity of revolution, he was not ready to endorse violence before the work of educating and organizing had well begun. Yet, of course, the energies channelled by socialist bands and chanting marchers did lead participants into scenes of violence, if not necessarily of their own making. For a somewhat different view, see Florence Boos’s chapter in this volume.

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17 On Morris’s care to argue from specifics, avoiding vague generalities or sentimentality with concrete details on what distinguishes his songs from many others written at the time (and earlier), see also Waters, “Morris’s ‘Chants,’” 136–7, 141. 18 On the links between Chants and Chartist poetry, see Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition. In Republican Politics and English Poetry, Kuduk-Weiner discusses the Chartist chants but not Morris’s. 19 “The Voice of Toil,” CW 9:178, lines 37–40. 20 Armstrong, “Hegel: The Time of Rhythm, the Time of Rhyme.” See Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:1011–34. 21 Morris, “Voice of Toil,” CW 9:177, line 1. 22 Ibid., 177. 23 Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:908; Armstrong, “Hegel,” 4. 24 This reflexive perception is not, Jarvis rightly notes, necessarily propositional. See Jarvis, “Prosody as Cognition,” 11. It cannot be separated from the body and its affects and, indeed, he suggests, is perhaps better described as “the feeling of thinking.” See Jarvis, “Musical Thinking,” 69. 25 Armstrong, “Hegel,” 5. See Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:1022, 1023. 26 Armstrong, “Hegel,” 10–12. 27 Ibid., 7–8; Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:1023. 28 Armstrong, “Hegel,” 7; the italics are hers. 29 Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” in E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds, The Works of John Ruskin 10:197. Morris revered and often cited “The Nature of Gothic,” which he republished at the Kelmscott Press. 30 Ibid., 196. 31 See MacCarthy, A Life, 99, 200. 32 Morris, The Earthly Paradise, “Prologue,” CW 3:3, line 2. 33 On Morris’s belief in the restorative effects of rhythmic tale-telling on a modern sensorium, with particular reference to The Earthly Paradise, see Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts, 199–217. 34 The potentially unifying effects of rhythm reach back to what some have argued are lyric’s most important antecedents in song, charm, riddle, and chant when performed in public as civic or religious ritual. Ralph Johnson, countering what he sees as post-romantic modernism’s misguided confusion of lyric with first-person meditational poetry, points to classical lyric’s dependence on real or imagined performance (W.R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric, 1–7; see also Nagel, Poetry as Performance). Lyric’s dialogue between “I” and “you” was intended to unite the minds and

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notes to pages 116–20 bodies of multiple singers and listeners. Andrew Welsh similarly argues for lyric’s roots in the songs, charms, and chants central to social rituals in pre-literate cultures. Welsh draws direct connections between these and later, post-literate sacred chant, or secular chant in children’s games and adult work songs (where rhythmic chanting coordinates repetitive physical activity for participants); see Welsh, The Roots of Lyric, esp. 162–89. Protest songs, he suggests, are another instance of secular chant, uniting minds and bodies through a shared beat. Indeed, in both British and American collections of protest song made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several of Morris’s Chants were among the most popular. See Waters, “Morris’s ‘Chants,’” 133, 145. Charles H. Kerr, who compiled the first American collection of socialist and labour songs, Socialist Songs with Music, included five of Morris’s Chants – more than from any other single writer, including Shelley. “The Voice of Toil,” CW 9:177, lines 7–8. “The Day is Coming,” CW 9:180, lines 2–4. See Helsinger, “Song’s Fictions,” 141–59. See Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts, 199–217. Tucker sees this play of desire as all too successfully appealing to the consuming desires of bourgeois Victorian readers, the purchasers of Morris wallpapers; hence the poem’s popularity (Tucker, Epic, 426–36). “The Message” continued to be included in each subsequent printing of Chants and was included in Poems by the Way. Pilgrims, which Morris always intended to revise and complete, was not republished in his lifetime. See Salmon, “The Serialization of The Pilgrims of Hope,” 14–25, and Boos, “Narrative Design in The Pilgrims of Hope,” 147–66. “The Message of the March Wind,” CW 24:370–71, lines 33–4, 65–8. See Goode, “Morris and the Dream of Revolution”; Silver, The Romance of William Morris; Holzman, “Encouragement and Warning of History,” 98–116; and Weinroth, “Redesigning the Language of Social Change,” 37–63. Morris, A Dream, CW 16:224. Walsingham, Historia Anglicanae, 2:33–4, qtd in Holzman, “Encouragement and Warning of History,” 103–4. The description of these verses as “dark” comes from Holinshed’s Chronicles, also qtd in Holzman, “Encouragement and Warning,” 103. Morris, A Dream, CW 16:220. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 230.

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47 Morris to James Frederick Henderson, 6 November 1885, CL 2:483. Latham quotes this passage to emphasize Morris’s interest in language itself, and particularly his turn to an English that restores Germanic and Anglo-Saxon concreteness, bluntness, and force to an overly Latinized (post-Norman) literary vocabulary. See Latham, “Introduction” to Poems by the Way, 6, and his chapter in this volume. 48 Morris, A Dream, CW 16:257. 49 Morris, The Sundering Flood, CW 21:109. 50 Morris first introduced such songs in The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains, romances of the late 1880s depicting clanor gens-based communities in early northern Europe, but he continued to use them in less explicitly historical later romances. They recur in The Story of the Glittering Plain, the first romance written after he left the Socialist League, and the posthumously published Sundering Flood. Medieval-European-style songs are also found in The Roots (set somewhat later than Wolfings) and in the otherwise historically non-specific The Well at the World’s End. 51 Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain, CW 14:292. 52 For the charms invoked by Birdalone and Osberne, see The Water of the Wondrous Isles, CW 20:35, 40, and The Sundering Flood, CW 21:27. 53 Thanks to Florence Boos for this suggestion. chapter five 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

“Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,” CW 1:43, lines 212, 218–19. Morris to James Frederick Henderson, 6 November 1885, CL 2:483. Chorley, Review of The Defence of Guenevere, 428. “How I Became a Socialist,” CW 23:277. Crane, William Morris to Whistler, 66. “Education towards Revolution seems to me to express in three words what our policy should be; towards that New Birth of Society which we know must come, and which, therefore, we must strive to help forward so that it may come with as little confusion and suffering as may be” (Morris, “Our Policy,” 18, in Salmon, ed., Political Writings, 122). Yeats, Preface to Cuchulaine, 4. Chorley, Review of The Defence of Guenevere, 428. Morris, “Gothic Revival I,” in LeMire, ed., Unpublished Lectures, 67. Chorley, Review of The Defence of Guenevere, 427. Pater, “Poems,” 300.

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notes to pages 127–35

12 Matthew Arnold, “Summer Night,” line 37. 13 “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done … Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden” (Sidney, Defence of Poesie, 956–7). 14 Morris to Cormell Price, July 1856, CL 1:28. 15 Pater, Renaissance, 199. 16 Ruskin, Works, 7:321. 17 Pater, Renaissance, 177. 18 Swinburne, “Mr. George Meredith,” 632. 19 Swinburne, “Charles Baudelaire,” 998. 20 Swinburne, “Review of Hugo,” 387. 21 Morris, “The Worker’s Share of Art,” 18. 22 Morris, “Concerning Geffray Teste Noire,” CW 1:79. 23 Ibid., 81. 24 Morris, “Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,” CW 1:61, line 745; “Haystack in the Floods,” CW 1:128, line 153. 25 Morris, “Summer Dawn,” CW 1:144. 26 Morris explains how art helps us to maintain our faith in a better future: “The repulsion to pessimism … is, I think, natural to a man busily engaged in the arts” (“Preface to Signs of Change,” CW 23:2). 27 Morris, The Earthly Paradise, Prologue, CW 3:1. 28 Morris, “How I Became a Socialist,” CW 23:279. 29 Ibid., CW 23:277–8. 30 Ibid., CW 23:280. 31 Ibid. 32 Dickens, Hard Times, 65. 33 “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (Pater, Renaissance, 86). 34 Morris, “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” CW 23:119. 35 Morris, “The Reward of Labour,” 244. 36 Ibid., 245. 37 Ibid., 250. 38 Ibid., 252. 39 Ibid., 251. 40 Ibid., 254. 41 Ibid., 255. 42 Ibid., 254. 43 Ibid., 255–6. 44 Anonymous, Unsigned Review of The Roots of the Mountains, 208.

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45 Anonymous, Unsigned Review of The Wood Beyond the World, 52–3. 46 Morris to the editor, 20 July 1895, Spectator, 81, in May Morris, The Introductions, 2:499. 47 Anonymous, Unsigned Review of The Story of the Glittering Plain, 102–3. 48 Latham, “To Frame a Desire,” 155–72. 49 See Morris and Bax, Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome. 50 Ballantyne, “Wardour Street,” 585–94. 51 See George Saintsbury, who praises Morris’s Wardour Street prose as a remarkably unmetrical, natural, and conversational prose tinted with the colour of romance (A History of English Prose Rhythm, 435–7); and John Drinkwater, who praises the “Wardour Street diction” for providing the peculiar, cumulative power of another era (Victorian Poetry, 169–73). 52 Morris, The Wood Beyond the World, CW 17:12. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 124. 55 Morris, The Sundering Flood, 165. 56 Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:151. 57 See my discussion of Morris’s reading of Aristotelian metaphor in “‘Between Hell and England,’” 193–208. 58 Latham, “Haunted Texts,” 18. 59 For a parallel discussion of the shift from lyric intensity (Helsinger) to the relaxed and leisurely pace of a mature Morrisian aesthetic, see chapter 10. In the latter, Weinroth points to the shift from the intensity of metaphoric colour schemes in Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite poetry (1850s) to the mellow chromatic hues of his wallpaper motifs (1860s–70s). Seen together, Latham’s and Weinroth’s parallel treatments of Morris’s evolving aesthetic show with considerable consistency that his altered style (in language and in design) reflects not the abandonment of radical politics, but its intensification in a new key. 60 Morris, Child Christopher, CW 17:133. 61 Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, 21 August 1883, CL 2:217. 62 Morris, “Textiles,” AWS 1:245. 63 Morris, “Woodpecker,” CW 9:192. 64 Morris, “Gothic Revival I,” 70. 65 Morris, “Early England,” 158. 66 Ibid., 163. 67 Ibid.

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68 Ibid., 167. 69 As William Moron Payne, the reviewer of The Glittering Plain observed, the Latin element is all but banished. See Payne, Review of The Glittering Plain, 274–5. 70 Morris, “Early England,” 176. 71 Morris to James Frederick Henderson, 6 November 1885, CL 2:483. 72 Fanon, “On National Culture,” 176–79. 73 Morris, “Gothic Revival I,” 54–5. 74 Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” in E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds, The Works of John Ruskin, 10:187. 75 Morris, “Gothic Revival I,” 58. 76 Ibid., 65. 77 Ibid., 68. 78 Ibid., 65. 79 Ibid., 66. 80 Ibid., 55. 81 Ibid., 56. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 82. 84 Ibid., 71. 85 Morris, “Early England,” 164–5. 86 Ibid., 165. 87 Ibid., 176. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 176–7. 90 Ibid., 88. 91 Morris, “Gothic Revival II,” 91. 92 Morris, “Art: A Serious Thing,” 53. 93 Ibid., 51–2. 94 Ibid., 44. 95 Ibid., 48. 96 Ibid., 45. 97 Ibid. 98 Morris, “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” CW 23:109. 99 Morris, “Early England,” 168–70. 100 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 186. 101 Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain, CW 14:211. 102 Morris, The Wood Beyond the World, CW 17:7. 103 Morris, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, CW 20:38.

notes to pages 146–53

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104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

Ibid., 40. Ibid., 363. Morris, The Sundering Flood, CW 21:49. Ibid., 61. Morris, “Gothic Revival I,” 57. Morris, “Early England,” 177. Ibid. See Tennyson’s “Gareth and Lynette” of the Idylls of the King, in Ricks, ed., Tennyson: A Selected Edition, 272–4: the city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built for ever. 112 Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain, CW 14. chapter six 1 I would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of the staff and curators of the Huntington Library in San Marino, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, and the British Library in London. A substantial portion of the section entitled “From Translator to Printer: The Order of Chivalry Volume” was first published in the “Bibliographical Headnote” to my electronic edition of Morris’s translation “The Ordination of Chivalry,” for the William Morris Online Edition. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of Florence Boos and the William Morris Archive. 2 See Kelvin, “Patterns in Time,” 140–68; also Kirchhoff, “William Morris’s Anti-Books,” 93–100. 3 Frankel, “‘A Thing Most to Be Longed For’: William Morris’s Textual Paradise,” 249–79. 4 See, for instance, the exhibition catalogue edited by Diane Waggoner, “The Beauty of Life”: William Morris and the Art of Design. 5 Waithe, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers, 90. 6 Ibid., 96. 7 Morris, “Architecture and History,” CW 22:300. 8 McGann, “A Thing to Mind,” 75. 9 Rollison, “The Kelmscott Shelley and Material Poetics,” 55–73; and Frankel, “‘A Thing Most to Be Longed For,’” 252–3. 10 Morris, qtd in Peterson, ed., The Ideal Book, passim.

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notes to pages 154–9

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Whitla, “‘Sympathetic Translation’ and the ‘Scribe’s Capacity,’” 29. Caxton, The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, 73. De Voragine, The Golden Legend (1892), 2:1285. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press, 92. Wardle, “Memorials of William Morris,” 1897, British Library, bl ms Add. 45350, 12. Henry Halliday Sparling and contemporary journalists established the myth of Morris as the Caxton of the small-press movement, a line picked up later on by Joseph Dunlap; Susan Ashbrook even suggests that “Morris saw himself as the heir of Caxton,” although I have come across no particular statement by Morris on the subject (Ashbrook, “William Morris and the Ideal Book,” 286). Whether Morris consciously exploited this adulatory parallel – that is, whether the emphasis on Caxton was in some way a Kelmscott branding decision – is of course impossible to tell. It seems unlikely. Peterson, A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press, xxvi. Llull, The Order of Chivalry, trans. Caxton, with L’Ordène de Chevalerie and The Ordination of Knighthood, trans. Morris and ed. F.S. Ellis, 151. Morris, qtd in Peterson, Bibliography, 27. Sparling, The Kelmscott Press and William Morris Master-Craftsman, 174. See also Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 194. H. Oskar Sommer edited Caxton’s translations of Le Fèvre’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troy for David Nutt to publish in 1894, two years after the Kelmscott edition. It is possible that the Kelmscott edition even indicated to Nutt and Sommer that another, more scholarly edition might find buyers. At any rate, the publication of two editions within two years of what might otherwise be considered a niche work suggests that a reading audience of some kind did in fact exist. These included Edward Arbor’s 1878 English Scholar’s Library edition of Reynard and the 1884 Bibliotheca Curiosa reprint of Arbor’s edition; Ellis himself provided an adaptation for David Nutt a few years later. Gibbon, qtd in Blake, William Caxton and English Literary Culture, 5. Ellis, for instance, had published works such as Halliwell’s edition of The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Mandeville in 1866, before he had retired from active publishing. Morris to Ellis, 29 August 1890, CL 3:198. Sparling, Kelmscott Press, 109. Quaritch to Ellis, 8 September 1890, in Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 205.

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28 The classic discussion of the Victorian cult of chivalry is Mark Girouard’s The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. 29 Peterson, Bibliography, 152. 30 Ellis’s daughter transcribed the Golden Legend from the borrowed Cambridge University Library copy, while for the other Caxton works, the Kelmscott editors worked from transcripts that Sarah Peddie had painstakingly typed out at the British Museum. See Colebrook, William Morris, Master-Printer, 32. William S. Peterson suggests that “the story may be apocryphal,” since none of the transcriptions are extant and he could find no record of her having been issued a reader’s ticket at the Museum at the time (Bibliography, xxxviii). But in the introduction to the Early English Text Society’s History of Jason (1913), the editor, John Munro, states: “In preparing this text for the press, I had the advantage of William Morris’s type-written copy of the Romance, a copy which, I believe, he had had prepared for his own press but never used” (Lefèvre, The History of Jason, vii). So not only did at least one of Sarah Peddie’s transcripts undoubtedly exist (adding another worker to the long roll of Kelmscott collaborators), there was also a systematic plan to print more Caxton works at the Kelmscott Press than just the five that ultimately materialized. 31 Barbazan, ed., Fabliaux et contes des poètes françois. 32 Ibid., ix. 33 Ibid., viij. 34 Blades, The Life and Typography of William Caxton, 2:288. 35 Llull, The Order of Chivalry, trans. William Caxton, with L’Ordène de Chevalerie and The Ordination of Knighthood, trans. William Morris and ed. F.S. Ellis, 149. 36 Sparling, Kelmscott Press, 153. 37 Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 96. 38 LeMire, A Bibliography, 173. 39 Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 2:280. See also Morris to Ellis, 4 December 1892, CL 3:479. 40 Hugues de Tabary, The Ordering of Chivalry, trans. Ellis. 41 May Morris, Introductions, CW 2:502. 42 Blake, William Caxton: A Bibliographical Guide, 42. 43 Morris, qtd in Peterson, ed., The Ideal Book, 105. 44 De Voragine, The Golden Legend, 2:1285. 45 Ibid.

320 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

notes to pages 167–73 Caxton, “The Lyf of Saynt Thomas of Caunterbury,” cviij. De Voragine, The Golden Legend, 1:312. Ibid., 2:1285. Ellis to E. Gordon Duff, 20 March 1892, Papers of E. Gordon Duff. Burne-Jones, qtd in Robinson, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and the Kelmscott Chaucer, 35. Morris to Ellis, 2 November 1894, CL 4:227. See, for instance, Bühler, “The Kelmscott Edition of the Psalmi Penitentiales,” 16–22, and LaPorte, “Morris’s Compromises,” 209–19. Camille, “Philological Iconoclasm,” 382. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 235. Ibid., 236–40. chapter seven

1 Morris to John Bruce Glasier, 7 October 1890, CL 3:218. 2 May Morris, The Introductions to the Collected Works, 2:464–5. 3 For a selection of telling reactions to NfN, dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Helmer, “The Prettiness of Utopia,” 6–7. Helmer notes that J.W. Mackail referred to NfN as “a slightly constructed and essentially insular romance,” a display of “refined rusticity” (Mackail, The Life, 2:243). Alfred Noyes found that NfN’s “dreamlike pastoral atmosphere” was wrought of “a homogeneous sensuous mist,” where “hardly anything matters any more, except superficial sense-pleasure” (Noyes, William Morris, 130, 134–5). 4 See Johnson, Review of News from Nowhere, 483–4. 5 For a fairly extensive (though not exhaustive) compilation of appraisals, see Kinna, “The Relevance of Morris’s Utopia,” 739–50. For nineteenthcentury reviews, see Arata (ed.), News from Nowhere by William Morris, 342–51. 6 See Noyes, William Morris, 132–3. 7 Wells, A Modern Utopia, 7. 8 Williams, Culture and Society, 159. 9 After all, one of his abiding narrative themes was heroic endurance in the face of doom. 10 In Morris’s poem “The Defence of Guenevere,” Guenevere’s rhetorical efforts at self-defence appear as a literary projection of Morris’s own strenuous attempts to be heard and understood by his contemporaries. Although she desperately seeks her accusers’ understanding and compas-

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sion, Guenevere’s justification of her controversial act seems to fall upon deaf ears. Her audience, like Morris’s readership, cannot see beyond the narrowness of utilitarian thought and thus fails to comprehend her plea. See Morris, “The Defence of Guenevere,” CW 1:5–10. This self-questioning dogged him through his activist years. In correspondence, Morris shared many of his public speaking experiences with his family; in his diary, he repeatedly comments on his reflections about his working-class audience and its reception of his speeches. (Boos, William Morris’s Socialist Diary, 19–20, 23) Morris, “Apology,” The Earthly Paradise, CW 3:1, lines 1–6. See also Florence Boos’s claims that Morris’s self-effacement in The Earthly Paradise is not escapist, but “an understated reflection on art’s limited capacity directly to assuage the problems it represents” (Boos, “General Introduction to the The Earthly Paradise”). Morris, “Apology,” The Earthly Paradise, CW 3:1, line 13. Ibid., lines 24–5. May Morris, The Introductions, 2:449. Ibid., 450. Buckley, “Morris and His Critics,” 18. LeMire, The Unpublished Lectures, 24; May Morris, The Introductions, 2:540. Though many of Morris’s lectures were successful, there is evidence that he was not always fully understood by his audiences, and that he himself was aware of this. Catherine Buckley writes: “What must have seemed even more disheartening to Morris was that often those groups who shared some of his liberal sympathies and came prepared to listen to his social philosophy could not accept it. In the year he edited Justice, 1884, the newspaper has frequent accounts of his speeches and the remarks that followed, printed without editorial comment. Almost always, those who rose to give thanks found it necessary to state their reservations about his views and sometimes even to contradict his facts … That Morris was aware of such antagonism to the real kernel of his message is apparent in the later speeches. In some of those on artistic subjects there are glances at his socialism, which he then shies away from, saying he must not speak of the matter there. And in those in which his social philosophy is to be explicit he often confronts the audience with remarks like ‘I am here before you as a breeder of discontent.’” (Buckley, “Morris and His Critics,” 18) LeMire, Unpublished Lectures, 16.

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22 For a typology of late-nineteenth-century (French) socialist propaganda and its characteristic forms, see Angenot, La propagande socialiste. 23 See, for example, Sketchley, “The London City Companies,” 277; Donald, “Lord Mayor’s Day,” 260; and Dave, “The International Conference of the Glass Bottle Makers,” 261. 24 Cuddon defines “eclogue” as “a short poem – or part of a longer one – and often a pastoral … in the form of a dialogue or soliloquy,” stemming from the Greek word for “selection.” See Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory, 248. 25 Irrespective of its origin: Hellenic, Hegelian, or Marxian. 26 See, for example, Holzman, “Anarchism and Utopia,” 589–603. 27 Eisenman, “Communism in Furs,” 92–110. 28 Vervaecke offers a twentieth-century response that could well reflect the typical Commonweal reaction: “The reason why the trip down the Thames seemed to elicit less interest on the part of lecturers is related to its more leisurely narrative pace and to its lesser informative quality” (Vervaecke, “Teaching News from Nowhere,” 32). 29 For another twentieth-century reaction of this kind, see Arnot, A Vindication. 30 Contrary to conventional views, Morris foregrounds the ornament’s central significance to society (Morris, “Of the Origins of Ornamental Art,” 6). 31 See Morris, “The Woodcuts of Gothic Books,” AWS 1:318–38. 32 Arscott, Interlacings. 33 Lewis, “News from Nowhere: Arcadia or Utopia?” 24. 34 John Barrell and John Bull claim that “pastoral vision is, at base, a false vision positing a simplistic, unhistorical relationship between the ruling, landowning class – the poet’s patrons and often the poet himself – and the workers on the land” (Barrell and Bull, The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse, 4). 35 Gilbert, “The Landscape of Resistance,” 24–5. 36 Gifford, Pastoral, 52. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 71–2. 39 For Conservative rhetoric and the English countryside, see Weinroth, Reclaiming William Morris, 66–83. 40 Gifford, Pastoral, 18–19. 41 Batstone, “Virgilian Didaxis,” 130. 42 Gifford, Pastoral, 23–4.

notes to pages 179–87 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

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Giesecke, “Lucretius and Virgil’s Pastoral Dream,” 1. Ibid., 2. Smith, “Lentus in Umbra,” 298–9. Ibid., 301. Cicero in Smith, “Lentus in Umbra,” 301. See Baldwin, “On England,” 1–9. See Arnot, A Vindication, 28. Leopold, ed., News from Nowhere, xx. Smith, “Lentus in Umbra,” 301. Ibid. Ibid., 300. Giesecke, “Lucretius and Virgil’s Pastoral Dream,” 1–2. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid., 6. Giesecke reads otium as “a Latin translation of the Epicurean concept of ataraxia” (“Lucretius and Virgil’s Pastoral Dream,” 9). Giesecke, “Lucretius and Virgil’s Pastoral Dream,” 3, qtd in Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics, 15. Ibid., 3. I use the Latin or Roman reference here to sustain continuity with the discourse of otium and negotium developed thus far in my argument. See my discussion of Morris’s divergence from anarchists and reformists in “Redesigning the Language of Social Change,” 37–63. Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:4. Ibid., 211. Batstone, “Virgilian Didaxis,” 125. For a detailed discussion of the contrast between alienated labour and creative praxis, see Weinroth, “William Morris’s Philosophy of Art.” Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:10. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 37. My italics. Ibid., 38. In chapter 3, the Golden Dustman also cheerfully defers his own pleasure for the sake of someone else’s. See Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:21–2. On this, see Jameson’s comments on Marx’s analysis of the commodity form in chapter six of Capital, vol. 1: “Marx offers a textbook exercise

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75 76

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81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89

notes to pages 187–93 in binary oppositions which is at one and the same time their deconstruction and their critique: a demonstration of the necessary asymmetry of the equation and of equivalence as such, now unmasked as the ‘objective appearance’ of non-identity” (Jameson, Valences, 18). Note also that this preference is embedded in the interstices of the fiction. In reaction both to utilitarian thinking and to Bellamy’s technocratic Looking Backward, NfN foregrounds quality over quantity. In its opening pages, with typical irony and understatement, Morris stresses the protagonist’s epistemological shift from rationalist thinking to aesthetic perception wherein “all remembrance of that brilliant logic and foresight which had so illuminated that recent discussion [disappears]; and of the discussion itself there remain[s] no trace, save a vague hope … for days of peace and rest” (Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:4). See Weinroth, “Redesigning the Language of Social Change.” I owe this expression to Florence Boos’s discussion of Morris’s world view as conveyed in the Earthly Paradise. See Faulkner, “Review of The Design of William Morris,” 23. Morris, “Equality,” 59. Morris, A Dream of John Ball, CW 16:231–2. See Weinroth, “Redesigning the Language of Social Change.” NfN is at once a propagandistic representation of an ideal world and a meta-commentary on the difficulties of that very propagandist undertaking. Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:210. Jameson, Valences, 41. Ibid. Pastoral is always self-reflexive: art commenting on art or literary form on literary expression. (Martindale, “Green Politics,” 111). I owe this observation to Paul Leduc Browne. Particularly among socialists, for this ruralist social and natural setting seems to tarnish the otherwise sublime austerity of their revolutionary politics. Noyes, William Morris, 134. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 54. Florence Boos states that “Morris expressed his characteristic emphasis on creating achievement from failure.” For example, in his Commonweal article of 19 March 1887, “Why We Celebrate the Commune of Paris,” Morris wrote: “I have heard it said, and by good Socialists too, that it is a mistake to commemorate a defeat … The Commune of Paris is but one link in the struggle which has gone through all the history of

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the oppressed against the oppressors; and without all the defeats of past times we should now have no hope of the final victory” (Boos, William Morris’s Socialist Diary, 27n53). 90 On this, see Leopold, ed., News from Nowhere, xxx. 91 Characters in NfN (Guest, grumbler, Bob, old man) are used as indices of the public’s varying resistances and reactions to Nowhere. chapter eight 1 “It is a matter of course that everything made by man’s hand is now obviously ugly” (Morris, “Art under Plutocracy,” CW 23:168). 2 For an acute characterization of this sort of romantic anti-capitalism, see Lukács’s preface to The Theory of the Novel, 11–23. 3 Morris, “How I Became a Socialist,” CW 23:280–1. 4 See various works by István Mészáros, especially Beyond Capital and The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time. See also Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative; Caillé, Don, intérêt et désintéressement; Godbout, Le don, la dette et l’identité; and Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. 5 Panitch, “The Left’s Crisis.” 6 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 13. 7 Heller, “Lukács’s Later Philosophy,” 190. 8 Morris, “How I Became a Socialist,” CW 23:277. 9 “Surely there are but two theories of society: slavery on the one side; equality on the other” (Morris, “How Shall We Live Then?”). 10 Mészáros, Beyond Capital. 11 Morris, “Why I Am a Communist.” 12 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW 6:506. 13 Morris, “Why I Am a Communist.” 14 Good work, says Morris, has hope in it: “hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and good quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having; product worth having by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all for us to be conscious of it while we are at work” (Morris, “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” CW 23:99). 15 In chapter 14 of News from Nowhere, “How Matters Are Managed,” Morris illustrates this system of autonomous self-government and selfmanagement through the example of a collective decision to build a bridge (Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:85–90). 16 Morris, “How Shall We Live Then?”

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notes to pages 202–5

17 Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:45. 18 See Dick’s concern to find some work for Robert the Weaver and George Brightling in Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:12–13. 19 Morris, “Why I Am a Communist.” 20 Ibid. 21 Morris, “Art under Plutocracy,” CW 23:186. 22 Morris, “Why I Am a Communist.” 23 Morris, “Art under Plutocracy,” CW 23:174. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Whether or not this view of medieval craftwork is historically accurate or not is of no importance in this context. 27 “To sum up, then, concerning the manner of work in civilized States, these States are composed of three classes – a class which does not even pretend to work, a class which pretends to work but which produces nothing, and a class which works, but is compelled by the other two classes to do work which is often unproductive” (Morris, “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” CW 23:104). 28 Although the “saving” in many instances incurs another, long-term, debt, to the extent that labour power is saved at great ecological expense, notably through the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. 29 “When all were working usefully for [the support of civilization], the share of work which each would have to do would be but small, if our standard of life were about on the footing of what well-to-do and refined people now think desirable. We shall have labour-power to spare, and shall, in short, be as wealthy as we please. It will be easy to live. If we were to wake up some morning now, under our present system, and find it ‘easy to live,’ that system would force us to set to work at once and make it hard to live; we should call that ‘developing our resources,’ or some such fine name” (Morris, “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” CW 23:107). 30 See Waring, Counting for Nothing. 31 The question of disposable time is discussed extensively by István Mészáros in a number of publications, in particular Beyond Capital and The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time. On the need to rethink the opposition between necessary and free work time, see Browne, “Disposable Time, Freedom, and Care,” 297–324. 32 These four categories – exchange, redistribution, domestic administration, and reciprocity – are borrowed from Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

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33 Mauss, L’esprit du don. 34 Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 218. See also 158–62. 35 Rousseau, Du contrat social, 98. My translation. 36 Ibid., 136. 37 Mészáros, The Structural Crisis of Capital, 157. 38 For critiques of notions of the gift as sacrifice, see Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value; see also Caillé, Don, intérêt et désintéressement, and Godbout, Le don, la dette et l’identité. 39 Morris, A Dream of John Ball, CW 16:230. 40 This is one of the reasons put forward by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government to explain the end of the state of nature and the introduction of a political order. See Locke, Second Treatise, 8–15 (§4–13), 65–8 (§123–31). 41 In a commentary on an earlier version of this paper, when it was presented at a September 2011 workshop at the University of Ottawa. 42 Morris, A Dream of John Ball, CW 16:234. 43 Morris, “Why I Am a Communist.” 44 It is no coincidence that in News from Nowhere the first thing that alerts Guest that something in the world around him has changed is the bridge, a sight so stunning that he is obliged to put an end to his swim, much to Dick’s surprise (Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:8). 45 See Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative. 46 See Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain, CW 14:256. 47 Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 3: Labour, 33. 48 Weinroth, “Redesigning the Language of Social Change,” 47. 49 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, MECW 11:103. 50 Le Pan, “The Net and the Sword,” 20. 51 Morris, A Dream of John Ball, CW 16:269–70. 52 Ibid., 276–7. 53 Ibid. 54 Morris, “Equality,” 57. 55 Marx, Capital, 1:714–15. 56 Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, esp. 454–67; The Crisis in German Social Democracy, in Selected Political Writings, 322–35; What Does the Spartacus League Want? in Selected Political Writings, 366–76. 57 Morris, “Equality,” 64. 58 Weinroth, Reclaiming William Morris, in particular the detailed analysis of the construction of the “sublime hero” in communist rhetoric. 59 Morris, A Dream of John Ball, CW 16:282.

328 60 61 62 63

64 65

66 67 68 69

notes to pages 213–24 Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:4. Morris, A Dream of John Ball, CW 16:284–5. Zbigniew Herbert, “Elegy of Fortinbras,” 426. “In another sense, however, A Dream is a moment of self-consciousness and reckoning, an occasion to take stock of the daunting nature of social transformation, since readying men for change is fraught with adversity. The narrative is thus an opportunity to plumb the emotional and philosophical depths of defeat among men whose ardent efforts to rewrite their destiny often entail groping in the darkness of history” (Weinroth, “Redesigning the Language of Social Change,” 44–5). Morris, “How Shall We Live Then?” Lenin, surely the ultimate tactician of intra-party political struggle, emphasized the inspirational character of dreaming. Morris goes further in stressing dreaming’s moral purpose in cementing fellowship (Lenin, What Is to Be Done? LCW 5:509–10). For a discussion, see Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1:8. Weinroth, “Redesigning the Language of Social Change,” 47–9, 58–9. Bloch, Experimentum Mundi, 12. Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, 377. Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” CW 22:3–27. chapter nine

1 See Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis; see also Douzinas and Žižek, eds., The Idea of Communism. 2 Morris, The Earthly Paradise, CW 4:146. 3 May Morris, “Introduction,” CW 3:xxii; and “Introduction,” CW 17:xxxix. 4 Morton, The English Utopia, 213. 5 Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, LCW 31:passim. 6 Duncan, “Return to Nowhere.” 7 Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:3. 8 Ibid., 58. 9 Ibid., 92. 10 Ibid., 102. 11 Ibid., 194. 12 Ibid., 180. 13 Abensour, “William Morris: The Politics of Romance,” 125–61. 14 Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization,” in The Ideologies of Theory 2:80–1. See also Archaeologies of the Future, xiii.

notes to pages 225–41 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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Tompkins, William Morris: An Approach to the Poetry, 319. Gribble, “William Morris’s News from Nowhere: A Vision Impaired,” 20. Morris, News from Nowhere, CW 16:166. Ibid., 188. Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” 92. Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” CWOW , 969. Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” CWOW , 1113–4. Ibid., 1113. Morris, “Looking Backward,” 194–5. Bacon, New Atlantis (1627), 183. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 54. Morris, Sigurd the Volsung, CW 12:122. Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” CW 22:17. Ibid., CW 22:18. Morris to Janey Morris, 8 November 1875, CL 1:276; Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, 19 August 1880, CL 1:581–4. Allen, “The Thames Valley Catastrophe,” available online at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602071h.html. Williams, Politics and Letters, 429–37. Skinner, Walden Two, 240. chapter ten

1 See, for example, reactions by Shaw and Yeats to Morris’s combination of politics and poetry writing in Gardner, “An Idle Singer,” 96. For twentieth-century views reflecting Morris’s conflicted admirers, see Newman, “Wallpaper and Propaganda,” 10–16. 2 See Edwards, “The Trouble with Morris,” 4. 3 On the incompatibility between mainstream art and revolution, David Beech writes: “The starting point of any avant-garde critique is the insistence that art is a problematic category, as opposed to the locus of all that is great and good in the culture, as the dominant ideology suggests. Anti-art’s resistance to social division, privilege, symbolic violence and barbarism is waged through the resistance to art, taken to be immanently charged with society’s ills. So instead of regarding art and aesthetics as the cure for society and as immune from political division and degradation, the anti-artist calls for the struggle for a better society to begin as a struggle against art” (Beech, “As It Might Be,” 15).

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notes to pages 241–4

4 Mabb, Rhythm 69 (slide show). http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/Vol_15/ ReadingMatters/Rhythm%2069/index.html. 5 An English translation can be seen in Bulgakowa ed., Kazimir Malevich, The White Rectangle. A reproduction of the original script appears in Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film, 58–9. 6 The drawing is reproduced in Foster, Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism and the Avant-Garde, 87. 7 The drawings are reproduced in Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film, 90. 8 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N2a, 3. 9 Morris’s wallpaper aesthetic was not initially accepted in the Victorian world of interior design. See Victoria and Albert Museum commentaries: “Certainly Morris’s papers did not find favour immediately: around 1865, Lady Mount Temple’s London house was decorated in the ‘French’ fashion with ‘watered papers on the walls, garlands of roses tied with blue bows! Glazed chintzes with hunches [sic] of roses’ … She recalled that Rossetti came to dinner, and ‘instead of admiring my room and decorations, as I expected, he evidently could hardly sit at ease with them.’ When asked if he could suggest improvements he advised her to ‘begin by burning every-thing you have got.’ Shortly afterwards Morris & Co. carried out some renovations, and a Morris paper was hung on the staircase walls, followed in September 1865 by Morris’s Daisy in grey in an attic room (the paper supplied by Cowtan & Son, their only order for a Morris paper around this time). The result was that ‘all our candid relations and friends intimated that they thought we had made our pretty little house hideous.’ Sales of Morris papers continued modestly, mostly to ‘purchasers who had acidently [sic] seen some of his [Morris’s] wall-papers.’ As Metford Warner explained later, most West End decorators dismissed his papers as ‘too peculiar’ when they first appeared. It was only when Eastlake’s book Hints on Household Taste (1868) stimulated wider interest in interior design that the trade, and the public, began to appreciate Morris’s designs.’” (Victoria and Albert Museum, “William Morris and Wallpaper Designs.”) 10 Steve Edwards argues that “the Morris industries have succeeded in turning his work into kitsch by severing his connection to the ugly” (Edwards, “The Trouble with Morris,” 5). To put it thus, however, is to associate radical politics with “ugliness”; it is to suggest that politics can never be grasped in “beautiful” aesthetic terms without appearing as a capitulation to the ruling establishment. 11 See Morris, “Art under Plutocracy,” CW 23:164–91.

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12 On the importance of masking the repeated motifs and creating the illusion of continuous growth, Morris writes: “What we have to do to meet this difficulty is to create due paper-stainers’ flowers and leaves, forms that are obviously fit for printing with a block; to mask the construction of our pattern enough to prevent people from counting the repeats of our pattern, while we manage to lull their curiosity to trace it out” (Morris, “Hints,” CW 22:191). 13 Parts of the two preceding paragraphs have been culled from Weinroth, “Introduction to Reading Matters.” 14 I draw this expression from Elizabeth Helsinger’s discussion of “lyric colour,” in Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts. 15 Ibid., 62. 16 Ibid., 63. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 77–8. 20 Ibid., 115. 21 Ibid., 115–16, 199–200. 22 Wegner, “Here or Nowhere,” 115. 23 On Mabb’s production of a space for an alternative imaginary, see Edwards “The Trouble with Morris,” 7. 24 Wegner, “Here or Nowhere,” 115. 25 Ibid. 26 Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts, 199, 200, 203. 27 On the relation between agitation and education in Morris, see Weinroth, “Redesigning the Language of Social Change,” 37–63. 28 See Morris’s lectures on art and labour in Hopes and Fears for Art: Lectures on Art and Industry, CW 22. 29 Morris, “Hints,” CW 22:202. 30 Beech, “As It Might Be,” 17–18. 31 For a detailed discussion of this, see Weinroth, “William Morris’s Philosophy of Art.” 32 I read this aesthetic of equality in Morris’s pattern work in the light of Blue Calhoun’s discussion of Eugene Vinaver’s theory of medieval romance cycles and their acentricity: “Whereas the Roman doctrine of amplificatio or auxesis was concerned with the art of making small things great, of ‘raising acts and personal traits above their dimensions’ in a kind of upward movement, the medieval variety of amplification was, on the contrary, a linear or horizontal extension, an expansion or an

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notes to pages 249–63 unrolling of a number of interocked themes.” Calhoun also argues that “the ‘unity’ of this kind of composition derives from its lack of center or single goal” (Calhoun, The Pastoral Vision, 118). A comparable acentricity is present not only in the wallpaper patterns, but in News from Nowhere. The utopian romance is constructed in interlocking characters, none of whom can boast exclusivity or superiority. Boos, “William Morris’s ‘Equality,’” 59. Morris, “Socialism,” 25. Morris, “The Revival of Handicraft,” CW 22:341. Morris, “Hints,” CW 22:176–7. On Morris’s rejection of genius, and its resonances of elitism among the Romantics, see Calhoun, The Pastoral Vision, 62. “You may be sure that any decoration is futile, and has fallen into at least the first stage of degradation, when it does not remind you of something beyond itself, of something of which it is but a visible symbol” (Morris, “Hints,” CW 22:179). Ibid., 181. Ibid. Ibid. In discussing the features of Morris’s wallpaper patterns and their typically graduated hues, Helsinger identifies a shift in his use of colour from the 1850s to the 1860s/70s: “The combination of subtle gradation with clear contrast is essential to the success of Morris’s later pattern designs. In his new concern with movement, gradation and complexity, making use of a broader tonal range including paler and more subdued tints, Morris moved away from the Pre-Raphaelite practice of the 1850s … the peculiarly modern effects of intense color” (Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts, 112). Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” CW 22:4. Morris, “Making the Best of It,” CW 22:109. See Weinroth,“Redesigning the Language of Social Change.” On imitation, see Morris, “Hints,” CW 22:177–8. On the question of “order,” see Morris, “Hints,” CW 22:180. Morris, “Hints,” CW 22:199. For examples from his prose fiction, see The Water of the Wondrous Isles, The Story of the Glittering Plain, News from Nowhere, and A Dream of John Ball. As Morris notes in his lecture on equality, “There must be a long period of half[-]formed aspirations, abortive schemes and half measures inter-

notes to pages 263–71

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53 54 55 56

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spersed with doubtful experiments, disappointment, reaction and apathy before we can get anywhere near the beginning of the obvious and dramatic change which people know as revolution” (Morris, “Equality,” 57). Referring to Morris’s Brother Rabbit design, Eisenman argues that its represented fecundity is “a bit frightening, suggesting an uncontrolled surge or floodtide of rabbits. The basis of this ornamental contradiction between naturalism and nightmare … lay in Morris’s growing recognition of the historical antagonism between nature and development” (Eisenman, “Class Consciousness in the Designs,” 24). I use the term “frames” to denote the cinematic character of a horizontal viewing or reading of Mabb’s Rhythm 69. Seen thus, each design constitutes a frame or cinematic shot that relates both to its previous image and to the one that succeeds it. Together, the series of sixty-nine images can be seen as the filmstrip of a motion picture and the dialectical character of Mabb’s Morrisian aesthetic. See Tupytsin, Malevich and Film, 99. See Mabb, Rhythm 69 (slide show). http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/ Vol_15/ReadingMatters/Rhythm%2069/index.html. Mabb, “Some Introductory Notes on My Morris Works,” 11. Mabb’s artistic work on Morrisian wallpaper is clearly at odds with some Victorian reactions to Morris’s designs. Disapproving of Morris’s delight in “‘glaring wallpapers,” the architect Richard Norman Shaw wrote: “It is disconcerting, you will admit, when you find that your host and hostess are less noticeable than their wallpapers and their furniture … present day belief that good design consists of pattern – pattern repeated ad nauseam – is an outrage on good taste. A wallpaper should be a background pure and simple, that and nothing more. If there is any pattern at all … it ought to be of the simplest kind, quite unobtrusive” (Victoria and Albert Museum commentaries in “William Morris and Wallpaper Design,” http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/w/williammorris-and-wallpaper-design/). See Simmons, Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square, 51, 251. Gramsci’s view is consonant with the politics of Morris’s artistic work, with his appropriation and reuse of traditional literary and aesthetic forms. See Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, 330–1. For a discussion of Morris’s re-articulation of the cultural, ideological, and artistic conventions of his day, see Kyriakakis-Maloney, “The Resuscitation of Romance.” Morris, “Hints,” CW 22:179.

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notes to pages 271–6

60 Eagleton notes that Marx’s ideal aesthetic entails a similar supersession of the extremes of Kantian beauty and sublimity. “If Kant’s beauty is too static, too harmoniously organic for Marx’s political purposes, his sublime is too formless. The condition of communism could be envisaged only by some blending of the two” (Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 217). 61 For further discussion of Morris’s ethically grounded aesthetic of beauty, see Weinroth, “William Morris’s Philosophy of Art.” 62 Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” CW 22:17. 63 On the misreading of Morris’s “patriotism,” see Latham in this volume. 64 Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” CW 22:17. 65 Ibid., 18. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 17. Italics mine. 69 Ibid., 18. 70 Lutchmansingh, “Archaeological Socialism,” 21. conclusion 1 Fowler and Fowler, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 117. 2 Contrary to a world where one might weary of one’s mirth. See Morris, The Earthly Paradise, Apology, CW 3:1, lines 8–13. 3 Ibid., lines 15–16. 4 Ibid., lines 39–41. 5 Morris transcended petty ideological divisions while being uncompromisingly principled. He saw beyond the allure of immediate political gains while sustaining his commitment to everyday Socialist League struggles. He felt the demoralizing impact of history’s reversals, but was fully committed to hope. He openly faced the clash between his privileged class position and his revolutionary outlook. Throughout, he never wavered from his role in educating the people. 6 On this type of revolutionary figure, see Johnson, “Victor Serge as Revolutionary Novelist: The First Trilogy,” 58–86; Angenot, Le Marxisme dans les grands récits, 17–18. 7 Williams, Culture and Society, 159. 8 Thompson notes that Paul Meier, in spite of his enormous respect for Morris’s genius, could not believe that Morris was able to raise himself to the theoretical level of Marxist dialectics independently. See Thomp-

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18

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son, Romantic to Revolutionary (1976), 781. Contrary to recent findings by Jeffrey Petts, Thompson claims that “as a theorist of the arts, [Morris] failed to construct a consistent system” (Petts, “Good Work and Aesthetic Education,” 717). Morris, “Address at the Twelfth Annual Meeting” (“Antiscrape,” 1889), AWS 1:148. Morris to Aglaia Coronio, 25 November 1872, CL 1:173. I draw this expression from Kyriakakis-Maloney, “The Resuscitation of Romance,” iv. For a detailed discussion of Morris’s revision of the romance form, see chapter 1 of Kyriakakis-Maloney’s PhD dissertation, 1–21. Thompson, Making History, 66. These peers would have been members of the sdf (Hyndman), anarchists from the Socialist League, radicals from the Second International in France (Jules Guesde), among others. These various representatives of radicalism would have been inspired by the spirit and iconography of the French Revolution, with its epic and tragic dimensions. See Bennett’s references to the rhetoric of heroic conquest in Kropotkin, Sorel, and Belfort Bax, in her “Riot, Romance and Revolution,” 27. In a letter to Joseph Lane, Morris confessed that “however we may rebel against the sham society of today we are all damaged by it.” Morris to Lane, 21 May 1889, CL 3:68. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 206. “Socialism is not a change for the sake of a change, but a change involving the very noblest ideal of human life and duty: a life in which every human being should enjoy unrestricted scope for his best powers and faculties” (Morris, “A Talk with Mr. William Morris on Socialism”). See John Ball’s sobering words of caution to the peasants after their first triumphant skirmish. He warns them that their next battle will be in London, that “great and grievous city,” and that they will be overwhelmed by the magnitude of their challenge, implicitly a hellish bloodbath. (Morris, A Dream of John Ball, CW 16:254). Morris’s reluctance to romanticize heroic action can be traced to his earlier works; for even in those instances where the paradigm of heroic action in medievalist verse and narrative is dominant, “the great romantic vision is lost, and the man of action is an anachronism: knights fail in their quest … the valiant combat of the knight-at-arms repeatedly ends in betrayal, death or bitter isolation. Power is increasingly associated with corruption, and the sword, often impotent in the hands of the good, serves those who would separate and destroy” (Calhoun, The Pastoral Vision, 30).

336

notes to pages 278–82

19 On the imperialist dimensions of the epic mode, and Morris’s discomfiture with it, see Gilbert, “A Vision Rather than a Dream,” 10–13, 28. 20 See Kiriakakis-Maloney, “The Resuscitation of Romance,” iv. 21 See Quint, Epic and Empire, 9. 22 Boos, “An Aesthetic Ecocommunist,” 27. 23 Ady Mineo argues that the “reborn men [in News from Nowhere] have acquired new psychological and emotional qualities, and are now able to express those feelings which traditional patriarchal culture labelled ‘unmanly’ and tried to eradicate. They are no longer powerful, competitive, aggressive, ambitious, authoritarian; instead they are gentle, obliging, joyously ironical, affectionate with both sexes, and are not ashamed to blush (Dick) or to be moved or to enjoy fancy dress (Boffin), to talk about personal matters, to show their deep love for nature” (Mineo, “Beyond the Law of the Father,” 201). 24 Morris, “The Art of the People,” CW 22:49. 25 For instance, William Guest, John Ball, Hallblithe, Birdalone. 26 Frye, “The Meeting of Past and Future,” 305. 27 As Lynne Hapgood notes, “there is a consensus of critical opinion among the readers of News from Nowhere (who are, by and large, those who analyze it) that it is a difficult and uncomfortable experience. Patrick Parrinder argues that Morris’s political naivety (our italics) makes readers experience ‘discomfiture when asked seriously to imagine a world in which enjoyment and leisure are not paid for in the coin of other people’s oppression and suffering’” (Hapgood, Margins of Desire, 19). Ruth Levitas writes: “Despite the fact that News from Nowhere contains a long section on ‘how the change came about’ … the dominant mood of the book remains anti-industrial and the society presented by Morris is one of much greater simplicity than can be regarded as feasible (our italics)” (Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 108). 28 See Glouberman and Zimmerman, “Complicated and Complex Systems,” 21ff. 29 See, for example, Mahamdallie, Crossing the “River of Fire.” 30 See, among others, Levitas, The Concept of Utopia; Thompson, Making History; Weinroth, Reclaiming William Morris. 31 Thompson, Romantic to Revolutionary. 32 Morton, The English Utopia, 213. 33 Thompson, Romantic to Revolutionary, (1976), 79. 34 Watts-Dunton in Gardner, “An Idle Singer,” 107.

notes to pages 282–7

337

35 Arnot, A Vindication, 5. 36 In the tradition of E.P. Thompson, Mahamdallie writes that Morris was one of the finest recruiting sergeants to Marxism. See Mahamdallie, Crossing the “River of Fire,” 43. 37 Thompson admits that the reviews and criticisms levelled at his book in 1955 were a “tonic to one’s fighting blood” (Thompson, 1976 postscript to Romantic to Revolutionary [1976], 770). 38 See ibid., 61. 39 Palmer, E.P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions, 8–9. 40 See Weinroth’s discussion of the “gentle” socialist in Reclaiming William Morris, 98–103. 41 Arnot quotes Lenin’s statement that great revolutionaries, after their death, are often canonized by their adversaries. This process ends up “emasculating and vulgarizing the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge” (Arnot, William Morris: A Vindication, 4). 42 See Weinroth, Reclaiming William Morris. 43 Ibid., 24–49. 44 Ibid. See also Eagleton’s treatment of the Marxist sublime in his Ideology of the Aesthetic. 45 In Adorno’s sense of two torn halves that do not add up to a whole. 46 He culled categories from medievalism and romanticism (categories that key Marxists had repudiated as idealist and subjectivist), transforming these into new ways of conceiving socialist praxis. 47 Thompson, Romantic to Revolutionary, 770. 48 Ibid., 773. 49 See the opening page of A Dream of John Ball, where Morris describes his dream of a building in which the design features of several centuries are telescoped in one edifice. (Morris, A Dream of John Ball, CW 16:215). 50 See Lutchmansingh, “Archaeological Socialism,” 16–18, and Latham in this volume. 51 Williams, Culture and Society, 159. 52 Thompson, Romantic to Revolutionary, 809. 53 Ibid., 810.

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Contributors

phillippa bennett is senior lecturer in English and creative writing at the University of Northampton. florence boos is professor of English at the University of Iowa. yuri cowan is associate professor in the Department of Language and Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. elizabeth helsinger is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Departments of English, Art History, and Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. davi d latham teaches Victorian studies in the Department of English at York University. paul leduc browne is professor of political science at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. davi d mabb is an internationally renowned artist whose oeuvre has focused on William Morris and Russian constructivism. to ny pinkney is senior lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

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miles tittle teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. michelle weinroth teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa.

Index

Abensour, Miguel, 96, 223, 283 Adorno, Theodor, 187, 294n64, 337n45 aesthetic/aesthetics, xiii, xiv, 6, 12, 16, 17, 22, 24, 27, 28, 58, 59, 61, 82, 127, 128, 143, 194, 235, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 260, 261, 264, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 280, 285, 286, 289n2, 290n3, 291n8, 291n12, 291n16, 295n83, 315n59; 330n9, 331n32, 333n52, 334n60, 334n61; and politics, 3, 10, 18, 22, 33, 34, 78, 79, 116, 128, 178, 241, 270, 271, 273, 288, 289n2, 309n4, 333n58 aestheticism, 18, 21 aestheticists, 25 alienated, 17, 49, 114, 127, 183, 199, 201, 233, 270, 273, 323n67 alienation, 98, 99, 199, 203–4, 244, 290 Allen, Grant, 237 Amiens Cathedral, 43, 45 anamorphic/anamorphosis, 290–291n8. See also Beaumont, Matthew anarchism/anarchists, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 36, 130, 177, 221, 275, 284, 294n71, 323n63, 335n13 antinomy, 10, 17, 192, 207, 269, 280

antiquarian, 27, 31, 59, 60, 124, 125, 126, 150, 158, 161, 167, 287 antiquarianism, 28, 295n78 archetype, 125, 139, 176, 270 Arendt, Hannah, 20 Aristotle, 127, 146 Armstrong, Isobel, 112–14 Arnold, Matthew, 127, 230 Arnot, Robin Page, 180, 281, 282, 337n41 artisanal, 3, 13, 59, 152, 248, 264 arts and crafts movement, 6, 7, 140 Ashbrook, Susan, 318n16 ataraxia, 179, 180, 181, 182, 323n59 Augustus, 59, 76 Aveling, Edward, 221 Bacon, Francis, 223, 227, 232, 239 Baldwin, Louisa, 85 Ballantyne, Archibald, 136 Barbazan, Étienne, 161–2 Barron, W.R.J., 89 Batchelor, Joseph, 156 Bauhaus, 6, 243 Bax, Belfort, 115, 335n14 Beardsley, Aubrey, 18 Beaumont, Matthew, 290–1n8. See also anamorphic/anamorphosis beauty, 3, 7, 16, 33, 48, 58, 59, 60, 64,

364 74, 77, 78, 80, 125, 128, 139, 145, 153, 179, 182, 185, 190, 195, 202, 203, 241, 247, 249, 250, 251, 267, 270, 271, 273, 284; category/aesthetic of, 16, 17, 22, 33, 34, 235, 239, 242, 244, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 284, 285, 286, 295n83, 330n10, 334n60, 334n61 Beech, David, 249, 329n3 Beer, Gillian, 95 Bellamy, Edward, 193, 220, 223, 231, 239, 324n74 Benjamin, Walter, 243, 294n64 Bennett, Phillippa, 38, 297n15, 335n14 Besant, Walter, 221 Blades, William, 162 Blake, N.F., 165 Blake, William, 111 Bloch, Ernst, 98, 101, 103, 274, 294n64 Bloody Sunday, 19, 235 Booker, Christopher, 220 Boos, Florence, 83, 313n53, 317n1, 324n76, 324n89 Borrow, George, 86 Bosanquet, Bernard, 6 Botticelli, Sandro, 60 Brantlinger, Patrick, 87, 88 Broadhurst, Henry, 108, 109 Brogan, T.V.F., 107, 310n6 Brown, Ford Madox, 297n22 Browne, Paul Leduc, 324n85 Browning, Robert, 114 Bühler, Curtis F., 153, 157 Burne-Jones, Edward, 24, 56–84, 93, 168, 297n22, 302n4, 302n6, 303n13, 303n15, 303n21, 303n22, 303n23, 304n27, 304n30 Burne-Jones, Georgiana, 41, 57, 92, 93, 101, 108 Burns, Robert, 310n5 Butler, Samuel, 220, 223, 232 Buzard, James, 88, 91 Caillé, Alain, 196 Calhoun, Blue, 331–2n32

i nd e x Callenbach, Ernest, 226, 228 Camille, Michael, 169 Campanella, Tommaso, 223 Carlyle, Thomas, 7, 12, 83, 282, 284 Caxton, William, 28, 33, 149–171, 318n16, 318n21, 319n30 change (social, political, historical), 5, 14, 15, 19, 22, 25, 26, 30, 32, 60, 79, 103, 123, 125, 128, 130, 176, 177, 178, 181, 189, 191, 193, 194, 197, 208, 210, 215, 217, 230, 240, 241, 247, 248, 250, 261, 275, 276, 277, 285, 286, 287, 288, 294n63, 295n72, 309n1, 328n63, 335n17. See also transformation chants, 26, 31, 106–23, 276, 309n2, 309n3, 311n18, 312n34, 312n39 Chapman, George, 76 Chartism, 19 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 46, 170 Chorley, H.F., 126, 127 Cicero, 179, 180 Cockerell, Sydney, 51, 158, 160, 164, 165 commercial war, 20, 24, 25, 28, 39–42, 47, 54, 201, 244, 274, 278, 283 commonweal, 17, 21, 23, 27, 31, 122, 188, 191, 193, 271, 273, 281 Commonweal, 15, 19, 36, 40, 111, 115, 118, 125, 133, 135, 140, 172, 175, 176, 177, 219, 221, 222, 248, 296n91, 310n12, 322n28 communal society/system, 51, 199, 200–3, 206 communism, 19, 30, 33, 37, 75, 92, 136, 195, 196, 197, 199, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 213, 214, 215, 287, 334n60 communist, 19, 104, 172, 177, 180, 194, 205, 216, 218, 264, 269, 273, 276, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 290n3 Cooper, Thomas, 111 craft, 6, 13, 16, 18, 46, 47, 50, 52, 78, 79, 91, 114, 125, 145, 146, 150, 203, 216, 222, 242, 246, 249, 273, 275, 326n26; craftsman, 3, 45, 101, 145;

index craftsmanship, 78, 79; handicraft, 151, 252; handicraftsman, 146; small crafts, 51, 52, 150. See also artisanal; arts and crafts movement; lesser arts; minor arts Crane, Walter, 125 Crimean War, 297n12, 297n13 Darwin, Charles, 223, 263 Dearle, John Henry, 151 decorative arts, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 22, 24, 29, 58, 124, 136, 139, 140, 141, 176, 275, 276, 277, 280, 291n17. See also craft; lesser arts debt, 6, 15, 17, 151, 184, 187, 205, 326n28 Defoe, Daniel, 86 Delany, Samuel, 224 Derrida, Jacques 5, 290n8 Devon Great Consols, 14, 40, 293n46 De Voragine, Jacobus, 154 dialectic, dialectics, dialectical, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23–24, 30, 49, 61, 79, 113, 115, 133, 176, 183, 191, 192, 193, 222, 242, 243, 244, 252, 264, 269, 271, 275, 277, 278, 280, 290n8, 293n36, 333n52, 334n8 dialogical, 189 Dickens, Charles, 87, 131–3, 135, 138, 160 disposable time, 203–4, 326n31 domestic arts, 151, 280, 287 dream, 23, 29, 30, 31, 44, 53, 94, 97, 99, 125, 127, 128, 135, 136, 140, 172, 182, 191, 197, 198, 204, 208, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 261, 262, 274, 287, 320n3, 337n49 dreaming, 14, 22, 29, 43, 173, 177, 197, 213, 214, 215, 217, 275, 279, 286, 287, 328n65. See also oneiric dream vision, 5, 7, 14, 23, 29, 31, 68, 126, 183, 185, 187, 188, 191, 193, 213, 261, 286 Drinkwater, John, 315n51 Duff, Edward Gordon, 168

365 Dumas, Alexandre (père), 86 Dunlap, Joseph, 160, 318n16 Eagleton, Terry, 33, 278, 334n60, 337n46 Eastern question, 19, 24, 58 education, 30, 58, 77, 111, 125, 141, 176, 208, 209, 215, 215, 248, 251; aesthetic, 14, 261, 291n16; of desire, 96, 223, 285; moral, 191, 214; political, 29, 30, 31, 133, 208, 209, 214, 261, 262, 269, 313n6, 331n27. See also propaganda; rhetoric Edwards, Steve, 244, 330n10 Eisenstein, Sergei, 238 ekphrasis, 59, 77, 79 Eli Cathedral, 141 Eliot, George, 18 Eliot, T.S., 7, 232, 292n23 Ellis, F.S., 154–70, 318n22, 318n24, 319n30 Empson, William, 220 Engels, Friedrich, 196, 276, 282, 294n64, 300n65 Englishness, 10, 29, 234, 235, 241, 245, 269, 272 Epicurean, 179, 180, 181, 189, 193, 323n59 Epicurus, 181, 193 equality, 32, 36, 95, 182, 187, 189, 195, 198, 199, 206, 207, 208, 209, 250, 263, 271, 281, 286, 325n9, 331n32; of condition, 188, 198, 199, 249, 261; formal, 187, 198, 206; substantive, 30, 187, 198, 200, 202, 206, 209 exchange, 16, 37, 107, 121, 167, 173, 184, 185, 188, 205, 267, 295n72, 326n32; of activities, 30, 201–2, 208, 209; commodity, 13, 184, 187, 202; gift, 281; of labour, 184, 186, 187, 280; of property, 201 exchange value, 183, 184, 186, 187 Fanon, Frantz, 143 Faulkner, Charles, 40–1, 56, 79, 230

366 Faulkner, Peter, 7 fellowship, 14, 20, 21, 31, 42, 51, 55, 96, 98, 99, 100, 107, 110, 112, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 123, 125, 144, 145, 174, 184, 188, 198, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 213, 249, 261, 272, 279, 281, 286, 310n5, 328n65 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 207 Fourier, Charles, 20 Frankel, Nicholas, 150, 152, 169 Froissart, Jean, 87, 124, 128, 160, 167 Frye, Northrop, 4, 93, 96, 104, 280 Gautier, Théophile, 127 geist, 26 Gerard, John, 151 ghost/ghostly, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 21, 28, 45, 118, 242, 253, 262, 276, 279, 281, 290n8 Gibbon, Edward, 158–9, 299n43 gift (economy), 30, 145, 184, 186, 187, 205–6, 281. See also exchange; reciprocity Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 220 Gladstone, William, 19 Glasier, John Bruce, 19, 172 Godbout, Jacques, 196 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 6 Golden Legend, The, 154–5, 158, 159, 160, 163, 167, 168, 169, 319n30 Goode, John, 7, 106, 283, 309n1 Gordon, Charles George, 35 Gothic, 4, 5, 11, 14, 16, 21, 22, 27, 45, 82, 125, 126, 141, 142, 143–4, 221, 222, 285 Gower Street, 141 Graeber, David, 196, 205 Gramsci, Antonio, 269, 333n58 Gribble, Barbara, 225 Guesde, Jules, 335n13 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 277 Haggard, R. Rider, 97 Hanson, Ingrid, 37, 297n13 Harwell Atomic Research Station, 226

i nd e x Hegel, G.W.F., 112–14, 207, 290n8 Helsinger, Elizabeth, 246, 251, 315n59, 331n14, 332n42 Herbert, Zbigniew, 214 Hewitt, Graily, 57, 83, 302n4 Hodgson, Amanda, 88–9 Holst, Gustav, 110 Homer, 75, 76, 114, 295n77, 305n38 Horace, 127 Hugo, Victor, 86 Hulse, J.W., 283 Hunt, William Holman, 298n22 Huxley, Aldous, 225, 239 Hyndman, H.M., 115, 335n13 Ibsen, Henrik, 221 ideology, 10, 87, 125, 127, 130, 142, 143, 147, 227, 290, 329n3 Ingelow, Jean, 51 innovation, 6, 177, 216, 264 Jameson, Fredric, 10, 91, 96, 192, 224– 5, 247, 270, 290n8, 291n11, 293n36, 323n73 Jarvis, Simon, 113, 311n24 Johnson, Ralph, 311–12n34 Jones, Ernest, 111 Justice, 115, 321n20 Kant, Immanuel, 17, 80, 270, 334n60 Keats, John, 114 Kelmscott, 11, 135, 177, 233, 234, 236, 238, 239 Kelmscott Chaucer, 57, 60, 83, 157, 169, 170, 302n6 Kelmscott House, 156, 170, 236 Kelmscott Manor, 104, 218, 233, 234, 236 Kelmscott Press, 11, 28, 38, 51, 92, 104, 138, 140, 149–71, 302n4, 311n29, 318n16, 318n21, 319n30 Kelvin, Norman, 169 Kenning, 140, 146 Kerr, Charles, 312n34 Kinna, Ruth, 105

index Kitz, Frank, 19, 20 Kropotkin, Pyotr Alexeyevich, 41, 294n71, 335n14 labour, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 28, 29, 39, 44, 53, 78, 79, 96, 114, 115, 132, 134, 135, 141, 173, 178, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 198, 199, 200–2, 203, 204, 205, 206, 209, 211, 212, 215, 249, 261, 270, 280, 286, 289, 312n34, 323n67, 326n28, 326n29, 331n28 Lafferty, R.A., 230 Lane, Joseph, 19, 335n15 LaPorte, Charles, 157 Latham, David, 309n3, 313n47, 315n59 Leavis, F.R., 7 Lebowitz, Michael, 196 Lefèvre, Raoul, 158, 160 Le Guin, Ursula, 224, 226, 228–9 Leighton, Frederick, 156, 297n22 LeMire, Eugene, 163 Lenin, V.I., 220, 277, 328n65, 337n41 Leopold, David, 180 lesser arts, 9, 12, 15, 17, 18, 23, 24, 31, 34, 35, 38, 45, 47, 49, 51, 54, 61, 77, 78, 79, 149, 216, 248, 249, 250, 251, 267, 271, 273, 274, 277, 278, 286, 291n17, 297n15. See also craft; decorative arts; minor arts Levitas, Ruth, 98, 100, 101 Lewis, C.S., 232 Lewis, Roger, 178 Lindsay, Jack, 6 Lloyd Webber, Lord Andrew, 57, 84 Llull, Ramon, 159, 161 Locke, John, 327n40 Longinus, 127 Lucretius, 181 Lukács, Georg, 196, 294n64 Lutchmansingh, Lawrence, 273 Luxemburg, Rosa, 212 Mabb, David, 32, 33, 34, 228, 230,

367 241–73, 331n23, 333n52, 333n56. See also Rhythm 69 MacCarthy, Fiona, 40, 88 Mackail, J.W., 39, 164, 320n3 Magnússon, Eiríkr, 47, 51, 305n37 Maidstone, Richard, 153, 159, 167 Malevich, Kazimir, 33, 242–8, 264, 267–70 Malory, Thomas, 77, 160 Mao Zedong, 277 Marcuse, Herbert, 196 Marin, Louis, 247, 248, 251 Marx, Eleanor, 221 Marx, Karl, 17, 21, 22, 33, 114, 122, 187, 193, 195, 196, 197, 199, 212, 277, 282, 284, 286, 287, 294n64, 323n73, 334n60 Marxism, 22, 275, 282, 283, 285, 287, 337n36 Marxist, 179, 212, 282, 285, 337n46 masculinism, 18, 32 masculinity, 31, 79, 160, 279 Mauss, Marcel, 205 McGann, Jerome, 152 medievalism, 27, 75, 141, 236, 264, 285, 337n46 Meier, Paul, 283, 334n8 Mészáros, István, 196, 199, 206, 215, 326n31 Michelangelo, 60 Mill, John Stuart, 130, 207 Millais, John Everett, 298n22 Milman, Henry Hart, 299n43 minor arts, 83, 276, 286 Moggach, Douglas, 207 More, Thomas, 219, 223, 230, 231–2, 239 Morris, Jenny, 40, 41 Morris, May, 87, 88, 92, 110, 164, 165, 172, 174, 219, 220, 221, 233 Morris, William: The Aeneid, 24, 56– 84, 192, 302n3, 302n4, 303n13, 303n19, 305n38; “Architecture and History,” 151; “Art and the Beauty of the Earth,” 39; “Art and Socialism,”

368 90–1, 93; “Art under Plutocracy,” 39, 41, 42; Chants for Socialists, 106–23, 309n3, 311n18, 312n34, 312n39; Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, 96, 99, 139; “Communism,” 95, 103–4; “Communism, i.e., Property,” 44; “Concerning Geffray Teste Noire,” 128; The Defence of Guenevere, 8, 35, 45, 88, 124, 126, 128, 139, 162, 221, 246, 297n15, 320– 1n10; A Dream of John Ball, 29, 54, 100, 112, 117, 118–20, 123, 134, 175–6, 189, 190, 197, 212, 213, 215, 224, 240, 291n9, 295n72, 337n49; The Earthly Paradise, 3, 14, 39, 46–7, 53, 62, 107, 115, 117, 120, 130, 131, 139, 173, 174, 189, 190, 219, 262, 267, 276, 311n33, 321n13, 324n76; “The Ends and the Means,” 95; “Equality,” 36, 44, 212, 332n50; “Frank’s Sealed Letter,” 85; “Gertha’s Lovers,” 38; “The Hollow Land,” 45, 238; The House of the Wolfings, 51, 54, 82, 121, 136, 221, 313n50; “How I Became a Socialist,” 101, 130; “How We Live and How We Might Live,” 34, 94; “The Ideal Book,” 153; The Iliad, 75, 124; “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” 107; “The Lesser Arts,” 15, 271; “The March of the Workers,” 109, 110; “The Message of the March Wind,” 92, 118, 312n39; “The Mosque Rising in the Place of the Temple of Solomon,” 43, 44; News from Nowhere, 7, 18, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 42, 49–51, 52, 87, 88, 91, 95, 101, 103, 105, 112, 134, 138, 172–94, 195, 197, 200, 202, 206, 208, 209, 218–40, 262, 267, 276, 278, 280, 282, 289n1, 290n6, 291n9, 325n15, 327n44, 332n32, 336n23, 336n27; The Novel on Blue Paper, 87; The Odyssey, 75, 76, 108, 124, 136; “On the Woodcuts of

i nd e x Gothic Books,” 78; “Our Country Right or Wrong,” 35, 36, 37; “The Pilgrims of Hope,” 36, 117–18, 175– 6, 123, 234, 296n91, 312n39; Poems by the Way, 309n2, 309n3, 312n39; “Preface to the Nature of Gothic by John Ruskin,” 38–9; “The Reward of Labour: A Dialogue,” 133; The Roots of the Mountains, 121, 135, 136, 221, 313n50; “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,” 35, 124, 130; Sigurd the Volsung, 23, 35, 47–9, 76, 108, 117, 121, 147, 229, 232, 238; “Sketch for Windrush,” 7; “Socialism,” 36; “The Society of the Future,” 87, 95; “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing,” 15, 102; “Some Thoughts on the Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages,” 153; The Story of the Glittering Plain, 90, 96, 99, 122, 136, 146, 197, 209, 201, 213, 222, 223, 234, 262, 313n50, 316n69; “The Story of the Unknown Church,” 45; “Summer Dawn,” 128– 9; Strawberry Thief, 140–1; The Sundering Flood, 51–3, 54, 82, 90, 99, 100, 103, 105, 117, 122, 146, 313n50; “Svend and His Brethren,” 45; “Unjust War: To the Working Men of England,” 58, 74; “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” 133, 146, 294n67; “Wake, London Lads!” 108; The Water of the Wondrous Isles, 51, 88, 90, 93, 99, 102, 122, 146, 221, 234; The Well at the World’s End, 88, 92, 94, 96–7, 98, 99, 100, 210, 211, 234, 313n50; “What We Have to Look For,” 36, 42; The Wood Beyond the World, 90, 92, 94, 96, 97–8, 99– 100, 135, 136, 146, 147, 213; “The Woodcut Books of Ulm and Augsburg,” 153; Woodpecker tapestry, 140, 141 Morris, William (père), 40 Morton, A.L., 95, 219, 281–2

index Moylan, Tom, 224–5 Murray, Charles Fairfax, 57, 62, 83, 302n4 Noyes, Alfred, 193, 320n3 obstinate refuser, 183, 186, 187, 208, 221, 225, 227, 238, 283 Occupy movement, 238 oneiric, 7, 29, 177, 183, 192, 276, 279, 285. See also dream ornament, 9, 15, 16, 48, 50, 57, 60, 76, 77, 78, 147, 253, 259, 280, 303, 322n30 Orwell, George, 36 ostranenie, 248 otium, 179, 180, 181, 186, 187, 194, 323n59, 323n62 Ovid, 140

369 Pierson, Stanley, 283 Poe, Edgar Allan, 222 political discourse, 24, 30, 175, 176, 192, 193, 262, 284; conservative discourse, 178, 179, 271; persuasive discourse, 19; socialist (Marxist) discourse, 32, 175, 176, 180, 285 political unconscious, 9, 26, 275 Pound, Ezra, 6 Powell, Louise, 83, 302n4 Pre-Raphaelites, 7, 14, 18, 117, 127, 139, 147, 246 Price, Cormell, 29 propaganda, 19, 30, 31, 37, 41, 58, 59, 105, 106, 157, 173, 175, 176, 182, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 194, 261, 269, 277, 301n85, 322n22 Proudhon, Pierre, 41 Quaritch, Bernard, 159

Palmer, Bryan, 283 Panitch, Leo, 196, 197 paratext, 79, 160, 170, 231 paratextual, 24, 61, 65, 74, 304 Paris Commune, 21, 36, 41, 118, 278, 324n89 pastoral, 52, 142, 172, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 193, 194, 230, 239, 241, 242, 244, 275, 285, 287, 320n3, 322n24, 324n84 Pater, Walter, 125, 126–7, 132 pattern designs, 250, 332n32, 332n42. See also wallpaper Payne, William Moron, 316n68 Peasants’ revolt, 261 Peddie, Sarah, 319n30 period of consequences, 210 persuasion, 29, 31, 172–94, 248, 284. See also education (political); political discourse; propaganda; rhetoric Peter the Hermit, 43 Peterson, William S., 155, 157, 159, 163, 170, 319n30 Piercy, Marge, 224

radical, 10–34, 58, 61, 75, 89, 100, 107, 116, 118, 124, 126, 139, 147, 154, 175, 176, 178, 179, 189, 192, 195, 196, 198, 199, 226, 235, 238, 241, 242, 244, 264, 269, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284, 285, 287, 288, 295n83, 315n59, 330n10, 335n13 radicalism, 3–34, 60, 61, 101, 174, 194, 195, 241, 242, 247, 248, 267, 275, 276, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288, 295n76, 335n13 reciprocity, 203, 205, 206, 207, 273. See also exchange; gift recurrence, 252–3, 261, 262 Red House, 247 reification, 30, 197, 198 revolution, 19, 20, 23, 32, 33, 36, 42, 91, 92, 93, 105, 107, 125, 133, 136, 177, 188, 197, 204, 212, 227, 228, 229, 235, 237, 238, 239, 245, 249, 276, 279, 310n16, 313n6, 329n3, 333n50; counter-revolution, 222,

370 237; post-revolutionary, 87, 91, 136; revolutionary, 9, 17, 24, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 77, 89, 91, 100, 104, 105, 106, 126, 130, 138, 141, 142, 143, 175, 176, 178, 181, 188, 189, 196, 201, 203, 204, 208, 209, 212, 213, 215, 216, 224, 229, 235, 239, 241, 244, 246, 248, 249, 264, 269, 276–88, 295n79, 324n86, 334n5, 334n6, 337n43 rhetoric, 19, 29, 33, 58, 60, 74, 111, 136, 143, 173–7, 188, 190, 192, 279, 283, 322n39, 327n58, 335n14. See also persuasion; political discourse; political education; propaganda rhyme, 26, 107–22, 125, 130, 139, 174 rhythm, 106–23, 148 Rhythm 69, 32, 34, 241–73, 333n52 Richter, Hans, 242–3, 263, 264 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 229, 233, 236 Rollison, Damian, 152 romance, 3, 4, 5, 11, 13, 14, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 35, 38, 43, 51, 53, 54, 82, 85–105, 106, 107, 116, 123, 125, 126, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 147, 157, 159, 160, 166, 173, 176, 177, 181, 182, 190, 194, 210, 221, 234, 236, 253, 260, 261, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 285, 286, 287, 297n13, 301n95, 309n1, 309n4, 313n50, 315n51, 319n30, 320n3, 335n11. See also utopian romance romantic, 43, 92, 107, 164, 177, 195, 250, 282, 283, 285, 286, 311n34, 325n2, 332n37, 335n18 romanticism, 282, 284, 285, 337n46 Rossetti, Christina, 8 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 7, 12, 40, 114, 125, 127, 128–9, 297n22, 298n31, 330n9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 195, 205–7, 209 Ruskin, John, 7, 12, 21, 38, 45, 83, 114, 127, 142, 143, 220, 222, 282, 286, 291n14

i nd e x Russ, Joanna, 224 Saintsbury, George, 315n51 Saint–Simon, Henri de, 19 Sasso, Eleonora, 38, 297n15 Schiller, Friedrich, 278 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 219 science fiction, 33, 88, 182, 229, 237, 290n8 Scott, Walter, 86, 87, 107, 117 Sermon on the Mount, 43 Shakespeare, William, 187 Shaw, George Bernard, 100, 102, 221, 329n1 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 111, 310n5, 312n34 Sidney, Philip, 127 Silver, Carole, 51, 87, 88, 89, 97, 104 Skinner, B.F., 218, 240 Skoblow, Jeffrey, 8 socialism, 19, 21, 36, 44, 51, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95, 101, 103, 104, 105, 115, 116, 125, 130, 135, 136, 140, 144, 155, 195, 196, 198, 199, 206, 212, 218, 221, 226, 230, 238, 239, 282, 285, 293n51, 310n5, 335n17 socialist, 3, 9, 15, 19, 20, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 48, 51, 82–105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 117, 118, 120, 123, 136, 140, 142, 155, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 180, 187, 190, 193, 194, 196, 197, 208, 209, 212, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221, 225, 229, 237, 239, 248, 249, 269, 275, 276, 277, 279, 280, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 294n51, 301n84, 309n1, 312n34, 313n50, 322n22, 324n86, 324n89, 337n40, 337n46 Socialist League, 15, 19, 35, 100, 110, 111, 117, 123, 173, 187, 221, 248, 313n50, 334n5, 335n13 Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, 40

index solidarity, 26, 47, 209 Sorel, Georges, 335n14 Sparling, Henry Halliday, 159, 160, 163, 318n16 spectral, 9, 10, 11, 16, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 127, 261, 263, 264, 274, 275, 278 spectrality, 5, 9, 10, 11, 16, 22–33, 275, 290n8 spectre, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 251, 274, 275, 280, 287, 290n8, 291n10. See also dialectics; geist; ghost/ghostly spirit of the age. See zeitgeist Stalin, Joseph, 239, 277 Stalinism, 33, 218 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 91–2, 97 Stoker, Bram, 222 subjectivity, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 113, 115, 192, 194, 232, 280, 281; intersubjectivity, 26; philosophy of subjectivity, 25 sublime, 34, 58, 235, 237, 248, 268, 270, 284, 324n86, 327n58, 337n44 sublimity, 33, 59, 241, 269–72, 283–6, 334n60 suprematism, 243, 244, 247, 269, 270 Suvin, Darko, 247, 290n8 Swift, Jonathan, 133 Swinburne, Algernon, 117, 125, 127 Talbot, Norman, 90 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 8, 12, 38, 117, 126 Thompson, E.P., 7, 135, 225, 277, 281–8, 290n3, 334n8, 337n36 Thompson, Paul, 104 Thoreau, Henry David, 218 Thoroddsen, Jón, 51 Tolkien J.R.R., 6, 12; The Lord of the Rings, 48 Tompkins, J.M.S., 225 tradition, 7, 11, 13, 15, 17, 20, 26, 27, 31, 56, 60, 75, 76, 77, 78, 90, 91, 95, 107, 111, 116, 126, 138, 143, 144,

371 150, 151, 152, 159, 178, 210, 220, 223, 225, 239, 249, 264, 282, 286, 294n64, 305n37, 337n36 transformation (social), 19, 20, 21, 25, 30, 36, 38, 101, 104, 106, 174, 177, 195, 196, 197, 209, 212, 215, 249, 269, 275, 282, 328n63. See also change translation, 24, 28, 48, 57, 60, 61, 75– 7, 80, 83, 108, 110, 116, 124, 136, 149–71, 191, 302n5, 305n37, 305n38, 305n48, 310n4, 317n1, 318n21, 323n59, 330n5 Tucker, Herbert, 48, 108, 310n4, 312n38 ugliness, 195, 203, 244, 330n10 Ugolnik, Anthony, 48, 49 utility, 15, 17, 77, 78, 176, 185, 186, 200, 203 utopia, 7, 30, 33, 95, 100, 138, 151, 159, 173, 184, 187, 188, 191, 193, 194, 197, 209, 218–40, 247, 251, 270, 274, 275, 276, 282, 285, 287, 290n8. See also utopian romance utopian romance, 8, 32, 95, 175, 176, 177, 183, 191, 193, 194, 221, 262, 332n32 utopian socialists, 19, 196, 197, 285 Vinaver, Eugene, 89, 90, 331n32 violence, 23, 24, 35–55, 92, 110, 133, 208, 211, 218, 278, 294, 296, 297, 310n16, 329n3 Virgil, 24, 56–82, 173, 176, 178, 179– 82, 192, 295n77, 302n5, 305n37, 305n38, 305n48 Volsunga Saga, 47 Wagner, Richard, 305n37 Waithe, Marcus, 98, 151 Walker, Emery, 156 wallpaper, 3, 7, 11, 12, 32, 151, 241– 73, 276, 282, 315n59, 330n9, 332n32, 332n42, 333n56

372 Walsingham, Thomas, 119 Wardle, George, 155 Wardour Street English, 136–7 waste, 18, 41, 131, 145, 185, 198, 202, 273 Waters, Christopher, 309n3 Watts, G.F., 298n22 Watts, Theodore, 49 Webb, Philip, 40 Wegner, Phillip, 247–8 Weinroth, Michelle, 315n59 Wells, H.G., 6, 223–6 Welsh, Andrew, 312n34 Whitla, William, 43, 154, 166 Wilde, Oscar, 6, 12, 18, 125, 230–1, 240

i nd e x Wilkes, John, 19 Williams, Raymond, 104, 233, 239, 276, 294n64 Winstanley, Gerard, 111 Wolfe, Willard, 283 Wyatt, A.J., 165 Yeats, William Butler, 6, 12, 126, 274, 329n1 Zangwill, Israel, 221 zeitgeist, 10, 12 Zeno, 191